James Herbert

by Sepulchre

  Shay could only shake his head in a stupefied gesture.

  'Let's leave this heathen place, Danny! There's no good for us here!' The leader climbed to his feet, bringing Flynn up with him, his eyes never leaving the monstrosity growing from the lake, this seen through a screen of driving rain. McGuire joined them, afraid to be left standing alone. He clutched at Shay's other arm.

  'There's no turning back!' the leader yelled. 'Whatever devil's work this is, it doesn't matter! It'll not stop us doing our job!'

  'No, it's a bad business, Danny!' McGuire protested.

  Shay hit him, a back-swipe of his hand. 'You'll do as you're told! The house is close, an' he's in there!

  We'll not leave until it's settled!' He shoved both men from him, forcing them to turn their backs on the lake with its phenomenon that could only be some kind of illusion—there really couldn't be any reality to such a vision. Although . . . although didn't he see for himself two of his own men dragged down into its terrible depths?

  Shay began running, cutting out further thought, intent on one purpose alone, urging McGuire and Flynn to follow. They did for, scared though they were, disobedience was unthinkable.

  They did their best to ignore the squishy gurgling of the sinuous island as it heaved itself from the water, resisting the temptation (it was as though there were whispered entreaties in their minds to do so) to turn round and watch. They kept their eyes on the manor house which was now but a short distance away.

  Most of the lights were on, a welcoming relief despite the duty they were bound to perform, a glorious beacon in the darkness they had travelled through.

  They found themselves on firmer ground, gravel crunching under their feet as they dashed forward, no caution in their untidy gait. There was a porch at the front, an entrance like a darkened cave. Flynn strove to keep up with the others, the pain in his ankle a handicap, his hand tucked into his anorak pocket touching the revolver there for comfort. He suddenly slid to a halt.

  There were headlights coming towards them!

  A car on the road, moving fast, freezing them in its searching beams. It skidded to a stop twenty yards away. Doors were opening. Someone was shouting.

  46 TOWARDS DESTRUCTION

  Candle flames flickered and dimmed momentarily, smoke curling from them, as Kline came closer, his hands livid against the blackness of the robe he wore. In them he held a black chalice, a cloth draped over the top.

  All eyes were on the shuffling figure emerging from the alcove and instinct told Halloran that this was the time to make his move. Yet he could not. Like the others, he was mesmerised.

  Kline faltered, as though the weight of his burden was too much. But after drawing in a deep, grating breath, he continued to approach.

  Thunder grumbled in the distance and it seemed to came from below, from the earth itself, rather than the atmosphere above.

  At last Kline, or the disfigured thing that Kline now was. reached the stone slab. He attempted to grin, perhaps in triumph. but his lips merely wavered, his stained teeth bared only, partially. His hands were trembling when he placed the chalice on the altar. He removed the cloth, allowed it to fall to the floor.

  Then Kline dipped both hands into the vessel, the abject he removed still unseen by the others. He held out his prize across the furred belly of the paralysed bodyguard.

  A husky whisper. 'His disciples, his loyal priests, preserved his poor mutilated body. They hid Bel-Marduk away, a deep place where no one could find him. Hidden in darkness, his secrets around him, waiting out the centuries far one such as I . . .' He placed the object on the stone beside the bodyguard” and there it rested for the others to see.

  A blackened, crisped shell. A thing almost rotted away, shrivelled stumps that had once been tubes, but which now had no function, protruding.

  And as they watched, the ancient withered heart pulsed.

  Just once . . .

  Mather had jammed on the handbrake and was opening the driver's door even before the car had rocked to a halt.

  'Stop there!' he shouted, but the three figures either did not hear him over the storm or had no intention of heeding his command.

  'Draw your weapon, Phil,' he ordered. 'Whoever they are, I don't want them to get inside the house.'

  Both men used the car doors as shields, the operative clenching a Browning with both hands, using the triangle between passenger door and frame as an armrest.

  'Hold it!' he warned, but one of the figures, someone who appeared to be limping, whirled round, bringing something from his anorak pocket as he did so. Flame spat out into the rainy night.

  'Pacify him!' Mather yelled at his man as a bullet scythed sparks off the car roof. The-operative would have preferred to have 'retired' the gunman, a more permanent condition, but he knew better than to disobey an order. He took quick aim at the enemy's shoulder; unfortunately the target had changed position, had tried to follow his companions. The Shield operative knew by the way the man violently jerked, then dropped like a stone, that the bullet had taken him in the head or neck.

  He muttered a curse, but didn't take time to shrug an apology at Mather, for the other two intruders were disappearing into the porch.

  He gave chase, skirting around the vehicles parked in front of the house, flattening himself against the outside wall of the porch, keeping out of sight until he could position himself. Realising Mather had not followed, he looked back at their car. The Planner was facing the opposite direction, towards the lake.

  They had noticed a strange shining from that area when they had broken free of the woods moments earlier to descend into the valley, but the rain had been too heavy to see clearly. Even this close it was difficult, for there was a mist rising from the peculiar incandescence that was the lake itself, creating a swirling fog which the rainfall failed to disperse. Mather tore himself away and began limping towards his companion, body crouched, cane digging into the gravel.

  'What is it out there?' the operative asked when the older man reached him.

  'I've no idea,' came the breathless reply. 'Some kind of disturbance in the lake, that's all I can tell. Let's worry about our immediate problem.'

  'Here comes the other patrol.' The operative nodded towards the lightbeams descending the hill at a fast pace.

  'We can't wait for them. Check inside.' The other man ducked low, quickly peering into the tunnel of the porch and drawing his head back almost immediately.

  'Shit,' he said. 'The door's open. They're inside the house.' It was a dream. It could only be a bad dream.

  Yet Cora knew it wasn't. The nightmare around her was real. She tried to focus her mind, desperate to understand what was happening, why Monk, that bloated, repellent creature, was lying naked on the stone, and . . . and . . . Shock broke through the haze.

  The black-robed figure standing on the other side of the prone bodyguard was obscene in its deformity.

  Only the eyes allowed some recognition.

  'Felix . . . ?' She imagined she had said the name aloud, but in fact it had been no more than a murmur.

  She held up her hands to her face, not because of the unsightliness in front of her, but to clear her thoughts . . .

  . . . While Halloran's mind was sharp by now, all grogginess gone. He stared disbelievingly at the blackened object lying on the stone altar.

  'It can't be,' he whispered.

  'But it is. The only part of Bel-Marduk that survived his mutilated body's entombment. His heart.'

  'Impossible.'

  'Naturally.'

  'Kline, let's stop this nonsense. Let me walk away with Cora -' Kline screamed across at him, a furious cry that might have been anguish. The wire noose around Halloran's neck jerked tight and he was dragged backwards by Daoud, away from the altar, his legs giving way so that he fell to the wet floor, the Arab crouching behind him, maintaining the pressure. Cora took a step towards them, then collapsed back against the stone.

  'There's still more to he done, Halloran!' Kl
ine screeched. 'Especially now, in this era of awesome power, when we hold the very weapons of our own genocide. Don't you understand that he directed mankind towards this point, he set us on this road! A few more decades, that's all it will take. A micro-second in earth's lifespan. A few more years of disruption and dissent, of famine and disease, of wars and violence. A culmination of evils, when the balance between good and bad has been tilted irrevocably towards his, Bel-Marduk's, way! I showed you the lake, Halloran, allowed you to see its contents. A residue, like many others around the world, of our own corruption, a manifestation of our evils in living form. You saw them, you recognised your own culpability, your own vileness! We're not unalike, you and I, Halloran. You just have a little further to travel.' Kline was leaning over Monk's body, sucking in air, exhausted, drained by his own beliefs. 'I could have made you one of mine, Halloran. A little encouragement, that's all it would have taken. But I can't trust you. I don't have time to.' He calmed himself, or perhaps weariness did it for him. 'She'll join us in our communion, Bel-Marduk's and mine.

  Cora will help us and be one of us.' He levered himself up from the body. 'Asil . . .' The Arab stepped forward and from beneath his robes he drew out a long blade, one edge thickened for weight so that it resembled a machete. The metal glowed in the candle-light.

  He raised it over Monk's chest and the bodyguard's hands twitched frantically. His lips parted. A sobbing came from them.

  Khayed brought down the blade with a short, sharp movement, minimum effort in the blow, for he needed only to pierce the breastbone so that the paralysed man's ribs could be pulled apart, his heart exposed.

  Monk shuddered. His hands and now his feet quivered as the finely-honed blade was drawn down his stomach. The cutting stopped when muffled gunfire was heard from above.

  47 ACROSS THE COURTYARD

  'Hold 'em there, McGuire. Don't let anyone through the door.' McGuire looked at his leader apprehensively. 'An' where the hell will you be?'

  'Finding our man. He'll not escape.'

  'Are you fuckin' insane, man? There's nothing we can do now except mebbe get away ourselves.'

  'You'll do as I tell you, or it'll not only be me you'll answer 'An' what if he's not here?'

  'Oh, the bastard's here all right, I can feel it in me piss.'

  'I'll give it five minutes, Danny, no more than that.' Shay decided it was pointless to argue. McGuire had always been the yellow one, enjoying the killing only if he was mob-heavy or guaranteed a safe getaway.

  Besides, five minutes should be enough; then he'd leave McGuire to his own fate. He turned away from the main doors, one side of which remained open, and quickly scanned the hall, taking no note of its grandness. It was a damned cold house, to be sure. And there was nothing good inside these old walls.

  Shay ran across the stone floor, expecting someone to appear at any moment through one of the many doors that opened out onto the hall. He kept an eye on the stairs and landing too as he went, sure that anyone in the house would have heard the din outside.

  Into a corridor he ran, revolver held before him like a pointer. Ile stopped and listened. Gunshots from the hall. McGuire was keeping whoever had driven up to the house at bay. Had they nabbed Flynn? he wondered. Things were going bad. He almost smiled. Things were fucking terrible.

  A door was open at the end of the corridor, rain pouring in. What was this? The house couldn't be that narrow. He hurried to the doorway and looked outside, suddenly understanding the layout. A courtyard, filling up with rain by the looks of it. And what was that?

  Light from another doorway opposite. Somebody there, like him, peering out.

  Shay did not hesitate: he was through the door like a shot, racing across the courtyard towards the other man. Something was bubbling to his right, but he paid it no mind, realising it was a fountain, the storm causing its basin to overflow.

  He kept running and the other person had spotted him, was backing away. The fool's attention must have been on the fountain before, not on the shadow bearing down on him through the storm. It had been Shay's luck that lightning had not struck during those few seconds.

  He burst into the hallway and was able to reach out for the man who, too late, had attempted to flee. He pulled him round, clamping a hand over the man's mouth, then ramming the barrel of the gun beneath his captive's wire-rimmed spectacles so that they rose off his nose, the weapon hard against his closed eyelid.

  48 BLOOD RITES

  The Arab was murmuring an intonation that was breathless, his excitement conveyed through the wire which vibrated against Halloran's throat. Daoud watched the figures at the altar, fretful that he was unable to join them, but chanting the incantations learned from the cuneiform writings, so that he was at least part of the ceremony.

  A breeze swept down from the corridor above, bending the candle flames as it swirled around the underground chamber, ruffling the light so that shadows danced and weaved as though they also belonged to the rite.

  At the stone slab that served as an altar, Felix Kline, aware that his strength was fading, his will weakening with it, urged Khayed to hurry. Tissue was breaking from him, falling onto the robe he wore, onto the open body lying below on the stone. He could feel fresh lesions forming, the flesh ulcerating and rupturing beneath his clothing, skin weeping pus, dribbling wetness. The pain was intense, as though every joint in his body was on fire, and his scalp was tightening around the skull, splitting apart as it shrank. This agony was like never before, and it was the significance of that which frightened Kline more than anything else. The torments of his sleep, the panic that had lingered afterwards, the sense of deep foreboding—these were feelings he had not experienced since discovering the hidden tomb so many years before. Why now, O Lord? Have I failed you in some way? Acre you failing me, Bel-Marduk?

  The questions were silent, his spoken invocations uninterrupted, for those ancient words were important to the ritual, their tonal values an inducing cadence for affinity between the psyche and the spiritual realms.

  Khayed's hands were bloodied beyond the wrists as he pulled at the sliced sides of the body to expose Monk's innards. The bodyguard's eyelids fluttered as life dwindled, receding within him so that it could expand outwards through another dimension. The Arab tugged at Monk's exposed sternum, bending the ribs upwards, then pushed sweating organs down towards the gut, reaching for the heart and dragging it clear, stretching arteries and breaking veins until the feebly pulsing organ was revealed. All a familiar and well-practised ritual.

  Kline took the other heart, the old shrivelled husk that represented—that was—the existence of his deity. With one hand he lifted this shell, while with the other he reached for Cora's wrist. She was too numbed to resist, incomprehension still misted in her eyes.

  But when Kline plunged both their hands into the gaping wound, the dried, withered thing held between them, she whimpered. When he settled the remnant organ against the fresh, bleeding one, using their hands as a vice, she screamed.

  Cora felt her whole self being drawn down into the huge open wound, blood spurting along her arm, her hand disappeared into the quagmire. And it was the ancient petrified heart that sucked her in.

  Kline was lost in a delirium of sensations, a euphoric rebirth without trauma, a vigour beginning to pulsate through him. All this ceased for him when the girl pulled her hand free, bringing with it the parasite heart.

  Cora held the relic in her bloody grasp and stared loathingly at it for but a moment. Turning away, she cast it from her, a violent and sudden movement that neither Kline nor Khayed could prevent.

  The brittle shell scudded across the stone floor and came to rest in a puddle of blackened water.

  Now it was Kline who screamed, a piercing cry that echoed around the walls of the chamber.

  And it was Halloran who took his chance.

  Daoud's attention was on the dark, blood-soaked mound lying in the water only a few yards away, his grip loosened on the wooden handles of the garotte
. Halloran, half-kneeling below the Arab, swiftly brought the point of his elbow up into the other man's groin. Daoud hissed, releasing one of the handles to clutch at himself, the wire cutting across Halloran's throat. The operative grabbed the Arab's ankle and pulled, sending his opponent crashing onto his back.

  Despite the pain, Daoud kicked out at Halloran, toppling him as he tried to rise.

  They came up together, but tears blurred the Arab's vision. Halloran's stiffened fingers jabbed at the front of Daoud's neck, striking for the thyroid cartilage. If his balance had allowed a greater force to the blow, the Arab would have been killed instantly; as it was, Daoud crouched over his knees, choking and gasping. Halloran half-rose, turning as he did so, ready to launch himself at the Arab's companions.

  Cora had sunk down against the altar, blood from the open body above spilling over the edge to stain the shoulders of her white robe. Kline was stumbling around the stone slab, one hand against it for support, the other stretched out, fingers spread, as though reaching for the relic lying in the wetness of the floor some distance away. Khayed's gaze was fixed on his choking lover. Rage burned when it shifted to Halloran. Khayed lifted the long and broad chopping knife.

  But others had entered the chamber.

  Janusz Palusinski, whom Kline had ordered to investigate the earlier sound of gunfire, had returned. A man in a rain-drenched anorak gripped the Pole's collar from behind; in his free hand was a revolver pointing at Palusinski's head.

  Danny Shay was dismayed by what confronted him in the gloomy, candle-lit room. Dismayed, then fiercely angry. There were robed figures below him, one wielding a long, bloodstained knife, another in black wearing a hideous mask of some kind. There was a girl resting against a stone slab, her legs exposed, blood soaking her clothing. And the stone resembled an altar, and on that altar—oh dear God in Heaven !—there was a mutilated body, blood pumping from it like red springwater. There were moving shadows, dark alcoves that might have hidden others involved in this atrocity. Shay thumbed back the hammer of the .38.