The stench was staggering. His steps echoed as he pushed forward only out of a sudden and very real sense of danger until he skidded to a stop, at first not sure of what he was seeing.
The shower room was long and claustrophobic, with ten showerheads on each wall, long brown stains on the tiles beneath them. Bierce identified the hissing sound as coming from the single showerhead that was working, it’s spray of dirty water striking the back of a woman’s hospital gown, plastering it to her buttocks and legs as she swayed slightly from side to side, muttering.
He stopped in mid-motion, afraid to attract attention.
There were twelve of them. Soulless bodies standing in a circle, looking at something on the ground in their midst, something Bierce could not see. They swayed, out of synch with one another, slowly and clumsily shuffling around the circle until the woman had moved from under the spray and a man stepped into the blasting water, oblivious as it soaked through his gown.
Bierce held his breath and took a step backwards. He took another step, forcing his imagination away from the questions. What was in the middle of the circle? What were they staring at?
He stepped slightly to the left, out of the line of sight of anyone in the shower room, and released his breath. Even with his protections, to see what they saw would be to embrace the world as envisioned by Mister White, a sight that would surely drive him mad.
They were the embodiment of minds consumed. Bierce struggled to shore up the walls of his own sanity, refusing to consider the idea that if he was not exceedingly careful, one day he too might take a place in that circle and share their vision of Hell.
- 6 -
Her name was Bella and she thought she was dreaming when the man from outside entered the ward. As he approached, she saw his paleness and decided it was a trick. She fled, white hair streaming behind her. In her own room no one could find her. She was safe. She burrowed.
As she calmed herself, the man reminded her of streets and cars and ordering dinner at a restaurant. A world beyond here. She came to believe that this man was not Him. This one was a sad man, she decided, and a sad man would understand. A sad man would help her leave the ward.
It’s a trick! It’s a trick, and you know it, Bella.
“Hello?” His voice was clear and sounded so much of outside, of sanity, that she almost wept.
He’ll think you’re sick, Bella. Sick people don’t leave the underground.
She moved closer along the floor, carefully. But he was gone, and she forced herself to uncurl from underneath the newspaper and slip quietly out into the hall. A wraith named Bella.
In the safety of the dark, she thought she answered him. “Hello?”
Why didn’t he respond? Did she actually speak? She used her hands to open her mouth and tried again. “Hello?”
But he left her dark hallway and went into the shower place. She couldn’t go any closer. Goosebumps erupted across her exposed arms and she shivered. She closed her eyes. A second? A minute? Time was becoming taffy, and she railed at the early warning sign of psychosis.
Open your eyes, girl. Open!
She used her fingers to peel her eyelids up and saw the back of the man as he strode quickly away.
NO!
With him departed distant dreams of sunlight on her skin and wind rustling her hair. Dreams, surely, because they could not be memories. There was no time before the now. She was of the underground and had always lived in the underground.
Lucidity—more a cruel tease than a friend of Bella’s—chose that moment to slide away between the cracks. She dropped to her knees, crawling back down the flickering corridor to her burrow where she brushed aside debris and crawled inside a ring for safety, carefully setting upright the cans that had tipped.
As Bella—conscious Bella—grew smaller and smaller in her mind, she railed and fought. She screamed for him, screamed inside her diminishing mind.
“Hello!”
- 7 -
The unclean atmosphere grew noticeably thicker as Bierce approached the chamber that held the object. After eluding the woman in white, he had passed several more geometric shapes made from tin cans, shapes that tickled at his understanding. But he refused to address them consciously, terribly aware of the traps that existed in this subterranean place.
The people who lived here now had once lived in the light of day as he did, but they had not been careful as they cared for the facility and the object within. They had allowed themselves to consider, to ponder without suitable precautions, and thus were lost.
Bierce did not intend to join them.
He armed sweat from his upper lip with the gray sleeve of his jacket, aware of the growing damp beneath his armpits and in the crotch of his slacks. It was a soupy air, difficult to breathe, and his lungs labored from more than fear as he came to the unmarked door at the end of a long corridor.
Here he paused to remove the file from under his arm, opening it to remind himself of the page number he needed before compulsively closing it with a snap.
He straightened his spine, inhaled a long breath through his nose and pushed it back out through his mouth before taking the slimy doorknob in his free hand and pulling open the door. He strode through as if late for an executive meeting.
The chamber itself was not large, and a black excrescence had grown in biological patterns below the two air vents. It was a wet, mossy substance that sent tendrils across the crumbling acoustic tile of the ceiling and dangled from above like sickly Spanish moss.
A single tattered goat’s hoof lay between Bierce and the object.
It was a tall, coffin-like box of rotting wood and peeling paint, covered in all manner of obscene graffiti with the word TELEFON inscribed at the top. It stank of fresh piss and lost hope, emitting a subliminal message of unwelcome.
Contained in the folder beneath Bierce’s arm were photographs and a detailed study of every marking on the surface, an attempt to understand how the object had come to be what it was. That it was originally from Berlin they were certain, but other than that, the experts could not say.
Experts. They were children fumbling in the dark with atomic weapons. A team of would-be Oppenheimers illiterate in physics. They knew, to a limited extent, what it could do. But not why. Not how.
It was hideous, a Bavarian work of art gone awry, with severed wires dangling from the back like black hair from a wart. The semi-liquid moss hanging from the ceiling had reached down to touch the surface, or perhaps the phone box had reached up to spread its corruption. Bierce was struck again by a desire to reinstate the old emergency protocols that were designed to fill the corridors with benzene fumes and detonate the underground compound like a massive fuel-air bomb, incinerating everything inside in the event the weaponized syphilis escaped confinement.
Bierce pushed such thoughts away, clearing his mind before attending to the business at hand.
The booth’s folding doors were pushed open and the interior was blacker than it had a right to be. Extending from within was a long cord connected to the tubular ear piece for the ancient candlestick phone it contained.
Ronald was inside listening to the phone, facing away from Bierce, hunched over as if his internal machinery had spun down to dormancy. He took the phone away from his ear with a meaty tearing sound, his mouth opening in a silent shriek as the cartilaginous organ was torn away from his skull. Rivulets of bright scarlet danced down the side of Ronald’s neck as his anguished eyes met those of Bierce.
“It’s for you, dear,” Ronald said, before dropping the handset so that it swung back into the opaque interior with a whack. He shuffled out of the booth and patted Bierce on the shoulder as he moved past.
Bierce cleared his throat and opened the file once more, committing the fourteen-digit number to memory, knowing from past experience that he would be unable to read once inside the dark space.
“Right, then…” Bierce said.
He carefully opened the book to the page he needed and commit
ted the words to memory as he angled sideways into the phone booth, gagging at the palpable stench and closing the door behind him.
Ronald looked back at the phone booth, lips stretched in an idiot grin. With the door closed, he almost couldn’t hear Bierce screaming.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
- 1 -
“Morphine,” the Fat Man slurred into the darkness as his consciousness swam up from the depths of Lethe. He was aware of the rank sweat pooling between his breasts and running down the folds of his flesh beneath the hospital gown as his body fought the infection.
He struggled to see past the bulk of his own middle to the heavily bandaged stumps at the end of his legs. Tears boiled from his eyes as he realized that the disfigurement was real, not a symptom of his unending nightmare.
I am in hospital in Landstrasse. I am in Vienna.
He groped for the call button as his eyes slid to the closet door, open just a crack. A hoarse whisper drifted forth from inside, “Herr Gruebel.”
“No,” he whispered as it swung open with a faint squeak of hinges and the shadows inside stirred. What he at first took to be the dim outline of a hanging coat stepped out and into the room. He drew in a breath to shout as the shadow flowed towards him, and the smothering white of a pillow was placed over his face.
- 2 -
Warmth flooded his extremities and lit his mind with heroin joy as Herr Gruebel opened his eyes to see the outline of an intruder beside his bed.
The intruder removed the syringe from an IV connected to the Fat Man’s wrist and set it on the nightstand.
“You are not him,” Herr Gruebel whispered.
“I am Strigoi,” Lewis said, and his eyes flashed in the reflected light of the heart monitor. “Herr Gruebel, who is Mister White?”
The Fat Man flinched and waved a palsied hand. “To say that name is death.” He glanced at the phone on the bedside table and closed his eyes. “He lurks and listens for his name and rides our own creations to follow us.”
Lewis glanced at the phone. “Phones? There are phones everywhere.”
“And so is he.”
Slats of light from the sodium lamps outside slipped through the venetian blinds to illuminate unsettling features of Lewis’s face. Hard eyes. Narrow lips. Unshaven jaw. Even as the opiate set his mind adrift, Gruebel knew he recognized in this man another denizen of the shadow world. A creeper of alleys and slitter of throats. A spy.
“He’s after me. Tell me who he is.”
“If he’s after you, then I speak to a dead man.”
“Why do you say that? He didn’t kill you.”
Gruebel released a long sigh. “As hunters will hang a pheasant until the meat grows high with flavor, so too may this one have left me to stew in the juices of my own fear, to make of me a more savory meal.” He grinned. “Or perhaps I am simply unimportant.”
“Why did he kill Abel?”
The Fat Man twitched nervously, but the opiate kept the fear to a distant clamor at the back of his memory. “Abel was a bad man.”
“Why is he trying to kill me?”
The Fat Man looked at him, watching the visitor’s body stretch like toffee or a shape in a funhouse mirror as the opiates ate away at Gruebel’s hold on reality.
“Morphine,” the Fat Man said.
“Later. Tell me who he is.”
The Fat Man shivered, aware of each pore on his body emitting a single, oily bead of sweat. “He is the blind goat with eyes of burning coal.”
“What?”
“His form is albino, furred and hoofed.”
Lewis leaned over and rocked the Fat Man’s head with a sharp slap.
The hospital room swam around Gruebel and words began to draw out into long lines of sound.
“Whoooo iiiiis heeeee?”
“A nightmare who rides men as a man would ride a horse,” Gruebel said. “Even now there is one with an empty mind wandering the streets of Vienna, having been used and abandoned. Where the bodies of the mad and empty wash up on riverbanks and freeze beneath bridges, there you know he has passed.”
“Is he human?”
The Fat Man shook his head slowly. “Perhaps he is the goat-headed Baphomet. Perhaps he is the evil within your own mind. He follows the scent of your terror.”
“Can he be killed?”
Again, a shake of the large, round head. “Can you kill a nightmare?”
Lewis walked away and turned back to see the Fat Man’s eyes rolling like marbles as they tracked him.
“Who watches the watchers?” Gruebel whispered, straining for clarity of thought. “Ask yourself who would be displeased with Abel.”
Lewis bunched the Fat Man’s gown in his fists and leaned close. “Are you saying he was sent?”
“Eyes of red,” the Fat Man muttered. “Fur of white.” His eyelids fluttered and he grabbed Lewis’s wrist with shocking strength. “Do you also work for Herr Bierce?”
“What about Bierce?” Lewis demanded.
“Morphine,” the Fat Man pleaded. “Morphine before he comes.”
Lewis pulled free and stepped away, rubbing his wrist before retrieving the syringe from the nightstand.
“Are you sure?” Lewis asked, and the Fat Man nodded, quietly weeping.
“He wants you fat with fear before he takes you. It is his bread and wine. Morphine before he comes for me, and for yourself as well if you are wise,” Gruebel said.
Lewis re-inserted the needed into the IV tube and depressed the plunger, injecting the remainder of the drug into the Fat Man’s system.
- 3 -
Lewis lit a cigarette as he passed the Belvedere Palace in Vienna’s Landstrasse district, long since closed to tourists for the day. His shoes tocked hollowly on the sidewalk as he glanced around and flicked the match into the quiet street, disguising a quick look back towards the low building which contained the private hospital in which he had found Gruebel, the information broker.
The Fat Man’s fear had been genuine, but his scattered thoughts reeked of opiates. Lewis wondered if the day he had spent locating Gruebel, and the time it took to infiltrate the hospital, had been wasted.
His memory conjured the clatter of hooves atop the train and he turned towards a rhythmic tapping. Only a windblown shutter banging against a wall.
Not a blind goat to be seen.
“Madness,” Lewis whispered. But Gruebel knew of Bierce. “It has to be madness.”
Eyes of red. Fur of white.
CHAPTER TWENTY
- 1 -
Hedde sat on the thin mattress and stared at the bars of the crib, caught in a strange current as inescapable reality coalesced around her yet became more difficult to see. The smell of Etienne, of Uncle Gerard’s coffee and of sharp tobacco gained strength and developed clearly discernible outlines even as her ability to remember her home, schoolboys and the sullen tension of a mother on the verge of divorce grew into diffuse, fantastical creations by C.S. Lewis.
She did not understand that she was in shock. Having fought hard to learn so much so young, she had yet to realize that there were, and always would be, events and feelings beyond her capacity to comprehend. They would push her and shove her and roll her like a vicious breaker at the seashore.
And there she was, staring at the crib while wearing the same dress she had worn for two days now, rolling in the surf with no idea which way was up, was air. No idea that she was drowning.
“Etienne!” she said.
Hedde cocked her head as she laced up her Doc Martens, but did not hear the scrabbling crash of his charge through the house, unaware that she was already clinging to the dog as a talisman against the dark waters swirling over her head.
Uncle Gerard had left her a fresh pot of coffee as well as cigarette makings while he went off to do whatever he did on frozen mornings. Something to do with the Christmas trees. Hedde sipped and she smoked in silence. She wondered if this was what adulthood would feel like. Alone and confused in a place that was not, and coul
d never be, a true home.
Rolling in the surf. Drowning.
Hedde wandered the sparsely furnished house trailing cigarette smoke, touching this here and that there, noting the absence of personality in the rooms and wondering if that did reflect her uncle’s personality.
Cold seeped from the wooden door leading down to the basement and she heard the rumble and chug of subterranean machinery. The door was locked and she decided to save exploring that for later, instead pouring herself another cup of coffee, the cup burning her hand as she trudged up the creaky wooden staircase, running fingers along a banister made smooth by years of sliding hands.
The hall upstairs seemed built for another time, too thin and too tall for this age. It conjured images of narrow New England schoolmasters and memories of The Crucible, that most terrifying play. The ever-present gray of the sky, the dead, leafless trees with bony branches drooping towards the iron-hard ground, all were of a piece with her taciturn uncle and these too-thin, too-tall hallways.
She paused in her room to neaten the blankets, shifting the mattress until the corner was in tune with the corner of the room itself. The crib was slightly out of alignment and she shifted that, casting a weather eye between the never-baby’s bed and her own until she was sure that they were in tune.
The door to her uncle’s room was not completely closed, and she pushed it open but hesitated to step inside. It was a dark space, the shades drawn, the smell of his sweat heavy in the air, as if it were the den of an animal. She stepped back into the hall and pulled the door firmly shut.
Shrouded in shadows at the end of the dim hallway was an incongruous red door of a tall and skinny shape, signifying through color and style that it led to no ordinary bedroom. Red. Somebody had painted it red. From the peeling state of the paint, the deed had been done long ago.
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