which to cut his bonds—if he could move his hands enough to pick up anything. Something to start a fire with, to attract help? He hadn’t yet reached the stage where burning himself to death looked like a desirable option.
But it didn’t take long to convince himself that trying to work free of the ropes without some kind of tool was going to be futile. Maybe if they left him here two days unwatched he’d manage it. But by then he would have died of hypothermia, or whatever they called it now. The storeroom wasn’t as cold as the outdoors tonight, but even with his jacket still on he was no longer warm.
The ropes were fixed so he couldn’t stand. He might be able to spill boxes, though. If one of them contained glass, and if the glass broke, that might help—more likely, though, they would just be irritated by his noisiness and come in and twist one of his fingers off.
There was one box on the floor, about as high as a piano bench and as long as a piano, whose lid was slight askew, so that it ought to be possible to see or maybe reach inside. A place to start, something to try. Crabbing his way along the cold concrete as best he could, almost silently, Joe got beside the large crate. Here his face was in reflected streetlight, while the interior of the box remained in heavy shadow; looking in, he could distinguish only vaguely mounded white, about halfway down.
He had to find something to cut his ropes with, the way people were always doing it in stories. Anything.
At once end, the whitish surface inside the box was marked with a dark ring a couple of inches across. Just above that were two glassy spots. . . .
He froze, even the cold-trembling in his limbs suspended for the moment, and in that moment he was afraid that he was going to faint. A dead woman lay there, her staring eyes hardly a foot beneath his own. A young woman dressed in white.
Jesus. Jesus. His back against another crate, Joe slid away from his discovery, trying to keep from blacking out. His arms and legs were throbbing, and at the same time trying to go numb. If he fainted now . . . they hadn’t even taken away his gun. . . .
. . . there were two voices again, somewhere out in the apartment. Joe understood that he was coming out of some kind of blackout. Probably a brief one, for he hadn’t frozen yet, or wet his pants either. Something else to think about . . .
A Chicago cop shouldn’t pass out at the sight of one more dead woman. It made his enemies no worse than before, he’d known what they were like ever since Kate’s body had been found. . . .
Oh, God.
But it wasn’t Kate. Blondish hair, perhaps, but—
In a moment Joe had pushed himself back in position to peer again into the crate, or coffin. Of course it wasn’t her, he would have known at first glance if it had been. He forced himself to gaze into the box, trying to make out details that he had earlier avoided. It wasn’t Kate, even allowing for death’s changes. This woman was smaller, sharper-featured. And something was wrong about her mouth.
Out in the apartment, the two people talking had moved closer to the storeroom door. “You simply left him there,” Carol was saying now. Whoever had been left where, she wasn’t sure whether she liked the idea of it or not.
“He woulda died,” answered the rough voice of Leroy Poach, who had been hanged in Oklahoma in 1934. “No way he would’ve lasted if I’d tried to bring him here. As it is he’s prob’ly finished by now. I think I got him right through one lung. You shoulda seen the blood.”
“Oh, I’d love to fly out there now . . . if I thought I could be there for the end.” Carol’s voice suddenly became a whisper of concentrated hate. “So much effort, so much time. Even you can’t begin to realize . . . and now, to miss the end at last.”
“Take off, then. Enjoy. I’ll talk to the people till you get back. Explain to Lady Wanda when she gets up.”
“No.” Carol was regretfully decisive. “This conference is too important. I must be here for all of it, if I can. I must be unhurried, in control of everything. There must be no doubt in any of their minds that I am now in control. That the future is going to be what I say . . . Poach, what about the Southerland family?”
“They were all out somewhere, except the old woman. I put her out. It don’t look to me like any of the others will get home tonight, the way it’s snowing. If they do, well, they’ll move the old bastard one way or the other, and that’ll be it. Cops’ll buzz around for a while, but the body’ll be gone to nothing before they get a good look at it.”
“Tell me again about the fight. I want to hear it all.”
“Well. I looked in all the closets and everywhere as I went through the house, see? Then I got to this room in back, and I knew right away. There it was, a big stone coffin like the one I found out in the cemetery.”
“It must have been earthenware of some kind, to provide the home earth. Clever. We must remember that for future use ourselves. Go on.”
“Anyway, I just knocked it over and he rolled out on the floor. I got the stake in before he even got his eyes open.
When Carol spoke again her voice was low. “I suppose it was for the best.”
“Suppose?” Poach’s voice did not really show anger; rather it was as if he would have shown anger if he dared. “In the two years since I met you, you been drummin’ it into me, how I gotta kill him quick if I ever get the chance. How dangerous he is. Also how much you hate him. So I thought it worked out just perfect. I got ‘im but I didn’t finish ‘im. I give you the chance.”
“Yes, you did the right thing. You have done very well.”
“You don’t act too happy.”
“Ah, dear Poach, don’t sulk. It is just—can you imagine what it is like, to hate someone for four hundred years? You cannot, you are not yet a century old. After such a length of time, there is something like love in it.”
“Love?” The tone was crude, incredulous. What had been near-anger was near-laughter now.
Carol’s voice lashed at him. “Remember your place, my man. What you were when I found you. What you are and will be still depends on me.”
Poach mumbled something.
“What?”
“Yes, my lady. I didn’t mean. . . .”
“See that you don’t.”
The door to the storeroom opened without warning, and Carol was looking in at him. She was wearing a kind of green jumpsuit now, a fancy party coverall, and she smiled at Joe enchantingly. Then her eyes moved beyond him, just as a faint noise came from that direction.
The dead woman had got out of her box and was standing beside it in her white gown, plainly visible in the brighter light from the apartment. She stretched luxuriously. There were traces of something dried around her lips, and she licked them with a perfectly pink tongue. . . .
* * *
. . . when he could hear the distant voices chattering again, and knew again where he was, he refrained for a long time from opening his eyes. He didn’t want to see the walking dead. He thought about the sensations of numbness in his feet and hands. That he could assess them so carefully meant that he was awake now, didn’t it? Before, he had been drugged. The woman in the box must have been only a drugged dream.
Joe opened his eyes, though, when he heard the door again. It was a smiling Leroy Poach, hanged in 1934, attired now in black evening dress, come to take Joe to the toilet. This prophylactic attention was actually just about in the nick of time.
“Wouldn’t want you to be messy when we bring you out, cop.” Poach was quite jovial now, despite his crusted forehead crease. It looked like a days-old wound, cared for and then forgotten. “Nice and clean and fresh is the idea. You’re gonna be the piece de resis-
While being carried to the bathroom and back he could hear Carol and the other people chatting, off somewhere in other rooms. He could see no one but Poach. The apartment was still mostly in darkness. There were lamps but no one had bothered to turn on more than a very few of them. Rusty water ran into the toilet when it was flushed, as if the fixture hadn’t been used in a long time.
