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

      “Close under your roof, old man,” said Del. His young face looked so strange, so strange. It wasn’t, it couldn’t be, simply makeup or anything like that. It brought back authentic memories. This was really the way Del had looked, thirty, forty years in the past.

      Del asked Stephanie: “Did this boy give a name? What did he look like?”

      “Short, blond hair, very young.” Ellison couldn’t remember the name, but Stephanie did. “He said his name was Pat O’Grandison, something like that.”

      “Ah,” said Del. “Yes. She talked about him, before she decided she was going to be Helen. I suppose she’s gone with him. But I’ll go up and take a look.”

      And with the last word, Del disappeared. Just like that, from the middle of a lighted room. Ellison found that he had raised his own arms, and like a sleepwalker was groping through the empty air where a moment earlier his rejuvenated brother had been standing.

      And was standing again. Del’s powerful young hand, materializing in mid-air, casually warded Ellison’s groping arm out of the way.

      “She’s not in the attic now,” said Del to Stephanie. “The earth and everything looks undisturbed.” His light frown had solidified but did not seem to dent his confidence. “So the two of them apparently took off together. They’re both crazy so I’m going to have to check up on what they’re doing.”

      Stephanie said: “She was wearing Helen’s perfume again.”

      “Oh, she’s completely settled in as Helen now, in her own mind. I don’t know how she justifies to herself sleeping in the attic all day, and occasionally flying out through the wall at night and enjoying a drink of blood. Not the way Helen should act, certainly not in Annie’s dream of the home-sheltered adolescent. She may be five hundred years old, I don’t know, but inside she’s still a little girl wanting to be loved.”

      Ellison groped his way to a chair and sat in it. He looked at the gun still in his own hand and wondered for a moment what it was doing there. He tried to frame questions that he could ask and that would do him some good, but got nowhere in the attempt. The crafty suspicion suddenly sprang to life: his wife and his half-brother were conspiring to drive him mad.

      The spark of suspicion had no sooner been ignited than it sprang up in a roaring blaze.

      He looked up, keeping his face calm. Understanding seemed to grow. “You’re not really Del,” he announced his sudden insight. No one could shed, really shed, thirty or forty years. Stephanie had murdered Del, after all, and had found this young man who looked like him. Could Del have had a son who looked this much like him?

      Del’s young face looked at him, and away again, contemptuously. I’ll see you in a little while, then,” the youth said to Stephanie. “Can you manage things here?”

      Stephanie was clinging to him impulsively. “Don’t go yet. Del, change me now, tonight. You said you would, as soon as you were changed yourself. Now you’re all set. I don’t want to go on like this, with him, another day. Not another hour if I can help it. You can’t imagine what it’s like. Take my blood once more. Change me.”

      “Oh, I can imagine. But, as I say, I’m going to be busy for a while. If she heads for the painting again tonight there could be problems. Gliddon’s out there, and his men, and they don’t imagine that there are any such things as vampires. I’m not quite ready to be rid of them all just yet.”

      To Ellison, listening, the whole conversation had become utterly insane, incomprehensible. Yet it was perfectly plain to him from looking at the two of them just what was going on. What had happened between his wife, his wife, and the giant young demon-figure that somehow looked like a young Del.

      Now Ellison watched as the young man who looked like Del took Stephanie by both arms, and kissed her softly on the forehead. He said, in his perfect imitation of Del’s young voice: “I will. I’ll change you. You’ll be young forever too. But you have to understand that when that happens, it will make a difference between us. No more lovemaking. It doesn’t work between two vampires, you understand. Then we’ll just be—friends. So I don’t want to rush things. I love you just as you are.”

      Stephanie gave a wild cry. “You don’t want me any more. I can see it. You’re through with me now. And, my God, I gave you my daughter for your games. You’ve had both of us and used us up. Helen’s dead, and I’m—now you want to leave me with this, this obscene old lump of fat—”

      Ellison was not conscious of getting to his feet, or of saying anything, though he could hear his voice. And the gun in his right hand rose levelly and seemed to go off by itself. He had at last got Stephanie’s full attention. She stood up very straight, and gazed at Ellison with wild and unbelieving eyes. Then her hand caught at the seventeenth-century Spanish shawl and at her breast beneath. And then she fell.

      Ellison held the gun up higher now, and shifted his aim. And now he was looking straight down the long Luger barrel, at Del’s eyes, excited but unfrightened, that gazed straight back at him.

      “You haven’t learned a thing, have you old man?” said Del. Ellison fired, but somehow Del was not falling, though he winced as if with pain. Anger and triumph were in his face and he was moving rapidly toward Ellison, reaching out for Ellison with young powerful hands. The Luger fired and fired again, and Del came on unharmed.

Chapter Twenty-Three

      Fade in on violence.

      If you have seen one tournament of jousting, you have seen them all. But then, unless you are after all, in tune with my jests, almost as old as I am, you have never seen