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

raised her face from the thick carpet and sat up. Corday was in the act of crouching down beside her, one hand outstretched. His fingers touched her hair. “Judy, it is all right now. You are not hurt?”

    She jumped to her feet. “Find Johnny.”

    Her companion was already in motion, his long strides carrying him off into the darkness engulfing the rear portion of the house.

    Before following, Judy looked around. The front door was tightly closed once more, though now a portion of its lock hung in at an angle among splinters of newly broken wood. On the other side of the living room, near the great fireplace, the young man’s sheepskin coat lay in a bulky mound, and near it the long-barreled revolver. He must have run outside…

    “Judy?” Corday’s penetrating voice reached her from some distant room. “He is in here.”

    She ran down a dark hallway, past dim, unfurnished bedrooms, and a bathroom where she could make out a dirty towel hung on a rack, soap in a grimy puddle on the lavatory top. Light shone out of another bedroom, where Corday was waiting for her. A small lamp burned on an upended crate that served as bedside table for an unmade cot. Odds and ends of men’s clothes were strewn about, along with girly magazines, weightlifting journals, bits of food and garbage, tin cans, paper cups, plates, a small transistor radio.

    Corday stood beside the open door of the huge closet, gesturing for Judy to go in ahead of him. “He looks bad,” he said with his usual calm. “But I believe he will recover.”

    No clothes were hanging in the closet. Inside, Judy dropped to her knees beside the horrible, pale figure contracted into one dim corner. The figure stirred, raising a head matted with long, dirt-colored hair. Against its naked chest were folded two mummified Egyptian hands, covered with dried brownish stains, their fingers clenched and twisted.

    Startlingly pale eyes appeared, in a face that might once have been her brother’s. “Judy,” a stranger’s voice croaked at her. “They caught you, too.”

    “No, oh no. Oh, Johnny, your poor hands.”

    Corday was in and out of the closet now, moving with impersonal gentleness and quite improbable speed. He helped Johnny stand, looked at his throat closely for some reason, then wrapped him in two blankets from the cot. Somehow he found Johnny’s own boots and helped Judy get them on his feet. There seemed, for some reason, to be a tremendous hurry.

    “You are to drive him directly home, Judy, stopping for nothing, except to avoid collision.”

    “The car—”

    “There is a car in the garage, and unless I am mistaken these are its keys.” He handed her a jingling ring. “Hurry ahead and get the engine started—down the hall to your right. I shall bring John.”

    In grabbing for the keys Judy accidentally bumped her brother’s arm and he cried out in pain. Then she flew down the hall in the direction Corday had indicated. She caught a last glimpse of the living room in passing; the bundle of sheepskin coat had legs, she saw from this angle, and it was stirring now, raising a face.

    A light was on already in the garage, and its door had been rolled up. She was already behind the wheel of the Cadillac, engine started and headlights on, as Corday arrived to stow her brother in beside her.

    “Shouldn’t we telephone someone first—”

    “Joe will be calling for help. Drive straight home now, stop for nothing. Leave all else to me.”

    “Judy?” The voice coming from the pale face beside her did sound a little like her brother’s now, though terribly weak. “Take me home now?”

    Corday had already slammed the Cadillac’s door shut and vanished back into the house. Even as Judy gunned the engine and pulled out of the garage, two muffled banging noises from in there reached her ears. She had driven miles toward home before it occurred to her excited mind that they might possibly have been shots.

CHAPTER TWELVE

   Of the two uniformed Cook County sheriff’s deputies who had met Joe at the country gas station in response to his phone call, and had then followed him back to this lonely house, one was now outside in their official car, busy with its radio. The other deputy was with Joe in the house, and had begun a more or less methodical questioning of the only other person who had been on the scene when they arrived.

    “Now, you say he fired twice at you, Dr. Corday? Where were you standing when that happened?”

    “I believe—here.” And Corday moved decisively to a position in the living room not far from the entry. He seemed to have been not in the least shaken by the peril through which, according to his own story, he had so recently passed.

    “Uhuh.” The deputy remarked. He was not especially excited either. Following the old man closely he pointed to, without quite touching, a shattery-looking place in the otherwise new-looking plaster wall behind him. “If that is a bullet hole, I guess you weren’t standing exactly where you are right now, when she hit.”

    “Approximately,” Corday conceded, turning to look with mild interest at the damage.

    The deputy made a note. “You say he fired twice…one could be in the carpet somewhere, I suppose.”

    “That seems not improbable. As I recall, his arm was shaking.”

    “Then he ran out of the house, you say. Did you make any attempt to hold him?”

    “I am not as young as I once was, officer.”

    “Yessir, I don’t blame you a bit for that. Don’t get me wrong. But first, he did let you load the kidnap victim into his car and drive him out of here? I