A Coven of Vampires (17 page)

But why me? Why should I be so lucky?

Attractive? Was I? I had never thought so. Perhaps it was because I
was
so safe: here today and gone tomorrow, with little or no chance of complications. Yes, that must be it.
If
she wasn’t simply making a fool of me. She might be just a tease—

But she wasn’t.

At 8.30 that evening I was in the bar of my hotel—had been there for an hour, careful not to drink too much, unable to eat—when the waiter came to me and said there was a call for me on the reception telephone. I hurried out to reception where the clerk discreetly excused himself and left me alone.

“Peter?” Her voice was a deep well of promise. “He’s gone. I’ve booked us a table, to dine at 9.00. Is that all right for you?”

“A table? Where?” my own voice, breathless.

“Why, up here, of course! Oh, don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe. And anyway, Nichos knows.”

“Knows?” I was taken aback, a little panicked. “What does he know?”

“That we’re dining together. In fact he suggested it. He didn’t want me to eat alone—and since this is your last night….”

“I’ll get a taxi right away,” I told her.

“Good. I look forward to…seeing you. I shall be in the bar.”

I replaced the telephone in its cradle, wondering if she always took an aperitif before the main course….

• • •

I had smartened myself up. That is to say, I was immaculate. Black bowtie, white evening jacket (courtesy of C & A), black trousers and a lightly frilled white shirt, the only one I had ever owned. But I might have known that my appearance would never match up to hers. It seemed that everything she did was just perfectly right. I could only hope that that meant literally everything.

But in her black lace evening gown with its plunging neckline, short wide sleeves and delicate silver embroidery, she was stunning. Sitting with her in the bar, sipping our drinks—for me a large whisky and for her a tall Cinzano—I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Twice I reached out for her hand and twice she drew back from me.

“Discreet they may well be,” she said, letting her oval green eyes flicker towards the bar, where guests stood and chatted, and back to me, “but there’s really no need to give them occasion to gossip.”

“I’m sorry. Adrienne,” I told her, my voice husky and close to trembling, “but—”

“How is it,” she demurely cut me off, “that a good-looking man like you is—how do you say it?—‘going short?’ ”

I sat back, chuckled. “That’s a rather unladylike expres sion,” I told her.

“Oh? And what I’ve planned for tonight is ladylike?” 

My voice went huskier still. “Just what is your plan?” 

“While we eat,” she answered, her voice low, “I shall tell you.” At which point a waiter loomed, napkin over his arm, inviting us to accompany him to the dining room.

• • •

Adrienne’s portions were tiny, mine huge. She sipped a slender, light white wine, I gulped blocky rich red from a glass the waiter couldn’t seem to leave alone. Mercifully I was hungry—I hadn’t eaten all day—else that meal must surely have bloated me out. And all of it ordered in advance, the very best in quality cuisine.

“This,” she eventually said, handing me her key, “fits the door of our suite.” We were sitting back, enjoying liqueurs and cigarettes. “The rooms are on the ground floor. Tonight you enter through the door, tomorrow morning you leave via the window. A slow walk down to the seafront will refresh you. How is that for a plan?”

“Unbelievable!”

“You don’t believe it?”

“Not my good fortune, no.”

“Shall we say that we both have our needs?”

“I think,” I said, “that I may be falling in love with you. What if I don’t wish to leave in the morning?”

She shrugged, smiled, said: “Who knows what tomorrow may bring?”

How could I ever have thought of her simply as another girl? Or even an ordinary young woman? Girl she certainly was, woman, too, but so…
knowing
!
Beautiful as a princess and knowing as a whore.

If Mario’s old myths and legends were reality, and if Nichos Karpethes were really Necros, then he’d surely picked the right companion. No man born could ever have resisted Adrienne, of that I was quite certain. These thoughts were in my mind—but dimly, at the back of my mind—as I left her smoking in the dining-room and followed her directions to the suite of rooms at the rear of the hotel. In the front of my mind were other thoughts, much more vivid and completely erotic.

I found the suite, entered, left the door slightly ajar behind me.

The thing about an Italian room is its size. An entire suite of rooms is vast. As it happened, I was only interested in one room, and Adrienne had obligingly left the door to that one open.

I was sweating. And yet…I shivered.

Adrienne had said fifteen minutes, time enough for her to smoke another cigarette and finish her drink. Then she would come to me. By now the entire staff of the hotel probably knew I was in here, but this was Italy.

5.

I shivered again. Excitement? Probably.

I threw off my clothes, found my way to the bathroom, took the quickest shower of my life. Drying myself off, I padded back to the bedroom.

Between the main bedroom and the bathroom a smaller door stood ajar. I froze as I reached it, my senses suddenly alert, my ears seeming to stretch themselves into vast receivers to pick up any slightest sound. For there had been a sound. I was sure of it, from that room….

A scratching? A rustle? A whisper? I couldn’t say. But a sound, anyway.

Adrienne would be coming soon. Standing outside that door I slowly recommenced towelling myself dry. My naked feet were still firmly rooted, but my hands automatically worked with the towel. It was nerves, only nerves. There had been no sound, or at most only the night breeze off the sea, whispering in through an open window.

I stopped towelling, took another step towards the main bedroom, heard the sound again. A small, choking rasp. A tiny gasping for air.

Karpethes? What the hell was going on?

I shivered violently, my suddenly chill flesh shuddering in an uncontrollable spasm. But…I forced myself to action, returned to the main bedroom, quickly dressed (with the exception of my tie and jacket) and crept back to the small room.

Adrienne must be on her way to me even now. She mustn’t find me poking my nose into things, like a suspicious kid. I must kill off this silly feeling that had my skin crawling. Not that an attack of nerves was unnatural in the circumstances, on the contrary, but I wasn’t about to let it spoil the night. I pushed open the door of the room, entered into darkness, found the light switch. Then—

I held my breath, flipped the switch.

The room was only half as big as the others. It contained a small single bed, a bedside table, a wardrobe. Nothing more, or at least nothing immediately apparent to my wildly darting eyes. My heart, which was racing, slowed and began to settle towards a steadier beat. The window was open, external shutters closed—but small night sounds were finding their way in through the louvers. The distant sounds of traffic, the toot of horns—holiday sounds from below.

I breathed deeply and gratefully, and saw something projecting from beneath the pillow on the bed. A corner of card or of dark leather, like a wallet or—

Or a passport!

A Greek passport, Karpethes’, when I opened it. But how could it be? The man in the photograph was young, no older than me. His birth date proved it. But there was his name: Nichos Karpethes. Printed in Greek, of course, but still plain enough. His son?

Puzzling over the passport had served to distract me. My nerves had steadied up. I tossed the passport down, frowned at it where it lay upon the bed, breathed deeply once more…then froze solid!

A scratching, a hissing, a dry grunting—from the ward robe.

Mice? Or did I in fact smell a rat?

Even as the short hairs bristled on the back of my neck I knew anger. There were too many unexplained things here. Too much I didn’t understand. And what was it I feared? Old Mario’s myths and legends? No, for in my experience the Italians are notorious for getting things wrong. Oh, yes, notorious….

I reached out, turned the wardrobe’s doorknob, yanked the doors open.

At first I saw nothing of any importance or significance. My eyes didn’t know what they sought. Shoes, patent leather, two pairs, stood side by side below. Tiny suits, no bigger than boys’ sizes, hung above on steel hangers. And—my God, my God—a waistcoat!

I backed out of that little room on rubber legs, with the silence of the suite shrieking all about me, my eyes bulging, my jaw hanging slack—

“Peter?”

She came in through the suite’s main door, came floating towards me, eager, smiling, her green eyes blazing. Then blazing their suspicion, their anger, as they saw my condition. “Peter!”

I lurched away as her hands reached for me, those hands I had never yet touched, which had never touched me. Then I was into the main bedroom, snatching my tie and jacket from the bed, (don’t ask me why) and out of the window, yelling some inarticulate, choking thing at her and lashing out frenziedly with my foot as she reached after me. Her eyes were bubbling green hells.
“Peter?”

Her fingers closed on my forearm, bands of steel contain ing a fierce, hungry heat. And strong as two men, she began to lift me back into her lair!

I put my feet against the wall, kicked, came free and crashed backwards into shrubbery. Then up on my feet, gasping for air, running, tumbling, crashing into the night. Down madly tilting slopes, through black chasms of mountain pine with the Mediterranean stars winking overhead, and the beckoning, friendly lights of the village seen occasionally below….

In the morning, looking up at the way I had descended and remembering the nightmare of my panic-flight, I counted myself lucky to have survived it. The place was precipitous. In the end I
had
fallen, but only for a short distance. All in utter darkness, and my head striking something hard. But….

I did survive. Survived both Adrienne and my flight from her.

Waking with the dawn, stiff and bruised and with a massive bump on my forehead, I staggered back to my hotel, locked the door behind me—then sat there trembling and moaning until it was time for the coach.

Weak? Maybe I was, maybe I am.

But on my way into Geneva, with people round me and the sun hot through the coach’s windows. I could think again. I could roll up my sleeve and examine that claw mark of four slim fingers and a thumb, branded white into my suntanned flesh, where hair would never grow again on skin sere and wrinkled.

And seeing those marks I could also remember the wardrobe and the waistcoat—and what the waistcoat contained.

That tiny puppet of a man, alive still but barely, his stick-arms dangling through the waistcoat’s arm holes, his baby’s head projecting, its chin supported by the tightly buttoned waistcoat’s breast. And the large bulldog clip over the hanger’s bar, its teeth fastened in the loose, wrinkled skin of his walnut head, holding it up. And his skinny little legs dangling, twig-things twitching there; and his pleading, pleading eyes!

But eyes are something I mustn’t dwell upon.

And green is a colour I can no longer bear….

THE THING FROM THE BLASTED HEATH

That which I once boasted of as being the finest collection of morbid and macabre curiosities outside of the British Museum, is no more—and still I am unable to sleep. When night’s furtive shadow steals over the moors, I lock and bolt my door to peer fearfully through my window at that spot in the garden which glows faintly, with its own inexplicable light, and about which the freshly grown grass is yellow and withered. Though I constantly put down seeds and crumbs no bird ever ventures into my garden, and without even the bees to visit them my fruit trees are barren and dying. No more will Old Cartwright come to my house of an evening to chat in the drowsy firelight or to share with me his home-pressed wines; for Old Cartwright is dead.

I have written of it to my friend in New England, he who sent me the shrub from the blasted heath, warning him never to venture again where once he went for me lest he share a similar fate. 

From the moment I first read of the blasted heath I knew I could never rest until I had something of it in my collection. I found myself a pen-friend in New England, developed a strong friendship with him and then, when by various means I had made him beholden to me, I sent him to do my bidding at the blasted heath. The area is a reservoir now, in a valley west of witch-haunted Arkham, but before men flooded that grey desolation the heath lay like a great diseased sore in the woods and fields. It had not always been so. Before the coming of the fine grey dust the place had been a fertile valley, with orchards and wildlife in plenty—but that was all before the strange meteorite. Disease had followed the meteorite and after that had come the dust. Many and varied are the weird tales to come filtering out of that area, and fiction or superstition though they may or may not be the fact remains that men will not drink the water of that reservoir. It is tainted by a poison unknown to science which brings madness, delirium and a lingering, crumbling death. The entire valley has been closed off with barbed-wire fences and warning notices stand thick around its perimeter.