Demogorgon

by Brian Lumley

  To get it off his mind he got up, quickly dressed, stole downstairs. The old man slept in his chair, empty glasses standing on a wooden table close at hand, just where father and son had left them. They had talked until Costas had had his fill of brandy and nodded off, and then Dimitrios had gone upstairs to sleep, until nightfall and the cicadas had woken him up. But now there was something he must do, and until he had done it there’d be no more rest for him. He had to know about this man Khumeni. There could be no connection, no, of course not, but still he had to be sure. And he had good reasons for wanting to be sure …

  Over the years, ever since that monstrous night in Chorazin, Kastrouni had thought long and often on what he had seen there in that dead, doomed city. Much of it was still very clear in his mind, seared there, but his mind itself had long since stopped believing in it. It had been hallucination, nightmare, a bout of madness – any or all of these things – but it had not been real. How could it have been? And Guigos, George Guigos: whoever he had been, he could not possible be alive now. Could he? No, of course not, for he had been ancient even then. By now he would be bones picked clean by the worms. Surely …

  And yet there had been the contents of the packs on Guigos’ donkey: those esoteric books, old parchments, fragments of half-forgotten, long discredited or ‘forbidden’ incunabula. Oh, yes – and at various times Kastrouni had studied all such in great depth over the years.

  Guigos had been a diabolist, beyond doubt, and he’d wrought diabolic things. But his magic, however ‘black,’ was still only magic: stage-trickery dressed up to look real. For all Kastrouni knew, the things he thought he had seen that night had been rigged to frighten him off, so that he would have no claim to the balance of the money Guigos had promised him. And perhaps the other two had been dealt with in a like fashion. Perhaps Ihya Khumnas and Yakob Mhireni had been similarly frightened off, thus forfeiting their wages also. That must be the truth of the matter … mustn’t it?

  Sometimes, rather than face an unthinkable truth or an untenable situation, the human mind will fashion all kinds of excuses for those things it does not want to believe. Kastrouni’s mind was no exception to this rule, but it did retain its great curiosity. And because he was still a fugitive, it was a curiosity which the years had taught him to temper with wariness. The curiosity of a fox, and stealth to match. He was a fox now as he drove a battered hire-car along the coastal road from Larnaca in the direction of Dhekelia …

  About half-way between town and garrison he drove past Yanni’s Casino, a sprawling concrete bar and taverna standing midway between the road and the sea, and remembering the place from his boyhood he smiled. ‘Casino,’ indeed! The only gaming he’d ever seen in the place was in the shape of a trio of one-armed bandits! Actually Yanni’s wasn’t intended to be a casino at all; it catered for weddings and other receptions, political meetings, social and ethnic festivities of many sorts, and so forth. Its main attraction was its large, open hall, which doubled as a restaurant, and its views of the ocean.

  The smile quickly slipped from his face. This was where the man – the youth, really – he’d killed would have brought his new bride. And since then twenty years had flown by, and now here he was, Dimitrios Kastrouni, back on the island from which he’d once fled for his life. Back to see his father, his sisters, the place where he’d grown up in what now seemed a different age. And back to come face to face with this ominous coincidence: this man who said he had known him back in Israel.

  The bright lights of Yanni’s Casino faded in his rearview. One or two cars passed him, heading for Larnaca. The road was fairly quiet, and that suited him perfectly. Another mile and he’d be there.

  Khumeni …

  George Khumeni.

  And this stranger – this man who rented his father’s villa – he had three along to guard him, did he? That other George had also had three men to do his work for him. And over the years … hadn’t Kastrouni had his suspicions? Hadn’t he time and again suspected that someone, something, tracked him – sniffed at his heels, followed his spoor as he constantly changed his identity, covered his tracks and moved on?

  Of course, it could simply be that he’d developed a morbid phobia, a sickness of the mind. He supposed that there would be a name for it, this fear of being tracked down and brought to justice. It wasn’t just a persecution complex, for there was guilt there, too. After all, he had killed a man; but did he fear retribution for that, or for something else? Whatever it was, he supposed that the great Nazi war criminals must all have suffered from it – until the day they were tracked down. And now the thing was in him, too. Either that … or there really had been someone on his trail ever since that night in old Chorazin.

  And what if that someone and this George Khumeni were one and the same? And what if Khumeni was also one and the same with … with someone else?

  ‘That can’t be!’ Kastrouni snarled out loud. ‘It can’t be!’ But again that niggling doubt in the back of his mind, asking: ‘Oh, can’t it?’

  Where the road swung a little away from the sea, in a fenced grove of pomegranates and olives at the foot of a long, wide garden, there stood the villa. It had a dirt path leading to it for maybe a hundred yards, then a gravel drive through the garden to the front of the house. Of fairly modern design – or at least of a design still greatly in fashion – it was a low and spacious bungalow, very clean and attractive, airy, uncluttered.

  Kastrouni saw it from the road, slowed down, stared hard into the night. He wound down his window, slowed his car’s pace to a crawl. The sea made a low, barely audible hush, hush, where it breathed against the land like a great sleeping head on a pillow. The sea and the cicadas, nothing more. But a light shone in the villa.

  Kastrouni spotted a vehicle’s headlights moving toward him from Dhekelia. He picked up a little speed, turned his face away as the other car sped by, watched it in his rearview. Its braking lights came on and it turned down the track to the villa. He hadn’t seen the occupant or occupants and presumed they hadn’t seen him; probably one or more of this Khumeni’s henchmen.

  Less than a hundred yards farther on there had used to be a sparse copse of Mediterranean pines standing just off the road. If the land hadn’t been cleared …

  It hadn’t.

  Kastrouni parked the car under the trees, made his way back toward the villa along the beach. He knew every inch of the way, seemed to be familiar with every washed pebble on the shore. Nothing had changed. But as he approached the house a second car came down the path from the road, causing him to duck low as its lights cut a swath in the night over his head. Perhaps this Khumeni was throwing a party or some such. If so, the house seemed oddly quiet. Whichever, he would soon know for sure. And he would know for sure about Khumeni, too.

  The villa was probably unique on the island for its roof, certainly in the Greek sectors. Dimitrios’s father was originally Rhodian and had wanted incorporated into his new home the ceiling beams peculiar or special to that island; but at the same time he had known that the winter rains along the Larnaca coast – often violent as monsoons - would demand a roof sturdier than those of village houses on Rhodes. Hence the double roof: a slightly sloping concrete slab roof on reinforced supports over a flat Rhodian roof of thick pine tongue-and-groove planking, sealed on top with bitumen and white gravel. Inside, the pine ceiling was varnished and supported by the carved and beaded Lindian beams the old man so fondly remembered from his childhood. The villa was weatherproof and well insulated, cool in the summer and warm in the winter. And between the two roofs – a space where a man could hide. Or a youth, anyway. The way Kastrouni remembered it, it hadn’t been too tight a squeeze; but he guessed he was a lot bigger now, bulkier. Certainly he was heavier …

  At the ocean-facing fence – a wire trellis held up on red-leaded iron staves, itself supporting a vine extending all the way to the house – Kastrouni took off his jacket, bundled it up and put it down in shadow. His shirt was black and merged with the da
rk mass of the vine where he reached up, caught hold of a thick, gnarly branch, lifted his feet like a circus acrobat and swung them through the gap between the trellis and a ceiling of blue-shining, almost ripe grapes. Then, when he soundlessly lowered his feet, he was inside the garden.

  And that was when he once more became aware of the cicadas. Or rather, it was when he noticed their silence; a silence like that of the tomb. Kastrouni shuddered. Most tombs, anyway.

  He brought his mordibly wandering mind back to the present: the cicadas were still as the night, their voices switched off like a single light, as if someone had thrown a universal switch. Even the sea was silent, its hush, hush against the shingle beach suddenly stilled.

  Kastrouni held his breath, listened. And it was as if all around him the night, too, held its breath.

  The thing lasted for only a moment; it was over when a third car approached the front of the house, the purr of its engine opening a door in the silence and allowing the sea and the cicadas once more to breach the threshold of reality. Kastrouni heard the car’s engine switched off, heard two of its doors open and slam shut one after the other, and was glad sound had returned. But for all that he jiggled his little fingers in his ears and shook his head to clear it, still the sea didn’t sound quite the same, and there seemed a new, timid note in the song of the cicadas.

  He moved quickly through the dark garden to the house. The lights on this, the ocean-facing side, were out, but still he was careful to keep low and not put his silhouette on the silver sea, the floating moon or the stars. Above him the straight edge of the concrete room loomed blackly, a shutter on the Milky Way, where beside him a stepped wall of fancy breeze blocks formed his ladder to the gap between inner and outer roofs. He climbed carefully, noiselessly. Up there, between the roofs on the external perimeter of the building, he knew there was a facade of varnished marine plywood; but he also knew where a section of the ply was hinged to allow for inspection of the inner roof. In a corner where the breeze-block wall met the actual wall of the house, he wedged himself firmly in position and put both hands to work in the darkness searching for the flap. He found it, lifted the vertical trapdoor on hinges which nerve-gratingly squealed a little, for they hadn’t been oiled in years, and squeezed himself in through the gap. Lowering the trapdoor behind him, he found himself at once plunged in utter darkness.

  The gap between the roofs was such that Kastrouni could barely crawl, and even then his shirt dragged on the rough concrete above. Cobwebs were thick and the dust his movements stirred up choking; also, the gravel finish over the bitumen was sharp on his hands and knees and in places loose, so that he must be careful not to disturb it for fear of the harsh, sandpapering sound it would make. For the moment, however, he’d stay perfectly still and make sure that the squealing of the trapdoor had not attracted anyone’s attention, and while he waited give some thought to his next move.

  The darkness was not total after all. Some little starlight filtered in through ill-fitting joints in the ply panels, and ahead of Kastrouni at the front of the house, lamplight came up in dusty beams through several small knotholes in the pine boards. He knew those knotholes well enough: he was the one who had poked his fingers through them, knocking out the hard cores, when this pine ceiling had been brand new! Yes, and he’d counted on it that they’d never been stopped up. For now they were to be his peepholes on this Khumeni.

  Now from below, also from the front of the house, came the low murmuring of voices. Kastrouni could make nothing of what was said. On elbows and knees he began to make his way toward the dust-filtered beams of light – and at once collided with something in the gloom, his right elbow sending it sliding and clattering on the gravel. He stopped moving, stopped breathing, even tried to stop the sudden wild hammering of his heart. And he listened …

  The low murmurings had ceased. He could detect nothing, and yet it was as if a large dog had suddenly, silently pricked up its ears. And in the next moment: ‘Was that outside? The back of the house? Take a look. I want no snoopers!’

  That voice: was there something in it that Kastrouni recognized? It was mud and oil, that voice, thick and glutinous, but yet viscously fluid as treacle. It had not spoken Greek or Armenian but more nearly Iraqi. Kastrouni’s nostrils flared and his flesh grew cold. He felt he knew the owner of that voice.

  He lay perfectly still, listened to soft but hurrying footsteps below and the clicking of switches as lights were put on almost directly beneath him. Thin light at once filtered up through poor joints in the pine boards, and thinner beams through nail holes and other tiny apertures. Then the sound of a door thrown open, and a moment later muted voices from the garden where minutes earlier Kastrouni had crouched.

  He listened attentively:

  ‘Should we go onto the beach?’ (American, that voice.)

  ‘Hell, no! It’s almost clear as day under these stars. If there was a kitten on that beach you could see it from right here. And if there was someone here he’s long gone. No good to look for footprints: it’s all pebbles.’ (This one, too, American; but where the first had been cautious, this second voice contained something of a sneer. The voice of a man too sure of himself.)

  ‘What about those trees along the beach, between the road and the sea?’ inquired the cautious voice. Kastrouni gritted his teeth: that was where he’d left his car.

  ‘You want to take a look, take a look,’ snorted the other, disgustedly. ‘I say you’re too jumpy. I say: you check around that way to the front of the house, and I go this way. We meet at the front. If there’s nothing in the garden, that’s it. Me, I’m not going anywhere. I want to know what our Georgie is up to with those women!’

  The first voice growled a warning: ‘Yeah? Well, OK – but watch your lip. He hears you taking the piss like that and he’ll have your balls!’

  ‘It’s been tried,’ the other grunted.

  ‘The guy you replaced used to say the same thing. We still don’t know what happened to him …’

  Footsteps were soft in the night, dividing, circling the house to the front. Kastrouni remained perfectly still, prayed that cramp wouldn’t set in, wondered what it was he’d bumped into in the darkness. As voices drifted up to him again – the oily voice with its Iraqi accent and one other, polished, English – he reached out his hand in search of whatever it was he’d sent skittering. And the moment his fingers made groping contact he knew. The plastic-coated steel body; the pistol-grip, safety-catch; the long, heavy projectile itself still seated in position atop the barrel: it was his speargun!

  He fingered the rubber hurlers and found them in tatters, rotted away. But beside the gun a hinged tin box, and Kastrouni’s memory flooding now with pictures twenty years forgotten. He’d used to keep spares in this box and maintenance gear: spare rubbers, trident heads for the spear, some talc and a small bottle of oil.

  Spare hurlers … Kastrouni wondered if they’d kept. He waited until he heard the two at the front of the house, heard them enter and their voices join others in a low conversation, then opened the box and took out the spare rubbers. They were still good! Trying to catch all of the conversation – or if not its substance, at least its mood – he removed the old rubbers from the speargun, replaced them, began to lightly oil the mechanism. The spear itself felt rusty – its trident welded to the shaft – but the gun still seemed in working order. Praying the rubbers wouldn’t snap, he slowly stretched them and loaded the weapon, then carefully placed it to one side. Just knowing it was there made him feel a lot easier in his mind.

  The voices were louder now, and it seemed to Kastrouni that two of them were a little heated. He crawled soundlessly, laboriously forward until he found a knothole over the main entrance hall. Putting his eye to the hole he saw that four men stood below him in the porch. He looked down almost directly on top of their heads. On a wooden bench against one wall there half-reclined a woman whose features and clothing defined her as one of the island’s upper class Turkish-Cypriots. Her head lo
lled back a little and Kastrouni could see that she was quite young and very beautiful – and either very drunk or drugged almost unconscious! To the right of the group an open door led to a corridor with two bedrooms leading off.

  Now one of the four men – a figure with a lop-sided, peculiar half-crouch, who had his back to Kastrouni – spoke up in that volcanic mud voice of his: ‘In there, I said – put her in the second room, on the bed beside the English girl.’ His voice contained a note of authority – and a barely veiled threat. This could only be Khumeni.

  One of the Americans, a tall, thin man with slicked-back blond hair, stepped closer to the one who commanded. ‘And I asked why! Look, Georgie, I don’t mind the work and the money’s good. Also, I get to travel. But see, I like to know what I’m doing. I hate working in the dark, you know?’

  ‘Oh?’ said Khumeni. ‘And did your last boss spare you so much time? Did the Mafia treat you that well? Did they tell you all the whys and wherefores? Listen, Garcia, the only reason you’re alive now is because I needed a man with your talents as they were described to me. A talent for kidnapping, and possibly a talent for killing. How long have you been with me now? Three weeks, a month? The only talent you’ve shown until tonight is an unhealthy curiosity! Be careful – I might yet send you back to the tender mercies of Mike Spinneti.’

  The man Garcia was suitably cowed. He backed off, looked down at the floor, said: ‘I only thought to – ’