Author: John Skipp
Date: 1986-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Vampires; Fiction; Splatterpunk; Fantasy; Paranormal; Thriller; Urban Fantasy; Supernatural; Halloween
Description: An adrenaline-charged tale of unrelenting suspense that sparks with raw and savage energy... The newspapers scream out headlines that spark terror across the city. Ten murders on the New York City subway. Ten grisly crimes that defy all reason -- no pattern, no m.o., no leads for police to pursue. The press dubs the fiend the "Subway Psycho"; the NYPD desperately seeks their quarry before the city erupts in mass hysteria. But they won't find what they're looking for. Because they all think that the killer is human. Only a few know the true story -- a story the papers will never print. It is a
Publisher: Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

THE LIGHT AT THE END

John Skipp & Craig Spector

Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

© 2011 John Skipp & Craig Spector

LICENSE NOTES

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.  This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.  If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.  If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy.  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

JOHN SKIPP

JOHN SKIPP is a New York Times bestselling writer, editor, social critic, splatterpunk poster child, literary zombie champion, and all-around horror legend. His books include The Light at the End, The Cleanup, The Scream, Deadlines, The Bridge, Animals, Fright Night, Book of the Dead, and Still Dead (with Craig Spector); The Emerald Burrito of Oz (with Marc Levinthal); Jake’s Wake, The Day Before, and Spore (with Cody Goodfellow); Opposite Sex (as Gina McQueen); Conscience, Stupography, and The Long Last Call (solo); and, as solo editor, Mondo Zombie, Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead, and Werewolves and Shapeshifters: Encounters With the Beast Within.

He is also sometimes guest fiction editor of The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, and has a long-standing passion for music and film. He lives with family and friends, both human and otherwise, on a hill overlooking the glistening spires of downtown Los Angeles.

His novel CONSCIENCE has just been released in digital, and there is an excerpt at the end of this novel.  Check it out HERE.

Find him on the web at:  http://www.johnskipp.com

CRAIG SPECTOR

CRAIG SPECTOR is an award-winning and bestselling author, editor, screenwriter, and musician, with eleven books published, millions of copies sold, and reprints in nine languages. His fiction has been published by Tor/St. Martins Press, Bragelonne, Bantam Books, Harper Collins, Pocket Books, Arbor House, and others; his film and television work includes A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD and projects for TNC Pictures, Anonymous Content, ABC, NBC, Fox Television, Hearst Entertainment, Davis Entertainment Television, New Line Cinema, Beacon Pictures, and Wonderful World of Disney. His feature film adaptation of ANIMALS was a 2010 release from TNC Pictures and Anonymous Content (distributed by Maverick Entertainment)and stars Marc Blucas, Nicky Aycox, Eva Amurri, and Naveen Andrews. Spector’s graphic novel THE NYE INCIDENTS (co-created with Whitley Streiber) was a June 2008 release from Devils Due Publishing and has been optioned by Dark Castle/Warner Bros/Silver Pictures.

Spector is a graduate of the Berklee College of Music in Boston MA and an alumni of the Atlanta College of Art in Atlanta GA, and was the founder and Chief Creative Officer of the late Stealth Press -- 1999-2002 -- an Internet-enabled publishing company that specialized in quality hardcover reprints of titles by such authors as Peter Straub, Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker, Peter Atkins, William Nolan, Dennis Etchison, John Shirley, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and others.

Spector’s novel UNDERGROUND won Le Prix Masterton for Best Foreign Novel of Horror for 2008 (fr. edition).  He is currently at work on a new novel and screenplay, TURNAROUND, as well as a solo music e-CD, SPECTOR: RAW, and various other film, television, art and alt culture projects.

Spector divides his time between Virginia Beach, VA and Los Angeles, CA, but is at present doing a "Kerouac with wi-fi" tour of the states, looking for more trouble to cause.  You can reach him on facebook, reverbnation.com, myspace, twitter, and even in the real world.

His solo novel A Question of Will is available now in digital.  There is an excerpt at the end of this novel.  Check it out HERE.

Find him on the web at : http://www.craigspector.com

OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHORS

John Skipp:

Conscience – Free excerpt at the end of this novel

Craig Spector:

A Question of Will – Free excerpt at the end of this novel

John Skipp & Craig Spector

Animals

Deadlines

The Scream

The Cleanup

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DEDICATION

"To The Creator, who gives us the Light by which we more clearly see the Darkness..."

New York City – 1986

Prologue

On the Dark Train, Passing Through

When all the lights went out, Peggy Lewin was alone in the third car. She had been trying to immerse herself in Love’s Deadly Stranger, trying to drive away thoughts of that bastard Luis and their miserable “night on the town,” vainly fighting back tears. Now the paperback sat limp and forgotten in her hand, and all she could think about was how frightened she had suddenly become.

“Oh, Christ,” she moaned softly into the darkness. Slowly, she set down the book and reached into her purse, groping for a moment. Her finger closed around the Mace and remained there while her eyes cast blindly from corner to corner and a voice in her head whined it’s too late to be taking the subway alone, that cheap bastard, wouldn’t even pay for a cab, goddamn it!

Peggy squeezed the Mace for reassurance, tried to control herself. Light from the tunnel strobed in through the windows, playing across billboards for El Pico coffee and Preparation H. A nervous giggle escaped her. It was buried under the roar of the train.

Should I get up? she wondered. Find some people, some light? She stood, shaky, in the center of the aisle, and looked in either direction. Darkness. A sigh escaped her, and she moved to the security of the metal holding post on her right: a pretty girl, slightly overweight and modestly trendy, willing slave of Manhattan’s you-gotta-look-good prerogative, wishing suddenly that she’d played down her curves. Who knew what kinds of creeps rode at this time of night?

The dark train pushed forward, racing toward the southern tip of Manhattan Island. It struck her that they would be rolling into 42nd Street any minute now, and that even though Times Square wasn’t the greatest place in the world at 3:30 in the morning, it had to be better than this. There’d be a cop or something, anyway. There’d be light.

There’d be hope.

“Hurry up,” she almost prayed. “Oh, hurry up and let me out of here.”

As if in answer, light flooded the car from either side. Gratefully, she moved toward the center doors, watching the pillars whip past, the regular hodgepodge of derelicts assembled, the long TIMES SQUARE 42 ST. sign, more pillars, an officer, more pillars, more pillars, more . . .

. . . and she realized that the train wasn’t going to stop, and she pounded against the glass with her fists, a mute sob welling in her throat as the station whizzed by. . .

. . . and in the last moment of concentrated light, before darkness engulfed her once again and completely, she saw the man standing in the space between cars, staring in through the door.

Staring in at her.

And she saw the door slowly open.

~*~

“It ain’t stoppin’, Jerry! Check it out!”

“Yeah, I see it, man,” he answered, but Jerry wasn’t watching that at all. His eyes were on the big black cop, smiling coldly, while his mind worked. “Yeah, officer. Why doncha go find out what’s wrong with ol’ Pinhead, the conductor? Lights go out, train don’t stop . . . looks like a job for the police, ya know it?”

The cop frowned, nervous and torn. On the one hand, something was definitely wrong. On the other hand, skinheaded punks like these guys formed their own category of bad news. Sure, one of ’em couldn’t even sit up right now, might start pukin’ any minute; and the one with his nose against the glass looked too stupid to worry about.

But he’ll be right there if this Jerry creep starts anything, he noted, unconsciously fondling the butt of his gun. And Jerry-creep probably will.

There were two other people in the car: two little middle-class hippie throwbacks, probably never been so glad to see a cop in their lives. They were huddled together in the corner by the door, eyes full of mute appeal. Jerry had been giving ’em grief before the lights went out; their upraised voices had drawn Officer Vance in from the last car, where he’d wearily been trying to rouse a crashed-out derelict.

If I leave now, Vance knew for a fact, these boys are dead meat. Not that it makes that much difference to me. But, dammit, then I will have to book Jerry and his bozo friends, chase ’em halfway to Hell and back on this friggin’ blacked-out train. Oh, Jesus. Thoughts of switchblades in the darkness made him very, very nervous.

He had pretty well decided to stay when Peggy Lewin’s scream ripped into their ears from five cars ahead. The two hippies jumped a foot a piece and came down hugging each other like pansies in a high wind. Something in Vance’s chest tightened up and froze; that was not a natural scream. He quickly glanced at Jerry’s face and saw that the fucker was smiling.

“Sic ’em, baby!” Jerry yelled. “Woof woof woof! It’s Police Dog!” His dimwit buddyboy guffawed, steaming up the window. Vance felt like knocking their heads together.

Then Peggy Lewin screamed again. This time it was worse. Much worse. It wailed out and out, as though her soul had been soaked in gasoline and lit, sent howling out of her mouth to shrivel and die in midair. Even Jerry shut up for a second.

Even Jerry had never heard such terror.

“Damn,” Vance hissed. He had no choice. Peggy Lewin had made up his mind for him. Choking down fear, he drew his revolver and started running toward the front of the train. When Jerry refused to get out of the way, Vance knocked him on his ass and kept going, just as the tunnel swallowed them again.

“I HOPE IT GETS YOU, TOO, YOU BLACK BASTARD!” Jerry bellowed in the fresh darkness. Vance bit back a response, by now scared half out of his mind. The screaming had stopped, but somehow that was not reassuring.

I hope it gets you, too. The voice rang in his ears. Like the scream. Like the roar of the train. You black bastard! It hurt to be hated so automatically, so completely, on the basis of so very little: uniforms, pigments in skin. The fact that he did the exact same thing did nothing to dampen his rage.

I’d love to blow you away, white boy, Vance thought bitterly as he came to the door. Blow you right the hell off this world. But the girl, if that was what it was, might still be alive. He was compelled to check it out.

The door slid open, and he stepped into the space between cars. The wind blasted into him, and the metal platform pitched and buckled beneath his feet. Carefully, he reached over and opened the door to the next car, moved from blackness to blackness to blackness, pausing nervously on the other side.

The car was empty. Silent, but for the ever-present thunder. No, more than silent and empty. Dead. Suddenly, Vance was overwhelmed by the feeling that he was riding in a dead thing, already beginning to rot, kept in motion by a power not its own.

Vance knocked on the conductor’s door. No answer. He rattled the lock. “Sid?” he called. “You in there?” No answer. Something damp and chilling uncoiled in his gut.

What the hell is wrong with this train? he wondered, and then forced himself to keep moving.

A man named Donald Baldwin was slumped in the driver’s seat, one hand dutifully on the throttle, staring straight ahead. The lights from his instruments were the only working lights on the train; they cast bright reds and yellows on all the shiny spots and streaks in his clothing.

The door to the engineer’s booth was locked from the inside. Any driver with half a brain kept it locked on night runs, because you were a sitting duck in there, and only lunatics rode at night anyway. If you were crazy enough to be there in the first place, you could at least minimize your risks.

Tonight, Don Baldwin had been grateful for his half a brain. Right after leaving 51st Street, something started to rattle at the door. Not just the train shaking around; something was trying to get in. Don didn’t know why he thought something instead of someone, but he did, and it scared the bejesus out of him.

He had tried to raise Sid, his conductor, who sat in a similar cab toward the middle of the train. No answer. He couldn’t even be sure if the intercom was working. Goddamn train is falling apart, he silently groused. Whole goddamn transit system. He got a sudden vivid flash of Sid and Vance, just hanging out, the exact kind of lazy-ass, spear-chucking bastards that were dragging the subways to ruin. And me with a nutcase at the door, he moaned. God damn it.

Don lit a cigarette, his twenty-third of the night. He always smoked a lot on night runs; it killed time, and what else could you do? Even with his side window open, it filled up with smoke pretty fast in there.

He never saw the mist drift in, under the door.

He never even knew what hit him.

By the time Officer Vance reached the car where Peggy Lewin lived and died, the back of the train was already filling up with rats. They were gray, squat, bloated little bastards with red, gleaming eyes, and they came up through the floor like maggots out of pork. As though they’d been there the whole time. Just waiting.

The derelict that Vance failed to rouse was still sleeping, decked out on the cool curved plastic of the seats, thick in his own smells. The rats had found him.

Just as Vance had been found by the dark shape in the doorway. The shape that motioned toward the dead thing at its feet, and impaled him with its luminous eyes.

“Cigarette?” Jerry was kneeling in front of the two wimps, grinning unpleasantly. They shook their heads, blubbering. He smacked the taller one across the face, eliciting a yelp. “I didn’t ask if you wanted one! I ast if you got one!”

The taller wimp, William Deere by name, shook his head more emphatically and whimpered a little. First time he’d ever wished for cigarettes, too. Big night for firsts. Fortunately, his friend Robert had one; the little longhair pulled a Tareyton out with shaky fingers and handed it to Jerry.

“What the hell is this? "Jerry took it, inspected it in the light from the tunnel. “Tareyton. These any good?”

“I like ’em,” Robert said, risking a chummy grin. His NO NUKES T-shirt was plastered to his back and armpits. He was remembering a movie he saw on TV once, with Tony Musante and Martin Sheen playing badass teen psychos who terrorized sixteen people on a subway car. It was called The Incident, and it had made him swear that he’d never be intimidated like that. He’d never simper and squirm and let some tough guy take him apart piece by piece.

He had fooled himself about that for a long time. No more. If Jerry wanted to take Robert apart, Jerry could go right ahead. Robert wasn’t going to do shit. Robert was going to risk a chummy grin.

“Great,” Jerry said, grinning back. “You got anything else I might like, baby boy?” Robert’s smile dried up, and he reached into his pockets.

“You, too, doll,” said Jerry’s stupid friend, coming over to join in the fun. William Deere nodded now, exercising his neck far more than his spine. He echoed his friend’s gesture, coming up with eighty dollars in crisp twenties.

“Hot damn! Moses, you done good by us.” Jerry punched William in the shoulder affectionately. “Yer buddy didn’t do so hot, though. Wassa mattah, little Jesus? Nobody givin’ at church?” He grabbed Robert by the collar and started to hoist him out of his seat.

Then the door at the front of the car slammed open, and Vance reappeared, still holding the gun. There was something stiff about his movement as he came toward them. And his eyes gleamed red, like a rat’s.

They hit 34th Street just as the first shot went off, striking Jerry’s asshole friend in the forehead and spinning him backward. Light flooded the train, illuminating the brains and blood that spattered the back wall. Jerry jumped back, freaking. William and Robert squealed like pigs.

Jerry’s remaining friend, the drunk and sickly one, looked up in time to see a nightmare appear in the door behind Vance. He groaned, assumed he was delirious, and lost it all over the floor. Vance pumped two bullets into him, rolling him off into his own vomit, face first and forever still.

“Jesus!” Jerry screamed. He pulled a very nasty blade from his back pocket and flicked it open, brought it to rest against William Deere’s throat. The gangly hippie came up with ease, back pressed against Jerry’s pounding chest. “One more step, man, this boy gets his throat sl. . .”

Vance’s next shot smashed William Deere’s nose on its way out the other side. The body jerked once and then sagged in Jerry’s arms. He pushed it away with a tiny animal sound and ran screaming toward the cop.

To his credit, Jerry was every bit as tough as he liked to act. He took one in the belly and one in the right lung, crawled ten feet on his knees and buried the blade in Vance’s thigh before drowning in his own blood. Vance watched, blank-faced, not even seeming to feel the pain.

“Take it out, please,” said a voice from behind Vance. A voice of unspeakable calm and remorselessness. A chill, serpentine hiss. A whisper of graveyard breeze.

Vance dropped the gun, gripped the handle of Jerry’s switch with both hands, and pulled it wetly out of his leg. He straightened. The knife hung poised in front of his stomach.

“Now in,” said the voice, and Vance plunged the point into his navel.

“Now out.” The blade slid away with a puckering sound.

“Now in.”

Officer Vance was slopping viscera all over his boots by the time Robert finally lost his mind. The young man bolted from his seat and attacked the end door, pissed himself and didn’t even know it. The door slid open almost by itself, and he staggered out into the space between, wind and thunder pounding at him as he screamed,”HELP ME! HELP ME! OMIGOD, YOU GOTTA . . .”

Then the last of the empty 34th Street platform disappeared, and he was screaming at a wall in total darkness. His hands gripped the metal chain guardrail and clung to it with everything he had.

Robert dimly heard the door slide shut, and leaned against it with a sigh of relief. The sound of Vance mechanically disemboweling himself could no longer be heard, and that was good, because if Robert had had to listen for one more second, he would have jumped.

Jumped . . .

Robert looked down. Even in the dark, even half-insane, he could tell that the ground was moving by very quickly. The part of his mind that still worked weighed his chances of survival. Not too good. He began to cry.

Oh, Jesus Christ, they’re dead, they’re all dead, I’m gonna die! His thoughts tumbled all over each other like the bodies behind the door. The floor, split down the middle, wanted to rip his legs off and eat him alive; but he was losing his grip on the chain and the world. His strength was slipping away; he was sagging, sagging . . .

The door rattled in front of him. Not the door, behind which the cop was still carving himself like a Christmas turkey and the walls were wearing William’s face. Not that one.

The other one.

The one that led to another car.

The one that led to escape.

Robert half fell across the platform, grabbing hold of the door latch and pulling. A crack appeared. He gibbered and extended its dimensions, struggling to his feet. . .

. . . just as the dark train entered the 28th Street station, flooding him once more with light...

. . . just as a rat the size of his foot squeezed through the crack, chittering in its own obscene tongue. Robert shrieked and booted it right into a pillar, slamming the door shut abruptly. He imagined that he could hear a thousand furry, filthy little bodies slamming against the other side, trying to reach him.

Then, beyond imagining, he felt the red eyes boring into the back of his head. The window went cold, and he recoiled from it. The door slid open without resistance. And a hand . . . ancient, horrible . . . reached out for him.

Without hesitation, he jumped.

Robert experienced a moment of remarkable freedom, of triumph. Then he hit the first pillar and his neck snapped, mercifully, like a twig. He was dead before most of the damage was sustained.

It was the best he could have hoped for. Under the circumstances.

It was taking a joyride on the dark train tonight, cold steel slicing through the underbelly of Manhattan. Just as it had twenty years before, and twenty years before that, when the whole system of subterranean labyrinths was fresh and marvelous, before the taking-for-granted and the turning-to-shit. The more things change, the more they stay the same, it thought, savoring the brute constancy of humans and their achievements, no matter how far through the ages they slithered.

It was over 800 years old, and didn’t look a day over seventy-five.

Someone was giggling and whining in the conductor’s booth: crawling with spiders that nobody else could see. The ancient creature was amused, as usual. Boundlessly, terribly amused.

The dark train barreled down corridors of endless night, heading toward 23rd Street and beyond. In the engineer’s booth, Donald Baldwin stared vacantly out at the tunnel, fingers locked on the throttle, cigarette butts stuck to the spilled Pepsi and blood at his feet. In the light from the tunnel walls, the meaty expanse of his throat twinkled and gleamed. And the controls cast bright reds and yellows on the shiny wet spots and streaks in his clothing.

As they approached 23rd Street, Don Baldwin’s dead fingers pulled back on the throttle, and the dark train began to slow down.

Way at the front of the downtown platform, Rudy Pasko was defacing subway posters. Evita’s eyes became two blackened pits. Blood rolled from the corners of her mouth in bold streaks of Magic Marker. The microphone stands had been turned into an enormous penis. And in large jagged letters, on either side, Rudy wrote:

SHE EATS THE POOR

AND MAKES SHELLS OUT OF HER LOVERS

There was no joy in it. Rudy scowled at his handiwork for a moment, then moved down to see what he could do with Perdue’s Prime Parts. A cigarette dangled from the arrogant slash of his mouth. His eyes were dark, set back with mascara in the pale, bony face. There was an unpleasant tic around the right socket: too much speed, too much pent-up rage and despair. His hair was a bleached blond rockabilly pompadour. He was dressed entirely in black: tight jeans, artfully ripped sweatshirt, spiked wristbands, leather boots.

Like Peggy Lewin, Rudy’s latest romance had come to a less-than-spectacular conclusion. Unlike Peggy Lewin, Rudy had not been drained of all blood and flung from a speeding subway. Also unlike Peggy Lewin, Rudy harbored no sugary illusions of love. Only nasty ones.

Which was why he had the terrible fight with Josalyn. Which was why she threw him out of her apartment. Which was why he woke up his so-called best friend Stephen in the middle of the night, threatening suicide or murder or worse. Which was why he waited, alone, for the RR train to come, while Steve the Sap was no doubt putting some coffee on the burner.

Curiously, now that he was alone, Rudy’s mind was almost completely silent. He stared at the twins in the poster, Smilin’ Frank Perdue and this enormous fucking sheep, and cracked up. The fight was forgotten. He thought only of those two ridiculous mammals, and how to enhance their appearance.

Rudy was applying a business suit to the sheep’s likeness when the dark train rumbled into 23rd Street with a ratlike squealing of brakes. He shrugged, beyond caring, and quickly added a pinstriped tie. “A masterpiece,” he proudly proclaimed.

The dark train ground to a halt and glared at him with its two blank eyes. Rudy took a last drag of his cigarette and chucked it onto the tracks. He leered at the man in the driver’s seat, slipped him the finger.

Donald Baldwin leered horribly back.

The doors opened, and Rudy noticed that there were no lights on the train. Then a very bad rush hit him with alarming force, and he staggered back a bit, puzzled.

It’s nothing, he told himself. It’s nothing. Let’s go.

He moved toward the open door, and the hair started to prickle on his arms. Rudy felt himself tightening up involuntarily, but he didn’t know why. His steps grew suddenly timorous, uncertain, and then the second rush hit him like a fist to the belly.

“Jesus!”He doubled up slightly and stopped, just staring at the blackness inside the car. What’s happening? his mind wanted to know. He hung there, frozen.

The doors started to close. Purely by reflex, Rudy jumped forward and grabbed for the opening. The doors flew open at his touch, and he hustled inside. The doors closed. Rudy watched them, panting. He pressed his face to the glass, took a last look at the Perdue twins. Suddenly, they weren’t very funny anymore.

Something moved behind him, and he turned.

The dark shape stood in the middle of the aisle, winking at him with luminous eyes. “How do you do,” it whispered, and light sparkled on the long sharp teeth.

As the dark train resumed its terrible, downward roll.

BOOK 1

The Writing on the Wall

CHAPTER 1

Light struggled gamely against the storefront window with the words MOMENTS, FROZEN embossed on its filthy surface. If Danny’d ever scrubbed the sucker, the light just might have prevailed. But New York City grit is feisty, pernicious, and only a few diffused beams clawed their way into the shop.

Inside, Danny Young was thumbing through old movie posters, as usual. There was a little dust on Marilyn Monroe’s showgirl thigh; he brushed it lovingly away. Her angelfood face was so luscious, so tragic, that he found himself lost there for a moment, his four eyes gazing into her own.

He pushed his wire-rimmed spectacles up on his nose, ran a hand through his quietly receding hair. He was a tall, gangly man who seemed flash-frozen in 1968: flannel shirt, Grateful Dead T-shirt beneath it, jeans that were a threadbare excuse for a thousand-odd colorful patches. His love of the fantastic, of make believe, was stamped all over his long, clownish features. He couldn’t tell you what he had for breakfast yesterday, but he could tell you every bit player’s name in the original Thief of Baghdad: a movie made before he was born.

“Oh, Marilyn,” he moaned, bending close to her, romantic. “I would have respected your intelligence! I would have given you serious, challenging roles! I would have done anything . . .”

She smiled tenderly, understanding.

“. . . to have you smile at me that way in real life!” He peeked around the room, a bit guiltily, though no one else was there, then he pulled the poster toward him and gave Marilyn a large wet smack on the lips.

And, of course, someone walked through the door.

“Oops!” Danny cried, dropping her like a hot potato. He flipped quickly ahead to a shot of King Kong and looked up, embarrassed, at his customer.

Only it wasn’t a customer. At least, the odds were against it. It was Stephen Parrish; and while Stephen was a regular to the shop, he rarely, if ever, bought anything. He mainly just liked to hang out and talk, obsessively, about the strange concerns of young media freaks: movies, music, comics, books, and video.

Danny liked Stephen, even though the kid didn’t know when to stop sometimes, and his dress was a weird blend of punk and preppie that came off looking silly as a six-legged beagle. True, he’d stopped combining LaCoste shirts with spiked wristbands; but he still seemed perpetually out of place, as if he were followed through life by the caption, What’s Wrong With This Picture?

It was sad, but Danny could forgive him. Some good ideas always got batted around, and Stephen definitely knew his trivia. Every once in a while, Danny even saw some dollars out of the bargain.

But this morning, Stephen looked pale and haggard, not well at all, from Danny’s perspective. It’s been that way ever since he started hanging out with that graffiti asshole, the pseudo-poet with the blackeye-liner . . . what’s his name?

“Have you seen Rudy?” Stephen asked suddenly, as if in answer.

“Nope,” Danny replied. “But have you seen this?”

He reached into the next rack of posters and pulled out a beautiful coup: Dwight Frye as Renfield in the original Dracula, climbing up from the ship’s hold with crazed eyes and a lunatic’s laughter.

Ordinarily, this would have made Stephen’s eyes pop open. But Stephen just muttered, ”This doesn’t make sense,” and went right back out the door.

“Nice seein’ ya!” Danny called after him, then shrugged and scratched his balding head. “Wonder what’s up his ass,” he mused. Probably Rudy, three times a night, came unbidden from out of the blue. It made him laugh, but it wasn’t really very funny.

It was depressing, in fact.

“Oh, well,” Danny sighed, turning his attention back to Renfield. “I suppose we’ll just have to ask The Master, won’t we, if we want to know why Stephen is hunting a rat.”

Renfield’s eyes, twinkling with secret knowledge, reflected on the thick glass of Danny’s spectacles. And faintly, in the back of the shopkeeper’s mind, played that mad and discomfiting laughter . . . .

Stephen Parrish moved briskly down MacDougal Street, eyes scanning the sweltering crowd. Ninety-five degrees out and stickier than a bitch in heat, but the sidewalks were still crawling with life. Tourists, students, frustrated artists and burnouts: all parading through the Village like there was nothing better to do, sweating their silly asses off.

We’ve probably got everybody in the western world here today, Stephen thought, except Rudy.

So where the hell is he?

There were several conflicting tides rolling through Stephen right then. The one that had stayed up all night for nothing was tired and pissed. The one that worried throughout was worrying still. The forever-voice of Reason was recycling old, lame explanations. And other voices, which made no sense, demanded to be heard nonetheless.

Rolling in separate directions like that, his thoughts were taking him nowhere. He crossed Bleecker Street with the traffic, saw nothing useful, and decided to just sit in the park for a while. Maybe I’ll run into him there, he thought. Or somebody who’s seen him.

But I doubt it.

Sweat gathered in the short dark hair around his temples, ran in rivulets down his back and sides. He kept close to the wall, in a thin band of shadow. It helped, but not much.

There was a pizzeria on the corner. An extra large bottle of Coke, with ice cubes all over it, danced in the back of his mind. Stephen moved toward that cold vision, smiling a little. For a moment, thought gave way to more basic biology.

Then he passed the newsstand, and the Daily News headline screamed out for his attention. He stopped dead, staring. The Coke was forgotten. And something far colder flooded him with a terrible, dawning realization.

It was raining Frisbees in Washington Square Park, but Stephen didn’t notice. Even when one zipped by an inch from his ear, he remained oblivious.

Same went for the kids who were illegally whooping it up in the dry fountain; the cops who had to chase them out, even though they were roasting themselves; the jazz trio in one corner, the guitarist whacking off his Les Paul in another; the stand-up comedian surrounded by his howling, hysterical audience; the loose joint salesmen, rip-off artists, roller-skating homosexuals in tights, and would-be intellectuals of every shape and description. Not even the promise of a thousand ripe halter tops, dancing in the sun, could pull Stephen away from the nightmare.

He took another absent swig of his beer and read the article again.

8 DIE ON TERROR TRAIN

Subway Ride Through Hell

Leaves No Motives, No Clues

“Police today are at a loss to explain the deaths of 8 people found slaughtered on a downtown RR train this morning. Nor can they explain why the victims—five youths, a transit patrolman, the motorman, and one unidentified man who appears to have been eaten by rats—all died in such horribly different ways.

“And the lone survivor—the conductor of the train, whom TA spokesman Bernard Shanks declined to identify—has been hospitalized for ‘complete psychological collapse.’ The man, who was taken from the scene of horror at 5:17 this morning, is not currently regarded as a suspect.

“A police spokesman stated that ‘we are still looking for a motive in what is certainly the most bizarre, horrible tragedy in recent memory . . .’”

There was more, but Stephen had already gone over it ten times in the last twenty minutes. All to no avail. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t find the black hole that appeared to have swallowed his friend.

And yet he knew that it was there.

“Dammit, Rudy,” he moaned, low in his throat. “Where are you? What happened?” He felt dizzy and weak, and he wanted to cry; but the tears, like the answer, refused to come. He was no closer to the answer than he’d been at 5:00 this morning, when the coffee was just beginning to grow cold.

CHAPTER 2

Joseph Hunter was hunched up behind the wheel of his delivery van, his muscular frame fighting for air space in the cramped cab, just waiting for the light to change. Midtown traffic being what it was, he’d been stuck on the same block of 38th Street for the last ten minutes. Fucking gridlock, he thought to himself. If I don’t get out of here soon, I’m gonna drive right over somebody’s car.

There were a lot of cars blasting by on Fifth Avenue. Joseph watched them wearily, trying to guess which one would be blocking the intersection when the light changed. “Who will die?” he asked them, indifferent. A black Volvo’s brakes squealed with terror.

His beeper went off.

“Oh, God damn!” he growled, reaching down quickly to silence it. He hated the thing, its insipid meep meep meeping sound. Like the alarm clock, the telephone, the school bells of his youth: it was the shrill, insistently whining voice of civilization itself. He hated the way that it dug into his side, clinging to his belt like a blood-bloated parasite, nagging like the world’s tiniest Jewish mother.

Most of all, he hated the fact that his livelihood depended on it.

Joseph shut the beeper up with a slap of his hand, unclipped it from his belt, tossed it contemptuously onto the dashboard. He was just reaching for his Winstons when he heard the scream.

He glanced immediately at the rearview mirror. When she screamed again . . . it was a woman . . . he pinpointed her: pretty, fashionable, middle-aged, waving her arms and running up the sidewalk toward him. She screamed again.

Joseph whirled around, trying to figure out what was going on. Then he saw the skinny black dude flying through the crowd, clutching something that might have been a football to his chest. Except it wasn’t.

It was the woman’s purse. And she’d never be able to catch him, no matter how loud she screamed.

“Son of a bitch,” Joseph mumbled under his breath. He threw the van in park and jumped out, the door slamming shut behind him.

All the way to the curb, he couldn’t stop thinking about his poor crippled mother and the punks that messed her up. He couldn’t stop thinking about how much he hated New York, the human garbage that infested its streets. His mind was moving rapidly . . . much more rapidly than his feet. He pushed himself to go faster.

Out in front of the neighborhood deli that bore his name, an old man named Myron was busily sweeping the walk. He refused to look up at the source of the screams. He kept his eyes on the pavement, the end of his broom, and the never-ending filth and debris at his feet, cursing quietly in Yiddish. He was, like most people, afraid.

That was why he didn’t see the enormous form of Joseph Hunter barreling out of the street. He didn’t see the wild-haired giant bearing down on him like a nightmare Paul Bunyan, eyes flaming, beard bristling. Not until the broom was snatched from his hand did he look up; and then there was nothing to do but watch.

“Excuse me,” Joseph said. The wormy little purse snatcher was almost upon him. He reared back with the broom, settled into a Reggie Jackson stance, and waited three seconds.

“Now,” he whispered; and when the guy was even with him, Joseph broke the broom handle squarely across his forehead.

Everything went flying at once. The purse did a triple somersault and landed flat on its side with a mute wump. Its snatcher went over backwards, feet whipping out from under him, a little louder but no less dead to the world when he hit. The severed end of the broom spun crazily over the backed-up traffic and pinged off the roof of a parked car on the other side of the street.

Myron’s arms were beginning to flail when the woman rushed past him. He stepped back to avoid a collision, and the next moment found him holding what was left of his broom.

“Thanks,” Joseph muttered, and turned away.

The woman had retrieved her pocketbook. It was clutched to her bosom like a baby as she pushed past the little storekeeper again and started kicking her would-be assailant. “Take that, you lousy prick!” she shrieked, nailing him low in the belly with the point of one expensive Italian high-heeled boot.

“Jeezis, lady!” yelled some guy from the crowd, grabbing her from behind and holding her back with some difficulty. “He’s already unconscious, fercrissake! You wanna kill him or something?”

“You’re goddamn right I do!” she bellowed, and a small crowd began to applaud. The woman flailed out with her right foot, but the guy had dragged her out of range. “Let me go!” she screamed, and caught him in the shin with her heel. He yipped like a puppy with a stepped-on tail and obliged her. The crowd went nuts.

Myron was speechless. The dead broom was still clutched in his hand. He let it drop and peered, birdlike, into the sea of faces. Looking for the mountain man.

But Joseph was already climbing back into his van. The light had just turned green, but nobody else had tuned into that yet. He slammed the door shut behind him, slammed into gear, and slammed his foot down on the accelerator.

Luckily, no one was in his way.

“Lucky for you,” he growled at no one in particular. A pedestrian thought about crossing in front of him, thought better of it, and jumped back quickly. Joseph ignored the outstretched finger and rumbled past.

It wasn’t until he’d cleared the intersection and gone halfway to Madison Avenue that Joseph Hunter allowed himself the slightest trace of a cunning grin. It disappeared as quickly as it came.

“So you flattened him, huh?” There were a few drops of ale on Ian Macklay’s blond mustache. He brushed them away with long, delicate fingers and grinned ferociously at his friend.

“Uh-huh.” Joseph shrugged, as if it were nothing, but the tiny smile on his face betrayed him.

“Well, good!” Ian brushed the long blond hair back from his thin, intense features. He drained his mug, pounded it against the table for emphasis, and cleared his mustache again, blue eyes twinkling mischievously. “All the little predators should be so lucky! WHAP!” He pantomimed a mighty swing. “Sons of bitches might think again before . . .” He paused a moment, puzzlement in his eyes. “On the other hand, he might never think again at all. Joe, you didn’t kill him, did you? Knock his brain out of its socket, or anything?”

“If he had a brain,” Joseph said, ”I might’ve.”

“Well, fuck him, then. Bash his head in!” Ian laughed and reached for the pitcher, emptied it into their mugs, and raised his for a toast. “To streets that are free of monsters and maggots!” he cried. They drank to it.

But when the empty vessels came down, their eyes were sober and serious. For a moment, the sounds of the bar took over. They listened like men in a dream.

There was an argument brewing at the barstools by the door. Some guy with a buzz cut and leather biker jacket had just spilled his Budweiser all over some other guy’s pants, and now everyone else was starting to take up sides. Joseph and Ian watched the bartender reach for something under the counter, and Ian said, ”It’s time to go.”

“Where?”

“Under the table.”

“Bullshit. I’m still thirsty.”

“If it gets too hairy in here, you’re gonna hafta tuck me under your arm and run.”

“Bullshit. If it gets too hairy to drink in here, you and I will just have to kill ’em all. Order up another pitcher, all right?”

“Right.” Ian rolled his eyes and laughed, a little desperately. He was not a very large man—a full foot shorter than Joseph’s 6’3” stature— but what he lacked in size, he made up for with audacity. “HEY, WAITRESS!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “WE NEED ANOTHER PITCHER OF BASS ALE HERE!”

All eyes turned to the little guy with the big mouth and his even bigger buddy. The argument stopped dead for a second, distracted. Their waitress, a tall, vampish girl with long black hair, nodded quickly and hurried out of the firing line.

When the stares had lasted just a little too long, Ian smiled and waved impishly. People went back to their own business; New Yorkers are notoriously good at that. Ian didn’t fail to point that out with amusement.

“Yeah,” Joseph grumbled. “Like today. If I hadn’t stopped that guy, everybody woulda just let him go. Nobody wants to put their ass on the line for anything, you know? That’s why this is such a sick city.”

“That’s why they had you shipped in here at an early age. They knew you’d grow up to be Batman.” Ian winked and leered. Joseph groaned and muttered some expletives. The waitress came back with a full pitcher.

“This one’s on me,” Ian informed them, digging into his pocket and whipping out a ten-spot. Joseph started to protest. Ian pshawed him. “I don’t want to alarm you,” he added to the waitress, ”but this man is secretly The Defender: an amazing new superhero.”

Joseph buried his face in his folded arms. The waitress pretended to be amused, gave Ian his change, and headed for a nice safe corner. Ian socked his friend lightly in the shoulder and said, ”Drink up, champ. There’s crime to fight.”

“Aw, cut me a break . . .”

“No, seriously! I’ll be your teenage sidekick, Butch Sampson. We’ll strike terror into the hearts of . . .”

“Can it, Ian! You’re makin’ me feel like an idiot. Cut it out.”

Ian shut up, and silence reigned. After a moment, he gingerly refilled their mugs. Joseph stared at the table, stony-faced. Ian sighed deeply, lit a cigarette, and said, ”I’m sorry. It’s not funny. I know.”

And it wasn’t, because Joseph was retreating back into his mind now, and it was not a happy place. Ian could only watch his main man slip away, guess at the scenarios playing out behind those eyes. His mother’s vicious beating? His own helplessness, when he found out? The helplessness of living, trapped, with her twisted and broken remains? Or was he back in his van, reliving the frustration, flooded by the knowledge that he and he alone would act?

Suddenly, Joseph looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed and weary as they focused on Ian’s. “I just want out,” he said, and the pain in his voice was contagious. “I just want out of this cesspool. Back to the hills or something. I dunno. Just . . .

“Anywhere a man can breathe, damn it! Clean air!” Without even thinking about it, he lit a cigarette. Ian was politely silent. “Where you aren’t stepping in someone’s piss every time you turn around! Where people don’t eat each other for lunch and then go back to the office, you know?”

“Yeah, man. I know.” To the best of Ian’s knowledge, that was the longest speech Joseph ever made. He was not about to break the flow.

“I just gotta get out. I can’t take it anymore.” He took a long cold swig of his ale, wiped his mustache. “And I can’t be knockin’ people over the head all the time, either. I don’t wanna be anybody’s goddamn superhero. I just . . .”

“Want out.”

Joseph nodded, eyes averted. Ian wasn’t about to ask well, why don’t you just go? He knew the answer to that one, alrightee.

And it went, very nicely, without saying.

On the subway home . . .

Joseph Hunter, alone in a hot, grimy car with twenty other people who were also alone. No major problems: no threats, no delays, no multiple slayings. Just too much time to think, as they rolled over the bridge into Brooklyn.

On the street . . .

Joseph Hunter, scowling against the ruin. Teenagers, hawking bad drugs and blow jobs, dotting the sidewalk like garbage bags in groups of three to five. Grandmothers, huddled behind shuttered windows. The twinkle of cabs and taverns. The occasional glint of steel.

Joseph Hunter. Leviathan strides against the wasteland. Angry. Alone. Pausing in a battered, poorly lit doorway. Withdrawing his key. Engaging the lock.

In the stairwell . . .

Alone. Mounting the stairs, dragging his weight through the blue light of fading fluorescent bulbs. Hand sliding on the rail. Eyes smoldering. Joseph Hunter, coming to a stop in front of his apartment. And waiting.

At the door . . .

Thinking. Too much. Saying I don’t want to go in there. Knowing I have nowhere else to go. Hanging in the space between shadow and darkness. Thinking, but knowing. Reaching slowly, once again, for his keys.

Inside . . .

Darkness, almost total. A thin wedge of light, on the wall in the hallway. Across from the bedroom. Its door, open a crack.

She’s asleep, he thought. He hoped. Moving quietly inward. Sidestepping the coffee table. Closing in on the television set. Flipping it on, with no volume.

Floorboards creaking, as he moved toward the refrigerator. Shushing himself with a whisper. Opening the door. Brightly lit, for a moment. Withdrawing a can of Bud and popping it open.

From the bedroom, a moan.

Damn. Eyes clenched. Refrigerator door, swinging shut. Back to darkness.

Another moan. Louder.

A semi-articulated sound. Movement: a shifting on sheets, the old bed groaning.

A semi-articulated sound.

“Joey?” Her voice, as he’d heard it all his life. Until the beating. “Joey?” Her voice, ringing in his ears.

A semi-articulated sound. Her voice, the voice of memory, receding. Receding, as the sound in the room took over. A sound that few would recognize, saying something that only he could understand.

Calling his name.

“Joey?” A semi-articulated sound.

Then she began to cry.

Damn. Moving quietly toward the coffee table. Taking a long pull before setting the beer down. Moving toward the light.

The darkness, vibrating, as he moved. Too much beer. Thinking to himself, as he moved.

Crying, ahead. Not enough, he thought. Longing for the beer on the table behind him. As he moved.

In the doorway . . .

Joseph Hunter. In the thin beam of light. Hesitating, once again. Listening. Fighting the impulse to run, to leave her, to find some kind of freedom from the burden and the pain of it. Shuddering. And stepping forward.

Into the room.

In the bed . . .

She lay. Shivering, under her pile of blankets. Scrawny, pale, prominently veined and horrible: a shadow of herself, stark as a solitary detail in the light from the bedroom lamp. Fear in the eyes: modulating, as recognition struck, into a kind of relief.

Not an enemy, he could almost hear her think as she closed her eyes. My son, as she rolled over, sighing as a full human might. Not one of them. Then still. Very still.

In the doorway . . .

Joseph Hunter. Not moving. Barely breathing. Knowing what he knew, full well. And unable to touch her. Unable to comfort her. Unable to find it in him.

Standing. Watching. Waiting.

Until she was asleep. Lingering, even then, until he was sure that she would stay that way.

Wishing she would stay that way forever.

And then moving back into the darkness.

Alone.

CHAPTER 3

Upstairs, a phone was ringing. Josalyn Horne paused in the front doorway and winced; there was no doubt in her mind that it was hers. There was also little doubt as to who it was. “Oh, no,” she muttered, slamming the door and starting to run up the stairs.

An automatic response. Less than ten steps of the way up, she stopped, catching her reflection in the stairwell window: an attractive young woman, with fashionably short dark hair and finely chiseled features, looking more distraught than she liked to or deserved.

Josalyn smiled ruefully, her eyes flicking upward toward the sound. “Drop dead,” she said, taking a moment to readjust the weight of her backpack. Then she started back up again, taking her good old time about it.

The phone continued to ring. She tried to ignore it. She tried to think about the desk she’d be sitting in front of for the next five hours or so. She tried to concentrate . . . absurdly, as she’d be the first to admit . . . on how tired her legs were as they hauled her up the stairs at a deliberate snail’s pace.

The phone continued to ring. She gritted her teeth against the sound. It rang again. She got to the second floor landing and stopped, leaning against the rail and wiping moisture from her forehead. I’m not going to hurry, she told herself sternly. I’m not going to . . .

The phone rang again. She let out a little scream and rushed to the second flight of stairs, rounding the corner and climbing again. The phone continued to ring, louder and louder as she got closer and closer to the apartment door, fumbling with her keys and cursing under her breath.

Josalyn tripped on the last step and almost fell flat on her face. Her keys dropped to the floor. She picked them up angrily and hastened to the door, unlocking it in one swift motion and throwing it open.

The phone rang again, unquestionably hers now. She threw on the lights and made for the kitchen. Her white cat, Nigel, gave her one wide-eyed glance from his place in the middle of the floor and skedaddled. She nearly tripped over him, yelled, ”Oh, Nigel!” and reached for the receiver . . .

Just as it cut, in mid-ring, to silence.

“Sonofabitch!” she hollered, lifting the receiver and putting it to her ear. A dial tone. She slammed the receiver back down and leaned against the refrigerator, fighting back tears.

Nigel watched her for a moment in silence, then made his way cautiously over to her feet. He rubbed himself against one nylon-stockinged ankle, a calculated gesture of friendliness. She didn’t nudge him away. He took this as a good sign, repeated the performance; then, glancing quickly up her skirt, he turned for another pass and quietly mewled.

“Oh, Nigel,” she cooed, gently dropping to her knees beside him. He purred, a sound like a tiny fur-covered outboard motor. She scooped him up and held him to her breasts, softly squeezing. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I’m just not in a very good mood.”

Nigel struggled a little, looked her in the eyes, and mewled again. She understood. “Hypocrite,” she said, setting him down and then standing with a tired, motherly grin. “You just want something to eat, don’cha?” He meowed, loudly this time, and circled her feet as she moved to the cupboard.

Josalyn withdrew a can of 9 Lives Western Menu from the shelf, set it down on the counter, and started rooting in a drawer for the can opener. “This is going to be tremendously exciting,” she informed him. He meowed in agreement. She laughed, feeling better already. “John Wayne used to eat this stuff by the case.”

Nigel reacted indifferently to this piece of information. It occurred to her that he didn’t know John Wayne from a hole in the wall, and that, in essence, she was just talking to herself. She shrugged, equally indifferent, and continued to dig until she found the opener, while Nigel meowed ever more loudly and began to pace at her feet.

“You’re all alike, you know it? Men are all alike. I don’t care what species they are.” Nigel, unfazed, continued to whine. “See? It’s just ‘gimme gimme gimme.’ You don’t care about my needs. You don’t care about my problems. All you want to do is to sleep with me and eat my food.”

The can came open. Josalyn wrinkled her nose, but Nigel seemed to find it quite stimulating. “Mmmmmm, boy,” she said, trying to conceal her distaste. He started to go wild on the floor; this time she did knock him aside with one foot. “Hold your horses, asshole. Don’t get so uppity. When was the last time you made me dinner?”

She smiled, slightly; it faded. This whole happy encounter had been, she knew, just a diversion. In the end, it had brought her right back to where she started: with the phone, and the man on the other end.

No, scratch that, she amended. Make that the child on the other end. She smiled again, ruefully. Just then, Nigel reasserted himself at her feet. “Oh, yeah,” she mumbled, absently picking up the cat bowl from the floor, filling it up with Western Menu, and putting it back down again. The cat let out one last meow of anticipation and set upon the food in earnest.

Josalyn watched him chow down, his back to her, as if to say you’re dismissed. It reminded her of the look on Rudy’s face after one of his selfish sexual performances. After a half-hearted premature ejaculation (his standard offering), he would slide out from between her legs and roll away from her; in that moment, she would catch a glimpse of his eyes . . . just a flash, before he pulled away.

Only on their last occasion in bed had she figured out what his eyes were saying.

They were saying I got mine, bitch. Get out of my face.

It made her furious, just thinking about it. Furious with Rudy, but that was the least of it. Mostly, she was furious with herself for ever having let that soft-headed, brainless prick through the door in the first place.

She turned to stare at the phone, practically daring it to ring. It hung there: silent, white, innocent as a baby’s first tooth. She shook her head, tried to clear it. When that didn’t work, she moved to the living room and stood foggily in front of the stereo.

Dan Fogelberg was gathering dust on the turntable. She’d put him on last night, after the big to-do with Rudy. It harkened back to happier days . . . less complicated ones, anyway . . . and helped her to get the tears out of her system.

She slapped him on again, cueing the needle by hand. She was not very good at it . . . it always made her nervous . . . and the involuntary shaking of her hands didn’t help.

When the phone rang, she almost ripped the tone arm from its socket.

“DAMN IT!” she screamed. The needle dropped to the middle of the first song. She went to fix it, trembled in a mad sort of paralysis, and then just let it go. The phone rang again. A cacophony of voices howled through her brain like a tornado, and she wrestled with them. The phone rang again. And again. And again.

Finally, when she could stand it no longer, she moved back to the kitchen and brought the receiver to her ear.

“Hello?” she said, painfully aware of the weakness in her voice. It misrepresented her position. It didn’t belong. It made her angrier still.

“Josalyn?” She jumped at the sound; it was not the voice she expected to hear. “I don’t believe it! Do you know that I’ve been calling all day?”

“Uh . . .” she droned, mentally off-balance. “Who is this?”

“It’s Stephen!”

“Oh.” Her thoughts snapped back into place with a nearly audible click. “Hi,” she said, thinking so this is how you try to get back into Josalyn’s good graces. So we’re still in kindergarten, after all. You bastard.

“Hi,” Stephen said. “Uh . . . listen. Is Rudy there?”

What? she thought. It took her a second to answer. “No,” she said finally, ”he isn’t, and . . .”

“Well, have you seen him? Talked to him? Anything?” There was something desperate in his voice. Josalyn wondered briefly what Rudy had told him, what kind of story he got, and the anger flared up like a Roman candle inside her.

“Listen,” she said. “Rudy is a very bad subject for me right now. I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to think about him. If I never see or hear him again, I’ll still have seen and heard too much. Now, if you don’t mind . . .”

“But you don’t understand!” Stephen cried, his voice stripped of veneer. “Rudy has disappeared! I can’t find him anywhere!” And then, seeming to realize that he’d begun to sound melodramatic, ”I think that . . . something might have happened to him.”

“Stephen, you don’t understand.” Her voice was cold; she felt it was a definite improvement. “I don’t care what happens to Rudy. Rudy can jump off the nearest bridge, as far as I’m concerned. He’s a pig, and I hate him, and that’s all there is to it. If you want to find him so badly, you can call almost any other number in New York and have a better chance of it. Because he’s not going to be here. Never again. Do you understand me now?”

“Josalyn . . .”

“What?” He seemed to be on the brink of tears. She tried not to let it bother her.

“Josalyn . . . did you hear about the murders last night?”

“What murders?”

“On the subway. On the downtown RR train, to be specific: about 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. Eight people were killed. Horribly. Are you interested now?”

“Not really,” she said, but a little something in her voice betrayed her. “It’s the train he would have taken. I know it is. He was on his way to my apartment. He called me from the station . . .”

“What did he tell you?”

“Well . . .” Stephen hesitated for a moment. “Just that there was a big fight, and that . . .”

“That I was a cunt, right?” Josalyn could no longer contain her fury. “Surely he couldn’t have left out the undeniable fact that I’m a cheap, stupid, naive little farm-girl cunt who thinks that her shit smells like roses! His words, Stephen! Do you see why I don’t want to talk about it?”

“But . . .”

“If Rudy was on a train where eight people were killed, then I’m sorry, but I think he’s probably the one who did it. Why don’t you just call the police?”

“What?”

“He’s the only person I know who’s nasty and vicious enough to do anything like that. What were they: Grandmothers? Babies? That sounds just about his style.”

“Josalyn!” Stephen sounded furious now, as well. That makes two of us, Josalyn thought with a grim kind of satisfaction. “Do you know anything about this story?”

“No, and I . . .”

“One of the people was eaten alive by rats!” Stephen yelled, and it came through the receiver with such force that Josalyn shuddered despite herself. “Do you think that Rudy could possibly have done that?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” she said, trying to sound cooler than she felt. “To be perfectly honest with you . . . and no offense, Stephen . . . they’re the only kinds of friends he deserves.”

“I don’t believe this!” Stephen was screaming. “Rudy could be dead, and you don’t even care!”

“That’s right. I don’t.” Come to think of it, she actually felt as cold as she sounded. She felt nothing at all.

“You’re every bit as big a bitch as Rudy said you were!”

“If you’re stupid enough to believe that, Stephen, you’re stupid enough to believe anything. How about this one? Rudy is Jesus. Rudy walks on water. Rudy . . .”

“I don’t believe this!” Stephen yelled for the last time. There was a loud click, followed by silence. Blessed silence. Josalyn felt like spitting on the receiver, decided it was pointless, and hung up with a hand that shuddered in deliberate spite of herself.

“Jesus Christ,” she thought out loud. It was so absurd: even if it were true, the timing was unbelievably, riotously funny.

It’s like Glen, she thought suddenly. The thought sobered her, and her mind drifted back to her tenth grade year. She had been going with this guy named Glen Burne . . . another self-styled poet, of course . . . and finally just decided that she didn’t want to see him any more. He was a nice enough guy; it wasn’t a matter of bastardliness, like Rudy; there weren’t any fights, any bitter points of contention, or anything of the sort.

But he burned like Rudy. The memory made her shiver, as though she were standing over Glen’s open grave again, a chill wind blowing in her face. He was so sad, so strange, so obsessed with darkness. He took the whole weight of the world on his shoulders and let it crush him into the ground, a little deeper with every step.

She hadn’t been able to take the constant depression. That’s what it had come down to, finally. She’d had a lot of optimism in those days, a lot of faith, and she didn’t like the way he walked all over it without even trying. He was the kind of guy who couldn’t pass a flower in the field without dragging out the tortured metaphors: it would remind him of innocence lost, martyrs on crosses, butchered babies stacked through the war-torn ages. He would say it all offhandedly, as if those were the things you were supposed to be thinking every time you saw a fucking flower in a field.

It had finally become too much for Josalyn, and she had resolved to break off with Glen . . . gently, of course . . . on the very next day.

That was on April 26th, 1978. She remembered the night distinctly. That was the night that, at roughly the same time she arrived at her decision, Glen Burne quietly went up to his room and hung himself from the rafters, a seventeen-page suicide poem set neatly on his desk, immaculately printed on his mother’s flowered stationery . . .

Josalyn pulled herself out of her thoughts forcefully, returning to her kitchen in the present. Suddenly, the room seemed too stark, too white, as though she were having an acid flashback in a Stanley Kubrick film. She leaned against the counter dizzily, and a low, husky moan escaped her.

It’s been so long, she flashed. So long since I’ve thought about him. His face lingered on the big screen behind her eyes, larger than life and stronger than the grave. It smiled at her, full of woe, and turned to stare off into space. She shook her head to clear it, and Glen’s face disappeared . . .

. . . and suddenly it was Rudy’s face that she saw, his typical arrogant sneer plastered across it like the pancake makeup he used to make himself more ghastly white than even God, or whatever, had intended him to be. Rudy, with his cold eyes as black as the tips of his Magic Markers, mocking the world with every glance.

And in that moment, she knew that Stephen was right.

“Oh, shit!” she whined, slamming her fists down on the counter. “Why, God? Why does this always have to happen to me?” Once again, the anger overwhelmed the sorrow. “It’s not fair!” she yelled, not thinking about her two dead poets, though their faces ran together in her mind to form one perfect, grinning skull.

She was thinking about what a phenomenal guilt tripper God is, pointing his fat little finger, bringing sweat to palms that in no way deserved it. Was it her fault that Glen was too weak and self-absorbed to survive? Was it her fault that Rudy was too much of a bastard to put up with for one minute more? Was it her fault that they’d gone and purchased such nasty fates for themselves?

NO, God damn it! NO! her thoughts screamed, almost audibly. Her eyes snapped shut, squeezing out hot tears that she was barely aware of, she was so royally pissed.

Without thinking, she reached a trembling hand into the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Vola Bola Cella. She’d been saving it for a special occasion, and by God, this had to be it. After all, it wasn’t every day that your lousy ex-lover got eaten alive by rats, or whatever the hell happened to him. She let the door slide shut behind her absently, not even bothering with a glass, just popping the sucker open and taking a long, cold pull off of it.

The wine was sweet, strong. It went straight to her head like a helium balloon. She teetered slightly on her feet, steadied herself with effort, took another hefty swig, and waited for the second rush to tear through her system.

When it subsided, she felt much better. The shaking had quieted: the voices and pictures had backed off; the kitchen looked normal again. She smiled wanly at nothing in particular and moved back to the living room, where ol’ Dan Fogelberg might as well have been back in his record jacket, for all she’d heard of him.

“Oh, damn,” she said, shrugging. She took another hit, set the bottle down, and cued up the album again. This time, with a couple of belts in her, it was no problem. She giggled a little, mostly at how high she had suddenly become, and sauntered casually over to her desk.

Before her, the various facets of her project were arrayed in consummate order. To the left of the typewriter, the first nine pages of her thesis were facedown and neatly stacked; half of page ten was jutting out of the typewriter, awaiting completion; to the right sat an index-card file with more than a hundred entries, all clearly and sequentially catalogued. Next to that was the filing cabinet that held the lamp, the ashtray, the box of heavy white bond paper, and a host of reference books (philosophical tracts, Webster’s New Universal Dictionary, the current Writer’s Market, etc.). And on the bulletin board above the desk, an outline of the thesis and the book that should result from it . . . plus a check list of the myriad essays and articles that she planned to spin off from there, slanted toward everything from New Age magazine to Psychology Today.

Josalyn Horne was nothing if not methodical in her work; and though she was possessed suddenly with the devilish urge to just tear it all up and scatter it around the room like confetti, she knew that the next five hours would find her poring over it, refining it, and whipping it into shape, as methodical and orderly as ever.

“If I’m not too ripped,” she qualified aloud, then laughed and amended it: “I damn well better not be.” Still, she moved to retrieve the bottle from its place beside the stereo before sitting down at the desk, taking just a sip this time, and turning to the opening page of her manuscript.

NIHILISM, PUNK, AND THE DEATH OF THE FUTURE read the bold print at the center of the page. Catchy title, she kidded herself, and then lapsed into absolute seriousness. She stared at the title for almost a minute before taking another long pull from the bottle and lighting her first cigarette of the session.

This is the payoff, she told herself silently. My meal ticket. My baby. My rite of passage.

If I pull it off, I won’t have to worry about needing a good man . . . assuming, of course, that there is such a thing . . . to take care of me. Because I’ll be taking care of myself.

And if I ever actually do find a good man, she added, I’ll be able to do it on my own terms. Or at least be able to negotiate the terms. And, God, what a precious, rare commodity that is.

She raised the bottle in a one-way toast, glass clinking against thin Manhattan air, and took another short swig. Then she set it down, resolutely this time, and tried to focus on the words poised awkwardly in mid-sentence, halfway down the length of page ten.

After a while, she began to write. And kept it up, doggedly, for the specified five hours, before shutting off the old Smith-Corona and cashing in her chips for the night.

That night, she did not dream.

CHAPTER 4

In the tunnels . . .

The old Number 6 train rumbled away from the light of Union Square Station, dragging itself painfully into the darkness uptown. The usual number of passengers were on board, doing their midnight ride; atrocity tends to attract as many people as it scares away. Much to the disappointment of morbid thrill-seekers, nothing spectacular was going to happen to them. They would get where they were going, and that would be that.

A few of the more astute commuters would notice the abandoned station, smothered in darkness, that hung to either side of them as they rolled down the tracks between. If they were quick, or particularly observant, they’d notice the signs on the walls: EIGHTEENTH STREET, bold lettered in white against the long black rectangles. They’d notice the debris on the platforms, the general state of disrepair, the fact that nobody’s made a habit of getting on or off there for a long, long time.

They wouldn’t notice the figure that lay sprawled in the corner of the uptown platform, surrounded by rusting trash receptacles. They wouldn’t see it writhing in the grip of a nightmare, twitching like a man on a gas chamber floor. They wouldn’t see the rats that were gathered around it, caught between hunger and an almost religious awe.

They wouldn’t know that it dreamed.

Meanwhile, halfway across the Atlantic, something awakened in the cargo hold of a freighter bound for Europe. It smiled like an old man who’d just proved once again that his bowels still worked. It stretched. It sighed.

It climbed out of its coffin.

To its ears, the sound of the ocean was a beautiful thing. Such power. Such mystery. Such agelessness. It felt a kinship with those pounding waves; its life, too, was moved by the moon into patterns of endless recurrence.

The thing in the cargo hold scanned its surroundings with grinning, luminous red eyes. It estimated that there might be 80 to 120 people on board. They should last the voyage.

Although it expected to be very hungry tonight. Traveling did wear on one so.

And after all, it thought, anyone who’s lived 800 years is entitled to a little excess.

CHAPTER 5

“Your Kind Of Messengers, Inc. Can I help you?” The phones were ringing off the hook, and the sweetness in Allan Vasey’s voice was almost purely a matter of routine. Had to be nice to the customers, man. At all costs. You had to keep them happy. In fact, just this morning, he’d pinned a bogus memo up over the dispatch desk: it said BE POLITE, OR WE’LL KILL YOU. Signed, The Management. At least two of the people who came into the office weren’t sure that it was a joke.

“Jesus Christ, I never seen such a rush!” Tony yelled from the chief dispatcher’s seat. He seemed upset; but Allan knew that Tony wouldn’t have been happier if you laid two lines of coke out for him and gave him a fifty-dollar raise. It had been a miserable, slow summer for the business, and any action was good action when you’d been staring at a dead switchboard for nearly a month.

Your Kind Of Messengers, Inc., occupied a renovated storefront on Spring Street, in SoHo. Despite its barebones economy, it was a fairly cheery place: large bay windows for the sun to shine through, plants on the ledge, good people working both the phones and the streets. The dispatch phones sat in a line on the western wall, directly opposite the messenger checkout counter, with the customer-line desk between.

Chester and Jerome were bogged down with calls from clients: law firms, p.r. (PR???) firms, publishers, fashion designers, art galleries, advertising agencies. It seemed like every client on the books had been waiting all summer for this morning; the sudden volume was staggering. Allan had no choice but to assist them, leaving poor old Tony to dispatch it all.

The only messenger in the office was a new guy. He stood at about 5’9” in his roller skates, wore a light tan jumpsuit that contrasted sharply with his black messenger bag. He eagerly watched the runs pouring in, waited for his share of the pie. Your Kind Of Messengers worked on a commission basis: the more you worked, the more you made. He was ready for some money.

Allan hung up the phone and absently massaged his brow. A headache was coming; he could feel it building up behind his deep-set brown eyes. He let his hand slide down his face, tug briefly at his neatly trimmed and mahogany beard. He glanced at the economy-sized bottle of Tylenol next to the phone, decided against it for the moment, then snatched up a pair of tickets from the desk and handed them to the roller-skating messenger.

“Here’s two for you, Doug,” he said. The messenger smiled appreciatively. “Not too bad for your second day, huh?”

“It’s great,” Doug replied, taking the runs and copying the information onto the sheet of paper in his battered clipboard’s grip. “Love it.”

Allan turned back to his phone. The customer lines had mercifully stopped ringing, for the time being; only the messenger lines were lit, seven flashing buttons on hold. Seven guys, calling in from all over the city, waiting for something to do.

He picked up the receiver and punched in the first button. “Your Kind. Who?” he said.

“This is Vince,” answered the little voice over the phone. “Listen . . .”

“Where are you, Vince?”

“Uh . . . Grand Central.” Vince sounded impatient. “Listen, don’t you guys have any work? I mean, I’m gettin’ tired of being told to . . .”

“Hold on, Vince,” Allan said, pushing the hold button. If there was one thing he didn’t need, it was idiots like that to contend with. Vince’s light blinked cheerily, like a Christmas tree bulb. Allan punched in the next line.

“Your Kind. Who?”

“Hunter, up at Columbus Circle.”

“Hey, boss! How ya doin’?”

“Alright.” Even on the phone, Joseph Hunter was a man of few words . . . most of them surly. “Let me talk to Chester.”

“You got it, champ.” Allan put him on hold, called across the room. “Hey, Chester! Hunter on seven-oh!”

“Wait ’til I finish with this jerk,” Chester called back, holding the phone away from his mouth. Then he turned back around and said, ”Vince, you always got an excuse for everything. You know that? Always got a fuckin’ excuse.”

Allan couldn’t hear the response, but he knew that Vince must be laying it on heavy. Chester’s broad shoulders were slumped in resignation, his head shaking back and forth slowly, eyes rolling in the dark face. He flashed a pained glance at Allan. Allan nodded and mouthed the words I know, man. Chester straightened in his chair and cleared his throat.

“Hey, man. I don’t wanna hear that!” Chester cried, exasperated. “I wanna know why it took you two hours to get from Manhattan Harbor to 57th Street, you know? I mean, did you get out of the van and just push it up the street yourself?”

You could hear Vince from across the room.

“That’s bullshit, bro’,” Chester intoned. “That’s bull . . . no, man, I don’t have anything on my desk . . . I . . . listen, pad’nuh. If I did have anything, I wouldn’t give it to you. You are the slowest motherfucker I ever seen!” Jerome got off the phone, looked at Chester, looked at Allan, and started to laugh. “Now . . . hey. No, man! Now you just drop by the office with your manifest. I wanna make sure that people been signin’ for this shit, you ain’t just been dumpin’ it in the river or somethin’.”

“Hunter on seven-oh,” Allan reminded him gently. Chester nodded and squared his shoulders.

“Come into the office, Vince . . . no. Come. In. To. The. Office. Vince. That’s all . . . no . . . goodbye, Vince . . . goodbye, Vince!” He slammed down the phone and turned wearily to his compatriots.

“Man, if there’s one thing I don’t need,” he moaned, ”it’s Vince.”

“Vince is the worst,” Tony contributed, turning from the phone for a moment. “A real scumbag.”

“You know what he said?” Chester exclaimed, throwing his hands up in the air. “He said they had him carrying coffins! I mean, what the hell does that have to do with anything? Why did it take you two hours to get halfway across town? Two hours! Can you believe that?”

“Hunter on seven-oh,” Allan said for the last time.

“Soon as I get another driver, Vince is gone,” Chester concluded, insistent. “That boy is O-U-T.” Then he picked up the phone again and punched Joseph’s button. “Hunter?” he said. “Hey, babe. You don’t know how good it is to talk to somebody sane . . .”

“That’s what you think,” said a voice from the doorway. Allan turned and saw Ian walking into the dispatch room. Ten o’clock in the morning, and Ian was already dripping with sweat, pasting the long hair to his head and staining the blue work shirt in innumerable places. His messenger bag dangled at his side from the shoulder strap; his clipboard was already in hand. “Hey, who’s the spaceman?” he jibed, glancing at Doug.

“Hey, Ian! How’s it goin’, boss?” Allan called, flashing a toothy grin. Then he addressed the question. “That’s Doug Hasken, ace skating messenger.”

“Pleased ta meetcha,” Ian said, grinning. “Are you for real?”

“You bet,” said Doug.

“What happened to your clipboard? Looks like it got fired out of a cannon.”

“I use it to direct traffic,” Doug quipped, emphasizing this with a swinging motion. “Cabs, especially.”

“Him, I like,” Ian said, turning to Allan. He flashed a wildass grin and continued. “Hey, I just thought I’d drop by, since I was in the neighborhood and my beeper went off.”

“You ready to do some work, buddy?” Tony asked, holding up a handful of tickets. Ian’s eyes widened, and he nodded in mute astonishment. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven runs for you, buddy. I’ll tell ya, we’re goin’ off the wall in here.”

“Seriously,” Allan said, massaging his forehead again, ”this is the busiest we’ve been all summer. If it would just keep it up . . .”

“I could get that condo in Florida,” Ian cut in, ”instead of sucking gravel for lunch every day.”

“It’s just the economy,” Allan went on. “If you want to know how the country’s doing, just check out how many runs are going out. We’re one of the best economic indicators there is.”

“Who is?” Jerome wanted to know. “You and me?” He was a handsome, fair-skinned black man with a decidedly effeminate air about him. For Jerome, every week was Gay Pride Week, and he didn’t care who knew it.

“Nobody’s talking to you, Mary,” Tony informed him gruffly.

“I told you not to call me Mary. My name is Jerome.”

“Anything you say, Queen Mary.”

“If nobody’s making any money,” Allan resumed, unflustered, ”we’re not gonna make any money, ’cause they’re not gonna be sending anything anywhere.”

“Well, somebody’s doin’ something,” Ian asserted, busily copying the runs onto his manifest, ”because I am definitely making some money today.”

“Enough for a couple of six-packs on Friday night?” Allan sidled up to the counter conspiratorially. “Maybe go back down in the dungeon again?”

“You know,” Ian said thoughtfully, ”Poot the Barbarian hasn’t hacked up anybody in . . .”

“Three weeks,” Allan completed the sentence for him. “And I’ve added a couple of new rooms, a few more magic items . . .”

“Ah! Renovating, eh?”

“You won’t even recognize the place.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Jerome was feigning petulance. “You have a dungeon in your basement, or something?”

“Yeah,” said Ian. “It’s green, and slimy, and . . .”

“Do you tie people up there?” Jerome asked, eyes brightening. “Do you hold them in chains?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Mary?” Tony commented over his shoulder.

“I’d like to wrap you up in chains,” Jerome countered, ”and flog you silly.”

“I bet you would, bitch. I bet you would . . . Hey, Ian! You gonna sit on those runs all day, buddy? Let’s go!”

“Right!” Ian started writing hurriedly again. “So it’s Dungeons and Dragons on Friday night. My place again?”

“It already looks like a battlefield, so I don’t see why not.” Allan winked, and they shared a grin. “Think we can get Mr. Hunter to play?”

“Is he still on the line?” They turned simultaneously to look, but Chester had just hung up the phone.

“Now, that guy is good,” Chester proclaimed. “I don’t hafta worry about Hunter. He’s okay. He does his work. But fuckin’ Vince . . .”

Everybody started rolling their eyes. Chester was going to be on a Vince-trip all day, and it was only ten after ten.

“All he kept sayin’ was ‘Coffins, man! Coffins!’ I mean, who cares about coffins?”

Allan and Ian looked at each other, two minds that liked to play with the fantastic. Two sets of eyebrows raised at the same time. A matched set of evil, obsequious leers.

“Our master,” said Allan, rubbing his hands together in toadyish abandon.

“Count Vampiro,” said Ian, with fawning adoration in his voice.

“What a lovely bunch of coconuts we’ve got to work with around here,” Tony griped, lighting up a cigarette. “I kid you not, buddy.”

“Don’t these guys ever do any work?” Doug asked Tony. Tony shrugged.

“No,” said Jerome with perfect diction. “They’re too busy serving Count Vampiro.”

“Nobody’s talking to you, Mary . . . Ian! Get outta here, buddy! Doug, you too!”

“I’m going!” Ian grabbed his clipboard, stuffed it into his bag, and ran for the door, Doug skating up in hot pursuit. Allan watched them, and a weird flash of trepidation struck . . . a shapeless fear, with no identifiable cause, that suddenly loomed up inside him like a monster from his imaginary dungeon.

A sense of impending doom.

He started to say something, but the door slammed shut behind them. Allan stood there, frozen, the bad rush just sittin in his chest like a rotting thing. Was it for me, or was it for them? he wondered, staring at the closed door. Or was it just random paranoia?

He was dimly aware of Chester’s voice, going on and on behind him.

Saying, ”Coffins, man! Can you believe that?”

As a chill moved up his spine like a snake.

CHAPTER 6

At about 3:30 in the afternoon, Stephen Parrish resolved to call Josalyn again. He’d been all over the Village until almost four in the morning, checking every possible hangout, and come up with nothing. He’d finally dragged himself home and collapsed in defeat, slept through the rest of the morning, and awakened at a quarter to two: bleary-eyed, cranky, and not at all rested.

He’d gotten dressed, made a cup of instant coffee, and gone down to the corner for the Post and the Daily News. The subway murders were relegated to small boxes in the lower left-hand corner of the front page: POLICE SUSPECT DEMON CULT IN SUBWAY SLAYINGS for the first, SUBWAY PSYCHO’S CALL . . . “THE DEVIL MADE US DO IT!” for the other. They did not make him happy. He bought them and took them home.

He read them. They were nonsense, pure and simple. Stephen was amazed that the ruse had made it past the copy editor’s desk. Obviously, some fruitcake had called in, dubbing himself High Priest of the Luciferian Order, and claimed to have orchestrated a blood sacrifice to the Dark Prince Himself. The police were checking on it, on the off chance that there might be something to it; but Stephen’s opinion was that “Lord Blood” (as this loony-tune referred to himself) was a sicko publicity-seeker, cluttering the trail with bad jokes and schizophrenia.

But . . . how could he know for sure?

For all he knew, Lord Blood was not only as weird as he seemed, but even weirder. For all he knew, the guy might be a cover for a real group of Satanists, or mobsters, or terrorists, or whatever. For all he knew, it could have been the C.I.A.

The big question in his mind was beginning to be what difference does it make? If someone got Rudy, it doesn’t really matter who it was. Does it?

In truth, he didn’t really have any evidence that Rudy was on the train at all, just a gut feeling that got harder and harder to hang on to as time dragged by. By 2:45, Stephen was more than half convinced that he’d been making a complete arse out of himself . . . that Rudy was out somewhere, sleeping it off, and just not bothering to call.

Which led to the next question: why, exactly, should I care? Why should I break my neck looking for someone who wakes me up in the middle of the night, says he’ll be right over, and then doesn’t so much as call for two days?

By 3:15, Stephen had decided that Josalyn was right, and he was wrong: Rudy was a pig. He had no respect for anybody else. He was completely selfish, completely wrapped up in his own cynical world. He treated other people . . . other artists, even . . . like trash, and he had a ridiculously inflated sense of his own importance. And ego as big as a Buick. And he wasn’t all that great, really, when you came right down to it.

Stephen felt extremely guilty, then. He felt like an idiot for letting Rudy jerk him around like that, and he felt even worse about jumping all over Josalyn. She was a nice enough girl, and she certainly wasn’t stupid: she’d seen through Rudy before he had.

And so it was that, at roughly 3:30, Stephen decided to call her up and apologize. It won’t be pleasant, he told himself, but I really have to do it. It’s the least I can do, considering how I’ve behaved.

He started pacing around the apartment, trying to figure out how to approach it. Should he just say I’m sorry and forget about it? Should he try to joke around with her, stay within her good graces if it wasn’t already too late? And what if she wasn’t willing to talk with him? Could he blame her? Not really.

By 3:40, he’d given up on the idea. It would probably just blow over, and the situation was already awkward. Why make it worse? He spent another ten minutes, just trying to assure himself that he’d made the right decision.

Then he tried to think of something to do.

He went downstairs and checked the mailbox. His weekly check from Mom and Dad was there. As an unemployed art school student (who needed lots of time to pursue his main interest, which was writing), it seemed only right that they should cover his rent, tuition, and all other expenses. This will come in handy, he thought. I’m down to thirty bucks. Then he went back upstairs.

Half an hour later, after another cup of instant, he decided that writing might help him work off some of his nervous energy. The only problem was, he didn’t know what to write about. There were a couple of stories kicking around in his head, but he didn’t quite know where to start with any of them.

He tried to come up with something new, but it went nowhere. He threw out the sheet and put in a new one. He stared at it for a long, long time.

When 5:00 rolled around, Stephen put on his jacket and headed for the store. He decided that a nice long walk might do him some good, help him clear his mind for this story he was trying to write, help him to relax. He wanted desperately to be a writer . . . a great writer . . . but he just couldn’t seem to concentrate. Too many distractions. He made a private vow to let nothing disturb him until the story was complete.

By 5:15, he was calling Rudy’s house from a Bleecker Street pay phone. Nobody answered. He decided to get a Coke or something and try again later. Just knowing that Rudy was alright would certainly ease his mind.

By 9:30, Stephen had decided that Rudy probably wouldn’t be out on the street tonight. He headed home to do some serious writing: a great new idea came to him at McSorley’s, swigging ale . . . actually, just some insights into collegiate behavior. Their sexual problems. How hard it all was. That kind of thing. It wasn’t a story, but it could be turned into a great one, if only he could think of some way to tie all the pieces together.

By 10:30, Stephen Parrish was fast asleep in his bed. He decided that the story could wait until tomorrow. He was really, really tired.

It had been a long, hard day.

CHAPTER 7

By 10:30, Danny Young was munching popcorn in the front row of the St. Marks Cinema and waiting for Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu to start. It was only the tenth time he’d seen it, and he couldn’t wait. “Ah, this is gonna be great,” he said to no one in particular, and kicked his scrawny legs like a little kid on a swing.

The black couple on his right, busily rolling up joints for the performance, took one look at him and busted up laughing. He smiled back, ebullient, and did a series of elaborate dance steps from his seat.

“Wha’choo on, bro’?” the guy wanted to know, brandishing a fat joint of what looked to be highgrade Hawaiian. “It’s got to be better than this, thass all I got to say.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Danny answered. In truth, all he had was some mediocre Colombian. But, hey, why spoil the illusion? he thought. That’s what going to the movies is all about!

He didn’t notice the girl coming up on his left until she was almost next to him. He turned, going on the chronic moviegoer’s sixth sense; but when he saw her, something else went off in his mind.

I’ve seen her before, he thought. In my shop, maybe. Or maybe it was the last time I saw Nosferatu, with Jay and Brenda. I’m not sure. But I know that I’ve seen her before.

He certainly couldn’t forget that face: the large, dark eyes, surrounded by broad patches of black makeup in the shape of bat’s wings: the broad features, made almost gaunt by highlights and a thin layer of whiteface; the thick black hair, streaked with blue, styled like Magenta’s in The Rocky Horror Picture Show; the gaudy purple of her full, arrogantly set lips. He certainly couldn’t forget this girl, perennially dressed in red and black flowing garments that only partially obscured her extravagant curves.

No, there’s no doubt about it, he mused, watching her approach. She’s the one. It suddenly occurred to him that there was only one empty seat in the front row, that it was currently occupied by his pack and denim jacket, and that she was going to ask if anyone was sitting there. He cleared his throat in advance and waited for her to reach him.

“Anyone sitting there?” she asked, pointing at his belongings.

“Not at all,” he said, piling his things quickly onto his lap. “Sit thee down.” Without a proper explanation, his heart was beginning to pound.

“Thanks,” she said, complying. While there wasn’t any gushing of eternal gratitude, he figured that she probably wasn’t pissed off at him, either. Maybe she’ll share a doobie with me, once the show gets going, he thought, checking in his pockets for the joints he knew were there with suddenly clammy hands. Quite involuntarily, the movie screen in his head started showing clips from a new art-porno film in which he and she were the stars. He closed his eyes and tried to stop the projector, but some pretty hardcore scenes played out before he achieved any measure of success.

Danny chanced a quick look over at her. She sat, eyes trained on the blank screen, expressionless. He assumed that she hadn’t read his mind and relaxed a little, but the sight of her hit him with a burst of renewed imagery.

You don’t get laid enough, he reminded himself sternly. That’s not good. Nonetheless, it is the way it is. He helplessly allowed one more seamy shot to flash before the shout went up from behind him and the lights began to fade . . .

“Alright!” he cried, as darkness enveloped the theatre.

And the horror began.

When the uptown RR pulled out of the 8th Street station, there were only two people left on the platform: Louie, who was passed out some twenty yards from the southern mouth of the tunnel, and Fred, who was staggering around in a considerable stupor, looking for money that people might have dropped. Neither Louie nor Fred had held any gainful employment for the last eight years or so. Both of them smelled like ripe sewage on a hot plate. The uptown passengers on the RR were extremely glad that Louie and Fred had decided not to join them.

Louie snored while Fred dragged his gaze along the concrete floor. It didn’t look promising for the great white hunter: if he found more than fifteen cents, he would have to consider himself lucky. Maybe . . . he wasn’t quite sure . . . that’d give him enough for another bottle of muscatel, if he got Louie to chip in . . .

There was a sound from the mouth of the tunnel. At first, Fred thought that it was just his buddy, shuffling around or something. But when he heard it again, he was looking directly at Louie, and Louie didn’t seem to be moving at all.

“Whuzzizit?” he mumbled, wiping his eyes with a grimy paw. He staggered a little further down Louie’s way, and that was when he saw it.

Sitting at the very edge of the platform, right next to the far wall, was a wallet. Even from that distance, with his vision swimming like an Olympic gold medalist, Fred had no doubts as to what it was. It looked pretty fat, too, and Fred couldn’t figure out for the life of him why he hadn’t noticed it before.

“Oboy,” he said, making a jagged beeline toward the black leather goody. He briefly considered waking up Louie, but decided against it. Piss on ’im, he thought. Gonna drink the whole bottle myself.

He was almost up to the edge of the platform when the first wave of irrational fear hit him. He shrugged it off, having learned long before to ignore anything that didn’t get him drunk. There was a gold buckle on the wallet; it twinkled in the overhead light like the wink of a harlot.

He was seduced. The wallet was so close now that he could almost smell the leather. He stumbled up to the yellow safety line, dropped to his knees, and reached out slowly with one trembling hand.

“Oboy,” he said.

And then the hand whipped up from below: so cold, so fast, that Fred barely had time to gasp before it took him by the wrist and yanked him, head first, toward the rails . . .

Two joints and more than half a film later, a strange thought came together in the back of Danny’s mind. Though it had nothing to do with what was on the screen at the moment, he found himself remembering the scene where Nosferatu’s ship docked . . .

. . . his ship full of rats . . .

. . . and he thought about the subway murders from a couple of days ago: the ones that made all the papers. He seemed to remember something about rats in that story, too: somebody eaten alive, speculation that a large number of rats were brought on board by Satanist crazies, or something . . .

What if . . . he thought, and then stopped himself. It was too crazy to even consider, beyond a shadow of a doubt. And yet.

And yet.

Sitting in this theatre, surrounded by crazy people, with Klaus Kinski’s two monstrous fangs staring him in the face, it suddenly didn’t seem any stranger than the fact that James Watt was once Secretary of the Interior. Suddenly, with a rush that bordered on cold certainty, it seemed ridiculously clear that vampires were riding the subways and feeding on hapless commuters.

Danny giggled nervously. He looked at Nosferatu’s face and cracked up completely. People on either side of him turned to see what could possibly be so funny; he waved them off with helpless little sweeps of his arms. Oh, it’s so obvious, it’s almost obscene! he thought, and then broke out into fresh, hysterical gales of laughter.

The girl on his left, with the bat-wing makeup, grabbed him by the arm and started to shake him. “What’s going on?” she hissed, eyes red and glassy from Danny’s two joints and God-knew-what-else she might have done before the show. On her face was a mixture of annoyance and amusement; she wanted to know why he was laughing just as badly as she wanted him to shut up.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered back. “I’ll be quiet.” And started giggling again.

“No, wait a minute.” The smile had taken over her face. “I want to know what’s so funny.”

“Uh . . .” The words froze on the way up his throat. She’ll think I’m a fruitcake, his rational mind informed him. She’ll say uh-huh, right, and move to the back of the theatre. But then he looked at her again . . . not just her physical appearance, but the way she was leaning toward him now, her eyes almost flaming in their twin pools of dark design . . . and he reconsidered.

Fuggit. One fruitcake to another. He shrugged his shoulders, not giggling now, and leaned toward her with one hand cupped between his mouth and her ear.

“You might think this is silly,” he whispered, ”but I’m beginning to suspect that there’s a vampire running around in the subways.”

She didn’t move. Danny, too, was fixed in position, with his face half-buried in her hair; and because he couldn’t see her awed, almost beatific expression, he had no idea as to how she was reacting. For a long moment, he sat in tense, motionless apprehension, wishing that he knew what went on in her mind.

And it was funny, because when she turned to him with lowered eyelids and a crafty smile on her purple lips, the first thing she said was, ”You know, I was just thinking exactly the same thing.”

For another long moment, their eyes were locked.

An understanding passed between them.

“Later,” she whispered finally, bringing one finger to her lips. They turned, secretly smiling, and went back to the movie.

On the screen, an actor was pretending to drain blood from an actress who was pretending to die; but for the first time in Danny Young’s life, he saw it as though it were actually happening. As though it were possible.

And for the first time in ten viewings of Nosferatu, he was genuinely scared to the bone.

Louie wasn’t sure, at first, what woke him from the sleep of the mortally wasted. It happened suddenly; no dreamlike segue between his own little world and the big one outside his head, no break at all between total unconsciousness and as much attention as he could muster. Suddenly he was awake, staring bleary-eyed at the empty platform.

Alone.

“Wuh,” he mumbled, wiping something wet from his mouth. Liquor and drool. It left a thin, glossy smear across his dirty hand. He wiped it on the hair that spilled down into his eyes, and looked around the platform again.

Dimly, in the back of his mind, it occurred to him that something was missing. He didn’t know what it was, but it was there; or, rather, it was not. Louie grimaced, perplexed, and scratched absently at his itching scalp. His brain, pickled by the years, refused to cooperate.

And then he heard the sound that awakened him. Echoing crazily from the depths of the tunnel. Cutting off sharply, as if by a switch. And erupting again.

A scream.

Louie dragged himself forward for about a yard before he could get to his feet. It came again . . . horrible, tortured, pleading . . . and stopped abruptly. He craned his neck, stumbled, and fell on his face. For a second, he forgot where he was, then remembered; his ears pricked up like a dog’s, and his bowels threatened to let go in terror.

But the screaming had stopped.

“Fred?” he whispered.

Then, from somewhere deep in the forever darkness, a low rumbling: faint at first, but slowly gathering force as it drew closer and closer to where he lay, trembling, on the cold concrete. The rumble became a roar, like thunder. For the second time today, Louie pissed himself; but this time he was awake, and whimpering, as two bright circles of brilliance glared out of the tunnel like a pair of hellish eyes.

And as the express train hurtled through the 8th Street station, Louie was not at all sure whether the puny screams that he heard were a last dying echo from the shadows beyond, or whether they were his own.

“The thing I don’t understand,” she said, ”is why it’s just starting now. Why now?”

“Why not?” he answered, glib. “Good a time as any.”

“No. I mean, did he just move to New York two days ago, or has he been hiding out for a while?”

“I don’t know. A lot of people move here every day.” He paused to scratch his chin, a gesture of deepest concentration. “Maybe it’s just a tourist.”

“A tourist?” She laughed, beaming, and brushed a dark lock of hair from her eyes.

“Yeah. He pops into town, takes a room under the wine cellar at the Plaza Hotel, sleeps all day, and paints the town red at night.”

“Oh, Jesus.” She shook her head and gave him a look that said I don’t believe I’m walking with this guy, then laughed again. “Paints the town red. Jesus. You’re insane, did you know that?”

Her name was Claire De Loon; or at least that was what she’d have had him believe. She said that she lived on MacDougal Street, just south of Houston, which was good news for Danny: it put her within four or five blocks of his shop.

Another happy development for Danny, were it to be true, was that Claire seemed to like him. It was evidenced by her laughter, the sparkle in her eyes, by the fact that she’d told him so much about herself . . . even if some of the details, like the name, were bogus—if nothing else, then by the fact that they were going to Cafe Reggio for cappuccino together.

It was good news for Danny because he had definitely taken a liking to Claire De Loon, or whatever her name was. She’s a real character, he thought fondly as he watched her walk beside him. The jiggle of her breasts was an awesome thing to behold. She moved with unmistakable New York bravura: a swagger just this side of haughtiness.

But the clincher, without a doubt, was their little psychic link. There must have been half a million girls in the city who could make him do a double-take; very few of them, however, would be apt to get the same flash at the same time, and fewer still would be willing . . . no, make that eager . . . to talk about it. Especially when it was as weird a flash as this.

“Well, then,” Claire continued, ”he might be gone by now. Nobody else has been killed, have they?”

“Not that I know of . . . but it’s an awfully big city.”

“I know.” She looked wistful. “I hope he isn’t.”

“Isn’t what?”

“Gone,” she said. “I hope he didn’t pick up and leave.”

“Why?” He gaped at her with honest incredulity.

“I’ve always wanted to meet a vampire,” she answered, matter-of-factly. Then, with a cryptic little half-smile, ”I think they’re sexy.”

“And you think I’m crazy!” He smacked the flat of his right hand against his receding hairline. She put on a mock pouting expression. “This is not a nice vampire, Claire. It feeds people to its pets.”

“Well, you know how monsters are.” Grinning.

“Yeah, but . . .” he started, and then grinned back. It was too ludicrous a situation to get all worked up about. Danny threw up his hands, conceding, and then thought of an even more ludicrous twist to throw in.

“How do we know,” he asked, ”that it’s even a he?” She looked up, startled. He smiled triumphantly and continued. “How do we know that it’s not some withered, two-thousand-year-old bag with warts all over her?”

“No, no, no,” she insisted, repressing a giggle. “Vampires are eternally young and eternally beautiful.”

“Oh, yeah? What about Nosferatu? He wasn’t so cute.”

“That was only a movie.”

“Oh. Right.”

By now, they were almost across Astor Place, the small plaza that splits Park Avenue South into Fourth Avenue and Lafayette Street, and 8th Street into St. Mark’s Place. In the center of the plaza, an enormous cube was balanced on one of its corners. A bunch of enterprising young punks were spinning it around and around: in a sense, that was what it was there for. Participation Art.

On one side of the cube, the word IMAGINE was rendered in large, spray-painted letters. It happened shortly after John Lennon’s senseless, pathetic murder. Nobody had seen fit to paint over it.

New York City loves its graffiti artists.

They crossed in silence, watching out for the cars that blasted by with little or no regard for pedestrian safety. There was one singularly deranged taxi driver who must have been doing 60 mph; he seemed to be deliberately bearing down on them. Danny took Claire’s hand and took off running. She followed, not resisting. The cab missed them by less than two feet.

“CRAZY BASTARD!” Claire yelled from the safety of the curb. The cabbie shouted something back, swallowed by the sound of his own squealing tires. She flipped him the bird as he raced into the night, then laughed and turned to face her companion.

Danny let go of her hand, feeling suddenly awkward . . . presumptuous, even. It took a second before he realized that she hadn’t minded; by then, it was too late to just grab it back again. You putz, he informed himself silently, and hoped for a lot of traffic when they hit Broadway.

They resumed their pace, heading down 8th Street toward Greenwich Village. For the moment, they remained silent, immersed in their own internal dialogues. Neither was sure as to what the other one was thinking. If they’d known, they would have been amazed by how strong their psychic link actually was.

Because they were both thinking about the same two things: the vampire in the tunnels, and what it would be like to sleep together. For Danny, the priorities were reversed, but that hardly mattered.

But since neither of them knew for sure, neither one dared or cared to say anything. Then, because he sensed that the silence had become overlong, Danny cut off his train of thought and cleared his throat loudly.

But before he could think of something ridiculous to say, they heard the voice shouting from down the block, near the subway entrances. The words were drunken, slurred, more than slightly hysterical. As they drew nearer, they listened carefully to what the voice was trying to say.

“. . . DOWN THERE! IZ’WUZ DOWN THERE, AN’ IT GOT FRED! OMMA . . . OMMAGOD, IT WAS . . . HE WAS SCREAMIN’, AN’ I . . . OH, LORDY, SUMPIN’S DOWN THERE!”

They stopped dead, turned to stare at each other apprehensively. Claire asked him quietly if he heard that. He nodded, mute.

And though it was a warm night, they shivered, as though a cold hand had reached up from Hell to take the two of them in its grip.

CHAPTER 8

In her dream, she was standing over Glen’s open grave again. A thin wet mist descended from the sunless heavens of a chill gray autumn sky. Josalyn was smoking a cigarette, cupping it in her hand protectively as she stared down at the coffin in its hole of mud and formless shadow, watching the scattered clods of dirt on the fiberglass lid lose form themselves as the rain slowly, painfully, broke them down.

Inside, she felt cold: cold as the rain, as the sky, as the grave. No tears. No sorrow. Nothing but a sense of flat, stupid finality: life as a series of elaborate, meaningless figures on a mathematician’s blackboard, rendered in chalk and wiped away by a clumsy block of wood and felt and padding.

It’s so stupid, she thought, staring down at the muddy pools on the coffin’s lid. So stupid, and pointless, and cruel. She’d have liked to know what she’d done to deserve this, what crime so heinous that it demanded this smack in the face, this deliberate blow of her belief that life was good and sensible and fair.

But she knew the answer, no sooner than the question was posed. Nothing. She’d done nothing, short of being born in a world that had long before lost its bearings and gone cartwheeling off toward madness and oblivion—perhaps at the time of the Apple, perhaps even earlier than that.

She mused, sight unfocusing, turning inward. She was only dimly aware, in the back of her mind, of something stirring in the hole at her feet. It didn’t fully register until, with a loud snap of splintering wood, something burst through the lid of the coffin.

Josalyn stared down at the grave in horror, frozen. The cigarette slipped from between her fingers and tumbled downward, a slow-motion spinning that seemed to go on forever.

From the grave, a rotting skeletal arm projected upward, clawing at the air as if to rip bleeding holes in the sky. A tiny cry escaped her throat, and the mouldering hand froze, clenched like the talon of a great winged bird. Then slowly, slowly, it twisted itself around so that the back of the hand was facing her. The index finger, its broken end dangling from a few strands of greenish flesh, straightened and then curled back toward the palm. Repeated the gesture. Repeated it again.

It beckoned to her.

NO! she cried silently, no wind in her lungs. NO! She spun, eyes snapping shut reflexively, and something was there: something warm and comforting, wrapping itself around her and holding her tightly. She shivered, blind and terrified; she whimpered, deep in her throat; she nestled against the figure that held her and understood, though foggily, that it was a man. A good man. She let herself go, and huge gut-wrenching sobs escaped from her mouth, smothered in the warmth of her protector.

It’s alright, a kind, soft voice assured her. It can’t touch you now. It can’t hurt you. And though she could still feel that skeletal arm, trying by its sheer presence to claw through the back of her skull and take her, consume her, she also knew that the dead thing was losing its power. That the voice wasn’t lying. That she was, in fact, safe.

Oh, thank you, she whispered, pulling her face away from the man’s chest and opening her eyes to see him . . .

. . . and suddenly she was alone, in her apartment, with the typewriter quietly humming on the desk before her as she jotted down something in her notebook with a finely sharpened No. 2 pencil. Life is good, she rendered in tight, elegant longhand. Life is sensible. Life is fair . . .

The phone rang. She jumped, and the pencil went flying out of her hand. She watched it spin through the air like her cigarette on its way to the grave, with the same slack-jawed expression of horror on her face.

She watched the pencil imbed itself point-first in the hard wooden floor, sticking straight up like the needle of a compass pointing north. Trembling for a moment. And then standing completely still . . .

. . . as a dark pool of blood began to spread across the floor, slowly at first, then more and more quickly . . .

. . . as a mocking, sneering, inhuman voice from somewhere in the room breathed the words you were expecting company? into her ear and began, horribly, to laugh and laugh and . . .

Josalyn awakened, screaming, into the otherwise silent darkness of her bedroom, alone.

It was the first, and the mildest, of the dreams.

CHAPTER 9

At 11:08 the following morning, by the company time clock, Allan took the call from Rosa, the woman who lived downstairs from Joseph and watched his mother during the day. Rosa’s English was poor, and the fact that she was crying and lapsing sporadically into Spanish didn’t help, but Allan got the message loud and clear.

He hung up the phone, feeling like he’d aged a hundred years in the last three minutes. His breakfast started to churn sickly in his stomach; sweat covered his forehead like a thin sheet of ice; he reached for his pouch of Captain Black tobacco with a trembling hand, tamped it into his pipe, and just stared at it for a long unhappy moment.

Jerome was the first to notice that something was wrong. He’d just been clowning with Allan a few moments before, and everything’d been hunky-dory. He could only think of one thing that could bring a dispatcher down that fast.

“Did somebody get hit?” he asked, remembering the squealing taxi brakes that had brought his own career as Ace Bike Messenger to an inglorious end.

Allan turned quickly, disorientation stamped on his features. “What?” he said, and then the statement registered. He grinned vaguely and shook his head. “No, no. It was . . . well, nobody got hit, exactly, but . . . uh, beep Hunter for me, will you?”

“Joseph?” Jerome didn’t get it “What . . .”

“Beep him.” Allan lit the pipe and made every attempt to steady his voice. “His mother just died. I’ve got to tell him.”

Joseph Hunter was standing in a phone booth on the corner of 8th Avenue and 42nd Street, the dead receiver still clutched in his hand. He stared out through the glass, seeing nothing. His mind was elsewhere.

When his beeper had gone off, he’d been cruising up 8th with a vanload of prints for some European film festival. His mind had been riveted on his environment at that point; like most cities, New York demands that you drive like a ruthless maniac with metal teeth and eyes on all four sides of your head. Joseph was accommodating: cutting people off, swerving madly from lane to lane in an effort to pass everybody on the road, shouting at people when they didn’t get out of his way. Death had been the farthest thing from his mind.

When his beeper had gone off, he’d suspected that the guys in dispatch had something else for him to pick up.

He’d had no idea that it would be this heavy.

She’s dead, said a voice in his head that sounded like it must be somebody else’s. He felt detached from the thought, from the very idea of it. She’s dead. It had to be somebody else’s life that he’d just been listening in on.

Automatically, his free hand dug into the pocket of his jean jacket for a cigarette; he spent about thirty seconds trying to light the filter before he realized what he was doing.

“AARRGH!” he bellowed, tossing the useless smoke to the floor. He looked at the receiver as if it were a pigeon turd that had landed on his sleeve, slammed it down onto the hook, and stormed out of the booth.

Back on the sidewalk, surrounded by the gaudy sleaze of West 42nd Street . . . peep shows on top of live sex acts on top of $1.99 porno triple bills, all flashing their multicolored marquees to sucker in the scum of the earth . . . Joseph was overwhelmed by the urge to just reach out and smash something. It didn’t much matter what: a wider selection of eminently smashable things could not have been assembled for love nor money. All he had to do was wait for a little provocation.

Normally, he wouldn’t have had long to wait. There was something daunting, however, about a gigantic bearded young man who looked like he was about to explode. The danger light went on. Con men who would ordinarily try to sell him bad drugs, pictures of naked harlots, the naked harlots themselves, and other hot items gave him a wide berth, some actually stepping off the curb and into the street to get around him.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said, too quietly for anyone to hear. “Back off.” But as he spoke, the tears began to well up in his eyes. The shuddering seemed to start in his chest and radiate outward, like shock waves from a depth charge that somebody just set off in his heart. Before he fully realized it, he was practically doubled over by the force of his own massive sobbing.

And the same voice in his head came back, speaking like a stranger with a clearer view of the situation than anyone involved. She’s dead, it repeated. But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You wanted to be free of her. To live your own life. To get the hell out of this grimy insane asylum.

Isn’t that what you wanted? the voice insisted, point-blank, and suddenly it sounded like some cheap prick D.A. that the State had sent in to break him down. It was the voice of his conscience being a cruel bitch, trying to make him squirm over crimes never even committed.

Isn’t that what you wanted? the voice repeated, jabbing his chest with a long, bony finger. By then, he’d had just about enough.

“No,” he growled through gritted teeth. He wiped the tears from his eyes with a painfully clenched fist and repeated the word. “No.” It played over and over in his head, as though he’d spoken into an echo machine and then kept slowly turning up the speed and intensity so that it gradually rose in pitch, faster and faster, the word blurring into itself, a maddening cacophony that pounded against the insides of his skull . . .

Until something inside of him snapped.

Joseph Hunter turned then, shutting his mind off with an audible click. He began to move east on 42nd, toward his parked and waiting van, with a chill and deliberate gait. Once again, the crowd parted before him with extreme caution in their sidelong glances.

About thirty yards ahead, an argument was brewing on the sidewalk in front of an adult novelty store. Out of the hundred-odd conversations going on within earshot, this one singled itself out for Joseph’s attention. He moved closer.

“I WANT MY MONEY!” A white guy. Young. Very hip-looking, like he just got off the plane from California. Except that he was sweating, and his face was red.

“Hey, blood . . . you wanna try an’ double it, doncha?” A black dude. Young. Very cool. In shades, so you couldn’t see his eyes as he reached down to scoop up three cards.

Between them was an improvised Three Card Monty table: an open cardboard box on a trash can. Around them was the usual crowd of suckers and rubbernecks out on a lunch break, taking turns gawking and losing more of their paychecks than they could reasonably afford. There was easily three hundred dollars riding on this game, most of it California’s.

“NO, MAN! I WON!” California was howling, pointing at the cards. Evidently, he’d picked the right one anyway.

“Yo, man. Chill out. Don’t . . .?” Monty began. He was starting to get nervous now. He took a short step backward: the cards in one hand, the money in the other.

“GIMME MY MONEY!” California yelled, making a grab for it. Two large black dudes started to converge on them from the gathering crowd.

“Cops,” Monty said, kicking over the trash can and turning quickly away. The money was halfway to his pocket: his face was still half-turned, looking over his shoulder. He took one step, his head swinging back around, and walked face-first into something large and solid.

He looked up.

“How much money did you steal today, cocksucker?” Joseph inquired. A pair of tiny Joseph Hunters stared back at him, reflected in the mirrored shades. Monty smiled, innocent as dumplings, and started to back away. Joseph smiled and punched him in the head.

Large white teeth and dark sunglasses went flying through the air. The stack of twenties blossomed and dispersed like a bright green fireworks display, dancing in the breeze. California rushed forward. Monty dropped at his feet.

Joseph whipped around quickly. The dealer’s two buddies were stunned, for the moment; they were the ones who were supposed to appear from out of nowhere when trouble arose. By the time one of them got it together to go for his knife, a large fist was already on the way.

The knife never left its sheath. Its owner’s nose broke with a resounding crack, twin crimson geysers streaming from the wide, flaring nostrils. The man wasn’t out, but he was hurtin’ for certain; he dropped to his knees, clutched his face, and moaned into his blood-spattered hands.

The sporting thing to do would have been to leave him there for a moment, then come back to disarm him. Joseph kicked him in the stomach first, then turned to deal with the other one. It took just a second too long.

He didn’t see the excited crowd, fanning out in a wide semicircle. He didn’t see California drop to his knees, scooping up the fallen dollars. He didn’t see the fourth dude that was coming up behind him, or the two cops that were running to the scene.

What he saw was a shiny, black, metallic blur, racing toward the side of his head. He brought one arm up reflexively to block it, and searing pain shot through his forearm. Before he could cry out, the pipe completed its swing, striking him just above the temple. His vision started to gray out, like a bad picture on an old black-and-white TV.

Then something hit him hard between the shoulder blades from behind, and he went over. He heard the shouting and commotion above him as if from a great distance: then it faded out altogether.

“He’s just lashing out.” Ian sighed wearily. “It’s so obvious.”

“I know,” Allan agreed. “But what are we going to do?”

Ian shrugged, eyes downcast, and took a listless drag off his cigarette. They were sitting around the coffee table at Ian’s one-room studio apartment. It was 1:30 in the morning, and Joseph Hunter had finally passed out on the couch, having drunk himself into his second oblivion of the day.

Allan set down his tobacco pipe and reached across the table for his brass dope-smoking bowl. “There’s still a little bit in here,” he said. “You want some?” Ian looked at it for a moment, then nodded and smiled wanly. “It’s the most constructive thing I can think of to do at the moment,” Allan concluded, passing the pipe.

Ian brought the stem to his lips and wrapped them silently around it. Allan was there with the lighter, flicking it on, and for a few seconds their faces were all highlights and shadow, like two characters making a deal by candlelight in an old Prince Valiant comic strip: Ian, with his wild blond hair and heavy mustache, struck an almost barbaric figure; Allan, with his dark hair cut evenly at the shoulders, his thin mustache and goatee, could have been a moneyed merchant of old, striking up an offer that no red-blooded mercenary could refuse.

Then Ian had the pipe lit, and Allan withdrew the lighter. The illusion ended: they were two young men in the twentieth century, half-stoned out of their minds, agonizing over somebody else’s problems.

Ian took a hit and passed the pipe back to Allan. He sucked in sharply, holding back the cough that threatened to wrack him, and somberly shook his head.

“What?” Allan asked, taking his toke. The other paused for a moment, blew out a great cloud of smoke, and then leaned forward.

“Five hundred dollars,” he said finally. “That’s what.”

Allan rolled his eyes and nodded solemn agreement. It had taken $500 to get Joseph out of jail this afternoon on charges of assault and battery. Because California had vanished after Joseph helped him out, there were virtually no witnesses who weren’t either friends of, or afraid of, Three Card Monty and his boys. The cops had no choice but to book him, though they informed him confidentially that the charges would be dropped. It still cost him five big ones to get out.

“Thank God he had it,” Ian continued. “I couldn’t have helped him.”

“Me either . . . He makes more in a week than both of us put together!” They laughed, a welcome development. “Last week, I think he took home about eight hundred.”

“Christ.” That figure looked like the Holy Grail from where Ian was sitting.

“Yeah. But he has all kinds of expenses that we don’t; gas, tires, repairs on his van, insurance . . .”

“And funerals,” Ian added. “Don’t forget that.”

“No. Christ.” Allan looked over at Joseph’s limp form, sprawled out on the couch. “I don’t think I could forget that. I was the one who had to tell him.”

“I bet that was fun.”

“A joy unbounded.”

“I’ll bet.”

“A regular barrel of monkeys.”

“Oh, God.” They laughed again, the way one laughs at dead baby jokes: nervously, guiltily, and helplessly. “Jesus Christ, I can’t stand it,” Ian concluded, when he regained his voice, then staggered over to the fridge for two more 16-ounce Buds.

“Thanks,” Allan said, receiving his. They spritzed the cans open simultaneously, took identically long swigs off of them, then turned to stare at each other with grim smiles.

For almost a minute, there was no sound but the faint rumble of Joseph’s drunken snoring. Ian took another swig off his beer and spoke.

“You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think he should pack up his gear and get the hell out of New York, as soon as he can. I’d hate like crazy to see him go, but I think he’d be a lot happier almost anywhere else.”

“Yeah.” Short pause. “I think you’re right. There’s nothing, short of our smiling faces, to really keep him here, is there?”

“Nope.” Another short pause. “Not that I can think of.”

Another pause, longer.

“Do you think he will?”

“God, I hope so.” Ian snubbed his butt out in the ashtray. “Before something else happens.”

“What do you mean?” Allan’s dark eyes were hidden in shadow, but Ian felt the bright glint of them just the same.

“I don’t know,” Ian answered. He was staring at the ashes, as if for a clue. Then, turning to meet Allan’s shrouded gaze, ”I really don’t know.”

CHAPTER 10

It watched her from the darkness of the tunnel.

She was a fat, ugly, middle-aged woman with a large, hairy wart displayed prominently on her left cheek. Her dress was preposterous: a shapeless mass of fabric that had once been brightly colored, but which had faded and worn away through the years into a dull, dingy opacity. Her hair hung lifelessly down either side of her face, the color of a healthy dog’s stools.

Nobody was near her. A few others were gathered around the middle of the platform, near the safety of the turnstiles; they were not paying any attention to her. She had chosen to wander down to the end, with her grocery bags full of bric-a-brac in a clumsy pile at her feet.

She picked her nose with a flabby finger, indifferent to the reaction it might provoke. She flicked a dry, pale strip of mucus onto the tracks with a graceless minimum of effort.

It was sickened, watching her. It leaned against the cold wall of the tunnel, pressing its cheek against the moist stone, and contemptuous nausea bubbled up in its empty stomach. If the disgust could compete with the hunger, it would turn away now and leave this woman to some other ghastly fate.

But it was hungry. Oh, yes. Unbelievably, ravenously hungry. And this woman, unpleasant as she appeared, seemed to have an awful lot to offer in the way of food.

It considered snatching her from the platform, then decided against the idea. There were others . . . too many others . . . and it did not want to be seen. Not now.

Not yet.

It waited, watching. Two more people made their way down onto the platform. They remained near the entrance, as well. It appreciated their good sense, in light of all the nasty horrible things that had gone down in the subway of late. It chuckled, more than a little mad.

And it waited.

Presently, a deep rumbling from the darkness behind it announced the imminent arrival of the uptown local. It ducked deeper into the shadows, waiting for the train to pass, and tried to figure out how to time its next move.

Within a minute, light began to creep along the rails, heralding the final approach. It hunkered back even further, into a niche; and as the train whipped by, the thing in the tunnels was quite certain that its presence had not been given away.

It waited for the train to screech to a halt before moving; even then, it moved as silently as possible. When it heard the doors slide open, it slipped quickly up to the back of the train, then sidled along the far side until it came to the space between the last two cars. It jumped up onto the metal platform. Crouched down, unseen. And waited for the train to start rolling again.

The waiting lasted only a moment.

Then, as the train disappeared back into the darkness, it rose to its feet. Slowly, very slowly, it opened the door to the rear car. Stepped inside. Closed the door.

And, barely realizing that it had done so, ripped the handle off in its hand.

Armond Hacdorian was a quiet, dignified, peaceful old gentleman of Rumanian descent. With his neatly tailored suit and carved walking stick, he bore more than a passing resemblance to Sir Laurence Olivier in The Boys From Brazil: the same fragile good looks, not so much withered as weathered and beaten by time.

He had suffered more horrors than most people would encounter if they lived to be two hundred. Armond was only seventy-five, however; and he expected to spend the next twenty years, at least, in an atmosphere of some decency and sanity. That would be sufficient, he felt. That would balance the scales.

If there was one more horror that Armond Hacdorian was not willing to suffer, it was the horror of being seated next to a young Neanderthal with a radio twice the size of his head. Not only did it offend his sensibilities; not only did it hurt his ears; not only did it seek to intimidate every other single person on the train; more than all of that, it threatened to make him angry.

And anger was something that he wanted no part of. Anger was something that he hoped to have outgrown, like the impulse toward cruelty, or his swaddling clothes. He had seen the wages of anger and its dark brethren. He had been through the wars, and the camps, and the purges. He had lost friends and family to Fate’s brutal, arbitrary blade. And if he never witnessed another act of violence . . . even of the tiniest sort . . . then he still would have seen too much.

Rather than dicker with the boy, and endure anything from gross epithets to actual physical assault, he decided to move to the next car down. The boy could then listen to his rhythmic noise until every tooth in his mouth was shaken loose by it, for all it would concern Armond; though the Good Lord knew that Armond wished nothing but the best for the poor, misguided youth.

He got to his feet gingerly . . . it was difficult for an old man to keep his footing on a moving train, no matter what kind of shape he was in . . . and turned toward the rear of the train. One step at a time, holding always on to the handgrips that dangled from overhead, he moved slowly toward the door. Once, he glanced back at the boy and his radio. He met a cold, uncomprehending set of eyes, and kept moving.

The train was moving with merciful smoothness; Armond crossed over to the door without incident. Now will come the tricky part, he told himself. Crossing to the next car while the train is in motion. I must be a stupid old man, to try such a dangerous thing.

Still, the train was riding smoothly; and though the split platform between was somewhat treacherous, shifting and bouncing as it did, Armond felt that he should have no problem with the help of the guardrails.

He stuck one foot out onto the platform and stood there, poised like a surfer. It seemed alright. He held on to the door frame and brought his other foot around. When both feet were on the platform, he reached over to the guardrail with his left hand, steadied himself, and pulled himself over to the door of the rear car.

There was nothing to it. Chuckling slightly, he reached over to open the door, pleasantly aware of his heart’s quick pounding in his temples.

The door wouldn’t open.

What? he thought, as the handle clicked futilely; and for the first time since he made up his mind to move, he was afraid. He twisted on the handle again, vainly, and grappled for a moment with panic.

It’s alright, he thought. I can always go back. It seemed to help pacify the little voices that were gibbering in the back of his head, like the voices of people in cattle cars being led to the ovens. It seemed to calm them down.

He paused for a moment in the doorway, catching his breath and resting. When the rate of his heartbeat returned to normal, he took just a quick peek in through the window before turning to go back . . .

The lights went out.

From somewhere in the darkness ahead, a fleeting movement.

What? he thought again. With his failing eyesight, he could only dimly perceive the shape on the right-hand side of the train. It seemed to be thrashing, making some sort of rapid movement, although Armond couldn’t really tell if he was imagining it or not. He stared concertedly, trying to make sense of the shadow-play before him . . .

. . . and then the lights flashed on again, and he saw the dark, slim figure standing over the enormous pale one, with its fat limbs kicking and flailing while the darkone leaned over and . . .

The lights went out again.

“My God,” Armond whispered. The shapes blended back into one again; he could no longer distinguish between them. He saw the one dark shape rise from the seats, hang there for a moment, and then fly to one side . . .

. . . as the sound of shattering glass drifted quietly to his ears like a distant, delicate music box . . .

. . . as the lights came back on, and he saw the dark shape dragging the other one’s throat across the windowsill, while hot blood gushed over the wall and the seats and into the tunnel beyond . . .

. . . as a scream strangled in Armond Hacdorian’s throat, and . . .

The light went off again.

And stayed that way.

There, in the dark space between cars, Armond Hacdorian stood with his face pressed against the window of the broken door. There, immersed in the wind and the roar of the train, he watched the monster feed. Unnoticed, he watched. Until it was done.

It was not easy for an old man to maintain consciousness under such circumstances, no matter what kind of shape he was in; but Armond managed to pull himself back into the car that he came from, find a seat, and ease himself into it before he blacked out.

Perhaps it was because he’d seen more horror than most people would if they lived to be two hundred; and, whether he liked it or not, he could handle it.

When it had finished with the headless, stinking thing beside it, the thing from the tunnels paused for a moment in bloated, almost drunken elation. Then, remembering its situation, it rose to its feet and looked out through the door to the next car.

Nothing. It appeared that no one had seen it. And that was very, very good.

It returned its attention to the terrible dead thing on the seat. There was blood everywhere. The rich, ripe smell burned in its nostrils, reawakening the hunger. But it had had its fill.

A strange idea came to it, then: something so marvelously, thoroughly twisted that it was amazed with itself for not having thought of it sooner. With a tittering, high-pitched giggle, it leaned over the corpse and dipped a finger into the jagged, dripping stump of the neck.

Withdrew the glistening tip.

Smiled.

And began to draw.

CHAPTER 11

On the newsstands the following morning, both the Post and the Daily News had a common message for their common readership, as expressed in almost identical headlines which could be boiled down to this: SUBWAY PSYCHO’S MESSAGE IN BLOOD . . . “I’M BACK!” Both were accompanied by a grainy black-and-white photograph of a figure under a sheet, being carried off a train by MTA workers with decidedly queasy expressions.

For the ghoulish delight of the millions who purchased these papers, there was another photograph to grace the story on page 3, just above the shot of the long-legged actress who proclaimed in bold type, ”Playing WINGO Turns Me On!!!”

This was the shot of the writing on the wall: of large, ornate letters, gracefully rendered above a bloodstain roughly the size of an upright piano. A smiley face, also in blood, dotted the exclamation point at the end of the killer’s pronouncement.

Easily half of the 600-plus commuters on the 14th Street subway platforms were taking in all the gory details while they waited for their trains. They were reading about the horrified group of teenagers who discovered the body, tearfully swearing to God that “we didn’t do it”; they were reading about the sole witness, an old man who subsequently fainted and proved unable to give any description of the killer; they were reading about redoubled police patrols on the trains, a massive manhunt for “The Subway Psycho,” and an appeal from the police and the MTA to avoid the trains at off-peak hours until “this nightmare is ended.”

Because they were so busily engaged, very few of them noticed the figure staggering out of the tunnel.

Peggy Lewin: a pretty girl, slightly overweight and modestly trendy. Formerly a receptionist with a major New York graphics firm. Last seen over three days ago by an ex-boyfriend whom she referred to as “that bastard Luis.”

Peggy Lewin, no longer pretty, staggered up the thin stairs that lead to the uptown platform. Half of her head had been staved in from the impact of being thrown from a moving train. Her neck was bent backwards and to the left at an impossible angle. Her right arm was crushed and dangling; her right leg, blackened and stiff. Her dress had been shredded in innumerable, revealing places, but it showed nothing that anyone would want to see.

Peggy Lewin, over three days dead, dragged herself up the last remaining steps and onto the platform, still shrouded in darkness. She fell back against the wall for a moment, panting, then pushed forward into the light.

The first scream rang out. Followed by another. Followed by twelve more, as startled eyes turned away from their papers and focused on the thing that shambled toward them, moaning piteously, coated with dirt and mottled gore.

Fifty people retreated, shrieking, on the already-crowded platform. From behind them, shouts of anger and excitement, as the throngs were pressed dangerously close to the edge. People coming down the stairways paused, gaping; a few of them ran back up the way they came.

The thing that had been Peggy Lewin continued to advance, waving its good arm as it reeled forward, dragging the bad leg behind it, hissing now through broken teeth. It advanced steadily, forcing back the crowd even further, until the front ranks broke and ran for the stairs as well.

Panic erupted. The screaming spread to the platform across the tracks, where commuters were swarming down to the end for a glimpse of whatever the hell was happening. On Peggy Lewin’s side, people knocked each other over and trampled each other in the grip of mindless mass terror. The platform began to clear.

Something in Peggy Lewin’s mashed, malfunctioning brain told her to escape. It didn’t think to go back the way it came. It was incapable of that kind of thought. It saw, with its one still-functioning eye, that people were pouring up the stairs. Just as mindlessly, it decided to follow.

She pulled herself up the stairs, laboriously breathing, her ruined arm flapping at her side. Above her, she could dimly hear the screams, the sound of retreating footsteps. Her one eye rolled; her broken throat emitted a howl. However obliquely, the monster inside of her sensed that it had the people right where it wanted them. A vague feeling of victory flowed through her, mingling with the unbelievable pain of her broken body and what it had become.

Peggy Lewin reached the top of the stairs, struggled to pull herself upright, and headed for the turnstiles and the streets beyond.

“Jesus Christ,” Ian droned, his voice barely more than a whisper. “What the hell is going on down there?”

He and Joseph had just crossed 14th Street to Union Square Park. They were roughly fifteen yards from the subway entrance when the first wave of howling humanity came surging up the stairs at a breakneck pace. Now they stopped, Ian grabbing his friend’s arm involuntarily, as the hysterical stream continued to gush forth from below.

“This is insane,” Ian continued, slapping his free hand to his forehead in disbelief.

“Let’s go check it out,” Joseph said. Ian looked up at him, stunned, and saw the cold set of Hunter’s features. He smacked himself across the face again.

“What are you talkin’ about . . .?”

“I want to see what’s going on.”

“But . . .”

“I thought you said your name was Butch Sampson,” Joseph said, and the delivery was so straight that Ian had to laugh. “Now are you gonna help me fight crime, or what?”

“What?” Ian said, but the point was moot. Joseph started to drag him toward the stairway. He shrugged helplessly and then cooperated, standing just behind Joseph as they hit the last of the fleeing crowd.

“DON’T GO DOWN THERE!” someone screamed as they muscled past.

“Bullshit,” Joseph mumbled, and then they were at the mouth of the stairs.

Staring downward.

Halfway up, the dull semi-darkness of the underground gave way to sunlit radiance. Slightly below that halfway point, a dark shape made its way laboriously toward them. Joseph took two steps downward and squinted, but still couldn’t really see what was coming. He called to Ian. Ian reluctantly came to his side.

“What is it?” Ian’s whisper was nervous, sharp.

“I don’t know,” Joseph whispered back, ”but I . . . wait a second.”

At the foot of the stairs, an amorphous black mass surged into view. A crowd, from the looks of it. It filled the passageway and then froze. A ripple of motion ran through it, and Ian noticed the glint of light off of eyeglasses, metal clasps, and something else. A gun? he thought, and then the sight no longer interested him.

Because the thing on the stairs let out a low, yowling cry; and with a massive effort, it dragged itself into the sunlight.

It screamed, then. It screamed the way Peggy Lewin screamed the first time she died: a high-pitched wail of agony that wound out and out, echoing madly, as though it had traveled all the way up from Hell to split the morning air. It screamed, and it whirled, and it dropped to its knees, weakly clutching the railing. Then it pulled its terrible face around to gaze, one last time, in the direction of Ian and Joseph and the sky.

And before their horrified eyes, Peggy Lewin’s flesh began to pucker and sputter and turn a grayish green: the color of meat left to rot in the sun. Tiny patches of furry turquoise mold formed in the open wounds. She fell sideways, her head striking the stone step with a wet thud. She kicked once, twice. A last dying rattle poured out of her throat like sand. Then she was still. Forever still.

Peggy Lewin had escaped, after all.

CHAPTER 12

The story, in a highly abbreviated form, made it to the evening papers. Mention was made of a young woman who was found dead at the Union Square station, suffering from massive head injuries and numerous broken bones.

No mention was made of the fact that she wandered out of the tunnels, or that she was in such a state of decay that she had to be scraped from the steps.

“Are you sure about this?” Allan asked over the phone, a match’s flame dancing nervously at his fingertips. He cradled the receiver against his shoulder and brought the briar pipe to his lips. Lord knew that he needed something to relax.

“I stood there and watched it!” Ian’s voice was profoundly agitated, still wavering at the borderline of hysteria. “Hunter and I both! We watched this poor woman crawl up the stairs, hit the sunlight, and . . . poof! Just go down in a cloud of green gas!”

“You . . .” Allan began, but Ian would not be interrupted.

“When the smell hit, I wanted to run up the stairs and find a quick bush to puke in, that’s how bad it was.”

“Whoa . . .”

“And they’re covering it up, goddamit! I don’t know why, but they’re covering it up, Allan! I mean, who are they trying to protect? Something like this happens, the people ought to know about it! You know what I . . .?”

“Yeah, boss. I know. It’s just that . . .”

“You don’t believe me, right?”

“Well . . .” How do I put this? “If I were hearing it from anyone else, I’d be having an even harder time than I’m having now. That’s all.”

Ian seemed to consider this. At any rate, he paused for a moment; and when his voice came back over the line, it was a good bit calmer.

“Honest to God, Allan. It’s true. You wouldn’t have believed it if you saw it with your own eyes . . . I’m having an awfully hard time believing it, myself . . . but it actually happened. There were cops there, just standing there with their jaws flapping. They didn’t know what to do, either. It was . . .” His voice cracked, and Allan suspected that he’d started to cry. “. . . it was just so unreal. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Worse than Day of the Dead.”

“Jesus.” From Ian, that was bad; he must have seen that film a hundred times.

“It was worse, because it was real. It was . . . well, you know what it was, don’t you?”

Allan sat and thought for a moment, filling the room with clouds of aromatic smoke. He knew the answer that Ian was suggesting . . . what looks dead, walks around, and decomposes when exposed to sunlight? . . . and he wasn’t lying when he said he’d have a harder time believing it from anyone else. But, dammit, how could he believe something like that? How could even a dungeon master, with one foot firmly planted in the shadowland of fantasy, suddenly rip down the veil and say that, yes, monsters are real? How could he say that?

“A . . . a vampire?” he said.

“You can bet your ass on it,” Ian declared, ”and come home with two.” They laughed nervously. “Yes, sir. You can walk through the door with a full set of cheeks on either side if you push the buzzer that says VAMPIRE. Because that’s exactly what it was, my man. No two ways about it.”

“And Joseph agrees with your prognosis?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s all we talked about all day. That’s why we didn’t show up for work; we just sat in a bar and drank ’til it came out our ears. Then . . . I guess it was about eight o’clock . . . he just got up and split.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No.” Pause. “Well, he said that he was going home, but I didn’t believe him. And when I called out there, nobody answered the phone.”

“That’s probably the last place in the world he wants to be right now.”

“Yeah.” Allan heard Ian lighting something; he waited. “You know where I think he went?” Ian resumed.

“Where?”

“Well, I think we’re gonna have to start calling him Joseph ‘The Vampire’ Hunter.”

“Whoa, boss. Wait a minute. What do you mean?”

“I think he went to look for the thing that killed that woman.” Once again, Allan got a cold rush up his spine. “I think he plans to track it down and destroy it.”

CHAPTER 13

Stephen fidgeted nervously in his seat on the downtown side of the 42nd Street station, 6th Avenue line. There were a lot of unsavory characters out tonight, filling him with a low-level, numbing sort of dread. He didn’t want to be the next victim of the Subway Psycho, or anybody else.

In the seat next to him, a black man in a nicely tailored suit was reading the Post. Stephen determinedly repressed the urge to peek over the man’s shoulder. He had always hated those seamy scandal-rags; and he had, in his opinion, wasted enough time and money on them in the past week to last him the rest of his life.

Especially since they reminded him of Rudy, this week’s Number One time-waster. Every time he thought about Rudy, anger smoldered inside of him like a hot coal. When he thought about all the work he could have done, if he hadn’t been running around and worrying himself half to death! It was just infuriating, that was all. It was just intolerably, unforgivably infuriating.

That was why he’d spent the afternoon at the New York Public Library, ostensibly doing research for a new science fiction story. That was why he’d decided to treat himself to a nice dinner at Beefsteak Charlie’s and the 7:15 showing of The Dark Crystal: an evening calculated to relax and reward him for all his fruitless effort.

It didn’t work. He’d accomplished zilch at the library, of course; dinner at Beefsteak’s wasn’t nearly as much fun when you were alone; and Dark Crystal had left him with some extremely disturbing imagery. The essence-sucking scenes, in particular, were fraught with a horror that he’d in no way expected. They nagged at him now, though he didn’t know why.

I wish the train would hurry up and get here, he thought, staring down at the tracks. Nothing had run their length in the last fifteen minutes. Slowly, the platform was beginning to fill with people, all of them strangers. I wish I weren’t alone, he posed as a corollary to his first wish.

A noisy group of Latinos came down the stairs, laughing and gesticulating like crazy while one of them shouted out some story in Spanish. Stephen turned to look, and that was when he saw the woolly mountain of anger on his left.

That the man was blitzed, he had no doubt. That the man was fully capable of murder was equally clear. As Stephen stared, the man turned suddenly; and Stephen found himself looking into the coldest set of eyes he’d ever seen. The man turned away then, looking at something or someone down the platform, and Stephen shuddered with relief.

Thank God, he thought. That man was terrifying.

Then, barely discernible at first over the boisterous Latinos but quickly overcoming their chatter, came the sound of the train. It took a moment to figure out which way it was coming from. Stephen found himself looking both ways, as if his eyes could pinpoint the source of the rumbling; then, with a slow grin of dawning realization, he became certain that it was heading his way.

“Terrific,” he said, pulling himself to his feet. He took a few steps in the direction of the tracks, glanced around at the others who were beginning to move forward, and …

. . . roughly halfway down the platform, his pale features contrasting sharply with his customary black attire, was Rudy.

“Omigod!” he gasped, barely believing his eyes. “RUDY!” Rudy looked vaguely around, as though Stephen’s shout had been an echo heard in a dream. “RUDY!” he repeated; and then the train plowed into the station, drowning out all other sound.

“Shit!” he yelled, audible only to himself. Hastily, he began to muscle his way down the platform. Some people didn’t take kindly to it; he muttered a series of apologies that went unheard by all, save one.

The train screeched to a halt. Stephen realized that he wasn’t going to get all the way down there in time. The doors slammed open; he moved quickly to the nearest one, then waited in extreme impatience for the five or six people in front of it to drag their asses on board.

He had completely forgotten the large, angry man who had frightened him mere moments before.

He didn’t know that the man had begun to follow him.

Stephen boarded the train and proceeded toward the front. It was fairly clear sailing inside . . . most everybody was taking advantage of the available seats, leaving the aisles open . . . and he had made two cars’ worth of progress by the time the doors shut and they began to roll.

He came to a door. He opened it. He stepped into the space between cars and hesitated for a moment, unsure of his footing. It occurred to him that he had never trekked through a moving train before . . . had always considered it a reckless, foolish thing to do . . . and the realization unsettled him further still.

As a kid, Stephen Parrish had always been regarded as a wimp. In his pre-teen years, he sat home and read comic books while the other kids whupped the tar out of each other in contact sports and other forms of casual violence, or flung themselves bodily through the air via rope swings and high diving boards. When high school rolled around, the stakes of playing rough got increasingly higher; Stephen advanced tangentially into the worlds of science fiction and fantasy.

Now, as Joe College, Stephen had graduated to the realms of highbrow philosophy, New Wave culture, and moderate drug use. His earlier fascinations still remained . . . had expanded, in fact; and so with his fear of bodily harm, his recalcitrance in matters of even slight potential danger. New York City, in particular, had heightened his urge to seek escape from mortal terrors by the use of his intellect.

And here I am, he thought, still poised on the bucking, yawning sheets of metal where the cars joined together. It reminded him of standing on a two-by-four slung across a flowing stream . . . another activity which, as a child, he had always wanted nothing to do with.

It had always scared the bejesus out of him.

Just as standing here was scaring him now.

So why am I doing it? he asked himself. Why am I doing something so contrary to my own nature? Why is Rudy worth taking that kind of chance?

Standing there, in the space between, Stephen found himself examining the nature of his strange friendship with the notorious Rudy Pasko. His mind ran over some of the more typical scenes that they’d been known to act out: Rudy, going off on a spiel that was half lecture, half mad raving, while Stephen passively absorbed it all; Stephen, admiring Rudy’s latest piece of graphic poetry, be it on tenement wall or subway poster; Stephen, lending Rudy money that his parents sent, knowing full well that Rudy would never pay him back; Stephen, blushing in embarrassment, while Rudy introduced him to total strangers with caustic wit and derision; Stephen, envying Rudy’s indomitable self-confidence, easy success with women, and relative success in the field, while Stephen himself eked out an existence as a lonely literary dilettante who barely even started his work, much less finished it; Rudy, strikingly handsome in the dim light of some Bleecker Street cafe, while Stephen wrestled with the impulse to reach over, to touch . . .

“Oh, God!” Stephen whined, suddenly hating himself more than he ever had before in his young, self-pitying life. He saw it all very clearly, all of a sudden. He saw himself in the subservient, stereotypically feminine role: wanting to be dominated by a stronger will, sucking up the humiliation like some fawning, insecure little chippie would suck up her macho boyfriend’s semen on demand. Not request: demand.

He realized that what he’d wanted all along was Rudy himself, and that he had been willing to believe all the nasty lies that Rudy told about Josalyn because, in the final analysis, he was jealous of her.

It made him want to cry.

Suddenly, the platform between cars was monstrously stifling: a cage balanced precariously on the edge of a cliff, with the wind howling through it like all the demons of Hell joined together in song. He tried to hold back the tiny scream that trembled in his throat. He failed. And with a sudden, desperate effort, he yanked open the door ahead of him.

And stepped inside.

Of the thirty or forty people in the car, only a dozen or so turned to look as the door slammed shut behind him. None of them were wearing Rudy’s face; the confrontation had not been forced. Stephen received this with mixed disappointment and relief.

The train rumbled into the light of the 34th Street station, dramatically slowing down. He staggered as the engineer jerkily plied the brakes, grasping for the nearest handgrip. Several people got up from their seats to stand in front of the doors, and Stephen briefly considered the idea of joining them, of getting off the train and letting Rudy roll right out of his life forever.

But something inside of him, one of his mind’s wiser voices, told him to stay. Go find him, it said. Calmly ask him what happened, where he’s been. If he hands you some kind of arrogant attitude, turn around and leave. If he apologizes, or has some kind of legitimate excuse, forgive him.

But whatever you do, keep your head on straight. Don’t let him manipulate you.

Be strong. For once.

The train ground to a halt; the doors flew open. Stephen waited once again for the doorway to clear, then peeked out onto the platform to see if Rudy had disembarked. As far as he could tell, no. He decided to take advantage of the fact that the train wasn’t moving, started walking once again toward the front.

Behind him, at the rear of the car, someone waited for Stephen to reach the next car before opening the door and slowly, cautiously, following after.

Stephen stepped into the next car just as the doors closed on 34th Street. His own door slammed shut behind him. Once again, numerous sets of eyes looked up to check him out; but this time, he saw only one of them.

One set of eyes, so red as to appear infected, staring up at him: hazily at first, then clearing into the sharp glint of recognition.

“Ah,” said the owner, a thin smile cutting jaggedly across his thin, bone-white features. “Stephen.”

“Rudy,” Stephen said. It was barely more than a whisper. His heart seemed to have climbed into his throat and strangled the sound.

The train began to move. Stephen stumbled forward, nearly tripping over a businessman’s briefcase. Rudy was watching him, head cocked to one side and grinning coldly, like a pet boa constrictor who’s just been thrown a live mouse. Predatory. Reptilian. Amused. And totally in control.

“Come have a seat, Stephen,” Rudy said. “Be my guest.” Rudy spread his hands to indicate free seats on either side of him. A chill ran through Stephen, paralyzingly cold, and it said nobody wants to get too close to him. Everybody else is afraid of him, too.

“Have a seat,” Rudy reiterated, patting the space to his immediate left. This time, however, though the smile was still there, it was not a request. There was something strangely compelling about the eyes: a fire not previously there, a force behind them that seemed to draw Stephen forward despite himself.

Slowly, Stephen obeyed.

Rudy watched. He nodded. His smile broadened, as though some wonderful thought had just occurred to him for the first time. Stephen saw him mouth something, but was unable to read it.

Stephen’s hackles rose. He could feel the short hairs at the nape of his neck stiffen as the chill continued to flow through him. He saw now that Rudy was not only pale, but sunken to a deathlike pallor; and the darkness around those horrible eyes was not his customary makeup, but an actual discoloration of the skin. The sight was almost enough to make Stephen stop.

But not quite.

Stephen sat down beside Rudy, and at once the smell hit him: the smell of dampness and mold, the slightest trace of sewage wafting up and through it as though Rudy had been dipped in a septic tank. Stephen wrinkled his nose, but he didn’t move away; to his horror, he discovered that he couldn’t.

“It’s good to see you, Stephen,” Rudy said, grinning. “How’ve ya been?”

Stephen shrugged. It was as if somebody had him hooked to invisible strings; had it been left to him, he wouldn’t have been able to move at all.

“Good.” Rudy drew out the word, as if he were savoring a fine wine. “I suppose that you’ve been wondering where I’ve been.”

Stephen nodded, this time voluntarily; but the movement was sluggish, weak. Rudy grinned, watching him, then laughed out loud.

“I’ve been traveling, Stephen. A trip and a half.” He tittered and wrung his bone-white hands. “A great and mysterious journey,” he said.

His features grew wicked and patronizing. His eyes burned holes in Stephen’s last vestige of self-control. He smiled.

“I used to fancy myself quite the connoisseur of darkness. I really thought I’d seen it all.” An almost humbled expression flickered across his face and was gone. “The full depth and breadth of human depravity. The monster behind the civilized veneer! The skull behind the mask! I thought I knew all about it. I thought I knew . . .” Rudy’s eyes glittered darkly, madly, his voice a husky whisper. “But now I know.

“I . . . I’ve changed, Stephen.” He laughed again, a piercing lunatic trill. “I’ve seen things in the last few days that you wouldn’t believe . . . you would not believe it, Stephen . . . unless I showed you.”

Stephen shuddered, eyes locked on Rudy’s. It was like staring into a roaring furnace. There was something happening inside of them that inspired the same kind of awe and terror: a dance of destructive power so intense that its majesty outweighed the pain of bearing witness to it. Stephen’s eyes burned, but he was powerless to look away.

Behind him, at the rear of the car, somebody stepped through the sliding door and stood there, watching. Stephen could not have been less aware of the fact.

“I’ve gone all the way in, Stephen.” Rudy’s voice was hypnotizing, like the hiss of a cobra over cold, slit eyes. “I’ve gone all the way into the darkness, Stephen. And do you know what I found there?

“The other side.” Rudy’s face, as he said it, was a terrible thing to behold. “The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, my friend: a place beyond your wildest dreams.

“I think I’d like to take you there.”

Rudy reached over to take Stephen’s arm. His hand was extremely cold.

Suddenly, the train began to slow down drastically. Without realizing it, they had gone all the way down to West 4th Street. Rudy looked up, startled, and his hold on Stephen was broken.

Stephen snapped back into ordinary awareness. All at once, the sweat welled up from his pores and soaked him in tingling dampness. A sharp breath escaped him, and he cringed from Rudy like a beaten puppy, eyes wide and full of terror.

“Omigod,” he croaked. “Omigod, Rudy, I . . .”

Rudy whirled back around, lips curled in annoyance. He started to say something.

And then things started happening very quickly.

The train stopped. The doors opened. Next to the doors, directly across from Rudy and Stephen, a young couple was seated in nervous silence, watching the whole thing. The girl had an ornate, woven gold chain around her neck.

A large, muscular youth stepped up to the doorway. He took one look at the girl’s necklace and, without hesitation, reached down and tore it from around her neck. She screamed.

“Hey!” her boyfriend yelled, half-rising out of his seat. Again without hesitation, the chain-snatcher smoothly drove one fist into the boyfriend’s nose. There was a loud snapping sound, and the kid went flying back into his seat, blood flowing from his nostrils. The thief ran quickly out the door.

“Oh, holy Christ!” the boyfriend hollered, leaning forward into his cupped handful of blood. With his free hand, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, which he promptly applied to his nose. By now, everybody in the car was watching the action.

But Rudy was leaning forward, red eyes wide and glazing over. His mouth opened a crack, and his tongue flicked out across the trembling lips. The air around him crackled like a static charge. His whole body shuddered, and he let out an unearthly moan.

Then, without warning, he surged out of his seat and grabbed the boyfriend’s bloody hands. There was a brief, insane struggle. The girl screamed again. And again. And again.

“RUDY!” Stephen shrieked, his hands pulling down at the sides of his face, mouth and eyes locked in a rictus of stunned horror.

Rudy spun around, yanking free of the boyfriend. He had the bloody handkerchief in his hands. As if to stifle a scream of his own, he touched it to his lips and started backing toward the door, his expression twisted into something beyond rage, beyond madness, beyond any conceivable human emotion.

He was directly in the center of the doorway when the doors slammed shut, pinning him from either side. He screamed like an animal and struggled against them. They recoiled for a second, as if in pain, then closed on him again. Rudy writhed and flailed and twisted until he finally broke free.

The doors slid shut.

And Rudy disappeared into the West 4th Street station, leaving a carload of people behind him in stunned, astonished silence.

“Oh, shit,” moaned the boyfriend, as he and his girlfriend collapsed into each other’s arms and began to cry.

Stephen just stared at them. He stared at the blood on the floor. The train lurched into motion, and he stared at the pillars as they drifted slowly by like clouds on a windy day. He stared at his hands, shaking uncontrollably and knotting together like two awkwardly mating spiders.

Faintly, as if from a distance, the tiny voice of reason informed him that he was losing his mind.

Then a hand reached down to touch him on the shoulder. He looked up blearily into the face of the enormous shaggy man who had frightened him way back at 42nd Street, when fear had a different, lesser meaning. The man said something. Stephen had no idea what it was.

The man shook him then, and Stephen’s mind began to clear. He heard the words, ”I said, did you know that guy?” And, like a movement made in a dream, he felt himself nodding yes.

“At the next stop,” the man said, and this time Stephen heard him clearly, ”we’re gonna get off and go for a little drink. And you’re going to tell me everything you know about him. Okay?”

“Okay,” Stephen said, as the tears started to trickle down the sides of his face.

Joseph Hunter nodded, squeezed Stephen’s shoulder in a gesture of almost fatherly reassurance, and then turned to stare out the window into the tunnels of forever night.

BOOK 2

Sweet Teeth

CHAPTER 14

The West 4th Street station is a sprawling, multileveled subterranean structure of reinforced concrete and steel. At its deepest point, a good 60 feet below street level, run the trains of the 6th Avenue line: the D, the B, the F, and the JFK Express. On the top level, perhaps only twenty feet from the outside world, the 8th Avenue line veers over to the west, consisting of the A, AA, CC, and E trains. Both of these platforms are brightly lit, as are most subway stations; both are reasonably well-populated at all hours of the day and night.

Sandwiched between them is yet a third level, continuously rumbling from the tracks above and below it but bearing no rails of its own. It is neither well-lit nor populous; rather, it has the appearance of an empty warehouse, lined symmetrically with massive steel girders and periodic staircases on either side which, when standing at any point near the center, give it the appearance of infinite length, the far ends disappearing into darkness.

It is an ominous place, reeking of mildew and at least a decade’s worth of wino piss. It is not the kind of place where anyone would care to linger, unless they were a bum seeking shelter from the elements, or a mugger waiting to drag some innocent into those boundless crosshatchings of shadow. Most people . . . most sane people . . . pass through this level with wrinkled noses, a sort of nightmare apprehension, and as much speed as they can muster.

It would not be a good place to die.

Deep in the shadows, next to a pile of human feces rendered odorless by time, Rudy Pasko leaned against a moist, grimy wall and played nervously with his hair, twirling and twisting it around one pale, bony finger. The bloody handkerchief sat like a lump at his feet, caked with dirt and saliva, discarded like an empty granola bar wrapper.

It was a snack, that’s all: a little something to tide him over. He had snatched at it impulsively, like a kid passing by a candy store. He had fought over it like a dog vying for a bone, a pigeon desperately grappling for an old crust of bread.

And that was all it was, actually: a scrap tossed by Fate to make him crazy for a moment and further whet his appetite. It bothered him now that he’d gone for it so automatically, so instinctively . . . that the sight and smell of so little blood could make him lose control.

More than that, however, he was worried about Stephen. He could have kicked himself for talking so much, flexing his new muscles like that. It would have been just as easy to lure him somewhere, out of the simplest of pretexts . . . let’s go have a drink, Stephen, you wouldn’t believe what kind of week it’s been . . . and laid it all on him after the fact.

How much does he know? Rudy asked himself, still twiddling absently with his hair. How much did I tell him? It angered him that his concentration was so scattered. Even now, less than ten minutes later, he could barely remember what he’d said.

The last several days had been, for Rudy, like an endless and incredibly potent acid trip. The same kind of insane sensory clarity. The same surreal disorientation. The same flood of images so powerful that they took on the aspect of Visions From God. And though he found the idea of God and the Devil laughable, he couldn’t deny that the visions seemed to be coming from somewhere higher, or lower, than himself.

Rudy pulled away from the wall and stood in the middle of the vast second landing. To his sight, the shadows seemed to be crawling with a power and a life of their own, like blind protozoa slithering across the face of all earthly creation, invisible to the ordinary naked eye.

Maybe it is alive, he thought, chuckling quietly to himself. Maybe the darkness does have a life of its own. It made sense, suddenly. It made complete and utter sense. It moved from the realm of ideas to the domain of absolute certainty: another vision.

It served to explain his own strange new existence.

Rudy giggled aloud. It echoed off the naked walls, ghostlike as it bounced back into his ears. He grinned, entertained. It was all he could do to keep from howling like a wolf, filling the air with riotous sound. But that would bring the transit cops running, and force an unnecessary encounter that could blow his cover to smithereens.

“No,” he whispered to himself, no longer giggling. “There’ll be plenty of time for that later.” Smiling faintly, wickedly. “All the time in the world.”

Rudy Pasko listened to the thunder of a train overhead. He looked up, drawn by the power of it. Slowly, the sound of his footsteps drowned by the echoing roar from above, he moved toward the nearest flight of stairs. Slowly, he ascended them.

It would have been fun to ride the trains again tonight; the subways had always fascinated him, though never so much as in the last several days. But the newspapers he’d found abandoned in the stations, and his own recent encounter with Stephen and the bloody nosed boy, led him to believe that the streets would be far safer. The night was young, and the Village would be teeming with life at this hour.

Hot-blooded life.

Just waiting for his kiss.

Besides, he thought, there’s still the matter of Stephen. I’ll have to get to him soon, before he puts two and two together. Not that that’ll happen any time soon. Stephen’s such a schmuck. He’s probably shaking in his shoes right now, taking a couple Darvons from his asshole psychiatrist and sitting at his stupid typewriter.

Rudy laughed, thinking about Stephen. What a wimp. What a spineless little jellyfish: afraid of life, afraid of death, afraid of sex, afraid of his own goddamn shadow. Rudy knew that Stephen wanted to get it on with him; he’d been playing with that for a long time, teasing Stephen subliminally with it, though the idea of actually bedding down with Stephen didn’t interest him at all. It would be too easy, like seducing a twelve-year-old girl. It would be boring. No challenge. No risk.

But he has uses, Rudy added, reaching the top of the stairs and moving toward the ramp that led to West 4th Street and the great outdoors. I like his parents’ money. And who knows? He might make an excellent slave.

The AA train rumbled away from the platform, covering the sound of his private laughter as he proceeded, shrugging his way past small clusters of people who completely failed to interest him. He looked up for a moment, and noticed a transit cop who was eyeing him strangely.

Fuck you, prick, Rudy thought, averting his gaze and continuing on his way. He felt the same kind of insolent paranoia that he used to feel while dealing drugs: an irrational, overwhelming distrust of anyone who looked at him askance, coupled with the desire to lash out and smash those prying eyes back into their sockets.

Rudy continued to walk, containing his fear and anger. He felt the cop’s eyes burning into him from behind. He kept walking. Not until he reached the ramp and began to climb it did he turn around to look; when he saw that the cop was still staring, but had not budged an inch, Rudy laughed and nodded as if to say yeah, clown, you just stare all you want.

Then he turned, his white lips pulled taut in an unpleasant, vindictive smirk. Ahead of him lay the turnstiles, the token booth, and the stairways leading up into the night.

“I’m coming, Stephen,” he said, in a sing-song. “I’m coming for you now.

“But first, I’ll grab a little something to eat. Just a bite,” he added, chuckling and running his tongue along the sharp incisors that were growing out quite nicely. “Because, God, am I hungry!”

And with that, he proceeded again toward the stairs and the first moon that he’d seen since the night that he died.

“In here,” Joseph said, a bit impatiently. “Let’s go.”

He was practically dragging Stephen along behind him. As the shock began to wear off, and the original fear loomed up again, Stephen had become more and more reluctant to talk. Joseph had tried to be understanding for a while, as calmly persuasive as he had ever been in his life, but this was the end of the line.

“No, I don’t think . . .” Stephen droned, his eyes wide and timorous, pulling slightly against Joseph’s grip on his wrist.

“Now,” Joseph said, yanking him forward with one hand, pushing open the door of the Blarney Stone pub with the other.

As the door slammed open, a number of old men looked up from their mugs and shots, eyes full of drunken disinterest. Two young couples in a booth near the back laughed boisterously, unaware of anything in the spinning universe but themselves. The bartender, a great burly Irishman with twinkling green eyes and massive sideburns, nodded and grinned at Joseph and Stephen, while cars collided noisily and exploded on the TV above his head.

Joseph nodded back, not smiling. “Two pitchers of Bud,” he shouted over the noise from the tube, the laughing hyenas in the rear booth. The bartender made the A-OK sign with the fingers of his left hand and pulled two pitchers off the shelf with his right. Joseph turned back to Stephen, pointed at a table near the door, and said, ”Let’s sit here.”

“Wuh . . . we don’t really need two pitchers,” Stephen said, allowing himself to be led to the table.

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll probably drink most of it myself. You just have what you want.” Joseph pulled out a chair for Stephen, then crossed to the other side of the table and seated himself with a small grunt of weariness. “Sit down,” he said.

Stephen sat. They looked at each other for a moment, then away; their minds were racing. The silence went on for nearly two minutes. Then a waitress emerged from the ladies’ room, saw the bartender point at the two pitchers and the new arrivals, nodded tersely, and went to bring them their drinks.

“How ya doin’, Joe?” she asked, setting down the beer and empty mugs. He shrugged, digging in his pocket for a ten spot. “Who’s your friend?” she inquired further, looking from Stephen to Joseph and back again.

“Uh . . . Stephen,” said the smaller man, trying hard to smile warmly. “Stephen Parrish. How do you do?”

“Alright,” she answered, flashing a glance at Joseph that said what’s with the gimp? He laughed and handed her the money.

“Keep the change, Rita,” he said quietly. “Thanks.”

Rita smiled, tucked the money coyly into her blouse, and sashayed back over to the bar. Stephen watched her move, more than casually drawn by the swivel of her hips. Joseph disinterestedly filled his mug.

“Are you a regular here?” Stephen asked.

“I’m a regular almost everywhere,” Joseph answered, taking a long swig. He all but drained the mug, filled it up again, and set the pitcher down in front of Stephen. “Here. Have some.”

Stephen nodded, saying, ”Thanks,” so quietly that even he couldn’t hear it, and poured himself a mugful. He took a tiny sip, smacked his lips, and then took something close to a healthy swig. “Ah, that’s good,” he said, setting down the mug and looking at Joseph.

Joseph stared back coldly.

There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

“Okay, man,” Joseph said finally. “Stephen, right?” Stephen nodded numbly. “Okay, Stephen. I want you to tell me about that guy you ran into on the train. Like, for starters, what’s his name?”

Stephen hesitated. A mad thought flickered through the back of his mind. Then he cleared his throat and said, as calmly as he could, ”Uh . . . Bruce.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, seriously! His name is Bruce . . .”

“Then why’d you call him Rudy?”

“His name is Bruce Rudy!” Stephen yelled, aware of how absurd it sounded, how obvious a fabrication it was. And in the back of his mind, he was wondering why am I saying this? But he didn’t have an answer.

“BULLSHIT!” Joseph shouted back, slamming his mug on the table for emphasis. In the space of a second, his right hand shot across the table to grab Stephen by the lapel and yank him forward.

“Now you listen to me,” Joseph hissed, his face very close to Stephen’s. “If you talk to me straight, you can go home to Mommy in less than an hour if you want to, or you can sit here and drink all night for free. But if you feed me this kind of crap, I’m going to snap your scrawny little neck in two. You got me? I’m going to twist your miserable head off if you don’t tell me what I need to know. Alright?”

Stephen nodded rapidly, eyes bulging, unable to speak. Joseph held him there a moment longer than he needed to, getting a sort of cruel enjoyment out of it: and it occurred to him that he didn’t much like this Stephen kid, the way he whimpered and stuttered and talked out his ass. He was kind of pathetic.

But he’s the only lead I have, Joseph mused, letting go of the kid’s collar.

Joseph thought back to the subway platform, to the oddly gripping sensation he felt when he first picked Rudy out of the crowd; there was something profoundly wrong with the spiky-headed little bastard, something that transcended fashion, or politics, or personality. It rolled off him in waves. Even blitzed, even from a distance, he’d felt it. And this sniveling collegiate twerp was his bestest (???intentional) friend. Stephen would tell him what he needed to know—or else.

Stephen slumped back in his chair, shaking and shivering. He reached for his beer and took a sloppy swig of it, getting his face wet. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. He brought a hand up nervously to wipe it all away, then snuffled and stared at the table.

“Let’s try it again,” Joseph said, no emotion in his voice. “What’s his name?”

“Rudy.” Stephen’s voice was wobbly, weak. “Rudy Pasko. He’s an artist.”

“He’s an artist,” Joseph repeated, musing. “I bet he’s just the greatest. Where does he live?”

“I . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Now, listen . . .”

“I DON’T KNOW!” Stephen screamed, collapsing face-first onto the table and sobbing hysterically. Joseph turned and looked at the other people in the bar. They were all staring now. I’ll let it go for now, he decided, even though he knew that Stephen was lying.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “So you don’t know where he lives.” Stephen’s hysteria seemed to abate slightly, though he remained facedown. Joseph paused to light a cigarette, clear his mind, think of a more productive approach. The beer was catching up with him again, and he wanted to make the most of this situation before he passed out.

“Stephen, look,” he said, reverting to his more compassionate voice. “I’m sorry. But I’ve got a bad feeling about this Rudy guy . . . the way he acted on the subway was not normal, you know? And . . .”

Stephen mumbled something into his hands.

“What?” Joseph asked, leaning forward.

It took a moment for Stephen to pull his face up from the table.

His eyes were red and puffy; a nearly transparent pool of mucus had slid from his nostrils to the ridge of his upper lip; strands of shimmering saliva were draped between the teeth of his upper and lower jaws as he opened his mouth to speak, making his thin face look like something out of a Bernie Wrightson illustration. The face itself was flushed and stained with tears. Joseph couldn’t help but feel the faint stirring of pity in his heart, looking at this guy.

“Yuh . . . you think th-that Rudy had . . . s-something to do with the m-m-murders, don’t you?” It was almost an accusation. “You think he m-might have k-k-killed all those people!”

Joseph took a drag off his cigarette, saying nothing.

“Well, you’re wr-wrong!” Stephen straightened, gathering the presence of mind to wipe the snot from his nose, and made every attempt to steady his speech. “Rudy’s a little crazy, but he’s not that crazy. He wouldn’t do anything like that. He . . . he wouldn’t . . .”

“How well do you know him?”

Again, Joseph could see the internal struggle on Stephen’s face, could see fact locking horns with convenient fiction. Nobody wants to put their ass on the line for anything was the thought that came instantly to mind, remembering his rap with Ian on the day that he flattened the purse snatcher. Then he pulled back to the present and waited for whatever answer the kid decided to present.

But Stephen had opted not to answer at all. “You’d have to understand Rudy,” he said. “Rudy’s a philosopher. He really thinks about the things going on in the world today. He’s got a certain way of looking at things . . .”

“Yeah?” Joseph, trying hard not to show his dark amusement, refilled his mug.

“If you understood what Rudy’s really like, you wouldn’t think . . . what you’re thinking.” The sentence ended in an oddly clipped manner, as though Stephen had intended to say something else entirely, then thought better of it.

“Well,” Joseph said, putting one elbow on the table and resting his chin on the fist at its end, ”why don’t you just explain him to me, then?”

Stephen looked away for a moment. When his gaze returned to Joseph’s, there was something slightly different about it . . . a decisiveness, a willingness to talk . . . that hadn’t been there before: as though he wanted to convince not only Joseph, but himself as well, that what he was saying was true.

“Can I have some more beer?” he asked. Joseph nodded, a slight grin on his face. Stephen lifted the pitcher, emptied it into his mug, drained the mug in one long shot, then refilled it from the second pitcher. Joseph was tempted to applaud; instead, he sat back in his chair, crossed his massive arms, and waited for the story to begin.

Nihilism is the branch of philosophy that negates the existence of absolute truth, or any knowledge thereof; it denies the existence of any order or meaning in the universe; it mocks any religious, moral, or social system that would seek to impose such order or meaning, on the grounds that such an imposition is purely arbitrary, a mental construct designed by the people in power to hold the rest of humanity in thrall. Therefore, a nihilist believes in none of the things that lend a sense of order or meaning to the bulk of humanity: hope, charity, courage, faith, love, harmony, cooperation, caring.

Josalyn paused at this point in her manuscript, pulling her fingers away from the typewriter keys to wrest a Salem Light 100 from its pack and bring it to her lips with trembling fingers. The machine hummed quietly in front of her, patiently waiting for her to decide on the wording of the next paragraph.

She lit the match, brought the dancing flame to the tip of her cigarette, and inhaled. The flame went out in a burst of cool, mentholated smoke. She watched the cloud disperse into nothingness, as Rudy and his philosophical pals would have the entire universe do, and grinned fiercely at the thought. What assholes, she thought; but, of course, she couldn’t write that into her thesis.

Yes, she continued, imagining the words in neat double-spaced type on her college professor’s desk. Nihilists are angry, self-deluding assholes who would sooner deny all meaning than take responsibility for the condition of their world. If life is meaningless, they’re off the hook; they can do any goddamn thing they like and not be taken to task for it, because nothing means anything anyway, and what difference does it make in the gaping black pit of infinity? Just sit back, pick your scabs, and pass the buck.

She laughed aloud at the image. Maybe Dr. Mayhew would give her good grades for her courage and audacity, but she doubted it; the language was more extreme than she planned to use in any of her writings on the topic. Instead, she’d couch her observations in the same tidy, polite rhetoric that she’d used throughout her college career.

It was funny to think about how much she owed to Rudy, in regard to the paper. When she’d first started doing her research, she was dangerously close to defending nihilism as the proper response. Something inside of her . . . the bloodied baby Josalyn who refused to die, she supposed . . . still resisted the idea; but life at home and life in the newspapers had all but persuaded her to murder the child and abandon all hope.

Then she had met Rudy, and there was something so damned attractive about the way he packaged his anger that she forgot entirely about the paper for a while and just threw herself into him. Or he into her. Whatever.

That had lasted for about two months. By the end of that time, he had begun to get on her nerves. Such bottomless hatred she had never imagined, much less seen, in a human being. If she had wanted a living embodiment of the philosophy that intrigued her, then . . . God help her . . . she seemed to have found him.

Also by the end of that time, she had begun to write again. It pissed Rudy off. “What are you doing, fucking me or putting me under a microscope?” he’d shouted once, storming into her living room after finding several of his observations picked apart in her notebook.

She’d been speechless at that point. She hadn’t been thinking about it that way at all; he’d just happened to bring up some points that she thought were worth mentioning, if only for their immense questionability.

Thinking about it now, however, she realized that Rudy had been right. She had been studying him. And as it turned out, that was good: it was the only good thing she’d gotten out of their miserable two months together.

I wonder if he’s dead, she thought, snubbing out the cigarette in a pile of its own ashes. And if he is, I wonder where he went.

Soon . . . all too soon . . . she would know the answer.

Dorian gets all the gorgeous guys, Claire complained to herself silently. All she has to do is toss that peroxide mop of hers around, leave her blouse half-undone, and come on like Debbie Harry in heat. It’s all over.

She was standing alone near the jukebox at the St. Marks Bar & Grill . . . or as nearly alone as one can be in a room that has exceeded its 250-person capacity by at least thirty people. They were pressing against her from every side, a sea of faces that extended all the way to the front door; but not a single one within reach was nearly as cute as the one that her roommate had managed to wedge herself against.

That bitch. Some people have all the luck, she continued, sullenly sucking on her Heineken with her eyes pointed in the direction of her shoes. Of course, she couldn’t actually see them; that would be asking a bit much, wouldn’t it? To be able to see all the way down to her feet? Christ, I might as well be hanging out on the subway at rush hour, for all the fun I’m having.

The gorgeous guy that Dorian was wedged up against had the kind of dissipated, lean, vampish look that really turned Claire on. Pale-skinned, dark-eyed, redolent with a sense of mystery and danger that expressed itself in his cocky stance, the cryptic nastiness in the way his mouth curled upward as he smiled. She’d only gotten a brief glimpse of him, on her way back from the bar, but that was enough; she wished Dorian would keel over dead, so that she could get a shot at him.

But no. Dorian would take him home, that little slut, and hump his brains out. Claire could see it now. She’d wind up sleeping with the headphones on again, trying to screen out the wild moans and whimpers from the next room. It was enough to make her take up prostitution: at least Dorian wouldn’t be the only one shaking pictures off the wall ’til 6:00 in the morning.

Oh, well, she thought, draining the Heineken and turning her gaze toward the cracked plaster on the ceiling. There’s always Danny. I could snag him in a second. Probably get a few free posters in the bargain. It was a cruel thought, she admitted . . . she liked Danny . . . but there was no comparison. Paranormal connection or not, the guy still left a thing or two to be desired in the looks department; she’d take a stupid, meaningless night of continual banging with a guy as cute as Dorian’s latest in a second, given half a chance.

I mean, she reasoned, you only live once, right?

Right.

Claire decided to go for one more beer, one more peek at Romeo, before checking out some other scene. It wasn’t easy. She had to plow her way through half a dozen skinheads, twice as many trendies, and a gaggle of miscellaneous riffraff before she could even reach the point where she’d last spotted Dorian and the handsome hunk.

They were no longer there.

Figures, she silently bitched. She cast her gaze around for as far as it could go, but there was no sign of them. Knowing Dorian, they were probably halfway into the sack already. “Goddam,” she mumbled, barely loud enough to be heard.

“Pardon?” said a voice from behind her. She turned to stare into the eyes of a pizza-faced preppie with moldy-looking teeth.

“Oh, fuck off,” she suggested to him, elbowing past on her way to the bar and another sorrow-drowning bottle.

Or maybe a dozen.

At the Blarney Stone, an hour had passed since Stephen and Joseph first sat down. A lot had gone down in that time, the least of which was another pitcher of beer. Now they sat, staring dully at each other like a pair of frogs in formaldehyde, wondering how to wrap things up.

Stephen’s discourse on the Gospel According To Rudy didn’t carry much weight in the final analysis; not nearly as much as Joseph’s description of the rotting woman on the Union Square steps. Every time Joseph closed his eyes, he saw her: the light green vapor that rose from her body as she lay, kicking and sagging into herself like a gouged inner tube, her flesh glossing over with mold and a thin layer of slime. While Ian had turned away, swallowing bile, Joseph had remained. He hung around while the crowd crept slowly up the stairs, gagging and fainting and shrieking anew at the sight and smell of her. He watched the police push the bystanders back. He watched them scrape her up.

The officer in charge, a young guy named Benzoni who was looking a little bit green around the gills himself, made Joseph agree that he wouldn’t say a word to the press. “No problem,” Joseph had said, and it wasn’t.

He wanted the thing that had killed that poor girl. He wanted that thing for himself.

Which was why, after darkness fell, he decided to stake out the subways. Which was why, when he saw Stephen calling that Rudy cat on the platform, he decided to follow behind. Which was why, after that bit with the handkerchief, he no longer had any doubts as to who or what he was after.

“I’m sorry, pal,” he said finally, pointing a drunken finger at Stephen. “But after what you saw, and after what I told you I saw, there shouldn’t be any question. Rudy’s the one.”

“No.” Stephen shook his head, eyes half-closed, expression blank. “No,” he repeated, banging his mug on the table. “I can’t accept it.”

“It’s true.”

“I don’t care. . . . I mean, I don’t know!” His head was spinning, the world was spinning. He let go of the mug and gripped the edge of the table with both hands, as if that could make it stop. Too much beer, too much weird information.

Stephen had done his best to withhold as much information as possible. He had managed, for example, to leave out the fact that Rudy disappeared on the night of the multiple murders. It would only strengthen Joseph’s case: a case already so strong that it would have been undeniable if it weren’t so utterly preposterous.

In fact, he had found himself continually whitewashing everything that he’d said, and he wasn’t sure exactly why. There was no question that Rudy was acting peculiar as hell; there was no question that he had scared the piss out of Stephen, although the details had receded into a fear-and-alcohol-induced fog, at least for the time being. And that thing with the bloody handkerchief . . . Christ! he thought, playing it back in slow motion on the Betamax of his mind, while the room lurched suddenly, sickly, to the left and proceeded to turn and turn and . . .

“No,” he gasped again, knuckles turning white from the sheer effort of hanging on. He could feel his dinner come alive again in his stomach, trying to force its way back to the shrimp ’n’ salad bar at Beefsteak Charlie’s. The thought of throwing up made him instantly sicker. He wobbled in his seat, cheeks bulging, and groaned.

Joseph didn’t see him. Joseph was busily writing something on a napkin, bent over the table. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, pausing to finish the line, still looking down. “If anything weird happens to convince you that I might be right, give me a call. Here’s my number . . . whoa.” He looked up to see Stephen, pale and sweaty, with one trembling hand over his mouth. “Hey, man. Are you alright?”

“No . . .” Stephen moaned through his fingers. He tried to get up and fell backwards into his chair, almost keeling over entirely.

“Oh, Jesus Christ.” Joseph got out of his seat quickly and moved to the other side of the table. He grabbed Stephen by the armpits and hoisted him up. The chair fell over with a crash. Everyone in the bar turned to see Joseph dragging Stephen to the bathroom as fast as he could.

“He pukes on the floor, you’re cleaning it up!” Rita yelled from somewhere behind them. Joseph responded by slamming open the door marked MEN with his shoulder, dropping Stephen to his knees in front of the toilet, and flicking on the light.

Immediately, the air filled with the sound of violent retching, the moist plunk of vomit against water echoing up from the toilet bowl. Joseph wavered in the doorway, staring stupidly for a moment, before leaving the room and closing the door behind him.

A brief flurry of one-man applause erupted from the booth in the back. Joseph turned a baleful eye toward the comedian, who stopped in mid-clap and turned quickly away. The only sound in the bar then poured faintly from the TV set: a Budweiser commercial, no less.

“This Bud’s for you,” sang the twangy C & W voice from the speaker as Joseph stomped back to his table, shaking his head at the absurdity. Rita came up behind him, also shaking her head, a repressed grin on her face.

“Where’d you find that guy?” she asked. “The Salvation Army?”

Joseph laughed sourly. “Oh, he’s a real champ, alright. Lied his ass off to me all night, and then . . .” He stopped himself. I can’t tell her this. “He’s just a jerk.”

“Tell me about it. Hey, you’re not gonna leave him here, are you?”

“Call him a cab or something. He’s got money. I paid for all the beer.”

Rita nodded, keeping her amusement to herself. “You’re done then,” she said finally.

“Yeah,” he answered. Then he remembered the napkin, still sitting on the table where he’d dropped it in his haste. “Almost,” he added, picking it up and turning back toward the bathroom.

“What, are we out of toilet paper?” she called after him. He ignored her, striding up to the door. Opening it. And looking inside.

Stephen appeared to be just about done. His body no longer shuddered or heaved. His arms were crossed over the toilet seat, his head resting upon them. He could have been asleep.

“You alright now?” Joseph asked.

“Yeah.” The voice was weak and breathy as it rang up from the toilet bowl. “I guess so.”

“Well, here,” Joseph said, sticking the napkin into Stephen’s back pocket. “My phone number. Give me a call when you wise up.”

Then he stepped out and closed the door behind him again, leaving Stephen to think about it. He wasn’t really angry . . . not nearly as angry as he could have been, considering the amount of garbage he’d had to listen to just to get one useful piece of information.

But he got it, and that was what counted. He got what he was looking for.

A name.

Rudy Pasko. The words felt nasty on his tongue as he mouthed them. Rudy Pasko. He could almost taste the dust.

“You’re a real prince, you know it?” Rita yelled as he passed her on his way out the door. She pointed to the men’s room with mock indignation. “A real friend of the animals!”

“Thanks, Rita,” he called back, waving. “I’ll see ya later.”

“What, I’m supposed to be thrilled?” she countered. Then she smiled, making ready to wave in return.

But Joseph Hunter was already gone.

Okay, Mr. Rudy fucking Pasko, he thought, stepping out of the Blarney Stone and into the night. I’m gonna find you. I’m gonna track you down and nail you to the floor, before you do it to anyone else . . .

The door opened.

“. . . and that’s when I knew that those people didn’t know anything about fashion!” Dorian exclaimed, absently twisting the key until it yanked loose from the door. “I mean, they were totally ignorant!” She laughed wickedly, dropped the keys into her pocketbook, and stepped into the apartment.

Rudy followed her, nodding and smiling silently. He was barely hearing her words: absorbed by the motion of her infinitely layered hair, the sound of her blouse sliding against the naked shoulders beneath, the aura of vitality that surrounded her. It was amazing. It was enthralling. It was . . .

“Hey. Shut the door, alright?” She turned now, her eyes locked on Rudy’s. He didn’t notice her slight irritation, engrossed in the tiny lines that streaked the warm blue of her irises, emanating from the pupils like spokes on wheels. He got lost in their depth for a moment; her words didn’t register at all.

“Are you deaf?” she said, and he snapped back into . . . what? Character? Circumstance? At any rate, he heard her; he understood what she’d been saying; he reached behind him to give the door a push, let it swing shut on its hinges with a screech that grated along his spine like a piece of steel wool. A grimace flickered across his face, then vanished as the lock clicked audibly shut.

Dorian was looking at him strangely. “I haven’t had enough to drink tonight,” he offered by way of apology, and grinned. She wavered for a moment, uncertain, then grinned back. So he’s a little weird, she mused. I can handle it.

Dorian was not oblivious to the sense of danger around him. It was part of the allure. So many men were merely cute, merely interesting, merely endowed with money or drugs or a striking image. But Rudy was different; she could tell that from the moment she spotted him. The difference radiated from inside of him, a perverse magnetism that simultaneously attracted and repelled.

It intrigued her. It sent little rushes of excitement through her body that tingled in all the right places. She turned fully toward him and smiled now, her irritation of a moment ago forgotten. “Let me show you around,” she said, extending her hand and winking seductively.

Rudy’s mouth dropped open slightly. His heart was pounding in his chest, in his ears. There was a rasping, grating quality about it, like an engine that’s low on oil. He couldn’t believe that she couldn’t hear it as she moved forward to take his hand, trembling with awesome exhilaration.

“God!” she cried out at his touch. “Your hands are cold, lover! We’re gonna have to do something to warm them up.” Rudy nodded, eyes half-closed and dreamy, as she brought her other hand up to massage the white flesh, the long fingers, with a sensual circular motion.

They were both breathing heavily now, as though the contact had caused some unseen floodgates of passion to cave in, unleashing the tidal waves. Dorian looked up into his dark eyes and saw a swimming, infinite blackness; Rudy looked down into hers and saw shimmering oceans, vast and blue and pulsating with life, with life, with . . .

Her soft lips parted, as if for speech, but no words would come. She made a little clicking noise with her tongue, and the corners of her mouth lifted upwards hungrily. Her hands let go of Rudy’s and moved to the sides of his face, cupping it gently, as she moved forward to press herself against him. Then, very slowly, she slid her tongue along his Adam’s apple and up to the cleft of his chin, tarrying for a moment before taking his chin in her mouth and giving it a light, playful nibble.

Rudy groaned, low in his throat. His hands closed around her back, feeling the lithe muscles tremble at his touch through the sheerness of her blouse. She pushed forward with her pelvis insistently. His eyes snapped shut. He saw red, glorious red.

He would not be able to control himself much longer.

Josalyn was asleep, her consciousness trembling at the border between darkness and dreams. She shifted beneath the sheets, rolling over onto her back, legs opening slightly. Her soft lips parted.

She made a little clicking noise with her tongue.

At the foot of the bed, Nigel also stirred, awakened from a dream of his own. The soft white fur of his back stiffened slightly; the back arched. His claws came out, imbedding themselves in the blankets and hooking there like long, thin teeth.

Nigel pulled himself to a standing position. Something was happening in his little cat-mind that was utterly beyond him. He moved with it, like a dancer responding to some primitive beat. Very softly, he began to purr.

Then he moved . . . slowly, gently . . . through the space opened up between Josalyn’s legs. He stood, looking over her with eyes that gleamed in the darkness.

Gleaming red.

Then he nestled down over her groin, curling up in the way that cats do, his eyes never leaving her face.

The sound of his purring filled the room.

They were in bed now, Rudy lying prone on his back while Dorian crouched over him. She had unbuttoned his shirt to the waist and was running her tongue down the length of his abdomen, lingering at the nipples to bite and suck and tease. He writhed beneath her, running his fingers through her hair and moaning with insane pleasure.

Her mouth moved down to the side of his belly now, finding the line that arced inward to his crotch. She traced it to the waistband of his pants, flicked her tongue beneath the fabric; then, shuddering with hunger, she brought her hands up to unzip him.

Rudy lifted his hips. Her hands came around under his ass and quickly dragged the pants down to his knees. She pulled away for a moment, bringing one hand up to brush away the hair that had fallen over her face, and Rudy settled back onto the bed.

“My God,” she said, staring at the white, semi-erect penis. It didn’t look real. She had never seen anyone so incredibly pale: the color of the walls, the sheets. It astounded her.

Dorian took his penis into her hands. It throbbed slightly; and she noted with pleasure that it was the warmest part of his anatomy. Rudy moaned loudly as she ran one sharpened fingernail along the aperture at its tip. She smiled, and then took him into her mouth.

“Ohhhh,” Rudy gasped as she began to work him. His eyes were dry and luminous, red. His fingers dug into the mattress, hanging on. His body shook uncontrollably. His mouth opened wide, sharp teeth glistening in the dim light; when he closed his mouth, the teeth tore into his lower lip, drawing no blood.

It was as though all the blood in his body, what little there was, had rushed down into his cock. He felt lightheaded, dizzy, on the verge of unconsciousness. Dorian held him upright at the base while her lips slid rapidly up and down the shaft, a tight and expert orifice. Rudy felt the thunder building up in his balls, more intense than any ten orgasms he’d ever dreamed of.

And at the same time, he felt the hunger washing over him, smashing against the whole of his body in an overwhelming blood-red tide. It sent a surge of renewed power into him, a lust more commanding than the sexual drive, merging with it into something beyond.

He reached forward to unbutton her blouse from behind. She shifted slightly, still sucking on him, to facilitate the operation. He took her then by the breasts and pulled her gently but firmly backwards. Her lips smacked as she disengaged, and then she was on her back beside him.

“Now,” he said throatily, unbuckling her pants. Her hips uplifted, grinding at thin air. The garment came off in one smooth motion. He threw it on the floor and turned to her.

Her eyes were clouded over, pale blue and glistening. There was a warm, beautiful flush in her face, her neck, her breasts. Rudy could see the blood surging toward the surface, making her hot to the touch as she moaned for him, thrust herself toward his crotch, took hold of his prick with one hand and began to pump it.

Rudy’s senses were swimming. He couldn’t hold back another moment. With a tiny cry, he pulled her hand away and rolled on top of her, hearing her cry out something that he couldn’t understand. Violently, he plunged into her. They gasped in unison, her body tightening around him, and launched into a mad, staccato rhythm.

It built. It built. She shifted herself so that her legs were sticking straight up, brought him in as deeply as he could possibly go. He collapsed against her chest, nearly swooning, as she humped at him with deliberate animal abandon.

And in the moment before he felt himself blacking out, he brought one shuddering hand up to jerk her head sideways, holding the face away by her beautiful hair, and buried his teeth in her neck.

In her dream, Josalyn was making love to somebody. His face was veiled by clouds, but his body was upon her, huge within her, as she ground and pumped against him. Something wild had come alive inside her, sending the blood racing through her veins, hammering in mad syncopation with the pounding at her loins. She gritted her teeth and whined desperately through them.

Her hands were clutching his back. She slid them up to his shoulders, his neck, the back of his head. She tried to pull him closer, to see him, to kiss . . .

. . . and the clouds parted, and she saw that it wasn’t a man at all, and she suddenly began to scream . . .

. . . as the animal face descended upon her, blood and drool rolling from the contorted lips, the glistening fangs, the bone-white jaws that parted in lust and hunger . . .

. . . and she screamed, and she screamed, and . . .

Dorian’s eyes were almost closed now. She was dimly aware of her body: the vigorous coitus in which it was still engaged, the sharp prickling at her jugular vein. She could hear the sucking and slurping in her ear, but it seemed to be coming from far away. And the warmth of Rudy’s body was rapidly increasing; but she, herself, was going cold.

Her sharp fingernails were buried in Rudy’s back. Thin trails of blood trickled from the broken flesh. She was only faintly aware that it was her blood, running from his wounds, and onto the sheets.

She moaned, almost silently. There was very little wind left in her. Her body had ceased to move of its own accord, bouncing against the mattress because he was humping her now, he was slamming in and out of her with frightening power, with the energy he had drained from her throat in hot glistening gouts of crimson that she could see from the corner of her eye.

The room was bright, too bright. Her head ached dully, a cold steel band of pressure, relentlessly tightening. She felt the teeth slice down her throat, opening a gash three inches long. It made a sound like tearing curtains, like a veil rent asunder to let the darkness stream in on leathery wings, a muted and pervasive beating that pulsed in her temples as she felt herself slipping away . . ..

Then Rudy’s hand, still gripping her head by that beautiful, blood-matted hair, jerked violently to the side. And the neck snapped. And she gave herself over to the darkness completely.

“NO!” Josalyn screamed, jolting suddenly into total, terrible wakefulness. She sat bolt upright, wide eyes streaming as they stared into the darkness of the room, aware of a rumbling in her ears and a sharp pain in her groin.

It took her a moment to realize what it was.

Nigel was still curled up in the space between her legs, his chin resting on her mons, the paws to either side. Because the room was too dark, she couldn’t see the blood; but she felt his claws, having torn through the sheets, sunken deep into her soft underbelly.

While his eyes, red and luminous, stared into her own. And he purred.

“NIGEL!” she cried, reaching toward him quickly. He hissed, back arching, claws sinking deeper. She squealed with pain and swatted him across the face. He yowled, claws wrenching free with a wet shredding sound. Josalyn screamed, thrown forward by reflex, and grabbed him by the throat. Before he could respond, she hurled him across the room and into the wall.

“Oh, God, Nigel! Oh, God! Oh, God!” She collapsed forward, curling like a fetus, and cried violently into her hands. “Oh, God, I don’t believe this!” she whined, and then words were no longer within her power.

Nigel hunkered down in the corner of the room. His muscles were tensed. His breath was shuddering, mad, incensed. He growled, low in his throat: a terrible sound. And he watched her, poised, as though he were waiting for a command.

“N-N-Nigel?” she whimpered, looking up through her fog of tears. Nigel growled again, baring his teeth. “Nigel, you . . . you’re not yourself!”

He spat at her, hunkering lower.

“You’re not yourself, Nigel!” she screamed, pulling herself to a half-seated position. “You’re not . . . you’re not . . .” She reached the point of hysteria, smashed through it like a train. “MY GOD, NIGEL, WHAT’S HAPPENING TO YOU?”

Nigel screamed, then: the sound of babies, tortured babies, with cigar butts being ground out in their eyes. It was the most unearthly, horrible sound that she had ever heard. It coiled out and out of him, forcing his head back like a coyote’s, climbing higher and higher in range until it threatened to burst her eardrums, send blood surging between the fingers that she clamped now to the sides of her head, trying to shut out the killing noise, trying to ward off the madness that she was a membrane’s thickness from being engulfed by.

“STOP IT!” she screamed. “STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP . . .”

Rudy awakened, suddenly, from the trance. For a moment, he didn’t remember where he was. Then he looked down at the dead, bloody shape beneath him, and it all came back.

Dorian’s neck had been twisted around so that her face was pressed down in her pillow, though the body was still on its back beneath him. Her throat was a raw meat canyon, open to the point where the broken bone protruded like a drainage pipe, emptying its waste into the river of blood that had finally ceased to flow.

Her skin was completely white . . . as white as his had been. He noted with surprise that his color had deepened, become more the color of flesh. He also realized, with a strange blend of horror and amusement, that he was still grinding on her automatically; and that he was still erect.

How long? he found himself wondering. How long was I out? How long have I been . . . humping her like this? He stopped himself, an act of will, because his body had locked itself into a rhythm that it could probably have maintained forever. He slid out of her immediately, crawling backwards off the foot of the bed and away from the corpse.

Naked but for the pants around his ankles, Rudy stumbled to the middle of the room: his penis caked with the dried lubricants of passion, pointing like a divining rod at his grisly handiwork. Every pore in his body seemed to open wide, screaming with life. He rubbed himself all over to ease the tingling.

Of all the killings that he’d done, this was clearly the most horrible. And yet . . . and yet . . .

“I feel great.” He said it so quietly that it was barely audible over the roaring in his temples, the hot pulsation of blood in his veins. “I feel great,” he repeated, as if to convince himself that it was true.

But he didn’t need to. There was no doubt. He felt absolutely invigorated, absolutely without remorse. He felt, to his way of thinking, the way he should have felt every time he slipped it to some dumb cunt: the way he should have felt with Josalyn, and every other . . .

Josalyn. His thoughts backtracked, riveted on the word with unnatural intensity. Josalyn. It rang in his head like a sweet, clear bell. He remembered the night that she tossed him out, swearing at him, trying to make him crawl with the ferocity of her words. He remembered the way that she tried to make him feel small and shitty, less than a man: more like a mongrel, a lap dog, some tiny-brained bundle of Willingness To Serve, yapping and wagging its idiot tail every time she craved affection or understanding or . . .

Less than a man. The phrase rankled his ass, filled him with a hatred profound as the heavens. Less than a man? I’m MORE than a man now! MORE than any pathetic, sniveling little human being!

I’m MORE than that!

And God be damned if I don’t prove it to you, bitch.

All the while that he was dressing, his mind was focused on Josalyn. That tart. That slut. That lousy collegiate whore. As he pulled up his pants and zipped them, he was seeing her: on her knees before him, the two puckered wounds in her neck standing out in sharp relief as she blew him with the abandon of the damned. As he put on his shirt, he was seeing her: her sallow flesh setting off the red luminescence of her undead eyes as she draped a royal robe around him, forever his servant, his jiz bag, his slave. And as he slipped on his boots, he was seeing her: the boot pressed into her face as she groveled in the dirt, begging forgiveness, pleading for the opportunity to go with him, to feed . . .

Ah, yes, he thought, chuckling to himself. The right to feed. A new issue for Gloria Steinem to champion, once she and the rest of those bimbos are mine. He laughed aloud, an evil rippling against the silence. He laughed, and he laughed, and he laughed.

When he had laughed the image out of his system, he took one last glance at the thing on the bed before turning to leave the room. It was tempting to write, once more . . . to poke around in the wound until enough juice came out to compose with . . . but he dismissed the thought. I don’t want them to make the connection, he thought. I want them to believe that their “Subway Psycho” only kills in the subways.

He was about to leave when yet another thought struck him: what if she gets back up again?
It happened to me; it could happen to her. It was a disconcerting thought. On the one hand, she was beautiful, and great in bed: she’d make a welcome addition to any man’s court. On the other hand, her neck was broken: he didn’t know if he wanted to see anyone, beautiful or not, walking around like that.

Rudy walked slowly over to her. He took her head in his hands, tried to twist it back around. When her glazed, dead eyes met his, he jerked involuntarily.

And her head came away in his hands.

“Wah!” he yelled, dropping it like a hot potato. It bounced on the bed, hit the floor with a thud. Rudy backed away, disgusted, and hurried out of the room.

On his way to the front door, he noticed another open doorway in the apartment. A quick glance inside revealed a pale, familiar nightmare countenance that made him giggle when he saw it. He stopped in the doorway—the giggling giving way to howling now—and stepped inside.

The room was plastered with vampire posters. The first one, Bela Lugosi, leered at him in black and white with his ridiculous, limpwristed predatory stance. Surrounding Bela were shots of Frank Langella, Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski, Max Shreck, and Lon Chaney. In addition, there were half a dozen David Bowie shots, all of which clearly showed why he’d been chosen to play John Blaylock in The Hunger.

One more picture hung on the wall, a photograph in an expensive frame. The light glared across the glass. He moved closer, in order to see.

He smiled.

If only she knew, he mused, looking at the pictures of an attractive girl, dressed entirely in black and red, with the bat wings painted across her features. He had never seen Claire before, but he knew all too well what she was trying to be.

In fact, the entire room was a sort of shrine to vampirism, strewn with regalia from the popular mythology. Her bookshelves were cluttered with vampire titles: I Am Legend, Interview With The Vampire, Salem’s Lot, Dracula, the whole Fred Saberhagen series. There was a candle in the shape of a human skull. There was a large mirror with a black tapestry slung over it, a bureau covered with conventional and theatrical makeup.

There was an inverted cross hanging over the bed; but instead of Jesus Christ, Bozo the Clown was nailed to it, his red hair jutting out in either direction.

This is tremendous, Rudy marveled, clapping his hands with childlike glee. This is really incredible. I’d like to meet this chick, whoever she is. I might even let her reign at my side.

The thought inspired him. Up to now, he’d been thinking exclusively in terms of slaves. This vampire lover, however, set up another line of reasoning entirely. He played it over and over in his mind, excited by the prospect.

Why not? he thought. Why not a queen? There are eight million people in New York City . . . more than enough for me. And with so many servants, I couldn’t possibly keep track of them all.

He moved to the bookshelf, perusing the contents. Interview With The Vampire stuck out in particular; there was something gratifying about the title, a touch of glamour to what he already knew was a superior status. “Why, yes, Johnny, I’ve killed over ten thousand people,” he said out loud, imagining himself on the Tonight Show, Ed McMahon’s mangled body at his feet. “And you’re next.”

He picked up the book, began to flip absently through it. His eyes stopped on page 83, riveted to a particular passage near the bottom of the page. He read:

“Vampires are killers,” he said now. “Predators. Whose all-seeing eyes were meant to give them detachment. The ability to see a human life in its entirety, not with any mawkish sorrow but with a thrilling satisfaction in being the end of that life, in having a hand in the divine plan.”

That’s nice, Rudy observed. I don’t know about this “divine plan” crap, but that’s very, very nice. I like that. He began to flip ahead, see what other gems of sterling wisdom the author had provided for him . . .

. . . when there was a sound at the front door.

What? he thought, his heart suddenly pounding.

And in that moment, quite contrary to his own desires . . .

He underwent a transformation.

Claire hesitated for a moment at the door, listening. She wouldn’t have been surprised to hear them going at it from the stairwell. At the very least, she expected some kind of loud music, some laughter, some of Dorian’s characteristic drunken shouting.

But she heard nothing. Absolutely nothing. And the absence of sound confused her.

Maybe they went to his apartment, she thought, but that didn’t sound like Dorian. Dorian always had to flaunt her new boyfriends, invite Claire in for a naked peek before telling her to get out and change the record or something. No, she would have definitely brought him here, she confirmed with a nod. So where are they?

Claire fit her key into the lock, struggled for a moment to make it turn, and then pushed open the door . . .

With a screech, something small and squat and dark rushed past her feet. Claire let out a screech of her own and stepped back, terrified, staring after it.

It was the largest rat she’d ever seen.

“Oh, my God,” she breathed, bringing one hand up to her breasts involuntarily. She watched as the rat disappeared into the darkness of the stairwell, and fell back against the door frame.

“Dorian!” she called, backing nervously into the apartment. “Dorian, did you see that . . .?”

Then she turned.

The words froze in her throat.

The door slid shut behind her, forgotten.

And she collapsed to the ground, unconscious, while Dorian’s head stared across the floorboards at her with eyes of bright, forever-unseeing blue.

CHAPTER 15

It was now 2:35 in the morning. Ian sat at the bar of the Shamrock Pub, alone. To either side of him, empty barstools jutted from the floor like black, bloated mushrooms on fat chrome stems. In his left hand was a cigarette with an inch-long ash. In his right was a red Flair pen.

Spread out before him were a series of notes and diagrams, drunkenly scrawled on the backs of several blank messenger manifests. He stared at them, red Flair poised, while his mind grappled with the details of the plan.

One of the pages was labeled TOOLS. On it, he had all the traditional implements of vampire-hunting: wooden stakes, mallets, crucifixes, silver bullets, garlic, holy water. To this, he had added an innovation or two: compact mirrors, to spot the monster by his absence of reflection; and, most important, a pair or more of data pagers, a dozen street guides, and the number of every subway pay phone in lower Manhattan.

As for the plan itself . . . well, it was an iffy proposition at best. It could work, if all went properly. Ian didn’t doubt that. But it had some major holes in it, any one of them big enough for a full-grown vampire to slip through.

Twelve guys, say, Ian thought, musing over the notes on the page marked THE PLAN. Split up into groups of three. A data pager in each group. We leave Joseph and two other guys in the van; the other three groups hit strategic subway stations around the city. When somebody spots the vampire, they beep everybody else. The number of the pay phone shows up on the data pagers; they look on their charts for the location of the phone, then surround the area within a three-stop radius in either direction . . . .

Damn! Ian stomped on the barstool footrest in frustration, knocking the long cigarette ash onto his lap. Goddamn it, this is never gonna work, he added miserably, and turned to the page marked PROBLEMS.

There were already more problems than anything else, he noted; and he’d just come up with another. Running down the list, they read:

1) Data pagers cost $150 apiece.

2) What if the phone’s busy, doesn’t work, doesn’t have push buttons?

3) How does everybody get to the right station fast enough?

4) What twelve guys?

5) We don’t even know what the vampire looks like.

6) Do we kill him right there on the platform, or what?

7) Who’s gonna get the number of every goddam pay phone in lower Manhattan?

8) Where do you get silver bullets: a sporting goods store? Weapons cost money!

To all this, he now had to add:

9) Twelve people aren’t enough to surround anything in groups of three!

“Well, that just about does it,” he complained to himself. “No way in Hell.” Then, silently, if twelve people aren’t enough to do it, then how is Joseph supposed to do it all by himself?

And how am I supposed to explain that to him?

The door behind him opened. He turned automatically, with a start; even after a dozen beers or more, his nerves were still horribly on edge. Like Joseph, he couldn’t close his eyes without seeing Peggy Lewin’s spontaneous decay.

Ian turned toward the door and watched as two large men stepped into the pub, wearing the orange Day-Glo vests, rubber boots, and grimy work clothes of the MTA. Their eyes shone white in their dirty faces, darting this way and that with an expression that took only a second to read.

Those guys are terrified. Ian stared at them for a moment, his jaw hanging slack. He felt like laughing, like curling up in a ball. He watched as the second man closed the door with a bang that made the first man jump. Ian jumped, too, then giggled involuntarily. His flesh was crawling.

He could feel their fear from halfway across the room.

He turned away abruptly, staring straight ahead. In the mirror behind the bar, his reflection stared back at him: a pale, ghastly mockery. He tried to grin reassuringly, the traditional hambone response to discomfort; but the face that grinned back at him was so drained . . . so dead . . . that his eyes snapped shut in revulsion . . .

. . . and Peggy Lewin was screaming, one eye rolled back into darkness, the other gone entirely, as the flesh surrounding her tensed jaws began to split and reveal the straining muscles beneath . . .

“No,” he whispered through clenched teeth, eyes snapping open again to rivet on his hands, clenched into fists on the bar before him. Behind, he could hear the two men, their steps slow and halting, as they made their way toward the bar. I’m not going to look at them, he told himself. I don’t want to see any more.

But he found himself listening as they seated themselves about four stools down to his right, ordered double shots of Johnnie Walker Red with a pitcher of beer for a chaser, and . . . softly, tentatively . . . began to talk.

“Yo . . . T. C.?” This from the white guy, the first one in the door. He sounded, predictably, like Sylvester Stallone.

“Go ahead,” his black companion muttered without much enthusiasm.

“It’s . . . I . . . I don’t know if I want to go back down there again.” The black dude let out a derisive snort. “No, really, I . . .”

“You had to go right up to that thing, didn’t you? Shine your goddamn flashlight right in its face.” He snorted again, furious. “You’re one badass dude, Tommy. You know it. You as bad as they come . . .”

“Hey! You ran, too, buddy! Don’t give me that crap!”

“I didn’t even want to check it out, blood! You were the one who had to be so inquisitive! You were the one . . .”

“Hey, just lay off me, would’ja?” The white dude, Tommy, stared sullenly down at his knees, grimacing. T. C. glared at him, then chugged heavily on his beer and ruminated. Finally, he spoke.

“I’m goin’ back down,” he said. “I can’t be quittin’ no job just because of this. I got alimony to pay. I got child support. I got bills crawlin’ up my butt like you wouldn’t believe . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, but . . .”

“But nothin’, you stupid Pollack sonofabitch! Now, if Weizak wants to make some kinda big deal outta this, he can just deal with that thing himself! I just needed a drink to mellow myself out. Thass all.”

“That fuckin’ thing!” Ian glanced over and saw that they had both paused to drain their double shots in unison. Then Tommy slammed his empty glass down and said, ”I don’t even wanna think about it!” Ian looked quickly away.

What did they see? The question tugged at the base of Ian’s brain like a spoiled brat at the hemline of his mother’s skirt. He found himself grinning wildly, grinning at his knotted hands, while his mind repeated the question: what did they see? What did they see down there?

As the net closed inexorably around him.

One minute, he thought, you’re allowed the illusion that things are pretty much the way they’ve always been and always will be. Next time you turn around, some pinhead rips the world out from under you, and the weirdness starts pouring in from every direction . . .

Like these guys. If they didn’t see the vampire down there, I’ll eat my hat. I’ll buy a hat and eat it.

In the tunnels . . .

T. C. Williams and Tommy Wizotski, cleaning up after a water main break on the Broadway line between 8th and Prince. Not thinking about the murders, the rumors of things even worse than death; not thinking about the bodies that sporadically turned up in one section of tunnel or another, even in the most ordinary of circumstances . . . MTA workers stumbling into third rails, junkies and winos crawling down there to die . . .

Not thinking about any of that.

T. C. and Tommy, drenched with sweat and filthy water, nodding at each other like conspirators do. T. C. and Tommy, leaving the mess behind them as they moved to a niche in the wall on the uptown side. Withdrew a joint of exotic pot, valued at $120 an ounce, from a grease-stained pocket. And proceeded to fire it up.

A train, rumbling toward them. Pausing to blow blue smoke defiantly against the approaching lights, laughing in the grip of a steadily mounting high, before pressing back into the niche and safety.

Glimpsing, in the moment before caution forced them to retreat, something small and pale that lay by the side of the shuddering rails . . .

. . . and then moving back, watching the faces in the brightly lit windows flash by, too quickly to be distinguished, as the train thundered past. Communicating with a glance, because words could not possibly cut through, while the joint passed back and forth in the constricted space of the niche. The first glimmers of fear, constricting that space even further . . .

. . . as the train continued to stretch out before them, a solid wall of power and motion . . .

. . . and then was gone, the last car whipping past them and off into the distance, leaving them bathed in dope smoke, darkness, and reverberating sound . . .

. . . that dissipated, gradually, into silence. Moving, then, away from the wall. Stepping carefully over the deadly third rail and into the center of the still-thrumming tracks. Moving toward the thing . . .

Ian had made up his mind.

They had been talking together for the last fifteen minutes. Little by little, the story was coming together, as the steady flow of alcohol began to loosen them up. But they were still beating around the bush, and Ian couldn’t stand it much longer.

He closed his eyes. The darkness was softly spinning, but at least Peggy Lewin wasn’t in it. I’m going to regret this in the morning, he informed himself, grinning lopsidedly. Then he opened his eyes, waited for the room to steady itself out, and motioned for the bartender.

“What are those guys drinking?” Ian asked, leaning forward and cupping his hand to his mouth. The bartender squinted at him darkly, suspiciously. Ian was confused for a second; then he rubbed his eyebrows and leveled a cold gaze at the man.

“Look. Just set ’em up with shots of whatever they’re drinking,” he said, ”and bring me another pitcher, okay?” The bartender nodded, slowly, and turned away.

What does he think I’m gonna do? Get two big transit workers drunk, lead ’em out back in the alley, and mug ’em? Didn’t seem too likely; they were both about six feet tall. Probably thinks I want them to take me home, Ian continued, laughing at the thought. Christ. In a sane environment, that wouldn’t even come into the picture.

But this isn’t a sane environment. The thought clung for a moment. This is a place where bodies come climbing out of subway tunnels. This is a place where, if you have three guys sitting at your bar, chances are all three of them saw a monster today.

Which reminded him. The bartender was setting up the shots now; the two guys were staring over with blank surprise. Ian motioned for them to wait a minute, then gathered up his belongings and rose from the stool.

God, this is going to be weird, he thought, and then he was moving toward them.

It was the head. Tommy had suspected it from the first glance. As they got closer, it became more and more evident that this was no handbag, no crumpled-up newspaper, no discarded underwear: none of the options that T. C. had stubbornly posed.

It was the head, all right. The one from the murder of a day before. Upside down and at an angle, forehead half-buried in a pool of water, stringy hair dangling downwards. A dirt-caked expanse of blackness at the base of the neck, bone poking out and toward them like an accusing finger.

A large, hairy wart displayed prominently on the left cheek of its fat, lifeless face.

“Aw, come on, Tommy,” T. C. had almost whined. “Leave it alone, now. I’m serious.”

“Wait a minute. Just wait a minute.”

“You don’t wanna see that . . .”

And they had come closer, to within five feet of it. They had come closer, almost on tiptoe, as though they were afraid of awakening it.

Then Tommy had knelt down in front of it; and pausing to make absolutely sure that T. C. was watching, he unhooked the flashlight from his belt. Flipped it on.

And shone its light into the dead thing’s face . . .

. . . and the eyes shot open, twin crimson reflectors that stared blindly back at them, while the jaws widened into a silent, screaming rictus of horror . . ..

Tommy and T. C. had screamed then, too: sonic accompaniment to the soundless howl of the thing at their feet. The flashlight had slipped from Tommy’s fingers and rolled, its beam trailing off into darkness and distance. Then they turned and ran, crazily: away from the nightmare, away from the tunnels, out into the street and the dull, comforting light of the nearest bar.

And into the tightening net.

Breaking into the conversation wasn’t easy. T. C. and Tommy weren’t inclined to talk. It took forty-five minutes, two more rounds of shots, and the story of Peggy Lewin to get anything out of them.

But by 4:00, when the Shamrock closed its doors for the night, they had discovered that there was, indeed, a lot to talk about.

CHAPTER 16

Night gave way slowly to dawn, the gradual blossoming of daylight into a heavily overcast sky. The city was sleeping, insofar as it ever does; and in the tunnels, even the dead were at rest.

In a small apartment on MacDougal Street, police were just wrapping up their interrogation of a terrified young woman named Claire Cunningham. The body . . . both parts of it . . . had recently been taken away.

Detective Brenner of Homicide was less than thrilled with the morning’s events. The girl was in shock. She couldn’t tell him anything. She said that she wasn’t there, and he believed her; she said that she had no idea who Dorian Marlowe was with, and he wasn’t so sure. But what can I do? he asked himself rhetorically. I can’t say a thing without her bursting into tears.

Brenner left his name and number on the kitchen table, next to the phone. He told her to call him when she’d rested; he wanted to talk with her again. She barely seemed to have heard him. Her eyes were staring off into some dark space beyond. He shrugged, exchanged helpless glances with the remaining patrolmen, and ushered them toward the door.

There were several things about this case that bothered Brenner a lot: the fact that there were no signs of struggle; the staggering brutality of the murder itself; the conspicuous shortage of blood both in and around Dorian Marlowe’s corpse. The fact that she’d been beautiful set off a little private pang, as well; but he’d seen more than his fair share of great-looking stiffs in his seventeen years on the force.

Worst of all was the similarity between Ms. Marlowe’s death and the bag lady’s from the day before . . . which led him, inescapably, to that whole bit with the “Terror Train.” He knew that he wasn’t the only one who would make that connection, and it worried him. The police commissioner was breathing down his neck, the mayor and the city council were about to shit Tiffany cuff links, the media were blowing it up into mythical proportions . . . and all Brenner was left with was a growing pile of still-warm corpses, an enormous deadweight that had been laid upon his shoulders.

He paused in the hallway, thumbing through a battered leather notebook. The “Terror Train” conductor was still in Bellevue, still a basket case: constantly slapping at himself while he whimpered and drooled. It was like somebody had taken his brain out, popped it in the microwave for three minutes, and then put it back in, completely cooked. They would never get a word from him, ever again.

Then there was the old man, Hacdorian. He was unhelpful to the point of evasiveness, but Brenner couldn’t really blame him: old people were traditional targets for the vengefully, murderously insane. And checking on his records, it was clear that the poor bastard had already been through enough misery to last him for another two thousand years.

Which left him with Claire Cunningham: a nut case if ever there was one. Her bedroom belonged in next month’s issue of Better Homes and Coffins. She was too shook up to talk right now, and he could understand it; but he wondered if she had anything up there to begin with. Bats in the belfry, maybe. Toys in the attic.

Vampires, he thought, snapping the notebook shut. Vampires. Sure. Then he lit a cigarette and stepped out into the street.

The ambulance was just pulling away, replete with Dorian Marlowe’s neatly bundled remains. Brenner scanned the crowd of rubbernecking well-wishers, pushing up against the blue police department barricades. A News 4 van had arrived on the scene and was wrapping their broadcast. He was glad that he’d told his boys to keep their mouths shut.

“Vampires,” he mused, poking his cigarette at the sweaty hordes. “Here’s your goddamn vampires.”

Claire sat alone on the living room couch. It took her a minute to realize that she was alone, and the cops were gone. The knowledge didn’t affect her much, one way or the other. She was lost in the dull haze of her thoughts.

Four images in particular were haunting her. Dorian’s head, of course, was first: she would be seeing that picture until the day she died. Second on the list was that guy at St. Marks Bar & Grill: the details were unclear, but the overall impression lingered on.

Third was the sight that greeted her when she stumbled into her bedroom, dragging herself off the floor and frantically calling the police. The disorientation had been overwhelming even then, but her eyes had not failed to notice the item that lay sprawled on the floor beside her bed.

Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice.

Claire had picked up the book and stared at it for an unknowable length of time. She had tried to read the pages that the book was open to, but the words all ran together before her eyes. It didn’t matter.

After a while, she had closed it and replaced it carefully on her bookcase. Then she had gone back into the living room and waited for the police to come.

It was something that she didn’t mention when they questioned her. Like the guy at the bar. She didn’t know exactly why.

Last, but not least, was the rat.

Fuzzy as it was, her mind had arranged these images into a neat cosmology: one that related back to the other night, and Danny. The vampire was here, in her home. She knew it.

And she knew that it was aware of her now. It had been in her room. It had left her a clue.

And, for some reason, chosen to spare her.

She was starting to nod out now, real sleep placing its demands on her stunned, scattered mind. Her eyes closed, and the world pressed its soft, insistent weight upon her like a mountain of cotton and chloroform.

Once, before she blacked out completely, she got a strong flash of something standing in the room with her. Some presence, powerful and unseen, just waiting for its moment to approach her. She struggled to open her eyes, but she couldn’t. And then, in an instant, it was gone.

I’ve got to see Danny, she thought in the last second before darkness overcame her. Maybe he’ll know what to do.

And then she was unconscious. At the table. In her apartment.

Alone.

CHAPTER 17

Joey . . .

Joseph was dangling at the edge of a dream, in that halfway state where both the inner and outer worlds have ghostly fingers with which to reach out and pull you. Inside his mind, he was back at Union Square, at the top of the subway stairs. From below: a shuffling, the sound of voices. He turned to Ian, but Ian was gone.

And the shuffling from below was getting closer.

Joey . . .

Joseph moved slowly down the staircase, squinting into the darkness at the bottom. Something was moving there: a lone figure, bent and shambling, that wavered painfully at the sunlight’s edge. He took another step forward, crouched down, and peered closely, intently . . .

That was when he recognized her.

No! he tried to shout, but no sound would come. He shuddered for a moment, paralyzed, and then started to move forward. But he was too slow, and it was too late . . .

. . . and his mother came staggering out of the darkness, her head twisted awkwardly to one side, her withered body jerkily moving beneath her nightgown . . .

. . . and her flesh began to sputter and run . . .

. . . and she began to scream . . .

. . . and suddenly Joseph was alone, in a dark place, moving resolutely forward. Up ahead, in the distance, there was a light. Abruptly, he stopped.

And waited. For the light. To come.

To him.

It came with a rumbling at his feet and in his ears. It came with a violent rush of wind, as if the light were a solid wall racing toward him. It came with such sudden, awesome speed that he almost backed away from it, his arms rising up to shield his face . . .

. . . and then the thing was on him, tearing at him, raking its claws across his arms, his chest, his face. He struggled against it, his hands on its throat, holding back the teeth that now loomed before his eyes, long and sharp and glistening redly . . .

. . . as the light and the rumbling overwhelmed him . . .

. . . and suddenly Joseph was sitting bolt upright in his chair, the gaping mouth of Bugs Bunny enormous before him on the TV screen, while sunlight streamed through the living room window.

“Balls,” he moaned. It came out garbled. His throat was caked with dried phlegm; his body, weak from lack of rest and extreme dehydration, cried out for water and food. He rubbed one paw across his burning eyes and groaned again.

On the screen, Bugs was nose-to-nose with the Tasmanian Devil. They roared at each other. It hurt Joseph’s ears. He winced, rubbed his eyes again, and dragged himself out of his chair. Behind him, something smashed loudly, and the cartoon monster howled in pain. Joseph jumped, startled, and whirled toward the set.

Jesus Christ! That’s too loud! he thought, reaching for the volume control. I’m gonna wake up . . .

And then he remembered.

Joseph stared at the television for a long cold moment, oblivious to the action on the screen. In his mind, he went back to the dream for a second: back to the head of the stairs, looking downward. Then he pulled himself out of it, backed away from the set, and just stood there with his arms across his belly.

“You can make all the noise you want,” he informed Daffy Duck, who had suddenly appeared on the screen. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Daffy and Bugs launched into an argument while the Tasmanian Devil watched them, dimly confused. They argued as to who would make the better, tastier victim. Joseph turned away from them, moving wearily toward the bathroom for a badly needed piss.

On his way, he paused at the doorway of his mother’s old bedroom. The door was wide open; the room was dark. He hung there, hesitating for almost a minute, before he could bring himself to look inside.

At the empty bed, alone in the center of the dark room. At the deep groove that ran down its center, where the mattress had conformed to her shape over the course of endless months. At the clean, freshly laid sheets; at the night table, barren except for one lamp, no longer burning; at the blank walls, the pools of shadow, the shuttered window staring in at nothing like the eye of a corpse.

Then he proceeded once again to the bathroom.

Pausing, only once, to punch the wall.

The viewing was held in a small Brooklyn cathedral, not far from Joseph’s apartment. It was done largely for the benefit of his mother’s friends, who assembled in black to weep and prop each other up in front of the open casket.

Joseph sat alone in the back of the cathedral, expressionless. The old women who had given their respects passed by him silently, frightened by his stoniness, on their way out the door.

He waited for all of them to leave.

All during the sermon, while the preacher waxed sanctimonious on the heads of his sorrowful flock, Joseph held it in. It wasn’t easy. The impulse to scream, to rip the pews right out of the floor and hurl them through the stained glass windows, was almost more than he could contain. But he did; it would have been pointless to do otherwise.

So he sat there, thinking this is so inspirational! and trying not to show how angry he was, while Father Drucker spewed out platitudes from a leather-bound book. He clenched his fists at the image of Jesus leading Mary Ellen Hunter up the path to glory, surrounded by cherubims soft as bunnies. He hissed through his teeth as the good Father praised God for His mercy, His eternal love and comfort in these, our times of greatest sadness, amen. He swallowed bile at the thought of his mother’s death being used like this: as a plug for some dipshit in a black and white smock, a chance to hype the Church.

And now, as the last mourners filed out of the chapel, Joseph thought about what he’d do if he were God, wandering into His house, confronted suddenly with this mealy-mouthed Pillsbury Doughboy of a priest. He saw himself glowering, eyes bright as all the flames of Hell, his head nearly touching the ceiling. He saw Father Drucker, cowering behind the altar, his raiments falling away from the puffy flesh, ash before they hit the floor . . .

. . . then Joseph was back in the last row of the cathedral. The mourners were gone. Drucker was alone in the front, extinguishing candles. A replica of Christ hung on a cross of polished metal.

And his mother lay in a temporary box, awaiting the hot kiss of cremation.

Slowly, Joseph Hunter pulled himself to his feet. Slowly, he proceeded down the aisle. Drucker turned at the sound of his footsteps. Joseph scrupulously avoided the man’s gaze, eyes focused on the pale white profile that jutted from the open coffin.

Then he was standing over her, his great hands resting on the coffin’s rim, looking down at the hideous mannequin that the makeup artists had made her up to be. He trembled, a rush of emotion sweeping over him, sudden and unexpected as a sniper’s first shot.

“I don’t know what God’s will is, Mama,” he heard himself saying, ”but it sure as hell ain’t this.” Part of his mind detached, saying you’re talking to a corpse, man. Cut it out. But the words continued to come.

“It’s insane,” he said. “It’s insane that you should die like this. It’s not right. I mean . . .

“You were a good lady, mama. Not the best, but . . . Christ, who is? I didn’t always like you. Sometimes I felt like I didn’t even . . . even love you, Mama, but . . . you were my mother, you know? You were my mother, and . . .”

He paused, trying to get a handle on what he was trying to say. He could no longer ignore the tears that were streaming down his face, the chest convulsions that were making it difficult to speak, the round eyes of Father Drucker that peered at him from behind the altar. A high-pitched whine escaped his throat, absurd in a man so huge; after a moment, he abandoned himself to it like a martyr to his fate.

He didn’t hear Father Drucker pad softly up beside him. He didn’t see the pudgy hand reach out to rest gently on his shoulder. He didn’t even feel the contact. Not until the priest’s voice came sliding into his ears did he realize that the man had approached.

“Joseph,” said the priest, all dutiful kindness, ”is there anything I can do for you?”

Joseph took a moment to consider it; just long enough to control his breathing.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “You could get the hell out of my face.”

Drucker took a nervous step backwards. “Now, son . . .” he started to say.

“Now, son, my ass.” Joseph had turned now to face the priest. His eyes were bloodshot and glassy and wild. His voice was level, the danger thinly concealed. “I just listened to you talk for half a goddamn hour or more, mister. I think my mother’s name mighta come up two or three times, all told. Remember her? She’s the one in the box.”

Joseph indicated her with a jab of his thumb. Drucker hit the edge of the dais and teetered for a moment in awkward panic, eyes bulging. A grin flashed across Joseph’s features like a switchblade’s sharp flickering to life.

“She used to come out here a lot, didn’t she? Sunday mass, church socials, fund raisers . . .” Drucker went off the dais now, slowly, as Joseph advanced. “She used to spend a lot of time here, on her knees, listening to the same kind of holy horseshit that you fed us all today. Only today she couldn’t hear it, could she?”

He reached out to poke Drucker in the chest. Drucker backed off, sweat beading up on his smooth forehead.

“Because somebody killed her, didn’t they?”

Poking again, harder. The priest, staggering backwards and blubbering slightly.

“But we didn’t hear about that today, did we?”

One last prod, forcing Father Drucker onto his ample behind in the first row of pews.

“No,” Joseph said, towering over the priest, with a voice like ice and steel. “Today we heard about how great God is. We heard about the merciful heavens above. We heard that God is great because He has such a great place set up for us; and all we have to do is pray to Him, and believe in Him, and thank Him for everything He does.

“Then, when cheap punks rub us out on the way to the grocery store, we can thank Him for the broken bones, the internal bleeding, the stroke that lays us up for years and years. We can thank God that the punks are still running around, so that more of us can get up to Heaven even sooner. We can thank God that there are guys like you around, to tell us what a swell guy He is for letting us get down on our knees to praise Him! Right?

“Now listen.” He hunkered down in front of the priest, face to face, with only inches between them. “There is something moving around in the subways right now. It’s killing people. You might’ve read about it in the papers.” Drucker nodded hesitantly, his eyes wide and full of terror, his sweaty forehead gleaming like a freshly varnished floor. Joseph nodded in response.

“Yesterday, I saw some things,” he continued. “I saw some things that let me know we’re not talking about any ordinary human. Comprendo? Not an ordinary human.”

He hesitated then, fishing for the words. A wily grin crossed his face, disappeared, then flashed again. Drucker was convinced that Joseph Hunter had gone mad, but he didn’t dare say a word.

“It’s a vampire, Father. Do you believe in them? It’s a vampire, and it sucks the blood right out of your neck. It’s a dead thing that walks around at night, killing people and turning them into vampires. I don’t know if you were ever a kid or not, but I must’ve seen a billion of those things in the movies, and I never believed in ’em for a second.

“Until now.”

The same violence in his voice, but something else as well, as he posed the question.

“But you’re supposed to be a man of God. You’re supposed to know all about this shit. So let me ask you: do you believe in vampires, Father? Do you believe in evil, the same way you’re supposed to believe in good? Do you believe,” hoisting Drucker up by the collar of his robe, ”that Satan can bring dead bodies back to life; and if you do, can your God do anything to stop them?”

Drucker’s jaws worked, but no sound came forth.

“Can He?”

Drucker’s face began to darken, turn purple. Joseph was holding his collar too tightly.

“Can He?”

Joseph hurled him, gasping, back onto the pew. His eyes shone with triumphant contempt.

“I didn’t think so,” Joseph said, stepping back toward his mother. “This guy wouldn’t know Jesus from a blank fucking check.”

Behind him, Father Drucker was sucking air like a beached whale. Joseph ignored the great whooping sound. His attention was on his mother’s face, drinking in the details for what he knew was the last time.

“Goodbye, Mama,” he whispered.

His eyes closed then, involuntarily. He found himself seeing her the way she once was: when there was still vitality in her body, life and lustre in her eyes. He remembered them after Papa’s death: Mama & Joey at Coney Island, her smiling and stretching their meager budget to allow one more ride on the Cyclone; Joey stuffing his fat little pre-adolescent face with hot dogs and knishes and cotton candy. Mama & Joey, alone against the world, her working fulltime days at Freiberg’s and three nights a week as a maid, fer chrissakes, just to keep a too-small apartment and meat loaf on the table; Joey, the man of the house, leaving school to work so she could finally stop. “Joey” always protecting her, afraid to leave her, loving her too much to leave her, and hating her for it . . .

. . . and then, in his mind, he saw her as she was now: the features sunken, the complexion pasty and withered, the eyes forever closed . . .

. . . and suddenly her eyes snapped open, blank and redly gleaming as her face turned, slowly, cold lips parting to reveal . . .

“No,” he hissed, jerking back to reality by reflex, eyes riveted on the face in the coffin.

The cold, unmoving face.

She’s just dead, he thought. Just dead, thank God. Whatever that means . . . Heaven, Hell, or nothing at all . . . she won’t be getting back up again.

Thank God.

If there is one.

Then he turned, terror and rage coursing through him like a slow infusion of embalming fluid, and left Father Drucker to his empty house of worship: a place unsullied by any living presence, any power, any flame.

CHAPTER 18

Business was slow at MOMENTS, FROZEN. It was not atypical; it did, however, leave Danny Young with far too much time to think as he wandered through the racks of memorabilia.

All day, Danny had been thinking about Claire. Nothing wrong with that, per se; he’d spent much of the previous day doing exactly the same thing. It’s just that, while yesterday’s thoughts consisted largely of nice romantic fantasies (and blue movies of the mind), today’s were dominated by fear.

It began when he awoke, a cold sweat rolling off of his forehead to burn in his eyes. He couldn’t remember the dream, exactly . . . it slipped away at the borders of consciousness, was gone before he had a chance to get any sort of handle on it . . . but one image lingered, phantomlike, in the rear projection screen of his mind.

It was Claire, a dark shadow looming over her, while her eyes shone with something between horror and hunger.

That was remembrance enough. It nagged at him all morning, while he got ready to go to work. It twisted in his guts as he walked to the shop, squeezed at his temples as he opened for business, wormed its way up his ass during the first few customers of the day. It absolutely refused to leave him alone.

It was refusing still.

Danny wandered back to the cash register, checked the alarm clock behind it for the umpteen-millionth time. Almost three in the afternoon. Oh, Hell, he thought, nervously picking at his teeth with a long-nailed index finger.

Again, for the umpteen-millionth time, he glanced at the phone book. He’d sworn up and down that he wasn’t going to look up that number . . . that he’d wait for her to come around, to demonstrate what a nonthreatening, go-with-the-flow kind of enlightened male lover he planned to be.

But that was before the dream.

He stared at the phone book. He moved, slowly, toward it. He ran his fingers across the cover like an infant discovering tactility. He waged war internally, logic versus intuition, fear of rejection versus fear of bodily harm or worse.

Or worse . . .

The image came, full-blown, of Claire cruising the streets of the Village by night. Charming the pants off any number of young, testosterone-bearing men. Taking them home, with a wink and a smile and a swivel of hip. Bedding them down, her flesh white and cool as a marble tombstone. Inviting them to take her. And then, when they had dropped their guards and succumbed to the lure, a sudden baring of fangs . . .

“Forget it,” he mouthed, barely aware that he had done so. His attention was on the pages that flipped past him as he searched for her name.

And, of course, her number wasn’t listed.

“Son of a bitch,” he moaned, slamming the phone book closed. He whirled, glaring at the blank wall behind him. “Probably isn’t really her name,” he informed it pointlessly. “Probably Dustin Hoffman in drag again. Probably . . .”

The door behind him opened.

He whirled again, face flushed, half-angered by the intrusion.

It took him a moment to recognize her.

“Claire?” he asked weakly, his fears confirmed with a moment’s glance.

Claire Cunningham/a.k.a. De Loon stood framed in the open doorway, sunlight diffusing through the wild disarray of her dark hair. No elaborate makeup, no exotic garb: just an organic darkness around the eyes, jeans and T-shirt on a body that trembled, frightened and vulnerable, before him.

Without a word . . . without even closing the door behind her . . . she rushed across the length of the shop and into his arms.

She told him about Dorian. He thought my God, picturing the scene easily enough. His arms tightened around her instinctively, protectively; she snuggled against him and shuddered. The vibrations ran through him like waves.

She told him about her room, the book on the floor. He thought my God and urged her without a moment’s hesitation to stay the hell away from her apartment. “Sleep at a friend’s house. Get a hotel room. Go to the YWCA. You could even”—hesitating for the first time—“stay at my place if you wanted . . .”

She stopped him, abruptly, with a kiss. He thought my God, but he wasn’t about to argue. They spent the next three minutes in wordless and total agreement.

Then, after their breathing had returned to normal, she told him about the guy at St. Marks Bar & Grill. He pressed her for a description. She gave it to him. He thought my God and froze up, a picture imposing itself upon him with chilling clarity.

The picture was of Stephen Parrish’s friend. The creepy graffiti artist. Whatsisname.

The guy who disappeared . . .

CHAPTER 19

Nigel was fine again. Josalyn couldn’t understand it. She had spent the night in the living room, on the couch, listening to Nigel slam himself against the bedroom door and wail like a banshee for hours. Finally, he had quieted down, and she had been able to catch a few hours of troubled sleep.

In the afternoon, she had awakened to the sound of his gentle mewling. He no longer sounded insane . . . at least not any more than usual. He sounded like archetypal Hungry Nigel, coolly allowing his wishes to be known.

She let it go on for a long time: tending to her wounds, where the red streaks of infection had begun to sprout along her abdomen; fixing a light meal that she barely touched; trying to write, with the stereo blaring in an attempt to cover his evermore-piteous sounds. But the clock had spun around to six o’clock, and she’d found that her sympathy had begun to outweigh her fear of seeing him again.

Finally, she’d opened the bedroom door. Nigel had strutted out, every bit his old self. She found that, barring the scratch marks on the door, he had been a good boy.

Now he was eating, in his customary place on the kitchen floor. It was 9 Lives Super Supper tonight; she studied the empty can, laughing nervously, knowing what a great lecture she could give on the importance of eating his Super Supper and growing up to be big and strong.

If only she weren’t so scared.

Nigel is fine, she told herself. Look at him. I bet I could swat his ass silly right now and he wouldn’t so much as growl.

It’s as if he doesn’t even remember.

But she remembered. She had the scars to remind her.

And as darkness fell over the city, and the urge to lie down and sleep began to press more and more insistently upon her, she found herself dreading what the night might hold in store.

And she knew that, no matter how sweet he might appear at the moment, she couldn’t allow Nigel to sleep with her tonight. She couldn’t bring herself to trust him.

Not now. Not yet.

Not until something changed drastically.

One way or the other.

CHAPTER 20

Twenty rats in a tight semi-circle around the mouth of the niche. Tiny eyes, glittering in the dim light from the tunnel walls. Twitching like a single wounded organism, moved by some impulse more basic than thought, as they watched.

The two great rats, facing off in the niche: the first one gray, bloated, monstrously scarred; the second smaller, leaner, entirely black. Sharp yellow teeth bared. Eyes glaring red. Fur standing up straight along their spines as they circled each other, making tiny-throated bloodhunger sounds.

The gray one moved first, lunging forward suddenly to lash out with powerful jaws. The second one ducked, crouching lower, driving up with its snout. Tasting of the flesh beneath the chin.

Then rolling, the both of them, a ball of thrashing raw meat motion and animal scream. Tearing holes in each other, sharp teeth and talons struggling for a hold, tearing away jaggedly and attacking again, imbedding deeper into muscle that strained with the effort of its own offensive.

The others, growing in number, pressing closer, straining for a glimpse of some edge in the murderous blur, some hint as to which one was closer to death.

And then it came: a sudden reversal, a grinding halt, a final flurry of motion. The black rat on top, its jaws clamped tight on the throat of the other, jerking it back and forth like a dog with a bloody rag. The other, fruitlessly kicking, eyes glazing over as its windpipe severed, sputtered, and sprayed . . .

. . . and Rudy Pasko was kneeling in the dirt of the niche, with a large dead rat in his mouth.

The other rats backed away now, as a body. Their screeches of confusion and terror split the silence. Rudy watched them retreat, mind swimming, not entirely clear himself as to what had just happened.

Then it all came rushing back; and with a snarl, he ripped the dead thing from between his jaws and winged it into the tunnel. It struck the third rail with a wet splut, flopped madly at the center of a shower of sparks and light, then lay still in the dirt, smoking and sizzling like a burger on a grill.

“LITTLE BASTARD!” he howled, wiping the warm blood from his face with a contemptuous sweep of his hand. His flesh stung in a dozen places, where the rat’s teeth had taken cold chunks from him that grew exponentially as he regained human form.

But he did not bleed.

Rudy plopped backwards on his ass in the dirt, leaning against the side of the niche. He was still breathing heavily from the fight, his heart still pounding emptily in his chest. “God, that was weird,” he mumbled, letting his mind drift back . . .

. . . to a time outside of time, a flowing stream of moments without perimeters that stretched on and on and on. Time spent scrambling about on scrawny legs, belly inches from the earth. Time spent trapped in the body of a rodent, scurrying for cover in a world grown suddenly too huge, too huge for comprehension, while the threat of killing sunlight hung imminently like the fat knot of a hangman’s noose over his head.

Then . . . who knows how much later . . . finding a subway entrance and making a mad dash for it. Failing to compensate for the change in size. Tumbling ass-over-elbow down the concrete steps in a series of uncontrollable flips, screeching with pain and terror.

Amazing himself by landing at the foot of the stairs, regaining his own footing, and racing past the platform into the safety and darkness of the tunnel beyond.

Lapsing, then, into the sleep of the dead: a sleep that was crawling with dreams . . .

In his dream, time had rolled backward to that fateful night, a mere five days before. Defacing the posters. The dark train’s approach. Leaping onto it, ignoring his soul’s last scream for survival. Facing the small, dark shape that leered at him with its glimmering fangs. Hearing that soft, quietly mocking voice, as the dark shape approached.

And then he was dying, the thing fastened onto him, the blood rushing up to his throat and then out through the twin puncture wounds. It was meticulous, not at all like Rudy; it didn’t miss a drop.

But while it drained him, it spoke to him. Not with its mouth . . . its mouth was busy . . . but with its mind somehow, using the same cool inflection to resonate, not in his ears, but at the core of his shriveling, dying soul.

Rudy, it said, knowing him intimately, more intimately than a lover, as it sucked the life from his veins. You’re not going to die. Not now. This is something far greater than death that you’re experiencing. And far more interesting.

You are fascinated by the darkness, yes? Rudy had tried to answer, then. He couldn’t. There was no longer any air in his lungs. So I thought. When I first saw you. Amazing what time can do for your perceptivity, if you apply yourself.

A dry chuckle. And you will have time, Rudy. Plenty of time. All the time—and it chuckled again—in the world. You will come to know darkness, in all of its subtle texture and gradation. It will be your essence and your environment: no longer just an obsession, but the state in which you dwell. You will know it as you know yourself.

If you are attentive. And if you are careful, Rudy. Careful. It paused then, emphatic. For, just as surely as you will hunt down humans . . . as I have done, with you, tonight . . . they will be hunting you as well. They will cling to their tiny sparks of life, for as long as they last. They will recognize you as an enemy, and they will kill you if they can.

The train was slowing. Rudy sensed it in a way quite unlike anything he had ever experienced before. Blind, limp, and nerveless . . . for all intents and purposes, a dead man . . . he was still intensely aware of the train’s movement, the grinding of the brakes, the whole-body shuddering of the train as it lurched to a halt.

Then he was being borne, as if floating, across a dark expanse that reeked of metal and dust. How he could sense these things, he had no idea; but they were there, impressions more vivid than life. Of the tunnels. Of the arms that bore him. Of the vast, filthy, concrete expanse where he was laid to rest.

And before it all faded out into perfect consuming blackness, he heard the voice coming to him from somewhere beyond, saying you have power now, Rudy: enormous, untapped potential, just waiting for you to discover and develop. Things you would not have believed possible are now well within your grasp, if you will but learn to master them.

But that requires discipline, which is a trait you sorely lack. You frittered away your potential in the last life, sneering at the very idea of it, mocking the techniques that would have allowed you to come into your own. You assumed that to be what you were was enough, as though the sheer raw force of your anger could bring empires to their knees.

That kind of arrogance has no place, Rudy. Not in Heaven. Not in Hell. Not in this world, so firmly between. There is order in chaos, a dark hierarchy of power you cannot yet conceive of. It will not smile upon your pretensions. It will not be impressed by your tacky bravura, your insolent airs.

See, now. I have taken you as I might a little girl: effortlessly. I could take you again, any time I so desired. I am your master. I shall always be your master. Forever and ever, you will bow before me. Remember that. Always.

But to them, Rudy, you can be like a god. As I am to you. If you will utilize the gifts that I have bestowed upon you . . . unlimited power, and unlimited time in which to gain control over it . . . they will have no choice but to bow before you. As you must bow for me.

The voice was fading, the darkness all-encompassing. Still, the last words crept into his consciousness somehow, reverberating with an eerie finality.

I must go now. You are on your own. I wish you better luck with this life, your last. If you are successful . . . if you do justice to what I have given you . . . I will be back to show you what lies beyond. If not . . .

Whatever came after was lost, as the blackness achieved completion. One last cold rush, moving through him like a skewer, and then . . .

. . . Rudy was back in the niche, sight refocusing on the moisture that beaded up on the dank concrete walls. His own forehead was damp and clammy with sweat. He found himself gnawing at his fingernails, and pulled them away abruptly, panic in his eyes.

He’d forgotten. He’d forgotten entirely. For days, everything from the point where he was bitten to the point where he woke up on the abandoned 18th Street platform had been a total blank. He assumed that he’d just been left there, and that was that. He thought he was a free agent.

Now, with the words still ringing in his ears, the picture had been turned around completely. Suddenly, with all the subtlety of a rapist’s hands on his victim’s skirt, Rudy’s illusions had been stripped away. I am your master, the voice said, and a shiver rattled painfully through him.

He glanced over at the dead rat, still smoldering by the side of the third rail. An overwhelming hatred welled up in him, a hatred directed at all that lived: all the puny little scuttling things, racing pointlessly toward nothingness, dim lights flickering behind their eyes. It didn’t occur to him that the hatred was really aimed straight back at himself, at his dream-induced feelings of insignificance.

He only knew that he wished the rat were still alive. So he could kill it again. And again. And again.

Rudy Pasko pulled himself to his feet, staggering slightly with the effort. The hunger. It made him weak, lightheaded. It filled him with rage as he moved out of the niche and into the tunnel itself, pausing at the edge of the tracks to look around and get his bearings.

He had gotten to know the tunnels quite well over the last several days. They had become his kingdom, his turf, his home. He knew them by heart, every lonely stretch and confluence, every subtle detail that set one length of track apart from the others. He knew where to sleep, when the hour was upon him. He knew where to hide, when the workmen drew near. He knew where to hunt, where the pickings were easiest.

But the time had come to change all that.

Rudy moved toward the Prince Street station on the Broadway line, hugging close to the wall. In jollier times, he’d have walked down the rails like a ten-year-old country bumpkin with a piece of straw in his mouth. But there was something burning inside of him that had sucked out all the joy.

Like a little girl, huh? The words, the words ate away at him now. They stuck in his craw like hot rivets, dredging up shame that translated as righteous indignation. So I pissed away my whole life, did I? Just an arrogant little nobody who never got his act together . . . certainly no challenge for you, is that it? You bastard.

A plan was forming, of its own accord, in his mind. A piece from here. A piece from there. A glimmer of inspiration, sudden and striking as poetry, shedding new light on the path that lay before him.

There was much to be done in the next several days. A lot of groundwork to be covered, before the real action began. And though Grampa Death made a big deal about there being all the time in the world, Rudy wasn’t sure that he felt like taking all that much time.

Especially if he wanted to be ready when Grampa came back.

And I do, baby. I do, he thought, smiling now as he entered the gray foyer to the workman’s stairs. Outside, the night had fallen conclusively. He could feel it.

Before anything else went down, there was somebody that he wanted to see. And he would see that person.

Tonight.

CHAPTER 21

A covert roll of the six-sided dice. A crafty, giggling glance from his lightly glazed eyes. A luxuriant toke. A malevolent grin. A lush cannabis cloud that he hissed through his teeth. “Seven armed skeletons have just entered the chamber,” he said.

“Hooo-EEEE!” Ian yelled, leaning into the table. His eyes were wild. “Alright! Poot’s got his broadsword out. He rushes forward and swings into the first one’s teeth.”

Dice, tumbling like dislocated molars. Allan, nodding as he spied the result. “The skeleton’s head is flying apart. The top of its skull just hit the second one in the face.”

“Great . . .” Ian began. “But it’s still coming at you. It takes a swing with its double-edged battle-ax.”

“But . . .” It was the sound of a bubble bursting. Allan rolled again. “Poot parries the blow. Does he take another swing?”

Ian nodded fiercely. “Just under the ribcage, cutting right through the spine.”

“Okay.” Allan rolled again and passed the pipe to Ian. “Clean shot. The top half just fell off and shattered on the floor. The legs are still hopping around.”

Ian took a deep toke and let out a maleficent leer. “Poot trips ’em,” he croaked, still holding his hit. Again, the tumbling dice.

“They’re down.” Ian exhaled, grinning. “The second and third ones are coming up on Poot now. What’s everybody else doing?”

“Well, Mighty Matilda’s still a little bummed out about her broken sword arm. She’s just hangin’ back. Weaselface is hiding behind her.” Ian turned to his silent partner and poked the stem of the pipe at him. “How ’bout your people?”

“They’re freaking out,” Joseph mumbled. He was staring at a ripple in the stuccoed ceiling.

“Even Wambo, the Warrior King?” Ian demanded incredulously. Joseph shrugged. A long pause. Ian stared at Joseph, exchanged woe-begotten glances with Allan, and stared at Joseph some more. “Are you sure you don’t want some of this?” he queried, motioning with the bowl again.

Joseph shook his head. Ian shrugged, eyes rolling like dice, and passed the pipe back to Allan. Another pause, equally long.

“Poot slices ’em off at their imaginary spleens,” Ian said finally. His grin was tainted. He flashed it nonetheless.

“Right.” Allan rolled again, a ponderous motion. His smile, too, was a teensy bit strained. “You got ’em. Bones are piling up all over the place.”

“Hey!” Ian thumped the table exuberantly, shook his fist at the trembling air. “It’s a hot time in the ol’ dungeon tonight, boys! Yow!” This time, the grin was effortless and genuine. It’s fun to kill monsters, he flashed, and thought about pointing that out to Joseph. Then he thought better of it; they were already walking on extremely thin ice.

“It’s not over yet, boss,” Allan informed him. “Poot’s up to his kneecaps in animate arms and legs, you know.” A roll of the bones. “One of ’em just sunk its talons into his leg.”

“Whoa . . .!” Ian jumped back a foot in his chair.

“And the other four skeletons are converging.”

“Jesus!” Ian flashed a look of shock and betrayal at the dungeon master, who shrugged with godlike indifference. “What are you trying to do to me, man?”

“That’s beside the point,” Allan said. “They’re trying to kill you. That’s just what kind of guys they are.” He put a torch to his Captain Black, sent a plume of smoke to hover loftily over Ian’s head. “So what you gonna do, Poot?”

“Well, since the reinforcements don’t seem to be coming . . .” This with a mock-disparaging glance at Joseph, who was staring into his beer. “. . . there’s nothing left to do but back off, I guess.”

Allan rolled. “He trips over somebody’s ribcage and falls on his ass. The sword flies out of his hand.” He rolled again. “One of the skulls just bit into his forearm, and a skeleton’s coming at him with a spear.”

“For Christ’s sake!” Ian yelled at Joseph. “Do something, man! I’m gonna get killed!” Joseph stared at him blankly. “Have Saint Pompous give me a fucking protection spell or something!”

“Protection spell,” Joseph muttered. Ian looked exasperated. Allan rolled the dice.

“Didn’t work.” A grave pronouncement.

“You didn’t even try!” Ian howled.

“You’ve got three seconds before the spear comes down,” Allan intoned. “You’d better get moving.”

“Jesus!” Ian looked genuinely distressed. “Poot does a quick roll to the left and starts to scuttle away . . .”

The tumbling die.

“I hate to tell you this,” Allan said slowly, ”but Poot just got a spear through his back.”

Ian mouthed the word no, but no sound would come. Allan sighed heavily and nodded his head. Ian cleared his throat and squeaked, ”All the way through?” Allan continued to nod. “Oh, God,” Ian breathed, cupping his face in his hands. “Am I . . . am I dead yet?”

“Well, let me put it to you this way,” Allan said, taking his friend gently by the shoulder. “If a mosquito bites you, it’s all over.”

“AAAAAUGHHHHH!” Ian screamed, falling back in his chair. His arms and legs flapped like the flags of conquered nations. “AAAUGHHH! AAAUGHHH!” He slid off the chair entirely, disappeared under the card table. “Saint Pompous! You gotta help me! I’M DYIN’!”

“Well?” Allan said, turning to face Joseph. “Is Saint Pompous going to do anything? A healing spell? Warding off of evil?”

“A magic booger with which to smite mine enemies?” Ian called from under the table. He was still thrashing feebly.

Joseph was still staring at his beer, the white-knuckled hand that clutched it. There was no trace of humor on his face. “Saint Pompous can’t do shit,” he said finally.

Beneath the table, all movement ceased. Silence, thick and ponderous as stone, descended over the room. Joseph continued to stare at his hand. Allan rubbed at his eyes, then folded his hands on the table and followed suit.

“Alright,” came the muffled, weary voice from below. The sound of scuffling was, in context, extraordinarily loud. Then Ian was crawling back into his seat with exaggerated stiffness, like an old man abandoned to lethargy’s weight. “Alright. We’ll just wait around for rigor mortis to set in.” He scowled, grinned, scowled again, pointed a loaded finger at Joseph’s forehead, and said, ”Dude, you don’t seem to understand that we’re trying to show you a good time.”

Joseph sighed massively. His eyes continued to point straight down. “And you don’t seem to understand,” he said, ”that it ain’t gonna work.”

“Terrific.” Ian threw up his arms. “That gives me the courage to go on.”

“Hey, I’m sorry,” Joseph answered quickly. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I’ve got a lot of things on my mind, and I’m just not in a partying mood. You know? I mean, I had to say goodbye to my mother today.

She’s a little pile of ashes by now. That gives me the courage to go on, right? I had to sit in that stupid goddamn church, listening to that stupid goddamn priest rattle on and on . . . man, I coulda killed that guy, he was such a friggin’ idiot!” He paused to take an angry swig.

“And you know what the weird thing is? I kept waiting for her eyes to open. Not like she was still alive, but . . .” Turning to Ian. “. . . like that thing we saw yesterday. You told him about it, didn’t you?”

Ian nodded. He and Allan were both staring at the table now, shamefaced and silent.

“Yeah, well. So then you know. There’s this thing running around in the subway, killing people and making them get back up to kill somebody else! Regular punks and murderers aren’t bad enough, I guess! Now we gotta have vampires to scare the shit out of us when we walk the streets at night! It drives me crazy!

“And while all this weirdness is going on, what the hell are we doing? We’re sitting around in Ian’s apartment, gettin’ blitzed and playing Dungeons and Dragons, fercrissake! There’s a real monster out there, killing real people, and I’m supposed to get all bent out of shape because Poot gets a spear stuck through him? Shit! It’s like we don’t have a goddamn brain in our heads!”

Joseph stared defiantly at his friends. They were unable to meet his gaze. He took another swig off his beer, caught himself in the act, and slammed it back down on the table violently. His eyes snapped shut, features tightening like a fist. Through clenched teeth, he hissed, ”I can’t stand it.”

“Well,” Allan asked him, ”what do you want to do about it?”

“I wanna kill it. That’s all.”

“Whoa, Joseph . . .”

“Whoa nothing, man! Don’t you understand? Somebody has to kill that thing!”

Allan looked wildly over at Ian for assistance. He didn’t get it. Ian had his elbows on the table, his face resting heavily in his hands. Very gently, he massaged his temples, a thin sheen of sweat on the forehead between. His eyes, when they opened, had that faraway look.

“Okay,” Allan said, turning back to Joseph. “Somebody has to kill it, assuming that it’s real . . . an assumption I’m not quite ready to make. But who says that it has to be you?”

“You got somebody better in mind?”

“There’s always the police . . .”

“Shit.” Joseph dragged the word out contemptuously. “They wouldn’t know what they were dealing with.”

“And you do?” Allan leaned forward now, taking the offensive. “You’ve hunted vampires before? Or do you think that watching Dr. Van Helsing on the late late show taught you everything that you need to know? Come on, Joseph! Be real!”

“There’s nothing real about this,” Ian interjected suddenly, ”except that it’s happening. And it is, Allan. No two ways about it. The only question is: do we sit around on our asses, or do we act? And to tell you the truth, I’ve got to agree with Joseph . . .”

“Come ON!” Allan screamed. “I thought you were gonna help me talk sense to this guy!” The look in his eyes went on to say I can understand that Joseph’s got a vendetta going, but I don’t understand what the hell’s gotten into you. Ian saw the look, got the message; he nodded, held up one finger, and answered.

“It’s like this, man. I think Joseph will agree with me.” He glanced over to make sure that his big buddy was paying attention. The smile that he saw warmed Ian’s heart. “Did you ever find yourself caught up in a situation beyond your control: something that really has very little to do with you . . . certainly not the kind of thing you’d pick as your favorite pastime . . . but that you suddenly find yourself stuck in the middle of, and know that you have a part to play in it? Of course you have. We’re in one now.” He winked at Allan, but the playfulness of the gesture was buried by something weightier.

“When that happens,” Ian continued, ”there’s this very strange sense of inevitability about it. You can try to ignore it. You can try to escape it. You can hope that it’ll just go away, or that somebody else will deal with it. But you know that sooner or later, whether you like it or not, it’s gonna come back on you. Reminders will come up and tug at your sleeve; and in the end, you’ll have to answer for what you did or didn’t do.

“Well, it’s like that now. The same way we feel about Joseph”— this to Allan exclusively—“trying to help him through this miserable time. Nobody paid us to lay out this evening’s entertainment, such as it is. There are government agencies to help you cope with a death in the family. There are social workers. There are psychiatrists. But we know where that’s at.

“The fact is: you see something that needs to be done, and a little voice goes off in your head that says you know what to do, man. Do it. Don’t wait for somebody else, because they either won’t or can’t do it, and by then it might be too late.”

Ian paused to gauge his audience. Joseph was nodding emphatically; Allan’s face was a portrait of grim resignation. Apparently, he too had sensed the inevitability of it. Ian smiled and went on.

“Joseph has got that kind of feeling about . . . the thing in the subway.” It’s hard to say “vampire” out loud without feeling silly, he mused privately, not breaking stride for more than a second. “It’s pulling at him. It’s eating away at him, every time he stops long enough to think. I know exactly what he means, because . . . to be perfectly honest . . . it’s doing the exact same thing to me.

“I didn’t tell you what happened to me last night, did I?” Allan shook his head wearily. Something went off behind Joseph’s eyes, though: a flash of memory, the spark of something undivulged that raced now toward the surface. Ah ha! Ian thought, eyebrows raised. I should have guessed.

The storytelling began.

And the net inexorably closed in.

It wasn’t a dungeon, though the similarities were cheap and plentiful. It lay buried in the bowels of an imposing pile of brick and stone. It, too, was perpetually shielded from the light of day. Death was its stock in trade; corpses were its currency. Its unfortunate visitors were unceremoniously picked apart and trundled off by cynical technicians who whistled while they worked.

But instead of the acrid sputter of tallow-dipped torches, there was the cold blue-white hum and flicker of fluorescent lighting. Dank mold and matted straw gave way to springtime-fresh, industrial strength Pine-Sol; moist, pitted stone was replaced by miles of smooth linoleum tile. And while the dungeon marked the beginning of suffering and torment, the morgue at St. Vincent’s heralded the end.

At 10:15, Rick Halpern was halfway through his customary egg salad-and-Bacos sandwich. His round, porcine features were blissful, serene. His thoughts were on the swinging, late-night soirée with Sylvia Marx that he had planned for later. There was a dollop of yellowed mayonnaise at the corner of his lips and an unsightly tumescence in the crotch of his whites.

The double doors slammed open just as Halpern went for a big wet bite. He jerked slightly, and a sopping scrap of scrambled egg perched lazily on the tip of his nose. “Damn!” he yelled, setting down the sandwich and mopping at his face with his sleeve.

A big white body under a big white sheet wheeled into the room. A white tag dangled from the big right toe. “Guess who’s coming to dinner!” Broome announced, following the stretcher into the room. He had a wide, toothy grin that Halpern occasionally wanted to pummel.

“You got my coffee?” Halpern wanted to know.

“You bet. Now you’ll have something to dip your Twinkie in.” Broome parked the body in front of his partner, reached under the sheet, and pulled out a styrofoam cup with a plastic cap. “Don’t worry. He didn’t drink any. He’s just here for an autopsy and a steam facial.”

“Broome, you are a sicko,” Halpern muttered distastefully. His erection had dwindled in the last few seconds, and the coffee had become less appealing somehow.

“And you are a walking pork chop,” Broome replied. He could talk; he had a weightlifter’s body at the age of fifty-five. Nautilus. “In fact, you remind me a lot of this guy.” He paused to pull the sheet away from the corpse’s face. “Strong family resemblance. You might have fed at the same trough together.”

“Gee, thanks.” Now that he mentioned it, there was a marked similarity to their features. Halpern winced, and his first bite of egg salad came briefly back to haunt him. He was callused, by and large, but bodies that resembled him always touched a special nerve. “What got him?” he asked quickly, changing the subject.

“Heart attack,” Broome said, pulling his own coffee out from under and then covering the face again. He took a little sip and contentedly ahhhhed. “You know, it’s kinda nice to have some people in here who died of natural causes. Every once in a while, an inexplicable murder can brighten your day. But enough is enough, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” There’d been an awful lot of excessive nastiness going down in the last few days, and quite a bit of it had wound up at St. Vincent’s. “If I have to see another one like our topless cutie, I’m gonna hang this up and get a nice job in Proctology.”

“Birds of a feather . . .”

“Oh, you’re cute, Broome. Cute.” This was one of those times. The older man’s teeth made a target almost too good to pass on.

“But you’re right. That was depressing. I don’t even wanna know what happened to her.” Broome’s gaze slid down the rows of rollout drawers where the bodies were kept. “Marlowe, right? Man, she was a beauty. Things like that are such a damnable shame . . .”

It was true. They’d wheeled Dorian Marlowe in the previous night, and absolutely nobody was joking about it. The cause of death had been clear enough, so they’d foregone the autopsy. What little blood remained had been drained out through her right foot, and then they’d cauterized her stumps. After that, it was the body bag, with the head tucked neatly under one arm. Her funeral would be a closed-casket affair. No matter how much they’d loved her, her friends and family would not want to see.

Broome meandered over to the drawers and started picking over the labels. Halpern brought the sandwich to his mouth again and let it waver there, poised. He was afraid that Broome was going to do something crazy, and he wanted his mouth free, just in case he needed to scream.

But Broome just paused in front of the designation MARLOWE, shook his head, and rapped three times, lovingly, on the metal door. “Hey, kid,” he said softly. “Don’t sweat it, okay? You’re gonna make a beautiful angel.”

And on the other side of the door, inside the pale gray body bag, the face of Dorian Marlowe contorted horribly at the sound. Her lips peeled back in a soundless snarl, and her eyes popped open, flickering once with the red-light spark of vestigial evil that would never come to fruition. Then it was gone.

But the expression remained. It was anything but angelic.

CHAPTER 22

The crumpled-up napkin sat on the bedside table. Stephen’s eyes kept coming back to it, no matter how hard he tried to distract himself. A dozen half-finished chores surrounded him . . . dishwater in the sink, dirty clothes in a pile on the floor, a stack of notes and manuscript in the first phase of organization . . . all rendered abortive by a stupid piece of paper, designed to wipe the ketchup from a sloppy eater’s face.

One stupid piece of paper. With one stupid phone number scrawled across it.

And one all-pervasive aura of terror.

“I can’t handle this,” he whined, fairly leaping from his seat at the kitchen table. “I can’t handle this at all.” He moved quickly across the apartment, grabbed the napkin up in one trembling hand, and stared at it, as if daring it to threaten him further.

The napkin, of course, was innocuous; the terror lay in what it brought to mind. Stephen felt like an idiot, standing there, even as the fear and anger coursed through him like twin jolts of Freon and fire.

And the thoughts came rushing back in a flood of images: Rudy on the train, those red eyes glaring out from the ghastly pallor of his face; the bloody handkerchief; the madness, not human, that flashed across Rudy’s features at that moment. And behind that . . .

Dark eyes, glowering in the wide, primeval face. Massive fists, trembling with barely contained anger. A presence so formidable that you could punch it through a brick wall, staring at him across a distance the length of a barroom table.

Joseph Hunter read the name on the napkin before him. Stephen shook his head, overwhelmed by the metaphor. He could almost see Joseph, primitive spear in hand, running out of some cave to attack a saber-toothed tiger, and coming away wearing the animal’s skin.

He’s going to find Rudy, Stephen thought, and then God knows what he’ll do. He could see Rudy snapping in two with very little effort on Joseph’s part. And yet . . .

And yet . . .

Something had changed in Rudy. Stephen didn’t know exactly what . . . he certainly didn’t think that Rudy’d become one of the walking dead, as Joseph seemed to . . . but something had definitely happened. Something dark, and strange, and frightening.

I’ve gone all the way in, Stephen, the voice hissed once again in his mind. I’ve gone all the way into the darkness, Stephen, and you know what I found there?

“What did you find, Rudy?” he found himself whispering. “What did you find . . .”

The phone rang, loud and sudden as a fire alarm. Stephen jumped, his head whipping toward the sound, his hands jerking abruptly. There was a soft, tearing noise, and he felt something give. “Oh, no,” he mouthed, but the words were a silent lump in his throat.

The napkin had been torn neatly in half, right down the middle of the number.

The phone rang again. Stephen stood there, mute and motionless as a ventriloquist’s dummy, half a napkin dangling stupidly from either hand. A thousand voices screamed at him from the dark grooves of his brain, most of them his own.

The phone rang again. Somehow, the spell was broken. He let the flimsy pieces of paper waft to the ground and turned to the phone. On the fourth ring, he answered it.

“Hello?” he said, the shrill vibrato of his voice echoing back at him through the receiver.

“Ah, Stephen.” The voice was a thin, metallic whisper over the phone lines, but it thudded like a brass drum in his ears. “You’re home. I’m so glad. That’s just wonderful.”

The voice was the tip of a long cold stiletto, inserting itself into Stephen’s belly with infinite, almost lackadaisical, slowness. The voice was a forkload of maggoty flesh, pressed insistently against his lips. The voice was a Checker cab, wheeling suddenly around some corner and straight toward him, with its bright eyes glaring over the ravenous, grinning grill.

The voice was a train. A long, cold train. Upon him now.

And he was powerless before it.

“Listen, Stephen?” The voice struggled for control, trebling upward at the end in a burst of lunatic cheer. “We’ll be getting together in the next few days. I’m not sure when. But I’ll definitely let you know.”

The line went dead. His breath sucked in sharply, and the receiver dropped like a stone from his nerveless fingers. A great, uncontrollable spasm of terror shuddered through him, and he dropped to his knees beside the dangling phone wire.

“Oh, my God,” he whispered, eyes focused on nothing, a tidal wave roaring between his ears. He shook his head violently, and his vision came back, and he found himself staring at the napkin on the floor.

In two equal pieces.

With Joseph Hunter’s number torn neatly, lengthwise, right down the middle.

“Oh, my God,” he whispered.

CHAPTER 23

Rudy hung up the phone and leaned back against the door of his apartment, grinning beatifically. He had a definite buzz on, a consummate high; the weakness and the hunger and the anger were gone. His whole body tingled with strength and vitality. He felt absolutely tremendous.

“Tremendous,” he whispered, his head lolling slightly. His eyes were closed; and in the absence of light, he concentrated on the feelings that rushed through him. The two old friends, now coursing through his veins.

And against the backdrop of darkness, in the private screening room of his mind, he watched the events of earlier this evening unfold in living color . . .

His name was Dod Stebbits, but everybody called him “The Bod” because he had such an unusual one. He looked like a chicken on a spit, to be honest: little spindly limbs and a scrawny chest, attached to this enormous bulging belly and protruding ass. His neck was long and skinny; his head sat on top of it precariously, like a chunk of beef fondue on a toothpick. With his beak nose, bulging eyes, crooked grin, and puffy razor cut, he looked more like a Muppet than a man.

But Dod Stebbits consistently had good drugs. There was no question about that. Whatever else you could say about him, the kid was a walking pharmacy. There wasn’t a buzz on the market that he couldn’t get his hands on in the space of three hours, if he didn’t have it on him already. He was a procurer par excellence.

Rudy always scored his speed from Dod the Bod. Anything from diddly-shit like black beauties and robin’s eggs to first-class crystal Methedrine. All Rudy had to do was find him, and that was never too hard. The Bod was in business; he was always around.

Tonight, Rudy had gone to Dod’s Bleecker Street studio apartment. Fortuitously, he’d gotten there just as Dod was splitting for the night. Rudy had dragged the dealer back inside and killed him instantly, scrawny arms and legs waggling impotently while all the life flowed out of him like a milk shake up a straw.

Then, sated, Rudy had gone through Dod the Bod’s pockets, throwing the contents on the bed. He was staggered by what he found: a Baggie of Quaaludes, maybe twenty hits of blotter acid, and well over an ounce of coke, all cut down into grams. Not to mention miscellaneous doodads, $140 in small bills, and a .32 caliber Sterling Automatic. (Rudy checked Dod’s wallet. No permit. “Tsk tsk,” he mumbled.)

But that didn’t begin to compare with what the kid had stashed in his apartment. Rudy’d found himself looking down at the white, lifeless thing on the floor and thinking my God, man! You were worth this much? It was like a year in Disneyland without ever having to leave your house. It was incredible. You could’ve had your whole body rebuilt to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, with that kind of money.

Then the thought came: what could I do with that kind of money?

Followed by: what could I do with a steady flow of that kind of money?

Followed by what he felt to be a marvelous idea.

Within a half hour, he had Dod Stebbits’ body securely tied up on the four-poster bed, right in front of the picture window with the lovely eastern exposure. He used rope and strips of bedsheet, leaving Dod’s body awkwardly spread-eagled, oversized head slumped to one side, moonlight twinkling on the two wet holes in the throat. Rudy shoved a pair of Dod’s dirty underwear into the dead mouth and then taped it shut, just in case the guy came back screaming.

During the course of this, Rudy also popped a pair of robin’s eggs and snorted a huge line of coke. He had not slept well as a rat, and even the blood hadn’t brought him back to a full state of alertness. Besides, that was really what he’d come to Dod for in the first place.

He wanted speed to stay awake. The amount of sleep he’d been getting recently seemed like a total waste of time. And if I’m someplace where the sun refuses to shine, he reasoned, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to work straight through the day.

There was so much to do, after all. And he wanted it to come down quickly.

Which was why he left Dod trussed up like a turkey in front of the window. Which was why, just as he had loaded up his pockets and readied to go, he leaned over next to Dod’s ear and whispered, ”I’ll be back tomorrow to pick up some more goodies. Then I’ll decide whether to feed you or leave you like this. Depending on whether or not you’re worth having as a slave, you understand me? If you make it worth my while, I’ll let you live forever.”

And then, keys in hand, he’d sealed Dod the Bod up in the apartment that had become Dod’s tomb.

Rudy let himself slide down the wall, giving in to the euphoria. There would be plenty of time to work tonight . . . and into the new day, if he so desired . . . but right now, he just felt too good.

When his ass hit the floor, he grinned and splayed his legs out, slouching back against the wall. He stretched, sighed, and put his hands behind his head. His mind began to soar across the brainscape, plucking up images and toying with them briefly, then moving on, restless and fickle as a nursery school kid in an overstocked playroom.

He saw himself riding on a black Harley-Davidson, leading the great dark parade of the damned down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square Park. There was a bonfire in the center of the plaza; he could see its radiance, flickering through the arch at the end of the road like the light at the end of a tunnel. A lot of things were burning in there. So many more to come.

He saw himself at the head of a banquet table at the Plaza Hotel, where the walls were festooned with his sanguine graffiti. His horde was feasting tonight on the staff of People Magazine, having already dispensed with Time, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal. For dessert, they would have the Channel 11 News Team and the entire cast of All My Children. To his right was Ed Koch, the first undead mayor in the history of New York City. To his left was Caspar Weinberger, who had the misfortune of coming into town for a U.N. address. Tomorrow, he would go back to Washington for a special meeting with the President.

He saw himself at the top of the World Trade Center, staring out over his kingdom. Below him, the dark trains were moving through tunnels and over bridges, spreading the word into Brooklyn and Queens, thundering out to Long Island and Newark, creeping into Jersey City and Hoboken like a death kiss blown on the breeze. And establishing Rudy Pasko as the master of all that he surveyed.

Then he saw himself in the imperial bedroom, done up in lavish red and black silks and satins. There was a girl writhing on the bed before him, bound to the four posts by delicate scarves, her nightgown open to reveal the soft white flesh beneath. Her hair had fallen across her face, burying it even deeper in shadow.

Rudy moved toward the girl. Sat down on the bed beside her. Reached down slowly, with mock tenderness, to brush aside the hair . . .

“Josalyn.” He whispered the word, and his eyes suddenly opened, and the fantasy world ripped away like a gossamer veil. Rudy was staring at a dumpy room on 8th Street and Avenue B: dingy white walls that were fading gray, warped wood floor, two lousy windows that offered a stunning view of the alley.

And in the center of the room, a small gray rat, staring up at him with quizzical eyes.

“Come here.” The words surprised him on their way out of his mouth. He sounded, to his own ears, like an American Sportsman talking to one of his prize retrievers. There was no anger in the voice, no hint of the loathing. Just a firm, almost friendly command. “Come here, okay?”

Slowly, hesitantly, the rat began to move forward. A strange light came into its eyes. It slunk up to his outstretched feet, then around them, stopping about five inches beyond his reach. Its whiskers twitched, and its head cocked to one side, as though struggling to comprehend its own actions.

“Come here, bay-bee,” he said, motioning with his fingers. He giggled and adopted a whiny falsetto. “Oh, coochie-coochie-coochie, little baby, come to Daddy . . .”

The rat cringed, then, snuffling at the air, as though a bad scent had just wafted into the room. Rudy saw this, and all the humor went out of his voice. “Come here!” he barked. “Come here right NOW . . .”

And the rat stiffened suddenly, trembling on its haunches. The eyes flashed bright red for a second, then off; but what remained was glazed and blank. A thin stream of urine spritzed onto the floor. It formed a shimmering trail as the rat painfully began to drag itself forward.

And into Rudy’s hand.

“Good, good,” he cooed, cradling the animal to his bosom, stroking it absently as he settled back again and closed his eyes. “Little Poopsie’s all done peeing on the floor now, right? Nice Poopsie! Nice . . .”

And his mind drifted back to that fantasy bedroom. He focused on it with all of his might, his hand still idly stroking the rat, his lips falling silent.

And then, very softly, he whispered her name.

In her dream, she awakened on a huge brass bed in the center of a dark room. She saw something glide through the shadows and vanish. She heard something, faintly. A whisper. Her name.

She tried to get up. Something tugged at her wrists. Fear exploded in her chest like an incendiary bomb, but all that escaped was a tiny choking cry. She was bound securely to the four posts of the bed, and all the struggling in the world wouldn’t free her.

The figure in the shadow reappeared at her bedside. She whipped her head around to face it, and her breath sucked in sharply.

It was a silhouette, like a life-sized cutout in the shape of a man, rendered in a fabric so soul-suckingly black that it stood out in sharp relief against the darkness. The deeper she stared into it, the more she felt herself starting to drift, as though she were being sucked into an abyss, sent endlessly spiraling down . . .

Then the thing reached for her. And her eyes snapped shut. And she started to scream.

He had connected with her. He could feel it. Part of him, detached from the process, was picking up on her terror from halfway across town. It accounted for the smile that lightly creased the corners of his mouth.

As he continued to stroke the rat in his hands. And his mind stabbed deeper into her dreams.

There were hands upon her now. Cold hands, raising goose bump patches as they slid across her flesh. She writhed beneath them, not out of pleasure. The bonds would only give her an inch of leeway on either side. She whined and struggled harder.

Cold fingers, sliding up her inner thighs. Her legs, completely parted, shuddering with violent, helpless rage. Her hips, recoiling as far as they could go.

More hands. Coming up beneath her buttocks. And lifting.

More hands, then. More hands. Encircling her waist. Kneading her breasts. Raking their nails along her belly, describing circles around her painfully taut nipples. An icy finger, worming its way into her rectum, sending a horrible wave of nausea through her.

Something else . . . something terrible . . . poised at the mouth of her vulva.

And then the last set of hands, coming up on either side of her head and stroking her hair. Sliding down to the base of her skull. Moving ever so gently across the straining expanse of her throat.

Lingering there, for just a moment.

And then . . .

“Now,” he said, fingers tightening and twisting. There was a tiny squeal, followed by a muffled wet snapping sound.

In the back of his mind, he heard a scream ring out sharply. It seemed to be coming from far away. Then it cut off suddenly, and silence reigned.

Rudy opened his eyes. The glare of the lights was painful. He squinted against it, and his right hand automatically came up.

The dead rat’s head poked out from between his thumb and forefinger, thick red gore trickling from its ears, nose, and mouth. He had twisted its head completely around, without even knowing he’d done it.

“Blechhh,” he said, grimacing. He tossed the body to the other side of the room, then wiped his hands disgustedly on his pants and got to his feet.

On his way to the bathroom to wash his hands the full impact of what he had done came rushing back to him. I actually touched her! he marveled. I was there! I felt it! And she . . . He smiled wickedly, dreamily. She felt it, too.

He thought about the quality of the image he’d sent, and a cruel chuckle escaped his throat. It transformed to outright laughter by the time he entered the bathroom and flipped on the light.

Then he remembered the rat’s neck breaking; and in his mind, he heard the echo of a distant scream.

Rudy paused for a moment, questions flickering across his mind. He wondered at the extent of his power. He wondered if Josalyn was . . . if he’d just . . .

He started to laugh again.

“Oh, well,” he muttered, shrugging, as he turned on the faucets. “I suppose I’ll just have to wait and see, won’t I?”

As he washed the blood from his hands.

CHAPTER 24

Sunday morning. The air was muggy and oppressive, bloated with the potential for rain. It was the kind of day that invited inactivity and foreboding thoughts.

The calm before the storm.

Joseph Hunter was riding the D train over Manhattan Bridge, staring out over the harbor at the Statue of Liberty, wondering if and when he was going to get his chance. Allan was still crashed out on Ian’s guest mattress, blissfully unaware that Ian was already up and making plans . . . plans that would drag them both into the mouth of the dragon.

Danny Young was lying in bed, one arm still draped around the naked shoulders of Claire “De Loon” Cunningham, who dreamed of moving through a Gothic castle that looked like something straight out of a Hammer horror film. She shifted uneasily in her sleep. Danny’s expression shifted from joy to concern, then back again. He had made love to her . . . he loved her now, undeniably and irrevocably . . . and the emotion was a Ping Pong ball being knocked back and forth between the light and dark sides of his mind.

T. C. Williams and Tommy Wizotski were at their respective homes, privately dreading the day’s return into darkness.

Armond Hacdorian was talking to his priest, his satchel loaded with an unusual amount of holy water.

Stephen Parrish was barely tasting the breakfast he had prepared for himself. He didn’t know it, but he was just waiting for his phone to ring.

And at Josalyn Horne’s apartment, the bedroom door was open just a crack. It helped, in a small way, to ventilate the room.

To air out the ripe, overwhelming stench of death.

CHAPTER 25

The phone rang. It was now early afternoon. The same chores were still waiting to be tended, but Stephen was farther away from completion than ever. More dishes. More dirty clothes. A paragraph of something new . . . uncharacteristically, a horror piece . . . leaving even more unfinished prose on his desk. And now the phone was ringing. Again.

Hesitantly, fearfully, Stephen pulled himself off the bed and moved toward the phone. On the stereo, David Bowie’s Scary Monsters was blaring away at high volume. Stephen sidetracked to turn the volume down, lingered there for a moment, while his mind intoned it’s nothing. It isn’t Rudy. There’s nothing to be afraid of . . .

Then the phone rang again. His hand tightened on the volume knob, then jerked away abruptly. “You idiot,” he whispered, ashamed of his cowardice. Still, two more rings went by before he could bring himself to answer.

“Hello?” he said, trying to mask the quiver in his voice.

“Hello, Stephen?” The voice didn’t immediately register. It set Stephen off balance for a moment. But at least it isn’t Rudy, he noted, sighing inwardly with relief.

“Yes,” he said, adding, ”Who is this?”

“This is Danny, from down at MOMENTS, FROZEN.”

“Ah!” The inward sigh made its way to the surface. He giggled on top of it, a bit crazily, and added, ”Uh . . . what can I do for you?”

“Well, I . . . uh . . .” Danny’s throat, clearing from the other end of the line. “I wanted to ask you about something. Something really . . . weird.”

“Oh?” Something in the way Danny emphasized the word weird made Stephen tighten up suddenly. “What is it?”

“Well, it’s about your friend. The one who disappeared.” In the subsequent pause, Stephen practically swallowed the mouthpiece of the receiver. “You know who I’m talking about, right? I can never remember his name . . .”

“No.” Stephen heard the word come out of his mouth, but he didn’t believe it.

“Oh, come on. The graffiti artist. Black Bart with eyeliner. What’s his name?”

Stephen didn’t answer. The phone trembled in his hand. He felt an overpowering urge to hang it up and then leave it off the hook, maybe rip it out of the wall entirely. He suppressed the impulse, but not its power over him. Not entirely.

“Stephen?” There was a slight edge of desperation in Danny’s voice. “Are you there, man? Are you alright?”

No, Stephen thought, teeth gritted, eyes squeezed shut, his grip on the receiver tight as his chest’s suffocating pressure on his heart and lungs. No, I’m not alright. I’m losing my mind, cried a tiny voice in his head. His own voice was silent.

“Stephen! Jesus Christ!” Danny yelled. “Can’t you hear me, or what . . .?”

“Yes,” he managed finally. “I can hear you, Danny. I’m . . . I’m sorry . . .”

“What’s the matter?” Danny’s voice quieted, dropped an octave. There was concern there: mixed, to Stephen’s ears, with a wee drop of suspicion. Stephen wrestled with the words that wanted to come out, two conflicting messages that grappled for position: I’m fine. Rudy who? Go away on the one hand; I’m going crazy. What do you know about Rudy? Please help me on the other.

It was a draw. “I . . . I . . .” Stephen stammered, his voice cracking. “I can’t talk to you right now. I’m gonna have to call you back. I’m sorry.”

“But wait! Just let me ask you something . . .”

“I’ll call you back. Really. In a couple minutes.” I have to hang up, his mind warned him, emphatic. I have to hang up now.

“Just wait a minute, Ste . . .”

Stephen hung up the phone.

“Christ,” he moaned, his hand still on the receiver.

The phone rang again.

Stephen cried out, jerking backwards suddenly. Automatically, the receiver came up in his hand. He stared at it in shock and horror, as if it had just transformed itself into a lit stick of dynamite. Then slowly, very slowly, he brought it up to his ear.

“Hello?” he said, a trembling squeak.

“Stephen?” The voice was scarcely more than a whisper. He didn’t recognize it, per se; but there was something in it he connected with immediately. A terror very much like his own. Only worse.

“Who is this?” he croaked, his own voice hushed.

“Oh, Stephen . . .” the voice cried out, and then broke apart in a series of heartrending sobs.

Stephen didn’t know what to do. The caller was still unknown; he doubted that he’d ever heard a voice like that in his life. It sounded like a grade school girl who’d just watched her parents get skinned alive, aging ten thousand years in one horrifying instant.

He listened, helplessly. She cried . . . he knew, if nothing else, that the caller was female . . . for a solid three minutes before a word could come from either side. When it came, it was from the other end of the line: a plaintive moan, so utterly desolate that Stephen had to fight back his own tears at the sound of it.

“. . . please help me . . .”

And in that moment, Stephen knew precisely who he was talking to. The knowledge came like the serrated edge of a long bread knife, cold steel raking along his spinal column with inarguable yes-you-are-dead-now assurance. It came with an audible click in his mind, like the final closing of the morgue slab door. It came as a whisper that rang in his ears, saying oh, God, he’s going for both of us.

“Josalyn?” he said, a weak hiss into the receiver. The crying from the other end intensified suddenly; he could almost see her sitting in her apartment, unable to speak, nodding helplessly at her blind telephone. The next question came automatically, before he had a chance to consider it.

“What has he done to you?”

The sobbing from the other end subsided as quickly as it rose, dying down to a trickle. He could feel her gathering up the power to speak as she cleared her throat and hesitated, then cleared her throat again.

He waited.

“He’s . . . going to kill me, Stephen.” The words seemed to have forced their way out of her throat by necessity. The struggle behind them was gruelingly clear. “I know he is. He killed . . .”

“Who did he kill?” He almost shouted it.

“M-my cat!” Josalyn screamed back. A fresh wave of sobs escaped her. She fought her way through them. “He k-k-killed Nigel, and . . .”

“Your cat?” He started laughing then: a horrible, cruel sound that seemed to be . . . no, had to be . . . coming from somewhere else. It scared the bejesus out of him, even as it gushed from him like blood from a spurting artery. “You call me because your stupid cat . . .?” He was laughing too hard to continue.

Stunned silence from the other end. A sharp intake of breath that seemed to hold and hold forever, but only lasted a second.

And then she screamed.

“HE BROKE HIS FUCKING NECK!” Now she was like a mother, wailing over the corpse of her son. Stephen’s laughter cut off abruptly, a cold sweat patina oozing suddenly from his pores. “BROKE HIS NECK AND THREW HIM ACROSS THE GODDAMN APARTMENT! I WOKE UP, AND . . .”

“Wait a minute.” Stephen found himself waving away the mental cobwebs with his hand. “Wait just a minute. You mean that Rudy came into your apartment and . . .”

Josalyn paused for a moment; just long enough for her voice to drop down a couple of decibels. “It was a dream, Stephen. In my dream, it was happening to me. But . . .”

“Now, what kind of bull . . .” he began, the first ugly bubble rising to the surface and bursting.

“. . . but when I woke up, Nigel was . . . he was flying across the room, and . . . and there was all this blood, and . . .” Her voice decayed into sobbing again, through which she barely managed to say, ”. . . I still can’t . . . I can’t b-bring myself to . . . to touch . . .”

Stephen was silent as a stuffed moose head on a wall. The only sound in the room was Josalyn’s anguish, pouring through the receiver, as he struggled to put his reeling thoughts in order.

The anger had gone back to wherever the hell it came from in the first place, another weird phenomenon to try and piece together with the other events of a life gone suddenly and completely haywire. Subway slaughter. Corpses staggering out of the tunnels, or rumors thereof. A friend who mysteriously disappeared, only to come back as a red-eyed, dead-looking sucker of bloody handkerchiefs who made cryptic, frightening phone calls in the middle of the night.

And who, it now appeared, could send out dreams that make you die.

It was a puzzle that should not be able to come together, like a model of the M. C. Escher waterfall that flows down and down until it reaches the top of itself again. It should not come together. It should not make any kind of sense at all.

But it did. Somehow, suddenly, it did. And the room in which Stephen Parrish was sitting grew somehow, suddenly, extremely cold.

“Listen, Josalyn,” he said finally. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I do know that something is definitely wrong . . .”

“No sh-SHIT!” Her laughter, hysterical and shrill, cut through his words and her tears like an ice pick through terry cloth.

“No, no,” he blurted defensively. Embarrassment flickered through him, then anger, both giving way to the memory of his cruel laughter from mere moments before. He swallowed it all and continued. “You’re not the first one to come to me about Rudy in the last forty-eight hours. And I . . . had an experience with him myself . . .”

“You . . . what?” That seemed to stop her for a moment. Stephen let an oddly triumphant smile flash across his face before continuing.

“Friday night. I . . . I ran into him on the subway. He was . . .” Searching for the right words. Compromising, in the end. “There was something seriously wrong with him. I don’t know what. But he was . . . oh, shit. Listen.

“I think you should meet a couple of people tonight.” There was an assurance in his voice, as alien as the laughter from before. Telling of the plan that had just arrived, full blown and utterly unexpected, in his mind. “The people who have been calling me. Like I said, I don’t know what’s going on. But if it’s all of a sudden as important as this, then maybe we’d better find out.”

Silence, from the other end.

“Josalyn?” No sound. It made him very nervous. “Josalyn? Are you there?”

A long moment’s pause. Then, in a frightened little girl voice, ”You wouldn’t . . . this isn’t a . . . trap, is it? I mean . . .”

“No. Honest to God, no. It isn’t.” He hadn’t even considered it. But as he spoke, the image came to him: leading Josalyn down to the West 4th Street station, down the first flight of stairs to that ominous level between. And there, in the darkness, his red eyes gleaming over that ghastly self-satisfied grin, was Rudy: his pale hands outstretched, his voice whispering well done, Stephen. You have served me well . . .

“No,” Stephen repeated, to himself this time. To himself, and to the voice that giggled malevolently in the back of his mind.

After he had gotten off the phone with Josalyn, Stephen sat on the edge of his bed and thought. The imaginary betrayal was still fresh in his mind, and it bothered the hell out of him. Like the mocking laughter. Like the fact that he had held out on Joseph Hunter, automatically and wholeheartedly against what he now felt to be his better judgment. Like a thousand other things he had done in the past week, and . . . yes, now that he thought about it . . . for as long as he could remember.

But that was far too much to think about.

Stephen found himself staring at the wastepaper basket next to his desk, with the crumpled sheets of manuscript and empty Tropicana orange juice containers jutting above the rim. He knew that, not too deeply buried in the debris, both halves of Joseph’s number were waiting him out. Waiting for him to rediscover his backbone, get himself together, and dig them out.

He’d made a point of hiding the napkin from view, in the hope that the old adage would hold true: out of sight, out of mind. Well, it hadn’t. Not a bit. He might as well have glued the thing to his forehead.

And now it’s come down to this, he thought. I can’t even pretend to ignore this anymore. The next mistake might be the killing one. He shuddered at the thought.

Then, slowly, he pulled himself to his feet and moved to the basket. Knelt in front of it. Meticulously began to remove the refuse, piece by piece, until he found what he was looking for.

Stephen put the two pieces of napkin on the floor and fit them together as best he could. Dampened to begin with, the thin, fibrous paper had pulled apart in the worst possible way: the numerals were blurred and stretched and jaggedly mangled. Joseph’s handwriting didn’t help matters, either: the least damaged number could have been either a one or a seven.

Frustration rippled through him in sickly little waves. “How am I supposed to do this?” he whined quietly, fidgeting with the pieces, knocking them out of alignment. “Oh, Goddamn it!” he yelled, throwing his arms up in a gesture of defeat.

That was when the tiny voice in his mind, very matter-of-factly, said just dial the phone, stupid. Dial it until you get it right.

He slapped himself across the forehead. “Why didn’t you think of that, you dope?” he moaned; then he got to his feet with the napkin in hand, went over to the phone, and started running all the possible combinations.

On the first try, he got Antonio’s Pizza. “Sorry,” he said, hanging up. Next, he got a recording to the tune of we’re sorry, the number you have reached is not a working . . . That made him nervous. He hesitated for a moment before trying again.

The third call put him in touch with a Mr. Weinstein, who claimed to be locked in a hotel room in Queens. “Where’s Eddie?” Mr. Weinstein demanded. Stephen hung up without another word and tried again.

A sexy feminine voice informed him that he had reached Suzy’s Erotic Fantasies. He tried again.

A little boy answered and started screaming in Vietnamese. He tried again.

“Hello? Is this Eddie? This is Mr. Wein . . .” Stephen shrieked and slammed the phone down on the hook. He stared heavenward, as if for guidance, all the while thinking this is ridiculous, this is pointless, I’m never gonna get him, I might as well just forget about it . . .

But when he shut his eyes, dark things were in motion against a bright red backdrop. The light streaming through his eyelids from the bedside lamp was the color of blood. He opened his eyes with a start, picked up the phone, and tried again.

And tried again.

And tried again.

Until he got it right.

CHAPTER 26

On the screen, somebody was getting disemboweled with an electric carving knife. Lots of blood. Lots of intestinal splatter. The audience hooted and screamed and chuckled while the poor victim yowled and thrashed, hokey synthesizers blaring and whooping it up in so-called musical accompaniment.

The name of the film was Gore Feast. True to its name, Gore Feast had been moving along at a ferocious clip, serving up fresh bodies to mutilate at regular five-minute intervals. Heads staved in with hammers. Eyes turned to pudding with eggbeaters. Torsos dangling from meathooks. Brains in blenders. Kidney pie.

It made Rudy very hungry indeed.

He was sitting in the balcony of the Cinema Village, where a special sleaze festival had been running all week. Eternal classics like I Dismember Mama and I Spit On Your Grave, The Bloody Mutilators and Ilse: She-Wolf of the S.S., all gathered together under one roof for seven days of cinematic putrefaction. It was a big departure from the theatre’s standard fare . . . Woody Allen, Monty Python, Stanley Kubrick, and Federico Fellini . . . but it had its audience of twistos and fans who would pay good money to see it.

Two such creatures were sitting right in front of Rudy: two zit-faced butterballs with greasy hair and horn-rimmed glasses, the lenses on them thicker than bulletproof glass. Their mouths had been in motion continuously, shoveling down popcorn and making little whiny criticisms with their mouths still full. They were the kind of people that you just want to hit.

But Rudy had a better idea.

The carving knife victim had been reduced to cutlets by now; the audience had settled down; the camera had wandered off to look at something else. Ostensibly spooky music droned softly in the background as the camera finally settled on a closet door that slowly, silently, opened.

From the widening crack, a chain saw poked its many toothed head out daintily.

“Oh, Gawd!” griped the fat, greasy fan on the right. “Can’t they do anything original? I mean, really!” Rudy felt his gorge become buoyant.

“Well, I have to admit that I never saw anyone get their eyes taken out with an eggbeater before,” the one on the left quipped with snooty derision.

“But a chain saw? I mean, really! Gawd!” As he packed another handful of popcorn into his face.

Shut up, you fat fuck. I can’t stand it. I mean it. Rudy’s stomach felt hollow and coated with slime. He clutched it with cold, trembling fingers, rocking back and forth, just trying to get through the next few seconds without losing control.

But the chain saw extended itself out to its full length without making a sound. The drone built slowly in volume: far too slowly. Little clusters of impatient grumbling pockmarked the smoky air. Rudy gritted his teeth and sighed heavily, trembling. The moment dragged on and on.

“This is what passes for suspense in a Grade Z . . .” the second fan cleverly murmured.

And then the chain saw erupted into thundering action. The carving knife killer whirled just in time to watch the blade slice off the top of his head. Blood gushed out like paint from an overturned gallon can. He screamed. The crowd screamed with him.

The overall volume was more than adequate. Rudy leaned forward just as the first fan recoiled with involuntary disgust. He took a handful of greasy hair and pulled the fat head over the back of the seat, stretching the throat out, laying it bare.

Without hesitation, he found the carotid artery and proceeded to tap it.

The dying kid’s friend didn’t notice. He was quite absorbed, despite himself, with the spectacle of a man getting his head chain-sawed in half with one neat vertical sweep that wound up at the collarbone. The two halves of head flopped to either side and dangled like wet rubber chickens from what was left of the neck. It was quite an impressive display.

He was about to comment upon it when a cold hand took him by the base of the neck and squeezed. What came out of his air hole was just that: air, a great whooshing burst of it, muffled as a fart under a thick pile of blankets. His thick lips flapped impotently in the breeze. The grip on his neck tightened.

And slowly began to twist his head around.

“Mrgmph,” he managed, cow eyes bulging and bright with tears. They caught a glimpse of his dead friend’s face: the flesh bone-white and puffy, the jaw moist and slack, the eyes glimmering dully in the thin beam of light from the projectionist’s booth. He had just enough time to register the sight before a second hand came around from over his right shoulder to take him by the left side of the face.

“Hey, squishy face,” said a voice from behind him, a sibilant hiss that blew into his ear. “How about this? Does this scare you alright?”

A thin gurgle rose in the constricted throat.

“I noticed that the movie wasn’t doing it for you.” The hand on his face began to push, twisting his head around to the right, while the other hand held his neck stationary. Something went ping at the base of his skull, and white-hot pain shot through him like a lightning bolt.

He twisted his body onto its side in the seat, momentarily easing the pressure. His knees came up and banged against the dead meat at his side, which sagged and drooped like an overstuffed garbage bag. He pushed at it weakly, trying to keep it from falling on him. A whimper twitched, stillborn, on his shuddering diaphragm.

Then he was jerked around entirely, facing toward the back of the theatre. He gulped down one last breath before the hands closed around his throat, sealing in the air like a Ziplock bag.

Rudy grinned at him, their noses only inches apart. His fangs were long and capped with darkness, like the tips of fountain pens. His eyes were dancing pools of flame.

“Perhaps you’d like to offer some more criticisms,” Rudy whispered, and his hands squeezed with all their might.

“Mrgmph,” the fan tried for, but he hadn’t the wind. His eyes rolled back under the purpling lids. His cheeks bulged like balloons. His zits darkened and swelled. He looked like an enormous pimple on the verge of bursting open.

Rudy glanced away for a moment, attracted by a sudden movement on the screen. Mr. Chain Saw was still at it, hacking poor old Mr. Carving Knife into teensy-weensy pieces. All four limbs had been severed. They lay flapping on the floor in a grotesque parody of what was actually happening in the seat before him. A line from a book popped into Rudy’s mind . . . something about life imitating art . . . and he suppressed a chuckle as he turned back to the matter in his hands.

Dark, bubbling froth had appeared in the corners of the fat kid’s mouth. His thick, blackening tongue lolled out stupidly. A wet blatt trumpeted from his cushioned ass-end as his bowels let go in his corduroy slacks. There was one last spasm that made the body jiggle like Jell-O on a spring.

And then it was over.

Rudy let go gradually, careful to keep the kid from sluicing all over him when the throat opened up enough to drain. Sure enough, a thick gout of something hit the floor next to him. His legs jerked away just in time. Then Rudy eased the corpse back into its seat and let go.

Abruptly, the theatre went all but silent. A quick glance up revealed that the film had cut to a new scene, from the perspective of a table on wheels being rolled down a long dark corridor. Rudy watched, slumping back in his own seat and sighing contentedly. He felt ever so much better. The first guy alone was a meal and a half.

At the end of the corridor, there was a door with a small oval window at its center. Pale bluish light filtered through it. In the moment before the rolling table connected with the door, Rudy checked his face and hands to make sure that there wasn’t any blood on them. There wasn’t. His fastidiousness pleased him.

You’re getting good, he told himself. Getting better all the time.

Then the door slammed open, and the camera moved into a great banquet hall. There, a vast array of kooky cannibals were munching out on the organs of their choice. Evidently, this was the much-heralded gore feast itself. Rudy smiled at the shrieks and shrill hilarity that ensued.

The chain saw killer appeared at center screen, leaning over the table that he’d just wheeled in. He removed the half-moon lid from a large circular tray, and there was Mr. Carving Knife’s head . . . apparently glued back together . . . with a rosy red apple in his mouth.

Rudy took that as a cue. He’d have loved to stay and see the rest, but the smell of fresh feces was beginning to spread. He rose to his feet and moved toward the stairs, noting that he wasn’t the only one walking out at this point in the proceedings.

Never realized that the movies could be this much fun, he thought, laughing to himself, and then headed down the stairs.

Behind him, the riotous roar of the crowd was like music, sweet music, to his ears.

CHAPTER 27

So you say that this guy knows something about it.” Allan was dubious and, what was more, discomfited. He looked like the man who picked Door Number Three and wound up with two tons of manure.

“Yep,” Joseph said, not breaking his stride. “Like I said, he knows Rudy.”

“And who are those other people we’re going to meet?”

“One girl who says Rudy is sending her nightmares. One girl who thinks Rudy might have murdered her roommate. And some other guy, I don’t know what his story is.”

“He played basketball with Rudy back at Transylvania High,” Ian said, prodding Allan in the ribs. “Cheer up, Squiggums. This ain’t nobody’s funeral.”

Allan groaned and ground his teeth against the stem of his pipe.

They moved rapidly down Bleecker Street toward their rendezvous with destiny. The site of this encounter was slated as The Other End, a laid-back little bar and nightclub with two separate rooms. They had chosen the smaller room because the music was acoustic, not electric, and because there was no cover charge. “Besides,” Stephen had stressed, ”it’s not a very busy place, and there’s a big table in the back where we could probably sit all night.”

“I’m less than thrilled by this whole idea,” Allan grumbled. They moved past a NO PARKING sign, and he tapped out his pipe against it cheerlessly.

“We know, we know,” Ian droned, mocking him. “Some people just don’t know how to have a good time. Right, Joseph?” He elbowed both of his friends in unison.

“Cut that out,” Allan grumbled anew. Joseph just grunted and kept walking.

“So much fun, I’ve never had,” Ian added, grinning wickedly. Then his eyes perked up, and he said, ”There it is.” He pointed at a dark green awning on the other side of the street.

They moved single file between a pair of parked cars and stopped in a line at the edge of traffic. The light, for the moment, was against them. Allan took the opportunity to make one last appeal to their senses.

“I’d really rather not go in there, if you don’t mind,” he said, ”and I . . .”

“I do mind.” Joseph had turned to face him, constrained by one strand of patience that was wearing very thin. “I want you to meet these people, because I want you to see just how serious this is. I want you to see that we’re not just making this up. Okay? I want you to see for yourself.”

“I . . .”

“Allan.” The tone of his voice was unforgiving. “If you don’t go in there with us, I don’t even wanna talk to you.”

“He’s not kidding,” Ian piped in, not as funny as he’d have liked. “It could mean the end of a beautiful relationship.”

“This sucks,” Allan said, staring down at his feet.

But when the light changed, and Joseph stormed across with Ian capering and grimacing monster like behind, Allan knew that he had no choice.

Very reluctantly, he followed.

“Are you sure this is the right room?” Ian asked once they got inside.

“In the back,” Joseph answered, still forging ahead. They moved past the jukebox, the bar on their left. The room widened at that point, about thirty yards from the back wall and the little stage in the corner. As they stepped into the expanded space, Joseph glanced to his right and saw a very large table, catercorner to the stage. Four people were seated around it: two guys, two gals. Because the guys were facing away, it took Joseph a minute to peg the one on the right.

“Stephen,” he said, stepping forward.

At the table, all four of them looked up at once, the men half-turning in their seats. Stephen’s eyes lit up at once; it was hard to tell if the emotion behind it was fear, or relief, or both.

“Joseph,” he said, standing up gingerly and gesturing toward the seats. It crossed his mind to offer his hand for shaking. It crossed back out again.

The two young women were seated on a long bench that ran along the wall. They both slid down, and Joseph seated himself beside them. The man on the left, a tall, gangly guy with glasses and a dark ponytail at the far end of his receding hairline, moved one seat over to remain abreast of the girl he had been facing: a sultry brunette with a lot of makeup on her pale, agreeable features.

Allan sat down between the two guys and across from the other woman. Because her eyes were downcast, he took a moment to study her: the short, dark hair, unwashed and disheveled; the sunken, slightly discolored flesh around her eyes; the deep worry lines on either side of her thin, trembling lips, corresponding to the furrows in her brow.

She looked like someone who’d just spent the last several days as a guest of the Spanish Inquisition. Despite all that, it was obvious that she was a very good looker, under ordinary circumstances. It tugged at Allan’s heart, and he was forced to look away.

Ian, too, had been staring at her. Ever since they first looked up, his eyes had not left her face. He’d caught her gaze, in that moment, and a spark had gone off in the back of his head.

Oh, my God, he’d thought, something tightening up inside him like a wet washcloth being wrung out by hand. What has he done to you?

He caught himself now, still standing at the head of the table, awkwardly staring at a total stranger. He shook his head vigorously and grinned like an idiot at the wall, then turned to appropriate an empty chair from the neighboring table and seat himself, still at the head.

“Well,” he said, grinning sheepishly around the table. “Where do we start?”

There was a brief, nervous silence, full of unrealized and semi-furtive glances. Stephen shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Even Joseph seemed temporarily at a loss.

“Okay. How about this? My name’s Ian. And you are . . . Stephen?” Stephen nodded, smiling faintly. Ian nodded back and smiled, then looked to the other guy.

“Danny,” said the other guy, grinning affably. Allan interjected with his name at that point, and Claire . . . the brunette . . . quickly followed suit with a breathy voice that bordered on the suggestive.

“And this is Joseph,” Ian said, as Joseph didn’t seem inclined to introduce himself: he nodded, expressionless, at the mention of his name, then leaned back on the bench and crossed his arms.

One person remained to be introduced. Her eyes were closed, her head tilted downward. She didn’t speak, she didn’t move. The new silence that sprang into being was as heavy as the knot on a hangman’s noose. Not even Ian knew how to go on.

Finally, Stephen leaned forward and said, ”This is Josalyn. She’s had a very . . . rough experience . . .”

That was when she began to cry.

“Oh, Jesus,” Ian said, starting to reach forward with one hand. Allan echoed the gesture. They both stopped short.

It started as a sharp, sudden intake of breath that jerked her body once and then stopped. She sat there, straight-backed and rigid and motionless as a statue. The first tear rolled down her cheek as if by magic, from out of nowhere, like the stories of the bleeding Christ reenacted.

From there, it took about fifteen seconds for the walls to cave in, and for her to collapse across the table, the air lightly shaken by her gentle sobbing sounds.

“Okay,” Joseph said abruptly, putting one large fist on the table as he leaned resolutely forward. “We got that out of the way. Now where’s the goddamn waitress? I need a drink, and we need to start talkin’.”

Nobody else knew how to react, but Ian and Allan both flashed him a look that had you heartless cocksucker written all over it. Joseph shrugged, not exactly apologetic. Josalyn, for her part, seemed not to have heard. Her head remained on the table. Her sobbing softly continued.

As if just slightly behind cue, the waitress appeared and asked them what they wanted to drink. “A pitcher of Bud,” Joseph answered immediately.

“Make that two,” Ian followed.

“No. Three,” Allan added.

Danny smiled despite himself and turned to Claire. “You want to split one?” he asked. She nodded, smiling back. “Okay. We’re up to four.”

Stephen, apparently remembering his last drinking session with Joseph, said, ”Just a mug, please,” with an uneasy grin.

It was Allan who leaned forward and said, ”Josalyn? Can we get you something?”

She paused for a moment, seemed to consider it, then lifted her head just enough to be heard and said, in a tone only slightly above a whisper, ”Wine.”

“Wine?” the waitress repeated, uncertain.

“Yes. White wine.” She lifted her head and pulled herself upright, made a go of smiling around the table. It was close. Damn close. And her eyes, though bloodshot and cloudy with tears, were far more alive than they’d been a minute before.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and looked down again.

“It’s all right, kiddo,” Ian assured her. “Not to worry. So long as you’re okay, it’s okay.”

She looked at him, then. The second their eyes met, something moved between and through them like a quick jolt of electricity. It happened in a fraction of a second. That was all it took.

It didn’t get past Danny. He knew a connection when he saw one. His hand reached across the table as if by reflex to close lightly around Claire’s. She blew him a kiss and looked back at the others. She’d picked up on it, too.

In fact, none of them failed to notice the spark, though each had a different reaction: numb amazement from Stephen, mild jealousy from Allan, vast impatience from Joseph. The waitress, turning away to fulfill their orders, assumed that they were old lovers who’d fallen on hard times, and wondered why they were sitting so far apart.

“C