The room now appeared smaller still.
Chiun pressed his hand to his forehead. Beads of perspiration had formed there. They mingled with the drying blood and rolled onto his palm. He closed his hand delicately around them.
Something was wrong. A Master of Sinanju does not perspire without cause.
The walls continued to close in.
It could not be mechanical, this closing inward. The Master of Sinanju felt no vibration of gears grinding. He did not discern the walls moving toward him. Yet they were close enough that he could have reached out and touched them with his bloodstained fingers.
If this was some diabolic trap, whoever had engineered it had forgotten one thing.
He had forgotten to close the only door.
The Master of Sinanju padded out into the hallway. He was free.
When he looked back into the room, the walls had returned to the positions they had occupied when he first opened his eyes.
Chiun nodded to himself. There was no doubt now. The Leader's poison. It was the only explanation. His mind was playing tricks on him. It would cleanse itself soon enough.
The hallway was cast in a deep gloom. There were no lights on, and beyond the windows it was dark. Chiun did not know where such sparse light as there was originated.
He sharpened his senses. There was no one else nearby. He expanded his awareness. The entire building was empty.
At the end of the hall was a long wooden staircase. Padding to the top step, he descended this to the ground floor.
The stairs creaked beneath his feet.
That should not be. He was a Master of Sinanju.
Taking a sip of reviving air, Chiun took a cautious step. Still, the stair creaked in complaint. And it seemed as if there were more of them now. They stretched limitlessly into some infinite abyss below.
Something was desperately wrong. He continued, humiliation burning with every betraying creak.
Chiun touched his neck once more. The wound was as fresh as the moment it had been opened. It felt larger now. Even his neck felt larger. As if it too were growing to accommodate the expanding injury.
Suddenly, the stairs ended and Chiun found himself standing at the sterile entrance to Folcroft Sanitarium. The door was open, and the chill air of night blew in around Chiun's ankles.
He looked back. It was no longer the staircase behind him, but the door to Folcroft. Somehow he had ended up outside, beyond the door, and the door was closed.
He was being taunted. Tested.
But he did not fear. Fear he had banished long ago.
The Master of Sinanju tucked his hands into the sleeves of his kimono and disappeared into the gathering dark, where owls stared and called their eternal question.
"His neural activity just went off the charts!" Dr. Lance Drew studied the brain-wave monitor screen next to The Master of Sinanju's bed. On the screen a series of gently flowing waves had become a collection of sharp, almost vertical lines. They shot up, dropped down, and shot up again. Several disappeared off the top of the monitor, as if to escape their own frenetic energy.
A second doctor and three nurses had joined Dr. Drew at Chiun's bedside. Frantically, they pored over printouts and EKGs.
"What is it?" Remo asked anxiously. Smith lay docile where Remo had laid him, on the room's spare bed. Chiun's condition had gone critical just as Remo entered the room.
"I don't know," Dr. Drew said. "He was stable until just this minute. Now . . ." He shook his head. "I don't know what it is." He noticed Smith's prone form for the first time.
"What's the matter with Dr. Smith?" he asked.
"Same thing that's wrong with him," Remo said, nodding to Chiun.
One of the attending physicians went to Smith, checked his vital signs, and said, "He'll keep."
"Then give me a hand here," the doctor said, shaking his head. "We're in for a rough night."
A crisp professional voice interjected itself. "Doctor . . ."
It was one of the nurses. Chiun's face had twitched slightly, then returned to its parchment calmness. It resembled a death mask.
The doctor examined the monitor. The lines continued to spike dangerously. "If this keeps up, we're going to lose him," the doctor warned, glancing up at his colleagues. "He could burn out his entire nervous system."
Remo stood helplessly at Chiun's bedside. One of the nurses attempted to shepherd him to one side, but it was like pushing smoke. Each time he somehow shifted away without, apparently, moving his feet. She spoke gently of the need to give the physicians room to work. Two thick-wristed hands grasped hers and clapped them together. Not hard. But she couldn't separate her palms afterward.
She hurried off to her jeweler. Surely he would know how to un-weld her wedding ring from the one on her right ring finger.
"His heart rate's increased," the other doctor was saying.
"Respiration, too."
Remo hovered over Chiun's bedside, a spectator to a battle he could barely understand. The Master of Sinanju's life hung in the balance. Now Smith's as well. He'd probably be next.
"If only we knew what kind of infection we're dealing with," the doctor lamented at one point, "we'd have something to go on."
"It's Chinese," Remo said.
"Can you do better than that?" Dr. Drew demanded, not looking up.
"No," Remo admitted. What could he tell them that would help? They wouldn't believe the truth. And if they did, so what? Vampirism had no cure. Its victims were neither dead nor alive.
Remo's anxious eyes went to his mentor's face.
The Master of Sinanju was peaceful in repose. It was as if the medical team had forgotten there was a patient in the room, so busy were they monitoring their equipment. Languishing amid this nest of high-tech machinery, surrounded by white-clad Folcroft doctors and nurses, Chiun looked old and frail.
His face twitched spasmodically once again, then settled back into its normal pattern.
"If this is good-bye, Little Father," Remo said softly, "I swear no gyonshi will celebrate this day."
"What's that?" Dr. Drew asked distractedly. No answer. He looked up to see the door swinging shut behind Remo's resolute back.
After Remo had gone, Harold W. Smith sat up stiffly in bed. The pain in his stomach and throat were gone, although there was a slight tightening in his chest.
"Dr. Smith!" Dr. Drew exclaimed. "Please do not exert yourself! We will get to you in a moment!"
"Nonsense," Smith croaked, tightening the knot of his Dartmouth tie. "I feel fine."
"But the young man who brought you in here . . ."
"Do not concern yourself," he insisted, waving his hand in dismissal. "He is too prone to worry. I feel fine. Now if you will excuse me, I have a telephone call to make." He slid from the bed and stepped briskly from the room.
One of the nurses cocked an eyebrow. "Did he sound strange to you?" she asked the others.
"He always sounds strange," said the other nurse.
"Actually, that was the first time he ever sounded normal to me," said Dr. Drew. "And I've been on staff ten years."
"Why do you suppose he kept rubbing his fingernail?" the first nurse whispered to the second, as they resumed ministering to the old Korean.
He did not know why he had come here. He only knew that he had felt compelled to do so.
The night air was heavy with moisture. The dampness clung to his kimono. The dew on the freshly mowed grass collected in dollops on the tops of his feet.
Long Island Sound stretched out into infinity behind the sanitarium. No boats bobbed on its surface. No lights were visible. No starlight reflected in the lapping waves. The Sound was totally black, like spilled crude.
Chiun, Master of Sinanju, peered into the distance. Not totally black after all, he saw now.
Wallowing somewhere on the far horizon, there was a grayness. It swirled there for a moment in eternity and then shot out to either side, spreading outward from that single finite point until it had becom
e great gray wings.
Wings which began to beat remorselessly toward shore, spreading and widening.
They became a tidal wave, covering the vast distance to the shore in mere seconds.
The gray wings of fog enveloped Chiun's legs, rolling in around him in thick currents, but not stirring the wispy hair clinging to his venerable chin and in puffs over his alert ears.
It moved across the shore, obscuring the huge building behind Chiun.
Soon there was nothing but fog all around. No sky, no ground, no sea. Just the fog.
And there was a blackness in it. Like an evil pit in a rotted peach. It was vague and indistinguishable one moment, solid the next. It leaped around Chiun in the protective haze of the swirling gray fog.
Chiun followed its movements impassively.
The black fog-within-the-fog split in two, then the two vaporous shapes became four, and the four, eight. They spun kaleidoscopic patterns around him, encroaching, then retreating, bold and timid by turns.
Chiun paid them no heed. He stared resolutely out to where the horizon had been.
"Sinanjuuuuu . . ." The word was a taunt.
Chiun ignored the voice.
There was no breeze, and there were no other sounds or smells. Chiun was not even certain if he stood on solid ground any longer. There was just the dampness of the fog against his face. And the circling black mist.
"Do you invite us in?" A chorus of voices this time.
Chiun remained fixated on a long-vanished point in space, refusing to answer.
"You are frightened," scoffed a single voice.
"He has much to fear," another agreed.
"Much indeed," a third chimed in. "For he remembers Shanghai."
Chiun spoke. "I fear not gyonshi vermin." He refused to focus on the mist.
"Then invite us in," the first voice dared.
"Invite us in now, Sinanju Master."
"It is an invitation to death," Chiun said blankly.
The black mist circled closer. "Do you fear death, O great Master of Sinanju?" the voice whispered mockingly in his ear.
Chiun's eyes remained shards of flint. "I was not referring to my own death, gyonshi mist." Chiun delicately removed his hands from his kimono sleeves. He intertwined his fingers before him so that they formed a yellow basket of bones.
In his heart, he prepared himself.
"You are invited in," he said softly.
The tightness in his chest had worsened.
The man Smith had been would have been concerned, but not overly so. He would have assumed that it was simple esophageal reflux, or his ulcer acting up again. Were it to persist, he would have had it checked in a few days.
The thing that Harold W. Smith had become, however, did not care at all. Smith was a mere vessel now. The latest adherent of an ancient Creed. An expendable extension of the Leader.
But this thing that inhabited the body of Harold W. Smith was also in possession of Smith's knowledge.
Although Smith did not fully understand all that was happening to him, the thing did.
The Leader was of the Creed, he knew. The Leader had helped what had once been Harold W. Smith to be reborn in death. The Leader was all-knowing. The Leader could explain his new purpose to Smith the Undead.
But the Leader was in danger.
This "Remo" was a threat to the Leader, who Remo believed dwelled in the Three-G, Incorporated, health food company in Woodstock, New York. He was on his way now.
Smith's secretary was not at her desk when the Smith-vessel stumbled toward its office. For some reason, the body was not fully responding to the commands issued by its brain.
It wanted to stand erect, but the body was hunched. It clutched at its chest, trying to hold the pain in. In this doubled-over manner, the Smith-thing crossed the office and dropped into the cracked-leather chair behind the desk.
It was an effort to call up a phone directory for upstate New York over the computer terminal, and secure the number. But this was done.
When the phone was finally answered, the pains in the Smith-vessel's chest had grown sharper and more localized. It began to sweat. The sweat was cold, clammy.
The breath came with difficulty. His left arm grew numb.
"You . . . must . . . must . . . warn . . . Leader," the Smith-thing wheezed into the phone receiver. "Remo . . . Sinanju . . . coming . . . uuuhhhh . . ."
The receiver dropped to the floor as the Smith-thing slumped forward onto the sparse wooden desk, clutching his left breast as if a stake had been driven through his ribs and into his heart.
In her Woodstock office, Mary Melissa Mercy delicately returned the receiver to its cradle and hurried off to inform the Leader that the Shanghai Web had snared another foe.
All that remained now was the hated gweilo.
Chapter 21
Mary Melissa Mercy knew at an early age that she would devote her life to nursing the sick. As far back as she could remember she had practiced her art. Bandaging the family dog. Listening to family hearts with a stethoscope fashioned from a Dixie cup and plastic hosing. Once, she had even tried to "inoculate" a neighborhood playmate with a rusty nail-which resulted in a severe case of tetanus.
Mary Melissa got to visit the playmate in the hospital, thus opening up an entire new world to her young imagination. A world that smelled disinfectant-clean.
As soon as she had graduated from high school, Mary Melissa Mercy enrolled in the Lone Star Nursing School. It was a dream come true. And why shouldn't it have been? If there was one thing Mary Melissa cared about, it was health.
She had never been sick a day in her life. When every other kid was suffering from colds and flu and measles and chicken pox, Mary Melissa was always in the pink of health. Even a case of the sniffles would have been unusual for Mary Melissa Mercy.
She attributed her remarkable good health to one thing and one thing alone: vegetarianism.
If nursing was Mary Melissa Mercy's vocation, then vegetarianism was her avocation.
It wasn't something she had to do in order to maintain her perfect figure. It wasn't something she thought she'd try because her peers did it. They were beef eaters. It wasn't something that had been forced on her by her parents.
It was because Mary Melissa Mercy couldn't stand the taste of blood.
Little did she realize that her twin passions and single phobia would collide mere weeks after graduating from the Lone Star Nursing School, in a small, poorly ventilated corner room in the terminal ward of Houston General Hospital.
The elderly patient in Room 334 was enshrouded in mystery. He was known to the staff as Mr. Nichols, which everyone agreed couldn't be his name, for he was unmistakably Chinese.
The old Chinese had been left at the hospital many years before by his grandson, a Remo Nichols. This young man had dropped twenty-five thousand dollars in cash to pay for the life-support systems, and quickly vanished. Before the money had run out more began coming in, to cover the spiraling cost of sustaining the old Chinese gentleman, but the grandson never returned to visit his comatose grandfather.
Mary Melissa thought that was disgraceful. The old man had been left there to waste away by a relative who had no intention of ever returning.
She took on that patient as a personal cause.
At first, Mary Melissa told herself she gave the man special attention only because of his personal situation. That was all. But in fact, as with everything else in her life, she had become obsessive about him.
She had been obsessive in her quest to become a nurse, obsessive in her strict adherence to vegetarian dogma, and now she was obsessive in her care of the terminally ill Chinese gentleman.
And the trigger for that obsessiveness was the fingernail. It couldn't have been anything else.
What is its purpose? Mary Melissa often wondered, as she trimmed the old man's hair and sponged his flaking, purplish skin.
She had tried at one point to trim the sharpened guillotine tip of the index finge
rnail, but it just would not cut. She even jutted the tip of her pink tongue through her pearl-perfect teeth and scrunched up her freckled forehead in determination as she bore down on the nail with all her might, but all she succeeded in doing was snapping her clippers. The nail remained smooth and shiny.
Mary Melissa would sit for hours, eating salads from the cafeteria and holding one-sided conversations with the old man, because she had read that even the comatose were sometimes cognizant of their surroundings. And who knew? Maybe she could talk him back to health.
Mary Melissa Mercy believed in miracles.
The nursing staff at Houston General thought she was as loopy as mating squid, but no one complained, because Mary Melissa Mercy was the only nurse who undertook the distasteful job of veggie-grooming without complaint.
One day, a miracle seemed to occur.
Over the rhythmic sounds of the ventilator that assisted the man's breathing, she heard a sound issue from parted purplish lips.
"Missy . . ."
"My name! You spoke my name! You can hear!"
"Missy . . ."
"I've gotten through to you!"
Later, Mary Melissa Mercy tried to explain her progress to the attending physician. He was a cynic.
"Nurse Mercy," he had said. "I know you're excited. But try to listen carefully. The patient is brain-damaged. He will never regain consciousness. He will never leave that bed, except for the county morgue."
"But he said my name! He called me Missy! Missy was my childhood nickname!"
"Missy," the doctor patiently explained, "is a very Chinese form of address when speaking to a young woman. I would not take any such vocalization seriously."
But Mary Melissa Mercy did take the patient's words seriously. In the weeks that followed, she devoted herself to the old Chinese.
She knew on an instinctual level that he realized she was in the room with him. She spoke to him for hours on end. About the weather. About current events. About her life-which consisted mainly of the same twelve-by-fifteen foot room the old man lived in.
Her ministrations were rewarded one late afternoon, with the flicker of a translucent eyelid.
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