The Light at the End (22 page)

While Armond and Joseph discussed the consecration of entrances to the underground… while Stephen and Allan dragged themselves back to their respective homes, alone… while Danny and Claire got ready for the first bad vibes of their brief and bizarre relationship… while Rudy contemplated the intricacies of vampire suicide, temporarily sublimating his impulse toward revenge… while a creature that reeked of rotgut fed on human blood for the very first time, and a similar monster was born in its bedroom with secure bonds restraining its arms and legs… while, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, an ancient evil tooled down the streets of Paris in a limousine driven by a rotting thing… while all of this was going on, Ian and Josalyn were catching a cab back to her apartment on 25
^th
Street and Park Avenue South. It had been decided that she should not travel alone tonight.

And between them there was much to be discussed.

They grabbed a Checker cab just beyond the arch at Washington Square Park, which they had meandered through as if there were nothing in the world to be afraid of. The thought had struck both of them, at different times, that death could be lurking behind any tree; but they had dismissed it, and nothing terrible had happened at all.

They got stuck at the light on 12
^th
Street and 6
^th
. All the way down the block, and to their right, several police cars and an ambulance were pulled up in front of the Cinema Village. Two stretchers on wheels were being loaded into the ambulance. None of them failed to notice that the sheets were pulled up over the heads of the bodies on the stretchers.

A chill fell over the cab.

Ian and Josalyn split the tab when they got to her place, tipping generously, and hopped out of the back seat. Then they turned toward the doorway to her apartment.

To the right of the doorway, at street level, stood a storefront deli with a garish green paint job. Josalyn had shopped there, for convenience, ever since she’d first moved to the city.

To the best of her recollection, its name had never made her shiver before.

“Very cute,” Ian quipped; but the blackness of the joke sent a shiver through him, too.

The name of the deli, emblazoned across the storefront in bold pink letters bordered in crimson, was
SWEET TEETH
.

All the way up the stairs, Josalyn’s mind performed twisty calisthenics. She was bringing a strange man home with her… a
good
man, from all the evidence, but a stranger nonetheless… on the heels of what might well have been the worst twenty-four hours of her life. She couldn’t stop the pictures that her thoughts projected in the relative darkness of the stairwell: flashes of nightmare crosscut with the image of Nigel’s body flying across the room, Rudy and Ian at The Other End, that moment when she’d looked around the table and seen that all of them were dead. She found herself questioning both her motives and her sanity; she found the answers, in both cases, to be nebulous at best.

Then Ian, behind her, said, “If I’d known you lived this high up, I woulda brung my rope and pitons.” Josalyn laughed, amazed by how easy it was to laugh with him, and the tension broke. For the moment.

Typically, the light on the third floor landing was out. Ian moved to her side as she grappled with her purse for the keys, his eyes casting into the shadows for the slightest hint of movement. None. She found her keys, moved tentatively toward the door, located the lock through intuition.

She opened the door.

The phone rang.

“Oh, shit,” she cried, quickly flipping on the light switch and rushing into the kitchen. Ian hesitated in the doorway, watching. “Come on in. Make yourself at home,” he heard her call from around the corner. “I just have to deal with… oh, hell.” The sound of her foot connecting with something plastic, sending it skittering and sloshing across the floor.

Ian stepped into the apartment, let the door close behind him. He moved to the kitchen doorway and saw the water bowl strike the baseboard, splashing up onto the cabinets. He saw Josalyn’s spine tense, and her shoulders sag, and her hands come up to her face as she wavered in front of the still-ringing telephone.

He didn’t know about Nigel yet. He didn’t know about the half a dozen cans of 9 Lives that would never be eaten, the kitty litter in the bathroom that would never be shat in again. Nor did he know about the phone call from Stephen, only five days ago in tick-tock time, but still ringing wraith-like in her ears across a stretch of what seemed like eternity.

But he knew a crying woman when he saw one.

And as the phone fell silent, ringing its last, Ian moved slowly into the kitchen and took her gently in his arms.

She told him everything.

About Nigel. About Rudy. About Glen Burne, her long-lost, dangling boyfriend. About her studies, and the philosophical intaglio that led her to Rudy, then beyond him. About other things, obliquely connected, that she hadn’t even known were bothering her until it all started to pour out in the presence of her new confidant.

And he listened, understanding the role that this night had prescribed for him. They snuggled together on the living room couch, and his own feelings had been walking the tightrope between platonics and passion. There were moments where their eyes locked, and their lips parted, and the ripe potential of their two mouths mating sent a tangible current through the air; but every time, something stopped them, like a Greek chorus rising up from the background with the chant
not yet. Not yet. If it’s right, there’ll be time. Not yet. Not yet. If it’s right
…

Right now, she needed an ear. She needed a shoulder to lean on. Ian had two of each. He lent them to her gladly.

And the hours drifted by in a stream of conversation. And the soft weight of sleep began to press down on her eyelids. She settled into the crook of his arm as she would into a mound of pillows, yawning and squeezing him like a child. He held her, gently kneading her shoulders and neck, conscientiously avoiding her erogenous zones and grinning at the image of his libido on a leash, like a sad-eyed dog that longed to run.

Just before she slipped away, her sleepy voice wafted up to him, saying, “I hope the dreams don’t come tonight.”

“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “You’re in good hands with All State.”

She giggled and rubbed her cheek against his chest. He kissed the top of her head. They settled back into warmth and silence.

Sleep came to her, then.

And with it, the dream.

Josalyn.

Something in Ian’s mind jerked to attention at the sound. Floating in the shadowy middle ground between darkness and dream, he heard: like a wooden stake, punching a hole in the mist. It was not a voice from his own mind, he knew. It was a cold voice. It filled him with dread.

Josalyn
. A warm figure shifted beside him, and his consciousness slowly rose toward the surface, the waking world. The voice came from there, yet not from there. He trembled in the borderland, in the chill and billowing fog.

You little bitch. You’ll get what’s coming to you now.

The weight writhed against him then. Ian heard a low moan from light-years away; a dense aura of terror settled over him, crackling like the air before an electrical storm.

Suddenly, he knew where he was. He knew that, in the waking world, he and Josalyn were asleep on the couch. The weight was hers. The terror was hers.

But the voice was not.

In the distance, he saw something move.

Man in a dream, he rushed forward, parting the mists with his arms. He moved deeper into the alien landscape. Desperate. Blind. Pushing through the clouds that whispered and danced like gossamer curtains in a harem girl’s chamber. One after another, another, another, and…

Nothing but darkness. Abrupt and total. He paused, peering deeply.

He saw the teeth.

Long teeth, sharp teeth, surging out from the vanishing point and racing toward him as if fired from a cannon. Sharp teeth, enormous teeth, already the size of the image on a drive-in movie screen. And still growing, still growing, as they got closer and closer…

…and thundered past him, above and below him, churning up the darkness like a hurricane…

…and he was staring into a room, a room far larger than life, the way a man in the front row of a theatre stares at the pictures on the screen. Josalyn was there, her eyes wide and screaming, her jaws mutely working as she stumbled backwards into the room.

And Rudy was there, the red glow of his eyes partially obscuring his features: too bright, too bright to look at. Rudy smiled, and his teeth were clearly visible. Long teeth. Sharp teeth. They glistened in the crimson light.

Now, Rudy said, in that same chilling voice. Now.

As his hand reached toward her.

“NO!” Ian heard himself screaming aloud. Both Rudy and Josalyn turned, as if startled, and stared in his direction without seeming to see him.

“LEAVE HER ALONE, YOU SICK SON OF A BITCH!” Ian howled. Rudy took a step back, looking very much the way he had at the bar. “GET OUT OF HER BRAIN! GO CURL UP AND DIE!”

He felt himself growing; or perhaps it was Rudy who was shrinking. Josalyn was out of the picture entirely. All he could see was Rudy’s face, receding back toward that vanishing point and contorting with animal fury. A scream echoed out from the yawning darkness, dwindling down to nothing as the face disappeared…

…and Ian Macklay was awake. Wide awake. Adrenaline coursed through him like a gallon of iced espresso, forcing the sweat out through his skin.

In his arms, Josalyn had settled back into peaceful slumber. He listened to the gentle susurration of her breath, her heart’s even pulse, and he smiled. The dream had been averted. Tomorrow morning, with any luck, she wouldn’t even remember that it happened.

But he would.

And like Rudy, who screamed and threw a tantrum and trashed the bulk of the previous nights work, Ian would not be able to sleep until the moonlight was devoured by the sun.

“I’m out of practice,” Danny offered by way of feeble explanation. “I’m sorry.” Claire nodded and looked away, pressing the side of her face into the pillow. There was no point in trying to hide her frustration. He was all too aware of it as he rolled out from between her legs and flopped down limply beside her.

It wasn’t like this last night
, she mournfully observed.
Last night, he was fine. Last night was fantastic.
But the memory had faded to a ghostlike transparency in light of tonight’s blown performance: a minute of vigorous slamming together… just enough to set off her own urgent climb toward climax… only a minute, before he started to hoot and shiver and shoot his load, then grow weak and flaccid within her.

Danny, for his part, felt absolutely terrible, Wimpy excuses aside, the fact of the matter was that he’d been barely even there: he ejaculated, but he definitely did not get off. Most women aren’t aware that there’s a difference; they assume that if a guy shot his wad, he got his jollies. Most men don’t seem to grasp the difference, either. But Danny knew. He might have gotten to drain his scrotum, but neither of them were satisfied. It was almost as if his pecker had raced toward a premature ejaculation, just to get it over with.

Because something’s wrong
. He felt it, but he didn’t have a handle on it. All he knew was that Claire had been no fun at all on the way back to his apartment; but once they’d arrived, she’d been all over him, dragging him to bed before the front door had a chance to swing shut.

And the sex itself had been weird: too wild, too fast. It had reeked of desperation in an unpleasant manner, as if she’d been trying to prove something and it had to happen
now. This instant
. He’d felt helpless before it, had wound up riding her like a body surfer on an enormous breaker, bounced and buffeted toward the shore. There’d been no joy in it from the start, he realized. Because something was wrong… something needed to be proved… and he wondered what it was.

That she loves me?
he thought.
That’s a strange way to prove it. That she can have me any time she wants? That’s STILL a strange way to prove it. That she can make me cum in thirty seconds? Or that I can hold on for two hours under pressure?

No, that’s stupid
. He shook his head, staring straight up at the ceiling, horribly aware of the fact that she could feel his movement through the pillows. It bothered him so much that he stopped, closing his eyes and tilting his head to one side, seeing nothing.

Saying nothing.

While Claire pondered the nature of fatal attractions, and toyed with the notion of a late-night rendezvous.

Knowing full well how crazy it was, how deep-down suicidal and outright stupid. She knew what she’d sound like if she tried to verbalize it. She knew how Danny would feel if she verbalized it to him.

But when she closed her eyes, she saw that face. Those eyes. That smile. She felt the power. It frightened and beguiled her. She felt it. She wanted it. And it seemed to want her, too.

So what am I supposed to do?
she wondered.
Stay with Danny? Go back to an old boyfriend? Find somebody else who’s nice and safe and…?
She let it peter out.

If it weren’t true, then how could I possibly feel this way?

She settled on that question, rolling it in her mind as she lay there, face pointing away from Danny and toward the bedroom window. Out there, the night was like black lipstick on one great ripe kiss, for her alone. One glorious kiss that went on forever, just waiting for her with…

Teeth.

Something fluttered by outside the window. She shuddered and closed her eyes.

Saying nothing. Like Danny.

Afraid to.