“I’m scared,” I whispered, and I heard the surprise in my voice. Fear tingled and spread through my blood with each heartbeat.
“We could call for help,” Jacey said.
“Wake everyone up?” I wasn’t that scared. “Jacey, they’d make fun of us all over campus. We’d never live it down.”
Then the thing outside stopped moving. It began making sounds, softly at first, then louder. I can’t describe what they sounded like—imagine a puppy yelping, then pitching its voice higher, and finally so high that it threatened to shatter your eardrum.
Jacey made a strange sound too, a low gurgle in her throat.
Fear wasn’t fun anymore. She grabbed my shoulder, and I held her hand. I don’t know how long we stayed that way, wrapped in our sleeping bags, clutching each other, listening to the keening that came out of the dark. Sometimes I thought I heard words in the howling. Once I thought I heard it speak my name.
I heard Jacey thinking, And tomorrow they’ll find our dead bodies in the tent. I wondered what she’d think if she knew she was holding the hand of a vampire.
We didn’t sleep again that night. The thing outside eventually went away, but we knew it could come back anytime it chose.
Once daylight was strong, I unzipped the tent flap and saw only grass and trees and sky. I chided myself for being a coward. Why hadn’t I simply gone outside to see what made the noise?
The scariest things are the ones that visit us in darkness, the ones we never see. And the fear that kept us paralyzed in the tent that night left a funny residue, a bitter taste in my throat, a reminder that, after all, in some ways I was vulnerable as any mortal.
Chapter Twelve
Humans see things differently than animals do. Humans are much better at detecting unmoving objects. Animals’ nervous systems have evolved to detect movement, since motion may indicate the approach of a predator or prey. But a frog can’t even see a stationary object because of neural adaptation; its visual neurons don’t respond to unmoving things, in order to save energy.
Theoretically, humans do better at seeing stationary objects because their eyes are always moving, counteracting neural adaptation. But sometimes they fail to see objects in their field of vision because their attention is directed elsewhere. Skilled magicians know how to induce and manipulate states of inattentional blindness. That’s why tricks work.
Not much research has been devoted to examining vampires’ vision, but based on the little I’ve read on the Internet and on my own observations, it tends to be more acute than humans’. A vampire’s retina has more rod and cone cells than a human’s, making it more responsive to light and color. Yet even with that enhanced vision, the vampire eye may be susceptible to inattentional blindness. Like humans, and like frogs and dragonflies, we sometimes fail to see what is right in front of us.
Jacey and I avoided each other for the rest of our time in the swamp. Each of us reminded the other of the sour experience of fear that began as fun and progressed to something malignant.
Bernadette—who said she’d slept like a baby—did the paddling that morning. I slumped in the rear of the canoe, half-asleep, ignoring the alligators slumped along the banks, half-asleep.
Professor Hoffman, wide awake, gave us an impromptu lecture that drifted back to me in partial sentences. He was talking about alligators’ vision—how their eyes have layers of reflecting tissue behind the retinas that act like mirrors. “We call the tissue tapetum lucidum,” he said. “Anybody know what that means?”
It means “bright carpet,” but I felt too sleepy to volunteer. Hoffman said the tissue acts like a mirror to concentrate available light, helping the gators to hunt in the dark. And it’s also responsible for the way alligators’ eyes look at night if you shine a flashlight on them—they glow red, like burning coals.
Bernadette said, “Creepy.”
The whole trip had been a little too creepy for me. And I wasn’t looking forward to spending the night on a wooden platform, surrounded by who knew what. Vampires need sleep even more than humans do, to keep our immune systems healthy.
Hoffman was talking about something called succession—the natural process of change that occurs in a habitat. If the peat in the swamp built up, the swamp would become a shrub, and later a hardwood, habitat. “What keeps the swamp a swamp is the natural occurrence of wildfires,” he said. “As fires burn away peat, open lakes are left. Without the fires, this place would be a forest.”
One moment, I was half-asleep, half listening to the lecture, feeling mildly annoyed at the prospect of what I thought lay ahead. The next, we were all fully awake, thanks to Jacey’s screaming.
She saw it first: close to the shore, amid the golden club plants, something dark was floating.
Jacey said, “What? What?” She screamed again, and then someone else screamed.
I sat up, but the other canoes blocked my sight. But as we drifted, I had an open view of the shape in the water—dark clothes billowing out and a head of dark hair. The shape looked terribly out of place. It looked wrong.
The professors took out their cell phones. Neither had a signal. Then they pulled out maps, trying to identify our location and find the best route to a place where the phones would work.
“Jacey, you okay?” Professor Riley said.
She’d hunched forward, panting. Later she told me she was trying not to vomit.
Hoffman told the other girl in Jacey’s canoe to do the rowing. “The rest of you—everybody paddle.”
We turned the canoes around and Hoffman led us back toward the landing where we’d launched them. The pace of our paddling was twice as fast as it had been on the trip out.
From time to time I glanced over at Jacey to see if she was okay, but all I saw was the back of her jacket. She still bent forward, head inclined so that she couldn’t see anything beyond the canoe’s interior.
Bernadette kept looking at Jacey, too, and I heard her say something indistinct. “What did you say?” I said.
She turned her head sideways. “Jacey looks like the Six of Swords.”
I remembered the image of that tarot card: a cloaked woman leaning forward in a punt, a ferryman behind her, using a long pole to propel them to shore, and six swords before her, holding her in place. Bernadette had said the card signified escape.