And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) (27 page)

"They brought all my stuff here without even going through it," she told him. "These are the police reports, gossip, names of the people he obviously owns, a list of his properties in the city here." She put the folder on the coffee table and backed away slowly. He reached over and picked it up.

"This'll be a big help," he told her seriously. "Look, I know I'm making you uncomfortable, so I'll go now. But-if it's possible to get this jewel, I'll get it. Keep your hopes up. We're too close to the end to fail now!"

"Yes, we'll get the jewel, Mac," she replied softly, "but with how much blood on it?
That
is the prob-lem."

2

Finding his coffin proved to be easy. As sunup neared, he felt the pull of the burial place as if some great magnet were turned on and he were clad in an iron suit. It was in an alcove of a drainage pipe, up out of the way of the muck. He was satisfied with the location; it was unlikely his coffin would be dis-covered during the few days left.

He slept deeply and, as far as he could tell, dream-lessly.

He awoke feeling hungry as hell. He crawled out of the drain alcove, not certain what he was going to do next but knowing that he needed food badly-and re-membering just what that food was.

To his surprise he was not alone in the canal. There was a pretty young woman in a fashionable dress and a small man attired, as he was, in a conventional suit and tie. They looked ordinary, as did he; no fancy opera clothes and cape. He could see why the Vampire Squad might have its work cut out for it in figur-ing out who was who.

He watched, fascinated despite his hunger, as the woman turned herself into a wolf and loped off. The man, however, spotted him and gave a look of sur-prise. He walked over to Mac, who was still wondering what the hell to do.

"Hey! Aren't you Mac Walters?" the other vampire asked him.

Mac wasn't just surprised, he was stunned. "Uh-…yeah," he managed.

"I'll be damned," the man said, then added, "No, I already
am
that. Wow! I figured you'd have to get out of Denver-too many people know your face-but I never expected to find you in Chicago!" He put out his hand and Mac shook it.

"Uh-excuse me, but-should I know you?" he asked sheepishly.

The other vampire chuckled. "Oh, my! No! Of course not! But, you see, back at Super Bowl time I was much better situated with a nice house and all. Morey Kurtz was a real estate salesman in life, and, as luck would have it, he managed to salt away a lot in Swiss bank accounts before he passed away. Had a nice block of houses mostly for folks in our condition over on the South Side. He hired a crystal-ball man to rerun the game for us. We all knew you'd become one of us.

Poor Morey-the Vamp Squad finally got him, tipped by the property-tax assessor."

The man was rambling and more than a little odd, but then again, anybody in this situation might be ex-pected to be worse than that, Mac decided. He remembered his Dracula films. And the man might be useful.

"I-I've had some real memory problems since-since I died," Mac told him lamely. "Can you tell me what you're talking about? Why I became a vampire?"

The man moved his head in an understanding man-ner. "That's too bad, but don't be upset by the mem-ory thing. Happens to the best of us. Well, you remember you ran for one hundred and twenty-two yards against Dallas and caught for fifty more. There you were in L.A.-equal crowd for and against you. When you didn't get up early in the fourth quarter af-ter Billy Thompson gage you that hit, everybody seemed to feel you were a goner-only the Denver fans prayed that you'd live and the Dallas fans hoped you'd croak, seeing as how you were responsi-ble for them goin'

down the tubes. The mixture of the two wills got you when you croaked on the field. They were, freakishly, about exactly even, as I figure it-so both sides got their wish."

The current situation was a little unsettling, but Mac remembered what Jill had told him-magic was mostly willpower, the relative strength of the mind-a modified version of Abaddon's training ground, on a smaller level of individual accomplishment, of course. Here conflicting mass wills for him to live or die had caused him to become one of the living dead.

He sighed, surprised he seemed to breathe at all, and eyed the little man again. "Well, I'm new to this vampire business and, like I said, a little fuzzy on it. What do we do and how do we do it?"

The vampire shrugged. "The usual. Oh, some get into this big power trip and turn people into vampire slaves and like that, but the cops are pretty good at gettin' those nuts. Me, I figure I make the best of a bad situation. I'm lucky-like you, I wasn't made by any other vampire, so I have nobody to boss me around. I get enough blood to keep me goin'-you got to do it, it's like opium-so I find several victims and take maybe a pint from each. Doesn't hurt them and helps me, it only takes a little longer. Then I relax, maybe go to an all-night games arcade, play a lit-tle solitaire, or find a good crap game someplace. Mostly I just take it easy and enjoy what little I can of life. If it gets hot I'll move, maybe someday go to a resort area or somethin'."

"These victims of yours-they let you take their blood?" Mac asked incredulously.

The man laughed. "Oh, hell, no! All you need is eye contact and you got 'em hypnotized-women and kids are the easiest for men. Easy as fallin' off a log.

Only don't get no pattern or use the same area night after night, or the Vamp Squad will get you."

"That woman-she turned into a wolf. Can we?" Mac prodded.

"Oh, sure," the man told him. "Just will it. Also a cloud of white smoke or a bat. Handy sometimes. Just watch out that nobody tracks you back here, stay away from crosses if you were a Christian, or a Star of David or Seal of Solomon if you were Jewish, and remember that running water will drown you. Also, you'll find it hard to enter private dwellings if you aren't invited-there are ways around it, like hypno-tizing somebody near a window to invite you in, but it's tough and usually a bother." He turned and looked out at the tall buildings going off in all directions. "Hell, in a city this size there are always a lot of folks out late, not just the fools but the ones who work nights, too. Take it easy, don't draw attention, cover your ass, and you'll be fine."

Mac nodded, still bewildered and numbed by all this, and thanked the little man. As they parted he called back, "Hey! Tell me something! If you weren't made by another vampire, you must've had an experi-ence similar to mine-an equal number of people lov-ing you and hating you. What sort of work did you do?"

The man laughed bitterly. "How fickle is fame far from home," he mumbled. "Why, man, I was once the Mayor of Philadelphia!"

Vampirism was definitely not common, and people often ignored its perils as they did other perils of the city at night. Just as in Mac's own world people insisted on waiting alone on dark street corners, hitch-hiking on lonely roads, and walking through mugger-infested parks, so, too, did the citizens of Chicago-a small percentage of them, anyway-brave the added risk of the vampire.

He had to allow himself the luxury of this one night, even if time were pressing terribly. He found, in fact, that his craving for blood became overpowering, and he finally encountered a victim without even thinking about it, held her in a hypnotic grip that came to him almost completely without effort, and drank some of her blood without being in the least repelled by it.

He was conscientious, though, as the little man had in-structed him. He took only enough, never too much, and though his victims fainted afterward, he always left them in as comfortable and unexposed positions as possible and always with a strong pulse.

The blood had an odd effect on him, too. The more he drank, the stronger he seemed to be, the headier and braver he became. It was more than food, it was a mild stimulant and very mild intoxicant, and he resolved to watch his consumption in the future. Overconfidence could lead to carelessness, and care-lessness killed. He would be dealing with people who would know the protections and would guard themselves, particularly those in the upper echelons who would know where a Mafia don would keep a demon.

He also practiced the hypnosis and transformation tricks until he could perform them automatically and risked taking on a couple of men. One he could not control and had to depend on his incredible superhuman strength and transformation to get away; a sec-ond man was taken almost as easily as the women victims. Again it was a matter of emotion and willpower.

By sunup he was certain he had it all down pat, at least as much as he could master in the limited time allowed him. He also considered the parallels in his own life between this world and his own. In his own world he had quit rather than play that last season, even though he had felt that his team would go to the Super Bowl and be winners-an experience denied him. He had been smart and quit. His counterpart had given in to the temptation and died in that game. He wondered about that. His own world's Dallas had its own Billy Thompson. If he had played ...

The thought was still in his mind when sunrise brought sleep.

3

Jill McCulloch was impressed. They rode to the station in a huge and ornate coach seemingly fit for the King of England and pulled by a team of eight Clydesdale-like horses. With her was Constanza, his ever-present bodyguards, and O'Malley, who looked like a typical Irish, politician and was anything but.

Even master sorcerers in this world wore three-button suits and carefully knotted ties.

About the only thing that betrayed O'Malley's dumb-boxer impression was his eyes-steely blue-gray, hard, and alive with a tremendous intellect that seemed to see inside you. They were cold eyes, too, the eyes of a man who knows he is superior to the bulk of the human race and cares about them about as much as the exterminator cares about house flies. She'd asked him why he bothered to be in the employ of Constanza or of anyone, for that matter, and he'd just smiled and replied, "You see, miss, I have everything I need in the material world-I just love my craft, and as I lack ambition in worldly matters, it is people like Mr. Constanza who give me the chal-lenges to practice it."

She had been surprised when she'd first discovered that this world had steam engines and steam trains. They looked like something out of the 1880s, and even then their boilers seemed too bloated and their wheels of odd size and even more unusual distribution, but they were close to what the old western movies showed for all that. Now, as the coach pulled into Union Station and moved to a private entrance for first-class passengers, the incongruity of these engines in an otherwise nontechnological society struck her full on.

"I can't understand, if you have these, why you haven't gotten to electricity or at least to gas lighting for the cities," she remarked to Constanza, who knew of her other-worldly origin from the interrogations.

He smiled. "Well, you see, things are different here," he explained. Èlectricity is used in small doses, yes, for very minor things. But if this society were dependent on electricity, any good magician could disrupt its flow either specifically or generally. A society dependent on power so easily controlled by elemental spirits would be a captive one. As for the gas-" he sighed "-it's like most petroleum in the ground. The gnomes simply will not permit much drilling, let alone the pipelines necessary to bring it out. Most of it is in the strongholds to the west, too, and southwest, where the Indians have millennia-old alliances with the gnomes. Maybe someday we'll be able to compromise, but not now."

She thought that there was an awful lot she still didn't know about this world and probably never would and dismissed it.

They emerged from the carriage and walked into the station, the bodyguards fanning out and clearing the way, even opening doors for them. Constanza had a private car waiting at the end of the train and they boarded. Beyond, on the platform, large groups of men and women in Victorian modes of dress were boarding the regular cars as well. Some glanced back to the opulence at the rear, while newsboys ran up and down hawking papers and shouting headlines that sounded to Jill as if something like the fairy gold workers were on strike demanding AFL-CIO repre-sentation.

A minute or so after they had boarded, the train pulled out. The ride was a little shaky at the start but became much smoother once they left the railyards, much smoother than the trains of Jill's own world. They were heading west.

The private car had everything from a small bedroom to a flush toilet, plush, fur-covered seats, and even a small pool table down at one end that con-verted into a card table. A bodyguard mixed drinks from a hand-tooled leather-covered bar and brought them to Jill, Constanza, and O'Malley.

"So what happens now?" she asked them. They hadn't been very specific up to now, probably to mini-mize the risk of leaks. Constanza still hadn't found out where his rival had obtained the information on the files.

"First we head west, then southwest," Constanza told her. "We'll go off the main line at Kansas City and take the branch for Dodge, a dead end, you understand, because it's a railhead for cattle.

You'll be quite comfortable on the trip. The two cars forward are also mine-one is a dining car with a superb chef in my employ; the other, a first-class accommodations car with private bedrooms for you and Mr. O'Malley here, and quarters for my staff. From Dodge we will travel by coach and horseback to the Mexican bor-der, and there I will camp until word comes. Then it's O'Malley's turn with you, and I have only a vague notion of what he will do. From that point, though, you will be on your own."

She didn't relish the thought of being alone with O'Malley, but, as Constanza kept reminding her cheerily, she had little choice in the matter.

"This Amazon army-where is it located?" she asked them.

"Not Amazons, just women in my service," the don responded. "They will meet us along the way-or, rather, you. I wouldn't worry about it. Your role in this is quite simple and effortless."

Effortless,
she thought sourly. Perhaps. To order a mass slaughter, to make certain that every last man, woman, and child in a town and its surrounding farm land were killed, then to turn over the land to Constanza "freely and of my own will," thus regaining for him his stronghold and for her the jewel.