The Light at the End (16 page)

A covert roll of the six-sided dice. A crafty, giggling glance from his lightly glazed eyes. A luxuriant toke. A malevolent grin. A lush cannabis cloud that he hissed through his teeth.

“Seven armed skeletons have just entered the chamber,” he said.

“
Hooo-EEEE!
” Ian yelled, leaning into the table. His eyes were wild. “Alright! Poot’s got his broadsword out. He rushes forward and swings into the first one’s teeth.”

Dice, tumbling like dislocated molars. Allan, nodding as he spied the result. “The skeleton’s head is flying apart. The top of its skull just hit the second one in the face.”

“Great…” Ian began.

“But it’s still coming at you. It takes a swing with its double-edged battle-ax.”

“
But
…” It was the sound of a bubble bursting.

Allan rolled again. “Poot parries the blow. Does he take another swing?”

Ian nodded fiercely. “Just under the ribcage, cutting right through the spine.”

“Okay.” Allan rolled again and passed the pipe to Ian. “Clean shot. The top half just fell off and shattered on the floor. The legs are still hopping around.”

Ian took a deep toke and let out a maleficent leer. “Poot trips ‘em,” he croaked, still holding his hit. Again, the tumbling dice.

“They’re down.” Ian exhaled, grinning. “The second and third ones are coming up on Poot now. What’s everybody else doing?”

“Well, Mighty Matilda’s still a little bummed out about her broken sword arm. She’s just hangin’ back. Weaselface is hiding behind her.” Ian turned to his silent partner and poked the stem of the pipe at him. “How ‘bout your people?”

“They’re freaking out,” Joseph mumbled. He was staring at a ripple in the stuccoed ceiling.

“Even Wambo, the Warrior King?” Ian demanded incredulously. Joseph shrugged. A long pause. Ian stared at Joseph, exchanged woebegotten glances with Allan, and stared at Joseph some more. “Are you sure you don’t want some of this?” he queried, motioning with the bowl again.

Joseph shook his head. Ian shrugged, eyes rolling like dice, and passed the pipe back to Allan. Another pause, equally long.

“Poot slices ‘em off at their imaginary spleens,” Ian said finally. His grin was tainted. He flashed it nonetheless.

“Right.” Allan rolled again, a ponderous motion. His smile, too, was a teensy bit strained. “You got ‘em. Bones are piling up all over the place.”

“Hey!” Ian thumped the table exuberantly, shook his fist at the trembling air. “It’s a hot time in the ol’ dungeon tonight, boys! Yow! This time, the grin was effortless and genuine.
It’s fun to kill monsters
, he flashed, and thought about pointing that out to Joseph. Then he thought better of it; they were already walking on extremely thin ice.

“It’s not over yet, boss,” Allan informed him. “Poot’s up to his kneecaps in animate arms and legs, you know.” A roll of the bones. “One of ‘em just sunk its talons into his leg.”

“Whoa… !” Ian jumped back a foot in his chair.

“And the other four skeletons are converging.”

“Jesus!” Ian flashed a look of shock and betrayal at the dungeon master, who shrugged with godlike indifference. “What are you trying to
do
to me, man?”

“That’s beside the point,” Allan said. “
They’re
trying to kill you. That’s just what kind of guys they are.” He put a torch to his Captain Black, sent a plume of smoke to hover loftily over Ian’s head. “So what you gonna do, Poot?”

“Well, since the reinforcements don’t seem to be coming…” This with a mock-disparaging glance at Joseph, who was staring into his beer. “…there’s nothing left to do but back off, I guess.”

Allan rolled. “He trips over somebody’s ribcage and falls on his ass. The sword flies out of his hand.” He rolled again. “One of the skulls just bit into his forearm, and a skeletons coming at him with a spear.”

“For Christ’s sake!” Ian yelled at Joseph. “Do something, man! I’m gonna get killed!” Joseph stared at him blankly. “Have Saint Pompous give me a fucking protection spell or something!”

“Protection spell,” Joseph muttered. Ian looked exasperated. Allan rolled the dice.

“Didn’t work.” A grave pronouncement.

“You didn’t even
try
!” Ian howled.

“You’ve got three seconds before the spear comes down,” Allan intoned. “You’d better get moving.”

“Jesus!” Ian looked genuinely distressed. “Poot does a quick roll to the left and starts to scuttle away…”

The tumbling die.

“I hate to tell you this,” Allan said slowly, “but Poot just got a spear through his back.”

Ian mouthed the word
no
, but no sound would come. Allan sighed heavily and nodded his head. Ian cleared his throat and squeaked, “All the way through?” Allan continued to nod. “Oh, God,” Ian breathed, cupping his face in his hands. “Am I… am I dead yet?”

“Well, let me put it to you this way,” Allan said, taking his friend gently by the shoulder. “If a mosquito bites you, it’s all over.”

“AAAAAUGHHHHH!” Ian screamed, falling back in his chair. His arms and legs flapped like the flags of conquered nations. “AAAUGHHH! AAAUGHHH!” He slid off the chair entirely, disappeared under the card table. “Saint Pompous! You gotta help me! I’M DYIN’!”

“Well?” Allan said, turning to face Joseph. “Is Saint Pompous going to do anything? A healing spell? Warding off of evil?”

“A magic booger with which to smite mine enemies?” Ian called from under the table. He was still thrashing feebly.

Joseph was still staring at his beer, the white-knuckled hand that clutched it. There was no trace of humor on his face. “Saint Pompous can’t do shit,” he said finally.

Beneath the table, all movement ceased. Silence, thick and ponderous as stone, descended over the room. Joseph continued to stare at his hand. Allan rubbed at his eyes, then folded his hands on the table and followed suit.

“Alright,” came the muffled, weary voice from below. The sound of scuffling was, in context, extraordinarily loud. Then Ian was crawling back into his seat with exaggerated stiffness, like an old man abandoned to lethargy’s weight. “Alright. We’ll just wait around for rigor mortis to set in.” He scowled, grinned, scowled again, pointed a loaded finger at Joseph’s forehead, and said, “Dude, you don’t seem to understand that we’re trying to show you a good time.”

Joseph sighed massively. His eyes continued to point straight down. “And
you
don’t seem to understand,” he said, “that it ain’t gonna work.”

“Terrific.” Ian threw up his arms. “That gives me the courage to go on.”

“Hey, I’m sorry,” Joseph answered quickly. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I’ve got a lot of things on my mind, and I’m just not in a partying mood. You know? I mean, I had to say goodbye to my mother today.”

“She’s a little pile of ashes by now. That gives
me
the courage to go on, right? I had to sit in that stupid goddamn church, listening to that stupid goddamn priest rattle on and on… man, I coulda
killed
that guy, he was such a friggin’ idiot!” He paused to take an angry swig.

“And you know what the weird thing is? I kept waiting for her eyes to open. Not like she was still alive, but…” Turning to Ian. “…like that thing we saw yesterday. You told him about it, didn’t you?”

Ian nodded. He and Allan were both staring at the table now, shamefaced and silent.

“Yeah, well. So then you know. There’s this
thing
running around in the subway, killing people and making them get back up to kill somebody else! Regular punks and murderers aren’t bad enough, I guess! Now we gotta have
vampires
to scare the shit out of us when we walk the streets at night! It drives me crazy!”

“And while all this weirdness is going on, what the hell are we doing? We’re sitting around in Ian’s apartment, gettin’ blitzed and playing
Dungeons and Dragons
, fercrissake! There’s a
real monster
out there, killing
real people
, and I’m supposed to get all bent out of shape because Poot gets a spear stuck through him? Shit! It’s like we don’t have a goddamn brain in our heads!”

Joseph stared defiantly at his friends. They were unable to meet his gaze. He took another swig off his beer, caught himself in the act, and slammed it back down on the table violently. His eyes snapped shut, features tightening like a fist. Through clenched teeth, he hissed, “I can’t stand it.”

“Well,” Allan asked him, “what do you want to do about it?”

“I wanna kill it. That’s all.”

“Whoa, Joseph…”

“Whoa
nothing
, man! Don’t you understand?
Somebody has to kill that thing!
”

Allan looked wildly over at Ian for assistance. He didn’t get it. Ian had his elbows on the table, his face resting heavily in his hands. Very gently, he massaged his temples, a thin sheen of sweat on the forehead between. His eyes, when they opened, had that faraway look.

“Okay,” Allan said, turning back to Joseph. “Somebody has to kill it, assuming that it’s real… an assumption I’m not quite ready to make. But who says that it has to be you?

“You got somebody better in mind?”

“There’s always the police…”

“Shit.” Joseph dragged the word out contemptuously. “They wouldn’t know what they were dealing with.”

“And you do?” Allan leaned forward now, taking the offensive. “You’ve hunted vampires before? Or do you think that watching Dr. Van Helsing on the late late show taught you everything that you need to know? Come on, Joseph! Be real!”

“There’s nothing real about this,” Ian interjected suddenly, “except that it’s happening. And it is, Allan. No two ways about it. The only question is: do we sit around on our asses, or do we act? And to tell you the truth, I’ve got to agree with Joseph…”

“
Come ON!
” Allan screamed. “I thought you were gonna help me talk sense to this guy!” The look in his eyes went on to say
I can understand that Joseph’s got a vendetta going, but I don’t understand what the hell’s gotten into you
. Ian saw the look, got the message; he nodded, held up one finger, and answered.

“It’s like this, man. I think Joseph will agree with me.” He glanced over to make sure that his big buddy was paying attention. The smile that he saw warmed Ian’s heart. “Did you ever find yourself caught up in a situation beyond your control: something that really has very little to do with you… certainly not the kind of thing you’d pick as your favorite pastime… but that you suddenly find yourself stuck in the middle of, and know that you have a part to play in it? Of course you have. We’re in one now.” He winked at Allan, but the playfulness of the gesture was buried by something weightier.

“When that happens,” Ian continued, “there’s this very strange sense of inevitability about it. You can try to ignore it. You can try to escape it. You can hope that it’ll just go away, or that somebody else will deal with it. But you know that sooner or later, whether you like it or not, it’s gonna come back on you. Reminders will come up and tug at your sleeve; and in the end, you’ll have to answer for what you did or didn’t do.”

“Well, it’s like that now. The same way we feel about Joseph”—this to Allan exclusively—“trying to help him through this miserable time. Nobody paid us to lay out this evening’s entertainment, such as it is. There are government agencies to help you cope with a death in the family. There are social workers. There are psychiatrists. But we know where
that’s
at.”

“The fact is: you see something that needs to be done, and a little voice goes off in your head that says
you know what to do, man. Do it. Don’t wait for somebody else, because they either won’t or can’t do it, and by then it might be too late.
”

Ian paused to gauge his audience. Joseph was nodding emphatically; Allan’s face was a portrait of grim resignation. Apparently, he too had sensed the inevitability of it. Ian smiled and went on.

“Joseph has got that kind of feeling about… the thing in the subway.”
It’s hard to say “vampire” out loud without feeling silly
, he mused privately, not breaking stride for more than a second. “It’s pulling at him. It’s eating away at him, every time he stops long enough to think. I know exactly what he means, because… to be perfectly honest… it’s doing the exact same thing to me.”

“I didn’t tell you what happened to me last night, did I?”

Allan shook his head wearily. Something went off behind Joseph’s eyes, though: a flash of memory, the spark of something undivulged that raced now toward the surface.
Ah ha!
Ian thought, eyebrows raised.
I should have guessed.

The storytelling began.

And the net inexorably closed in.

*

It wasn’t a dungeon, though the similarities were cheap and plentiful. It lay buried in the bowels of an imposing pile of brick and stone. It, too, was perpetually shielded from the light of day. Death was its stock in trade; corpses were its currency. Its unfortunate visitors were unceremoniously picked apart and trundled off by cynical technicians who whistled while they worked.

But instead of the acrid sputter of tallow-dipped torches, there was the cold blue-white hum and flicker of fluorescent lighting. Dank mold and matted straw gave way to springtime-fresh, industrial strength Pinesol; moist, pitted stone was replaced by miles of smooth linoleum tile. And while the dungeon marked the beginning of suffering and torment, the morgue at St. Vincent’s heralded the end.

At 10:15, Rick Halpern was halfway through his customary egg salad-and-Bacos sandwich. His round, porcine features were blissful, serene. His thoughts were on the swinging late-night
soirée
with Sylvia Marx that he had planned for later. There was a dollop of yellowed mayonnaise at the corner of his lips and an unsightly tumescence in the crotch of his whites.

The double doors slammed open just as Halpern went for a big wet bite. He jerked slightly, and a sopping scrap of scrambled egg perched lazily on the tip of his nose. “Damn!” he yelled, setting down the sandwich and mopping at his face with his sleeve.

A big white body under a big white sheet wheeled into the room. A white tag dangled from the big right toe. “Guess who’s coming to dinner!” Broome announced, following the stretcher into the room. He had a wide, toothy grin that Halpern occasionally wanted to pummel.

“You got my coffee?” Halpern wanted to know.

“You bet. Now you’ll have something to dip your Twinkie in.” Broome parked the body in front of his partner, reached under the sheet, and pulled out a styrofoam cup with a plastic cap. “Don’t worry. He didn’t drink any. He’s just here for an autopsy and a steam facial.”

“Broome, you are a sicko,” Halpern muttered distastefully. His erection had dwindled in the last few seconds, and the coffee had become less appealing somehow.

“And you are a walking pork chop,” Broome replied. He could talk; he had a weight lifters body at the age of fifty-five. Nautilus. “In fact, you remind me a lot of this guy.” He paused to pull the sheet away from the corpse’s face. “Strong family resemblance. You might have fed at the same trough together.”

“Gee, thanks.” Now that he mentioned it, there was a marked similarity to their features. Halpern winced, and his first bite of egg salad came briefly back to haunt him. He was callused, by and large, but bodies that resembled him always touched a special nerve. “What got him?” he asked quickly, changing the subject.

“Heart attack,” Broome said, pulling his own coffee out from under and then covering the face again. He took a little sip and contentedly
ahhhh
ed. “You know, it’s kinda nice to have some people in here who died of natural causes. Every once in a while, an inexplicable murder can brighten your day. But enough is enough, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” There’d been an awful lot of excessive nastiness going down in the last few days, and quite a bit of it had wound up at St. Vincent’s. “If I have to see another one like our topless cutie, I’m gonna hang this up and get a nice job in Proctology.”

“Birds of a feather…”

“Oh, you’re cute, Broome. Cute.” This was one of those times. The older man’s teeth made a target almost too good to pass on.

“But you’re right. That was depressing. I don’t even wanna
know
what happened to her.” Broome’s gaze slid down the rows of roll-out drawers where the bodies were kept. “Marlowe, right? Man, she was a beauty. Things like that are such a damnable shame…”

It was true. They’d wheeled Dorian Marlowe in the previous night, and absolutely nobody was joking about it. The cause of death had been clear enough, so they’d foregone the autopsy. What little blood remained had been drained out through her right foot, and then they’d cauterized her stumps. After that, it was the body bag, with the head tucked neatly under one arm. Her funeral would be a closed-casket affair. No matter how much they’d loved her, her friends and family would not want to see.

Broome meandered over to the drawers and started picking over the labels. Halpern brought the sandwich to is mouth again and let it waver there, poised. He was afraid that Broome was going to do something crazy, and he wanted his mouth free, just in case he needed to scream.

But Broome just paused in front of the designation MARLOWE, shook his head, and rapped three times, lovingly, on the metal door. “Hey, kid,” he said softly. “Don’t sweat it, okay? You’re gonna make a beautiful angel.”

And on the other side of the door, inside the pale gray body bag, the face of Dorian Marlowe contorted horribly at the sound. Her lips peeled back in a soundless snarl, and her eyes popped open, flickering once with the red-light spark of vestigial evil that would never come to fruition. Then it was gone.

But the expression remained. It was anything but angelic.