Fatal Bargain Read Online Free PDF Page A

beneath her touch, but still he said nothing.
    “Eeeuuuhh!” shrieked Sherree. “How can you put your bare hand out there? What if the vampire touches you?”
    Lacey shuddered. The vampire was there, of course. No doubt he was taking pleasure in this; it was, after all, the first entertainment he had had in a long time. But somehow she did not think that her hand was going to encounter his slime.
    Her hand encountered nothing at all.
    Lacey latched her hands around Bobby’s waist and pulled, but he did not come free. And he still said nothing. Nothing at all.
    The weird thing was how normal it seemed, as if she had often met boys hanging in doorways and knew just what to do next. If you can’t pull, try pushing, she reasoned.
    So she stepped through the very doorway the vampire supposedly possessed — the doorway Bobby’s body had not penetrated — and then turned around to push Bobby back into the tower room.
    “You got through!” cried Roxanne, getting up. Roxanne hefted the hammer, ready to split the skull of any vampire that got close to her.
    “Run, Lacey!” shouted Randy. He was so proud of her! She was not an airhead after all; he could brag about her now; now Bobby and Zach couldn’t say anything about Lacey.
    But Lacey did not run.
    For beyond the door, at the top of the tower stairs, was the vampire’s miasma of swamp gas. Wet slime coated her face and tried to get in her eyes. Horrible smells and even more horrible sounds filled her nose and ears.
    The sounds were shrieks from another world: a dead world, a world of bodies the vampire had already used.
    He had been here forever, thought Lacey. He was here before the house, and he will be here after the house. He is evil now, he was evil then, he will be evil after I am gone.
    And now, Lacey knew why Bobby was not saying anything. He could not. He was deafened by the screams and the cries and the sobbing of the vampire’s past. He was looking right into it.
    Bobby knew.
    The rest of them were just guessing.
    But Bobby knew what was going to happen to one of them.
    Lacey screwed her eyes tightly shut, to keep from seeing the future and the past, and to keep the horrible swamp gas out of her eyes.
    Nothing would have made Lacey run down the stairs into that oozing, sucking mud.
    She pushed harder and harder on Bobby, but nothing happened.
    Or at least, nothing happened to Bobby. Lacey herself stumbled back through the door, back into the tower.
    Oh! The unbelievable relief of breathing real air again! No smog of corpses, no relics of pain.
    On this side of Bobby’s pinned figure were four other normal human beings, with their normal bodies, circulating blood, expanding lungs, functioning brains.
    “I know what it is,” said Lacey abruptly. She switched off the flashlight.
    Sherree screamed. She had a powerful scream, and one that the mansion seemed to appreciate; the scream was welcomed into the terrible dark beyond the door.
    Randy whimpered. Zach trembled convulsively. Roxanne’s eyes filled with tears.
    Lacey said, “I think the dark is better. I think this tower was meant to be dark. I think the flashlight is an invader. We can’t use it again.”
    She was right.
    For now that dark had returned, Bobby sank.
    Slowly. As if he were at the top of an old playground slide, rusty, no speed to it. A slide for tiny nervous children.
    Bobby puddled to the floor of the tower, like Zach in his Halloween memory. Zach and Randy rolled their friend safely back to the center of the room.
    In the middle of the tower the six of them huddled.
    When Sherree reached out to hold hands, everybody responded.
    Then Sherree said, “I can’t sit like this. My back is showing. Let’s turn around and have all our backs touching, and we’ll face out.”
    “That’s worse,” said Bobby. His voice had changed. It was dull and leaden. It was not Bobby at all; it was somebody who had known suffering and pain, someone acquainted with fear, someone with no hope.
    “Why is