The Night Inside Read online

  Stay away, his reason cautioned, they are many, you are weakened . . . stay away. But the smell of their blood was intoxicating, the hunger a red-blooming flower in his mind. Only one. Only one and he would be strong again, strong enough to take the others too, if need be. Only one—and then he would be free.

  He moved down the rest of the stairs carefully, clinging to the scraps of cunning that kept him in check while the blood-hunger raged. They mustn’t see him, mustn’t know he was there until he was ready. The machine’s whine filled his ears, battering his tightly strung nerves.

  At the bottom of the stairway, he moved into its shadow and waited. There was no cover in the empty warehouse, concealment existed only in the darkness of the shadows and in his own impossibility. He stood very still, and though his body ached with hunger, he waited while the voices of the men filtered slowly into his consciousness, past the annoying thrum of the machine.

  “One more pass and we’ll have finished this floor,” one announced.

  “’Bout time too. You know Roias said we weren’t supposed to do night work,” the second said.

  “Shit, Tucker, he’ll never know. We get the five grand whether the job takes a week or a month. Me, I could use a vacation.”

  “Me too. But this place gives me the creeps,” Tucker replied.

  “If you can’t hold your water, you can leave. Simpson and I will split your share,” the first man suggested.

  “Not a chance, Theo,” Tucker snapped back, then glanced around the warehouse nervously. “Do you ever wonder what the hell he’s looking for?”

  “Al Capone’s hidden vault?” the third man drawled, fumbling in his pocket. Their laughter scraped along the watcher’s nerves like dull razors.

  “It’d serve Roias right if all he found was a dirty bottle. . . . Oh Jesus, Simpson, put that shit away. You know I can’t stand that stuff.”

  “That’s why you’re pussy, Theo, my man,” Simpson said, as he struck a match that burned and beckoned.

  “Oh, go smoke that shit over there,” Tucker intervened, and Simpson shrugged and started to stroll across the barren floor.

  Under the stairway, the vampire felt his muscles tense in preparation for attack. Predatory instincts honed in a thousand ice-sharp nights moved him out to the edge of the shadows as Simpson moved closer, pacing casually beneath the halo of aromatic smoke. The tip of the hand-rolled cigarette glowed faintly, the only spot of light in the dark figure silhouetted against the circle of lights at the far side of the warehouse.

  Three steps more, two . . . the count sounded like bells in the vampire’s mind. The man paused suddenly, stared into the darkness, and the vampire froze. Then Simpson took another slow drag, tilted his head back and exhaled. The movement exposed the dark curve of his throat, outlined its arching strength against the lights. The vampire could feel the beat of the blood, and the scent of the life in the man’s veins filled his nostrils. It was more than he could bear, and he came out of the shadows in a feral leap that brought him almost to Simpson’s side.

  The man’s eyes opened suddenly, the glaze over the dark depths fading as uncomprehending shock took the place of drugged pleasure. “Holy shit. . . .” He had time for only those words, then the vampire’s hands had closed on his shoulders as his second lunge tumbled them both to the floor.

  Distantly, the vampire was aware of the other men turning, crying out, but then there was only the hot flesh and hotter blood filling his mouth. Simpson thrashed beneath him, head whipping from side to side, until taloned hands closed on the man’s forehead, drawing blood from the temples as they held his head still. Even then his strength was barely enough to hold the man down until he could tear open the throat wide enough to turn the frenzied struggles into death spasms.

  Then he was deep in the blood-thrall, the hot liquid burning down his throat, splattering on his face from the pumping artery. The world narrowed to the taste, the scent and the dizzying pleasure that coursed along his veins with each gulp of the sweet blood.

  When someone seized his shoulders, tried to pull him away from that rich fountain, he struck out, dimly aware that it was Theo he sent sprawling across the floor. He could hear Tucker shouting, a thousand miles away, then suddenly the dull mosquito hum in his ears shrieked up into a knife of sound that sent him staggering to his feet, clutching his head.

  He forced his eyes open to find this new threat. It was the man called Tucker holding something in his hand, a small device strung on cables to the strange machine that must be the source of the agonizing sound. He was halfway to the man, holding his ears, snarling and gritting his bloody teeth against the pain, when the sound jumped again, arcing off into a stratosphere beyond his imagination.

  He screamed then, howling in sudden, mindless anguish, and fell to the floor, writhing beneath the last of the white-hot pain in his head. He barely heard Theo’s obscene shouts. But he felt the man’s heavy boots as they thudded into his ribs, Theo’s fury driven by the blind determination to obliterate the creature that had dared to terrify him and, most importantly, shame him with that terror.

  The blows that hammered his sides could not kill him, or even shatter his bones, but that did not stop them from hurting, an agony he felt even above the roar in his mind.

  When the sound at last eased, the blows went on, sapping away the strength he had found in the blood. Arms wrapped around his head, he retreated back into the darkest corner of his mind. Distantly, he heard the men talking, sharp, panicky voices no more than ragged peaks of sound over the steady wail of the machine.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, what is it?”

  “I don’t know! How the hell would I know!”

  “Is it dead?”

  “I don’t know! But it fuckin’ killed Simpson.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I’m gonna call that bastard Roias, and tell him to get the fuck down here, that’s what I’m gonna do. Hold the machine on it and if it moves again, crank it up.”

  Dimly, he knew he had to get away, before these men called others and he was trapped. It should not have been like this, it had never been like this before . . . he was stronger than they, smarter . . . he was the predator and they the prey. He started to lift his head, to see where the men were, if Tucker had lowered that infernal device. The sound stabbed through him again, full volume this time, and the vampire screamed wordlessly, arching backwards until the pale moonlight filled his eyes, and then he passed back into darkness.

  Midnight Maps

  I’m putting markers on the

  midnight maps . . .

  From the Diary of Ambrose Delaney Dale

  13 March 1898

  Some news at last! I had almost begun to doubt my original conclusions, so quiet has the city become. But just before dinner tonight, a message came that Mr. Collins was waiting to see me and I dared to hope. When he was shown into the library, his expression lifted my hopes even higher. And when he told me his tale . . .

  He has, as I’ve recounted before, been keeping company in the bars and streets of the Ward, where the workers and the poor live, where the mysterious bloodless body was found, listening for any unusual stories. The few leads he had been able to pass along so far had proven to be no more than drunken ramblings, but tonight’s tale promises to be different.

  It seems that one of his cronies has as an acquaintance a woman who makes her living as a whore (sad to say, even this most respectable of cities is plagued by her kind). According to Collins’s friend, a group of whores meet from time to time to discuss the revolting details of their profession and warn each other of police efforts to stop their trade. One of the subjects of their latest gossip was a client who had visited several of them. A man of middling years and foreign extraction, he was reputed to be generous with his money and considerate in his treatment of them. Yet they were all, according to Collins’s informant, surprised to discover that none of them coul
d remember the precise details of the transaction.

  I suggested that this was hardly surprising, considering the drunken state in which many of these women must exist, but Collins insists that his friend was adamant that several of these harlots restricted their imbibing only to their leisure hours. There were other oddities about their encounters with this customer that mystified them. Several recounted falling prey to an unusual lassitude after his visits, and one or two specifically stated that, though they believed that they had performed the usual acts of intercourse, they found no physical evidence of it, though such was usually to be discovered in their dirty sheets.

  Upon the completion of this story, I paid Mr. Collins as usual and sent him out with instructions that I would be willing to pay to interview on of these whores. Collins, of course, has no idea what my true suspicions are (he seems to believe that I seek some damaging information about a business rival) and my name is never to be mentioned in connection with his inquiries.

  After he left, I sat down to write this. Reviewing these words—and the previous evidence that led me to pursue this line of inquiry—I am more convinced than ever that I am right.

  I hear Henry at the door, with no doubt yet another of his business schemes. As much as it relieves me to leave my wealth in such good hands, I sometimes wish he held my research into the occult secrets of the world in as much respect as my fortune. For what is another bank, or company, or rail line, when compared to the reward I now seek?

  Chapter 1

  The party was going to end with people passed out on the floor. Ardeth Alexander could tell that the moment she stepped in the door to be enfolded in Peter’s beerily effusive embrace.

  “Welcome to the end-of-the-world bash,” he said as he released her.

  “I thought this was your birthday party.”

  “So did I. But it’s the end of term, and that means we have to face life outside the ivory tower. That might as well be the end of the world for most of us. Everyone is much too depressed about that to celebrate only the most momentous event in the twentieth century.”

  “Was it?”

  “Of course!”

  “Well, if you say so. My specialty’s the nineteenth century, remember? We never notice anything after 1899,” Ardeth said and handed him the silver-wrapped bottle of Rémy Martin. More booze, she thought wryly, just what this party needs. “Happy Birthday anyway.”

  “Thank you,” Peter replied with an exaggerated gentility that was at complete odds with his appearance. “Early mountain man,” his girlfriend, Lise, termed it. He stepped aside to let the noise of the party drift out to envelop her as surely as his earlier embrace. “Now bring out that other bottle I see in your purse and come in and get stinking drunk with the rest of us,” he instructed.

  I may just do that, Ardeth thought, moving into the long corridor down to the kitchen. The party was in full swing, music thumping from the stereo, each of the old house’s small rooms crammed with people.

  The kitchen, as usual, was a focal point of social action. She squeezed her way through a knot of women she didn’t recognize to reach the counter. She had just managed to pour herself a generous glass of wine (the plastic glasses helped, she thought), when she heard a voice call her name.

  Ardeth turned to see Carla waving to her from the corner of the kitchen. She slipped between two men in deep conversation about economic theory and reached the small space Carla and her friends had claimed.

  She recognized Danny and Roger, both from the history department and both due to submit their theses at the same time as Ardeth; Richard, who’d quit after his Masters and found a job with some obscure government agency; and Conrad, who’d forsaken the University of Toronto for the wilds of a suburban university for his Ph.D.

  “Ardy, you made it!” Carla exclaimed and reached out to hug her. Ardeth returned the embrace briefly and then drew back to smile into the other woman’s face.

  “Of course I did. Did you think I’d miss this?”

  “Well, the way Roger tells it, you’ve had your nose so close to the grindstone you’ll end up needing plastic surgery.” She didn’t mention the other reason for expecting Ardeth’s absence; no one did.

  “Roger exaggerates,” she said with a quick glance at the fair-haired man lounging against the wall. And he usually exaggerates much more graphically, Ardeth thought. It’s not the grindstone he says my nose is up against. “I wouldn’t have missed this, and I imagine we’re all pretty busy now.”

  “How is the world of ‘Public Transportation and Private Ownership in Toronto: 1865 to 1900’?” Conrad asked. “Or maybe we shouldn’t ask each other these things.”

  “‘Public Transportation and Private Ownership’ is fine, and I trust ‘Political Doctrine in Nineteenth Century Russia’ is equally well. And I agree, let’s try to make theses a forbidden topic for this evening.”

  “That leaves us with politics and religion then,” Richard observed. “Has anyone changed parties or gods lately?”

  “If those are the only topics left, I’m planning to change locale right now. Con, pass me another beer and we ladies will leave you gentlemen to debate who’s right—or left,” Carla said firmly. Con flipped her the beer can, which she caught two-handed. She took Ardeth’s arm and steered her out of the kitchen.

  “How are you doing?” she asked carefully.

  “I’m fine Carla.”

  “Peter almost didn’t have this party . . . after what happened to Tony. Lise talked him into it.”

  “I’m glad she did. We can’t pretend our lives are all going to stop because Tony’s dead. It was over between us anyway, you know that.”

  “Yeah, I know. So, now that that’s out of the way, down that wine, girl, and we’ll try to find someone here who isn’t talking shop.” Ardeth laughed, swallowed down enough wine to make her scalp tingle a little, and let Carla lead her through the crowd.

  The party progressed as parties do, with Ardeth shifting among the knots of people, joining and abandoning conversations to the backdrop of music, smoke and the never-voiced fear of being left standing alone in the centre of the crowd.

  Later, momentarily unoccupied, she glanced around the room and thought that Peter was right. It did feel like the end of the world. It was almost April, and time for exams or theses or dissertations; the end had come for some of them of the long scholastic grind. Conversations seemed to turn inevitably to the future—jobs, yet more degrees (some in an attempt to avoid option one), marriage, going home to replenish drained finances before facing the world.

  And no matter what she or Carla said, none of them could really forget Tony’s death. Two weeks ago most of them had been together at another party. On the way home that night, something had happened to Tony. Death by misadventure, the police ruled: too much cocaine and a long fall from the bridge on St. Clair Avenue. Ardeth remembered hearing the news on the radio the next morning, seeing the television reports with the bland, blonde reporter speaking in measured tones in front of the body-bag being carried up the edge of the ravine. Then the funeral, which they all attended, shocked for the moment from their invulnerability, from the comfortable belief that it couldn’t happen to them. And though it was true that she and Tony had broken up six months earlier, their one-year relationship having died in slow, frozen inches, it was not true that there was no grief inside her.

  All of which was why, she supposed, she was drinking far too much wine tonight. She dreaded the future as much as any of them. She’d tried to avoid thinking about what she would do when her thesis was done and the letters Ph.D. firmly affixed to her name. Teaching positions were scarce and the competition fierce. She had no illusions of finding any great need for her particular field of study in the world outside academia.

  At times like this, I wish I could pass out on the floor, she thought, taking another sip of wine, knowing that she wouldn’t. And that she wouldn’t share the joints already
being passed around the room. Too practical, too conventional or just too scared—whatever the reason, she’d never been able to take any of the oblivions the world so considerately offered. Your problem, my girl, she said to her distant reflection, is that you think too much. Somewhere in the shadows of her mind, in the place she carefully locked away everything that did not fit into her well-ordered world, she felt the dark shiftings of dreams, of unarticulated longing for something that could make her stop, just once, thinking so much. Ardeth shivered and lifted her wine to her lips. It was only pretend-oblivion, but it was better than the promise of darkness she had felt beckoning in her mind. Then someone bumped into her, and the noisy reality of the party closed in again, dragging her back into a too-long conversation about the Byzantine power plays currently being enacted in the Department of Medieval Studies.

  Much later in the evening, in retreat from the smoke and heat of the house, she ended up sitting on the battered couch set out on the narrow balcony of the upper floor. The party had spilled out onto the back lawn and she listened idly to the conversations drifting up from beneath the oak trees.

  At the sound of the door opening behind her, she twisted around to see Conrad stepping through the narrow doorway. “Care for some company?”

  “Yes. Have a seat. No one else seems to have remembered how to get out here yet.” He settled onto the couch, offered her his beer bottle, which she declined in favour of another sip from the wineglass resting on the railing in front of her.

  “How’s it been going?” Conrad asked causally, and Ardeth laughed.

  “If one more person asks me that in that careful tone of voice. . . .” She sighed, shook her head slightly. “I’m fine, Con, honestly. But everyone seems to think I should be wearing black and a suitably tragic air. I hear my students whisper about it all the time. I’m sorry Tony’s dead, but I’m not exactly planning to play Queen Victoria to his Albert over this.”