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

looks like. He looks like a vampire. Nosferatu, remember? Because that’s what he is.”

      “A vampire? You’re trying to tell me that this man is actually—that he’s a vampire.”

      Her fiancé’s numbed lethargy began to crack. “Not trying anymore, honey. I’ve given up trying to break it to you gently. I’m telling you, because that’s what he is. And so is Kaiser. Angie, whatever you do, never say a word of invitation to any of those people who were out in the hall. They can’t come into someone’s house if they’re not asked.” John, for the moment looking totally insane, leaned toward her as he uttered the last sentence.

      But this time Angie didn’t think that he was crazy. Crazy would have been easier to deal with, somehow. She could only wish for some answer as manageable as that.

      “Thanks,” Angie said vaguely. “I wasn’t going to do that.”

      Recovering somewhat, John seemed ready to talk plainly and sanely once again. He gestured toward the window. “The sun’s up now. They may have to lie low for a while.”

      “That’s great—if they have to hide from sunlight.”

      “They sure don’t care for sunlight much. A large direct dose can even kill them. But that doesn’t mean they can’t come out at all in the daytime. They love our Chicago climate. You met Kaiser in the daytime, right?”

      “Right. I met him indoors. And the day was cloudy.”

      “Sure. And he looked just about normal?”

      “You saw him in the hall. Sure he looks normal”

      “But he isn’t. I’ve had experience. Honey? I know how this must sound, but it’s real. This isn’t like the movies.”

      “No,” she said. “It isn’t anything like that.”

      John looked at his wristwatch and moved toward the bedside phone. “I’m going to try Joe again.”

      “Joe? Joe Keogh? Why is it important to call him?”

      But John didn’t answer. He had already picked up the phone and was punching numbers.

      Angie looked once more at Uncle Matthew, shuddered, and started to move out of the room. At that moment the front door chime sounded.

      John put down the phone and came with her to the door. The color images of two people showed on the little screen. One was Valentine Kaiser. The second, standing beside him and locked in the circle of his arm that came around her neck and shoulder, was a woman with red hair, wearing a cloth coat.

      John switched on the sound.

      The switch caught Elizabeth Wiswell’s voice, softly desperate, in the middle of a sentence. “ —me in, please, you’ve got to let me in. He’ll let me go if you do. If you don’t, he’s going to drink my blood. All of it. He says that and I’m sure he means it.”

      Kaiser’s arm moved slightly and her voice fell silent. Another image hurried across the screen, someone on the way to work most likely. When Liz and Kaiser had the corridor to themselves again, her pleas resumed, low, quavering, and sometimes hard to understand.

      “He means it. They all do. Please, you’ve got to let him in now. He won’t hurt you. If you don’t, they’re going to—” John hit the speaker switch, and a moment later the switch that turned off the video. The little screen went blank.

      Now someone had begun pounding, though feebly, on the door. If Elizabeth was still trying to talk to them, from out there in the hall, it was impossible to hear her through the soundproofing of the walls and the door’s thick wood.

      John and Angie looked at each other. He said: “There’s a chance they won’t hurt her. I think a better chance than if we let them in. And it won’t do any good to call the cops. It won’t do any good at all. Do you believe me, Angie? Do you understand me?”

      She made a gesture between a nod and a shrug.

      John hurried back to the phone in the nearby alcove.

      Someone was still thumping weakly on the door.

      Aimlessly, moving in shock, Angie turned away and wandered back down the hallway, into the guest bedroom where she had had about two hours’ sleep before the vampires—the bad, dangerous vampires, not the one that wasn’t quite John’s uncle—came on the scene.

      Sinking down into a chair, she stared at the tape machine. In a moment she began to cry.

Chapter Four

      The return of full awareness, the reestablishment of the full presence of the soul within the mangled but mysteriously healing flesh, was a long, gradual, and parlous process. I need not discuss here what trials and journeys my soul, my self, was required to undertake before that process was complete. Nor will I detail here all the twists and turns through which that evolution progressed, before restoring my spirit to my transformed body. Suffice it to say that at length, however tardily, full consciousness returned, was localized in altered flesh.

      In drastically altered flesh indeed. More on that subject later.

      To begin with I understood little more than that I was alive, though garbed in the cerements of the grave. I was out-of-doors, where bright moonlight—oh, it was undoubtedly only the moon, however fantastically bright it seemed to me—showed me that I was alone, occupying a small glade in a woodland setting. When I came to myself I was crouched on all fours upon the earth, like some beast about to spring. The cold of the winter night meant nothing to me. My limbs were free of any restraint, and by this I knew that I must have somehow escaped my murderers, whose last efforts to torment me filled what were almost my last clear memories.

      Almost, I say. For it seemed to me that I could remember listening and watching in some disembodied fashion, even as others prepared my corpse for the grave.

      And the newly refrozen snow around me still showed the dirty traces of excavation and burial.

      Slowly I stood erect, trying to recognize the sylvan spot in which I found myself. Had it been only a dream of death, that seeming memory of falling to the swords of my treacherous lieutenants, of