Chapter Thirty-Eight

All of them felt uncomfortable, knowing that the oldest of the vampires might still be swooping around, somewhere behind them. They moved at a brisk walking pace along the corridors, past the numberless locked doors, until they reached the part of the redoubt that was familiar to them. Once they were close to the gateway entrance they all began to feel that they could finally relax.
"Nearly there," Ryan said.
Doc bolstered the gold-plated commemorative Le Mat, rapping on the floor with the ferrule of his swordstick. "Well, my dear companions, we have once again fronted the forces of evil and come through successfully. And I do not believe that the dark powers have been so dark or so powerful, ever before. Certainly I can recall no precedent for such wickedness."
"Then again, Doc," Mildred teased, "most times you have trouble remembering what you had for breakfast."
"Door's still open, Dad."
The heavy vanadium-steel sec door had jammed three-quarters of the way up and it still hung there.
Ryan ducked under it, pushing away a momentary vision of the faulty catch giving way and the entire weight tumbling on himself and the others, crushing them to smears of blood and pulped bone on the concrete.
But they all passed through safely and crossed the control room, where the faint smell of damp still lingered, through the anteroom, with the armaglass sec door of the gateway directly ahead of them.
Everyone bustled through, all of them following Doc's lead and bolstering their blasters. Dean had recovered all his sharpness and was back to his old self.
"Can I close the door, Dad?"
"No, I'll do it. You sit down with the others and get ready for the jump."
Krysty looked around, turning to stare behind them, across the deserted comp-control area, with its monitor screens showing endless, ever-changing fields of data.
"Anything, lover?" Ryan asked.
"No. Don't think so. Just got that odd feeling of there being something. And nothing."
"Well, if it's Melmoth, then he's too late. Another few seconds we're out of here."
Doc went in first, laying his swordstick at his side, stretching his long legs in front of him, knees cracking. Mildred sat next to him, her beads fluttering against the dark brown wall of the chamber.
J.B. stepped in third, avoiding a dried-up mess on the floor. "Could've cleaned up your puke, Ryan," he admonished. "Sloppy housekeeping."
Ryan grinned. "Remind you of that next time you throw up during a jump."
"That'll be the day, pilgrim." He settled himself beside Mildred, laying his weapons at his side, taking off his spectacles and carefully folding them, placing them in a top pocket of his coat. He took Mildred's hand in his.
Jak went in silently, sitting with the grace of a cat in front of a hearth.
Dean looked at his father. "Are you sure I can't do the door, Dad?"
"No. Sit down, quickly." Despite the security of being snug in the heart of the redoubt, Ryan still felt a little uneasy. The Trader used to say that an enemy alive meant always checking the shadows. It was true.
Krysty patted him on the cheek. "Let's hope we find a nicer, kinder place next time," she said, sitting beside Dean and waiting for Ryan to join them.
He took a last look behind him.
The air was still, though he thought for a moment he heard a whispering of wind.
He set that thought away and walked into the chamber. "Everyone ready?" A chorus of "yes" greeted him. "Then here we go." He closed the door and sat cross-legged beside Krysty, reaching out to hold her hand.
"To a good jump," she whispered.
"I'll drink to that, too, lover, when we got something to drink."
The disks in floor and ceiling of the armaglass chamber were beginning to glow, and a faint mist was gathering at the top of the hexagonal room.
"You see that the notice is gone off the wall of the little room, Dad?" Dean asked, his voice already echoing from far away.
"Notice?"
"Boy's correct, you know," Doc said, his voice booming like a bittern at sunset across a salt marsh. "About a show they were putting on here. Before skydark. It's vanished."
Ryan felt his brain beginning to scramble. Dean mentioning the note was somehow important. But how and why? Perhaps it didn't matter at all. Though it had to mean someone had been down in the gateway section since they jumped to the bayous.
"Who could?" he said slowly, his voice distorted.
Krysty's fingers squeezed his hand very hard, painfully. She was telling him something, shouting. But the jump was almost under way.
Almost.
A silhouetted figure appeared outside the heavy door, someone tall and skinny.
Wearing black.
Ryan's grip on the present had almost gone, and he was clinging to consciousness by a ragged fingernail.
Door opening.
Closing.
Dark figure.
White hair.
Face close against his, with eyes that leaked bright blood. Skin like paper.
Old, immeasurably old.
Hissing words. " what you did"
As blackness finally swallowed him up, and his eye closed, Ryan Cawdor's last sentient thought was that his nostrils were filled with the acrid stench of decay.
Of death.