Stiletto

by Daniel O'Malley

  On June 9, as the Germans drew nearer to the city, Claudette had gone to meet with a colleague named Anne to discuss the details of their plans. Upon arriving at Anne’s house, however, she had found the back door forced open and her friend dead on the kitchen floor.

  “All the fluids had been drained from her body,” said Claudette with a shudder. “All that was left of her was a husk.” Claudette had fled and sent word to the other Grafters. Three of them had not replied, and cautious investigation had revealed their desiccated bodies in their residences. At that point, panicked, the remaining Parisian Grafters had sealed themselves in their homes.

  A few days later, the invaders entered the city with tanks, trucks, and motorcycles rolling unopposed down the boulevards. Swastika banners hung from the buildings and flew from the Eiffel Tower. While German soldiers established themselves in commandeered houses and the führer himself visited the city, the Grafters remained sequestered.

  “My parents?” asked Marcel. “Siegbert?”

  “I’ve had no word, beertje,” said Claudette. “The telephone system has been unreliable, and none of us have dared to go out.” No one knew the cause of these desiccations. Some Grafters believed it was a deliberate policy by the new regime, which must somehow have found out about them. Others feared that the Checquy had tracked them down and were taking advantage of the chaos to finish them off. They had elected to keep separate and quiet so as not to present a single target.

  “Well, this adds a new level of complexity to the mission,” said Marcel. They agreed that there was no time to waste. Within half an hour, the four of them were proceeding on foot down the nighttime streets of Paris toward Siegbert’s house. It was not an easy journey—a strict curfew had been established and the streets were dark. The streetlamps were off, and the few cars that passed them had blue cloth across their headlights, permitting only the barest of illumination. Citizens were under orders to keep their windows and shutters closed with no light showing. The darkness posed no real problem to the eyes of the Grafters, and Claudette led Marcel by the hand, but the empty streets added a strange, haunted quality to the city.

  Occasionally, roving patrols would stop them and demand to see their identity cards, whereupon Henk and Hans would briskly beat them to a pulp and steal their money. By the time they arrived at Siegbert’s home, Hans had seven new wallets to replace his lost one.

  No one answered their quiet knock, and so Claudette picked the lock with some hastily grown fingernails, and they proceeded inside. The place was dark, but there were sounds coming from the back of the house—a low murmur, and the occasional clink of glass. Cautiously, the four made their way down the hallway. Ahead of them, the wavering glow of candlelight seeped out around the edges of a door.

  In the dining room, they found a barely conscious Siegbert lying on the table. Wooden stakes had been driven through his wrists and ankles to secure him, and a middle-aged woman was in the process of draining his blood into some demijohns. It was not clear who was more startled, the Grafters or the woman, but it was apparent that this was one of those situations where polite conversation would not suffice.

  For a few moments, no one moved, and then the woman drew herself up, and a low, throbbing growl bubbled out of her mouth.

  The Grafters, not unreasonably, took this as a sign that violence was the order of the day and so moved forward. Hans’s muscles appeared to grow as he walked, and the flesh of his neck and shoulders plumped out, lending him an arresting pyramidal appearance. With an audible tchok, curving blades erupted from Henk’s wrists. They projected forward and around his hands, so that his fists were surrounded by cages of sharp bone. Whipping tendrils burst out of Claudette’s shoulder blades and punched through the back of her dress. They flailed around, cracking in the air. Compared to these figures of biological violence, Marcel’s unholstering of his (admittedly rather small) pistol was a trifle anticlimactic, so the woman could be forgiven for focusing on his companions.

  Still growling, the woman took a cautious step back, and her jaw unhinged itself like a snake’s. Her snarl rose in pitch, shivering up through the scale until it could no longer be heard, only felt. The sound hit Marcel like a cudgel, and he staggered back and clutched his head (although he did not drop the gun). It felt as if his skull were being beaten briskly with some very small hammers. He looked around, and saw that it seemed to have affected his comrades very differently.

  The other three Grafters gasped as they felt strange lurchings in their bodies. Then, as one, they screamed as their implants flared in agony. Marcel watched in astonishment as his compatriots’ legs buckled and they keeled over. They lay there, twisted like puppets whose strings had been cut.

  Henk and Hans, who during their journey to Paris had each shrugged off several bullets to the chest and head without complaint, were wailing like infants as the sound rippled through their bodies. Claudette lay curled in the fetal position, her face contorted in agony. On the table, Siegbert was whimpering weakly, arching his back and fighting helplessly against the stakes that impaled him. The woman kept screaming, her breath seemingly inexhaustible.

  As Marcel watched, his companions’ implants began to break down. Several of the blades surrounding Henk’s hands fell away, trailing little strands of flesh. Alarming black blotches expanded across Hans’s augmented muscles. Claudette’s tendrils lay limp, with occasional shivers rippling through them. All three of them were incapacitated.

  The mysterious woman seemed to be smiling as she regarded the three people lying on the floor. Then she took in Marcel’s failure to collapse in agony. He was in pain, there was no doubt, reeling, barely on his feet, but he was on his feet, and he still had the pistol in his hand. She began to move toward him, and he raised his gun.

  She couldn’t smirk contemptuously, because her mouth had to stay open, but she gave a little shrug and stood still with her arms spread out. The message was clear: Go ahead. Try and shoot me. As Marcel shakily aimed his weapon, she actually rolled her eyes. His arm wavered, weaving back and forth in a figure eight as he tried to focus. He took a deep breath and then fired two rounds square into her torso. Her eyes opened wide. I didn’t think you would actually do it.

  She gave him a slow round of applause. Not that it makes a blind bit of difference.

  She moved forward.

  And then she halted.

  An expression of confusion washed over her face. Then, mercifully, she stopped screaming. The horrible throbbing pressure in Marcel’s head faded away, and he could see the woman clearly as she clapped her hands to her chest. A black liquid began to trickle out around her fingers. Bewildered, she looked up at Marcel, who remained impassive. Then she collapsed, and a pool of the black liquid washed out of her.

  18

  Marcel fell to his knees beside his wife and tried to help her sit up. “I’m here, mijn lief, I’m here,” he said to her frantically. “It’s all right.”

  “Oh, thank God,” said Claudette weakly. “That was . . . horrible . . . like being torn apart . . . from the inside.” She turned her head and spat out an alarming mixture of blood and slime. “I think . . . that thing . . . has done some serious . . . damage.”

  “Can you move?” Marcel asked gently.

  “I don’t know,” said Claudette with some irritation. “Make sure . . . that fucking thing is dead . . . and then . . . check the boys.”

  Upon examination, the fucking thing in question seemed to be dead, but by that point Marcel was taking no chances, and so he used a carving knife to carefully remove its head, which he then placed several feet away. Henk and Hans were clutching their stomachs and seemed to be having trouble making their limbs do what they wanted, but they didn’t appear to be in any danger of expiring immediately. Siegbert, however, smiled weakly at the sight of Marcel, and then a little blood foamed at his mouth.

  “Siegbert!” exclaimed Marcel. He hurried to his twin and cradled his head gently. He was in extremely bad shape and could barely mov
e. Marcel did not dare to remove the stakes that pinned him to the table.

  “Siegbert, where is Aimée?” asked Claudette urgently.

  “Dead,” said Siegbert. “She’s dead.”

  “No!” whispered Marcel.

  “That thing killed her when it entered the kitchen. It simply broke her neck.” He closed his eyes, and tears trickled from the corners.

  “I am so sorry, Siegbert,” said Marcel. “Your wife and baby.”

  “The baby is fine,” said Siegbert through labored breaths. “We felt that now was not the time to bring a child into the world, so a few weeks ago I removed him from the womb and placed him in stasis. He is in a thermos upstairs in a locked cupboard in our bedroom. Please, mon frère, you must promise to take care of him.” Before Marcel could answer, Siegbert lapsed into unconsciousness.

  “Can you help him?” Marcel asked his wife frantically. It had been years since he had utilized his Grafter training, and Claudette was the only proper fleshwright there.

  “Well, I can’t sit up,” said Claudette, who had regained some of her color. “But we’ll see what we can do. I know he has some spare blood in the wine cellar. Go get that, beertje, and we’ll replace some. Also, while you’re down there, get some wine. And don’t get them mixed up. And then go and find the thermos with our nephew in it.”

  The rest of the night was spent with all of them lying about sipping wine while blood dripped back into Siegbert’s body. Marcel brought the woman’s head over to Claudette, and she carefully examined it, exclaiming over the bizarre growths that lined the woman’s throat.

  Meanwhile, Siegbert slowly regained a bit of his strength. In addition to having lost all that blood, and his wife, he had been exposed to the woman’s anatomy-shredding scream twice, since she had struck him down with it earlier. Once he could speak properly, he demanded to know how Marcel had killed the woman. “I emptied my gun into the bitch, and she shrugged it off,” Siegbert said weakly.

  “Plague bullets,” said Marcel, cracking open his revolver to reveal chambers holding some extremely odd-looking cartridges. They were made of a transparent chitin, and strange squirming organisms were just visible inside. “Aunt Coralie whipped them up. So, who is the bitch?”

  “I have no idea,” said Siegbert feebly. “She walked into the house, broke Aimée’s neck; I shot her, she ignored it, and then she screamed. I woke up staked to the table.”

  “So who fabricated her?” Marcel eyed the head carefully—she didn’t look familiar.

  “No one fabricated her, Marcel. Those weren’t modifications. She was born with those powers, like something out of the Checquy.”

  “Mon dieu! Do you think that’s what she was?” asked Marcel, eyeing the corpse with a newfound wariness. “Have the Gruwels tracked us down?”

  “She never mentioned them,” said Siegbert. “And she was quite chatty. Although I am certain the Checquy would have loved to have her. None of the stories I ever heard involved someone who could do this to Broederschap implants.”

  “And not a Nazi, or even the French government?”

  Siegbert shook his head.

  “So, nothing to do with the war?” said Marcel.

  “No. In fact, she said all the fighting had proven very inconvenient for her,” said Siegbert. “She complained that she couldn’t transport me back to her place. Apparently she has some sort of juicing press there.” He shuddered.

  “Who else has she taken?” asked Marcel.

  “I don’t know,” said Siegbert. “She said that there had been several, but she didn’t say how many exactly.” Claudette knew only who the first four victims were. After that, all the Parisian Grafters had tried to barricade themselves in. To Marcel it seemed like the height of foolishness, but his relatives were scholars and scientists, not soldiers. They’d been conditioned by the tales of the Checquy always to retreat and hide from threats.

  Unspoken between the brothers was the possibility that their parents had been consumed by the woman.

  “We’ll need to ascertain the status of all Broederschap members in Paris,” said Marcel.

  “You may need to do that by yourself,” said Claudette from the floor, where she was propped up on cushions and peering carefully into the neck of the woman’s corpse. “Whatever that woman did to us, it’s been very bad for all our implants. I think some of the materials in my joints have actually dissolved, and a lot of my internal connections have been severed.” She held up one of the tendrils that drooped lifelessly from her shoulder blades. “We’re going to have to do some repair work, and it will take several days.” Marcel glanced questioningly toward his brother and then back to her, and she shrugged sadly.

  I don’t know if we can save him, she didn’t say.

  And so, as morning dawned, Marcel had to venture out by himself into a strangely subdued Paris. There was a tension in the air, and people did not meet each other’s eyes. It was not the gay metropolis he had grown up in. Hitler’s soldiers moved through the city and did not hesitate to question any man of military bearing. Marcel hurried through the streets and was prompt in providing his (forged) identity card when stopped. Tucked into the small of his back were two pistols, one of them carrying normal ammunition, the other with the modified rounds he’d been given.

  Against his first impulse, he hadn’t gone straight to his parents’ house, which was the farthest from Siegbert’s, across the Seine. Instead, he was methodical, plotting out routes that would take him to as many homes as possible each day while still permitting him to return to Siegbert’s house before night fell. In addition, he was responsible for obtaining food and supplies for his crippled companions.

  The first few houses yielded heartbreaking results. In three of them, Marcel found the drained corpses of his relations. A fourth was empty, although from the wrecked furniture and punched-in doors, it was apparent that the three Grafter residents had been taken by the screaming woman. The fifth house, however, held Richard van Eijden, a distant cousin who had replied to Marcel’s knocking with some shouted threats and a spray of some pungent spores under the door. It had taken Marcel several minutes to persuade Richard who he was, and all the while his skin had been itching madly from the spores. Eventually, however, he was permitted inside and given the antidote before his skin peeled off.

  Richard’s relief at seeing Marcel and hearing about the demise of the screaming woman was palpable. When he learned that they would be evacuating to Belgium, he was ecstatic. Upon arriving at Siegbert’s house, he immediately set to work on the injured.

  Marcel continued to visit Grafter houses but found only two more survivors: Alphonse, a master, and his apprentice, Pauline. They were both so caught up in their studies that they had barely realized there was a war on, let alone that some supernatural entity had been stalking them. They acceded, with very poor grace, to Marcel’s command that they accompany him back to Siegbert’s but insisted on bringing several suitcases of documents and samples.

  “So, to recap, we have ten members of the Broederschap horribly dead, yes?” said Alphonse. All the Grafters had gathered in the library of Siegbert’s house. Those who had been struck down by the woman’s voice were propped up on couches or lying flat on the floor. Upon hearing no disagreements, Alphonse made a little note in a little notebook. “And we have two whose horrific deaths have yet to be established.” He looked up to see everyone else staring at him. “What?”

  “Ahem, those two unestablished deaths—” began Claudette.

  “Horrific deaths,” interjected Alphonse helpfully.

  “Thank you,” said Claudette. “You are talking about the parents of Siegbert and Marcel, and Siegbert and Marcel are sitting right here in the room with you.”

  “. . . Yes?”

  “Never mind,” said Marcel. It was clear that Alphonse, while possessing an unparalleled understanding of biochemical interactions, was useless when it came to the human kind.

  “I have examined Claudette, Hans, Henk, and Siegbe
rt,” said Richard to Marcel. “We cannot repair them without access to significant facilities and more expertise. I will need help, from either your parents or our brethren in the north.”

  “I’ll go to the house tomorrow morning,” said Marcel. It had been the sensible thing to leave them until last, but in his heart, he was afraid to go, afraid of having his fears confirmed. In the past few days, a dozen different scenarios had floated through his imagination. The memories of the drained bodies that he had found in those other houses were always in his mind. He envisioned his parents sprawled lifeless on the floor of their parlor. At night, he had been tortured by nightmares of the house in flames or demolished. In his sleep, he had walked through the ruins, and in every room, his parents had lain dead.

  It was raining on the morning that he went to his parents’ home. He had an umbrella, but his legs were soaked from the knees down by the time he reached the house. Still, he stood across the street for several minutes, staring through the downpour at the place where he’d grown up. No lights were on that he could see, no sign of anyone inside.

  I’ve gone into battle, he told himself. I’ve watched my friends die around me. I’ve fought and killed a monster. It seems a trifle ridiculous that I should be afraid of knocking on my own front door.

  Eventually he mustered up the courage and crossed the road, the wind buffeting his umbrella.

  Little seemed to have changed in the years since he’d left. Pots of flowers stood by the door. They were flourishing, but that meant nothing. Thanks to his father’s tinkering, those plants could flourish without human care. They could probably flourish on the surface of the moon. He rang the doorbell several times, but there was no answer.

  That doesn’t confirm anything, he told himself. They could be in hiding, afraid to answer the door because of that screaming woman. He moved around to the back of the house and retrieved a hidden door key from within a beehive whose occupants had been engineered by his parents to be deadly poisonous but also to recognize the scent of their family members. But as Marcel climbed the stairs, something caught his eye, and a feeling of doom swept through him. The door was ajar, and, judging by the leaves and dirt that had blown inside, it had been that way for at least several days.