Fred Saberhagen - Dracula 04 - Thorn

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Saberhagen, Fred - Dracula 04 - Thorn (v1.0) (html)

Scanned by Highroller.

Proofed more or less by Highroller.

Made prettier by MollyKate's/Cinnamon's style sheet.

Thorn by Fred

Saberhagen

Prologue

The runaway fled gracefully through the smooth white tunnel, her small bare feet

moving with quick darting strides. Her slight, girlish body, completely naked,

was splashed by a quickly shifting disco spectrum of fantastic light that followed

her from the room she fled. Music, loud rock music, followed too, throbbing with

the light. Like the light, it lost its violence only partially and slowly as it

increased its distance from its origin.

As if the music had caught up with her in midstride, the girl's graceful run

changed abruptly, halfway through the tunnel, into a dance, but a dance that still

carried her rapidly forward into the large, white room at the tunnel's end.

It was a long room, like something out of a museum almost, and the windowless

white walls were angled and rectangular. The white carpet was immaculate and

thick. On the walls hung many paintings, drawings, prints, and all of them were

hard to see in the bewildering, reflected disco rainbow that came through the

tunnel to provide the only illumination. There were carvings hanging on the walls

too, and statues large and small stood everywhere. The girl's dance moved her in

and out among them, as if she might be looking for another way out. But the

tunnel was the only entrance, and the only exit visible.

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Saberhagen, Fred - Dracula 04 - Thorn (v1.0) (html)

The girl's dance was a performance meant for no one but herself. Her face was a

lovely mask, utterly unlined, looking very young, and looking too calm to be a

dancer's face. Around it, long brown hair swung wild and dark, dirty and un-

cared for. Her dark eyelids were half closed, the full lips parted levelly over

white, slightly uneven teeth. The skin of her body was childishly smooth, and

gleamed lightly in the strange changing light, as if she might be sweating despite

the coolness of the air. Her feet were tiny and arched, grained here and there with

dirt, and she set them precisely and silently down in the thick whiteness of the

floor.

The driving music had less and less to do with the dance as it continued. Its

movement shifted to a slower rhythm, becoming almost courtly. Then halfway

through a pirouette the girl's eyes opened wide. Her balance, perfect through all

the movements before this one, abruptly broke, and she went down on one knee

on the rich ivory carpet, stunned into awkwardness by something she had seen.

She stared with wide eyes for a long moment into the dimness straight ahead.

Then, bare shoulders heaving with a great sighing breath, she slowly turned her

head. Hardly did she dare to try to see again what she had seen a moment earlier.

It hung there on the wall, amid the hundred other paintings. Conflicting emotions

struggled in the girl's face; and then presently her face became tranquil again, but

on a different level. She was gazing outward now, away from self. She stayed

crouching there on one knee, almost exactly as she had fallen, becoming almost

as motionless as one of the surrounding statues. Now even her breathing

appeared to stop.

"There you are." The voice of the approaching man was slurred and gleeful, and

it contained hostility. The light coming through the curious white tunnel was

modulated by his approaching shadow. He moved into the girl's range of vision

now, but she ignored him completely. He was as naked as she was, and looked to

be a few years older. Perhaps he was twenty-two or twenty-three. Reddish hair

with a tendency to curl fell damply to his muscular and freckled shoulders. He

was only a few inches taller than the girl. And he was breathing heavily, as if he

too might just have finished a dance or some other physical exertion.

The girl was still down on one knee. She had regained grace in her pose, but

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Saberhagen, Fred - Dracula 04 - Thorn (v1.0) (html)

otherwise had not moved since turning her head to look back over one shoulder.

She had not yet taken her eyes from the sight that had made her fall.

The young man followed her gaze for a moment. Nothing but a row of old

paintings, mostly in wood frames, hanging on the white wall and, like everything

else in the room, hard to see in the odd pulsing light. He was not really interested;

he was used to being around people who stared at nothing. He walked toward the

girl until he was standing close beside her, but still she gave no sign of being

aware of him at all. Not even when he buried the fingers of one strong hand in

her wild hair and tugged.

"Hey," he said, trying to turn her face toward his body. As he spoke the music in

the other room cut off abruptly. Still the mad light continued to pulsate through

the tunnel.

Abruptly the girl thrust out one slender arm in a graceful shove. The young man,

who had no dancer's balance, went staggering back. He reeled helplessly into a

towering marble statue, which rocked on its base and settled back. Mumbling

something, the man tried to recover, clawed at a wall, then sat down on the white

carpet with a soft thud.

Again the multicolored light wavered with approaching shadows. Another naked

man was coming from the far room. The legs that bore him round the white curve

of tunnel were moving trunks of bone and muscle, well designed for his great

weight. The torso above the legs had once been heroic, but now sagged grossly

with advancing age. Still the clean-shaven face, its chin held high, was alert,

controlled, imperious. Only a fringe of hair, all white, remained around the

massive head; and gray hair grew matted thickly on the chest and belly and on

the heavy, still-powerful arms.

This man advanced a little way into the room and halted, looking with

displeasure at the scene. "There are some very valuable things in here," he

announced in a bass voice, "and both of you are evidently crazy, or completely

freaked out, or whatever the word for it is this year. Therefore I am not going to

let you make this your playground. Got that?"

The last words trailed off just a little. The aging man had at last taken some

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Saberhagen, Fred - Dracula 04 - Thorn (v1.0) (html)

notice of the extreme rigidity of the girl's gaze and the strangeness of her frozen

posture. The arm she had used to shove the youth away was still extended. Her

head was still turned, eyes looking back over her left shoulder.

The only sound in the room, besides the violent music, was the labored breathing

of the young man. He still sat on the floor, and now he was glowering angrily at

the girl.

The old man said, in his bass voice: "If that on the wall really strikes your fancy,

little girl, then you have good taste. Better than some people who have entered

this room fully clothed and supposedly in their right minds. Well, I have good

taste too, and you doubtless don't know what you're staring at anyway, and I

appreciate your round little ass. In fact, out of all the orifices available tonight, I

may just choose to end my evening there. But I want to do it back in the other

room. So get up."

Now through the tunnel behind the old man three more naked figures were

approaching, pushing before them an extensive interplay of shadows. Slightly in

the lead there walked a leanly muscular man of about thirty-five. His suntanned

body was marked with the pale outline of absent swimming briefs. Just after the

man came a boy who appeared to be in his mid-teens, small and slightly built,

pale-haired, blinking lost eyes at the world. The boy supported himself every few

steps by leaning a frail arm against the white curve of the tunnel wall. When he

emerged from the tunnel into the room and the wall flattened, he stopped, leaning

his back against it for support. A step behind the boy, another dark-haired girl

strolled in casually. In size, and build, and coloring, she fairly closely resembled

the girl who had been dancing. The brown eyes of this newly-arrived girl were

keen with interest—but they were focused on the empty air an arm's length

before her face. She paid no attention to anyone else. Her full lips mumbled

soundlessly, then smiled.

The red-haired man who sat on the floor ignored them all, all except the girl who

had danced. Now in his throat a low murmuring of rage and humiliation had

begun, and grew in loudness. On the second try he struggled back to his feet. His

right hand went out to a small white cube, and from its flat surface he grabbed up

a small but heavy artifact of silvery metal. Raising this, he lunged straight for the

crouching dancer as his right arm swung the lethally compact weight straight for

her skull.

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Saberhagen, Fred - Dracula 04 - Thorn (v1.0) (html)

The old man's was the only voice to cry a warning, and his yell did no one any

good. It sounded simultaneously with a sharp, dying scream.

The thin young boy still leaned back tiredly against the flat white wall. His

blinking eyes, completely lost, were looking somewhere on the far side of the

dim room. The dark-haired girl who had come with him through the tunnel stood

quietly beside him now. She was thoughtfully probing with one finger inside her

own mouth, as if intent on making sure her teeth were all still there. She took no

account of what had happened to the white carpet just a few feet away.

The athletic man, who was alert and could move very fast, was already a step in

front of the huge old one. But there he halted his swift advance, warily

astonished; his move had obviously come too late, and he had no wish to step

into the fresh blood.

The huge, gray old man was astonished too. Then, because he was no stranger to

sudden violence and it did not particularly upset him, and because he possessed a

quickly penetrating mind, he was immediately struck by circumstances even

more amazing than the mere fact of abrupt murder. Inspiration of a magnitude

extremely rare grew swiftly behind his clear blue eyes. Slowly he put out a

massive hand, to take his wiry companion by the shoulder.

"Gliddon," the old man said. He used the careful tone of one who wishes to wake

a sleeper gently, not to startle.

"What?" The attention of the wiry man was still warily absorbed in the scene

before him. Hell of a mess to be cleaned up, at best, he was thinking. The killer

was now standing, swaying, as if dazed. The silver artifact lay on the floor, near

something else.

"Gliddon. These two kids behind me. I want you to get them out of here. They're

both stoned blind, and I don't think this has made any impression on them at all. I

doubt that they'll remember seeing a thing—but anyway we'll cross that bridge

when we come to it. Right now get 'em out of here and put 'em down to sleep

somewhere. I want to deal with this." He nodded at the red spectacle before them.

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