by Brian Lumley
The first one, groggy but game, was back on his feet. He’d picked up a jagged rock, now commenced circling Jazz while looking for an opening. Jazz was long-legged and knew that in certain circumstances the reach of his legs was greater than that of his arms—and in any case this was no boxing match He half-turned from the man with the rock, who at once stepped forward. But as Jazz turned away, so he bent his body sharply forward and downward from the waist, lifting and lashing out with his right foot. The move was so fast and so alien to any of the other’s previous fighting experience that he seemed hardly aware of its offensive character at all! But suddenly his arm was numb and the rock had been kicked from his grasp. Still in fluid motion, Jazz straightened up, continued his turn through its natural circle, and sliced the other stiff-fingered across the Adam’s apple. And again he pulled his punch.
Then he fell into a defensive crouch, looking to see what damage he’d done. And finally he relaxed, straightened up, stepped back and folded his arms.
Both opponents were on the ground, one clutching his groin and groaning, rocking himself to and fro, and the other choking, sucking at the air, massaging his throat. They’d recover soon enough, but it would be a long time before they’d forget.
For a moment there was a stunned silence, then Lardis began clapping his hands in spontaneous applause. Many of the men with him followed suit, but not Arlek’s ex-gang. They sat very quietly, looking anywhere except at Jazz. To them he offered: “Well, is there anyone else would like to try me?” But there were no takers.
“I leave their punishment to you, Jazz.” Lardis shouted. “What shall be done with them?”
“You’ve shamed them enough,” Jazz answered. “Arlek had his warnings, which he failed to heed. He’s paid for that. Now these men have been warned. If it’s my choice, then I say leave it at that.”
“Good!” Lardis barked his agreement.
Men at once stepped forward to help their two fallen colleagues to their feet. One of them was a mirror-bearer; he carefully laid his mirror down as he stooped to assist the man with the bruised throat. Jazz glanced at the large oval mirror where it lay face-down, then looked again—then pounced on it. “What?” he gasped. “What in all the—?”
Zek had been moving toward him. Now she came flying. “Jazz, what is it?”
“Lardis,” he called out, ignoring her for the moment. “Lardis, where did you get these mirrors?” And suddenly, quite out of character, his voice had a breathless, unbelieving quality.
Lardis came over. He was grinning ear to ear. “My new weapons!” he answered, with something of pride. “I went to seek out The Dweller—and found him! As a sign of our friendship, he gave me these. Fortunate for you that he did …”
Jazz picked up the mirror, stared incredulously at its backing. “Fortunate indeed!” he finally got the words out. “Maybe in more ways than you know.” He licked his lips, looked at Zek for her confirmation that his eyes weren’t playing games with him.
She looked at what he held in his suddenly trembling hands and her jaw dropped. “My God!” she said, very faintly.
For the mirror was unmistakably backed with chipboard, to which some Traveller had attached leather straps. What was more, it bore a manufacturer’s label, carrying the embossed legend:
MADE IN THE DDR.
KURT GEMMLER UND SOHN,
GUMMER STR.,
EAST BERLIN.
Chapter Fourteen
Taschenka—Harry’s Quest—The Trek Begins
TASCHENKA “TASSI” KIRESCU WAS NINETEEN, SMALL AND slim, completely unpolitical and very frightened.
Her skin was a little darker than that of the rest of her family; her eyes were large and very slightly tilted in an oval face; her hair was black and shiny to match her eyes, and she wore it in braids. Tassi’s father, Kazimir, whom she hadn’t seen since the night they were arrested, had used to explain jokingly that she was a throwback. “There’s Mongol blood in you, girl,” he’d told her, his eyes sparkling. “Blood of the great Khans who came this way all of those hundreds of years ago. Either that … or I don’t know your mother as well as I think I do!” Following which Anna, Tassi’s mother, would invariably sputter furiously and chase him with whatever she could lay her hands on.
That, of course, had been in the good times, all of a few weeks ago, which now felt like several centuries.
Tassi had known nothing of Mikhail Simonov’s real reason for coming to Yelizinka in the Ural foothills; the story she’d heard was that he was a city boy who’d been something of a wild one, that he’d always been getting himself into one sort of trouble or another, until finally he’d been sent logging as a punishment, a penance guaranteed to cool him off. Well, places didn’t come much cooler than Yelizinka, not in the winter, anyway; but Tassi wasn’t at all sure that Mikhail’s blood had been cooled by it. In fact they’d very quickly become lovers, in a strange sort of way. Strange because he’d always been quick to warn her that it couldn’t last, and that therefore she mustn’t fall in love with him; strange, too, in that she’d felt exactly the same way about it: he’d serve his time here and wipe his record clean, and then he’d move on, probably back to the city, Moscow, and she would find herself a husband from the logging communities around.
The attraction had been the loneliness she’d felt in him, and a contradictory bowstring tension lying just beneath the surface of him. For his part: once, in a dreamy, faraway moment, he’d told her that she was the only real thing in his life right now, that sometimes he felt the entire world and his place in it were just an enormous fantasy. And now she’d been told that he was a foreign spy, which to Tassi had seemed like the greatest possible fantasy—at first. But that had been before they took her down into the Perchorsk Projekt.
Since then … everything had turned into a real fantasy, a horror story, a living nightmare.
Her father had been incarcerated in the cell next door to hers and she knew he had been tortured on a number of occasions. She’d heard it all coming right through the sheet steel walls. The hoarse, terrified panting, the sharp slapping sounds, his anguished cries for mercy. But there’d been precious little of that last. Then, three days ago, there’d been one especially bad session; in the middle of it, at its height, the old man had screamed … and then, he’d stopped screaming—abruptly. Since when Tassi had heard nothing from him at all.
She couldn’t even bear to think what might have happened; she hoped the silence meant that her father was now in a hospital somewhere, recovering; she prayed that’s what it meant, anyway.
Almost as bad had been Major Khuv’s questioning. The KGB Major had not once laid a hand on her, but she’d had the suspicion that if he did he would hurt her terribly. The awful thing was that she didn’t have—didn’t know—anything to tell him. If she had then fear on its own would have obliged her to tell it, or if not fear certainly the desire to stop them hurting her father.
And then there had been the beast Vyotsky. Tassi hadn’t stood so much in fear of that one as in horror of him. And she had sensed—had known instinctively—that he enjoyed her horror, feeding upon it like a ghoul on rotting flesh! There had been little or nothing sexual about his treatment of her that time when he’d had her photographed naked with him. It had all been done for effect: partly to shame her, underline her vulnerability and make her feel the lowest of the low; partly to show her the power of her tormentor—that he could strip her naked, leer at her and paw her body, while she was incapable of lifting a finger to stop him—but mainly to aid him in the mental torture of someone else. The sadist Vyotsky had told her that the photographs were for the “benefit” of the British spy, Michael Simmons, whom she had known as Mikhail Simonov: “to drive the poor bastard out of his mind!” Plainly the idea had delighted Vyotsky. “He thinks he’s so cool—hah!” he’d said. “If this doesn’t get him boiling, then nothing will!”
The KGB bully was quite mad, Tassi was sure. Even though he hadn’t been back to torment her for qui
te some time now, still she would freeze whenever she heard someone approaching the door of her cell; and if the footsteps should pause … then her breathing would go ragged at once, and her poor heart begin beating that much faster.
It had started to beat that way just a little while ago, but on this occasion her visitor was only Vyotsky’s superior officer, Major Khuv.
Only Major Khuv! Tassi thought, as the suave KGB officer entered her cell. That was a laugh! But she wasn’t even close to laughing as he cuffed her wrist to his own, then told her:
“Taschenka, my dear. I want to show you something. It’s something I feel you really ought to see before I question you again at any great length. You’ll understand why soon enough.”
Stumbling along behind him, she made no effort to even guess where he was taking her. Essentially a peasant girl, to her the Projekt was a maze, a nightmare labyrinth of steel and concrete. Her claustrophobia had so disoriented her that she was lost from the first step she took across the threshold of her cell.
“Tassi,” Khuv murmured, leading her on through the almost deserted, dimly lit night corridors, “I want you to think very carefully. Much more carefully than you’ve been thinking so far. And if there’s anything at all you can tell me about the subversive activities of your brother, your father, the people of Yelizinka in general—and in particular about the underground, anti-Soviet organization to which any or all of them belonged … I mean, this really is going to be your last chance, Tassi.”
“Major,” she gasped the word out, “sir, I know nothing of any of these things. If my father was what you say he was—”
“Oh, he was,” Khuv glanced at her and nodded gravely. “You may be sure that … he was!”
It was the way he said the last word, its ominous emphasis. And in a moment it had Tassi’s free hand flying to her mouth. “What … what have you done to him?” her question was the merest whisper.
They had arrived at a door bearing a legend familiar to Khuv but one which Tassi had never seen before. She only glanced at it; it said something about a keeper and security classified persons only. Using his plastic ID tag, and as the door’s mechanisms were activated, Khuv turned to Tassi and answered her question:
“Done to him? To your father? Me? I have done nothing! He did it all himself—with his refusal to cooperate. A very stubborn man, Kazimir Kirescu …”
The door opened with a click. Khuv held it open a crack, called out: “Vasily, is all in order?”
“Oh, yes, Major,” came back an unctuous reply. “All ready.”
Khuv smiled at Tassi. The smile of a shark on its attack run. “My dear,” he said, shoving the door open wide and leading her into the room of the creature, “I’m going to show you something unpleasant, and tell you something even more unpleasant, and finally suggest the most unpleasant thing of all. Following which you shall have the rest of the night and all day tomorrow to think about where you stand. But no more time than that.”
The room was in near-darkness, to which the ceiling lights added only an eerie red glow. Tassi could make out the figure of a small man in a white smock, and the shape of a large oblong box or tank covered with a white sheet. The tank must be of glass, for a small white light in the wall behind it shone right through, casting on the sheet a milky, ghostly outline, the silhouette of something that flopped sluggishly inside the tank.
“Come closer,” Khuv drew Tassi toward the tank. “Don’t be afraid, it’s perfectly safe. It can’t hurt you—not yet.”
Standing beside the KGB Major, unconsciously clutching his arm in her innocence as she stared wide-eyed at the weird silhouette on the sheet, Tassi heard him say to the scientist in the white smock: “Very well, Vasily, let’s see what we have here.”
Vasily Agursky tugged at one corner of the sheet and it began to slide slowly from the tank, letting a little more of the subdued light shine through. Then the slide accelerated and the sheet whispered to the floor. The thing in the tank had its back to the three; feeling their eyes upon it, it glanced over one hunched shoulder. Tassi looked at it, stared at it in disbelief, shuddered and clung to Khuv that much more fiercely. He patted her hand almost absent-mindedly, in a fashion which in other circumstances might almost have seemed fatherly. Except this was not her father but the man who had let Karl Vyotsky terrorize her.
“Well, Tassi,” he said, his voice very low, very sinister, “and what do you think of that?”
She didn’t know what to think of it, and later she would give anything to be able to forget it entirely. But for now: the shape of the thing was vaguely manlike, though even in this poor light it was quite obviously not a man. It appeared to be feeding, using taloned hands to tear its food and stuff strips of raw red meat into its mouth. Its face was mainly hidden, but Tassi could see the way its jaws worked, and the baleful glare of the very human eye that peered back over its shoulder.
Hunched down, crouching or squatting there on the sandy floor of its tank, the thing might have been an ape; but its leprous skin was corrugated and its feet gripped the floor with too many hooked, skeletal digits. An appendage like a tail—which was not a tail—lay coiled behind it; Tassi gasped as she saw that this extraneous member, too, was equipped with a rudimentary, lidless, almost vacant eye.
The thing was entirely freakish, and as for what it fed upon …
Tassi gave a massive start, jumped back from the tank. The creature had snatched up more food from the floor of its glass cell—and a human arm had suddenly flopped into view, dangling from its terrible hands! As Tassi’s eyes bulged in horror, so the thing commenced munching on the dismembered arm’s hand and fingers.
“Steady, my dear,” said Khuv quietly, as the girl moaned and reeled beside him.
“But … but … it’s eating a … a—”
“A man?” Khuv finished it for her. “Or what’s left of one? Indeed it is. Oh, it will eat any sort of meat, but it appears to like human flesh the best.” And to Agursky: “Vasily, do you have something for Tassi?”
The strange little scientist came forward, pressed something—several somethings—into her hand. A wallet? A ring? An ID card? And however familiar these things were, for a long moment her mind wouldn’t recognize them, refusing to make the final, terrible connection. Then—
She felt dizzy and put her free hand on the glass wall of the tank to steady herself, and her eyes went from the items in her hand to the thing where it crouched. Horrified but at the same time fascinated, she stared and stared at it. Were these men trying to tell her that … that this creature was eating her father?!
Agursky had gone to one side of the room, where suddenly he switched up the lighting. Everything sprang into sharp, almost dazzling definition. The creature threw its food to one side and turned snarling toward Khuv and Tassi where they both shrank instinctively back.
And that was when she fainted and would have fallen to the floor if her wrist hadn’t been cuffed to the Major’s, and if he hadn’t turned quickly to catch up her sagging body in his arms.
For the thing in the glass tank was … oh, it was something hellish, yes, nightmarish. But the greater nightmare was this: that however monstrous and warped, however altered and alien. that thing’s caricature of a face was when it had snarled at her, still she’d recognized it as the face of her father!
Jazz Simmons’s Georgian terrace bachelor flat in Hampstead was colourful, cluttered, and when Harry Keogh had first moved in a little over twenty-four hours ago it had been bitterly cold and the telephone was off. He’d had E-Branch clear it for him to use the place as his base, and he’d warned them not to come bothering him. He had Darcy Clarke’s word that he could play the entire game his way, without interference.
His way had been to attempt to absorb something of the atmosphere of the place first. Maybe he could get to know Simmons by understanding how he’d lived: his tastes, likes and dislikes, and his routine. Not his work routine, his private routine. Harry didn’t believe that a man was what he did
professionally; he believed a man was what he thought privately.
The first thing that had impressed itself upon him was the clutter. Privately, Jazz Simmons had been a very untidy man. Maybe it was his way of relaxing. When you’re trained to a knife-edge you have to have a place where you can sheathe yourself now and then, or else you might cut yourself. This had been Jazz’s unwinding place.
The “clutter” consisted of books and magazines dropped any and everywhere, more off the bookshelves than on them. Spy-thrillers (not unnaturally, Harry supposed) lay alongside piles of foreign language publications, most of the latter being Russian. There was also, beside Jazz’s bed, a dusty, foot-thick stack of Pravdas—topped by a copy of the latest Playboy. Harry had had to smile: hardly the most compatible meeting of ideologies!
Also in the bedroom were dust-free framed photographs of Jazz’s father and mother; on the wall a life-size Marilyn Monroe poster; a cabinet standing close to the window, containing cups won in various ski events; and again affixed to the wall a battered pair of bright yellow skis and sticks which must be of some special significance. A recessed cupboard in a narrow passageway had showered Harry with an accumulation of skiing requisites, and beside Jazz’s video cassette recorder were haphazardly stacked films of all the main winter athletics for the last five years. While Jazz hadn’t been available to participate, still he hadn’t been willing to miss out entirely.
