The Late Night Horror Show (9 page)

He sensed her scrutiny and glanced up at her, his face twisting in a desperate grimace as his eyes locked with hers. His face was red from overexertion and slick with rain. He was breathing heavily, but managed to push out a single word:
“Run!”

One of the masked man’s big hands shot upward and clamped tightly around her rescuer’s throat.

Lashon screamed.

And then she heeded the stranger’s advice.

She turned away from the scene of struggle and plunged into the deeper darkness of the woods.

Chapter Nine

Kira awoke with a gasp and sat bolt upright, breathing heavily and hearing the amplified beat of her overdriven heart pounding in her ears. The dream was over. She was safe and sound in a comfortable bed. There were no vampires here. No one was assaulting her. And, really, given her tastes in literature and movies, it was a wonder she had never had that kind of dream before. She had long prided herself on not scaring easily, but, apparently, even the most hardened dark-fiction addict could eventually pay a price for constant indulgence in the stuff.

She swept the thick comforter away from her body and swung her legs over the side of the bed, intending to get up to take a pee. Instead, she sat there on the edge of the bed, suddenly struggling to understand some things. This was a four-poster bed with an ornate wood frame. A gauzy canopy hung above her. She couldn’t remember ever having slept in a bed like this one. Moreover, she was relatively certain she didn’t know anyone who had a bed like it. But that was far from the only off-kilter detail about her current circumstances. Another odd thing was the very flimsy blue negligee she was wearing. It was see-through and had a very short hemline. She didn’t have much in the way of sexy lingerie and knew she had nothing quite like this thing in her wardrobe.

There were other things, too. The room she was in was not at all familiar. It was big.
Really
big. There was what looked like a real fireplace at the far end of the room, complete with a stone hearth. Very old-fashioned. Indeed, all the furniture in the room looked like antiques. She turned her head side to side in openmouthed amazement, doing a slow survey of the contents of the room. A large steamer trunk sat at the foot of the bed. It was secured with a very big and very old-looking padlock. A rolltop desk sat against the wall opposite the bed. It looked sort of fragile in the way of many very old things. Fragile and quaint. She could imagine Charles Dickens sitting at that desk, scribbling away at
Hard Times
or some damn thing. A tall wardrobe cabinet stood in a corner of the room. Like the bed, it was almost exquisitely ornate, with much painstakingly carved detail.

The windows in the room were all painted black. Weird.

She got up and went over to the wardrobe, hoping to find something more suitable to wear. She pulled at one of the rickety doors and the knob came off in her hand as the door creaked open. She frowned as she peered in at the handful of items dangling from wire hangers. They were all very tiny pieces of lingerie. She glanced at the knob in her hand, her frown deepening for a moment, and then she screwed it back on and pressed the wardrobe door firmly shut.

She moved numbly to the center of the room and took it all in again.

A single, obvious conclusion soon took center stage in her mind—
I have to get out of this room and out of this fucking house, wherever the hell it is, as soon as I can.

If that meant fleeing into the night in this silly little excuse for a nightgown, so be it.

There was a door to the right of the Charles Dickens desk. It was the only door in sight and had to be the way out. She took a single, determined step toward it and then stopped.

She frowned.

And put a hand to her neck, feeling for the marks she prayed were not there.

But they were.

And suddenly her heart was off to the races again. Her legs felt weak. She was woozy and felt as if she might pass out again. Passing out was even sort of an attractive option, though she knew her chances of escaping whatever kind of prison she was in depended on remaining alert. The bad dream hadn’t been a dream at all and had nothing to do with her fondness for fictional vampires.

A
real
vampire had bitten her.

And had drunk deeply of her blood…

—ohmygodohmygod—

She raced to the door and yanked it open, intent on getting herself out of this place as fast as she could, but two massive men, with blond crew cuts and dressed all in black, stood outside the door, flanking it on either side. They turned toward her as the door came open, their enormous bodies filling the doorframe.

Kira felt like crying.

No escape. No escape. Oh God, there’s no way out…

One of the blond behemoths smiled tightly at her. “You are not to leave.”

“Says who?”

The other one remained stone-faced as he said, “You are to stay in this room until further notice by order of the Master.”

“The what now?”

The creepily smiling one said, “The Master.”

Kira nodded. “Right. That’s what I thought you said.”

But what kind of total whack job has his employees refer to him as ‘the Master’?

She kept that question to herself, figuring it could lead to nowhere good and that, anyway, there could be no sensible answer for it.

The smiling one glanced at her chest and then looked her in the eye again. “You should return to bed and await the honor of the Master’s presence. He is anxious to drink of you again.” His sinister smile broadened. “And to partake of your beauty in other ways, of course.”

Kira nodded again. “Uh huh. You talk exactly like you’re in some weird seventies eurovampire movie. You realize that, right?”

The Smiling One became the Frowning One. “I do not understand.”

“I know you don’t. Okay, so…I’m gonna, like, take your advice and go await the presence of this Master person.” She moved back a step and began to swing the door shut. “Later, guys.”

She stared at the closed door a long moment.

It was painfully obvious now that she was completely trapped.

Goddammit.

So she returned to the bed and waited for the vampire to come calling.

There was nothing else she could do.

One of the black-clad brutes kicked a door open and shoved Monroe roughly through it. His shoulder banged off the doorframe, sending a shock of pain down his left side as he staggered to the edge of a small landing at the top of a spiral stone staircase. The only light available spilled in from the mansion’s huge restaurant-style kitchen, through which the thugs had just dragged him en route to this place. The staircase twisted down into utter blackness. Monroe gulped. His first thought was it looked like a path straight down into the heart of hell itself.
 

But just as he was thinking that, torches mounted in sconces on the stone wall at descending intervals of approximately a dozen feet sparked to life. The flickering tongues of flame pushed back some of the darkness, enough that one could descend the staircase without taking a blind tumble, but the light was too hazy to glimpse the bottom, which at a guess had to be at least a hundred feet or more below the surface of the earth.

“Bloody hell. How is this even possible?”

By which he meant every aspect of his current situation. The abduction by vampires. The inexplicable lighting of the torches. What the fuck was that? Magic? And, perhaps the most pressing matter of all right at the moment, the mystery of whatever awaited him at the bottom of this medieval staircase.

He turned around to gape at the big thugs as they glared at him from the other side of the open door. “There any chance I could come back in there?”

“No.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

One of them curled one of his big hands into a fist, then gripped and squeezed it with his other hand, cracking the knuckles. A gesture meant to intimidate. It was effective, too. One side of the knuckle-cracker’s face twitched in a sneer. “Go down the stairs. Do not stop until you reach the bottom. Do not attempt to come back up.”

“What happens if I disobey?”

“You die.”

“Right. Well, I don’t want that, so…okay then.”

He moved away from the sneering thugs, took a deep breath, and took his first step down into the darkness. A moment later he heard the door slam shut behind him, followed by the sound of a deadbolt clicking into place. It was hard not to hear a bone-chilling finality in that sound. He now fully expected never to see the outside world again. As he descended the next dozen or so big stone steps, he began to perceive distant, barely audible sounds. He couldn’t identify them immediately, but another dozen winding steps down brought the sounds into slightly clearer focus and he felt another chill. This one went deeper, sinking its icy tentacles right into the very center of his trembling soul.

Moaning.

Screaming.

These were the things he was hearing.

And they were getting louder with every downward step. Monroe had a fleeting thought that maybe he should just pitch himself off the staircase. A fall to his death right now might well be a far better thing than meeting whatever was waiting for him down there. It would be easy enough to do. The staircase had no banister or railing. He could just stop right here and step over the edge. It would all be over quickly. He considered it only briefly, though. He really didn’t want to die. The only real option was to continue down to the bottom and hope for the best once he got there.

So he kept going.

And the sounds of torment kept getting louder.

First Intermission

Greg Nelson regained consciousness an indeterminate time after the flashes of white light. Unlike everyone else in attendance that night, however, he did not wake up somewhere outside the cineplex, although he did not initially realize this because the appearance of the building’s interior had changed dramatically during his time of unawareness.
 

He woke up facedown in one of the sloping aisles between sections of seats. Except that the worn and stained red carpet he remembered had been replaced by a series of rectangular white panels. The panels were translucent and he could make out vague shapes of some form of machinery beneath, the purpose of which he could not begin to divine. Things were moving down there in a kind of clockwork synchronicity.
 

There was light visible through the panels, too. And it was moving, a pulse of diffused brilliance that rotated slowly from the top of the aisle down to the bottom and back again. Over and over. For many hazy minutes Greg remained where he was, tracking
 
the path of the light and the dimly perceived rotating gears, almost feeling hypnotized by the strange sights. But then, as his mind continued to clear, it occurred to him how very odd this all was. And as the last of the mental fog dissipated, he began to freak out a little.

He braced his hands on the panel beneath him and propelled himself upward, staggering backward a few clumsy steps as his feet fought to find purchase on the slippery panels. He eventually got himself properly righted and turned in a slow circle, gaping as he took it all in, marveling in terrified wonder at a transformed auditorium that looked like a sleek and ultrafuturistic chamber in the kind of starship that only existed in science fiction movies. The sections of seats were arranged precisely as they had been prior to the consciousness-obliterating flashes. There were double doors inside recessed alcoves at the top of each aisle. A large screen occupied the exact space one would expect. But any resemblance to any movie theater he had ever patronized ended right there.

Every seat looked as if it had been formed from the same seamless mold. There were no interlocking parts. No cushions that went up and down. He glanced down and noted that the seamlessness included where the legs of the seats met the floor. You couldn’t unbolt the things and remove them because they appeared to melt right into the floor. Also, they were all the same flawless shade of bone white. As was practically everything else in the theater, with the exception of the translucent floor panels and the screen. A kaleidoscope of slowly swirling color patterns danced lazily across the center of the screen. Lines of color extended outward, growing steadily thinner as they reached toward the edge of the screen before collapsing in upon themselves. An instant later, the pattern began to repeat. Like some kind of old school computer screensaver.

Odd.

Very, very odd.

The first thing he inferred from all this strange sensory input was that the theater he remembered hadn’t existed at all. Instead, it had been a highly realistic illusion of a decaying cineplex, an extraordinarily tactile skin image projected over this white skeleton beneath.
 

The second thing he gleaned from all this information was that it would likely be in his best interest to get the hell out of this place as soon as possible.
 

Another thing hit him before he could act on that undoubtedly very intelligent impulse.

He was the only person left in the theater. Everyone else had vanished.