A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen (ebook pc reader TXT) 📕

      Angie joined in the breakfast preparations, moving about the kitchen chores mechanically, her mind still trying to fight free of terror and shock. Coffee didn’t help very much. When she’d had two cups and had eaten something without really being aware of what she swallowed, she sat in the living room and tried to rest while John methodically took care of the dirty dishes. But every time her body started to relax, her eyelids began to sag, an onrush of unreasoning terror came to jerk her wide awake again. The memory of Elizabeth Wiswell’s face, her bloodstained throat, her voice, her feeble pounding on the door, would not be exorcised.

      Not only was Angie’s exhaustion growing, but anger swelled up in her too, making room for itself by forcing layers of fear aside. Several times she asked John: “But what did they want with him?”

      “All I know is somehow they managed to—poison him. Drug him. And then while he’s knocked out they come around and try to get at him. So what they want can’t be anything good.”

      “How did they poison him, do you suppose?”

      John only shook his head.

      Giving up for the moment on her attempt to rest, Angie walked to a window and looked out past the wide-open curtains. There was the lake, three or four blocks away horizontally and a comparable distance below. At such a remove, in a momentary patch of sunlight, the water looked tranquil.

      She said again, more hopefully this time: “Maybe they’ve really gone away.”

      John snorted. “Maybe they want us to think so. I wouldn’t bet on it. I wouldn’t bet on it at all. Maybe they hope we’ll run out on the old man while we have the chance. But I think they’ll be back, when the sun goes down if not before.”

      “And Liz?”

      “I don’t know what happened to her. I just don’t know. But we couldn’t have helped her last night. There was nothing we could have done.”

      “Anyway, you think we’re safe in here for the time being?”

      “If they couldn’t break in last night, I don’t think they can do it now.” John turned his gaze toward her and his shoulders slumped. He looked exhausted. “I’m sorry, honey.”

      “Not your fault.” Though deep inside, justly or unjustly, she felt angry at him for getting her into this. And for not trying somehow to help the waitress.

      John started thinking aloud. “One thing that worries me is that not all of them are vampires. That Stewart wasn’t”

      “You said that before.”

      “Yes. That means some of them will be as active as we are during the daytime.”

      “We’re going to have to sleep sometime!”

      “Take it easy, honey.” He looked at her in a kind of critical horror. “You’re moving around like a sleepwalker and your eyelids are falling shut. You get some sleep now, before Joe gets here. It’s as good a time as any.”

      Angie tried, taking off her shoes and stretching out on the sofa in the day-bright living room. But she still kept waking up with a start of terror every time she started to doze off. Between them they decided that John had better take the first nap.

      At a little before nine o’clock, a brisk tap came at the door. Angie, slumped in an armchair in a state between sleep and waking, jumped up, but she couldn’t make herself go to the viewer. She hastened to wake John, who was lying on the sofa fully clothed, snoring heavily.

      The tap was repeated, urgently, even as he awoke and hurried to switch on the viewer. In a moment his shoulders slumped with relief, and he was opening the door. “It’s Joe,” he said.

      In another moment Joe Keogh, wearing a topcoat, was in the room. Angie had met him a couple of times, briefly, over the last few months. Joe was about forty, his fair hair beginning to be streaked almost invisibly with gray. Of average size and sparely muscular, he couldn’t have put on more than a few pounds since his days as a Chicago cop. Today his tough-looking face was set in a grim expression.

      John did not waste a second in barring and chaining the door again behind him.

      Joe looked quickly around, while in the process of pulling off his topcoat and tossing it on a chair. He was wearing a sportcoat now and an open-collared shirt. He nodded to Angie and gave her a smile calculated to be reassuring. “How you doing?”

      She was sitting in a chair, feeling weak in the knees.

      “Better, now that you’re here. You must think we’re crazy, but—”

      “Oh, no. I know better than that. John and I have both been through this kind of thing before. How’s the old man doing?”

      “No change,” said John. “Still the way I described him to you on the phone.”

      “Let me see him.”

      In Uncle Matthew’s bedroom Joe, frowning, bent over the bed and inspected the patient without touching him. He could only shake his head afterward. Angie observed that he looked more worried now than when he’d entered the apartment. “Damned if I know. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He studied Angie. “I suppose Johnny’s been explaining a few things to you?”

      “I don’t know if I can make myself believe what he’s told me. I keep thinking we ought to call the police.”

      The ex-cop shook his head. “No, John’s right, that wouldn’t be a good idea”

      Johnny interrupted to ask their visitor “Was anyone watching the place when you came in?”

      “No. But that doesn’t mean they’re not around. Angie, tell me more about this guy who calls himself— what? Valentine Kaiser?”

      Angie repeated in more detail the story of her phone call from Kaiser, and her coffee-shop meeting with him. Joe, who hadn’t heard any of this before, listened with intense concentration.

      When she’d finished, John contributed his own description of the man, as he had seen him briefly standing in the hall He added: “No doubt about what he is.”

      Joe was nodding slowly. “I think I could tell. Hell, I know I