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Plainly they were looking for the old man. The plastic bags of earth, and the
spilled earth on the carpet, were important finds.
The vampires talked between themselves. "This is definitely his room, then."
"Looks like it. But where is he?"
Angle trembled, fearing interrogation. But at the moment the enemy were
relying on what they could discover for themselves.
They searched the bathroom, warily, a second time.
"Look at this." The white vampire paused in front of the video screen, as if
he had not seen his own face for a long time. He did not look entirely happy
with what he saw.
The other joined him in the bathroom to check out the electronic mirror. He
too seemed briefly fascinated with his own image, but fought free of the
distraction.
"Yes, this must be his room.
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But where is he
?"
At last their attention came back to Angle.
The short man demanded of her "Where is he, the old one?'
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The tall one echoed: "Where is he?"
Her head was spinning. She mumbled something.
Weren't they capable of discovering the open window for themselves?
It was one of their breathing attendants who called their attention to it.
The vampires themselves had seen and disregarded it. The tall, dark-skinned
one said: "Bah, he left that open to mislead us."
The short one said: "It's still daylight, he can't change shapes and fly."
Angie, still too high on the old man's drink to feel the full measure of
terror she should have felt, kept looking toward the doorway. She was starting
to wonder where Valentine Kaiser was.
Now panic was starting to set in among the invaders. Enlisting the breathers'
help, the two vampires launched a frantic, though still cautious, search for
the old man, which swept once more through the whole apartment. The intruders
grew more frantic rather than less with their continued failure to locate
their quarry.
Angie, her mind drifting off in an amazing way, thought that perhaps Uncle
Matthew should have hidden himself in the secret little cabinet, inside the
back of the bedroom dresser. He might have done it, made himself small enough
to fit in there, if he'd really tried. She almost giggled aloud, because the
ones who were looking for him so frantically never thought that there might be
such a secret place inside a piece of furniture. They never came close to
discovering it.
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When they had gone over the entire apartment again, they came back to the
bedroom and looked at her. Now they were having to face the fact that they
weren't going to find the old man in any of the rooms or closets, or under any
of the furniture. He simply wasn't in the apartment any longer.
One of the vampires looked at his fellow. "
Can he be out of man-shape?"
The other snarled back: "Not so soon after he was drugged. It's just not
possible." Then the same man looked at Angie, and demanded: "Where is he?"
Automatically she looked toward the window, reacting to the question without
thought.
Silently, warily, suspiciously
we want none of your tricks
! they all four of them, breathers and vampires together, went to look at the
window again, and out of it.
Meanwhile Angie, hands bound behind her, ankles tied, lay helplessly on the
old man's rumpled bed, and could feel herself continuing to get higher and
higher.
Brandy was like milk compared to the loathsome yellowish brown powder in that
little jar of odd-shaped glass. Angie giggled again, finding her situation
hopelessly amusing. But her captors, clustered at the open window, being
forced to the realization that that was where the old man had gone, failed to
pay any attention to the oddities of her behavior.
"How long," one of the vampires asked the other, "until the Duke gets up
here?"
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The other shook his head. "He didn't know, he wasn't sure. He wanted to stay
with the breather who uses wooden bullets, until he had a chance to finish
him."
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Listening, Angie understood vaguely that Valentine Kaiser must be the Duke,
and that for some reason he had left the storming of the apartment to these
people. But it hadn't gone as expected, and now they didn't quite know what to
do, and they were afraid of doing the wrong thing.
One of the vampires picked up Uncle Matthew's phone, listened to it, shook his
head, and put the instrument down again. "It's dead now," he complained. "Now
that we might have got some use out of it."
At the same time the other vampire ordered the two breathers to commence an
immediate hunt for Dracula
'Look upstairs, look in Val's place. Get everyone down on the street and look
for him. Got your wooden knives?"
The breathing woman murmured a timid protest.
"Don't be afraid, he'll be very weak if he's lying down there somewhere. Take
the people who're standing guard in the hallways. We don't need them here
anymore."
As soon as the breathing couple had gone, the two nosferatu took turns leaning
out of the window, gazing alternately upward and downward. Angie had looked
out earlier, and she knew what there was to see, and could imagine how it
appeared now with darkness falling: The surrealistic, slightly concave plain
of steel and glass stretching away to right and left and up and down,
vanishing indeterminately behind wreaths of darkening fog before the end of it
became visible in any direction.
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One of the vampires said at last: "Well, he's not hanging on a ledge out here.
There really aren't any ledges to speak of."
"I don't expect he's hanging on to anything. I expect he's lying dead or [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]