HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (38 page)

She looked full on
the ancient's face and said, "I know you've suffered an eternity
and you want me to go with you, but I can't. You have to understand.
I can't go with you."

"Forgive her,"
Mentor instructed.

"I forgive you
for hoping to spirit me away and make me a part of your suffering,"
she said meaning every word.

The Craven Maker
sighed and it was harder to bear than if she had wept and begged. It
was the sigh of a loneliness that had gone on forever without
abating.

Dell felt herself
weakening, making a move forward as if to embrace the old sick woman,
but resolve held her back. She bowed her head and shook it slowly
from side to side. "I can't help you," she said. "I
can't spend the rest of my time in sorrow and sickness, never to see
the light of day, never to be dose to humans again. I would rather be
dead in my grave." She didn't know where the words were coming
from to explain her position and to deny the old woman satisfaction.
It was as if she had aged fifty years in only a few hours since the
onset of the mutated disease.

The Mistress turned
slowly and padded back into the black hole of the cave until they
could not even hear her footsteps.

Dell turned into
Mentor's arms. "Can I go home now? Please, help me find my way."

Mentor lifted her
into his arms and ascended from the mouth of the cave, over the deep
chasm, above the red clouds, beyond the haunted forest, and past the
sagging blood moon. When again Dell opened her eyes, she was in her
bed, in her own bedroom, holding onto Mentor's strong hands.

She tried to
breathe and couldn't. She tried to cry and couldn't. She wanted to
speak and nothing came from her lips.

"Now you learn
how to be a Natural," he said. "The first step is to relax
into your body and get to know it again. You have passed the hardest
tests of all."

Dell gazed down at
herself. Someone had changed her clothes and dressed her in a long
granny nightgown. She tried to remember it. Maybe she'd gotten it for
Christmas or Aunt Celia had given it to her for her birthday. She was
closest to her Aunt Celia of all her aunts, but she had to admit Aunt
Celia always gave her old-fashioned things that a girl her age
privately shunned. Carolyn often complained that her mother belonged
in another age, one of long dresses to the ankles and button-up
shoes.

It was not only the
gown she did not recognize. She found herself alien. A cold hard
body. With a working brain. No air in her lungs. No beating of a live
heart in her chest. It all seemed unholy. Why must she go on with
knowledge of life when she was not alive?

It was enough to
drive her mad.

~*~

Life among the
undead had been nearly as normal as for someone who lived with a
human family. Dell remembered early memories that lay in her distant
past like shiny shards of mirrors reflecting bits of her childhood.
When she was almost five, living in the daydream that children
dreamed, she recalled a sunny spring day with her mother. Her brother
was a newborn, lying in a bassinet in the living room while her
mother attended to her regimen of household cleaning. The blinds were
drawn against the bright light that threatened to spill around the
edges of the windows. She remembered the dark drapes printed with
large green leaves, the marching-soldier columns of plastic blinds,
and the light peeking around all the edges with a golden aura.

Dell stood at the
corner of an Early American maple coffee table, clutching a baby
doll, her attention switching from the brightly outlined windows to
her mother's swift movements with a dust cloth. Suddenly her mother
lifted off her feet and was first near the top of the television and
then in a blink she was across the room, without ever touching the
floor, and dusting a tall bookshelf full of porcelain ladies in
frilly dresses.

It was not at all
startling. She had seen her mother do strange things before and
thought nothing of it. If her mother could levitate and fly through
the air, if she could move like a tornado, or if she could appear and
disappear in a twinkling, then that is just how the world was
arranged. Surely all mothers could do the same.

Another mirrored
memory was of her father on a hot summer day. He stood in the
backyard turning hamburger patties on a grill. Mom had gone indoors
to make a pitcher of lemonade. The scent of the searing meat made
Dell's mouth water. She was so hungry that her stomach growled. She
had noticed that only she and Eddie ever ate hamburgers. Her parents
carried on a conversation as their children ate and didn't even have
a plate setting before them. None of that mattered, of course, just
so long as she got her own fat hamburger with the juices squeezing
into the bun and the mayo and ketchup dripping over the sides.

Eddie found the old
crape myrtle at the back of the privacy fence and began to climb it,
the brown peeling bark of the limbs flaking off in his small hands.
Dell must have been seven and Eddie almost three. Dell watched him
from the swing set where she pushed herself back and forth lazily.
She could have told her father that Eddie was doing something he
shouldn't, but she was curious to see if her brother could make the
climb she had been making for some time already. If he could, then
they might have races up the tree to see which one reached the top
first. But only if he didn't fall now, didn't prove he was too little
for the game.

Eddie made it to
the very top of the old tree before his father noticed. Dell turned
her head at her father's cry. "Eddie! Get down from there."

Eddie, startled,
lost his hold, gazing out in his dumbfounded way from between the
pendulous white blooms, and began to plummet.

That was when her
father sped across the lawn in a blur, in a motion that was inhuman,
and leaped into the air, catching his son in mid-fall.

"Wow,"
Dell recalled whispering below her breath. "Gee."

When Dell was a few
years older, she understood that her parents' abilities might be
above and beyond normal parental behavior. No one else could do what
they did. Not a single soul. Children climbed trees and fell, no
rescuers in sight. Mothers dusted in a thoroughly mundane way,
slowly, on two feet. Most refrigerators held more food and no blood
bags. Parents ate the same food as their children.

When Eddie got sick
and began to change, her parents sat Dell down and explained
everything. The blood, the swiftness of movement, the appearing and
disappearing acts, the way they were never ill, not even with a cold,
not even with a fever. They told her why they might be caught
standing in the hall or the kitchen, napping. When Eddie got sick,
Dell faced the numbing truth. Her family wasn't really human anymore.
And she was about to lose her brother, too.

Eddie was twelve
when he got sick. The disease came on rapidly and waylaid him one
winter afternoon when he was lying on the sofa reading comics. It was
Dell who found him prostrate, sweating, unconscious. His body was
covered with sores and his lips were pulled tightly back from his
teeth so that he looked as if he were in great pain. One look at him
spurred Dell to the telephone to call her mother at work. "Mom,
Mom, come quick, Eddie's dying."

While her father
took care of Eddie, Dell's mother sat with her at the kitchen
breakfast counter and told her what was happening. And what might
happen to her one day. They carried the genes for a terrible disease
that merely crippled and killed humans, but in them it caused death
and then life again, but a life that changed their very molecular
structure and made them hunger for blood. There was no escape and no
cure. A group of Naturals were working on a cure, but it seemed they
were making no headway yet.

Now it was Dell's
turn to change, to become what she'd hoped never to be. It was an
affliction that had plagued their kind, those who carried the
deformed genes, for more than four thousand years. As she lay on her
bed in the long gown, unable to handle her fate, unable to move or
speak, her eyes staring into Mentor's at her bedside, she wondered if
she had the courage for this. How had little Eddie been able to
accept it? How had her parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents? Why
hadn't they all long since found a way to die rather than live this
way?

She could see
Mentor sitting nearby, gazing at her. She tried to blink to let him
know she was cognizant of him. Her eyelids came down halfway, then
went up again.

"I know you're
there. I can hear your thoughts. I didn't ask permission, so I hope
it's all right." She blinked just halfway again.

How do I ever act
human again? she asked him in her thoughts. How do any of you stand
this?

"We live
because we must, Dell, and so will you. There's a place in the world
for us or we wouldn't be here. You'll learn to be yourself again.
Your human self. You'll learn it so well, you'll be a natural at it."
He smiled at the play on the word they used for those who continued
on as if human.

Dell rolled her
eyes back into her head and fiercely tried to sit up. She couldn't
even lift her head from the pillow. She sent messages to her legs to
try to make them rise and they ignored her, lying like dead, fallen
trees on the bed.

Oh, God, she would
never learn how to walk again, to talk, to brush her hair, and to do
her trig assignments. She would never learn to smile or laugh or . .
. hope.

"Oh, yes, you
will," Mentor said. "It just takes time and faith. You're
not someone who will give up. I know you aren't."

She didn't know
that herself. Mentor might know more than she, but she wanted very
much to shout in his face that he was wrong, he was totally wrong.
She could give up if she wanted to and this felt like a time to want
to. The alternative—to learn to live again—seemed
impossible.

Charles Upton lay
in his bed propped up on half a dozen pillows. His butler—a
real one trained in London and transported to Houston, Texas by
Upton's private jet—had left the room moments before to
instruct the cook to prepare Charles his usual breakfast—a
poached egg and dry toast. Butter—any kind of grease—nauseated
him.

On the bedside
table rested a wood and ivory-inlaid tray filled with a stack of
unopened mail. Charles looked at it with a wary eye, as if it
contained bombs or poison glue on the envelope seals. He would rather
not handle the mail. Not today. Not any day. He should talk to David
about rerouting the mail from his penthouse atop Upton Towers to the
offices below so that David could sort through it. Daily tasks had
become too much trouble to deal with anymore.

Anyhow, none of it
was personal mail. His family had all deserted him when he'd gotten
ill. They thought it was contagious or something, or they just
couldn't stomach the sight of him. If he'd ever married and had
children, maybe he would have someone at his side now who cared. But
then he doubted it. Women always betrayed you and took the money and
ran. Children failed all your expectations and took your money and
ran, too. He realized he pretty much hated women and children.

He glanced across
the large silvery-gray carpeted bedroom, decorated in an ornate
Louis-the-Fifteenth style, to the gilt mirror over a writing desk. If
he were to make the effort to get out of bed and sit at the desk, he
would see his terrible image staring back at him. Well, he'd make the
effort, by God! He wasn't so crippled yet that he had to lie in his
bed like a dying man.

He threw back the
covers and swung his legs to the floor. He carefully pushed up with
both his arms, putting weight on his legs, and felt stronger right
away. He walked to the mirror over the desk and stood there without
any assistance, staring at his reflection.

Maybe soon he'd
have all mirrors taken from the penthouse. He wasn't sure he could
stand to look at himself anymore.

The disease struck
when he was in his mid-forties. Now, at sixty-eight, it had
progressed to where he could not go out in public without being
stared at. Just entering the elevator and running into one of his
Upton employees on the descent to the Tower lobby could mean
confronting the truth: he was a monster.

His butler and
cook, his doctors, and his partner, David, were used to his
appearance. Everyone else in the world would be horrified, and it
would show instantly on their faces. That was the reason two years
ago he'd given over the public running of his oil and shipping empire
to David. How long would it have taken his competitors to find ways
to sabotage his business interests if the world ever found out he was
so ill and so . . . deformed? Two weeks, max.

The doctors had
even begun referring to him, in private (or what they thought was
private, because Charles had once inadvertently overheard them), as
The Old Vampire.