Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror Read Online Free PDF Page B

knew where Stan had kept the ATM card; she even knew the code—sometimes she’d made withdrawals for the Hobbits as she ran her errands down in town. The car, whatever cash she could get from the bank: that was all she’d need in order to vanish. By nightfall, she could be in Philadelphia, or Buffalo, or Wilmington, cities she’d never visited before, blank slates, new starts. Ally lay on her back in the hot room, wondering if there were people who would do such a thing—no, that’s not true, because of course there were such people: what she wondered was if she herself could ever be that type of person. She was thinking about the Titanic , the listing deck, the band playing, the icy sea. There were men who’d donned dresses, she knew, pretending to be women so that they could claim a spot for themselves in the meager allotment of lifeboats. Ally didn’t want to be like that, but she didn’t want to be left on the deck, either; she didn’t want to stand there in the North Atlantic night, while the ship sank beneath her feet . . . and Mrs. Henderson was making her retie the knots, raising her voice above the wind, telling her to go over and around and then under again, and Ally (always so clumsy with her hands, but all the more so now, her fingers cramping in the cold rain) kept losing hold of the rope . Part of her realized she was dreaming, and it was this part that roused her back into waking, into the Hobbits’ stuffybedroom, with its faint smell of shit. It was still dark, but later now, and empty—the bed, the room.
    Ally pushed herself into a sitting position. She listened. Softly, in the distance, she could hear someone whimpering. It was faint enough for Ally to think that she might be imagining it—but no, there it was again, louder now, irrefutable. She climbed out of bed, stood in the dark room, trying to find her bearings, to shake off the last vestiges of sleep; she wanted to be certain she wasn’t dreaming. The pajamas clung to her body, heavy with perspiration, smelling of both her and Stan all at once.
    “Eleanor?” she called.
    The whimpering continued. It wasn’t Eleanor, Ally realized: it was Bo. She started out of the room, moved quickly down the hall into the kitchen. The dog was outside, Ally could tell. His whimpering had roused the birds; they’d begun to caw and shriek and whistle in the shuttered barn. Ally was hurrying—across the kitchen, into the mudroom—she didn’t pause to turn on a light, so it was a shock to come across Eleanor, standing there in the darkness, naked again, staring out the screen door toward the lawn.
    “Eleanor?”
    Eleanor held up a hand: “Shh.”
    Outside, Bo’s whimpering climbed a notch, becoming a sustained sort of yelp. There was pain in the sound, and fear, and helplessness. Ally pushed past Eleanor, out the door. The old woman grabbed at her arm—again with that surprising strength of hers—but Ally wrenched herself free. The dew on the grass felt cold against her bare feet, almost like frost. It was a pleasant sensation, sobering and clarifying: now, at last, she was fully awake. There was a half-moon, hanging just above the barn, but a cloud was moving slowly across its face, which meant the yard was dark enough for Ally to need half a dozen steps to realize that there wasn’t, as she first thought, a child lying in a white dress halfway across the lawn: it wasEleanor’s nightgown, cast aside on the grass. Bo would be tied to the hitching post, Ally knew, and as she approached, she began to hear not only his continued keening, but also a wet slapping, a heavy panting, and what sounded like the flapping of a flag in a light breeze. She could see him then, struggling to rise, falling, struggling up again—this was the slapping sound, his paws churning at the muddy puddle he’d peed into the dirt around the hitching post—he fell, he whimpered, he fell again. “It’s okay,” Ally said. “I’m here. It’s okay, sweetie.” She was