An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3), Fred Saberhagen [best large ereader .txt] 📗

upon myself to decide that Judy would be better off getting out, and it’d be safe enough if I rode shotgun.” He blinked at Corday’s blank stare. “Chicago cops always go armed, you know, even off duty. So here we are.”

    While Joe talked they had been slowly gravitating back to the doorway. Now Corday gestured and Joe stepped out. At the bottom of the little slope, Judy’s scarf-wreathed face smiled back from the small car’s window.

    Joe led the way down to her. Behind him he could hear Corday shutting the metal door of the mausoleum carefully, and the key turning, grating in the little-used lock.

    Judy looked well enough when they rejoined her in the car. “I think it was just the idea of going in there,” she said again. “I didn’t want to go in after all.”

    “Natural enough,” said Joe, getting the engine and heater started. Why was the old man here, today?  “Where can we take you, Dr. Corday?”

    The old man, in the right front seat, was twisting round to face the back. “Joe tells me you had two vivid dreams last night. What was the second?”

    Judy smiled, a quick little flicker, as if to mark the passage of some secret between her and the old man. Then her face turned bleak. “Towards morning I dreamed of Johnny. He was in a closet somewhere. All naked, and bloody, and…just awful. God, I hope it isn’t true. But I can’t stop feeling that it is.”

    “And can you lead us to this closet?” The old man was intensely serious.

    “I’m taking her home,” said Joe, and reached to move his selector lever into Drive. The old man’s fingers settled gently on his wrist. Joe urged his own hand forward anyway; his hand stayed right where it was, as if he were trying to lift the car with it instead of one thin elderly arm. He felt ridiculous. What was he going to do now, start a wrestling match?

    The old man continued to stare at Judy, and Joe followed the direction of his gaze. He was disturbed to see that although Judy still sat up straight, her eyes were closed and the utterly relaxed expression on her face suggested that she was asleep.

    In wonder, he asked: “Judy?”

    “She is asleep,” Corday informed him soothingly, and at the same time let go of Joe’s wrist.

    “Judy, are you all right?”

    “Answer Joe, Judy.”

    “I’m fine.” Her voice was pleasant, but remote. Her eyes stayed closed.

    Corday asked her: “Can you now guide us to the building where John is being held?”

    “Yes.” Her voice held sudden urgency. “Turn west as soon as you leave the cemetery.”

    Joe looked at her a moment longer, then got the car in motion, this time without interference. “What is she, hypnotized? Whatever you’re doing with her, I don’t like it. She’s going home.”

    “Joe, don’t” Judy’s voice was intense but calm. “I’m all right. If you love Kate, you’ll help to find her brother.”

    Joe glanced into the rear-view mirror. Judy’s eyes were open again and she looked quite normal.

    She said: “Do you think the police are ever going to find him? They don’t have a single clue, do they?”

    They had reached the plowed section of the cemetery roads by now. The gate was only a quarter mile or so ahead. Joe said: If you want the truth, I don’t think they’ll ever get him back alive.”

    “There you are. But we can. He’s in a white house, out in the country just a few miles west of here. I think the roof has shingles.”

    “I think you better go home.”

    “If you try to take me home I’ll jump out of the car before we get there. I’ll fight and scream. If you humor me a little I’ll be just fine.”

    Joe slowed, indecisively. Half angry, half pleading for help, he turned to the old man. “Doctor?”

    Corday’s face was altered by a smile, small, confident, and almost irresistibly comradely. Softly he said: “Turn west.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

   “Your hour’s almost up,” Joe commented. Almost an hour after leaving Lockwood Cemetery, they had at last penetrated the western belt of suburbs and were entering real countryside. The two-lane highway, coated in salted slush, ran northwest. On the left were cornfields, snowy stubble now, and on the right at the moment was a new apartment development, decorated barracks that seemed to have been extruded against the road’s shoulder by the congestion to the east.

    “Keep going,” Judy urged. Again, as happened every time Joe so much as hinted at giving up, there was an underlevel of panic in her reply. “Joe, he’s so badly hurt. We’ve got to get to him right away. There’s a man in the house with Johnny, but he’s not helping Johnny at all. I can feel how close it is. We’re almost there.”

    “Six more minutes,” said Joe firmly. “Then we’re going to find a phone and call your home and tell ’em you’re all right. I agreed to spend an hour at this, and we will, and then you’re going home. Right, Doctor?”

    No answer came from Corday, who had his hand in his coat pockets, and was gazing fixedly ahead, as if he were lost in his own thoughts.

    Joe did not repeat the question. There had been moments during the ride when mentally he swore at himself for being taken in by Judy’s hysterics and Corday’s strange act, and came very close to turning the car around at once. These moments were followed by others in which he nursed the feeling, hardly suitable for a cop but inextinguishable anyway, that weird things in the field of ESP did sometimes happen. His own mother and father had testified