Fright Night (8 page)

Wanting more.

He rolled and dove back to earth, to the safe, staid little homes, their soft, sleeping occupants oblivious to the nightsong, and yearned to swoop down and bury sharp teeth in their soft, stupid throats.

Something hit the roof with a thud. Charley jerked upright in his chair, heart racing. He shook his head, trying to dispel the tatters of the dream.

“Huh wubba?” he mumbled, staring at the ceiling. He listened hard, heard only the familiar night sounds of the house he grew up in. The soft rush of air through the heating ducts. The bubbling of the aquarium. The hum of the no-frost refrigerator down in the kitchen, doing its duty. His mom, snoozing away.

The creak of beams in the attic.

The attic?!
Charley jumped straight out of his chair. The creaking of the beam was soft but regular, moving away from him. Soft and regular . . .

Like footsteps.

Mustering all his bravado, Charley moved gingerly toward the door. He opened it a crack, poked his head out cautiously, ready to retreat at a moment’s notice.

“Mom?” His voice came out a squeak. “Mom, are you out there?”

The hallway was empty, and deadly silent. He crept out, feet making little
whuffing
sounds on the shag carpeting. He tiptoed to his mother’s door, opened it a crack.

Judy Brewster lay peacefully, mask in place, sleeping the sleep of the just. A bottle of Nytol was perched on the bedside table, within easy reach.

Something was downstairs now. A sound, faint yet palpable, emanating from the darkened portico. Like fingernails on glass.

Soft.

Relentless.

Charley’s knees wobbled. With Mom tucked away, that greatly narrowed the possibilities of who was making that sound. He didn’t want to think about that. Not in the dark, alone. He had to check it out, though.

Hey, no big deal,
he thought, fooling no one.
S’probably mice or something. Sure . . .

He gripped his crucifix a little tighter and went downstairs.

Charley stood in the portico, breathing a sigh of relief. The creepy scratching noise that reverberated through the entire living room had revealed itself to be a tree branch, scraping harmlessly against the window. Charley felt a flood of relief.
So much for things that go bump in the night,
he thought, and detoured through the kitchen for some munchies.

He didn’t notice, as he made his way to the kitchen, that the scratching stopped.

Jerry Dandrige stood calmly gazing down at the sleeping form of Judy Brewster. He took the room in at a glance: the wonderfully cheesy furniture (
Nouveau moustique, très chic, madame!),
the boudoir scattered with wigs and cosmetics, the infamous Judy Brewster herself (
Well, hel-loooo! Come in! Can I get you a drink? Tee-heeee . . .)
deep in repose.

It was too easy.

He touched her briefly, contempt mingling with the longing for her hot blood. She smiled, a nocturnal fantasy in motion. Then he turned past the open window and glided across the floor.

He paused as he passed the boudoir mirror, smiled wickedly. “You know,” he purred, “you look
marvelous!”

No reflection smiled back.

When he shut the door behind him, he very nearly yanked it off its hinges.

Charley never heard his mother’s door crack shut. He was immersed in constructing a sandwich, head buried in the fridge.

He put the last finishing touches on it, a certifiable Dagwood—bologna, salami, turkey roll, three kinds of cheese and pickles—and munched it noisily all the way up the stairs . . .

. . . scarcely glancing at his mother’s door.

He padded down the hall softly, shouldering open his door. Took another big bite before sliding inside. Locked the door, pushing his desk chair under the knob. Sat down, turned on the TV, took another big bite . . .

. . . and felt the tiny hairs rise on the back of his neck.

He turned around very slowly, so as to give the bad feeling plenty of time to
go away.
No such luck. His sensory information registered in microseconds, each one progressively worse than the last, until he had turned quite far enough.

And he and the vampire were face to face.

Charley wanted to run. He wanted to scream. If a coordinated air strike could be arranged, he wanted one of those, too.

As it was, the best he could manage was to leap out of his chair, spraying bits of partially chewed sandwich through the air.

The vampire lashed out casually and caught Charley’s throat in a vise-lock grip, shutting off his air supply without a squeak. He smiled magnanimously.

“Now, now . . . we wouldn’t want to wake your dear mother,
would
we, Charley? That would be a
terrible
thing to do, wouldn’t it?” The vampire nodded. Charley nodded. The vampire smiled. Perfect teeth. “Because then I’d have to kill her, too. Right?” He tightened his grip infinitesimally. The pain was excruciating.

Charley nodded. He had no choice. The vampire worked his head like a ventriloquist works his dummy. Up and down, up and down.
Yes, Boss, anything you say, Boss.

“Right,” the vampire concluded, flinging Charley the length of the room with such force that he smashed clear through the dry wall, leaving an enormous gaping hole. Charley slid down the wall and lay in a crumpled heap.

Dandrige sauntered across the floor as if on a fashion runway. Coolly elegant, reeking of menace. He picked Charley up one-handed—all 167 pounds of him—without even leaning to support the load. Charley’s eyes swam in his head as if he were a steer in a slaughterhouse, his brain going
MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY . . .

“Do you realize the trouble you’ve caused me? Spying on me, almost disturbing my sleep this afternoon, telling
policemen”
—he tightened his grip—“about me?”

He slammed Charley into the wall for emphasis. Charley wondered dimly how many successive slams it would take to induce complete renal failure. His face was the color of ptomaine poisoning. Jerry leaned in.

“You deserve to die, boy, and I think you should. But then, that could be messy. Too close to home.” The vampire smiled. “You see, I
like
my privacy. And I like this town. In fact, I’d like to stay here for a long, long time.” He loosened his grip on Charley, but continued holding him pinned to the wall. Charley gasped for breath.

“Of course, I could give you something you saw fit to deny
me:
a choice. Shall we make a deal, hmmm? You forget about me, I forget about you.

“Whaddaya say, Charley?”

Charley fumbled, his life in the balance.

Then he remembered his cross.

He wormed his hand into his pocket and started to whip it out. Dandrige caught his wrist on the way out and pulled it up and away, threatening to dislocate his shoulder in the process. Charley yelped, and got his head slammed into the wall for his trouble.

“Not so easy, Chuck. I have to
see
it.” Jerry held his hand at arm’s length and squeezed until Charley couldn’t take it anymore. The crucifix dropped to the floor.

“If you k-k-kill me, everybody’ll be s-suspicious,” Charley blurted. “My m-mother, the police . . .”

The vampire paused a moment, then smiled beatifically.

“Not if it looks like an accident.” He yanked Charley over to the window, pushing away the heavy dresser with one foot. “A fall, for instance.” He flipped the lock, started pulling the nails out one by one with a dainty
he loves me, he loves me not
cadence. “ ‘Disturbed teenager with paranoid fantasies about
vampires,
of all things, suffers a nasty fall while trying to barricade his bedroom.’ ”

He swung Charley around, opening the window with a flourish. “ ‘A terrible tragedy for all concerned, of course. But lately he had seemed so
withdrawn,
Officer, and you know what they say about suicidal teens . . .’ ”

Slowly, inexorably, Dandrige pushed back and back, easing Charley out the window. The boy kicked and clawed like a maniac, legs splaying wildly, arms thrashing, hands searching for any hold. His right hand found purchase on the windowsill, and he twisted his torso in the killing grip to find something more substantial.

Dandrige eased up momentarily before dealing the final push. After all,
any
death—even one as stupid and trivial as this—deserved to be savored.

Charley seized in desperation upon the lessened pressure. Bowing his back painfully, he lurched to the left, hand raking wildly across his desk.

The night yawned black beneath him, the cold earth a good thirty feet below.

The vampire resumed pushing. Its strength was overwhelming. “Tut tut, Charley. We don’t want to keep Mother Night waiting.”

Charley clawed the desk surface blindly, groping for anything.

And finding . . .

A pencil. His fingers curled around it. He started to slide.

Charley brought the pencil around in a blind arc that would have pierced his own throat had it missed. Instead it plowed home, impaling the dead flesh of the vampire’s hand. Dandrige howled and jerked back, hissing like a cat.

Charley scrambled to regain his equilibrium. His back felt as if someone had tied him to a belt-sander.
Great,
his mind raced.
Now I’ll fall out all by my myself.
He pulled himself in, coughing and sputtering . . .

. . . as Dandrige began to change.

First came the odor of overwhelming decay, a ripe stench of death too long denied. It hit Charley like a wave, making his gorge rise and his ears fill with the buzzing of many flies. Barely able to stand it, helpless to turn away, Charley stood slack-jawed with lurid fascination as the horror unfolded before him.

His room had been transformed into a nightmare detail from a Hieronymus Bosch painting, a livid slice of Hell pinwheeling around amid the sports-car posters and ski paraphernalia, howling and cursing in a harsh, guttural tongue. The Coors sign winked like a malevolent red eye, casting a pale glow on the room.

Jerry Dandrige writhed and spit, too overtaken with pain and indignation to remain calm in the face of this affront. He held out his wounded hand, the pencil still protruding. A faint plume of acrid smoke wafted up from the puckered hole, mixed with the stench of charred wood.

The vampire halted suddenly, hunkering over. Charley’s breath was ragged in his chest. His heart skipped a beat as the vampire whirled to face him.

Charley winced. His face was the worst.

Gone were the smooth, affluent good looks that had floored his mother. The real Jerry Dandrige was an ancient, misshapen creature with a jutting lower jaw that gaped open to reveal a host of foul yellow teeth. Its hair was coarse and brittle, its ears deformed and pointed flaps. The skin of its face was sallow and collected in hideous, liver-spotted pockets, gathering most noticeably ground its eyes.

Its eyes . . .

Sunken, red-rimmed pits. They burned, luminous and bulging, boring holes straight through Charley’s skull. Sapping him. The muscles in his back went slack, and he fell against the crushed wall on shaking legs.

Unable to pull away.

The vampire hissed then, and grasped the pencil with long crooked fingers, its nails clicking together with a chitinous sound. It fixed Charley with a stark, imperious look that did little to conceal its agony.

And pulled the pencil out.

Charley grimaced. The tip was blackened and still smoking. It tossed the pencil away contemptuously, and he noted sickly that a shred of withered flesh still clung to the tip, fluttering like a banner as it fell to the floor.

The vampire smiled, a horrible withered rictus. It felt
much
better. The pain was receding, as was the shock of this boy’s impudence.
They always were clever in desperation,
it noted.

Its appearance improved enormously as its anger subsided. Its features smoothed and tightened, its hair thickened, and some semblance of humanity returned.

But the eyes still glowed red. The nails still clicked. And the teeth . . .

Jerry Dandrige gazed at Charley intently. He held up his hand, the wound gaping. “See the trouble you caused me, boy?” he said, advancing for the kill.

Charley’s bowels turned to water.
“Noooo . . .”
he whined helplessly.

And then his mother started screeching at the end of the hall.

“DAMN!” The vampire whirled, hissing sibilantly.
Should’ve killed her when I had the chance.

He turned back to the boy, who was leaning against the wall like a sack of potatoes on stilts. He wanted to trash the kid right here and now, be done with it forever. But no, he’d wait.
Plenty of time,
he thought, fighting back the urge to rend and tear.

The past centuries had taught him nothing if not patience. He cast one last appraising glance at Charley and hissed again, quite involuntarily.

“CHAR-LEY!” Mrs. Brewster caterwauled from her end of the hall, the
rattlerattlerattle
of her hand on the doorknob persistent. “SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH MY DOOR!”

Charley dimly perceived the vampire bolting from the room. He hadn’t felt this high since he’d had his wisdom teeth out. His carotid arteries were working overtime to compensate for the constricted blood flow he’d experienced, courtesy of Dandrige’s grip. It took a full ten seconds for the message to cut through the fog.

“MOM!” He stumbled out of his room, hoping he wasn’t too late.

But his mom was okay. She stumbled out of her room, fumbling past the wreckage of her door. Charley cast about wildly, half expecting some kind of surprise attack.

The window at the end of the hall had been thrown wide open. Dandrige was gone, for now. Charley didn’t know whether to breathe a sigh of relief or wet his drawers. He sighed, cold sweat sheening his back.

“Charley, what happened?”

Oh, nothing, Mom. I was just attacked by the vampire you were neighborly enough to have over for a drink, and he tried to kill me. That’s all.

“I . . . I just had a nightmare, Mom. What happened to your door?”

Judy looked puzzled. “Why, I don’t know!” She brightened. “But, you know, I had a nightmare just last night! I was at this white sale, and there I was, standing at the counter, and I reached for my credit cards, and suddenly I realized I was naked as the day I was born—”