“Tell me again about the fight. I want to hear it all.”
“Well. I looked in all the closets and everywhere as I went through the house, see? Then I got to this room in back, and I knew right away. There it was, a big stone coffin like the one I found out in the cemetery.”
“It must have been earthenware of some kind, to provide the home earth. Clever. We must remember that for future use ourselves. Go on.”
“Anyway, I just knocked it over and he rolled out on the floor. I got the stake in before he even got his eyes open. That opened his eyes for him! He managed to stand up, and we thrashed around a lot, but it wasn’t really a fight. He didn’t have a chance—right through the chest. Nailed ‘im there like a bug.”
When Carol spoke again her voice was low. “I suppose it was for the best.”
“Suppose?” Poach’s voice did not really show anger; rather it was as if he would have shown anger if he dared. “In the two years since I met you, you been drummin’ it into me, how I gotta kill him quick if I ever get the chance. How dangerous he is. Also how much you hate him. So I thought it worked out just perfect. I got ‘im but I didn’t finish ‘im. I give you the chance.”
“Yes, you did the right thing. You have done very well.”
“You don’t act too happy.”
“Ah, dear Poach, don’t sulk. It is just—can you imagine what it is like, to hate someone for four hundred years? You cannot, you are not yet a century old. After such a length of time, there is something like love in it.”
“Love?” The tone was crude, incredulous. What had been near-anger was near-laughter now.
Carol’s voice lashed at him. “Remember your place, my man. What you were when I found you. What you are and will be still depends on me.”
Poach mumbled something.
“What?”
“Yes, my lady. I didn’t mean. . . .”
“See that you don’t.”
The door to the storeroom opened without warning, and Carol was looking in at him. She was wearing a kind of green jumpsuit now, a fancy party coverall, and she smiled at Joe enchantingly. Then her eyes moved beyond him, just as a faint noise came from that direction.
The dead woman had got out of her box and was standing beside it in her white gown, plainly visible in the brighter light from the apartment. She stretched luxuriously. There were traces of something dried around her lips, and she licked them with a perfectly pink tongue. . . .
* * *
. . . when he could hear the distant voices chattering again, and knew again where he was, he refrained for a long time from opening his eyes. He didn’t want to see the walking dead. He thought about the sensations of numbness in his feet and hands. That he could assess them so carefully meant that he was awake now, didn’t it? Before, he had been drugged. The woman in the box must have been only a drugged dream.
Joe opened his eyes, though, when he heard the door again. It was a smiling Leroy Poach, hanged in 1934, attired now in black evening dress, come to take Joe to the toilet. This prophylactic attention was actually just about in the nick of time.
“Wouldn’t want you to be messy when we bring you out, cop.” Poach was quite jovial now, despite his crusted forehead crease. It looked like a days-old wound, cared for and then forgotten. “Nice and clean and fresh is the idea. You’re gonna be the piece de resis-tahnce at the party tonight. Know what I mean? Not yet you don’t. Wouldn’t believe me if I told you, either.”
While being carried to the bathroom and back he could hear Carol and the other people chatting, off somewhere in other rooms. He could see no one but Poach. The apartment was still mostly in darkness. There were lamps but no one had bothered to turn on more than a very few of them. Rusty water ran into the toilet when it was flushed, as if the fixture hadn’t been used in a long time.
Back alone in his chill room, bound as securely as before, Joe thought he could hear more people arriving. There were more voices, and the voices were getting somewhat louder, as they tended to do at any party. And now Joe imagined that he could hear them talking in Latin. At least he might have called it Latin, if he had been forced to take a guess.
Latin was bad, because it made him remember Johnny. Johnny in his closet, losing fingers. Then reporting the Latin conversations which nobody quite believed. . . .
Somewhere in the outer air, between Joe and the distant streetlight, moved something that was larger and thicker than a snowflake but just as silent as the snow. There was no way that he could see what it had been.
The box that the dead woman had climbed out of was completely open now, lid beside it on the floor. He had been hallucinating. If he looked into that box now, he would see something ordinary. But he wasn’t going to try.
“But, why do we not speak English now?” said Carol’s voice, not far outside the storeroom door. “Some of you in the past have chided me for using the old tongue too much. Poach, I think there are more guests on the roof, go up and ask them in.”
“Thank you,” said a man, not Poach. “English will certainly be more convenient for most of us. I suppose half of us at least have been born on this side of the Atlantic.”
“And many of the rest,” a woman put in, “have been here a hundred years or more. Long enough to forget a great deal of the Old World.” Other voices murmured polite agreement. There was a nervous little female laugh.
Poach was back, saying something. With him came a man and a woman, new arrivals, for various greetings were exchanged. When that was over, Carol talked. She had become a public speaker now, addressing a gathering.
“I trust you have all had a tolerable journey, weather notwithstanding. Let me assure everyone that this storm is perfectly natural, at least as far as I and Poach are concerned. Our whole energies have been directed elsewhere.”
Someone commented: “It’s a great night not to be a breather.” It had the sound of a quoted proverb. Again there was a scattering of nervous laughter.
When this had died, the hostess resumed: “As you know, this meeting was originally called that I might solicit your support in a struggle for our freedom.” She paused. “That, I say, was the original purpose.”
Another pause. The room they were all gathered in was suddenly extremely quiet.
And the shadow in front of Joe’s streetlight was back again. Its presence was continuous now, but it was not still—there was a shapeless outline, shifting with some kind of movement. It was only the snow. What else could it be?
Abruptly Carol’s voice rang out: “Your support in that struggle is no longer necessary, for victory is ours. This afternoon our enemy overreached himself. He attempted to attack Poach in his earth.” This last was delivered as an indictment, made with disgust, as of an offense that was not only criminal but represented some ultimate breach of decency. “That ancient, evil . . . I scarcely know what to call him. That tyrant had evidently been taking his own publicity too seriously. He overestimated his own powers, and underestimated those of Poach.”
A few moments of silence intervened. Then Carol, in a harder voice, continued: “Surely no one here regrets this turn of events?”
Another woman eventually answered. “It is only that we are—surprised.”
Someone else murmured a faint question.
“No, he is not yet dead,” Carol replied. “But he is firmly in my hands, awaiting judgement.”
A man’s voice, stammering a little but with more boldness than any of the others had yet shown, asked: “And who is to sit in judgement on him then? Of what is he accused?”