An Old Friend Of The Family (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 3) by Fred Saberhagen (the two towers ebook txt) 📕

stashed away, he took her jacket as she slipped it off, and with a toss consigned it to the closet’s minor chaos.

   “You put out a standing invitation for Friday nights, Craig. I’m just taking you at your word.”

   “I’m just delighted that you are, Sweetie. Our little group here will never be the same—thank God.” Craig’s voice was still low, uncharacteristically near the whispering level, and now he glanced about, a man checking to see if he might be overheard. “Now listen, Doll, there’s a little house rule I’ve got to mention before you join the group.”

   “Rules? That’s not quite what I would have expected at your parties.”

   “Well, you see, it’s not your basic expectable kind of rule.” As they talked, he had started her moving down the hall toward the still rather muffled sounds of partying, with an arm round her waist that she somehow minded more than the expected cheek-kiss following. “The thing is, everyone—except me, of course—takes a new name for the evening, and pretends to be someone other than they are. You should be…how do you like Sabrina? Sabrina Something, and I’ll say that you’re an old friend of mine from Canada. How’s that?”

   “Well, I did think of becoming Sabrina once, believe it or not. When I was about thirteen years old.”

   They had now come to a room where four or five people were gathered, all standing as if none of them had been here very long. Kate so rarely remembered names the first time round that sometimes she was tempted to give up trying; and since these were supposedly all aliases anyway, she made no effort to retain anything from the round of introductions.

   Beside Kate stood a tall girl wearing an odd shawl who wanted to find out how much Kate knew about Tarot Cards. When she heard the answer was nothing at all, she wanted to explain them at great length. Kate tried for a little while to make sense of it, and then as the group shifted, took the first opportunity to move away. She was offered a drink, declined, then thought that the next time she would accept. In the background she could hear a heavy door, probably the front door of the apartment, being firmly closed. Craig had excused himself, and was somewhere around a corner, talking on the phone.

   “Try a joint?” This from a stocky young man with thick glasses who had not been in the group the first time round—no doubt there might be other people she and not met, in other rooms; it must be a huge apartment. The man making the offer got too close, and stared at Kate intensely. Being given a man’s full attention is a thrilling experience for a woman—well, sometimes. Hadn’t she seen him somewhere else recently? But she had no intention of asking that aloud.

   Kate puffed twice and put the thing down. As expected, she felt nothing from it just at first. The first few times that she had tried, in school, nothing at all had happened to her. The few times after that had always resulted in a pleasant high, with slow onset and letdown. She wouldn’t be surprised if it was nothing again tonight; quite likely she was just too keyed up, too nervous, though why she should be…

   “…play games in a little while, you know, identities and such.” Craig was back at her side, finishing a statement whose beginning Kate had somehow missed. “And someone else is coming Sabrina, someone I want you to meet. I’ve mentioned you to him, and he’s very interested.”

   “Oh? My Canadian background?”

   Craig’s eyes were sparkling with some inner amusement under their dark brows. But now his attention was forced away by someone else, a blondish boy with a loud mouth, who had some interminable anecdote to tell him, as one insider to another. Craig responded with offhand but deliberate insults, which the loud one laughed at foolishly.

   Kate almost tripped over the tall girl, then sat down beside her on the thick, burgundy-colored carpet. “What sort of games is he talking about?” Kate asked. The girl said something Kate couldn’t catch. Very loud music was starting in the next room. The Pointer Sisters?

   Upon the wall that Kate was facing there hung an Escher print, the circle of lizards crawling up out of the flat surface of the drawing-within-the-drawing, crawling up and around an improvised ramp of books and geometric solids, to ease themselves at last down into the flat again, where in three shades of gray their bodies formed a tessellated pattern. Kate willed for a moment to lose herself in the intricacies of the plan, but her mind was too restless.

   She looked around abruptly, with the feeling that someone, no one she knew, had just called her real name: a loud, rude calling in a strange man’s voice. But no one else seemed to have noticed it at all. And the voice seemed to have come, now that she thought about it, directly into her mind, not through her ears. Dear Kate, she warned herself, neither you nor Sabrina had better smoke any more tonight.

   Restlessness pulled her to her feet. A bar-on-a-cart offered bottles and glasses and ice. Shouldn’t mix with the other stuff, but just a taste was not going to do her any harm. In her hand a glass half filled with white wine, she wandered, mocking a slinky tall-model walk, up to a window of very solid, unopenable glass that looked out far above the endless chains of headlights and taillights of the Drive. Beyond the few additional streetlamps that were scattered through the park, the lake stretched out to the edge of everything, a vast black invisibility like death.

   One of the nameless boys she had just met came to the window too, ice cubes tinkling in his glass like Christmas music. God, the shopping she had yet to do. What was she here for,