“So if it activates another corpse, and there are no animals available, it may kill humans?”
“You’re learning,” she said.
I found two more prints before our way was intersected by a creek. We followed it into a dense thicket of wild blackberries. The hooked barbs caught our clothes and kept forcing us to back up and free ourselves. We were both scratched and bleeding when we reached the pool where the water bubbled out from beneath the cliff.
“It went underground here” Ann said.
“Apparently,” I said. “But I don’t see how.”
“Easy. It doesn’t have to breathe.”
I walked around the pool looking for tracks but found none. When I returned, Ann had taken off her coat and spread it on the spongy turf. She sat down, pulled her feet into her lap, and rested her hands on her thighs, palms up.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to show my ignorance again,” I said. “Why are you sitting like that?”
“It’s a stable posture. I withdraw my mind from the physical world in order to pick up emanations on the energy level.”
“You said it was probably shielded.”
“Apparently, when other people are around. Right now I’m hoping it thinks its safe and doesn’t have to be on guard.”
I waited. Again, I noticed the dead silence, the lack of birdlife which I’d come to associate with the beast. The sun hung in the overcast sky like an anemic eggyolk.
After about five minutes Ann began speaking, not like somebody in a trance, but as though she were getting her thoughts out where she could look at them.
“When all is well, the energy flows in a perfect circle. Each level has its own unity. When there is a break between, portals, the circle is pulled off-center, like a tilted carousel. It’s tilted now in that direction.”
Ann pointed with her eyes closed. I followed her finger and looked up at the towering cliff.
“Could you follow it?” I asked.
“If I concerned myself with walking, then I’d be drawn down to the physical level. I’d lose it.”
“Suppose we climb to the top of the cliff, and I’ll carry you piggy-back.”
I was only half-serious, but she liked the idea. Unfortunately we lost ten minutes finding the switch-back path leading up, and spent more time slipping, sliding and dragging ourselves up to the top. We found ourselves in a rocky glade overgrown with dark fragrant cedars. Ann sat down to take another fix, and I stood waiting, pleasantly anticipating the task ahead of me.
“It’s moving away,” she breathed after a minute.
“In a straight line?” I asked Ann.
“Lots of turns and cutbacks. But it tends to go in that direction.”
She pointed toward the northeast, where the land sloped up to the summit of Gubb’s Knob.
“Let’s go,” I said.
She didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds live-weight, but the going was all uphill and the slope was littered with loose chunks of flint which kept turning under my feet. I had my elbows hooked under her knees with her thighs resting on my hips, and every time I let my mind dwell on what I was carrying, I got weak in the knees. We’d gone maybe a quarter-mile when Ann said in my ear:
“It’s gone out of range. You can let me down.”
She slid off, leaving my back suddenly cool. I threw out my chest and took deep breaths of the cedar-fragrant air. Ann shook down her slacks and started walking uphill.
“Hey!” I yelled, surprised.
She called over her shoulder: “If I walk in a straight line I can probably intersect its path.”
I ran up and caught hold of her arm. “What if you intersect it on the surface?”
“It’s only a twelve year old girl—”
“It ripped the throat out of a deer. Tell me how it did that.”
“Sneaked up—”
“You don’t sneak up on a white-tail. They can hear falling dandruff at fifty yards.”
“Well, there’s some hypnosis involved.”
“Right. And you’re hypnotized. You know that? You’re like a hound dog after a rabbit. They’ll run through a barbwire fence once they’re on the scent. And you might run into a trap.”
I convinced Ann finally that it was better to take a line of sight, then drive along roads which intersected the line. Then she could get out and find out if the creature was behind or in front.
Ann congratulated me on my ingenuity, which I’d always thought of as a lazy man’s way of thinking.
We made a couple of east-west passes through the country. Each time Ann got out of the car and assumed her cross-legged position, the lotus-posture, she called it, the course of energy was a little bit north. The third time I stopped she got out and sniffed the air, turned right and then left, then climbed through the fence and walked through down into a hollow which was covered by wheat-stubble. She sat down in the middle of the field and went into her trance.
Since it usually took about five minutes for her to get a fix, I prowled along the fence row to see if I could flush some quail. There wasn’t even a titmouse in the brush, and that gave me a warning. I looked down into the hollow and saw Ann down on the ground. It looked like she was wrestling with something.
I vaulted the fence and ran down, and she was clawing at the dirt and making sobbing sounds deep in her throat. I hollered at her, What is it? but she just kept digging and making this horrible sound: Uh-uh-uh-uh...
It finally struck me that Ann was out of her mind. I grabbed her shoulders and tried to pull her up, but she turned op me like a cat and scratched my face. Her face was distorted, her eyes wide, and her pupils dilated. I fended her off with my hand, but she kept coming, backing me up until I felt that barbed-wire stabbing into my back.
I got her wrists trapped in my hands but Ann wrapped her legs around me and threw herself backwards. I put out my hands to keep from falling, on her, and she clamped my neck in a strangle-hold, with her right hand gripping her left wrist.
A dark film came over my eyes. Her teeth raked my neck. I remembered the deer with its throat torn out and realized this was no time for half-measures. I chopped my hands down on her neck but she tightened her tendons so I couldn’t hit the nerves. I gritted my teeth and wrapped my hands around her throat and squeezed, feeling her wind-pipe moving under my thumbs.
Ann stared at me with her eyes bulging, then she collapsed. I caught her in my arms and carried her across the fence. When I reached the car, I sat in the seat and held her across my lap, with her head against my shoulder. I felt a bitter rage at myself for lacking the skill to knock her out painlessly, the way it shows in the karate books.
Still, she didn’t look damaged. With the madness no longer twisting her face, she looked angelic, her eyes closed as if in sleep, her lips slightly open. I bent down and felt her warm breath, against my face. Ah inch more, and my lips touched hers. I tasted the salty tang of my blood on her lips.
When I quickly lifted my head she was looking at me, her eyes tranquil but vaguely puzzled.
“How’d we get into this situation?”
I felt a hot flush of embarrassment, but Ann didn’t try to pull away, so I kept my arms around her while I told her what had happened. Male-female chemistry began to take effect, and a warmth grew where our flesh came into contact. She must have felt it too because she sat up in the seat and said:
“I’m still cold... inside.”
“I’ve got a thermos of coffee in back.”
“Just what I need.”
While Ann sipped the hot brew, I examined, my throat in the mirror. One pink spot showed where her canine tooth had broken the flesh. I touched it and felt a sick-sweet thrill run through my body.
“Now I know how a vampire victim feels,” I said.