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

still softly playing in the living room. “I’m back.” In her own ears her voice sounded louder than it ought to have, yet still it went unanswered.

    The door of the closet in the front hall was standing open now, though Judy thought she could remember closing it after getting out her jacket and boots for the trip to the drugstore. Without removing any of her outdoor gear she walked on into the living room. The sofa where Gran had been was empty now, the television played for no one.

    Judy walked on into the formal dining room, and stopped. Granny Clare lay on the carpet at the far end. Her old-woman’s legs were crossed, one arm pinned beneath her body and the other one out flung. It was a pose suggesting not a simple fall, but the come-to-rest position of a body that had been thrown. Even before she hurried closer and bent to look at the still face, Judy knew that her grandmother was dead.

    Pulling from her jacket pocket the medicine that would not be needed now, Judy carefully set the small bottle in its paper bag on the dining room table. Then she moved dazedly for the extension phone that stood on a small table in the hall. Picking up the receiver, she realized that she had no clear idea of whom she ought to call first—and then realized that it did not matter, because the line was dead. Ice on the lines, the storm…

    But the act of careful listening had discovered another sound, an unfamiliar one, in the still house. Judy went back to the living room—glancing involuntarily into the dining room again as she passed—but could not hear it there, even when she had switched the television off. Further explorations showed that it was coming from somewhere down the cross hall in the direction of the old wing.

    At the entrance to that connecting hallway, Judy paused to listen. It was scraping or scratching, very soft. It fit into no niche at all in her memory. It got no louder, came no nearer. But neither did it go away. It was repetitious, but not quite rhythmical.

    For the first time it dawned on Judy that whoever had attacked Granny Clare—she did not doubt for a moment that someone had—could still be in the house. Conceivably the intruder had missed hearing Judy’s return. Therefore she could now flee out into the storm again, and try to get help at a neighbor’s. Police could be called—if all the phones in the neighborhood weren’t out. Police would come—whenever the blizzard let them.

    But even as she thought with part of her mind about running out of the house, Judy had taken the first steps toward her father’s study. She knew he kept a gun there in his desk…and now, from down the hallway, there came a new sound that stopped her dead in her tracks.

    “Judy…” The voice was ghastly, barely louder or more distinct than the scraping that had preceded it. It brought to Judy’s mind an image of dried snakeskin, being drawn tautly over jagged bone. But despite the horror of it, the terrible change, she knew at once whose voice it was.

    She ran toward it, flicking on a hallway light. To rooms on her right and left the doors stood open, and closet doors stood open inside the rooms.

    In the doorway to the room that housed the pottery collections she stopped. Enormous ruin was before her. Display cases and tables had been overturned as though in some giants’ struggle, glass and pottery alike smashed into a million pieces. Almost nothing seemed to have been left intact. The great terra-cotta sarcophagus that had stood in the middle of the room had been cast down from its base, and then broken, pulverized, as by madmen with sledgehammers. The lid of it was still almost intact, but it lay on its edge now yards away, beneath a window where one small pane was broken out. In through the hole a tortured tendril of the snowstorm groped, a dancing ghost in the near-darkness.

    “Judy…”

    She touched the light switch near the door. Destruction sprang out at her in all its horrible detail. A leather traveling bag, as unknown and out of place as something in a dream, lay half open in the middle of it all, and from the bag there spilled a man’s dark suit, clean shirts and ties.

    Only after she took a step into the room did she see him, lying in the middle of the one large open space left on the floor.

    Him? It was a scarecrow figure. It seemed to be hardly more than a suit of dark clothing that lay there, transfixed against the polished hardwood by a wooden shaft as thick as a hoe handle and a man’s height long. This incredible spear had somehow been driven down into that floor, like a gigantic nail. Where the shaft of it entered the dark coat near the right shoulder, upwelling red was already congealing and drying into brownish jelly. And everywhere around the figure, the floor and walls and wrecked furniture were marked with red-brown gouts and splashes.

    Of course the bloody clothing was not really empty, no more than that sheepskin coat had been. Dark cloth moved and swelled. What turned toward Judy was more skull than face, a loved face horribly transformed. Bared teeth grinned starkly white, the cheekbones bulged sharply beside a shrunken nose. But deep in the darkened caverns of the eyes, fierce life still burned.

    Between those lipless teeth the snakeskin voice scratched out a question: “He…is…gone?”

    Falling on her knees beside him, Judy spread helpless arms. “There’s no one here but me. Gran’s dead. Oh love, who did this to you? How did you get here?”

    A dark sleeve tried to gesture. “Pull…out…”