A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen (best reads .TXT) 📗

Down the shadowy hall behind her the apartment was mostly dark; some light was coming from one of the other bedrooms.

      The woman looked pale and haggard, appropriately for the hour. Also she was worried. “Something’s wrong with him in there,” she told them simply.

      John opened the bedroom door a little wider. He rubbed his eyes and massaged his day-old growth of beard. “What?”

      Elizabeth’s voice rose querulously. “I don’t know what. He just looks awful. His eyes are partly open but I can’t get him to wake up. And there’s blood smeared all over his mouth. I’d have thought he was dead, but he moves, a little. Is he subject to fits or something?”

      Angie saw that John was staring at the waitress’s neck. He blinked his eyes and stared again. Angie could feel her own flesh creep. There was a tiny, fresh blood spot visible on Elizabeth’s throat—no, two tiny spots, a couple of inches apart, and around them some dried smears as if the little wounds had been oozing for some time. But the woman seemed completely unaware of the fact.

      John muttered something, pushed past her, and led the way down the hall, to the room in which Uncle Matthew and the waitress must have retired not more than a couple of hours ago. After giving a token rap on the slightly open door, John pushed it open and led the others in. A moment later he had reached for a wall switch and turned on an additional light.

      The single figure now occupying the queen-sized bed was sprawled across it diagonally and concealed up to the armpits by a sheet. The rumpled cover left bare the pale and wiry arms, the muscle-rounded shoulders. Uncle Matthew’s head lifted slightly when the light came on. He turned his face away from the brighter light and toward the visitors.

      Or—was this really Uncle Matthew? Angie, coming closer to the bed, paused suddenly, for a moment doubting whether she was looking at the same man. This face looked altogether too young, and at the same time too unhealthy. The pallor of this face was intense, the features somehow altered. The glossy dark hair, now entirely free of gray, was wildly tousled. Angie saw that Uncle Matthew’s gaze, pointed in the general direction of his visitors, was unresponsive, his eyes glassy, hardly more than half open. If she hadn’t just seen the body move, she might well have thought the face before her now was dead.

      And Elizabeth was right, those certainly looked like bloodstains on his lips and chin and cheeks. As if he had been drinking clumsily, or sucking blood—Angie giggled suddenly, a strained and awkward sound.

      No one took any notice.

      “Uncle Matthew?” There was horror in John’s voice. He was wide awake now. As he leaned forward, closer to the bed, something crackled faintly beneath his hand pressing down the sheets. Puzzled, John shifted his weight and pushed again, testing. The effort produced a renewed crunching sound. “Oh,” he said then, as if he had just remembered something.

      The man who was lying across the bed suddenly rolled over on his back, an abrupt, almost convulsive movement. His eyes opened a little wider, and then sought those of the younger man. The gory lips twitched, revealing stark white, pointed teeth. It looked as if he were trying, so far without success, to communicate something to John.

      “Sir? What is it?”

      A straining, an evident attempt to answer, but no speech, hardly any sound. Angie chimed in, pleading, “Uncle Matthew?”

      The man in the bed gurgled, gasped for air, and murmured something. It was at last a response, but far from intelligible. He made an abortive effort to raise himself, but could get his head no more than a couple of inches from the pillow before falling back.

      Elizabeth the waitress had followed John and Angie into the bedroom and had been hovering uneasily in the background. Now she said: “At first I thought he was just drunk, but—I don’t remember that he even had a drink. We’d better call a doctor. If he’s bleeding like that around his mouth.” She giggled inappropriately. Unlike Angie’s nervous laughter earlier, Elizabeth’s went on for some time.

      But John was shaking his head emphatically before Elizabeth had even finished speaking. “No,” he said decisively. “No doctors.”

      Angie looked at him with a questioning frown, but said nothing for the moment.

      “Well, he’s your relative. Me, I don’t like the way he looks. In fact I think I’m getting out of here. Where’d he put my coat? In the front closet, I suppose.” The woman was obviously growing more and more upset every time she looked at Uncle Matthew in the bright light.

      “I’ll help you find your coat,” said Angie, turning away from the bed. Meanwhile she was wondering whether she ought to try to break it gently to Elizabeth that her throat was bleeding slightly, but before she could decide the doorbell chimed.

      “Who could that be?” asked Elizabeth automatically. Angie thought that after several hours of quiet it wasn’t likely to be the neighbors complaining about noise.

      All three of Uncle Matthew’s guests moved into the living room, approaching the front door and its closed-circuit color video.

      John turned on the viewer beside the door, and all three looked at the little wall-mounted screen. Angie started to speak, then bit her tongue. From the corner of her eye, she saw Elizabeth raise her fingers to her mouth; then the women looked at each other in puzzlement at their shared reaction.

      Before either of them could decide what to say, John made his own comment. “Some young guy,” he muttered. “Whoever it is, I never saw him before.”

      “I think I have,” said Angie timidly.

      Valentine Kaiser, wearing a trench coat, was standing there front and center, posing accommodatingly right in front of the electronic eye so anyone inside could get a look at him. Somewhat vague in the background was the figure of another man, who appeared just about tall enough to look over Kaiser’s shoulder. Angie couldn’t be sure, but she