Night Runner (10 page)

I hadn't been swimming since my father died. I could sort of picture how the whole thing was supposed to work, but making it happen was another matter. The water tossed me back up and I managed to sneak another breath, but a half second later I was
under again. Then I banged my shins against a rock and lost all my air. I tried rolling onto my back so I could keep my face above the surface, but the current made it too difficult. My head came up, slipped under again, and I took in a mouthful of water. The next time I made it up for air, a wave splashed into my face. By this time I was coughing like a pack-a-day smoker. My arms were flailing and I kicked with both legs. I might just as well have had rocks in my pockets.

I heard a muffled voice off to my right. Someone was shouting at me. With all the noise of the river, it sounded like it was coming from twenty miles away. I took a quick look around for the vampire, but with the water in my eyes I couldn't make anything out.

“Stand up,” the voice shouted. “STAND UP!”

It sounded like the vampire, but I couldn't be sure. It also sounded like good advice. I put a leg down and touched bottom. The water was about four feet deep, shallow enough to touch, but deep enough that the strong current pushing at my back made it impossible to stand in place. I got knocked off balance right away, but I just put my other leg down and so managed to keep my head above water.

Eventually I got the hang of it, bounding from leg to leg as I drifted with the current. I must have looked like those guys who landed on the moon, springing up and down like I didn't weigh a thing. The only difference, aside from the fact that I wasn't in outer space, was that I couldn't see where I was stepping. There were rocks on the bottom and so I lost my footing a few times and wound up swallowing more water. But with the current pushing me so quickly, I covered a lot of ground. Enough that I could no longer hear or see any signs of the police.

I spied the vampire off to my right. He was about a hundred feet away, moving towards the shore, which was steep and high and covered in trees. From the street, he'd be pretty much invisible. I followed as best I could. By this time, I'd swallowed half the Otonabee and could see the edge of Little Lake up ahead. In a relatively short
time, we'd managed to travel back up Water Street, past the police station and most of the downtown. The vampire waved me over, and as I approached, the water got shallower and shallower, so my moon-jumping changed rather abruptly into normal walking. Or at least normal stumbling.

“We should keep moving,” the vampire said. “They'll have the dogs out soon.”

“Where are we going?”

He nodded over his shoulder. “I want to get to the far side of the river,” he explained. “It's a bit ironic, really.” And he looked at me as though he'd just told one of the funniest jokes in the history of comedy.

“I don't get it.”

“Don't you read vampire books or watch the movies? We aren't supposed to be able to cross running water. It's a bunch of baloney, but in this case, it's sadly true.”

I still didn't get it. And I wasn't keen on the idea of leaving our hiding spot. But another minute with this kook was going to be the death of me. I was tired. What I wanted most was to collapse into a warm bed. Even a coffin would have done.

“Well, this is no good,” he said at last. “There's a place we can hide on the far side of the river, but we can't get across this way, and we're still too close to the heat.” He peered over his shoulder again, as though expecting the police to appear any second. Then he looked me over and smiled. “You all right?”

I nodded, shivering. “Who
are
you?” I asked.

“I have had many names,” he said, pulling his tattered overcoat up around his face so that it looked like a cape. He spoke with only his eyes and matted hair showing. “But you may call me . . .
John
.”

If this was supposed to be a joke, I didn't get it.

“John Entwistle.” He paused, like this was supposed to mean something to me. “You know, like the bass player from The Who.”

“Who are The Who?”

“
Who are The Who
? You gotta be joking! Rock band. Late '60s early '70s.”

I still didn't get it.

He started shaking his head again, then he looked up at the sky. A sliver of moon shone through the thin layer of clouds overhead. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Man, time moves quickly.”

I'd heard other people say that, too. I'd noticed they were never young.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Six and a half.” I thought he would say more, but he didn't. At least not right away. He kept his face to the sky. His eyes were closed. It was like he was soaking up the starlight. Then he fixed me with a steady stare. “When you're as old as I am, boy, you start counting by the century.”

That took a few seconds to register. Six and a half centuries. Six hundred and fifty years old?

“You're joking.” I said.

Mr. Entwistle reached into his coat and pulled out a silver flask. It had a bullet stuck to it.

“Of course I'm joking. I'm really only thirty. I've just lived hard.”

At this point, I really didn't know what to believe.

He pried the bullet lose and tossed it into the river. Then he uncapped the flask and held it up. “To our escape,” he said. He took a swig and offered it to me. I accepted, but as soon as I got it near my mouth, my whole system recoiled.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

“I thought it was blood!”

He shook his head. “No. There's the good stuff. And then there's the
good stuff
. I guess you're a little young for Crown Royale.” He took the flask back, put down another swig, then tucked it away.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

“Do what?”

“Get up after being shot so many times? That first night at the hospital, they shot you about twenty times. There was blood everywhere.”

“The blood wasn't mine,” he said. “I'd stuffed my coat with Red Cross bags, thinking you'd be hungry.”

As soon as he said this, I remembered something I'd forgotten.

“I left that box of blood in the car,” I said.

“That swill. Leave it. You'll never reach your potential drinking that crap. I almost feel sorry for the fish.”

I'd never had anything else. “I don't want to kill anyone,” I said.

“You won't have to. There are other ways of getting blood. I'll show you. Stick with me and you'll be fine.”

I looked him over. He was a disaster. Still, he wasn't freaked out like he had been the night he remodelled the Nicholls Ward. It made me wonder what had spooked him so badly.

“Why did you steal that motorcycle?” I asked.

He scratched at his stubble and thought for a second or two. “I was in a bad headspace. But that was two days ago. I'm better now, as you can see.”

I could see that I needed to get in touch with my uncle, or I was probably going to end up in jail, or worse.

“Do you have a cellphone?” I asked.

He laughed. “Yeah, I left it in my Porsche. Now we should get going. The cops are after us. And someone else is after you. Another vampire. A powerful one. With some dangerous friends.” He looked at me closely. I wondered if he was testing me to see how much I knew already.

“The Baron Vrolok,” I said. “And the Fallen.”

Mr. Entwistle raised his eyebrows and nodded slowly. “The Fallen. Interesting term. I like it. It fits. But as for Vrolok, well, we can talk about him later. For now, we need to disappear. And I know just the
place.” He nodded towards the heart of the city and reached out with a hand to help me up the bank. “Come along, boy. Time for your first lesson.”

He raised his upper lip just enough on one side to reveal the long canine tooth underneath, then he bounded off. I did my best to follow. If this was my first lesson, at least it was about something I understood. Running.

 

 

That night we were like a pair of wolves. Fast. Tireless. The hours drifted by. We dodged through backyards. Over fences and hedges. Across the rooftops of downtown apartments and single-storey row houses. Mr. Entwistle was light on his feet. Nearly invisible. And he didn't really run like other people. He bounded. He loped. Half the time I couldn't see him or hear him. I think he must have been testing me to see if I could keep up.

I couldn't.

But whenever I lost track of him for more than a few seconds, he'd appear on a rooftop overhead or leap out of the darkness so that our chase could continue. He stuck to the shadows, and I followed. Up and down fire escapes. Into trees. Along the edges of buildings and rows of parked cars. I felt alive. And, as weird as this will sound, I felt as if I was somehow part of the night. That my body was just a shadow, an extension of the darkness.

After we'd put a few miles behind us, Mr. Entwistle began to speak.

“You've lived a half life,” he said. “Like a caged animal, alive but not free. But you feel differently now, don't you, boy?”

I nodded. I did feel different. Excited. Uncertain. I was being hunted by another vampire, my father's killer. And his minions. An avalanche of trouble was headed my way, but I was strangely unafraid.

It was true that I had no idea what was going to happen to me, but there are many kinds of uncertainty, and uncertainty about the future is just one of them. There is also the uncertainty of where you fit in. Where you belong. Until my escape with Mr. Entwistle, I never felt as though I really belonged anywhere. My parents were dead. I had no brothers or sisters. No home of my own. And as much as I loved Nurse Ophelia, I certainly didn't belong in a mental ward. But those days were over. At that moment, I knew my place. I knew what I was. The problems that had made my life miserable back at the ward—my reaction to the sun, my food trouble, my transfusions, my bouts of anger, the need to be alone—these things had always been shrouded in mystery, because no one could explain why I was like this, why I was so different. I'd been waiting for an answer. For a cure. Well, the waiting was over. I was a vampire. A creature of the night. Inhuman. Beyond human. Stronger. Faster. Tougher. And the certainty of this gave me a profound confidence. I was finally where I belonged. In the darkness.

“To run, to hunt with another vampire, is to realize your true self,” Mr. Entwistle said. “You realize how you were meant to be.” He stopped to sniff the air, then glanced at me from the corner of his eye. “But be cautious. It is at moments like these that your desire to kill will be strongest.” He turned and scrambled over a tall wooden fence.

We were in the old west end, a neighbourhood of century-old homes. I can always tell when I'm running in an older neighbourhood. The houses all have wide porches, whose whole point seems to be to welcome guests to the front door. It's way different in the new areas of town, where the houses are all the same and the garages jump out at you like the cars are more important than the people. Whenever I imagined living a normal life, in a normal home, it looked a lot like the one in front of me. It was set well back from the street on a large lot with huge trees all around.
And even though it was dark and a bit rundown, it had a strangely inviting feel.

“Are you ready?”

I didn't know why Mr. Entwhistle was asking me this, but I said okay anyway.

“Well then, let's go.” And he started up the lane.

W
hile I walked beside Mr. Entwistle, our feet scuffing on the paving stones, the world of the night opened up like the pages of a book. Something—probably a cat or a squirrel—was moving quietly through the hedge off to our right. Bats hunted overhead. I could even hear the beating of moth wings; dozens were circling under the street lamp behind us. I sniffed at the air and noticed a faint trace of wine.

“Whose house is this?” I asked.

Mr. Entwistle laughed. “Mine.”

He turned towards a carport on the far side of the house. There was a Porsche underneath. A cherry-red convertible. He took out a set of keys, unlocked the door and reached inside. When he resurfaced, he was holding a cellphone to his ear.

“Just need to check my messages.”

I had to smile. I guess he wasn't such a disaster after all.

He led me up onto the porch, then through the front door and into the hall. I was curious to see what he'd have stored away in a house so old, so I was surprised to discover that it was nearly empty. No shelves or carpets or pictures or lamps. Only the living room had any furniture—just two wooden chairs that sat near the fireplace. There was a small, round table between them with a half-empty glass of wine on it. An overturned bottle was lying on the floor, accounting for the smell I'd detected on the walk.

“I must have been in a hurry,” Mr. Entwistle said. “Never leave a glass half full.”