"Harlan, I don't understand. This isn't right. Why would a lawyer—"
"You have no right to poke your nose into this. You have no right! Where is that paper?"
She held it out and he snatched it from her hands.
"Don't ever do anything like this again… ever," he said. He looked at Teddy. "I'm disappointed in both of you," he added, and rushed toward the house, folding the paper quickly and stuffing it in his briefcase as he hurried along.
Colleen said nothing. The tears streamed down her face.
"Jesus," Teddy said. He started his car. "I'd better get the hell home."
"Teddy, he's irrational," she said. "You can see that. You don't believe that whole thing about hiding names and identities, do you?"
"I've heard that families who give up babies do want to keep it secret, Colleen. That isn't unusual. Better let things calm down," he said. "I'll call you later, huh?"
She didn't reply. He backed out of the driveway, leaving her standing there staring at the house. After a moment she lowered her head and started for the front entrance. Before she reached it, Harlan came out, closing the door softly behind him. She looked into his face. It appeared as though he had gone completely insane. He worked his mouth in and out and pulled his eyelids up with such intensity, she thought his eyes might pop out.
"Harlan—"
He raised his right hand like a traffic cop.
"Don't say… anything else about this. Not in there," he added. She saw there was no point in arguing, so she nodded quickly, hoping to calm him. He did relax his shoulders. "Nurse Patio just told me Jillian called," he said. "She's sorry about the way she left the house, and she's coming back tomorrow night. I'm to set up the foldaway bed for Nurse Patio in the baby's room," he added.
She looked up quickly. Her heart began to pound, and she pulled back the corners of her mouth in a grimace of terror, her eyes wide and looking as wild as his. They truly looked like brother and sister, siblings reared in a house of horror.
"What?"
"So, you see," he said, "this confirms it. Everything is just your imagination. For a while there you even had me imagining things," he added. "Now put it to a stop," he said, waving his right forefinger at her. "You hear me? Just stop!" He turned and went back into the house, softly closing the door behind him.
When she reached out to open the door, she found her hand shaking so badly, she couldn't close her fingers around the knob. It took both her hands to turn it. Then she caught her breath and entered the house.
She paused in the entryway. Nothing she could think of at that moment was more terrifying to her than looking into Jillian's face after what she had thought she had seen in the shed.
Dinner was to be served later that evening because Nurse Patio was taking Dana to see Dr. Claret. Colleen was surprised to learn that Harlan wasn't going along. He said Dana had asked him not to, claiming he made her too nervous. He laughed about it, but it was a strange laugh, the laugh of someone on the verge of a breakdown himself. Colleen didn't question anything. She set the table and then went up to her room to wait.
She heard Nurse Patio and Dana get the baby, and she listened at her door as she talked to Dana about the visit to Dr. Claret, stressing how much he wanted to see her and how important it was that they go quickly. Although Colleen didn't hear Dana's replies, she had the sense that Nurse Patio was convincing Dana, that Dana had offered some resistance. It was confusing, especially in light of the way Dana had reacted to this physician before.
"Maybe Harlan should come too," she heard Dana say as they walked by Colleen's door.
"Oh, no," Nurse Patio replied.
"I'm afraid," Dana said, and they started down the stairs.
Why was she so afraid suddenly? Colleen wondered. She thought about it a moment and then made a quick decision: She would follow them. The phone rang just as she started out her bedroom door.
"How are things now?" Teddy asked.
"I can't talk. I'm going to follow Dana and Nurse Patio to the doctor's office."
"What? Why?"
"I can't explain. I'll call you later."
"Colleen, no—"
Before he could say anything else, she hung up and hurried out of her room and down the stairs. Harlan was in the kitchen seeing to some of the cooking duties Nurse Patio had assigned him. She opened the front door softly and slipped out just as Nurse Patio and Dana pulled away from the house. Then she hurried to her own car. She got in but didn't start it or turn on her headlights until Dana and Nurse Patio had turned off Highland Avenue. Watching suspense stories on television had taught her that much, she thought.
She turned on the headlights when she reached the main street and then followed Dana and Nurse Patio as they headed for the outskirts of Old Centerville Station. She had no idea where they were heading, but she thought it was odd that they turned down Church Road. The secondary road went on for miles before it reached a major highway and took travelers either to the city of Middletown or the bigger villages of Monticello and Liberty. There were so many shorter, easier routes to these places. And why would a doctor have an office out here? she wondered.
Her question was answered nearly ten minutes later when they turned up a hard-packed dirt driveway and headed toward a farmhouse a good thousand yards off the road. Before she turned in to follow them, she switched off her lights again and, using only the illumination of the moonlight, drove her car very slowly over the driveway, her tires crunching over the stones and sand. She saw the back lights of Dana's car go off as it pulled up to the house, so she stopped and waited until she heard the car doors close. Then she went a little farther, until she found what looked to be a safe clearing off the driveway. She parked her car there and went the rest of the way on foot.
The Indian summer days that they had been enjoying meant unusually warm afternoons and crisp, clear evenings. Tonight the moon looked enormous to Colleen, and she was grateful for the bright illumination. Out at a place like this, so far from town, an overcast or even a partly cloudy evening would make it impossible to move around without a flashlight. The gravel driveway was narrow and full of dips and holes. At some places along the way the vegetation had been permitted to grow unchecked along the sides of the drive. Long, thin, spidery branches from bushes and small trees reached over the road.
In fact, the closer Colleen drew to the farmhouse, the more she was impressed with the lack of maintenance. The fields were overgrown, the fences broken. Even the grass right in front of the farmhouse hadn't been mowed for some time. There were pieces of disabled and rusting farm machinery visible here and there. They looked like the corpses of nocturnal creatures left to rot in the dark. Disuse left a tractor forever precariously tipped. A long, flat wagon, its wheels removed or broken, lay on its side.
Walking alone in the darkness made her more cognizant of the stillness. Before this, she had been oblivious to the way the end of one season and the beginning of another had drawn down the curtain on many sounds in the night. The evening was no longer filled with thousands of insects going through their ritual symphonies. Peepers had metamorphosed. Birds were either asleep or on their way south. This far from the village, even the occasional car horn was muffled.
The silence made her even more aware of her own footsteps and heavy breathing. Every sound she made was amplified. She was sure she was being so loud, she would signal her arrival to the inhabitants of the old farmhouse, so she crouched down and practically tiptoed the remaining distance.
It had been difficult, if not impossible, to see just how run-down the building was. This was one of those early twentieth-century structures characteristic of this part of the Catskills. Like so many others, obviously it had begun as a small home and then been expanded as the family took in boarders to complement their meager farm income. Now the expanded, long front porch dipped. Some floorboards had popped up, and the railings were cracked and broken in spots. A second-story window shutter on the west side of the building dangled dangerously. Even in the darkness Colleen could see where the siding had peeled, where boards hung loose.
The house had a fieldstone foundation and there were two windows on each side, both now boarded up. She had been in the basements of old houses like this one before, so she knew it probably had a hard dirt floor. Although the house most assuredly had indoor plumbing, she saw an outhouse behind the building, adding more evidence to support the theory that the home's beginnings dated some time back.
But who would live in a place like this now? How could a doctor live there and have an office there? she wondered. It made no sense, but more importantly, it added to her anxiety. Perhaps she should turn right around and see if she could get Harlan to come up here, she thought. Then she realized he would simply rant and rave about her interfering again and poking her nose about where it didn't belong. Whatever she had to do, she had to do herself.
She started toward the lit windows at the west side of the house, moving through the tall grass quickly but carefully.
She didn't want to trip over anything and signal her arrival to the inhabitants.
There were no shades or curtains over the windows. In fact, she saw where two windows in the dark portion at the rear of the house were broken. Avoiding the pool of pale yellow light that spilled from the lit windows, she wove her way through the pockets of darkness around the house until she was against the side of the building. Then she inched toward the window until she was able to see in.
At first, because of the angle at which she was able to look in, she saw no one. She realized she was looking into a living room. There was a brick fireplace directly across from the window, but it looked as though it hadn't been used for years. The screen had fallen into it and looked rusted and torn. The floor of the room was covered with a thin, very faded brown carpet, and the walls were papered with a scarred, beige-and-blue flower pattern. There was a bookcase against the far wall, but there were no books in it, nor were there any artifacts or knickknacks. She saw one high-backed, deep brown, cushioned chair in the corner.
She squatted, moved under the window to the other side, and peered in again. Nothing she had imagined, nothing she had sensed, not even the horror she thought she had seen in the shed prepared her for this. She felt as though she had just fallen into a pool of ice water. The blood hardened in her veins. Every joint froze. A scream originated in the very essence of her being and grew louder and louder as it struggled toward her lips. Even her thoughts seemed trapped. It was as if her brain protectively folded into itself in her skull, denying and refusing to accept what her eyes reported.
Naked from the waist up, Dana sat on the long, heavy-looking, old gray couch. Her arms, extended, lay atop the couch. Her head was back, her eyes wide open as she stared up at the ceiling. She was the center of some grotesque ritual.
Nurse Patio squatted in front of Dana and held the baby by its waist as it suckled at Dana's right breast. The baby seemed to be growing as it did so. It was twice as long, twice as wide, and twice as heavy as Colleen remembered him to be.
As strange and terrifying as this scene was, it was not half as horrible as what went on around it. Standing behind the couch and to her right was a dark-skinned black-haired man who held Dana's right wrist down against the couch with both his hands, the fingers of which were long and thin, with nails that extended for inches. They looked more like claws. His eyes were a luminescent red. As he stared down at the baby nursing, his mouth writhed into a smile that looked more like a snarl.
And from out of his mouth loomed two long, narrow teeth that came to a sharp point.
Across from him, on the other end of the couch and behind Dana, was a woman, as dark and as tall as he was. Her long black hair fell loosely about her shoulders. She, too, had red luminescent eyes. Out of her mouth emerged the same threateningly sharp fangs as she pulled her lips back into a similar smile. She held Dana's left wrist down against the couch.
Sitting just to the right, calmly observing, a more gentle smile on his face, was a distinguished-looking elderly man who fit the description of Dr. Claret. He was dressed in a suit and tie and sat back in the dark gray easy chair.
Colleen finally found strength enough to pull herself back from the window. The numbing cold that had come over her body was quickly replaced by a terrific heat. It was as though her blood had defrosted instantly, but as it began to flow through her veins freely again, it caused a painful burning sensation. She embraced herself and moaned. Instantly she covered her mouth. She felt like two people, one controlling the other. If there was one thing she didn't want to do, it was to alert those creatures within to her presence.
The realization of what she had seen was so overwhelming that she had to question the truth of it herself. She had to look in one more time and confirm that this was just not another one of her illusions, the product of a distorted imagination. This was indeed reality.
When she looked in again, she saw that Nurse Patio had pulled the baby back from Dana's breast. A thin trickle of blood ran from the nipple. The baby began to wail. Everyone laughed, the laughter of the man and the woman so deep and reverberating, it made Colleen tremble. Nurse Patio brought the baby back to Dana's breast.
Colleen turned away and took a few steps back this time. It was all coming to her now, all of it making some sense. She really had seen a drop of blood on Nikos's lips that day. There definitely had been a bloodstain on the sheet, and when she had put her finger in the baby's mouth, it had drawn her blood because it wasn't human, at least not entirely so.
It was probably their baby, she thought, or maybe… maybe the offspring of the vampire man and Nurse Patio. That was why Nurse Patio had come to their house—to supervise the growing and feeding of her own horrible child, a blood child.