Undead - One Foot In The Grave Part 13

I saw a flicker of white in the dark depths of the vehicle's interior.

"Jenny!"

"Chris?" Deirdre's voice behind me.

And Damien's voice: "What is it?"

A white hand at the end of a white, poofy sleeve reached out and grasped the handle on the open cab door.

I moved toward the end of the dock and was caught, pulled back, by clutching hands.

"Let me go," I said. "Jenny!"

"Hold him."

"Chris, you can't leave the building!""Come back inside."

"Don't let go."

I struggled trying to escape the mult.i.tudinous hands and voices. "Jenny! Wait!"

The hand pulled the door closed with agonizing slowness. A brief glimpse of her face at the window.

The cab was pulling away. In a fit of desperation, I shrugged off two of my handlers, swung my fists, punched and kicked at the flesh that was trying to envelope me. I broke free. Tried to run for the departing vehicle. Made four, maybe five steps before I was tackled, smothered to the ground.

I screamed against the concrete.

The Doman's elbows were planted on the table, his left hand balled into a fist, cupped inside his right.

He leaned forward, pressing his knuckles against his lips. "You are sure?"

My own elbows were similarly planted, but I was resting my forehead against the palms of my hands.

"It was Jenny."

"I don't suppose you carry a photo of your wife in your wallet. It might help Deirdre make a positive ID.".

I shook my head. I had taken Jenny's and Kirsten's photos out of my wallet and down from the walls a month after the funeral. Maybe that was a sign of denial. All I knew was that it hurt so much more to open my billfold or look across the room and still see their faces. . . .

Pagelovitch sighed. "Doctor?"

"There are, of course, psychological and stress-related factors that could cause him to imagine that he saw his dead wife-"

"I'm not crazy, I really did see her."

"-so that he might easily see her face and form when no one was there."

"But there was someone there," Deirdre said. "I saw her, too."

"And easier to project her face and presence onto a woman of similar stature and coloring."

Damien entered the room with a file folder.

The Doman raised an eyebrow. "Photographs?"

Damien nodded. "One. Photocopy from a newspaper story-the quality is not that good."

Pagelovitch gestured toward Deirdre. "Show it to her anyway."

I sat up a little straighter. "You have a file on me? On my wife?"

"On you. Any information on your wife is peripheral and, in this case, fortuitous."

Deirdre was shaking her head. "I don't know. It's too fuzzy. Maybe. Maybe not."

"You're not sure?" Clearly, the Doman was unhappy without a clear decision either way.

"I just can't tell."

"Still, it's highly unlikely that your dead wife just turned up here in Seattle."

I scowled at the Doman. "Why not? I just turned up here, in Seattle."

"She was p.r.o.nounced dead, Christopher-"

"So was I."

"-and buried. You weren't."

"Maybe she was infected the same as me. Maybe better: maybe she's a full-fledged vampire." A part of my conscious mind was standing back and observing this conversation with a detached sense of horror. Another portion was desperately trying to make Jenny real at any price.

The Doman was relentless: "So, where has she been for the past year?"

"I don't know. Maybe she was trapped in the grave, underneath the ground, in her coffin. Maybe she just got free recently." "So, why is she with New York?"

"What? New York?"

"We checked all the dispatchers. No cabs were logged in this vicinity during or for an hour either side of this incident. No independent or company taxis in this city match the description of your vehicle.

"Christopher," he continued in a gentler voice, "for some reason New York still wants you. It would be very simple for them to hire a body double to act the part of your departed wife, to lure you outside of our sanctuary."

"With your psychological situation," Mooncloud chimed in, "a little makeup and the right dress would be all that was necessary for the power of suggestion to be complete."

"Perhaps they even went a step or two beyond makeup," the Doman said.

I stared at Pagelovitch. "What do you mean?"

He shrugged. "Perhaps a glamour of some type. . . ."

"Magic? You're telling me they can use magic?"

Looks were exchanged around the room. "Of course not. But if there was another vampire involved.

"A Projective," Mooncloud said. "Some form of mental domination."

"I thought other vampires couldn't come on the premises without a specific invitation to cross the threshold."

His eyes narrowed. "I don't have all the answers, yet." Then his gaze softened. "But that would tend to shoot holes in your theory that your wife had returned as a vampire."

I grasped at my last straw: "Maybe they found some other way to resurrect her."

"Magic? Hocus pocus? Come now," the Doman smiled, showing pointed teeth, "this is reality. . . ."

Chapter Eight.

Knowledge is power. So wrote Hobbes in Leviathan.

In Of Heresies, Bacon said: Knowledge itself is power.

But perhaps Andre Gide said it best when he wrote: "Education, c'est delivrance."

If education was, indeed, freedom, the Doman's library was the place to form my escape plan. I began my studies the following evening and, aside from regular evening visits from the two-tailed cat, I worked undisturbed until Sat.u.r.day night.

"Looking for a cure?"

I glanced up from the tumbledown fortress of books that encompa.s.sed me at the library table. "At this point I'd settle for a little sanity."

Taj Mooncloud sorted through the sprawl of volumes that had slid to the far side of the table. "The Golden Bough, Crosland's English adaptation of Valeria and Volta's The Vampire, a couple of Montague Summers' better known works, The Natural History of the Vampire by Masters-mygoodness, even a translation of the Malleus Maleficarum! You're looking for sanity, here?"

I said nothing and she wandered over to the microfiche reader that I had left on for cross-referencing.

"Traite sur les Apparitions des Espirits, et sur les Vampires, ou les Revenants de Hongrie, de Moravie-"

"First edition, Paris, 1746," I appended. "But I'm really more interested in a rather recent work." I lifted the bound ma.n.u.script I'd been studying and turned it so she could read: Vampirism and the Subconscious Mind: The Id Unbound. By Dr. Taj V. Mooncloud, Ph.D., M.D., S.D. "I'm impressed: Doctor of Philosophy, Doctor of Medicine. . ." I c.o.c.ked an eyebrow. "S.D.?"

"Doctor of Shamanism."

"You're joking."

"I never joke," she answered coolly.

"Well." I hefted the book. "I'll bet there're no copies in the Library of Congress."

"No, and more's the pity," she said, pulling up a chair across from me. "Ten years of semicooperative national and worldwide research and we know more about the AIDS virus than ten centuries of scholasticism on the subject of vampirism."

"We still don't have a vaccine for AIDS," I said, unsure of whether I was undermining or underlining her point.

"Bad enough that we can't utilize public facilities, personnel, or funding efforts in our research," she continued, "but it's difficult to secure cooperative information from the other enclaves, as well."

I tapped the ma.n.u.script. "You seem to have made some substantial leaps beyond anything else I've read."

"Theoretical leaps. We have a Magnetic Resonance Imaging device, an electron microscope, substantial lab and diagnostic facilities . . . but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the resources we really need-not to mention the statistical base!

"The bulk of the books you have there were first published before the turn of the century, some before the turn of the last century, and more than a few from before even that. They're such a hodgepodge of myth and third-hand stories that you can't be sure of the truth even when they seem to validate your own findings. . . .

"But you," she reached across the table and between two stacks of books to grasp my hand, "may help to change all that!"

"The missing link," I said.

"Oh, don't say it that way! It sounds so-so-"

"Guinea piggish?"

It took her a moment to find her smile. "Exactly."

"Oink, oink," I said.

She tossed my hand back at me. "Guinea pigs don't go 'oink, oink.' "

"I guess someone will need to coach me."

"Obviously, after that stunt you pulled at the pool."

"Ah, which brings me back to my research." I thumped the ma.n.u.script back open to my last bookmark. "I need to know all kinds of stuff. About mirrors and garlic and crosses and holy water-"

"You need someone to coach you," she said.

"-and why this stuff works the way it does. I mean, I used to be a great swimmer! What happened to me?" I flipped to the beginning of her ma.n.u.script and then back to my last marked pa.s.sage. "I've skimmed the first part, here, where you venture several theories about the physiological changes that take place in the human body.""It's really a brief summation of another paper I published earlier."

" 'Published'?"

"Within the underground network that ties all the enclaves together to some degree."

"Yeah, well I noticed that you skipped a lot of the empirical data and just highlighted the conclusions.

But it still begs the question on certain aspects of vampiric lore. I see how the physiological changes in body tissues may alter ma.s.s, augment strength, prolong longevity . . . but what about holy water, the crucifix, requiring invitations to cross thresholds?"

"Keep reading."

I glanced at the three-inch-thick remainder of unread pages. "I'm in a hurry."