But John didn't answer. He had already picked up the phone and was punching numbers.
Angie looked once more at Uncle Matthew, shuddered, and started to move out of the room. At that moment the front door chime sounded.
John put down the phone and came with her to the door. The color images of two people showed on the little screen. One was Valentine Kaiser. The second, standing beside him and locked in the circle of his arm that came around her neck and shoulder, was a woman with red hair, wearing a cloth coat.
John switched on the sound.
The switch caught Elizabeth Wiswell's voice, softly desperate, in the middle of a sentence. ' —me in, please, you've got to let me in. He'll let me go if you do. If you don't, he's going to drink my blood. All of it. He says that and I'm sure he means it.'
Kaiser's arm moved slightly and her voice fell silent. Another image hurried across the screen, someone on the way to work most likely. When Liz and Kaiser had the corridor to themselves again, her pleas resumed, low, quavering, and sometimes hard to understand.
'He means it. They all do. Please, you've got to let him in now. He won't hurt you. If you don't, they're going to—' John hit the speaker switch, and a moment later the switch that turned off the video. The little screen went blank.
Now someone had begun pounding, though feebly, on the door. If Elizabeth was still trying to talk to them, from out there in the hall, it was impossible to hear her through the soundproofing of the walls and the door's thick wood.
John and Angie looked at each other. He said: 'There's a chance they won't hurt her. I think a better chance than if we let them in. And it won't do any good to call the cops. It won't do any good at all. Do you believe me, Angie? Do you understand me?'
She made a gesture between a nod and a shrug.
John hurried back to the phone in the nearby alcove.
Someone was still thumping weakly on the door.
Aimlessly, moving in shock, Angie turned away and wandered back down the hallway, into the guest bedroom where she had had about two hours' sleep before the vampires—the bad, dangerous vampires, not the one that wasn't quite John's uncle—came on the scene.
Sinking down into a chair, she stared at the tape machine. In a moment she began to cry.
Chapter 4
The return of full awareness, the reestablishment of the full presence of the soul within the mangled but mysteriously healing flesh, was a long, gradual, and parlous process. I need not discuss here what trials and journeys my soul, my self, was required to undertake before that process was complete. Nor will I detail here all the twists and turns through which that evolution progressed, before restoring my spirit to my transformed body. Suffice it to say that at length, however tardily, full consciousness returned, was localized in altered flesh.
In drastically altered flesh indeed. More on that subject later.
To begin with I understood little more than that I was alive, though garbed in the cerements of the grave. I was out-of-doors, where bright moonlight—oh, it was undoubtedly only the moon, however fantastically bright it seemed to me—showed me that I was alone, occupying a small glade in a woodland setting. When I came to myself I was crouched on all fours upon the earth, like some beast about to spring. The cold of the winter night meant nothing to me. My limbs were free of any restraint, and by this I knew that I must have somehow escaped my murderers, whose last efforts to torment me filled what were almost my last clear memories.
Almost, I say. For it seemed to me that I could remember listening and watching in some disembodied fashion, even as others prepared my corpse for the grave.
And the newly refrozen snow around me still showed the dirty traces of excavation and burial.
Slowly I stood erect, trying to recognize the sylvan
But now I was not dreaming. I was as certain on this point as the reader is of being wide awake and reading now… and just at this critical juncture of metaphysics I was distracted by a peculiar physical sensation.
Something, besides the obvious damage caused by recent wounds, seemed to be gravely amiss with the muscles of my chest. The truth was that I no longer breathed. But this lack was more than compensated for by the discovery, which followed swiftly, that I no longer felt any need to do so.
Pain I still experienced in plenty; sharp pangs, radiating from my many injuries, shot through my body whenever I moved. But I had known worse torment. I was a soldier, and wounds and suffering were part of my natural state.
For the time being I could ignore the pain. And if I were in any danger of bleeding to death, I thought, I would have done so long ere now. The fact was that I did not even feel weak; indeed, quite the opposite. And a quick inspection of my wounds satisfied me that I was no longer bleeding at all.
Strange. But, even stranger, the mere thought of blood evoked neither fear nor disgust, but instead a rich, red thirst, a craving of such intensity that for the moment I forgot all about my pain and injuries and stood there growling like a hungry beast.
That red thirst could not entirely distract me from an even stronger lust. This was a great and all- encompassing drive for vengeance, without which, perhaps, my will might have failed, and I would never have found the power to come out of my grave. This craving was centered primarily upon the traitor Bogdan, and to a lesser extent on his two chief companions, Ronay and Basarab. As for the common soldiers who had taken part in the attack on me, I scarcely thought of them; they had done me no real harm, and besides they were mere hirelings, only obeying orders.
At the moment none of the three men I wanted were in sight, nor did I have the least idea where I might lay hands upon two of them. But as for the third, Ronay, a part of my recent and most strange dream had concerned him. It seemed to me that I could remember someone's voice, saying that Ronay, wounded, unable to ride far, had sought shelter within the nearby monastery of Snagov.
Walking slowly, I was halfway across the clearing, looking for some landmark by which to orient myself, when I heard a small animal scuttling in dead leaves nearby. Acting upon a new instinct, as strange to me as it was irresistible, I pounced on, caught, and killed a rabbit that had innocently chosen to wander nocturnally near my grave.
Aching in the roots of my canines, indifferent to the sensation of furry skin against my mouth, I drank greedily from the torn veins of the little creature. New energy, supremely welcome, flowed into my tormented body. But an access of mental and physical strength only sharpened my craving for revenge.
Casting aside the small, drained body—I cared not for the flesh, the blood was all—I began to consider with new clarity the all-encompassing strangeness of my new mode of existence. The sharpness of my senses with which I had detected the rabbit's exact location, the speed and precision with which I had been able to seize the creature before it could spring away—these augured well for my ability to accomplish whatever vengeance I might decide upon.
But now, newly fed, I was able to think beyond the needs and cravings of the moment. Where was I? Certainly not upon the field where I had fallen. And how, really, had I come here? I could not doubt the reality of the scene on the battlefield. But to credit my memory, to think that I had somehow witnessed my own death and burial, seemed a great absurdity.
Though I had not yet begun to realize the fact, I had of course awakened standing on my own grave, my transformed body having risen like so much smoke up through my coffin's wooden lid and all the earth that held it down. Stalking to and fro about the little clearing, moving in effortless silence, I knew only that I experienced a strong attraction to one particular spot of bare earth, in the center of the disturbed ground.
Snarling with impatience, I at last broke free—for the moment—of this tender psychic bond between myself and my grave. The Snagov monastery was somewhere nearby, it must be, and Ronay might be in it.
In a moment I had passed beyond the borders of the clearing. The thousand little sounds of the winter
