by Brian Lumley
Then, wandering up the drive where the curving gravel path came closest to the copse—a densely grown stand of beech, birch and alder, with one mighty cedar towering slightly apart—there he came across his car, its front doors standing open and the keys still in the ignition. George stared at the car in mild surprise, turned in a slow circle and glanced all about.
The copse had an overgrown crazy-paving path winding through its heart, and a once-elegant white three-bar fence running round it—like a wood in a book of fairy tales. The fence was leaning now and very much off-white, with rank growth sprung up on both sides. George looked in that direction but could see no one. Tall grasses and brambles, the tops of fenceposts, trees. And … maybe something big and black moving furtively in the undergrowth? Vlad?
It could well be that Anne, Helen, Georgina and Yulian were all walking together in the copse; certainly it would be leafy and cool under the canopy of the trees. But if it was only Yulian and the dog in there, or the bloody dog on his own …
Suddenly it came to George that he feared one as much as the other. Yes, feared them. Yulian wasn’t like any other person he knew, and Vlad wasn’t like any other dog. There was something wrong with both of them. And in the middle of a quiet, hot summer day George shivered.
Then he got a grip of himself. Frightened? Of a queer, freakish youth and a three-quarters grown dog? Ridiculous!
He gave a loud “Hallooo!”—and got no answer.
Irritated now, his previously pleasant mood rapidly waning, he hurried to the house. Inside … no one! He went through the old place slamming doors, finally climbed the stairs to his and Anne’s bedroom. Where the hell was everyone? And why had Anne left his car there like that? Was he to spend the entire day on his bloody own?
From his bedroom window he could see most of the grounds at the front of the house right to the gate. The barn and huddled stables interfered with the view of the copse, but—
George’s attention was suddenly riveted by a splash of color showing in the tall grass this side of the fence where it circled the copse. It caught his attention and held it. He moved a fraction, tried to see beyond the projecting gables of the old barn. It wouldn’t come into focus. Then he remembered his binoculars, still hanging round his neck. He quickly put them to his eyes, adjusted them.
Still the gables intervened, and he’d got the range wrong. The splash of color was still there—a dress?—but a flesh-pink tone was moving against it. Moving insistently. With viciously impatient hands, George finally got the range right, brought the picture close. The splash of summer colors was a dress, yes. And the flesh-colored tone was—flesh! Naked flesh.
George scanned the scene disbelievingly. They were in the grass. He couldn’t see Helen—not her face, anyway—for she was face down, backside in the air. And Yulian mounting her, frantic in his rage, his passion, his hands gripping her waist. George began to tremble and he couldn’t stop it. Helen was a willing party to this, had to be. Well, and he’d said she was an adult—but God!—there must be limits.
And there she was, face down in the grass, naked as a baby—George’s baby girl—with her straw hat and her dress tossed aside and her pink flesh open to this … this slime! George no longer feared Yulian, if he ever had, but hated him. The weird-looking bastard would look a sight weirder when he was finished with him.
He snatched his binoculars from his neck, tossed them down on the bed, turned towards the door—and his muscles locked rigid. George’s jaw fell open. Something he had seen, some monstrous thing burned on his mind’s eye. With his hands numb to the bone he took up the binoculars, fixed them again on the couple in the long grass. Yulian had finished, lay sprawled alongside his partner. But George let the glasses slide right over them to the hat and disarrayed dress.
The straw hat had a wide black band. It was Anne’s hat. And now that fact had dawned he saw that it was also Anne’s dress.
The binoculars slipped from George’s fingers. He staggered, almost fell, flopped down heavily on his bed. On their bed, his and Anne’s. Willing party … had to be. The words kept repeating in his whirling head. He couldn’t believe what he’d seen, but he had to believe. And she was a willing party. Had to be.
How long he sat there in a daze he couldn’t tell: five minutes, ten? But finally he came out of it. He came out of it, shook himself, knew what he must do. All those stories from Yulian’s school: they must be true. The bastard was a pervert! But Anne, what of Anne?
Could she be drunk? Or drugged? That was it! Yulian must have given her something.
George stood up. He was cold now, cold as ice. His blood boiled but his mind was a white snowfield, with the track he must take clearly delineated. He looked at his hands and felt the strength of both God and the devil flowing in them. He would tear out the black, soulless eyes of that swine; he would eat his rotten heart!
He staggered downstairs, through the empty house, reeled drunkenly, murderously towards the copse. And he found Anne’s hat and dress exactly where he’d seen them. But no Anne, no Yulian. Blood pounded in George’s temples; hate like acid corroded his mind, peeling away every layer of rationality. Still reeling, he scrambled his way through low brambles to the gravel drive, glared his loathing at the house. Then something told him to look behind. Back there, at the gates, Vlad stood watching, then started forward uncertainly.
Something of sanity returned. George hated Yulian now, intended to kill him if he could, but he still feared the dog. There’d always been something about dogs, and especially this one. He ran back towards the house, and coming round a screen of bushes saw Yulian striding through the shrubbery towards the rear of the building. Towards the entrance to the cellars.
“Yulian!” George tried to yell, but the word came out as a gasping croak. He didn’t try again. Why warn the perverted little sod? Behind him, Vlad put on a little speed, began to lope.
At the corner of the house George paused for a moment, gulped air desperately. He was out of condition. Then he saw a rusty old mattock leaning against the wall and snatched it up. A glance over his shoulder told him that Vlad was coming, his strides stretching now, ears flat to his head. George wasted no more time but plunged through the low shrubbery to the entrance to the vaults. And there stood Yulian at the open door. He heard George coming, turned his head and cast a startled glance his way.
“Ah, George!” He smiled a sickly smile. “I was just wondering if perhaps you’d like to see the cellars?” Then he saw George’s expression, the mattock in his white-knuckled hands.
“The cellars?” George choked, almost entirely deranged with hatred. “Yes I fucking would!” He swung his pick-like weapon. Yulian put up an arm to shield his face, turned away. The sharper, rustier blade of the heavy tool took him in the back of his right shoulder, crunched through the lower part of the scapula and buried itself to the haft in his body.
Thrown forward, Yulian went toppling down the central ramp, the mattock still sticking in him. As he fell he said, “Ah! Ah!”—in no way a scream, more an expression of surprise, shock. George followed, arms reaching, lips drawn back from his teeth. He pursued Yulian, and Vlad pursued him.
Yulian lay face down at the bottom of the steps beside the open door to the vaults. He moaned, moved awkwardly. George slammed a foot down in the middle of his back, levered the mattock out of him. “Ah! Ah!” again Yulian gave his peculiar, sighing cry. George lifted the mattock—and heard Vlad’s rumbling growl close behind.
He turned, swung the mattock in a deadly arc. The dog was stopped in mid-flight as the mattock smacked flatly against the side of its head. It crumpled to the concrete floor, groaned like a man. George panted hoarsely, lifted his weapon again—but there was no sign of consciousness in the animal. Its sides heaved but it lay still, tongue protruding. Out like a light.
And now there was only Yulian.
George turned, saw Yulian staggering into the vault’s unknown darkness. Unbelievable! With his injury, still the bastard kept going.
George followed, kept Yulian’s stumbling figure visible in the gloom. The cellars were extensive, rooms and alcoves and midnight corridors, but George didn’t let his quarry out of sight for a single moment. Then—a light!
George peered through an arched entrance into a dimly illumined room. A single dusty bulb, shaded, hung from a vaulted ceiling of stone blocks. George had momentarily lost sight of Yulian in the darkness surrounding the cone of light; but then the youth staggered between him and the light source, and George picked him up again and advanced. Yulian saw him, swung an arm wildly at the light in an attempt to put it out of commission. Injured, he missed his aim, setting the lamp and shade dancing and swinging on their flex.
Then, by that wildly gyrating light, George saw the rest of the room. In intermittent flashes of light and darkness, he picked out the details of the hell he’d walked into.
Light … and in one corner a glimpse of piled wooden racks and cobwebbed shelving. Darkness … and Yulian an even darker shape that crouched uncertainly in the center of the room. Light—and along one wall Georgina, seated in an old cane chair, her eyes bulging but vacant and her mouth and flaring nostrils wide as yawning caverns. Darkness—and a movement close by, so that George put up the mattock to defend himself. Insane light—and to his right a huge copper vat, six feet across and seated on copper legs; with Helen slumped in a dining chair on one side, her back to the nitre-streaked wall, and Anne, naked, likewise positioned on the other side. Their inner arms dangling inside the rim of the bowl, and something in the bowl itself seeming to move restlessly, throwing up ropes of doughy matter. Flickering darkness—out of which came Yulian’s laughter: the clotted, sick laughter of someone warped irreparably. The light again—which found George’s eyes fixed on the great vat, or more properly on the women. And the picture searing itself indelibly into his brain.
Helen’s clothing ripped down the front and pulled back, and the girl lolling there like a slut with her legs sprawled open, everything displayed. Anne likewise; but both of them grimacing, their faces working hideously, showing alternating joy and total horror; their arms in the vat, and the nameless slime crawling on their arms to their shoulders, pulsating from its unknown source!
Merciful darkness—and the thought in George’s tottering mind: God! It’s feeding on them, and it’s feeding itself to them! And Yulian so close now that he could hear his rasping breathing. Light again, as the lamp settled to a jerky jitterbug—and the mattock wrenched from George’s nerveless fingers and hurled away. And George finally face to visage with the man he’d intended to kill, who now he discovered to be hardly a man at all but something out of his very worst nightmares.
Fingers of rubber with the strength of steel gripped his shoulder and propelled him effortlessly, irresistibly towards the vat. “George,” the nightmare gurgled almost conversationally, “I want you to meet something …”
Chapter Six
ALEC KYLE’S KNUCKLES WERE WHITE WHERE HIS HANDS gripped the rim of his desk. “God in heaven, Harry!” he cried, staring aghast at the Keogh apparition where bands of soft light flowed through it from the window’s blinds. “Are you trying to scare the shit out of me before we even get started?”
I’m telling it as I know it. That’s what you asked me to do, isn’t it? Keogh was unrepentant. Remember, Alec, you’re getting it secondhand. I got it straight from them, from the dead—the horse’s mouth, as it were—and believe me I’ve watered it down for you!
Kyle gulped, shook his head, got a grip of himself. Then something Keogh had said got through to him. “You got it from ‘them’? Suddenly I have this feeling you don’t just mean Thibor Ferenczy and George Lake.”
No, I’ve spoken to the Reverend Pollock, too. From Yulian’s christening?
“Oh, yes,” Kyle wiped his brow. “I see that now. Of course.”
Alec! Keogh’s soft voice was sharper now. We have to hurry. Harry’s beginning to stir.
And not only the real child, three hundred and fifty miles away in Hartlepool, but also its ethereal image where it languidly turned, superimposed over and within Keogh’s midriff. It too was stirring, slowly stretching from its foetal position, its baby mouth opening in a yawn. The Keogh manifestations began to waver like smoke, like the heat haze over a summer road.
“Before you go!” Kyle was desperate. “Where do I start?”
He was answered by the faint but very definite wail of a waking infant. Keogh’s eyes opened wide. He tried to take a pace forward, towards Kyle. But the blue shimmer was breaking down, like a television image going wrong. In another moment it snapped into a single vertical line, like a tube of electric blue light, shortened to a point of blinding blue fire at eye-level—and blinked out.
But coming to Kyle as from a million miles away: Get in touch with Krakovitch. Tell him what you know. Some of it, anyway. You’re going to need his help.
“The Russians? But Harry—”
Goodbye, Alec. I’ll get … back … to … you.
And the room was completely still, felt somehow empty. The central heating made a loud click as it switched itself off.
Kyle sat there a long time, sweating a little, breathing deeply. Then he noticed the lights blinking on his desk communications, heard the gentle, almost timid rapping on his office door. “Alec?” a voice queried from outside. It was Carl Quint’s voice. “It … it’s gone now. But I suppose you know that. Are you all right in there?”
Kyle took a deep breath, pressed the command button. “It’s finished for now,” he told the breathless, waiting HQ. “You’d all better come in and see me. There’s time for an ‘O’-group before we knock it on the head for the day. There’ll be things you’re wanting to know, and things we have to talk about.” He released the button, said to himself: “And I do mean ‘things.’”
The Russian response was immediate, faster than Kyle might ever have believed. He didn’t know that Leonid Brezhnev would soon be wanting all the answers, and that Felix Krakovitch had only four months left of his year’s borrowed time.
They were to meet on the first Friday in September, these two heads of ESPionage, on neutral ground. The venue was Genoa, Italy, a seedy bar called Frankie’s Franchise lost in a labyrinth of alleys down in the guts of the city, less than two hundred yards from the waterfront.
Kyle and Quint got into Genoa’s surprisingly ramshackle Christopher Columbus airport on Thursday evening; their minder from British Intelligence (whom they hadn’t met and probably wouldn’t) was there twelve hours earlier. They’d made no reservations but had no problems getting adjoining rooms at the Hotel Genovese. where they freshened up and had a meal before retiring to the bar. The bar was quiet, almost subdued, where half-a-dozen Italians, two German businessmen, and an American tourist and his wife sat at small tables or at the bar with their drinks. One of the Italians who sat apart, on his own, wasn’t Italian at all; he was Russian, KGB, but Kyle and Quint had no way of knowing that. He had no ESP talent or Quint would have spotted him at once. They didn’t spot him taking photographs of them with a tiny camera, either. But the Russian had not gone entirely undetected. Earlier he’d been seen entering the hotel and booking a room.
Kyle and Quint were in a corner of the bar, on their third Vecchia Romagnas, and talking in lowered tones about their business with Krakovitch tomorrow, when the bar telephone tinkled. “For me!” Kyle said at once, starting upright on his barstool. His talent always had that effect on him: it startled him like a mild electric shock.
The bartender answered the phone, looked up. “Signer—” he began.
“Kyle??” said Kyle, holding out his hand.
The bartender smiled, nodded, handed him the phone, “Kyle?” he said again into the mouthpiece.
“Brown here,” said a soft voice. “Mr. Kyle, try not to act surprised or anything, and don’t look up or go all furtive. One of the people in the bar with you is a Russian. I won’t describe him because then you’d act differently and he’d notice it. But I’ve been on
to London and put him . through our computer. He’s dressed Eyetie but he’s definitely KGB, name of Theo Dolgikh. He’s a top field agent for Andropov. Just thought you’d like to know. There wasn’t supposed to be any of this stuff, was there?”
“No,” said Kyle, “there wasn’t.”
“Tut-tut!” said Brown. “I should be a bit sharp with your man when you meet him tomorrow, if I were you. It really isn’t good enough. And just for your peace of mind, if anything were to happen to you—which I consider unlikely—be sure Dolgikh’s a goner too, OK?”
“That’s very reassuring,” said Kyle grimly. He gave the phone back to the barman.
“Problems?” Quint raised an eyebrow.
“Finish your drink and we’ll talk about it in our rooms,” said Kyle. “Just act naturally. I think we’re on Candid Camera.” He forced a smile, swallowed his brandy at a gulp, stood up. Quint followed suit; they left the bar unhurriedly and went up to their rooms; in Kyle’s room they checked for electronic bugs. This was as much a job for their psychic sensitivity as for their five mundane senses, but the room was clean.
Kyle told Quint about the call in the bar. Quint was an extremely wiry man of about thirty-five, prematurely balding, soft-spoken but often aggressive, and very quick-thinking. “Not a very auspicious start,” he growled. “Still, I suppose we should have expected it. This is what your common-or-garden secret agent comes up against all the time, I’m told.”
“Well, it’s not on!” Kyle was angry. “This was supposed to be a meeting of minds, not muscle.”
“Do you know which one of them it was?” Quint was practical about it. “I think I can remember all of their faces. I’d know any one of them again if we should bump into him.”
“Forget it,” said Kyle. “Brown doesn’t want a confrontation. He’s geared to get nasty, though, if things go wrong for us.”
“Charmed, I’m sure!” said Quint.
