Free The Late Night Horror Show by Bryan Smith Page B

house, wherever the hell it is, as soon as I can.
    If that meant fleeing into the night in this silly little excuse for a nightgown, so be it.
    There was a door to the right of the Charles Dickens desk. It was the only door in sight and had to be the way out. She took a single, determined step toward it and then stopped.
    She frowned.
    And put a hand to her neck, feeling for the marks she prayed were not there.
    But they were.
    And suddenly her heart was off to the races again. Her legs felt weak. She was woozy and felt as if she might pass out again. Passing out was even sort of an attractive option, though she knew her chances of escaping whatever kind of prison she was in depended on remaining alert. The bad dream hadn’t been a dream at all and had nothing to do with her fondness for fictional vampires.
    A real vampire had bitten her.
    And had drunk deeply of her blood…
    —ohmygodohmygod—
    She raced to the door and yanked it open, intent on getting herself out of this place as fast as she could, but two massive men, with blond crew cuts and dressed all in black, stood outside the door, flanking it on either side. They turned toward her as the door came open, their enormous bodies filling the doorframe.
    Kira felt like crying.
    No escape. No escape. Oh God, there’s no way out…
    One of the blond behemoths smiled tightly at her. “You are not to leave.”
    “Says who?”
    The other one remained stone-faced as he said, “You are to stay in this room until further notice by order of the Master.”
    “The what now?”
    The creepily smiling one said, “The Master.”
    Kira nodded. “Right. That’s what I thought you said.”
    But what kind of total whack job has his employees refer to him as ‘the Master’?
    She kept that question to herself, figuring it could lead to nowhere good and that, anyway, there could be no sensible answer for it.
    The smiling one glanced at her chest and then looked her in the eye again. “You should return to bed and await the honor of the Master’s presence. He is anxious to drink of you again.” His sinister smile broadened. “And to partake of your beauty in other ways, of course.”
    Kira nodded again. “Uh huh. You talk exactly like you’re in some weird seventies eurovampire movie. You realize that, right?”
    The Smiling One became the Frowning One. “I do not understand.”
    “I know you don’t. Okay, so…I’m gonna, like, take your advice and go await the presence of this Master person.” She moved back a step and began to swing the door shut. “Later, guys.”
    She stared at the closed door a long moment.
    It was painfully obvious now that she was completely trapped.
    Goddammit.
    So she returned to the bed and waited for the vampire to come calling.
    There was nothing else she could do.
     
     
    One of the black-clad brutes kicked a door open and shoved Monroe roughly through it. His shoulder banged off the doorframe, sending a shock of pain down his left side as he staggered to the edge of a small landing at the top of a spiral stone staircase. The only light available spilled in from the mansion’s huge restaurant-style kitchen, through which the thugs had just dragged him en route to this place. The staircase twisted down into utter blackness. Monroe gulped. His first thought was it looked like a path straight down into the heart of hell itself.  
    But just as he was thinking that, torches mounted in sconces on the stone wall at descending intervals of approximately a dozen feet sparked to life. The flickering tongues of flame pushed back some of the darkness, enough that one could descend the staircase without taking a blind tumble, but the light was too hazy to glimpse the bottom, which at a guess had to be at least a hundred feet or more below the surface of the earth.
    “Bloody hell. How is this even possible?”
    By which he meant every aspect of his current situation. The abduction by vampires. The inexplicable lighting of the torches. What the fuck