On a Darkling Plain Read online

  “Ten miles outside An Tuc,” said one of the other actors. Roger frowned as though perplexed and then, suddenly, sneered. His fangs began to lengthen.

  With his hypersensitive hearing, Elliott heard the prompter stationed in the prompt box at the front of the stage whisper Roger’s next line: “Shit. No way am I walking that far. Where can I hire a car?”

  With one violent motion, Roger tore the camera from around his neck, breaking the sturdy leather strap in the process, and hurled it into the concealed opening of the prompt box. Elliott heard the device shatter and the prompter’s body thump to the floor.

  Roger’s fellow actors goggled at him in horror. The audience sat in stunned silence for a moment. Then they murmured and leaned forward, peering with heightened interest, as if they’d decided that Roger’s behavior, however aberrant it seemed, must be a part of the show.

  “Bastards,” the prince snarled to the peasants. “Trying to upstage me. Trying to ruin my reputation.”

  One of the actors pivoted toward stage left and gestured frantically. Elliott assumed that the performer was signalling to someone to lower the curtain. It didn’t come down. Perhaps the stagehands w'ere frozen in dismay.

  “And you,” slurred Roger as, swaying, he rounded on the audience. “You think you’re bloodsucking little gods, don’t you? The lords of creation. Well, I say you’re corpses. Vermin. A pack of mosquitoes and fleas.”

  Shocked, the thin, white faces of the spectators gaped up at him. Such insults were egregiously offensive and a gross breach of the etiquette proper to any Elysium whether a part of the script or not, although, somewhere in the darkened hall, a single thick-skinned Kindred was chuckling appreciatively.

  “Want some vitae, little fleas?” Roger mumbled, his long ivory fangs extending fully. “Of course you do.” Lifting his bare right forearm to his mouth, he scored his flesh from elbow to knuckles. The coppery aroma of Kindred vitae, even sweeter and more enticing than that of mortals, suffused the air. Red drops, shining like rubies in the spotlight, pattered onto the stage. The prince started to tear open his left arm.

  “No, sire, please!” cried one of the actors. The two faux Vietnamese grabbed their leader, trying to wrestle his muscular arm away from his bloodstained lips.

  Roger knocked one peasant on his butt with an elbow to the belly, then hurled the other crashing into the orchestra pit. As the first actor tried to scramble to his feet, the prince whirled and kicked him in the jaw. Bone snapped, and the performer slumped back down.

  Intending to help restrain Roger, Elliott surged to his feet. Some of the audience did the same. Voices babbled backstage.

  Turning, suddenly looking as formidable as a crazed, maimed god, Roger stared at his would-be rescuers. A spasm of unreasoning dread locked Elliott in place. Below him, vampires recoiled back down into their plushly upholstered seats.

  The Toreador prince tore open his other arm, thrust his fingers into the gaping gashes, and flicked spatters of vitae into the orchestra pit. “Go on!” he cried. “Soup’s on! Get down on your knees and lick it up!”

  No one moved.

  After a moment, Roger said, “Well, perhaps I’ve misjudged you. Maybe you’re not fleas, but maggots. In that case, have some carrion!” He put his index finger between his teeth and bit down hard, evidently intending to sever it and throw it to the crowd as well.

  Elliott wondered sickly if Roger meant to dismember or even destroy himself completely. His horror at the prospect drove the paralyzing awe out of his mind. Moving faster and more nimbly than any human acrobat, he scrambled onto the gilded, rococo balustrade of his box and leaped down toward the stage.

  He slammed down on the edge of the platform. The impact jolted pain through his joints and threw him to one knee, but he was all right; the fall hadn’t torn any ligaments or broken any bones. Roger spun around, snatching his bloody hand away from his mouth.

  Elliott tried to project his own unnatural charisma. “Please, take it easy,” he crooned soothingly. “I’m your friend. Your faithful childe. I want to help you.”

  Roger snarled and lunged at him.

  Elliott twisted aside, slamming his fist into Roger’s kidney as the prince blundered past. But, unlike certain other Kindred, the younger vampire only possessed the strength of an ordinary human. In his delirium, Roger didn’t even seem to feel the blow.

  Spinning, Roger kicked at Elliott’s head. Elliott ducked, then sprang forward, right into a second kick to the solar plexus. The impact threw him halfway across the stage and down onto his back. Black spots swam before his eyes.

  Christ, he thought, dazed, trying desperately to clamber to his feet, how can he move like a drunk one second and Bruce Lee the next1

  Addled with pain, Elliott never even sensed Roger approaching. But without warning, another kick smashed against the younger vampire’s temple, hurling him back down onto the stage. Roger dove on top of him and pinned him.

  Elliott struggled, but couldn’t break free. The punishment he’d taken had stolen his strength. Roger opened his jaws and lowered his head toward his opponent’s throat. Elliott realized that, despite the presence of nearly one hundred

  err'

  witnesses, despite the fact that diablerie, the practice of preying on one’s fellow vampires, was perhaps the most heinous crime an undead could commit, Roger meant to drink his blood.

  “No,” Elliott gasped, gazing imploringly into Roger’s maddened eyes. “Please. If the other elders see you do this, they won’t rest until they’ve destroyed you.”

  “To hell with them and to hell with you,” Roger replied. Overcoming Elliott’s last feeble attempt to fend him off, he plunged his canines into his childe’s neck.

  Elliott felt a stab of pain, then a wave of numbness. One part of his mind gibbered in terror, even while another part opened itself willingly to the final death, to an end to futility and sorrow. He prayed that he was about to see Mary again.

  Then several of his fellow Toreador charged onto the stage. Apparently they too had finally managed to break through the artificial cowardice Roger had implanted in their minds. They grabbed the prince and pulled him off his victim. As Roger’s fangs tore free, they ripped ragged gashes in Elliott’s throat.

  Roger struggled in the grasp of his childer for another moment, then went limp. His eyes rolled back in his head as the younger Kindred began to haul him offstage.

  Amanda, the same slender, fresh-faced cheerleader of a neonate who had assured Roger earlier that his offspring loved him, knelt beside Elliott. “Are you all right?” she asked, her eyes wide with concern.

  Feeling addled and slow, Elliott gingerly touched his wounded neck. The gashes were closing, though more slowly than if they’d been inflicted by a blade or the teeth of a natural creature. “I’ll be all right,” he managed. “Just help me up. Get me offstage.” It wasn’t prudent for him to look weak and helpless in front of his peers, either. In any case, a pride he’d half-forgotten he possessed rebelled at the prospect of further humiliation.

  The neonate lifted him to his feet and draped his arm around her shoulders, helping him toward the wings. His head swam; the theater seemed to spin around him. The audience, now convinced that what they’d witnessed had been real, maliciously rejoicing in the disaster that had overtaken the Kindred of Sarasota, began to applaud.

  ♦

  The aquarium was a four-story box of a building standing beside the Gulf of Mexico. A huge, wraparound mural of whales and porpoises, only vaguely visible in the darkness, decorated the exterior. By the time Forbes and his partner Ryan pulled up in front of the staff entrance, one of the facility employees was waiting under the light on the stoop to let them in. She was a dumpy, middle-aged woman dressed in a baggy gray sweat suit. With her short, gray-brown hair disheveled, she looked as if she’d been dragged out of bed. Given the lateness of the hour, that was no doubt precisely the case.

  The two policemen, clad in green uniforms with orange trim, climbed out
of the prowl car. Forbes, a lanky man with a straw-colored crewcut, paused for just a second to savor the cool sea breeze and the murmur of the ghost-white breakers. Ryan, a burly African-American with a neatly trimmed mustache and a broken nose, hitched up his gun belt, trying to position it comfortably over the beer gut he’d been growing for the past two years.

  “Let’s take care of this nonsense as fast as possible,” Ryan said. “We’ve had to stay past end-of-shift the last two nights. I’ll be damned if I’m going to do it again this morning.”

  “I’m with you,” Forbes said. “I’d like to get home in time to see the wife before she goes off to work. Maybe even catch her still in bed, if you get my drift.” God knew, he and Julie didn’t get nearly enough quality time together. He loved being a cop, but working his current hours was playing hell with his home life.

  The two men hurried up the sidewalk that led to the entrance. “Thank goodness you’re here,” the dumpy woman said. “I’m sure there’s nothing to this, but I was getting nervous, waiting here by myself.”

  “It would have been safer to wait in your car with the windows up and the doors locked,” Forbes said reflexively. Then, realizing that this little safety tip might spook the woman even more, he gave her a reassuring smile. “But you’re okay, so what the heck. I’m Sergeant Forbes and this is Officer Ryan.”

  “I’m Mattie Purvis,” she replied. “Mr. Bronson’s assistant. Of course I was glad to come when the police called, but I can’t imagine how there could be a dead body inside the building. How could anybody get it inside without setting off the alarms?”

  “Beats us,” said Ryan wryly. “All we know is that an anonymous caller phoned 911 and said you had a corpse on the premises. Ninety-nine chances out of a hundred it was a crank call, but we’ve got to check it out anyway. So if you could please let us in?”

  “All right,” said Mattie, lifting the jingling key ring in her hand. She unlocked three locks, then ushered the policemen through the door and into the hallway beyond.

  The corridor was far darker than the moonlit night outside. Though Forbes was as sure as Ryan that this call was bogus, for some reason a chill oozed up his spine. For a moment he nearly believed that something terrible might be waiting in the lightless rooms and passages ahead. Then Mattie threw a wall switch. Down the length of the hall, fluorescent lights pinged and flickered on, and his momentary trepidation dissolved.

  Forbes grinned sheepishly. He was a day person. He’d always hated the graveyard shift, even before he had a relationship for it to disrupt, and he guessed it was getting on his nerves again. He was glad Ryan apparently hadn’t noticed his jitters. His partner would have kidded him mercilessly.

  “Let’s get to it,” Ryan said.

  They worked their way through a series of hallways, checking cramped offices and storerooms full of janitorial supplies, bundles of promotional brochures and barrels of fish food. They didn’t find a body.

  “Let’s move on to the part of the building where the public goes,” said Forbes at length.

  Mattie conducted the cops to the atrium inside the main entrance. When she turned on the lights, Forbes saw that the floor was decorated with a tile mosaic of teeming undersea life. Similar frescoes adorned the walls. Beside the exterior door was a kiosk with books on ichthyology and bright cloisonne jewelry fashioned to resemble tropical fish on display. A map and directory had been mounted on the wall to guide patrons to the various exhibits, including Florida’s Rivers, Wonders of the Reef, and Manatee Encounter

  Mattie pointed to one of the arches along the wall. “This way?” she suggested, the statement garbled by a gaping yawn.

  Ryan shrugged. “Whatever. We’re going to have to check out every inch of the place before we’re through.”

  Mattie led them through another series of chambers. Whenever she switched the lights on, driving the darkness deeper into the building, the illumination revealed countless amberjacks, skates, eels, groupers, clowns, angels and gars, swimming sullenly back and forth in the blue-green world beyond the plate-glass walls.

  To his disgust, Forbes felt his jitters creeping back. His mouth was dry and his stomach, queasy. Even though he knew how stupid it was, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the fish behind the glass were staring at him. Or perhaps it was some presence lurking in the shadows that always hovered ahead of the searchers, no matter how many lights Mattie turned on.

  Snap out of it! he silently ordered himself. But the uneasiness didn’t go away.

  He and his companions entered yet another room. It was no different from the one they’d just exited — merely an octagonal space with windows for walls and two long, backless wooden benches set in the otherwise bare linoleum floor — and yet his anxiety intensified.

  Finally yielding to the feeling, he said, “Call me crazy, but I think there might be a body around here somewhere. Or some kind or problem, anyway.”

  Mattie gaped at him. Ryan’s eyes narrowed quizzically. “Why?” he asked. ' ’

  Forbes shrugged helplessly. “Intuition. Something in the air. Can’t you feel it?”

  Ryan grimaced. “Frankly, no. You sure you didn’t just get a bad burrito at Pablo’s?”

  “No,” Forbes admitted. “I’m not sure of anything. But my instincts are telling me that something’s wrong here. Right in front of us.”

  Ryan gestured at the largely empty space around them. “If there is, you’ll have to show me, because I sure don’t see it.”

  Squinting, stooping low, Forbes scrutinized the surfaces of the benches and the floor. Behind the walls sea creatures drifted and darted, some as beautiful and delicately shaped as butterflies, and others as dark and grotesquely formed as the denizens of a nightmare.

  Forbes didn’t find any bloodstains, or anything else suspicious. In the face of Ryan’s skepticism he was feeling increasingly like a fool, yet his nervousness still wouldn’t go away.

  “Well?” said Ryan. “Ready to move on? I’m sure Ms. Purvis would appreciate it. If we hurry, she might have time to go home and catch another hour or two of sleep.”

  “Okay,” said Forbes reluctantly. He straightened up and trudged toward the entrance to the next room in the chain.

  so

  But as he did, he glimpsed another peculiar form floating behind the glass. He couldn’t make it out clearly, not from the corner of his eye, but he sensed a wrongness about it. His heart jolting, he turned.

  The shape was the nude body of a little girl. Her wide brown eyes peered sightlessly through the glass, and her mouth gaped in a silent scream. An octopus had wrapped itself around her ankle, the ceaseless writhing of its tentacles mimicked by the stirring of her floating black pigtails. A cloud of small orange fish flickered around her, nibbling her flesh.

  Forbes gasped and lurched backward. Sick with horror, he wondered vaguely why he and his companions hadn’t seen the corpse right away. He supposed they’d been too intent on checking the rooms to pay much attention to what was on the other side of the glass. Or perhaps they’d unconsciously resisted the sight of anything so ghastly.

  Mattie and Ryan turned. “What’s wrong?” the black officer asked. His throat still clogged with revulsion, Forbes pointed at the little girl. Ryan cursed, and the woman squealed and wrenched her gaze away.

  Ryan swallowed audibly. “Chalk one up for intuition,” he said, moving closer to the window. Straining to reestablish a cop’s properly stoic demeanor, Forbes followed him. The little girl’s white hand brushed against the glass as if she were feebly knocking on a door.

  “Do you think she drowned?” Ryan asked. “Hm, maybe not.” He pointed. “Check out her throat.”

  Peering, Forbes saw that the child had twin punctures in the side of her neck. The marks looked like a vampire bite in a movie. In another situation such a ridiculous notion might have amused him, but now it only served to make his discovery seem even grislier.

  “Let’s call this in and seal the building,” Forbes said grimly, rea
ching for the radio clipped to his belt. He turned. “Ms. Purvis, you might want to phone your boss—”

  He faltered in bewilderment. The woman had disappeared.

  Forbes guessed he must look as shaken as he felt, because Ryan gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “Don’t get rattled,” he said. “I’m sure she just left the room while our backs were turned, so she wouldn’t have to look at the kid. Can’t say as I blame her.” He raised his voice. “Ms. Purvis! Are you there? Answer me, please!”

  The shout echoed hollowly down the lighted chain of rooms through which they’d come. No one answered. Forbes couldn’t help feeling that his companion had bellowed in the wrong direction, that someone or something had dragged the plump woman into the stygian chambers ahead.

  “I guess she panicked,” said Ryan, a subtle tremor in his voice. “Ran all the way out of the building.”

  “Or the guy who killed the girl is still here,” said Forbes. He could feel his pulse beating in his neck. “And he grabbed her.”

  “Without making enough noise for us to hear it six feet away?” Ryan asked.

  “Yeah,” said Forbes tensely. He knew the idea didn’t make sense, but his instincts were shrieking that it was true — they hadn’t been wrong so far.

  Ryan grimaced. “I guess it could happen. So we’d better go look for her.”

  Forbes radioed the dispatcher to describe their situation and request backup. Then he and Ryan drew their .38 automatics. Since they no longer had Mattie, who knew where all the wall fixtures were, to guide them, they took their pencil flashlights out of their belts. Thus equipped, they crept warily into the dark.

  The flashlight beams slid back and forth, illuminating a nurse shark and a starfish behind the glass. Forbes could hear Ryan’s quick, shallow respiration and smell the sweat that had begun to soak his partner’s shir!'.

  The policemen slunk around a corner, moving from one exhibition area to another. Now the massive gray forms of manatees, their backs grooved with white propeller scars, floated beyond the glass. Forbes’ flashlight beam picked out another light switch. He moved towrard it, and then a nearly inaudible tapping ticked through the blackness.