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

      “Looks like it. But where is he?”

      Angie trembled, fearing interrogation. But at the moment the enemy were relying on what they could discover for themselves.

      They searched the bathroom, warily, a second time.

      “Look at this.” The white vampire paused in front of the video screen, as if he had not seen his own face for a long time. He did not look entirely happy with what he saw.

      The other joined him in the bathroom to check out the electronic mirror. He too seemed briefly fascinated with his own image, but fought free of the distraction. “Yes, this must be his room. But where is he?”

      At last their attention came back to Angie.

      The short man demanded of her “Where is he, the old one?’

      The tall one echoed: “Where is he?”

      Her head was spinning. She mumbled something. Weren’t they capable of discovering the open window for themselves?

      It was one of their breathing attendants who called their attention to it.

      The vampires themselves had seen and disregarded it. The tall, dark-skinned one said: “Bah, he left that open to mislead us.”

      The short one said: “It’s still daylight, he can’t change shapes and fly.”

      Angie, still too high on the old man’s drink to feel the full measure of terror she should have felt, kept looking toward the doorway. She was starting to wonder where Valentine Kaiser was.

      Now panic was starting to set in among the invaders. Enlisting the breathers’ help, the two vampires launched a frantic, though still cautious, search for the old man, which swept once more through the whole apartment. The intruders grew more frantic rather than less with their continued failure to locate their quarry.

      Angie, her mind drifting off in an amazing way, thought that perhaps Uncle Matthew should have hidden himself in the secret little cabinet, inside the back of the bedroom dresser. He might have done it, made himself small enough to fit in there, if he’d really tried. She almost giggled aloud, because the ones who were looking for him so frantically never thought that there might be such a secret place inside a piece of furniture. They never came close to discovering it.

      When they had gone over the entire apartment again, they came back to the bedroom and looked at her. Now they were having to face the fact that they weren’t going to find the old man in any of the rooms or closets, or under any of the furniture. He simply wasn’t in the apartment any longer.

      One of the vampires looked at his fellow. “Can he be out of man-shape?”

      The other snarled back: “Not so soon after he was drugged. It’s just not possible.” Then the same man looked at Angie, and demanded: “Where is he?”

      Automatically she looked toward the window, reacting to the question without thought.

      Silently, warily, suspiciously—we want none of your tricks!—they all four of them, breathers and vampires together, went to look at the window again, and out of it.

      Meanwhile Angie, hands bound behind her, ankles tied, lay helplessly on the old man’s rumpled bed, and could feel herself continuing to get higher and higher. Brandy was like milk compared to the loathsome yellowish brown powder in that little jar of odd-shaped glass. Angie giggled again, finding her situation hopelessly amusing. But her captors, clustered at the open window, being forced to the realization that that was where the old man had gone, failed to pay any attention to the oddities of her behavior.

      “How long,” one of the vampires asked the other, “until the Duke gets up here?”

      The other shook his head. “He didn’t know, he wasn’t sure. He wanted to stay with the breather who uses wooden bullets, until he had a chance to finish him.”

      Listening, Angie understood vaguely that Valentine Kaiser must be the Duke, and that for some reason he had left the storming of the apartment to these people. But it hadn’t gone as expected, and now they didn’t quite know what to do, and they were afraid of doing the wrong thing.

      One of the vampires picked up Uncle Matthew’s phone, listened to it, shook his head, and put the instrument down again. “It’s dead now,” he complained. “Now that we might have got some use out of it.”

      At the same time the other vampire ordered the two breathers to commence an immediate hunt for Dracula

      “Look upstairs, look in Val’s place. Get everyone down on the street and look for him. Got your wooden knives?”

      The breathing woman murmured a timid protest.

      “Don’t be afraid, he’ll be very weak if he’s lying down there somewhere. Take the people who’re standing guard in the hallways. We don’t need them here anymore.”

      As soon as the breathing couple had gone, the two nosferatu took turns leaning out of the window, gazing alternately upward and downward. Angie had looked out earlier, and she knew what there was to see, and could imagine how it appeared now with darkness falling: The surrealistic, slightly concave plain of steel and glass stretching away to right and left and up and down, vanishing indeterminately behind wreaths of darkening fog before the end of it became visible in any direction.

      One of the vampires said at last: “Well, he’s not hanging on a ledge out here. There really aren’t any ledges to speak of.”

      “I don’t expect he’s hanging on to anything. I expect he’s lying dead or crippled down there on the plaza.” Evidently even vampire eyes could not see that distance clearly in this fog. “Even this length of fall upon concrete would probably not completely kill him—on wood, of course, it would have been a different matter.”

      “We’ve got to find him, finish him off—”

      “He might have crawled into an alley somewhere—”

      “He might have tried to climb up, instead of down. But I don’t see how he could have gotten far—”

      Angie was now experiencing a wave of nausea; but this reaction, like her others, passed unnoticed.

      The two vampires were trying to think of everything important.

      “Did someone block up the door? We don’t want people just wandering