Down Low Update

Originally written Wednesday, December 28, 2005

“So… any idea where the third one is?” I asked. “If you found the rose one at the archive, then it’s possible that Moshe”—since Richard still believes he’s been directly or indirectly responsible, as far as I know, and there was no way I could tell him about the night at the Crypt—“or whoever he’s working for already has it. Or knows where it is. Right? In other words, they’re now all present and accounted for… sort of.”

“It’s possible. Yeah, I guess so.”

“Maybe it’s time we go on the offensive here, try to track him down for a change.” I realized I hadn’t even told him that Moshe and Trudy had been getting all buddy-buddy for a while. He has no idea of the extent of my own interaction with the vampire. I was mostly trolling for reactions from him.

That nervous tic, the head-rubbing, that he engaged in when we’d gone out to lunch a week and a half ago, made another appearance. “Yeah, definitely. But you know, I’d better get back to work now, so let’s both sleep on it and get back to each other. I’m getting a new phone soon, same number. Anyway, I’m really glad the charm got to you safely. I figured it would be safe inside your house. Not like the vampire can break in or anything, right? And like I said the other day—daytime delivery.”

Though he becomes harder to read by the day, his point seemed important. Moshe could have broken in if he wanted to and if he’d known there was a charm waiting for him. I thought about how this fit into what’s been going on while I headed back up to campus. I had another post-vacation stop to make.

The tunnels, appropriately enough, have a very strong wet earth smell when it’s been raining. While I’d been away, the outdoor temperature rose to a relatively comfortable forty to fifty degree range, and the precipitation rose along with it. There are a few entrances in various parts of campus, none of which I knew of until Patrick showed me one inside his dormitory last year. That, in turn, was the only one he knew of until he came across the strange woman dwelling deep within the corridors. Each time I seek Trudy out in her home turf, I gain more of an understanding of why she stays down there. Moshe has stayed in his apartment (or had until the night at the Crypt), which is probably cleaner and more comfortable, but it will also become fairly claustrophobic to him after a while. Trudy, on the other hand, has myriad hallways and storage rooms to explore during the daylight hours. Every college and university has urban myths about the underworld beneath the surface. I don’t know how true the legends are in other locales, but they certainly apply here.

She’d realized fairly quickly that the charm was missing from where she was guarding it. Unsurprisingly, she was curious about it and went in to check for it the very first night when Patrick and I were both out of town. There was little she could do about that, she realized.

What she could do was look for Moshe, and indeed she succeeded, in a way. That is, she took the small amount of information about his parents that I passed along from my onetime student and performed a bit of surveillance on all the families listed in the phone book with Moshe’s last name, as well as reconnoitering Applewood. To make a long story short, she did end up finding him, but she also learned to keep her distance. He has apparently been under the distraction spell pretty much full-time ever since his abduction, and the refracting effect he has, pulling anyone he speaks with into a similar state of half-conscious activity, is still in full operation.

The events of this day to be continued...