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

      “I put it back in place again, just now when I let the breathers out. From out in the corridor you can hardly tell that it was broken in.”

      “What else should we do?”

      “You and I wait here for Val. He should be coming soon.”

      “Meanwhile—”

      The two of them had the same idea simultaneously. They turned their faces toward Angie and began looking at her hungrily.

      The shorter man said; “He said we could have the blood, if there was any here.”

      The other was already on the bed, snapping off the strips of cloth with which he’d tied her. And now her clothes were going.

      Angie screamed, once, and then a hand came smothering over her nose and mouth.

* * *

      Before Mrs. Hassler had started down to the pool for her swim, she’d urged John to make himself at home. So far he’d poured himself a glass of low-fat milk from her refrigerator, and was nervously eyeing the bananas on the table. The last time he’d checked on the sentinels in the hallway, they were still there.

      When the phone rang he jumped to answer it, hoping it was his helpful hostess, calling to report on what she had observed of the watcher in the hallway.

      His hopes were realized. Mrs. Hassler’s voice, sounding indignant, commented: “The one in the front hall, at least, seems a really unpleasant type of person—are the two of them still there?”

      “I’m afraid so. At least they were the last time I looked.” John took another gulp of milk.

      Sounds of tsk-tsking came over the wire. “Isn’t it a shame?” his confederate sympathized. “Not that it’s any of my business, of course, but—”

      “Not at all,” John reassured her hastily. “We’re grateful for your help.”

      The inane conversation went on. John accepted, for the moment anyway, the urgings of his absentee hostess to help himself to some health food from the pantry and refrigerator. He urged her in turn to enjoy her swim.

      “I’m going to do just that, John—may I call you John?—thank you.”

      As soon as she was off the phone he hung up and ran again to look out. He chose the back-door viewer this time, but he saw the same thing as before.

      He still couldn’t be sure, with only electronic images to look at, whether the watchers were vampires or not.

      He paced.

      Worry about Angie threatened to overwhelm him from time to time, but in his cooler moments he saw no reason to doubt that she would be okay if she just sat tight in the apartment. The old man, recovering, was with her. And it might be important to keep the enemy from discovering that he, John, had slipped out.

      Several times John considered trying to phone Uncle Matthew’s apartment. But in doing so he might be passing more useful information to the enemy than to Angie.

      Would Angie understand why he wasn’t coming back? Of course, as soon as she looked into the hallway. But she would be worrying about him. Well, for the moment it couldn’t be helped.

      Once, John’s restless pacing took him into Mrs. Hassler’s bedroom, where she had star charts, zodiacs, the tools of astrology taped up on her walls. Small fireplace, with a sealed vase centered on the mantel. Some husband’s ashes, maybe? She had seemed to have no qualms about leaving this nice young man alone in her apartment. Perhaps she had been reassured by her stars or oracles.

      John paced from room to room, wondering what he was going to do next.

      And the next time he looked out the front-door viewer, the sentry who had been there was gone.

* * *

      The old man had endured a long, tryingly difficult climb down the slippery, all-but-vertical north face of the great building. The range of his descent had so far been something like forty stories, approximately four hundred feet, and in his present condition this journey had taken him the better part of an hour.

      When he had swung himself out of his bedroom window, he had had basically two choices of direction open to him—up or down. But he had not hesitated for a moment. The various points of entry to the building, those accessible to a vampire who found himself locked temporarily into human shape, had all been charted by him years ago. Over the centuries, advance preparation for emergencies had become an ingrained habit.

      Fortunately—and not entirely by accident, for the old man had a certain knack for influencing the weather—the fog had come back thicker than ever, deep and high and solid enough to protect him from any but the most unlucky observation by the mundane on the street below or in some other building.

      To keep his mind off his exhaustion and other difficulties as he went down, he allowed himself to wonder whether anyone inside the windows he was passing might be able to catch a glimpse of his wiry figure, swathed in a white bathrobe, slipping by. A lot of curtains were open, here on the residential levels. But it would not be a particularly scenic day for looking out. People who caught sight of him would rub their eyes, and blink, and decide they could not have seen what their eyes reported. Office workers, like schoolchildren, tended to gaze out the windows of their daily prisons whenever they had the chance. But in this building most of the office space lay below the level of the swimming pool and health club.

      For a time the descending vampire set his course along one of the huge external cross-braces that went diagonally down across the building’s flank. The giant girder screened him partially from inside observation, and provided something large and relatively easy to hold on to in his weakness. The chief disadvantage of this route was that the total distance to be covered rather alarmingly increased.

      On reaching the corner of the building, he switched back to the next diagonal cross-brace, angling down in the opposite direction, remaining on the north side of the building, where fortunately he was shadowed from the day’s last