Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

somewhat exaggerated, in this day and age, to hide mere porn. Was there some other angle, purpose, to the concealed records? Blackmail? But that too now seemed rather outmoded. There was something here that deserved thinking about. He could come back later, if he decided it was important, and look again.

      Right now he closed his eyes. Like the rest of the house, these laboratory rooms had had many people in them at various times in the past. He could not be specific about a number but he had the feeling that the number was surprisingly high. People had been paraded through here, he sensed suddenly, one at a time, several days or weeks or months apart, for a period of years. Most of them had been young, he thought. A certain flavor of the house of the Boccalini…

      Upstairs in the mansion again, he prowled the silent hallway, which was lit by a backwash of outdoor security lights coming in through curtained windows on one side. He stopped at one closed bedroom door after another, trying to get a feeling for which room had been Helen Seabright’s. He thought he could detect the aura of Mary Rogers’ past occupancy in one bedroom. Ellison Seabright’s gross snore obviated any need for subtlety in telling where he slept.

      Here … in this room some young female, but not Mary, had spent a good deal of time a few months past. Thorn went in, through the crack of the closed door. The room had been stripped of almost all furnishings, but some things remained. Traces of young merriment, and fear … and considerable unhappiness … and just a touch of old perfume.

      The occupant was certainly no one Thorn had ever known before. And she certainly had not been a vampire, either.

      He found another room, one that had certainly been Delaunay Seabright’s before the night of kidnapping and murder. This room too was now unused. Thorn stood in solid form in the center of its floor, mulling over in his mind the few photographs of the former occupant that had appeared at the time of the kidnapping and murder, when word of the painting’s existence in the private Delaunay Seabright collection had first reached public print. Those pictures had shown Delaunay as having a fairly strong resemblance to his half-brother Ellison, though Ellison was ten or fifteen years younger.

      The bedroom’s furniture remained, perhaps because it was so massive, grandly antique. But the picture hangers on the walls were all empty now, and faint marks in a light layer of dust on some shelves showed where other objects had lately been removed; Ellison must be already scavenging. Any material object that might have helped Thorn to grasp the late owner’s personality had, it seemed, already been removed. And this personality seemed harder to grasp than that of the dead girl. About all that was left was a little dust, some large impersonal furnishings, and shadows.

      Thorn passed down the upstairs hall again, rather like a shadow himself, and silently entered the bedroom of Ellison Seabright. It was a guest room, really, but Ellison had made it his own. A snoring mound of body, clothed in an eastern garment of silken decadence, floated quite alone in a vast waterbed. Thorn did not gaze long upon this spectacle, but turned promptly to a door that connected this bedroom with another. With an anticipatory quickening of the pulse he entered the chamber he had been saving until last.

      Stephanie Seabright’s rumpled bed was empty. She sat nude in a soft chair before a softly lighted triple mirror, looking at her multiple images in the glass, and for a moment Thorn thought that she understood, had sensed his presence, and was waiting for him. Almost, he began to resume man-form. But he delayed a little, watching; and presently he understood that her attention was focused wholly on herself.

      A luxurious robe was crumpled on the white carpet at Stephanie’s feet. A small glass that smelled like pure vodka stood on the dressing table before her, bottle at hand to match.

      Stephanie stood up suddenly, chair toppling behind her, and Thorn saw that what gripped her was fear. Not of him. She still had no awareness, consciously at least, that he was there. It was not a sudden fear, but one that had been growing, and still grew. Her attention was still on her own reflections.

      Age was the terror.

      Age, abetted by too much sun in some careless summer not too many summers past, was beginning to make the skin wrinkle. Here at the armpit when the arm was down, there at the corners of the eyes. Time soon to consider cosmetic surgery and all its implications. The shape of the breasts, even though they were small, hinted at sagging; the flesh on the thighs was no longer of perfect smoothness, but had begun to be slightly mottled with subcutaneous fat…

      He could have appeared to her, a dim male figure standing or sitting in a pose devoid of menace, an apparition so gentle that she would not scream. He knew exactly how he might have done it. Experience rather than pride assured him that the seduction would be easy, and he could foresee its every move. Within an hour he would be able to taste her blood … she would perhaps begin to understand the centuries of youth that he could offer her … and she would tell him all she knew about the painting…

      Which, unfortunately, would probably not be much.

      Did his unknown opponent know him? Had it been calculated by that invisible but unavoidable foe that tonight Count Dracula would seduce Stephanie Seabright?

      The man now calling himself Thorn could perceive, not far ahead of him in time and space, some blunder he must not make, a tripwire he must never touch. A life of half a thousand years well stocked with perils had taught his inner senses a great deal about danger, and had also taught his conscious mind to trust such inner warnings when they