turning over; when he got home to Kate he was going to request a backrub.
“So now,” Charley sighed, “looks like you can tell your boy when he calls again that we came up empty trying to find this special blade he talkin’ ‘bout. What exactly was this cutter supposed to tell us when we did find it?”
During the day’s labors Joe had already managed to put off this question a couple of times. Of course it would have to be answered sooner or later, and he had been giving some thought to how. He tried now the best answer he had so far been able to come up with: “If we found it, and could describe it exactly to him—add details beyond what he already knows about it—then he thought it would help him, maybe, to put his finger on the guys we want.” Joe had to admit to himself that his best answer sounded purely terrible.
Charley took his time considering. “Well,” he said at last, “I guess this cat has really come through for you a time or two in the past.”
“Yeah. He has.”
“For Carados,” said Charley, “I’ll go to a lot of trouble. I’ll even take a chance on making an utter damn fool of myself and wasting a lot of time. When’s your guy supposed to call you again?”
“Tonight, I hope. He wasn’t sure.” Last night, when Talisman had called Joe at home, to give him the first detailed information about the sword, Joe had been able to hear the subway trains roaring in the background. And it had been midnight. Joe wouldn’t have cared to hang around a subway station at that hour, not without Charley Snider and maybe a small squad of marines.
His caller of course had not been distracted by any personal concerns. After describing the sword he was trying to find, Talisman had told Joe of the existence of an imported castle, a European building reconstructed out on the Sauk River, that really ought to be investigated. “The man I began by looking for is there, you see, as well as the truly remarkable man of whom I spoke.
“The oddity.”
“Yes. And I can sense now that there is a woman to match.” For a moment Talisman’s voice seemed to hold nothing but deep masculine appreciation.
Joe protested. “The Sauk River’s really way out of my territory, as you know. If I call the sheriff out there, or the state police, I can’t just tell them to look for a vampire.”
“Obviously, Joe. It is possible that a man named Carados, from New Orleans, is there also. His existence they believe in, his possible presence will greatly interest them. But say nothing yet. The time is not yet ripe. More important matters than I had dreamed are involved here.”
“Why are you telling me now, then?”
“Someone besides myself should know, Joseph. If I should disappear, if I should die. I am going to visit that castle presently. The duty I have assumed compels me to. But the powers of evil there are greater than I knew, and it may be that they will slay me.”
SEVEN
When you had just been strangled to death it seemed not surprising that your next experience should be a peculiar dream. But even under the circumstances this was starting out to be a very peculiar dream indeed. One moment Simon was nonexistent in nothingness, and the next he was adrift on the Sauk in an old rowboat, very like a boat he had sometimes played in during the summers of his childhood, when his grandmother with whom he usually lived in Chicago brought him out to visit his aunt and uncle who ran the antique shop, and the assorted cousins living in Frenchman’s Bend and on some of the farms around.
In this dream—he was almost sure it was a dream—Simon was a child again, or not much more than a child. He was wearing green swimming trunks, like a pair he had once worn. It was summer, and the rowboat that bore him was adrift, oarless, among the islands of the Sauk. The lack of oars was nothing to worry about. Whenever he wanted to get back to shore he could stick his feet out over the stern and splash hard enough to propel the boat, even straight against the sluggish current.
For a short while Simon was convinced that he was indeed a child again. Then he looked down at his body, and thought about himself, and came to understand that he was fifteen now. He was waiting for Vivian. That realization frightened him, but the fear was swallowed up in the idea’s overwhelming fascination.
He was expecting her to appear somewhere in the distance first, but instead she burst up with a violent, surprising splash from the brown water right beside his boat, something she had never done in real life, and Simon understood that she must have come swimming underwater for a long distance just to startle him. The effort succeeded; he jumped. Vivian, with green weeds as from the ocean tangled in her dark curly hair, clung to the gunwale looking at him wickedly.
“I am the lady—” she began, and then pantomimed biting her tongue, acting broadly the part of one who has started to say something that must not be revealed. She was unchanged, no older than when Simon had seen her last, except that her eyes now danced more openly with evil. With a single lithe splashing movement she now pulled herself completely up into the boat. There was a sound as of a faint creaking of bedsprings. At once Simon was compelled to stare at her body, which was clothed in nothing but a very small green bikini. Wetness gleamed on her tanned skin, and he gazed at her helplessly, and Vivian smiled knowingly to see the effect that she was having on him.
“I have to do this,” Vivian told him in a whisper, and her voice was altered, diffident, almost apologetic. She lay down in the bottom of the boat, which was now conveniently furnished with a mattress and white sheets. Then, “Take off your trunks,” in the same odd pleading whisper, at the same time whisking off her own bikini top. The breasts revealed were all wrong, were large and pale and soft, but Simon obeyed, and thrust his body toward her. He had no choice now, if he had ever had.
The frightened face below his was not Vivian’s, but that of the girl from the antique shop, and they were in a bedroom, on a bed. Simon saw this but nothing he saw affected what he had to do. He crouched atop the female and entered her, just as the bed that was once more a boat began to sink in a vast pool of blood, red rivulets running in from every side across the stark white sheets.
Now they were struggling on the flat stone altar in the court before the grotto. Seed pumped from him in dull mechanical spasms. When he was empty he rolled from the female onto the altar’s flat, cold stone, sticky where small pools and maculations of blood were drying. The stone squeaked like bedsprings. Simon knew that now the blood was on him too, and for the first time he grew aware of a ring of watchers, of evil beings who now had him firmly in their power…
… and the door to the grotto was a prison door in truth, with a host of victims caged behind it. One by one, they were being led forth by strange beings, led to the stone altar and a death of horror. They were young and old, male and female, some in rags, some richly dressed, some in the clothing of centuries long past. Some were innocent, some deep in blood as were the sacrificers themselves.
A young man with a face of perfect beauty and evil watched from a central throne nearby, and Vivian stood by his side. She was arrayed now in the costume of a queen, and her face wore a queen’s haughtiness. Saul, at the age of twelve, in jester’s cap and bells, sat crosslegged at Vivian’s feet, a wooden sword in his hand, staring solemnly at Simon. Old Gregory, in medieval costume, led a young girl victim forth and bit her in the neck. Another old man, horrible of countenance, stood beside the smoking altar which was empty now, and waited for the next victim to be brought. All round the altar blood-drained corpses lay.
The sword in the executioner’s hand was smoking, dripping, reeking…
The sword…
Swords, for there were more than one…
Came interruption. A resonance of light, a calling back and forth between the blades of light and darkness, like trumpets of opposing armies. The calling altered everything, unseated evil that had held the world in undisputed bondage. The evil young king rose up roaring, and Vivian had to shield her eyes. The watchers broke their circle, scattering. The victims who could still move fled, some hobbling on mutilated limbs. Only Simon, who drifted disembodied now, was able to see perfectly, not dazzled by the sword of light or blinded by the blade of evil darkness. I can always see, he thought, better than anyone else. It seemed a profound truth.
And then, for a time, he was nonexistent in pure nothingness again.
He was lying flat on his back, in what felt like a bed. He could tell from the feeling of air passing gently over his body that he was completely naked; but thank God, thank God, there was no stickiness of blood. Or of sex either, for that matter.
