Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (43 page)

“A book?”

“It was pretty horrifying.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“So. Why didn’t you try to leave before this?”

Tony glanced away. “I was afraid to. What I told you about the black mirror—there’s a reason the prisoner kills the first of its creations right away. He does it to intimidate his captive, which it absolutely does. Long before the books I read in the tower’s library, I knew about vampires; I taught
Carmilla
and
Dracula
. I had a good idea how to destroy one. Yet there’s a difference between theory and praxis, isn’t there, especially when a monster is involved. Thus my
plan for starving the prisoner until he became weak enough to risk confronting.”

“All right. Well, what about the prisoner?”

“His name is Mundt,” Tony said, “Edon Mundt. He’s from a very old city that stood on the shores of a black ocean.”

“You mean, like the Black Sea?”

“I mean an ocean whose water is black. It isn’t anywhere on Earth; it’s on another plane of existence . . . another dimension.”

“But there are people there.”

“More or less. Mundt was a member of the city watch, the police force. He was good at his job, excelled at it, in fact. His performance came to the attention of his superiors, and he was offered a position on the night watch. This was a group tasked with safeguarding the city’s libraries and cemeteries. It was no ceremonial post. The books in the libraries were of the same nature as the ones I discovered here, while the cemeteries were full of all manner of strange things. Mundt accepted the offer and was made part of the night watch, a process that involved his transformation into a vampire. I’m not clear on all the details, but it involved his having to walk out into the dark. Not the night, or a dark room, but something like death, if death were a place. Mundt entered the dark, and this allowed the dark to enter him. There’s a passage about a vampire in one of Byron’s poems: ‘
And fire, unquenched, unquenchable, / Around, within, thy heart shall dwell; / Nor ear can hear nor tongue can tell / The tortures of that inward hell!’
From what I’ve been able to learn, that seems a fairly apt description of his state.”

“Makes you wonder why he did it in the first place.”

“Power. The price he paid bought Mundt enormous power.”

On their left, a gap in the wall: the entrance to another tunnel. Tony took it. Carved from rock, this passage was shorter and curved to the left. Its walls were inscribed with the broken circle and the maze, set one after the other. The tunnel ended in a shallow cave,
against whose back wall August distinguished a pale form slumped. At the sound of their approaching footsteps, the figure raised a head that was too long and said, “Help me.” August slowed, but Tony caught his elbow and hustled him to the left, into the next passage. August cast a glance back at the white form but could not make out any details. “Who was that?”

“Not who,” Tony said, “but what. I told you the tower jumps around in space and possibly time. Although a person doesn’t always wander in, other things do. Animals, mostly, which helps anyone alive inside it to survive. Sometimes, other . . . creatures show up. That”—he gestured behind them—“is one of them.”

“What does it do?”

“It hollowed out one of the mirror’s children. Left him looking like an old, empty costume. I’m not sure how.”

Shorter than the last, this tunnel’s walls were also marked with the repeating maze and broken ring. It, too, curved counterclockwise, until it met bare rock face. August saw the passage on their left before Tony could guide him toward it. “You never told me what happened to the prisoner, to this Mundt guy. I mean, after he became a vampire.”

“He committed a crime,” Tony said. “I don’t know what it was, but obviously, it was severe. The penalty was imprisonment in the tower, which was cast loose through the cosmos. The tower is . . . Mundt and the tower are connected, in the most fundamental of ways. Its contains all of him, all of his pain. It traps all the pain of his victims, too.”

“The screaming.”

“It’s supposed to heighten his punishment, though I’m not certain how well it’s worked.”

“That sounds pretty harsh.”

Tony shrugged. “He’s a monster.”

As had been the case with the previous tunnels, this one’s walls were carved with the broken circle and maze, and bent left. “How is
it that we can keep going this way without running into the other tunnels?” August said.

“The spatial relations in here are not always consistent,” Tony said. “It’s the same with the passing of time. Depending on your location, time runs more slowly or more quickly. You’ve been down here for what? An hour?”

“Roughly, yeah.”

“Yet for anyone standing at the tower’s door, I’d guess no more than two or three minutes have elapsed.”

The passage ended in a narrow archway, through which a flight of stairs led up. Tony halted at its foot. The blended screams of Edon Mundt and his victims poured down it. “These,” he said, “will take us to the tower’s central chamber. Directly across from the top of the stairs, there is a doorway out of the tower. It has a black frame. That is our destination. The chances are excellent that Mundt will be somewhere in the room. As far as I know, he hasn’t fed in some time. He should be weak enough for me to occupy while you make your escape.”

“While I—what are you saying?”

“At the door, touch the frame with your right hand and concentrate on where you want to go.”

“Where we want to go,” August said. “You’re coming with me.”

“We’ll see.”

“ ‘We’ll see’? What do you think I am, five? I am not leaving you here. I—I didn’t realize how long I’d lost you. Shit, I didn’t know you were missing to begin with.”

“You know I love you, right?”

“Stop,” August said. “Do not say that. You think I don’t know what you’re doing? That’s the kind of shit you say when you’re preparing for the big sacrifice. No. You are not doing that. No way.”

Tony smiled. “Here we are, arguing again.” With his left hand, he reached behind his back and withdrew a sizable knife from the waistband of his pants. “But we’re wasting time.”

“Where did you get that?” August said. The blade of the knife was a foot and a half long, grooved up the center; its handle was bone.

“One of the mirror’s children. I’m not sure how he obtained it. There are still parts of the tower I haven’t explored. It’s possible it was in one of them.”

“You know how to use it?”

“Did you think I killed my doubles with my bare hands?”

“I guess not. Lucky for me you didn’t stab me before you knew who I was.”

“I almost did,” Tony said. “At the last minute, something stopped me.”

“Well, that’s reassuring.”

“All right; we’d better get a move on.”

Here, the walls were cut with a single character, the maze, repeated every few feet. The lines of the symbol shone, as if they opened to a blackness more total than August had known. He was overcome with the desire to speak to Tony, to tell him he loved him, too, he enjoyed their intermittent phone conversations, he no longer held his divorce from August’s mom against him, all the platitudes brought shuffling to the fore by extremity. However, the words could not find their way out, because they were drowned by the almost-visible wave of fear that swept through the stairway and over him. The temperature might have dropped fifty degrees. His legs shook; goose bumps roughed his skin; the hair on the back of his neck stiffened. Worse, it was as if the cold had passed into him, freezing his heart, his gut, his balls. The screaming seemed to be his own, except his mouth would not open.

On the job, August had experienced moments of intense fear. His second month on duty, he’d been part of a three-man team that searched a condo in whose upstairs bedroom an old woman lay a week dead. The death had appeared natural—the woman was lying
on her bed with no sign of violence done to her—but the next-door neighbor who’d called 911 in the first place claimed the old woman had taken in a young, mentally disturbed woman a few days prior to the neighbor’s last contact with her. Sidearms in one hand, flashlights in the other, the smell of rot in their nostrils, August and his fellow officers had cleared the condo’s surprisingly large first floor and basement. Although he feigned nonchalance later, when the residence had been found empty, during the actual process of opening doors to rooms and closets, he had been certain he could feel the madwoman in the house with them, waiting like a cliché from a horror film to leap out at them, butcher knife in hand. The air had seemed to vibrate around him, the way it does the instant after a loud noise.

Intense as it had been, the fear that had made the beam of his flashlight tremble had been generated from within, the sight of the old woman’s cadaver merging with his memories of one too many slasher films. What halted his advance up the tower stairs was the polar opposite, a sensation that assaulted him entirely from without, as if this portion of the tower were subject to its own weather of the emotions. It was forty below and terrifying. He wanted to move in the worst way, to lift his foot onto the next step, but he was filled with dread that, were he to raise his leg, it would shake so badly that, when he tried to set it down, he would fall on his face, unable to rise, defenseless against whatever used these stairs, against the vampire.

“August.”

He raised his eyes. Tony had stopped five steps ahead of him. “August,” he said, “come on.”

August tried to speak, to say he couldn’t, he was too afraid, but his teeth chattered too much for him to say anything.

“Mundt,” Tony said. “Your body is reacting to him.”

August nodded, his head jerking as he did.

“It’s a natural response,” Tony said. “He’s completely antithetical to everything in you. I’m sorry; I should have thought of this. If you can focus on something else, it helps. Do you know what I do? I remember all the poems I know, all those fusty Victorians I used to teach. Would you like me to recite one for you?”

Why the hell not? He nodded.

“ ‘
My first thought
,’ ” Tony said, “ ‘
was, he lied in every word / That hoary cripple, with malicious eye / Askance to watching the working of his lie / On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford / Suppression of the glee, that purs’d and scor’d / Its edge, at one more victim gain’d thereby.
’ ”

The poem was longer than August had anticipated. Much of its beginning, he struggled to follow, the fear continually snapping his attention. From the way his father’s voice rose and fell, flowed and ebbed, he had the sense he was overhearing someone talking to himself. As the poem progressed, so did his focus, until with a jolt, he heard Tony describe “ ‘
the round, squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart, / Built of brown stone, without a counterpart / In the whole world.
’ ” For the remaining lines, all of his concentration was on his father’s words. When the old man finished speaking, August said, “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“But—”

“Can you move?”

He could, if poorly, his leg shuddering madly as he pushed up onto the next step. “Can you recite it again?”

“Of course. Let’s try to keep climbing.”

“ ‘
My first thought
,’ ” Tony began, and August raised his left leg. The speaker of the poem—some kind of knight, from what August could tell—left the road he’d been traveling to cross a gray field, bare of everything but weeds and scrub grass. On the stairway’s surface, the images of the maze shimmered, as if full of black water. The
knight encountered a starved horse, forded “
a sudden little river
” that was “
unexpected as a serpent
.” Above and beyond Tony, a doorway was visible. The knight came upon ground churned muddy by a savage fight, beheld an “
engine
,” a “
wheel
, /
Or brake, not wheel
,” a “
harrow fit to reel
/
Men’s bodies out like silk
.” Faint light flickered within the doorway. At last, the knight arrived at the object of his quest, the “
round, squat turret
.” Two steps down from the doorway, Tony paused. He looked back at August.

“That’s a terrible ending,” August said.

“You aren’t the first person to say so. How are you doing?”

“I’m managing. Thanks.”

Tony pointed at the door. “Things are about to get worse.”

“Great.”

“I’d like to ask if you’re ready, but there isn’t much choice.”

“It’s okay.”

“The door should be across from where we emerge. As I’ve said, though, the geography of this structure can be rather fluid, so if you don’t see it where it’s supposed to be, look around. Remember: it’ll be the doorway with the black frame.”

“What about Mundt?”

“Let me worry about him.”

“You’re going to take on a vampire.”

“Remind me of your experience with the subject.”

“What happened to all that overwhelming terror?”

“It hasn’t gone anywhere, don’t worry. But seeing you . . . I’d really like to see your stepmother and little brother again.”

“A knife’s going to be enough?”

“It’s what they use to dispatch Dracula.”

“I never read that book.”

“Neither has Mundt. Don’t worry—I picked up a couple of tidbits from the books in Mundt’s library that should prove useful. Let’s go.”

The room into which they stepped was big as a banquet hall. A scattering of torches set shoulder high cast orange light over plain brick walls, leaving the vaulted ceiling in shadow. Opposite Tony and August, a door with a thick black border opened to a patch of green grass and sunlight, the meadow at the bottom of the back hill. Hope and relief surged through August. Despite his protests to the contrary, he had understood that Tony might not make it out of here with him. August had been trying to work out how he would get his father home should Edon Mundt appear, but the only solution that presented itself—shove the old man through and stay to deal with the monster himself—was not particularly inviting. Now, though, it appeared no such sacrifice would be necessary for either Tony or him. If only his legs would move faster, he would be on the other side of this chamber and out of this nightmare in no time.