by Brian Lumley
Finally he reached the top, took in the scene at a glance:
The roof of the double-decked cliff was fairly flat. Seaward, one hundred and fifty yards away, a final tower of rock jutted up at the very rim, carved by time and the elements. And beyond that lone sentinal … Trace could just make out the edge of a now skeletal structure of what was, or had once been, a large man-made building of huge square blocks of stone. At the base of the natural spire of rock, out of sight of the ruins, there sat Mr Lorre on a flat boulder, frantically engaged in something or other.
Trace whipped up his binoculars, looked. The long black bag lay empty to one side; its previous contents were being assembled by Mr Lorre. Trace recognized the weapon at once: the rifle-like stock, slender, dull metal cross-piece and flighted bolt. He gasped and let the glasses fall. A crossbow!
Trace was winded, but still he forced himself to run, sucking at the air as he commenced lumbering forward. If he had had the wind he might have yelled, but he was sure anyway that the American would pay him no heed. He might be wrong: it could be, of course, that the crossbow was for him, but he doubted it. And in fact the thin man was now on the move again, ignoring Trace, hurrying round the base of the rocky tower and once more disappearing from view as he closed on the ancient monastery.
On flat, springy turf, Trace might have covered the distance between in something less than twenty seconds – that is if he were fresh and his legs weren’t wobbly as columns of jelly – but here the way was strewn with rocks and boulders, and Trace, by his own terms, was very nearly knackered. Still it wasn’t much more than half a minute before he, too, was cutting round the base of the tower. And it was then, as the ruins came into full view, that his headlong speed very nearly did for him. For between the massive rock pinnacle and the ruins proper –
– A chasm that went sheer down to the sea!
Trace reeled back from the rim, his back slamming against the worn-smooth rock, and stared wide-eyed around the tower’s curve. Fifty feet away, a stout wooden bridge with a handrail crossed the gap; and between Trace and the bridge … there kneeled Mr Lorre, right at the rim, even now bringing up his crossbow to sight it on the ruins. Trace looked across the gap, saw an opening or window in the lower wall, and a man where he sat working at a table, facing away from Trace and the man with the crossbow. And it was this unsuspecting man’s back, clad in a shirt of faded yellow towelling, which was the American’s target!
‘No!’ Trace howled at the top of his voice. ‘No!’
He hurled himself along the ledge between the tower of rock and the chasm, threw himself at the marksman where he kneeled. Mr Lorre glanced in Trace’s direction, his thin face white with tension and murderous intent – and then Trace was on him. The crossbow went off even as Trace sent it flying from the other’s hands. Its bolt sped across the chasm, clanged harmlessly against the ruin’s wall. The two men clawed at each other for a moment, but the American was off balance. He drew back a fist to throw at Trace – and his eyes went wide, wide bulged as he tilted over backwards.
Trace reached for him – too late. He caught a sleeve of the man’s bright shirt – was left with it torn and dangling from his clenched, trembling fist. Trace looked over the rim. Mr Lorre was spinning like an autumn leaf. He made no protest, uttered no sound, simply flew, out of control, to where he struck a projecting rock before plunging out of sight two hundred or more feet below. And at last there came a splash, at once swallowed up in the lapping, grunting sounds of the ocean from some deep, unseen grotto.
And: ‘God – oh, Jesus Christ!’ gasped Trace out loud, horrified. ‘I didn’t mean to – I didn’t mean to!’ And in the back of his mind a small sarcastic voice cried: and that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into!
‘Ho!’ came a voice from behind. Trace turned on all fours. It was the Greek youth, built like a bull, his fist a great threatening knot.
‘I didn’t mean that to happen!’ Trace cried, his mouth agape and twisted. The Greek struck him once, right between the eyes, and Trace went out like …
Chapter Four
… A light!
But brighter than any light had any right to be.
Trace shuttered his eyes, turned them away from it, tried to sit up. He felt nauseous. Where the hell … ? What the hell … ? And then he remembered.
‘Christ!’ he struggled against a weight on his chest, realized he was stretched flat on his back, turned his face away from what could only be the sun. And now he could open his eyes.
The weight on his chest was the great paw of the Greek who’d hit him, who now sat staring at him with huge, soft brown eyes. Trace was lying on a stone table and the sun streamed in on to him from a large aperture he now recognized: the window in the ruin, into which the American had aimed his crossbow.
‘Shit! I killed him!’ Trace mumbled, his tongue thick and dry as an eraser. Again he tried to rise and this time the Greek let him sit up. Warm in the sunlight but not yet hot, Trace guessed he’d been out no more than a minute or two. His head ached abominably and the flesh of his forehead felt corrugated above his eyes, impressed with a crest of knuckles. He glared at the Greek, who in turn grinned back, then looked about the room.
A second young Greek, who could be the twin brother of the first, stood guarding a door of rough planking, his arms folded across his massive chest. He, too, was grinning. Trace looked at both of them again, carefully climbed down off the table using a stone bench as a step. The youth who was seated there steadied him until he was standing on the solid stone floor. Again Trace blinked, tried to get his eyes in tune with the cool gloom of the room now that he was out of the direct sunlight. And finally he saw the third occupant of this pile. The most important one.
It was the man in faded yellow towelling, which now Trace saw to be a knee-length robe, standing with his back to the room, his hands pensively behind him, staring out of a second window’s deep embrasure across the Aegean’s serene blue horizon. The man who had been Mr Lorre’s target.
Mr Lorre, poor bastard …
‘I … I killed him,’ Trace mumbled again, uselessly. ‘But I swear I didn’t mean to.’
‘Of course you didn’t,’ said the man at the window, turning to stare at him. ‘I saw it all. You cried out to warn me, went to deflect his aim. He tried to strike you, overbalanced … if he were still alive, then in all likelihood I should now be dead.’
Trace looked across the room at him through the shaft of sunlight, through swirling dust-motes turned to gold in that magic beam of Mediterranean sun. His head was haloed in a softer light from the window. He looked like a saint standing there. So this was the one: the young/old man who lived in the monastery – him and the thing he watches over …
Trace moved round the table, approached him, closed with him more rapidly and grasped the front of his robe in both hands. The Greek youths were beside him in a moment, effortlessly unclenching his fingers from the robe, pinning his arms to his sides. They looked like, were strong as, idiots. Trace glanced from one to the other and back again. Their eyes were soft and their grins vacuous.
‘They are idiots,’ said the man in faded yellow, as if reading Trace’s mind. ‘But idiots who love me. Idiots who obey my slightest whim, whose lives are mine, who would kill for me and never count the cost. If I wished it they would cheerfully toss you from this window. Right now – if I wished it.’
‘Who are you?’ Trace asked.
‘More to the point,’ said the other, ‘Who are you?’
There was only one way Trace would ever get to the bottom of this. ‘My name is Charles Trace,’ he said. ‘Dimitrios Kastrouni sent me.’
‘Dimitrios!’ The other’s mouth gaped. He signalled to his men who immediately released Trace and stepped back. ‘Dimitrios Kastrouni,’ the man in faded yellow said again, nodding. He took hold of Trace’s arm and drew him away from the window. And now for the first time Trace could look at him and see him clearly without straining his eyes.
&nbs
p; He wasn’t old, this man, despite his locks of flowing hair which almost exactly matched his robe, the wrinkles like gouges in his brown, leathery skin. No, for his eyes were young. They were grey-green and young and strange, and paradoxically there was that in them which was ancient. Like a saint, Trace thought again. They might have looked into heaven, those eyes, or into hell. And:
‘Dimitrios Kastrouni,’ he said again, a faint smile tugging the corners of his mouth. ‘Oh, yes, he’s a hard nut, that one. Too hard for Khumeni’s rotten teeth, I think. How is he, Kastrouni?’
Trace looked away, gingerly fingered his forehead. ‘You mean, how was he,’ he said. And: ‘I don’t know about Khumeni’s teeth, I only saw his hammer!’
Seemingly gnarled fingers gripped Trace’s arm tighter, almost in a spasm, actually bruised him. ‘Kastrouni?’ Trace’s host said in a disbelieving whisper. ‘Dead?’ Abruptly he released Trace, swayed, staggered to the table and collapsed onto the stone bench. ‘Not Dimitrios,’ he moaned, shaking his head. ‘Lord, let it be a lie!’
‘I’m not lying,’ Trace followed him. ‘I saw it.’
The man in faded yellow looked up at him. ‘How … ? I mean, what … ?’
‘Lightning,’ said Trace, watching the other’s eyes. They flinched; the man’s strong yellow teeth showed in a clenched double line as his lips drew back in a snarl of pain, horror; and he squeezed his eyes tightly shut.
‘Lightning!’ he repeated Trace, coughing the word out like bile. ‘Hell-bolt! Demogorgon!’
‘That’s why I’m here,’ Trace sat down beside him. ‘Kastrouni told me a story. I didn’t believe him. But some of the things he told me, however crazy, rang true. Then things started to happen. I saw Kastrouni killed. And I know now that it wasn’t an accident. Lightning killed him, yes, but deliberately! How can that be? I have to know. But before that … I didn’t give him a chance to tell me all he might have told me. Now I want to know - have to know. He mentioned you and this place, also a wine store in Pighadia. I came to Karpathos and spoke with a man in the town: a fat, jolly man who sold wine. Now he’s dead, too. They slit his throat. The police have the wrong man for it. I know who did it: either the thin man who went over the cliff, or another still in Pighadia.’ He paused for breath, finally continued:
‘That’s it, roughly. If you want further proof of what I’ve said just ask me details and I’ll tell you all I know. And then you have to tell me things.’
The man in yellow unscrewed his eyes, looked up through a thin film of tears, seemed to see Trace for the first time. Then … it was as if he looked directly into Trace’s soul, the way those eyes probed his. And Trace couldn’t be at all sure that he approved of what he saw. But:
‘Tell me everything,’ the man commanded. ‘Leave nothing out.’ He turned to one of his men, said something in Greek. The youth nodded, went out of the room.
‘Before I start,’ said Trace, ‘I asked you who you were …’
‘My name is Saul Gokowski,’ said the other. ‘I don’t suppose it will mean much to you. Nor should it. Now, if you don’t mind … ?’
As Trace organized his thoughts the Greek returned with a huge plate of salad, a loaf of bread and a pitcher of thin wine. ‘We can eat as we talk,’ said Gokowski, breaking off some bread for himself.
Trace was grateful, the chase had taken a lot out of him. He washed dust from his throat, dipped a chunk of bread in the juices of tomatoes and cucumbers. And then he told Gokowski everything. He told it quickly, breathlessly, tried to omit nothing. He even told him that he, Trace, was a thief; told him about his mother and where she was now; told him about his twin, a freakish thing who was born dead. The one thing he failed to mention was his affaire with Amira Halbstein, for of course she wasn’t part of the story.
It took maybe three-quarters of an hour, and then he was finished.
‘This twin of yours,’ said Gokowski after a moment’s thought. ‘What was he like?’
‘My mother only saw him once, I think, before they took his body away. She said he looked awful. If she said anything else about him, then I’ve forgotten. Anyway, he was dead …’
‘Who else knew about him?’
‘The doctor who delivered us,’ Trace shrugged. ‘A nurse or two – how do I know? My mother went into confinement to have a child; when she left the hospital she had me. Why should anyone want to know more than that?’
‘Did Kastrouni know?’ the other pressed.
‘No, he only wanted to know about – ’ and Trace realized that he’d left something out of his story after all.
‘About you?’ said Gokowski urgently. ‘Did he ask about marks, stigmata?’
Trace stared at the other, saw the way Gokowski was staring at him. ‘I am not the son of the antichrist,’ he blurted, shaking his head. ‘I’m not!’
‘But you do have a mark, right?’
Trace started to deny it, saw the other staring at him.
‘Right?’ said Gokowski again.
‘It depends what you call a mark,’ he said. And slowly, reluctantly he bared his left foot, showed it to the monastery’s master.
Gokowski looked, gazed intently, finally drew air in a great gulp. Trace guessed from his expression that the reality was not so bad as the expectation. He, too, took a deep breath, said:
‘Well?’
‘That is a club foot,’ said Gokowski. ‘Not the usual deformity, no, but it is hardly rare in any shape or form. And in this case not even a real deformity. It is not disgusting; at least, it does not seem to trouble you too much.’
‘No,’ Trace lied, ‘it doesn’t.’
‘Your mother was raped by a beast,’ said Gokowski. ‘By a monster, something that never should be but is! As God lives, so does the devil, and the hybrid horror which is his bastard on earth impregnated your mother. In this at least Kastrouni was correct. But he did not know about your twin, and for that matter we may assume that Khumeni is also ignorant of that fact. As for your foot: the pregnancy was abnormal, your mother carried a Thing in her womb as well as a child. You are probably lucky it is not worse.’
‘So what you’re saying is … you don’t think I’m Khumeni’s son?’ Trace saw that he was right; relief flooded over him, left him almost light-headed.
‘No,’ Gokowski shook his head. ‘I do not think you are. If you were your evil would show. You say you are a professional thief – but the world is full of thieves! You, Khumeni’s son? And would you seek me out and save my life if you were? Would you be interested in saving anyone’s life?’ Again he shook his head. ‘I doubt it.’ And at last he smiled. ‘No, you are not the son of the antichrist, Charles Trace.’
‘And yet my twin was? Is that possible?’
‘He was not your twin, not genetically. It’s not a frequent occurrence, but women have given simultaneous birth to disparate offspring, yes – and by “disparate” I mean the children of different fathers. You have said you always believed that your father was this Lt Solomon. And I think you are right.’
Trace sighed long and loud, leaned back where he sat and let his head loll backwards. Gazing up at the ancient, high-arching ceiling of stone, he said: ‘Well thank goodness for that. And for God’s sake, Saul, call me Charlie!’
Eventually Gokowski told his part of it. ‘As to what I am – you’ll know soon enough. But what I was: I was an archaeologist. So was my father before me. In the 30s we excavated at Berbati, Tell Agrab, Megiddo. I say “we”, but in fact I was just a boy then. No, not even a boy, a child. Before you ask it, Charlie, I’m fifty-three years old. I look seventy, I know, but that’s the way of it …
‘Anyway, that was my young life, digging in deserts. I developed a love of it. But as the years went by … we were Polish Jews and my father smelled a European war brewing. My mother had left us not long after I was born and so we had no commitments that way; Israel was a concept, lacking cohesion, even though the British had been bruiting the idea about ever since World War One; we somehow managed to s
ettle and stay in Palestine right through the war and all the other difficulties. Actually, it wasn’t all that hard: Jews had been flooding in for years. From Russia, and now from Uncle Adolf.
‘In ’52 my father died. I wasn’t yet twenty-two years old but I took over his work. He’d been doing a lot of research and translation work for several American institutions, for the French, even for the British Museum. He was an expert, you see? And where Middle-Eastern antiquities were concerned he was local. Ancient inscriptions, hieroglyphs, archaic Arabic, and anything Hebraic since time immemorial: Myself, I’d say he was a genius, who but for the problems of his time and his own personal aggressive attitude – he was both bull-necked and hardheaded – must certainly have gained recognition. Well, that wasn’t to be.
‘But the point I am making is this: he passed a lot of it on to me. Not only his love of ancient languages and civilizations but his understanding of them. He was a modern linguist, too, and I also got a smattering of that. I was raised a Jew, speaking the old language, but here I am speaking to you in English – do you see? And if you were a Pole or a Frenchman it would make little difference. This is not a matter of any great pride with me, it is merely a talent. However …
‘In the year before he died, my father, Joseph Gokowski, was visited at his home in Zippori, a town west of Galilee and close to Nazareth, by a white-haired man who gave his name as Jonathan Ben Meiris, a Jew living somewhere in the Greek islands. Let me cut the story short: Meiris was in fact Dimitrios Kastrouni. He brought to my father certain of the contents of Khumeni’s saddlebags, from his donkey, which animal Kastrouni had taken in error in Chorazin some thirteen years earlier.’
‘You mean Guigos,’ said Trace.
Gokowski smiled grimly at him across the table. ‘So,’ he said. ‘While there are some things you are willing to believe, others defy your acceptance. That is perhaps understandable. Except you must remember, we are dealing with the darkest powers of evil here, with the supernatural, with the antichrist himself. As you point out, I do mean Guigos, yes. Also Khumeni, Ab, Goor the Hun, Tirox of Haleb, which is now Aleppi in Syria – and others. As for those “others”, we can make educated guesses; those I have named are definite.’
