Vampire Dreams (Bloodscreams #1) (18 page)

Yet, somehow, she was at peace, feeling relieved that it would be done. It was as if some greater power lie on the other side and was now extending a gift to her. She couldn't move, but she reached up, not for Banaker, but for the gift she saw shining beyond him. She 
felt
 for the first time since her natural death--truly felt. All this was going on deep within her even as the creature moved in closer, preying on her while attempting to convince her that this was, after all, what she wanted in the first place. It was trying to wrench her from her gift and the dreamy thought of life after death after life again, was trying to manipulate her affection to center on it. But she refused it this last bit of emotional carrion.

It took her anyway....

Only at the last minute, as it took her in its great talons, did the broken Pamela Carr see that it wasn't Banaker who had done this to her. It closed her off to her senses then, as it, too, partook of her blood. As it lifted her into itself, the membrane of skin extending down from its wrists stretched around her, creating a cocoon. Other fingerlike talons formed struts for the larger talons, and these stretched back to the trailing edge of the membrane. Only the thumb remained free, an enormous knuckle, peculiarly human in quality and appearance. A kind of keel lie along the creature's breast bone, serving as an attachment for the large muscles which flapped its wings.

With elaborate, translucent ears, the ribbed cartilage was laced with scarlet blood vessels. On its nose there stood a spike used to direct the sonar sounds it made.

Through echo-location it had found her and now took hold of her. Like a shrew, it emitted ultra-sound waves which bounced off its prey. It had known precisely where Pamela was at all times, and that she was one of its own kind.

At least, it thought as it was feeding on her, she was 
partially
 one of them. Her parents hadn't been vampires.

A successful hunt had ended with its having lifted its prey from its talons to its fangs, once again, quenching an age-old hunger, a hunger that came with birth, the genes, heredity. The feeding caused momentary blindness in the bat creature. In order to feed, it must shut down its mouth, and so shut down its “eyes.” It fed in its own darkness when its fifty-million-year-old larynx must be put on hold.

Pamela's eyes were wide. She had recognized him in the end. He drew her deeper into his folds, holding her lovingly and firmly against himself as he continued to feed the hunger. His prey had relaxed into that catatonic state that insured his feasting would go on and on.

The creature now spewed out a wet, elastic string of matter from his mouth. The gummy, white stuff stiffened in the air and on contact with his prey. As if wrapping a mummy, the creature worked with the shape of Pamela's body to encircle it with the hardening material. He meant to truly cocoon her for future feedings.

All in all, it had become a fruitful night. Now only if he could put the name Abraham Stroud out of his mind.

-14-

Dr. Martin Magaffey paced the sitting room at Stroud Manse, anxiously awaiting Stroud's return. The Ashyers watched him pace. All of them drank tea, but none of them actually tasted or enjoyed it. Magaffey was obviously distraught and fatigue had almost kept him from coming the long way out here, but his brain was brimming over with what Dr. Cooper had left in his hands.

“You're sure of your findings, Doctor?” asked Ashyer getting up to guide the older man to a sofa chair.

“Where the hell is Stroud?” replied Magaffey irritably. “If I sit down, I'll go right off to sleep.”

“We can wake you, Martin,” said Mrs. Ashyer kindly.

He ignored this and answered Mr. Ashyer instead. “I was all day at the Banaker Institute. Ananias was right to suspect the Banakers all those years. Warlock he called the old man, sorcerer.”

“He finally settled on vampire,” said Ashyer with a shiver.

“Only now we might have the proof, Ashyer, don't you see? Supplied to us by Cooper!”

“But how did Cooper come by this so-called proof?”

Magaffey took in a deep breath and told them how he had spent most of his day searching for the body of a man named James Bradley. “As coroner of Andover, it's my job, for God's sake. Bradley was pulled from the Spoon some six, maybe seven hours after his car went off into the river. He'd come off an embankment at a high rate of speed according to the police report. I ... I was not sent for.”

“Briggs thought it routine, perhaps.”

Magaffey laughed at this. “Briggs's mind is routine.” Magaffey continued, afire. “What bothers me is how the whole matter's been mishandled. Any sudden or mysterious death, hell! any accidental death, is to be placed in my care! Not the goddamned morgue at Banaker Institute!”

Mrs. Ashyer tried to calm him with a buttery word and more tea.

But he would not be calmed. “The attending physician did an autopsy and hadn't bothered to call me in; nor has a report of the findings crossed my desk!”

“Highly irregular,” said Ashyer.

“Lately, my friend, it has become all too common. But this time, I wasn't going to let the bastards--sorry, Mrs. Ashyer--keep me from my duty. I went there demanding to see the body and the report. For some time it was 'lost!' Paperwork didn't exist on the corpse. They kept me waiting for over an hour before the paper appeared--hastily got up it seemed to me. I never did see the body there--it was already gone--and I felt like the focal point of ... well ... a conspiracy.”

“Where had the body gone?”

“Carl Hoff's Funeral Parlor downtown, 
Christ
! By now the place was closing, but I found one of Hoff's people and was told the body was being prepared for transportation to Bradley's home by mid-morning tomorrow, at the request of the Bradley family.

“'Don't do a damned thing to that body until I inspect it!' I told him. 'The body is from this moment confiscated by the Office of the Coroner.'

“'But it's finished, Dr. Magaffey,' the man said.

“'Finished?' I asked.

“'All but broke the Perma-Glow machine down on him. Mr. Hoff said it was a rush job.' “Magaffey scowled at the memory.

Ashyer shook his head. “So, they removed all the bodily fluids, the blood, so any autopsy you might perform would be useless.”

“True, but they can't cover marks and gashes. I inspected the body for these, and I saw marks I have not seen since ... since Ananias came in that night from the caves.”

The Ashyers fell silent, looking across at one another.

“If I could somehow hold onto the body, but Banaker and Hoff were called as I was looking over Bradley's wounds--deformities, actually ... like those horrible rents and tears that had maimed Lonnie and Ananias. I knew I must flee or quite possibly face Banaker and Hoff over the body that they meant to be a 'rush job.'“

“You then went home?”

“With a few photos and scrappings from the dead man, yes.” He showed Ashyer the photos, but Ashyer handed them back with a visible shiver, not wishing his wife to see them.

“And that is when Cooper came to you?”

“I was in my lab when the bell rang. He asked to come in. He seemed a bundle of nerves, but how could I tell? I was shaking for my own reasons. I didn't easily welcome him in. Cooper seemed afraid to stand out on the doorstep. He had a small leather case in his hand.”

“The vial? It was in the case?”

“Yes. He opened it under the light and I had an almost instinctive dislike for it as the light hit it when he held it up. I felt certain he'd brought it as a poison for me to drink, to please Banaker.”

“Tell us, in detail,” said Ashyer, “what happened next?”

Magaffey was fatigued by the long, arduous day that had become an even longer night. He was drained from the many run-ins he'd had with Banaker and his people, and the royal runaround he'd gotten when investigating the whereabouts of the body dragged from the river.

Magaffey was also very shaken and fearful since the visit paid him by Dr. Cooper. Magaffey's brief talk with the Ashyers must now convince them that they must all confide in the younger Stroud everything they knew.

Magaffey thought of Dr. Cooper's peculiar visit to him in the night. Cooper had come to him with a strange vial filled with an admixture of blood and bone marrow, and a genetic substance which he was deliberately vague about. Dr. Magaffey told the Ashyers all this. Cooper had called the stuff Banaker's lifeblood.

Dr. Magaffey had taken the vial in hand, and he had held it up to the intense light there in his laboratory. It did not look like blood, but rather like thick tomato soup or even jello. Aside from the consistency, the color was a deep, near purple, the way red looks in the dark.

“It's the fountain of youth, eternal life,” Cooper had then muttered under his breath.

“It looks like bile,” replied Magaffey.

“Think of it! Has Oliver Banaker aged a day?”

Magaffey had noticed as much over the years, but he had remained skeptical. “Why're you here, Cooper? Why've you brought this to me?”

“I ... I...”

“Did your boss send you? Make a fool of the old nigger? Is that it?”

“I have ... my
--
”

“Why're you being so helpful, so cooperative, Cooper?”

“I have my reasons!”

“Your boy? That's your reason?”

“Yes!”

The look of pain creasing Cooper's features at that moment could not be falsified. Magaffey was fearful of pushing the man any further, and yet, he was confused by Cooper's motives, and he wondered what Cooper had to gain by discrediting Banaker, and why'd he direct his anger at Banaker? Had Banaker something to do with the disappearance of Cooper's son? Magaffey had looked up to see that Cooper was on the verge of a suicidal depression. He'd gone steadily downhill since the loss of his son--what in the old days the boys called being “on the skids.”

Magaffey had gotten numerous favors out of Cooper recently, such as getting in to see the Meyers boy. Cooper had been equally mysterious then about his reasons, but it all seemed a vendetta of sorts against Banaker. Banaker had lost grace with at least one of his flock.

“I got to get out of here now. Place is dangerous for me,” said Cooper, who'd lost weight by the day and was a walking skeleton, totally emaciated, pale, bone white.

“I quit taking the stuff,” he said to Magaffey as if reading his mind. “Fighting the cravings ... fasting ... not long for this place, Doctor. Pam Carr...”

Magaffey instantly picked up on the sudden shift in his tone. It was one of fear. “What about Pamela?”

“She was put on Stroud to ... to...”

“Seduce him? By Banaker? Keep him engaged, huh?”

“She's gone now.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“Left, gone ... won't be back.”

“Left Andover?”

“I'll be next, but I'll choose my own way out.”

He then left abruptly, leaving the old man with the vial, an elixir that represented all that Banaker Institute had worked for over the years, according to Cooper. He'd hinted that test animals and human test subjects had died for the drink that gave Banaker and others a chance at godhood. He'd hinted that his son had died for Banaker's sins.

How much Magaffey could believe in the bereaved man's words, he was not sure.

He would hold his conclusions for later, after a look under his microscope at the thick, dark fluid in the vial. To keep it from contact with the air, he'd use a specialized slide that was created for such instances to keep a substance germ-free.

Under the slide he saw a teeming variety of cells that resembled those of human blood, but the white corpuscles were a dim, ghostly brown and the red corpuscles were a dark burgundy. A third viruslike cell impregnated the others with a dousing of inky fluid like miniature octopuses sending out blasts of ink, turning the corpuscles, both red and white, into some new, unrestrained cell that forged a bond. It was like nothing in nature he had ever seen, except for some slides a veterinarian had once shown him years and years ago of a bat's blood.

He then saw that the specimen was becoming superheated under the intense light of the microscope. It reacted very much like the blood of a cold-blooded animal.

He then tested it in the presence of oxygen to see if Cooper was telling the truth. Using only a pinhead dot of the elixir, he forced it onto a white cloth on a lab table. It burst like a firecracker, turning the cloth to flame. Yet, it had none of the properties of an acid.

Magaffey didn't know quite what to make of it. He tried to imagine the effects of swallowing this stuff. It made him think of Jekyll and Hyde. He wondered if he dared experiment on himself.

Given his age and the “little problem” besetting him, an elixir of youth was most tempting. But he had read Hawthorne's tale of the roomful of fools who'd gotten their hands on such an elixir and turned back time only to make the same sordid and idiotic mistakes they'd made the first time around, and so decided to withhold such a dram from himself, and his own bone marrow disease.

Instead he cocked an ear to the door outside his lab. Someone was puttering around outside. His secretary and nurse had long gone and he was in the building alone. He fought the fearful notion that someone from Banaker Institute had followed Cooper here, and was now prepared to retake the fluid at any cost--including an old fool's life. Magaffey knew no other way than what was normal for him, however. Despite the fact there were two other avenues out of the lab, one to a telephone and the other to a fire escape, he did what Martin Magaffey had done all his life. He pushed through to the outer offices with a barreling cry, “Who the hell's lurking around out here!”

It was Cooper, returned. But now he was again rushing quickly out the door. He'd left a note on the desk but it had taken leaflike flight in his haste to get away. Magaffey had seen the man agitated before, but now his entire body was quaking; he was literally shaking in the manner of a junkie denied the succor of his habit. Had Banaker turned him into a guinea pig, using the strange, brackish fluid? Was Cooper coming down hard? Did he need someone at his side, observation?