The Light at the End (33 page)

In the tunnels
…

They moved slowly down the outside of the tracks, holding close to the wall, in single file: Tommy, then Joseph, then Stephen. Tommy’s flashlight filled the tunnel with capering shadow-dances as its thin beam played off the rough-hewn supports and arches, casting suggestions of furtive movement that heightened the apprehension.

Stephen’s watch put the time at 2:45.
We’ve been down here for over an hour
, he thought.
We’re not going to find anything, we haven’t found anything yet, my God I want to get out of here now
… But the words were skewered to the tip of his tongue, going nowhere. The last hour had been spent in virtual silence, moving first along the uptown side of the space between Bleecker and Spring, now doubling back on the downtown side; in all that time, the only words had been whispered commands from Joseph. Stephen was not about to press his enormous good fortune by opening his mouth; all he could do was hope that Joseph would give up on the tunnels and take them back up to the street.

Another train was coming. In many ways, that was the most terrifying thing of all: standing so close to those thundering wheels, that massive crushing power. Worse than his fear of finding Rudy… Stephen severely doubted that he was down here; worse than his fear of Joseph, most certainly. Joseph could flatten him, but not like that. He pressed his back to the wall and slid along it, though the train was still out of visual range and only faintly audible.

“
Listen
,” Joseph whispered, stopping. Tommy turned and looked at him confusedly.

“
What?
” Tommy asked. “
The train?
”

“
No
,” Joseph hissed, his eyes suddenly blazing. “
Listen!
”

For a moment, there was nothing but the distant rumbling of the train. Stephen skrinched up his face, as if by sheer muscular exertion he could push his hearing out further, extend its range. Then the sound reached him, below and apart from the drone of the wheels.

Quiet sounds. A low moan. A muted, rusty cackle like the snapping of twigs.

And feeding sounds.

“
Come on
,” Joseph whispered. “
Real quiet and slow. The train will cover us
.” He stepped around Tommy and began to lead.

Stephen met Tommy’s gaze, terrified as his own; and for a moment, something flickered between them. An impulse, a beam of thought that translated as
he’s crazy, let him go, let’s get out of here
. The impulse flickered and died in an instant, leaving their eyes like two sets of dull mirrors, reflecting each other’s resignation.

They followed.

Twin snakes of light slithered up the tracks toward them, reflecting from the headlights of the oncoming train. The roar of its approach mounted steadily, more than keeping pace with the rise in volume as they drew nearer to the dinning sounds. Stephen heard a loud smacking, sharp and distinct, that whipped a nervous spasm down his spine.

Less than thirty feet ahead, there was an opening in the wall. He became aware of a low, steady thrumming and decided that it must lead to a generator room. The sounds were unmistakably coming from there. A mad picture came into his mind, of MTA guys sitting down with their ham sandwiches and beer, jumping out of their shoes when Joseph walked in with a cross in one hand and a stake in the other.

Then he heard a sound like a drowning scream, a gurgle crossbred with a yowl of anguish, and the picture evaporated like piss on a skillet.

The snakes of light whipped past them, beyond. The train poked its nose through the hole at the end of the tunnel, nailing them with its nightmare gaze. Stephen could feel the breeze that it pushed before it, chill and lifeless and ripe with decay. It screamed in his nostrils and put goose bumps on his flesh; he stopped, shuddered, fell back against the wall and tried to keep the tears from falling.

Something tapped him on the shoulder. Tommy. He watched Tommy say
come on, man
, but the moving lips made no sound. He watched Tommy turn away, proceed with silent footsteps. He watched his own feet, soundless as well, dragging themselves forward. They looked and felt like somebody else’s.

The train had gotten much closer, its presence overwhelming. There was no sound but the thunder, shuddering through the earth and air. He watched Joseph’s brightly lit silhouette disappear into the doorway, promptly followed by Tommy’s. Fear of being left alone, more than anything else, forced him to race forward and duck around the corner, moments before the train blasted by him.

Three feet into the doorway, he slammed into Joseph’s shoulder and stopped, halfway expecting to be hit; but Joseph didn’t even seem to have noticed. The big man’s eyes were locked on something ahead of him; Stephen’s eyes, partially blinded by the headlights, struggled toward focus.

Then he saw what Joseph was looking at.

And he felt himself starting to scream.

There were three of them, hanging on to the bag lady’s still-thrashing body. They were derelicts all, and the stench was overwhelming: they were already rotting before they died, and un-death had done nothing for their personal hygiene. They reeked of sewage and sun-puckered meat, of booze and bite and blood. Just seeing them, and smelling them, was more than bad enough.

But to realize what they were doing… to force the mind to believe that what it was seeing was true…

They’re spiking her
, Joseph thought, the words stamping themselves indelibly into his brain. Like suburban drunks at a backyard barbecue, dumping vodka into a watermelon and sucking it out through straws… except that she wasn’t a watermelon, and they weren’t using straws, and this definitely wasn’t the suburbs.

One of them… the one with only half a face… was emptying a bottle of muscatel down the bag lady’s throat. The other two were holding her down, teeth buried in the soft undersides of her arms. Thin rivulets of cheap wine and blood coursed down her arms, neck, and shoulders; still, she continued to writhe and kick feebly, her eyes glazing over, her mouth burbling pink.

Joseph felt rather than heard the train, six feet behind him; he felt rather than heard the tiny, high-pitched squeal of terror, rising up to the right of his shoulder. Stephen, he thought.
You little jerk
. He whirled, one hand coming up to wrap around Stephen’s face…

…and the back of the train flew past the doorway, almost instantly cutting its volume in half…

…and Stephen’s wretched whine cut off abruptly, his own hands coming up to throttle the sound…

…and Joseph whirled again, looking back at the vampires. They went on with their business, undisturbed. For a long cold moment, there was only the sound of their smacking and slurping, set against the ghostly farewell echoes of the train.

Then Tommy’s beeper went off.

Fred looked up. Through his one hazy eye, he could see the three dark figures framed in the doorway, jerked suddenly into motion by the steady
beep beep beep
, shouting and flailing impotently like bank robbers who’d just tripped the alarm.

He glanced down at his two companions: Louie and the nameless one, the one who went “blgy blgy” all the time. They continued to feed, too involved to notice.

He glanced back down at the bag lady’s bulging, swimming eyes, the pasty pallor of her flesh, the twitching nerves behind.

He looked back at the figures in the doorway.

Fred let the empty muscatel bottle slip through his fingers, pulled his legs out from under the bag lady’s head. The bottle clinked against the floor and rolled to one side; the bag lady’s head made a dull thud and lolled to the other; Fred scuffled against the pavement and dragged himself awkwardly to his feet.

“Oboy,” he said.

And smiled at them, advancing.

Tommy let out an inarticulate cry and instantly vented his bladder.

Stephen backed away, eyes like billiard balls, fists crammed halfway into his mouth.

Joseph stepped forward, his right hand dipping into the messenger bag and coming up with the wooden mallet. The half-faced vampire closed in, smecking and leering, its arms outstretched like a long-lost lover’s. The mallet whipped back, then around and forward in a single blurred motion.

The right side of the vampire’s skull caved in slightly at the temple, making the already-empty socket seem to stretch all the way around the side of its head. It slumped to its knees, moaning, clutching itself. Joseph kicked it in the face and sent it sprawling on its back; then he straddled its belly, sitting down with all his weight.

And with his left hand, he pulled out the first wooden stake.

It was all automatic. No thought. No delay. Just the placement of the stake with one hand, the raising of the mallet with the other, a sudden sharp sucking of air as he hammered down on the blunt end of the stake, driving its point through the vampires chest, not pausing to watch as the monster yowled and spurted and floundered like a capsized beetle, but rather raising the mallet again, high over his head, and bringing it down…

*

Louie scuttled backwards across the floor in a lopsided, drunken crab-like walk. His blood-slick jaws were slack with terror. Near the door, Fred was already beginning to decompose. Louie whimpered and burbled and backed into the wall.

The killing black shadow was rising now, rising up off of Fred’s body and looming over them all. It turned toward him, fixed him with its murderous eyes, thundered slowly forward.

The other one… the blgy-blgy man… was still crouched over the bag lady, still feeding. He didn’t see the enormous killing shadow cast itself upon his back, didn’t see the nightmare hands descending. Louie couldn’t bear to watch it, either. He curled up like a fetus, clamping down the lids over his murky red eyes. When the shadow pounded the stake in, with a sound like a tomato mashing against a barn door, Louie gritted his teeth and crawled blindly toward the stairs.

He crawled. He crawled. A voice bellowed behind him. He ignored it. He crawled. His forehead struck the bottom step, stunning him. He staggered back on his haunches, his eyes twitching open…

…and then the hands were upon him, the hot killing hands, and he was flipped over on his back, slamming down hard against the concrete floor, staring up into the face of the giant dark death-angel, black killing shadow, coming down like an avalanche of knees, like boulders on his stomach, making him rise up gasping at the waist to meet the sharp tip of the stake that forced him back to a prone position as the mallet came up and came down…

…and this time the sound was inside of him: his own heart, bursting like a water balloon as the wooden shaft plowed through him and thudded against the pavement on the other side…

And Joseph Hunter pulled himself back up to his feet, wobbling slightly, like a sleepwalker awakening at the edge of a cliff. Stephen watched him, detached, also like a dreamer;
this can’t be real, this can’t be real
, his mind told him over and over.

But Joseph had turned, moving toward him now; and behind him, Tommy’s baritone sobs were echoing arrhythmically against the hard walls. Stephen distinctly remembered the march down the tunnel, the three of them together; and unless it had
all
been a dream, starting back on the night before Rudy’s disappearance, or maybe before, then it was real, it was all real…

And Joseph was moving toward him, eyes shimmering like black moonlit pools, the face curiously expressionless in its frame of sweat-matted hair. The face was blank, but Joseph’s posture told a different story. The spine was stiff, the movements rigid. His hands were fists, the right one still tensed around the handle of the mallet.

Stephen watched, numbed by the horror; his mind registered every detail of Joseph’s advance, but failed to make the connection. Not until the dark killing shadow was upon him did he begin to understand.

By then it was too late.

“Your turn,” Joseph said, grabbing Stephen by the wrist and yanking him forward. Stephen yelped and stumbled, weak-kneed; but the big man dragged him relentlessly toward the center of the room.

Where the bodies were.

“No,” Stephen whimpered. He tried to dig in with his heels, wound up skidding across the floor like a reluctant water-skier. Desperately, he turned back to Tommy and silently pleaded for help.

Tommy turned away from the wall then, saw what was happening. A newer, deeper alarm nailed itself to his features. “Wait a minute…” he croaked, the words barely formed and scarcely audible.

Joseph didn’t appear to have heard. He plowed forward, Stephen still in tow.

“Wait!” Tommy yelled, pushing away from the wall.

He minced forward like a girl in an ultra-tight skirt, his urine-soaked pants clinging unpleasantly to his legs.

Joseph stopped and whirled, just long enough to paste Tommy with a menacing glare. “Stay out of this,” he growled. “I mean it.”

“But you can’t…!” Tommy persisted, though he froze in his tracks.

“What do you think I’m gonna do?
Kill
him?” Joseph laughed, a dry thunder devoid of humor. Tommy and Stephen stared back at him with eyes like glazed ceramic eggs. “No, no, no. It’s just that Stevie and I gotta finish the job.”

Before Stephen could respond, he was sliding forward on his heels again. Finally, horribly, he understood what was about to happen. “NO!” he screamed, struggling violently. To no avail.

Joseph came to a stop in front of the bag lady, yanked Stephen up beside him. Slowly, he intensified the pressure on Stephen’s wrist; slowly, he lowered himself to his knees, forcing the other to join him.

“You know what’s gonna happen to her?” he said, indicating the bag lady with his free hand. “Tomorrow night, she’s gonna wake up. She’ll crawl around the floor for a while, and then she’ll drag herself to her feet; and then, after a while, she’ll go out and get something to eat.”

“You know what she’s gonna want to eat, doncha?” He shook Stephen’s arm vigorously, prompting a response. “You know what she
is
now, right?”

Stephen looked at the bag lady. Her head remained as it landed, facing away, the tongue lolling out, eyes focused on nowhere. She was no longer breathing. Stephen shuddered uncontrollably.

“She’s dead…” he managed to say.

“Not dead enough,” Joseph answered, acerbically grinning. “Not dead enough for me.”

“Joseph…” Tommy began, still frozen in the doorway to the tunnel.

“Shut up!” Joseph snapped, loud and over his shoulder. Then, to Stephen: “This one’s yours, Stevie.”

Stephen moaned, the tears welling up, his face going slack and pasty white. He shrank back as Joseph squeezed his wrist with one hand and brought the mallet over with the other.

“Come on,” Joseph wheedled, patronizing. “Put the widdle hammer in your widdle hand now.” Stephen desperately clenched his fist. Joseph clenched his teeth, holding back with extreme effort, and methodically pried Stephen’s fingers apart. Stephen whinnied. Joseph forced the mallet into the palm of Stephen’s hand, forced the fingers to close around it, held them there.

Then, with his free hand, he pulled out another stake.

“Gimme your other poodie, now,” Joseph continued in the same tone of voice. Stephen squealed and wildly shook his head, eyes the size of softballs. “GIMME YOUR HAND!” Joseph hollered, dispensing with any cuteness. “NOW!”

Stephen brought up his left hand, not bothering to clench the fingers together, knowing what would happen if he resisted. Knowing what was about to happen, no matter what.

Stake in the left hand. Mallet in the right. Joseph’s hands, wrapped around his own, like a puppeteers strings made flesh as the big man forced Stephen to bend over at the waist, left arm reaching out to place the stake, right arm coming up to land the blow, all in a grotesque parody of free will.

“Now you’re gonna know,” Joseph said, very quietly. There was no anger in the voice. Like the voice of a god. “Now you’re gonna learn how to do what you have to do.”

Stephen let out one last, tortured gasp.

“I’m sorry,” Joseph whispered.

The mallet came down.