He spun around as if he were on a turntable. His mouth was wide open in horror. The front of his shirt was spouting blood – pints of it – which splattered onto the lighthouse steps. Michael tried to catch him, tried to hold him, but he lost his balance and tumbled down the steps, rolling over and over at the bottom.
Michael, stunned, held up both of his hands, both of them bloody. He stared at the girl and the girl smiled back at him, completely calm, completely self-possessed. Her right hand was bloody, too – right up to the elbow, like a single red evening-glove.
She was holding up a small, narrow-bladed knife. She must have cut Victor open from navel to breastbone, without any hesitation whatsoever.
‘Victor!’ Michael shouted, and started toward the steps. But the girl instantly stepped out of the doorway and stood in front of him, with the knife raised.
‘Get out of my goddamned way!’ Michael raged at her.
‘He’s hurt, you could have killed him! Get out of my goddamned way!’
He tried to dodge around her, but she swayed from one side of the steps to the other. Her eyes were completely emotionless and he was quite certain that she would cut him open, too.
‘Joseph!’ she called out, her voice piercingly high-pitched.
Michael feinted and tried to dodge around her again, but she whipped her knife diagonally in front of him, and sliced open the knuckles of his left hand, almost to the bone. Blood ran down, dripped all over the steps. He was forced to tug out his handkerchief and bind it around his fist. It turned immediately from white to scarlet.
‘Listen,’ he told the girl, shaking with shock. ‘You can’t just leave him there. He’ll bleed to death.’
‘I’m afraid he should have thought of that when I asked him to leave,’ the girl replied. She said it as matter-of-factly as if she and Victor had disagreed over which restaurant they were going to eat in that night.
Michael looked over the girl’s shoulder down the steps and saw that Victor was trying to climb to his feet. He was gripping his sliced-open stomach in one hand, and holding onto the railings with the other.
‘Victor!’ Michael shouted, but Victor didn’t answer, didn’t even turn around. He was probably too shocked, and hadn’t heard.
‘You have to let me help him,’ Michael insisted.
‘It’s all right ... Joseph and Bryan will help him,’ the girl smiled. At that moment, as if responding to a stage cue, two black-dressed young men came out of the lighthouse door, white-faced, their eyes hidden behind impenetrably black sunglasses. They scarcely glanced at Michael as they hurried down the steps.
‘For God’s sake, treat him gently!’ Michael shouted. Then, to the girl, ‘You have to call an ambulance. Come on, you have to call an ambulance now! Do you have a phone here?’
‘Stop worrying,’ the girl smiled. ‘Come inside, and see your wife and child. Your companion will be taken care of.’
‘He has to have an ambulance!’ Michael screamed at her. ‘He’s dying, you’ve killed him! He has to have an ambulance!’
At the foot of the steps, Victor looked up, and saw the two white-faced young men hurrying down towards him. Michael couldn’t guess what went through his mind. He must have been suffering such shock and agony that he didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him. Maybe he thought that he was little, and that his grandmother was warning him all over again about the lily-white boys, the pale-faced boys who came when you were sleeping and sucked out your soul. Whatever it was, he let out a cry of such despair that Michael’s neck prickled. He let go of the railings, clutched both of his hands to his stomach, and began to hobble away across the clumpy grass.
‘Victor! Victor, don’t run!’ But there was nothing he could do. He tried to push the girl aside, but she swept her knife against his linen coat, and cut right through the shoulder-padding and into his muscle.
Victor hopped and hobbled toward the seashore, bent almost double. Michael could hear him sobbing as he tried to get away. The pale-faced young men didn’t even bother to run after him; they followed him at a brisk, relentless walk, only twenty feet behind. The scene reminded Michael of Zybigniew Cybulski, in Ashes and Diamonds, staggering shot and bleeding through the wastelands of Warsaw. He felt the same sense of wasted heroism. He also felt the same sense of unreality, as if he were watching yet another movie.
Victor almost made it to the beach. But then he dropped to his knees, and when he managed to heave himself up onto his feet, his intestines suddenly slid out, and hung between his thighs.
Michael knew that Victor was going to die. Clinically speaking, he was probably dead already. But somehow he managed to take one step onto the sand, and then another, his head arched back so that he was staring up at the grey afternoon sky. The whole baggage of his intestines dragged through the sand, gritty and grey and glistening with blood. He stood for a moment or two, while the two pale-faced men stood beside him. Then he fell face-down into the sand.
Without any hesitation, the two pale-faced men knelt down beside him, pulled up his coat and his shirt, and bared his back. One of them produced two long thin metal pipes, which he probed into Victor’s flesh. Then the two of them bent over him, and Michael could see them carefully sipping.
He stared at the girl in disbelief. His stomach was churning, and he felt close to vomiting. ‘It’s true, then,’ he said. ‘They do exist.’
‘The lily-white boys? Of course it’s true.’
‘If you touch a hair of my wife’s head – if you hurt my boy –’ He stopped. He knew how stupid he sounded.
‘Come inside,’ the girl told him. ‘You’re really in no position to threaten us, are you?’
He took one last look at Victor, lying on the beach, with those two human carrion-crows hunched over him. Then he stepped into the lighthouse, with the girl following him close behind. She silently closed the door, and for a moment they were plunged into complete blackness. But then a heavy drape was drawn aside, and Michael could see a narrow stone staircase leading upward in a lefthand spiral.
He knew where to go. He had already visited this lighthouse in his trance.
He climbed, and he could hear the girl’s footsteps whispering up the steps behind him. At last he reached a landing, and the girl said, ‘Stop.’ He stopped, and she passed close by him, her breasts touching his sleeve, her green eyes never leaving his. She unlocked the door in front of them, and said, ‘Come on, now. Follow me. It’s time you met “Mr Hillary”.’
Michael swallowed dryly. He was feeling light-headed from shock, and from witnessing Victor’s terrible death.
‘Come on, now,’ the girl urged him. ‘This is a privilege. This is the high point of your entire life.’
He shuffled reluctantly forward and found himself standing in a huge, dimly-lit library. The vaulted stone ceiling must have gone almost all the way up to the light platform itself. The curved walls were lined with thousands of books, many of them new, but some of them so old that they were nothing but worm-wriggled bundles of dusty paper. There were sofas and tables and chairs arranged in a curiously haphazard way, and the floor was carpeted with layer upon layer of different rugs, most of them threadbare. The largest chair was positioned with its back to the door, so that Michael was unable to see who was sitting in it. But he could see a single arm dangling from one side of it, an arm that was sleeved in softest grey wool, an arm with a long-fingered, emaciated hand.
The fingertips were slowly being rubbed together, in persistent circles, in the way that a man might rub silk, or a woman’s hair.
The girl circled around the chair until she was facing the man who was sitting in it. ‘He’s here,’ she announced, softly.
The man must have said something like ‘What’s that blood on your hand?’ because the girl answered, ‘He brought a companion. We didn’t expect him to. Joseph and Bryan have seen to him.’
The man said something else. The girl looked away, as if she were embarrassed.
Michael waited
, uncertain what to do next. But his stomach was beginning to settle, and he was beginning to feel a little bolder. After all, if they had wanted to murder him, they probably would have done it already. They wanted him here for a reason.
‘I demand to see my wife and son!’ he called out, as loudly as he could.
The girl snapped him a sharp, green-eyed look of disapproval. But the grey-sleeved arm waved in a calming gesture, and the man said something else.
Then, at last, he rose from his chair, and walked around it, and confronted Michael in the flesh for the very first time. A grey cat slunk around the man’s black boots, watching Michael with cautious hatred.
‘Azazel,’ said Michael. And he was sure of it.
‘Mr Hillary’ stepped forward with his hands resting on his hips, his coat tails drawn back. He seemed even taller in reality than he had in Michael’s hypnotic trance. But he had the same silky white hair, the same chiseled face, the same blood-red eyes. He had the same presence, too – only more powerful, if anything. It was the presence of ageless power, extraordinary wealth, and the erotic but terrifying sensation of being close to the heart of absolute amorality.
His lips slid slowly back across his teeth in a complicated snarl. ‘I don’t think I know that name. It’s “Mr Hillary” to you. This is a secular world now. We have to wear secular names.’
He stepped up closer. He was at least six-feet-three, and Michael found himself drawing back a little, so that he wouldn’t have to crane his neck to look up at him.
‘Who have you been talking to?’ ‘Mr Hillary’ asked him. ‘Who told you about Azazel?’
‘I want my wife and my son back,’ Michael retorted. ‘You had no right to take them and you have no right to keep them here.’
‘Mr Hillary’ made a face. ‘I think I have a right to protect myself, don’t you?’
‘Not by threatening my family.’
‘Oh, come on, Michael,’ said ‘Mr Hillary’, and reached out with his knuckles and gently stroked Michael’s hair. Again, Michael had that alarming homo-erotic feeling. It ran down his spine like centipedes and wriggled between his legs. This man was no ordinary man. This man didn’t seem like a man at all. He was something else, something quite other. He was like woman and man and beast, all combined into one. And if anything, his aura was much more vibrant now than it had been in Michael’s hypnotic trance.
‘Mr Hillary’ said, ‘I don’t find you threatening, Michael, but your persistence in investigating John O’Brien’s unfortunate death is proving to be highly inconvenient to many of my friends. Your pursuit of poor Raymond Moorpath was the last straw. I liked Raymond. I almost loved him. He was wonderfully corrupt for a man who had taken the Hippocratic oath. He had a highly-developed sense of human frailty.’
‘I want to see my wife and son,’ Michael repeated, doggedly. ‘And don’t think that you’re going to get away with murdering Victor Kurylowicz. I’m a witness. I’ll see those lily-white boys of yours go to the chair. And your girlfriend here.’
‘Mr Hillary’ paced around Michael thoughtfully, his cat cringing around his soft black ankle-boots. ‘Maybe you’d like to speak to Commissioner Hudson. He’s a good friend of mine. I have a house in Amherst, in the Holyoke Range, and he often comes out to visit. Or maybe you’d like to speak to the Boston District Attorney’s department. I have all kinds of friends there. I have judges for friends, too, and newspaper publishers, and policemen.
‘The advantage of being long-lived, Michael, is that you can weave your influence from one generation to the next, from grandfather to father, from father to son. You can attract a devotion from your friends and colleagues that is quite unique. And from your women, too. Look at poor Jacqueline here. She suffers such pain, just to please me. She suffers such terrors, just to keep me fed. Jacqueline never knows from one minute to the next whether she will live or die. I could kill her now. Cut her open, and rummage in her viscera! You think I wouldn’t? And look how her eyes light up!’
Blood from the cut on Michael’s knuckles had now soaked right through his handkerchief and was beginning to drip onto the rugs. ‘Mr Hillary’ stood very still for a while and watched it. Then he said, ‘Your life is dripping away, Michael.’
He dragged a white silk scarf from around his neck and handed it to Michael to wrap around his fist. It was charged with static electricity, and crackled as he did so. ‘Mr Hillary’ looked directly into his eyes and Michael felt all kinds of strange sensations inside his mind and his body, a momentary loss of balance, like a minor earth tremor.
‘You shall see your wife and your son, and then you and I shall discuss the way forward.’
He gave an almost imperceptible nod of his head, and the white-faced girl called Jacqueline walked across to the fireplace and pulled a bell handle.
‘I don’t even know what you want,’ said Michael.
‘What does anyone want?’ said ‘Mr Hillary’. There was a touch of wistfulness in his voice. ‘Love, excitement, appreciation, comfort, survival.’
‘Do you have all of those things?’
‘Survival, yes. You would have to ask those around me about love. As for appreciation ... well, yes, there are many who appreciate me. Perhaps they appreciate me more for my influence than they do for my humble self, but –’
The door opened, and five young men came in, all of them wearing black, all of them wearing dark glasses. Their faces were white and chalky and three out of the five were wearing gloves. They gathered around ‘Mr Hillary’ protectively.
They had an aura like no other that Michael had ever encountered. Deathly, and cold, like dead flowers wrapped in funeral-black tissue-paper.
‘My children,’ smiled ‘Mr Hillary’. ‘My lily-white boys. Pale of complexion and perfectly dark of spirit. Pray that you never wake up in the night, Michael, and find one of these young rascals in your room.’
Michael took a deep, steadying breath. His knuckles hurt like hell. ‘Can we see my wife and son now?’ he repeated.
‘Of course. Why don’t you come with me? It’s a privilege, to see the lighthouse. It’s officially out of commission, you know, but I have friends in the coastguard. I call it my retreat. I have houses all over, of course. I have a wonderful ante-bellum mansion near Charlotte, North Carolina. You should visit.’
‘Mr Hillary’ beckoned, and Michael followed him across the library to a small curtained door on the opposite side. ‘Mr Hillary’ opened the door, and said, ‘Come,’ and began to climb the next flight of spiral steps. Three of the lily-white boys followed behind him. One of them took off his dark glasses, and when Michael turned around to glance at him, he saw that his eyes were filled with blood.
‘You asked me what I want,’ said ‘Mr Hillary’, as they climbed higher. They passed a small window overlooking the seashore, and Michael could see two children flying a white box kite, and a distant yacht.
‘I want only that men should accept the consequences of their actions. I want only that men should take the blame for what they do. Until that happens, this world will remain an evil and chaotic place.
‘You are suspicious of me. You are afraid of me. You revile me. But I attract you, too, don’t I? And do you know why that is? Because I am the personification of all of your sins, Michael, of everybody’s sins. I am the scapegoat.’
He turned on the stairs, and his red eyes glistened. ‘Do you love me? Do I frighten you? Good! Then you can have me!’
Michael leaned against the solid stone wall. He was chilled and exhausted, and his hand was hurting so much that he could hardly bear it. ‘Mr Hillary’s’ silk scarf had become drenched in blood, which had then congealed, so that the scarf was stuck to the open wound. He didn’t even dare to pull it away.
‘Mr Hillary’ touched Michael’s shoulder, and then continued to lead him upward. At last they reached a narrow, curved landing, and another door. ‘Mr Hillary’ opened it, and ushered Michael and his lily-white boys inside.
Here was a plain, wh
itewashed room with a large metal-framed window that looked out over the ocean. It must originally have been a recreation room for the lighthouse keepers, because there was a sagging sofa, two ill-matched armchairs, and a baize-topped table-tennis table which was now crowded with wine glasses and plates and books and magazines. Torn triangles of paper on the wall attested to a large collection of pin-ups, now ripped down, except for one faded 1950s photograph of a heavily-lipsticked blonde, holding her breasts as if she were weighing them.
Patsy and Jason were sitting on the sofa, two or three feet apart. They were blindfolded and tightly bound with cords. Their mouths were covered with sticking-plaster and their ears had been crammed with cotton. Patsy was wearing her pink checkered blouse and blue jeans; Jason was wearing his Red Sox T-shirt and shorts. As Michael and ‘Mr Hillary’ and the lily-white boys came into the room, they showed no signs that they were aware of their presence. Deaf, dumb and blind.
Michael immediately made a move toward Patsy but ‘Mr Hillary’ snatched his sleeve, and pulled him back.
‘Untie them!’ Michael snapped at him. ‘Take those gags off! What the hell’s the matter with you, that’s just a woman and a kid! You don’t have to keep them tied up like that!’
‘Mr Hillary’ pulled Michael even closer. ‘It’s good for their level of anxiety,’ he murmured. ‘And it’s good for yours, too.’
Michael took two or three more deep breaths. He could feel the floor opening up, and he didn’t want that to happen, not now. He needed to be calm and strong and in control. No more plunging through the night. No more Rocky Woods. Patsy and Jason depended on him staying together.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked ‘Mr Hillary’.
‘Mr Hillary’ released his grip on Michael’s sleeve, and walked around the sofa, so that he was standing directly behind Patsy’s head. He reached out and very gently stroked her bedraggled blonde curls, dreamily, slowly, his eyelids drooping over his blood-red eyes. Patsy twitched her head and tried to shake him off. She made a mmmfff of protest, but that was all she could do.
The Sleepless Page 41
