by Brian Lumley
And as Trace had left the monastery and crossed the bridge with Gokowski’s men behind him, so the master of that crumbling pile had commenced to quote a passage he knew intimately – a passage from the Holy Bible. Even skirting the massive rock pinnacle, where soon the monastery itself was lost from view, still Trace had been able to hear Gokowski’s voice rising on the still air:
‘The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up!’
After which there had been only an echo, quickly dying …
‘Charlie!’
Amira’s husky-honeyed voice was full of concern, astonishment – outrage? It contained, at any rate, a bag of mixed emotions. She was dressed casually in a frilly green blouse which allowed her elastic breasts freedom and a natural buoyancy, and in bottle-green slacks which fitted snugly and emphasized the slenderness of her waist, the sleek lines of her behind. Her feet were bare, agitated on the black and white cobbles of the Villa Ulysses’s courtyard.
She stood at the door, having opened it a few inches in answer to his hammering, her almond eyes wide and unblinking.
‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’ Trace said, his own voice rough-edged. He gave the door a none too gentle shove and brushed past her, pausing just inside. The courtyard’s subdued lights were on; Trace found the switch and turned them up full; shadows drew back as he glanced all about the place before striding toward the open door to Amira’s rooms. She was after him in a flash, her feet pattering on the cobbles as she hurried to draw level. And now her voice really was outraged:
‘Charlie, what the hell do you mean by this? How dare you! You … you go off for a few hours in the morning to collect your things, come back at night after I’ve spent most of the day worrying about you, rush in without so much as a – ’
‘Worrying about me?’ Trace snarled over his shoulder. ‘Save all that shit for your next victim!’ He went inside, checked quickly through the rooms, started toward the wooden, open-plan stairs, and:
‘Charlie!’ this time she spoke in a furious hiss; she laid a hand taut as a claw on his arm where he stood with one foot on the bottom tread, his hand on the stair rail; he froze still as a statue, glared for a moment at her hand on his arm. Then he turned, his face a mask of fury, white with rage. He went to strike her, checked himself at the last moment, gave her a shove.
Her anger turning to shock, Amira reeled off-balance across the room, came up against the recessed platform with its piled cushions, fell backwards into them with Trace stalking after her. He stood over her where she sprawled, reached down, bunched up the front of her blouse in his fist and tore it free of her body. The blouse came away like, felt substantial as, so much tissue paper in his hand. He tossed it down, stared at her, deliberately studied her breasts where her vulnerability exposed them to their best.
Then he stepped back a pace and quickly stripped.
She saw what he intended and the shock already written on her face turned to incredulity. She started to sit up but he pinned her head against a cushion, his hand rough on her throat. Then he tugged at her green slacks. ‘Get them off,’ he grunted, and for all his anger, still his voice had thickened with lust. ‘Now – or they go the same way as the blouse.’
Struggling to obey him, lifting her buttocks to work the material of her slacks down her thighs, she tried to laugh and almost made it. ‘Is this a game?’ she panted directly into his face. ‘Is this the way you really like to do it, Charlie? You get your jollies pretending you’re right? And by dreaming up crazy fantasies about blood and murder and satanists? Is that it? You like to think you have the devil in you? It makes you feel big and brutally strong, and – ’
‘Your skinny American chum is dead!’ Trace cut her off, yanked her slacks the last six inches and off her feet. Her hands were free but she made no attempt to cover herself. Instead a hand flew to her mouth, but she stopped the movement before its conclusion. She wasn’t as quick with her expression, though. Her half-sneer disappeared into the great O of her gasp. And still Trace stared at her, at all of her now.
In the soft light of the room and the blue light of stars falling through a high window, her skin gave the illusion of being silvery pale; and now her face grew paler still, grew into a white mask. ‘What did you say?’ she whispered.
Trace tried to analyze her expression and failed. Surprise? Relief? Gladness? All of these things one on top of the other? It didn’t make sense, wasn’t what he’d expected. But what had he expected? Maybe the message hadn’t sunk in yet.
‘He’s dead,’ he repeated. ‘Right off a cliff at the monastery – splash, squish! I pushed him.’
She licked her lips and her eyes were wild now, darting all about the room. ‘My American chum? I don’t know any Americans, Charlie. I – ’
‘Liar!’ he growled. He climbed up on to the pillows between her legs, made as if to enter her. ‘You and Laurel and Hardy, you all came out here together. And you were the sweet bait for the big fish – me!’
Her face was all terror now; terror stared out of her eyes at him. Trace had to admire her acting. ‘You … you really are crazy, aren’t you?’ she whispered. ‘Last night you made love to me, and now you want to rape me!’
‘Rape? Well, why not? He raped my mother, didn’t he? Your boss? Khumeni? That’s why he thinks I’m his son, right? Because he didn’t know about my beast brother, who was his son! Rape? You object to that? Or maybe it’s just that you’d like it better his way? The way of the beast? Is that how he gives it to you? OK, so let’s try it – and afterwards you can tell me which of us you prefer, me or the fucking donkey you work for!’
He grabbed her hair, tried to turn her face down. But suddenly she came back to life. The back of her slim hand was hard as a whip as it cut across his face and knocked him flying. It wasn’t the weight of the blow, rather its bite, its sheer unexpectedness; and also the fact that Trace was badly positioned, kneeling on the edge of the platform. In any case he flew backwards, arms flailing, went sprawling on his back on the floor.
For a second he lay there, fingering his face, his muscles and nerves jumping. Then he sucked at the air, sighed, lay his head back on the boards of the floor. He rolled his eyes down until they stared at her, and:
‘You,’ he said, his voice dripping poison. ‘You and your father: traitors, both of you. And him out there right now, in Israel, digging for Khumeni, looking for the second tablet while you … while you use your beautiful whore’s body to trap me. And then there’s that poor bastard Saul Gokowski, who thinks your father is his “friend”!’
Amira sat up, reached out her arms toward him. And again he couldn’t understand the look on her face. ‘Oh, Charlie – Charlie, you’re so – ’ Her eyes widened, lifted from him, looked beyond him. The wooden stairs creaked. ‘You’re so – right!’ she finished it.
A tiny foot came down on Trace’s lank hair, pinning his head to the floor. Small, that foot, yes – but it weighed a ton. Trace grabbed the ankle, started to swing his legs up and over to kick at the … but brought them to a halt in mid-air and let them fall back, unresisting. Mr Hardy was more agile than he looked. He had kneeled, grasped Trace’s left ear in pudgy fingers, now held something shiny and cold to his taut throat.
‘Bastard!’ Trace whispered.
‘Oh, yes, I really am,’ the fat man wheezed. ‘But you’ve seen what I can do, so please. don’t force me to demonstrate.’
Trace might have shook his head but didn’t dare. ‘Your freaky boss wouldn’t like it if I got hurt,’ he said, merely breathing the words, exhaling them.
‘Only if it wasn’t necessary,’ said the fat man, his upside-down face smiling. ‘Amira?’
She came off the platform and struggled into her clothes, then stepped out of view. A moment later she was back – with a hypodermic syringe! She tested it and a spray of pearly droplets few from its needle. Then she kneeled beside him
and said: ‘Hold very, very still, Charlie.’
He didn’t have much choice, hardly dared grunt as the needle slid into his arm. He felt it, though – felt its sting, and the cold, cold waves of numbness spreading outward from its point of entry. But after that – after that he didn’t feel anything at all …
… Trace was sitting up.
He sat upright in a high-backed chair staring out of a small window into the Villa Ulysses’s courtyard. It was a cane chair and he could feel the lattice of its woven seat against his backside, the ribs of its uprights against his back. He leaned fractionally backward, or was propped in that position, with his head tilted slightly forward and his arms hanging loosely down outside the chair’s arms. He wore a dressing-gown that smelled of stale urine.
Trace’s eyes were open but he couldn’t remember when he’d opened them. Apart from the needle – the hypodermic needle in Amira’s treacherous hands, which had put him to sleep – he remembered very little. His ‘sleep’ or period of unconsciousness had been deep and dreamless, and probably of some duration: his face felt itchy, an old symptom of two or more days’ growth of stubble. He could feel, hear, smell and probably taste. As for touch: hardly that, for he couldn’t move, but he could feel things touching him.
Oh, his perceptions were there, all right, but they certainly weren’t working overtime; in fact they felt mysteriously slowed down, dulled, weird and wasted. Only his sight seemed to be anything like normal. He wondered if that were possible: four of his five senses, atrophied. No, of course not, it was only the effect of the drug. But even his thoughts seemed to come slowly.
A fly, landing on his nose, caused him to blink. But the fly’s touchdown came moments before Trace felt it, and the blink – a very slow thing – came long moments after. In any case, the blink sufficed to scare the fly off: obviously Greek flies didn’t have the tenacity of their British cousins …
Since Trace wasn’t sure what day it was, he gave his attention to the time of day. That wasn’t hard: the shadows fell almost vertically out in the courtyard, which meant it must be just about midday. If his captors had put him out there in the sun, under those almost tangibly ‘heavy’ rays, they would have burned right through to his brain by now. ‘Fell asleep in the sun and died.’ Easy.
Except they didn’t want him dead. Khumeni didn’t want him dead. He wanted him … absorbed?
Trace’s every instinct yelled, ‘Get up, run, fly – fight, you idle bastard!’ But his flesh gave only a slow twitch; several nerves jerked sluggishly in his legs, his arms; and the lattice of the chair’s weave continued to impress his backside as before. So: ‘Forget it,’ he told himself. ‘You’re not going anywhere, Charlie.’
The courtyard door opened and Amira came through it. ‘Bitch!’ thought Trace. ‘Lorelei … lamia … Mata Hari … Circe … no, Gorgon! Gorgon, yes – you’ve turned me to stone!’
She was alone, came hurrying across the courtyard under the vines, looked nervous, frustrated, shiny with sweat. She was a woman in a hurry, with no time to spare. And half-way across the courtyard her eyes focused upon his own, saw that they were open, awake. At that she broke into a run, literally flew the rest of the way to the door to her apartment. Then she was beside him, kneeling in front of him, her almond eyes wide where they gazed into his.
Her concern was ‘obvious’, ‘real’, – as real as the concern she’d shown when she stuck the needle in him and did this to him. But wasn’t this carrying her acting a bit far?
Bitch! Trace said with his eyes. He tried to say it with his tongue, too, but what little movement he achieved only served to release into his mouth a previously trapped pocket of some vile goo that tasted like bile. She read his mind anyway, whispered:
‘Charlie, you’re so wrong! Oh, I’m supposed to work for Khumeni, yes, but in fact I’m working against him. My father, too. We know what he is, Charlie, so how could we work for him? If you don’t believe me – well, that’s your business. At this stage of the game it doesn’t really matter what you believe. Except to me. But at least you’ll hear me out …’ She paused and bit her lip.
‘Except … I’m not sure how much of this is getting through to you? And I don’t know how much time we have.’ She turned her head, cast anxious eyes across the distance to the door at the bottom of the courtyard. ‘Decker will be back soon. He’s the fat one. He’s arranging the details of our flight out of here.’ That’ll be a neat trick, Trace thought. And how do I go? In a trunk in the cargo hold?
As if reading his mind a second time, she said: ‘You’re going as Klein, the man who died at the monastery. Actually, you’re not all that dissimilar. His clothes should just about fit you, and we have his passport. And of course, Decker and Klein already had their visas for Israel. For me it’s no problem – naturally I’ve retained my nationality. As for your condition, the story will be this:
‘You take these fits, go into a sort of semi-catatonic state. There’s a clinic which treats just such ailments in Galilee, and you’re already booked in there. But this current attack is six months premature and caught you out on holiday. Anyway, it’s made you a wheelchair case. That’s no problem: Decker has a very capable, calculating mind. He had a chair flown out from Rhodes yesterday.’
Trace managed a slow blink – but deliberately slow. He kept his left eye closed for long moments before slowly opening it. It conveyed nothing except that maybe he had something to convey. Amira caught on fast. She took his hand, said:
‘Can you squeeze?’
Trace slowly, with great effort, squeezed. ‘I felt that!’ Amira was excited. ‘That’s good. One squeeze for yes, two for no, OK?’
Trace squeezed.
‘Do you believe I’m innocent?’
He squeezed once – then twice more. ‘Yes’ – and ‘no.’ He was still uncertain.
‘Well, it can’t be helped. But surely you must have seen how I was on the point of telling you all of this when Decker came on the scene? If he’d left his entry a second longer he’d have heard everything – and then I would have had to try to kill him! Anyway, you’ll believe me soon enough. But before anything else happens – before you make a mistake – there are things you have to know. And they’re important, Charlie, because as this thing proceeds they could well make the difference between life and death for you! And where your life is concerned … suddenly I care a great deal. I didn’t much care before I met you, and I only cared a little having met you, but since then …’
Trace squeezed. ‘Yes,’ he knew what she meant.
She leaned forward, gave him a kiss he could just feel but couldn’t respond to in the least, sat back again. ‘And you know,’ she continued, ‘right from the start I couldn’t believe you were what you were supposed to be. You were just too naïve – to be the son of that thing, I mean! But anyway, now you have to listen, Charlie, and try to understand. You really are going to have to play this thing dumb. No, dumber than that, stupid! I’ll explain:
‘You have to pretend Kastrouni told you nothing, gave you nothing. Or maybe he mentioned a friend of his who had a wine-shop in Pighadia – just a mention – and when you came here on holiday, naturally you looked him up. As for your trip to the monastery: you were sightseeing, that’s all. Maybe Klein picked a fight with you or something, you don’t know why, and in the scuffle he fell. Am I getting through to you? Do you understand that these are the things you must say if anyone asks you these questions?’
Trace squeezed. ‘Yes,’ he understood perfectly. They knew he wouldn’t go as a lamb to the slaughter anyway. But if he also knew who was in charge of the slaughterhouse - and what kind of ‘humane killer’ was waiting for him there … No, he could clearly see how it would be far too dangerous to know too much.
‘Good! – that’s important. If they think you’re mostly ignorant of this thing, then they might not watch you too closely. And that way maybe we’ll get the chance to work something out. But if they should ever suspect just how much you really know
– which I have a feeling is a deal more than you’ve said …’
Curtains! thought Trace. Definitely … And perhaps something of the helplessness he felt got through to her.
On her knees, she put her arms round him, hugged him for a moment before drawing back. Again she stared at him, her gaze intense. ‘Charlie, you accused me of some things. I want you to know that I’ve never known Khumeni … that way. When you see him you’ll know I couldn’t. I would die first, I swear it! Anyway, he doesn’t care for women. Decker says he … says he takes animals. What he did that time in Cyprus was out of necessity, to get himself some offspring. Oh, yes, I know about that; Kastrouni has been a friend for some years; we’ve pooled our information, our resources.’
Then her eyes widened more yet. ‘But what you said two nights ago, about not being his son – about having a beast-brother who was his son – was that true?’
Trace squeezed.
‘And did Saul Gokowski know that?’
He squeezed twice: ‘No,’ and once more: ‘Yes, now he knows.’
She thought about it, licked her lips, muttered to herself: ‘Kastrouni didn’t know, and so – neither does Khumeni!’ And to Trace: ‘Where is this brother?’
He could only give two squeezes.
‘He’s dead?’
Another squeeze.
‘At birth!’
Telepathy, Trace thought – and again he had doubts about her. But no doubt about the fact that she was one switched-on woman. ‘Yes,’ he squeezed.
‘Thank God!’ she let out a great sigh. ‘It was my part to seduce you, but when I found myself enjoying it – before I knew this – I was beginning to think I really was perverse!’
As her strained face gave way to a faint smile, so quiet footsteps sounded on the concrete path beyond the courtyard’s wall. She quickly stood up, put a finger up to her lips (a gesture which, if the situation wasn’t so desperate, Trace might have found comical, but which he nevertheless understood perfectly) and turned away from him. And moments later Decker came through the door, wheezed his way across the courtyard and into the apartment.
