Thorn

his hand, and one of my soldiers was with him to escort him to the edge of town.

Now I can hear the gentle reader murmuring again. What would the infamous Dracula have done, had the man proved as self-sacrificing as the woman? Well, it is my theory that Helen in coming to me was really not all that altruistic—she was tired, as she said, and took what she saw as the best chance, obeying an almost suicidal impulse—to get out of an intolerable situation even if it should mean death. On the other hand, if Perugino had proven himself ready to sacrifice himself for her—I did not think he would, but if he had—well, I should probably have taken him up on the offer.

As matters actually went, I walked into the room as soon as Perugino was gone. I stood there silently confronting Helen, who had sat down on my bed.

'But he is no longer a brave man,' she murmured, staring at my boots. 'If he ever was. So much has happened . . . what did you expect?' Then her eyes lifted. 'Tell me, are you going to have him killed now after all? Stabbed to death somewhere down the road? Tell me now if it is so.'

I had considered some such plan, but had decided against it. I half-expected that the fog of war was likely to carry out the postponed execution without any active effort on my part, local conditions being what they were. This was a faulty expectation, as we now know; Perugino's lifeless paintings done after 1467 are still to be seen covering a great deal of wall space in a number of Italian churches.

'It is not so,' I assured her. 'I do not mean to have him killed—unless he should come near you again. Then I will kill him, but only as an annoyance, not as a matter of honor. Do you understand?'

Helen tried to look agreeable, but I could see that she did not understand. She could not, perhaps, or she did not care.

So I explained it to her, once. 'That man is already dead.'

Chapter Twenty

Pat O'Grandison was dreaming again, and again the dream was of Annie, and in this dream she was naked. She and Pat were in bed together, and the sheets were satin. There were paintings and statues all about, watching. Pat was enormously aroused, but even more important was the secret that Annie was about to whisper into his ear.

Before he could hear a word of it, he awoke with a small start. It was dusk, and he could not immediately remember whose great house this was or how he came to be in it. He was lying on his back on a sofa in an unknown, luxuriously furnished room. His shoes were off, and his knapsack was under his head where he had put it to make a pillow against the sofa's wooden arm. He was beginning to remember now.

A brown-haired, slightly built girl was sitting at the foot of the sofa, looking at Pat. She wore jeans and a loose pullover shirt.

'Annie?' Pat was fully awake in an instant, and his body jerked up into a straight sitting position. At first glance he was sure this girl was her. The sense of Annie's presence was very strong. But as soon as he got a good look he could see this wasn't Annie's face, though this too was a face he ought to know. He had been asleep, and there was certainly a resemblance, and the lights in the room had not been turned on as yet.

'I'm Helen, Pat,' she said, in a voice that was certainly not Annie's either. 'Annie's friend. You saw a lot of me in Chicago. Don't you remember?'

'Oh, yeah. Sure. Gosh.' Gosh popped out in Pat's speech fairly often, part of a general plan, never deliberately thought out as such, to remain as young or at least as young-seeming as he possibly could. Sometimes this plan worried him and he wondered at its purpose.

The girl took hold of his foot in its dirty sock, squeezing it absently, as if she were petting a small child. Her fingers were strong. 'Pat? You know Ellison has just been on the phone, talking to someone about you. He was very guarded in what he said, but I'm sure you were the real subject of what they were talking about.'

'Ellison?'

'My stepfather. He owns this house. The big fat man who looks a lot like Del.'

'Del?'

The girl sighed faintly. 'Del is his older brother. You don't remember anything about that night in Phoenix, do you, when you and I first met? That was at Del's house.'

Pat pulled his feet free from her near-caress and swung them to the floor, where he started fumbling them into his shoes.

Helen told him: 'I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Ellison is making plans to get rid of you tonight. I don't know why else he would have let you sack out in his house like this. He doesn't like boys the way Del does sometimes. He just wanted to check with Del first, or with Gliddon, about what they want to do with you. Maybe they'll want to find out how much you know.'

'Oh my God. I'm gonna split.' Somehow Pat doubted that the girl was making any of this up, just for fun or just to get him out of the house. There was something about that huge old dude, her stepfather, that made Pat believe he could be capable of murder; Anyway, even if Helen was making it up, it wasn't a situation Pat wanted to prolong.

But even now he couldn't just leave without trying once more. 'Helen? Tell me where Annie is. I know she's right around here somewhere.'

Helen shook her head, and appeared to be annoyed. But then she reached over and with cool fingers touched Pat on the cheek. It was almost like the way that Annie had used to reach and touch him sometimes. 'Pat, I know you liked her, and she liked you.' Helen paused there, looking at him with strange eyes in the dusk. 'She was there on that night in Phoenix, too. She met you the same time I did. A lot of things got started on that night.'

'I don't really give a shit about that night in Phoenix any more.' Pat was jerking on his shoelaces to get them tied. One lace broke, and he just let it go. He stood up. 'Where is she now?'

'I was trying to tell you.' Helen, sounding irritated, stood up too. Pat could see now that she was barefooted; still she stood a little taller than Annie. 'The bad news about her. She was just a runaway from somewhere, and she didn't count for much. Anyway, you see there was another real bad night at the house in Phoenix, a few months after you were there. I mean the night when Del was supposedly kidnapped. Something went wrong with the scheme and Annie was killed. Almost everyone thought that I was the girl who died. Just as they thought that Del was dead—he wants everyone to think that, of course. But really he had another body ready, the body of a fat old man, that would look enough like Del after it had been blown up in the truck. And he even faked dental records and everything, just in case. You can do a lot, when you have as much money as Del has. And—'

'I don't wanna know about all that, I wasn't there. I'm gonna leave.'

'Sure. You'd better get out of here now. But what are you going to do, just walk the roads? You'll be picked up, that way.'

Something in the way she said it made it a special warning. 'Picked up?'

'I don't mean just by the law. Look, Pat, I'll give you a ride somewhere, okay? I know Annie would want me to look out for you if I could. She thought you were something special, you know. She talked about you quite a lot.'

'She did?'

Helen didn't answer, but moved away. His backpack dangling from one hand, Pat followed her on tiptoe through several darkening rooms. They came to a heavily grilled back door, where Helen bent to do something to the lock.

'Where are your folks now?' Pat whispered near her ear.

'Sometimes they don't seem much like my folks,' she whispered back. 'They're around. Be quiet. Here now, I've got to hold this—you go on out.'

The door swung open to a small patio. Pat had been in mansions before, enough to know something about alarm systems. He went out quietly. Helen delayed behind him, doing something to a mechanism attached to the heavy door, then closing it carefully behind her when she was out too.

After that she led Pat along the side of the house, over a brick walk, to an outside entrance to the garage.