Christopher Golden - The Nimble Man

The vampire had made its nest in the orchestra pit.

For the most part, ghosts were intangible. But Graves had quickly learned that while it took phenomenal effort to touch a human being, he had no difficulty laying hands on supernatural creatures.

It was a male vampire, a thin, filthy thing in stolen clothes with long, greasy blond hair.

"Child of Eve," Graves said, floating down toward it.

The vampire looked up quickly, startled, its jaundice yellow eyes glowing in the dark. It tried to fight him.

Tried, and failed.

For perhaps the hundredth time since the sky had gone dark, Katherine Matthews picked up the phone and listened to the hiss of dead air. There was no dial tone, nor any of the other signals the phone company sent when there was trouble on the line. No fast busy signal. Not even that annoying beeping it made if she left it off the hook. The first few times she had picked up the phone she had spoken up, asked if there was anyone else on the line. But there was no one there. Just that hiss.

Yet if she listened for half a minute or so, couldn't she make out something inside that hiss? A kind of pattern, like the gusting of the wind. The hiss seemed tremulous, as though the dead air on her phone line was laughing at her.

Katie Matthews had owned Lost and Found Books for seventeen years. It was not merely her business, however. It was her home. The shop was on the first floor of her house in Cambridge, just north of Boston, and she lived alone in a quartet of rooms in the second story. But for now she sat behind the checkout counter near the front door of the bookshop, where she had been ever since the darkness had fallen and the bloody mist had rolled in.

She was used to being by herself in the store. As silly as it sounded, she always told people she could never really be alone there, not with all the books. Lost and Found was overflowing with hardcovers and paperbacks, new and used, of all types of genres. In the back there was even a section of antiquarian books. The typical customer never bothered to even wander into the rear of the shop, but there were always those discerning clients who knew precisely what they were looking for and would peruse those shelves.

Katie had been tempted at first to retreat to the antiquarian section, but the only windows were at the front of the shop and the idea of being unable to see what was going on outside terrified her even more than the view beyond the windows. If anything worse happened, she would be trapped back there. From here she could at least run up the stairs to her apartment.

Only to be trapped there.

She didn't want to think about it any more, but there was no one to call, no one to talk to. The only escape she could think of was the one she had been using her entire life. Once she had hung the phone up, she picked up the copy of Cold Sassy Tree she had been delving into. It wasn't the sort of thing she usually read, but it was the first book she had laid her hand upon when she had reached for something to hang onto, somewhere to escape.

Outside the mosquitoes were gone. All of them, as far as she could tell. And that was something, at least. But now… there were figures moving through the red mist. At first she had thought about unlocking a window and calling out to them, asking what was going on. The radio did not work and neither did the small TV behind the counter.

But there was something off, something more than a little odd, about the way those figures were walking. They moved in a kind of rhythmic stagger that felt like a warning to Katie. So she kept the windows closed and locked, for all the good the glass would do if someone really wanted in. And she kept quiet, and she read, and after every few pages she glanced up and hoped the mist would be gone and the sun returned, and she picked up the phone and prayed for a dial tone.

Only to have the dead air laugh at her again.

Her skin prickled with awareness that all was not right and her pulse raced, but she forced herself back into the book. She was past the halfway mark but knew she had only registered a fraction of what she had read. Much as she wished to get completely lost in those pages, she knew she was fooling herself. There might not be a book in the world that was powerful enough to help her escape from this.

Katie read a few pages further and there was a creak in the old boards of her house. It was a familiar sound and late at night it gave her comfort. And old house moved with the wind. But there was no comfort in it this day. She glanced up at the sound and her eyes were drawn to the window once more. The bloody fog rolled past the glass, thick and damp, leaving a red film on each pane.

With a sigh she reached out and lifted up the phone again, cursing herself for doing it even as she raised it to her ear. It was foolish to keep doing this. Obsessive-compulsive idiocy. But she could not help herself, though she knew what she would hear.

Nothing.

She told herself it was nothing.

Another creak drew her attention, but this one was followed by a thump and a rustling noise, from deeper inside the shop.

Katie could not breathe. Her lungs were frozen. Her eyes were open almost too wide as she hung up the phone and moved around the counter. There were only dim overhead lights at the back of the store, in the antiquarian section, but now a brighter light pulsed there, a blue-green glow that cast the entire section in its oceanic hue.

Soft thumps issued from the antiquarian section.

Katie's chest hurt from holding her breath but she felt as though she could draw no air. Her shoes scuffed the wooden floor as she shuffled past shelves overflowing with books. The musty smell of old paper filled her nostrils. That aqua glow pulsed, turning her clothes and her hands that same color, even as she moved deeper into the store.

She paused a moment and closed her eyes. With all the concentration she could muster she focused on taking a breath, and soon she was shuddering as she inhaled sharply. She kept her eyes closed, trying to steady her breathing. When she opened them she glanced at the front of the shop again, saw that the view from her windows had not changed, and nodded to herself.

Once again she began to move toward that glow, that rustle and thump.

Katie felt a soft breeze caress her face and she gasped again, blinking in surprise. There was a scent on that breeze, the smell of earth and flowers and trees ripe with fruit. She shook her head and reached up to touch her face where the breeze had whispered past her.

She was just at the arch that led into the antiquarian section when there came another small thump. Her gaze was drawn instantly to the left, to the third shelf from the top, to a leather-bound book that seemed almost not to belong here. Most of the books in this section had bindings that were dried and cracked and faded, but the leather covering this tome was fresh and supple so that it seemed almost new. It gleamed in that blue-green light, and the way it sat on the shelf, it jutted from its place, as though someone had pulled it out several inches.

And it moved. Ever so slightly, it moved.

The book seemed to jump in its slot, there on the shelf, edging further out from the other volumes.

It tilted, and then it tumbled, end over end, and struck the floorboards, falling open with a ruffle of pages. Katie let out a small cry and put a hand over her heart as if to warn it to slow down.

That blue-green light flashed more brightly than ever and she had to shield her eyes. In that moment the breeze that had caressed her swirled around her again, tousling her hair, and the scents it carried were so delicious she thought she had been carried away, finally given the escape that she had longed for.

Then the light retreated and she blinked away the shadows behind her eyelids.