Read Online The Light at the End by John Skipp, Craig Spector - Free Book Online

some twenty yards from the southern mouth of the tunnel, and Fred, who was staggering around in a considerable stupor, looking for money that people might have dropped. Neither Louie nor Fred had held any gainful employment for the last eight years or so. Both of them smelled like ripe sewage on a hot plate. The uptown passengers on the RR were extremely glad that Louie and Fred had decided not to join them.
    Louie snored while Fred dragged his gaze along the concrete floor. It didn’t look promising for the great white hunter: if he found more than fifteen cents, he would have to consider himself lucky. Maybe… he wasn’t quite sure… that’d give him enough for another bottle of muscatel, if he got Louie to chip in…
    There was a sound from the mouth of the tunnel. At first, Fred thought that it was just his buddy, shuffling around or something. But when he heard it again, he was looking directly at Louie, and Louie didn’t seem to be moving at all.
    “Whuzzizit?” he mumbled, wiping his eyes with a grimy paw. He staggered a little further down Louie’s way, and that was when he saw it.
    Sitting at the very edge of the platform, right next to the far wall, was a wallet. Even from that distance, with his vision swimming like an Olympic gold medallist, Fred had no doubts as to what it was. It looked pretty fat, too, and Fred couldn’t figure out for the life of him why he hadn’t noticed it before.
    “Oboy,” he said, making a jagged beeline toward the black leather goody. He briefly considered waking up Louie, but decided against it. Piss on ‘im , he thought. Gonna drink the whole bottle myself.
    He was almost up to the edge of the platform when the first wave of irrational fear hit him. He shrugged it off, having learned long before to ignore anything that didn’t get him drunk. There was a gold buckle on the wallet; it twinkled in the overhead light like the wink of a harlot.
    He was seduced. The wallet was so close now that he could almost smell the leather. He stumbled up to the yellow safety line, dropped to his knees, and reached out slowly with one trembling hand.
    “Oboy,” he said.
    And then the hand whipped up from below: so cold, so fast, that Fred barely had time to gasp before it took him by the wrist and yanked him, headfirst, toward the rails…
     
    Two joints and more than half a film later, a strange thought came together in the back of Danny’s mind. Though it had nothing to do with what was on the screen at the moment, he found himself remembering the scene where Nosferatu’s ship docked…
    …his ship full of rats…
    …and he thought about the subway murders from a couple of days ago: the ones that made all the papers. He seemed to remember something about rats in that story, too: somebody eaten alive, speculation that a large number of rats were brought on board by Satanist crazies, or something…
    What if … he thought, and then stopped himself. It was too crazy to even consider, beyond a shadow of a doubt. And yet.
    And yet.
    Sitting in this theatre, surrounded by crazy people with Klaus Kinski’s two monstrous fangs staring him in the face, it suddenly didn’t seem any stranger than the fact that James Watt was once Secretary of the Interior. Suddenly, with a rush that bordered on cold certainty, it seemed ridiculously clear that vampires were riding the subways and feeding on hapless commuters.
    Danny giggled nervously. He looked at Nosferatu’s face and cracked up completely. People on either side of him turned to see what could possibly be so funny; he waved them off with helpless little sweeps of his arms. Oh, it’s so obvious, it’s almost obscene! he thought, and then broke out into fresh, hysterical gales of laughter.
    The girl on his left, with the bat-wing makeup. grabbed him by the arm and started to shake him. “ What’s going on? ” she hissed, eyes red and glassy from Danny’s two joints and God-knew-what-else she might have done before the show. On her