Undead - One Foot In The Grave Part 36

There was a low growl on the other side of the wood.

I tried to picture the sound coming from a human throat.

Couldn't.

The door began to shudder under repeated impacts. Smoke drifted down from the ceiling turning the flashlight beam into a Jedi lightsaber.

Time to leave.

I edged around the hea.r.s.e. The garage door was locked and the mechanism was out of reach, nearly flush with the car's rear end. Behind me I heard the sound of splintering wood. It was inspiring: I tore the metal tie-rods loose from their moorings and then punched a hole in one of the wooden panels with my fist. The garage door made protesting sounds, but it went up without any further hesitation. Smoke rushed out into the night air and I followed along behind.

The windows of the van reflected the red and yellow flicker of what used to be the second story of my home. I hesitated, thinking of Kirsten, and then ran for the van. It was too late, now.

Too late by at least a year.

Chapter Nineteen.

In my dreams the rabbi tells us to roll away the stone. We uncover the hollow carved into the hillside.

"Lazarus, come forth!" he says.

The sloping ground opens and a figure, wrapped in grave clothes and spiced linen bindings, emerges.

"Loose him and uncover his face."

I do as the rabbi bids. I step forward and tug the linen napkin from his face.

Only it is her face.

Jennifer's clear, clean features gaze back at me.

I turn, but the rabbi is gone. The burial place is swept away in a tide of sand. The hill is now a pyramid and I hold in my hands not a linen napkin but a golden mask wearing a serpent crown.

"Unbind me," she says. And her mouth is . . . right. Her teeth are white, her eyes bright andunshadowed, the hollows are gone from her cheeks.

"Free me," she says.

I search the bindings in vain: there are no knots or loose ends to unravel.

"You will need help," she says. "Ask Thoth."

Hurry, Daddy!

I bolted awake at the sound of Kirsten's voice echoing from inside the tomb.

I stared up at the night sky, at Ba.s.sarab's face hovering overhead.

Felt the gra.s.sy mound of earth against my back, turned my head and saw dozens of other landscaped hillocks, each with its own stone or marker to give it a pretense of individuality.

"An interesting place to take a nap," he said. "Perhaps you are changing more than you realize." He sat on my wife's headstone, leaning over to observe me like some great, dark vulture. "It will be dawn, soon."

I turned my head to the east, finally noticed the colors.h.i.+ft of night sky from black to deep cerulean at the horizon. "It was the only place I could think of to go to," I croaked, my throat gone rusty with ground vapors and dew. "I must have fallen asleep."

"Perhaps. Perhaps you even dreamed."

I sat up with an ache-induced groan. We are such things as dreams are made of, I thought.

"And our little life is rounded with a sleep," Ba.s.sarab said. "But did you truly dream? Or did you make contact?"

"Contact?" Annoyance pushed the grogginess from my head.

"What did your wife tell you?"

I struggled to my feet. "She seemed to think I had been unfaithful to her this past year." I tested my legs: they didn't seem entirely trustworthy.

"I asked what your wife told you. I was not speaking of the thing that nests in her remains. Dance at the masquerade, if you will, but do not be taken in by the costumes."

I glared at him. "What do you know about my wife? Or my daughter, for that matter?"

"I know that they could not be undead," he said gently. "They were not infected with vampire blood as you were. What infested your house was only an illusion, a pantomime of shadows." He sighed, looking strangely human for a moment. "Your wife and daughter are gone, Christopher."

"You don't know how much that comforts me."

"I am glad."

My hands balled into fists and then reluctantly relaxed: how does one explain irony to someone who's been around about five hundred years longer than you?

"How did you find me?"

"It is the blood-bond. Your blood calls to me; if I concentrate, I can hear it singing from many miles away."

"How poetic," Mooncloud interrupted. She was making her way toward us through the maze of grave markers. "Lupe and I had to follow the fire trucks to his house and then guess where he'd go next."

She gave him a look. "I can hear your blood singing," she mimicked. "Oh, please."

"How clever of you," Ba.s.sarab said sourly. "Where is Garou?"

"Back at the car. Dressing."

"And your quarry?"

"Got away. How about the creature?"

Ba.s.sarab scowled. "The same: got away.""Whoa, whoa, whoa; hold on a moment!" I reached out and grabbed the lapels of his scorched greatcoat. "It couldn't have survived that inferno!"

"Christopher," Ba.s.sarab's voice was flecked with traces of defeat and resignation, "you cannot kill something that is already dead."

I stared at him. Something stirred at the back of my brain, just below the surface of my mind. "Can you be killed?" I asked finally.

After an even longer pause, he nodded.

"Then it-that thing-can also be killed."

The old vampire shook his head. "I said that you cannot kill something that is already dead. I am undead. There is a difference."

"Yeah?" A red light began to bloom behind my eyes. "Well, what exactly is that difference?" For a moment I thought the sun was bursting over the inky horizon-but it was still dark all around us: the terrible, burning brilliance searing into my brain was something worse. "You son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h!" I cried, remembering, "you know that thing! You spoke to it!" The burning brightness intensified, blinding me.

"You called it by name!"

"Kadeth Bey."

"You set us up!" I roared, lifting him off the ground and shaking him like an unrepentant doll.

"No! I want him dead as much as you do!"

"Liar!" I flung him backwards and a tombstone, fifteen feet away, toppled over backwards in breaking his fall.

"New York is using him," Ba.s.sarab panted, "to track me-"

"I know that!" I yelled. "I'm not stupid! Time after time I've been the fall guy for you, but no more!

And you don't want him as dead as I do! You can't!"

"Christopher, even a man who is five centuries undead doesn't want to die."

I reached down and wrenched up the headstone from my wife's grave. "But maybe it will find you and you'll die anyway! And then what?" I panted, raising the ma.s.sive granite block over my head. "It'll be over! You'll be dead! Like you were meant to be-five hundred years ago! Like all men are meant to be at the end of their allotted time!" I took a step toward him, arms and legs thrumming with the strain. "No one will dig you up! No one will want you coming back! You can rest!"

I turned and flung the headstone at the iron fence a couple of plots away. The monument took out ten feet of iron fusillades with their concrete anchors and posts. "You can rest-" I fell to my knees "-under the cool green gra.s.s and have peace," I sobbed. "But not my little girl. Not my Jenny."

"It's not them anymore. They're not-"

"Shut up," I screamed, "shut up!"

Off in the distance a siren wailed, echoing the sound of my pain.

"I have," I panted, "every reason in the world to save that thing the trouble and kill you now."

"He's not your enemy, Chris," Mooncloud said softly, "Kadeth Bey is."

I looked up at her. "This isn't about friends or enemies, anymore. The one thing that you and Dracula here have taught me these past few weeks is that one controls or is controlled. One dominates or is dominated. In the end it's results that count. Not feelings.

"And now we've gone too far beyond who started what and whose fault lies where. That thing-Bey-dug them up! Dragged my baby and my wife back up out of the ground." I slammed my fist against the earth between my knees. "Violated them to get to me! To get to him! And it still has them! It still . . . has . . . them. . . ."

"We've got to destroy it," Ba.s.sarab said, climbing to his feet. "I had hoped you might succeed where I had always failed. You must understand that we both want the same thing-""No!" I said, climbing to my feet. "You don't seem to get it, do you? This thing has my family and it will do anything, anything to bring you down. If I can find a way to destroy this thing, I will. But if I can't, I'll set Jenny and Kirsten free the only other way I know how." I stabbed a shaking finger at him. "It won't need them if you're dead. So you'd better pray I can figure out how to kill something that's already dead. You can stake your un-life on that!"

Red and blue lights strobed the early morning mist at the cemetery gate. A side searchlight cut the predawn twilight and circled us in a porthole of light. "Don't anybody move," admonished an amplified voice from the speaker mounted on the roof of the squad car.

There's nothing happening here, I thought furiously. Go away!

The searchlight remained on. But now it pa.s.sed over us and on as the police car continued up and around the circular road. By the time it had circled back out the gate, we were climbing into the Duesenberg.

"His name was Kadeth Bey and he was an Egyptian sorcerer," Ba.s.sarab said. He frowned at the glow of daylight that framed the shades drawn down over another motel room's windows. "I really know little more than that."

"How did you meet?" Garou asked.

"The Turks brought him late to our conflict. That was back in the-let's see-fifteenth century. I had, of course, developed my own reputation as a master of the black arts by then. The Ottoman Empire was losing battles that it should have won without effort. They were frustrated and demoralized. The sultan had exhausted his reserve of holy men in trying to counter the demonic forces I brought to the conflict.

When they proved ineffective, it was decided that perhaps they should counter with an unholy man, instead."

"Bey," I said.

He nodded. "The little I know was difficult to come by. And it has done me little good through the long centuries up to this very day."

"Perhaps your information is less than reliable."

"It was reliable." His gaze turned reflective. "At great cost to my own troops I was able to capture two of his acolytes. I was exceedingly careful in my questioning-more so than usual: the long stake loosens most tongues even before the process is begun. Toward the end, all falsehood is stripped away.

They confess, not to me, but to the G.o.d they are about to face, to whom they must commend their souls.

No, Csejthe, these men spoke the truth as they knew it."

"And what truth was that?" Mooncloud persisted.

"That Kadeth Bey was both vampire and necromancer. That he was a high priest of the Egyptian G.o.d Set and became a vampire after his death by means of sorcery. That he was entombed as a royal high priest in the Egyptian manner, hence your problem of driving a stake through his black heart."

I snapped my fingers. "Egyptian burial. The organs are removed and placed in separate burial urns when the body is prepared for mummification."

Ba.s.sarab nodded. "Canopic jars."

"So what do we do?" Garou asked. "Find his jar and slam a stake down inside? There must be hundreds of those things in Egypt, alone, not to mention museum exhibits throughout the rest of the world."

"Anything else?" I asked Ba.s.sarab.

"Leaves. Bey was always preparing potions involving leaves that he had to have brought back from the valley of the Nile. About the only thing I could do to thwart him back then was ambush the returning trains of packmules and squeeze his supplies to a minimum." He paused, ruminating. "That's about it.""Tanis leaves," Mooncloud said.

"What?"

"It sounds just like those old mummy movies that the Satterfields were talking about."

I remembered now. "Right. They had some at their house, in fact.