Midnight Bites (28 page)

Myrnin stopped. He slowly put out a hand, and touched crusted dry paper. It crumbled at his touch.

He moved for the other window, and caught a glimpse of Oliver
turning impatiently to find out why he hadn't followed . . . and then that glimpse disappeared as the window filled with old, dry boards in a strange shimmer.

Well. This called for direct action. He punched the wood in a flurry, unmindful of the splinters and shards, and they did indeed break . . . but as soon as they did, more appeared. And more. An endless supply of barriers.

He heard Oliver hammering on the outside of the house, trying to batter a way in, but clearly, the house did not want Oliver.

It wanted
him
.

•   •   •

Shouting Oliver's name at full volume did nothing, except to rain down a tiny storm of dust from the decaying ceiling. Myrnin shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. Nothing seemed to have changed. He was used to imagining things, but those always had a certain feel to them; he'd trained himself in recognizing when his wandering mind threw up falsehoods.

This did not seem to be such a case.

He headed for yet another broken-out window, moving very slowly this time. As he stretched his hand forth, the house
shifted
 . . . and his fingers touched a barrier, not open air.

This place did not want him to leave.

He could hear it now, a kind of low, lethal hum well below the level of even vampire understanding, but he knew in an instinctive way that it was saying something to him . . . and what it was saying would eat away at him, strip him down to bone and madness, and he
could not have that. He was vulnerable here. He'd sensed it even outside, and he'd thought it was only his worry of being away from the safer ground of Morganville, but it was more than that.

This place was alive.

“You want something,” he whispered.

Oliver and his prisoner were almost certainly gone by now. Oliver, being Oliver, would have decided that taking his prize back to Amelie would have precedence over any rescue effort—and to be fair, the prisoner he had in chains was too dangerous to leave to its own devices for long.

He'll come back for me,
Myrnin told himself, to stem a rising tide of anxiety.
Or he'll send help. I only have to stay calm and find a way to save myself.

Well, that seemed easy.

He felt in his pockets and found the cell phone that Claire always insisted he carry; it was the simplest possible model, one with only a few numbers programmed and the choice of
CALL
,
END
, and
EMERGENCY CALL
. He decided that this was rightly an emergency call and pressed that button.

Silence.

He checked the small glowing screen. It told him there was no signal.
I knew these things were useless,
he thought, and dropped it to the floor to spin randomly, like a compass pointing toward insanity.

When he looked up again, there was a dining table crouching in the middle of the room. It was entirely out of place, because it seemed new, shining, spotless. There were six chairs around it.

He glanced back toward the wreck of a kitchen, and found it neat and orderly, as though the house itself was going back in time. No ghosts visible. That should have been an improvement. It didn't seem so.

There was now a book on the table—a photograph album, made
of old green velvet with fancy celluloid corners. On it, in antique metal script, it said
Our Family
.

There didn't seem much alternative, and it was pointless to try for another exit. He had to follow the path this place set for him, at least for now. The house wanted to tell him something.

He was willing to listen.

Myrnin sat down in the chair in front of the album, and reached out to flip open the latch. There was a space on the left-hand side of the cover for a name, and written in faded copperplate it said
The Vexen Family
.

Vexen. That seemed an ill-omened name.

The right side held a single large photograph—or, rather, a tintype—of a thin, craggy old man in an ill-fitting formal nineteenth-century suit, with a top hat. He was standing in what would have been the best days of this old farmhouse, with a pinch-faced wife half his age in her Sunday-best bonnet and black dress of mourning. A group of children sat at their feet.

But something about the photo struck him oddly, and in a moment he knew what it was: living children, but one dead one in the middle, propped up by his uncomfortable siblings on each side to give the boy a false appearance of life. It was given the lie by his blank stare and lolling head.

A mourning photograph. A Victorian tradition, when only one image might have existed of each person, and a way to immortalize the dead before it was too late. To modern eyes, it was horribly morbid, but for that family, in that time, it would have been a precious thing to memorialize a loved one.

He tried not to read anything into its presence in the album.

The next two pages held clippings of old, yellowed newspaper articles, complete with a not-very-expertly drawn illustration of the very farmhouse in which he now stood. This was, he realized, near
the time of Morganville's founding, and well before he'd become sane enough to venture far from his own walls in his new laboratory. The newspaper was the long-dead
Morganville Crier
, and it detailed a murder at the Vexen house. Micajah Vexen, his wife, Virtue, his brother Argus, and his children Trothe and Verily had all been killed. Missing from the home was the middle Vexen daughter, Clemencie. The gruesome scene had been discovered days later by a passing cowboy who'd stopped to water his horse. The Morganville sheriff of that time had been involved. No arrests had ever been made, according to the second clipped article.

The next turn of the page brought photos of the dead. Not in their living years . . . No, the house was not that kind. These were photos taken of them on the spot of their discovery—crime scene photos, they would have been called today. Faded sepia, but vivid enough to be chilling. Likely a profitable morbid sideline for the photographer.

Myrnin stared at them, trying to see what he was supposed to take from them. That it hadn't been a vampire's kill? That much was obvious; the scene was much too chaotic, too enraged, too . . . messy. It seemed to be a very human crime.

“Seems a bit obvious,” he said conversationally to the madhouse that was holding him prisoner. “Some family argument that boiled out of control, and the children were in the way of it. Am I right?” He turned the page. Nothing. He turned another, and received blank pages. “If that is your very subtle way of showing displeasure at my lack of comprehension . . .”

He looked up, because there was someone sitting across the table from him. A girl.

“Ah. That's better. Clemencie?” The girl sitting across from him was bone white, eerily so, with hair bleached pale and eyes clouded
over. In life, he doubted she'd been so colorless. From the shape of her, she would have been perhaps thirteen or fourteen . . . child more than woman. “Or is your name Trothe?”

The lips parted and shaped a word, but there was no sound.

“Clemencie, then,” he said. “If you're meant to terrify me, I'll have to warn you that you won't cause me nightmares. I'm far worse than you. In other words, you'll have to do better.”

She smiled. It was a sweet, unguarded kind of thing, and it made her . . . human. And it hurt, to think on this girl suffering. He'd been a predator a long time, but he'd rarely been a monster. Not in that way.

She reached out one pallid hand to him, and turned it palm up.

“You want something, yes. I know that much,” he said. “And I must compliment you on delivering a very creditable haunting, but you really must be more specific. I'm a vampire, not a mind reader.”

She just gazed at him with those blind eyes, and he finally sighed. He'd been raised believing in many things, ghosts chief among them, and he knew better than to touch one. Especially at the ghost's invitation. In the small Welsh village where he'd been raised, touching a ghost was a direct portal to hell.

But he
did
want to get out of this place, and he sensed very strongly that Clemencie Vexen would be the only doorway through which he could pass.

So he touched her hand . . . and died.

It wasn't
actual
death, physical death, but it certainly felt that way. Not pleasant. Not quick. It was the death of a confused, anguished child who could not understand how her life had gone so badly wrong, or why anyone,
anyone
, would want to wring such pain from her.

He sat back with a sigh, falling back into his own suddenly aching
body, and put a trembling hand to his forehead. Where the ghost had gripped his fingers, they felt icy and frostbitten, and were almost as pale as the corpse-girl's. As the feeling came back, they shot through with hot needles of pain, but he hardly even noted it.

He had died once, but by comparison his mortal ending had been much easier. He was not generally given to fits of emotion, but for a long moment he could not speak, nor could he look at Clemencie's still, pale face, which was blankly tranquil, in death as it had not been in the last moments of her life.

“Oh, dear child,” he said. “What happened to you here? And where did you go?”

When he looked up, Clemencie was no longer there. No one was there. The book was gone, but the table itself—and the chair in which he sat—were very much in evidence.

“Isn't that what you wanted me to ask? No? Then what do you want from me?” he asked the empty air. There was a terrible feeling in the air, something heavy and grim that made him wonder whether this place would ever release him.
Maybe it's just lonely,
he thought.
Maybe it wants company. It's tired of the dead. It wants the almost-alive.

He felt hands on his shoulders then. Cold hands. From the corners of his eyes, he saw the bloodless pale fingers, and felt the exhalation of cold on the back of his neck. Vampire or not, he shivered.

“You want me to find you,” he said, and drew in a sharp breath he did not need as her cold presence passed
through
him. When he exhaled the breath again, it hung as frozen fog on the air. Clemencie sat again in the chair across from him, staring with her blind, calm eyes. “You understand that it won't bring you back?”

She nodded slowly.

“Are you in the house?” That garnered him another nod, this one more emphatic.
Twenty questions with a ghost.
Well, it was hardly the most
insane thing he'd ever done. Or even in the top hundred, if he was forced to be honest. “Upstairs?” No nod. He assumed that meant a negative. “Here, on this floor?” Silence and stillness, again. He heard that buzzing whisper again, pushing at his mind like white static, and it sparked alarm in him. He needed to leave this place. He could almost hear its . . . words, and he sensed that when he did, they would burn him like silver. “Below?”

Not a nod, this time. An explosive movement. Clemencie slapped her ghostly hands on the surface of the table and leaned forward, almost nose to nose with him, and he recoiled. Couldn't quite help it. She bared her teeth and . . . nodded.

Damnation. He
really
needed to leave this place.

“If I go down and find you, will you let me leave here?” he asked her. The spirit stayed frozen in front of him, locked into that aggressive, frightening lean for what felt like far too long, and then she subsided back into a calm sitting position on the other side of the table.

And nodded.

Damnation.

The basement of a murder house, haunted by a very frightening, very sad little girl.

Yes, this sounded like, as Shane would have sarcastically said,
the best time ever
.

•   •   •

It was easy to see how searchers had missed it, he thought; the trapdoor to the cellar was well hidden in the floorboards, much more so than if it had been an ordinary sort of cool room. Someone hadn't wanted this place to be found. Age and rot had sagged the boards, though, and he found the seams and pried it up. The hinges broke loose as it levered away, and the square of rotting wood almost
disintegrated in his hands. He stared down into the dark. He'd often said to himself, and to others, that there was nothing in the dark that wasn't also there in the light, but in truth, he knew differently. There was one thing in the dark: fear. Fear that smothered and consumed and twisted.

He'd spent too many years in dark holes like this, and he hesitated for a moment on the lip of the cellar.

Clemencie silently rose from her chair at the table, and the table itself disappeared as she walked through them toward him. Well . . . walked was not quite the right word. Glided, perhaps.

“I know,” he told her, and sighed. “I know.” Before she could rush at him and surprise him into it, he simply stepped out, and dropped.

It wasn't so deep as he'd expected: ten feet, at most, a minor jump that he hardly felt at all.

But he did
hear
it, because bones snapped and crunched, and for an instant he waited for the pain to hit, but they had not, after all, been
his
bones. The skeleton that lay beneath his feet was dressed in a pale wisp of a dress that matched what the ghost wore.

Clemencie stood now in the cellar's corner, silent and as pale as the dead bones around his feet.

“Ah,” he said. “I appear to have found you, Clemencie. And without much effort, it would seem. You didn't escape the terror that found your family after all. . . .”

His voice faded, because he began to pick out the details of the room. Near her stood a row of wooden crates, and in the crates were coins, faded old crumpled paper money, jewels, watches . . . anything of value. Gold teeth had their own special bin. Here and there lying in heaps were mounds of decaying cloth, the glint of tarnished buckles, the withered leather of belts and boots. All carefully sorted.