Page 6 of Desperately Seeking Vampire
“I’m telling you,” he said, his voice dropping as if someone could overhear him. His voice was a harsh whisper, filled with ire and something that sounded almost like fear. “It’s not safe for me here. He’s going to come looking for me. Where are you?”
“At the festival. Who is after you? Does this have anything to do with that antique you bought in Paris that you said was going to be worth a fortune?”
“Stop asking stupid questions. I need to see you. Come to the police station. I’ll tell the cops to let me see you.”
“You’re insane, outright insane,” I told him. “There’s no way in hell I’m going to do any such thing. I have to go now, because someone has to deal with the festival that you were supposed to be running.”
“Get your ass in here pronto,” he demanded. “I need to see you.”
I clicked off the call, then, when he called back almost immediately, turned off my phone.
Thankfully, the hotel was of the small mom-and-pop variety, and they’d evidently hadn’t heard that Jason was in jail.
“We will let you have your room,” a short woman with thick glasses told me as she handed me what looked like an antique metal key. “But you must bring your passport tomorrow. It is the law, you know?”
“I know, and I’ll do the best I can to wrestle it away from the police,” I promised, praying she wouldn’t mention Jason’s card that was paying for the room.
That had me thinking as I made my way through a narrow, dark hallway to the ground-floor rooms. What was Jason so afraid of? He’d mentioned in Paris that he’d picked up a valuable item from an antique shop, one that would set him up for life, but he didn’t tell me what it was before hustling me off to Prague with the promise of meeting me in Brno.
“It doesn’t matter. Jason doesn’t matter,” I told myself once I got to my tiny room at the back of the hotel. I collapsed down onto the bed, wondering how many nights I’d be able to sleep there if my own cards and money weren’t returned. “I just have to get through the next few days; then hopefully the police will return my things.”
Brave words for someone whose back is to the wall, my inner narrator said. I sighed at her.
I had a feeling it was going to be a very long night.
THREE
It was the sound that penetrated the depths of water that Ivo imagined embraced him.
He was deep, so very deep in the ocean. Down where the light and sound could not penetrate, just his awareness drifting along without thoughts forming—being, but not alive. Aware, but not thinking. He simply was.
Thump, thump, thump.
He frowned, his consciousness returning from where it had drifted into the depths of his mental ocean, down in the inky abyss from which he wasn’t sure he could return.
Thump, thump, thump.
Jangle, jangle.
What was this? His consciousness swam upward, where he knew the light lived. First thumps, and then jangles? Was something happening to his resting spot? No, that could not be. He had been promised sanctuary.
Thump, thump, jangle. Thump. Twang.
No twangs, he said to himself as he continued to move upward through the layers of darkness, his eyes fluttering open. I draw the line at twangs. The thumping and jangles are enough.
He broke the surface of the noctambul, shedding the calm that had wrapped around him like a cocoon. And with the shedding came awareness.
First were the sounds, the dull noises now so sharp that they scraped against his ears with the gentleness of a razor blade. The thumping had taken on a rhythmical beat, interspersed with the jangles, and occasional twangs.
Music. Someone was playing music near him. He stared up at the white stone lid of the sarcophagus that was his resting place, but something was wrong. The lid was too far away, and vaulted, like a ceiling.
Voices, sharp and strident, accompanied the noise. He thought for a moment someone was being tortured, but then realized that it was singing. Of a sort. He frowned at the lid that was so wrong, his brain returning to life with a sluggishness that irritated him.
It was at that moment the hunger hit him. He gasped at the pain of it, his body doubling up on itself when he sat up, trying to breathe through the iron grip of pure agony. He half expected to hit his head on the sarcophagus lid, but instead, he found himself staring into the faces of seven people, all frozen in strange postures. Three of the men had instruments strapped to their bodies, while the other four were all women in odd costumes who were standing on the lid of his sarcophagus.
All seven stared at him with identical expressions of sheer, unadulterated horror.
He had a momentary vision of what the situation must look like.
