An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3) by Fred Saberhagen (interesting books to read for teens .TXT) 📗

    “Oh.”

    And now they were at Oak Street. The white-shrouded curve of the Drive, for once as silent as a country lane, stretched away to the north under the streetlamps and the altering sky, strewn with abandoned vehicles. The wind off the lake, now dying, had ridged the Drive with snowdrifts. But unlike Michigan it was already scrawled with rutted tracks where something had managed to crawl through. The sound of diesels was again a little louder now, and Joe thought he could see a yellow snow-mover laboring far to the north.

    Morgan and Poach still headed north, now crossing blank white that had been parkway. East of them lay snow-covered beach, and then a fantasy of ice. Beyond that, more than a hundred yards away, the almost invincibly open water of the lake was leadenly visible under the changing eastern sky.

    When she had gone another block north, Morgan came to an abrupt stop. She stood there, looked ahead and inland, to where apartment buildings rose above barren trees. Joe realized that Walworth’s building had just come into full view. One window of it about twenty stories up, was leaking interior light of a different tone than the light from the other windows near it. In a moment he realized that the glass of that window must be gone—those windows were not made for ordinary opening. Looking at the ground below it now, Joe could make out human figures, beaming flashlights at one another and on an object lying in the snow. Some of the tiny figures were wearing caps and jackets of police blue. A black face showed between an orange ski cap and a brown civilian coat. Joe had seen that cap before; at this distance Charley Snider’s features were unrecognizable, but fortunately distance worked both ways. An olive-drab halftrack with a red cross on its side, something borrowed from the army, stood by with its headlights helping illuminate the scene.

    Morgan and Poach wee standing still in conference. Now that giant raised an arm to point eastward at the approaching dawn. The desert of water and ice in that direction was becoming gradually more visible. The pale, still sunless sky above it was generally clear. Now the two turned and walked in that direction, not looking back.

    At once the old man moved to follow, almost at a trot. Joe and Kate were gasping with the effort of staying at his heels. Joe floundered across a snow fence, only the top two inches of its ineffectual slats showing above curved powder.

    Beyond the snow fence, forty yards of unbroken white ended in a jumble of foot-thick ice slabs, broken up and cast ashore by yesterday’s or last night’s powerful east winds. As Joe drew near the wilderness of ice its jagged horizon reached higher than his head. Above the ice beautiful streaks of pink were being born in the southeast sky.

    First Morgan and then Poach vanished, this time in something like a normal human way, climbing into the cold maze of broken ice. Corday paused for an instant in his pursuit to ask: “Will it be possible for them to find a boat of any kind?”

    “Not here. Not in the winter.” Legs laboring, lungs pumping on frozen air, Joe labored after Corday’s effortless, slow-plowing sprint, holding his spear at the ready, like a slow pole-vaulter, thanking God he at least found gloves in his jacket pockets.

    Following Corday’s gestures, his allies spread out to his left and right, then followed his advance into the ice field. Joe had the worst of it, handicapped with the spear when two hands as well as two feet seemed hardly enough for clambering among the jumbled, slippery slabs.

    Trying to keep Corday’s head at least intermittently in sight, Joe advanced as best he could. The sky was light enough now to let him see what he was doing, but still the going was very awkward and treacherous. Moving silently was impossible, at least for Joe.

    In a minute or so the whole city behind him was out of sight. Here it was as silent as Alaska, except for the sounds of his own progress. And, somewhere that could not be very far away, a gentle lapping of water against ice or rock or sand.

    Joe lost Corday for a little while. Then, dragging himself up into a saddle between two cakes, he was relieved to see the old man’s head and shoulders against a third, still and silent as the ice he rested on. He’s probably letting me draw the first attack, Joe suddenly realized. The clumsy, noisy one…well, if that’s the way we have to do it, it still has to be done. He gripped his spear and went ahead.

    In a moment he had slipped on impossible footing, skinning a knee painfully inside his trousers and wrenching an ankle, fortunately not hard enough to cut down on his mobility any further. Joe cursed silently and gripped his spear and went ahead. When he got close to the place where he had last seen Corday, the chuckle of water was much closer too. It sounded like it might be eating at the ice right beneath his feet. If a man were to fall into one of these deep, dark blue holes…

    Here was where Corday had been. But the old man was gone now. He and Kate must be nearby, following, listening even as the enemy was to Joe’s clumsy progress. On the other hand he could imagine the whole chase gradually progressing away from him, and he, the dull-sensed one, falling and freeze-drowning here and never knowing its result. Someone would find him in the spring…

    Ahead, around the corner of another tilted green-gray slab, an object of a different nature came into view. It took Joe a moment