He said: “Bring here all you can of the dust . . . earth of my homeland, you see. Fragments of my bed.”
“Dust?” she wondered aloud. “Bed?” The only dust in sight was that from the crumbling fragments of the shattered sarcophagus. Obedient without really understanding, she began to scrape the pieces and their powder toward him with her hands. “So you rested . . . inside this,” she murmured as she worked.
“He came upon me sleeping. Otherwise . . . but never mind. He will come back, or another even deadlier than he will come. So you must flee now, love. Run to some house nearby. Tell them to allow no strangers through their door tonight, no matter—”
“Here, I’ve got a bunch of this dust scraped into a pile. What do I do with it now?”
The sparks in his eye-caverns glittered at her thoughtfully. He said: “Push the dust under my body, along my side—no, do not try to lift me! I die quickly if you move me now. Else he would have taken me away with him—to her.”
As though tucking a dry blanket beneath the fragile-feeling body, Judy performed the foolishness with the dust. As if playing a game that had to be won, however childish and ridiculous it seemed on its face.
She sat back. It was hard for her to look at his terrible face, his wasted form. She fought for control over her face and voice, and asked: “What now?”
His horrible voice said: “You must flee.”
“I can run out somewhere, to one of the other houses here, and get them to call for the police. Then I’m coming back to be with you.”
He shook his head feebly. “Police will be of no help to me. Any doctor they bring will order me moved. That must mean my death. Neither of us will be able to prevent it.”
“Then I’m not leaving you at all,” Judy decided. “What’s the next thing I can do?”
“Oh, my dear,” he whispered. And again: “My love.” Then just when she thought her tears were going to break out at last, he ordered: “Gather more of the earth. Crumble the larger pieces to powder. You will find them brittle. It is the earth of my homeland, and very special to me. Mix the dust with my blood, and use it to stanch my wound.”
Again Judy did as she had been bidden. She pulled back his ruined clothing to get at his parchment flesh, and fought to stem the flow of blood that still oozed richly from God knew where inside his mummified body. In all this nothing now struck her as horrible, except only the chance that she might fail.
At last the bleeding stopped. Judy had lost track of time, but her neck and back ached as if she had been crouching in the same position for hours. Her patient let out a sigh, and moved his whole body for the first time since she had found him, stretching out to what must be an easier position for him on the floor. Suddenly mindful of her first-aid training, Judy wanted to bring him a blanket, but he insisted that it would do no good. He also refused her offer to fetch an ordinary pillow, preferring that she slide a fragment of the broken sarcophagus underneath his head.
That done, he took her hand and pressed it in his twig-like fingers. “Thank you. Now, for the last time, Judy, again, I warn you—go.”
“No.”
“Listen to me. He who made your sister a vampire—yes, that is the truth—he will soon be back. I am still too weak to fight him, or even to get away.”
She pushed back brown hair from her eyes. Her voice was hoarse. “I’ll fight him, then. You’ll tell me how.”
“Oh. My dear love.”
Her tears were threatening to brim again. “You do look stronger than you were. You can move, now, at least a little. Maybe if you rest a while . . . then I’ll help you get away. Can I lift you now, and hold you?”
He nodded, feebly. Judy shifted her position, sitting on the hardwood floor. His head weighed almost nothing when she laid it in her lap. Gray hair and paper skin on bone. She stroked his forehead, too fleshless to have wrinkles. She told herself his face did actually look a little fuller now than when she had first found him. Though she had to admit that the improvement was pitifully small.
The deep sparks in his eyes burned up at her. “You will not leave,” he said, stating a fact.
“No, I will not.”
“Then you will be here when he comes.”
“If he is coming. But yes, I’ll be here till someone comes.” With infinite tenderness she smoothed his hair.
His mouth emitted a ghost of its old hiss. “Then there is only one thing we can do. For your own sake as well as mine.”
“What? Tell me.”
“You know that I am not as other men.”
“I know.”
“Even wounded—so—it is possible for me to regain my full strength, or very nearly so, in no more than hours, or perhaps only minutes.”
“Love, tell me how.”
“The sun has set now and that helps me—of course it will help them also. Pulling out the spear and stanching the wound have helped me greatly. Yet one thing more is needed.”
Judy raised her head. Had she heard a footstep, somewhere in the house? No, she thought, only the storm. Just inside the broken window, the narrow wraith of snowflakes danced and melted. “What is it, my love? Anything.”
“My darling Judy, have I not told you again and again to go, to leave me here?”
“Stop wasting time and tell me—oh.”
Her lover’s hand had risen to the back of her neck, caressingly. First feebly now, then with strength surprising in a limb so thin, his arm urged her to bend lower over him.
Judy rearranged her own limbs, her body, to bend down in the way he seemed to want.
“Oh,” she said again. His lips, that had appeared so dry and wasted, felt soft and warm upon her throat.
EIGHTEEN
Before the immobilizing drug wore off, Carol bound Joe’s arms and legs with strong cord and tape. She worked so cunningly that the bonds were almost comfortable, and yet when he was able to try to move again he soon discovered that he could barely twitch a muscle.
A preoccupied expert, Carol smiled at him absently as she worked. “Joe, my little dear, are you awake? Yes. Too bad, in a way. You might just have slept from here on. Don’t worry, though. You’re going to rather enjoy things at the end, I promise you that. It really does work that way. Now, all nicely packaged.” She gave him a pat, then picked him up, dandling a baby effortlessly. “You must be packaged safely, because Mommy is going out for a while. I have to go and play with little Craig once more—to try to salvage him. Because at the moment he’s the only breather I have left who’ll work with me. And you breathers are so useful for some things. Yes, you are.”
Carol carried Joe into an unfinished side-room, about eight feet by ten, hardly more than a large storage closet. Barrels and crates and boxes almost filled the place. A second door, the upper half of it glass-paneled, led to another, much larger, darkened room or area, where streetlight entering by distant windows showed bare concrete walls and floor, sawhorses, scraps of lumber, a can of paint or two.
He got only one glance out through the glass panel, for Carol promptly lowered him to the floor, left him sitting there leaning against something solid at his back.
Before she straightened up, she kissed his forehead briskly, as people who kissed their dogs might do. “I’d like to give you a real kiss, Joey, of a kind you’ve never had. But there just isn’t time. Not right now.”
Her feet in high heels tapped back into the finished rooms of the apartment. The door closed solidly behind her, so only the street lighting, very distant and indirect, reached him now. He could hear vague sounds of movement from the apartment for a little while, then there was silence.