Hymn

by Graham Masterton

  ‘He’s not going to burn us, all right?’

  ‘But if he does . . . I just want you to know that what you’ve given me . . . well, it’s worth more than anything that Otto and Helmwige have ever given me. It’s worth the world.’

  ‘Draw my bath!’ Helmwige screamed.

  Franklin went to the door. ‘Three o’clock,’ he promised. He held up the doorkey. ‘And just to show you that I mean what I say . . . I won’t lock the door.’

  He hesitated, bit his lip. ‘If I do that . . . you won’t escape without me?’

  ‘I trust you,’ said Lloyd. ‘Don’t you think that you can trust me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Franklin replied, suddenly hesitant. He obviously wasn’t used to making up his own mind about anything.

  ‘Do you have any choice, but to trust me?’ Lloyd suggested.

  Franklin thought about it, and then he said, ‘No, I guess I don’t.’ He tried to give Lloyd a brave smile, and then he left the room and closed the door behind him. Lloyd waited to hear the key turning in the lock, but it didn’t. Franklin had kept his word. One way or another, they were going to be free.

  He heard water running like muffled thunder out of the hot-water tank. Then footsteps on the stairs, and creaking boards on the landing, and Helmwige talking as if she were slightly drunk. He lay on his mattress without moving. He had tried to sound confident about escaping, but he wasn’t at all sure that Franklin was bright enough to be able to get them out of the house, or that Otto and Helmwige would be sleeping deeply enough to allow them to go. If they could just get out of range of Otto’s fire-raising, they would be safe. But he wasn’t at all sure how far away that actually was. For all he knew, Otto only had to think hard enough, and he could ignite a fire in the next county, or the next state, or anywhere he liked in the world. His talent for fire-raising was the one secret that Otto had refused to discuss.

  Still, Lloyd recalled that when Otto had set fire to his steering-wheel, he had taken two or three steps forward, as if to bring himself closer. And when he had chased them out of the 24-hour drugstore in Del Mar, his arrow of fire had been able to pursue them only for thirty or forty feet.

  If they could just get clear of the house, he guessed that they would probably be safe. Then all they had to do was to find somewhere safe to hide and to wait for the solstice—wait for Otto and Helmwige to perform the ceremony of Transformation—and then rescue Celia and Mike Kerwin, too.

  Nothing to worry about. Nothing that the Lone Ranger couldn’t have handled, or maybe Dirty Harry. Lloyd would have loved Otto to make his day.

  After a few minutes, he eased himself up off the mattress and went to the door. He turned the handle, and found that Franklin had been telling the truth. He had left it unlocked. Lloyd opened it two or three inches, and listened. At the far end of the landing, the bathroom door was ajar, and he could hear splashing and murmuring, and then Helmwige saying, ‘Gently, gently, du bist so plump.’

  He hesitated for a short while, and then he opened the door wider, and crept out into the corridor. It sounded as if Otto was still downstairs, writing. The whirling sounds of The Ride of the Valkyries came from the record-player in the living-room, played at top volume, and Lloyd heard the clinking of Otto’s brandy-bottle as he poured himself another drink.

  Holding his breath, he tiptoed along the corridor until he reached the half-open bathroom door. Cautiously, he put his eye to the crack in the door. The whole room was foggy with rose-smelling steam, and from where he was standing he could see only the edge of a large white enameled bathtub, a bottle of Vidal Sassoon shampoo, and a glistening pink curve which he took to be Helmwige’s shoulder. Helmwige was sitting with her back to him, so he took the risk of leaning across the doorway and peering right into the room.

  Franklin was kneeling beside the bathtub wearing nothing but white Fruit-of-the-Loom shorts. He was facing the door and he saw Lloyd at once. He frowned, and mouthed the word. ‘Wha . . .?’ but Lloyd gave him a quick wave to reassure him that everything was fine, and that he wasn’t trying to escape just yet.

  There was nothing that Franklin could do, in any case. Helmwige was watching him too intently. He was massaging her shoulders with soap, while she ran her hands up and down his muscular forearms, and kept saying,’Mmmmmmm, that’s better . . . gently, gently.’

  Lloyd watched as Franklin rubbed more soap on his hands, and then began to lather Helmwige’s enormous breasts. Her wet skin squeaked as he grasped her breasts tightly, and rolled her nipples between finger and thumb. She continued to murmur, and to splash, and to run her hands up and down his arms.

  ‘Harder, you can do that harder. Pinch me! I like to be pinched! Ohhh . . .’

  Franklin rinsed her breasts with a huge natural sponge. Then he scooped his arm into the bath, so that his hand was right underneath her bottom, and he raised her hips right out of the water. She had heavy thighs, and a rounded stomach, but she was still in voluptuous shape for a woman who must have been immortalized when she was well into her forties.

  ‘You must make sure that I am completely clean,’ she told Franklin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Franklin. His voice was flat. He glanced at Lloyd but Lloyd remained where he was, not moving. Downstairs the Valkyries continued to thrash and to tumble, although it sounded as if this part of the record had suffered from years of being played almost every evening.

  Helmwige reached down with both hands into her dark blonde pubic hair, and opened her vulva as wide as she could, so that Franklin could soap his finger and slip it inside. ‘Ohhh, höchst erfreulich,’ she murmured.

  Franklin slid his finger in and out of her, and she threw back her head and moaned and warbled like a dove. Then he slid in a second finger, and a third. Helmwige gasped and splashed, and pulled herself even wider open. At last, panting, his muscular chest glistening with perspiration, Franklin worked his entire soapy hand up into her, right up to the wrist.

  Helmwige made an extraordinary growling deep-breathing noise that reminded Lloyd of a sea-lioness. She gripped Franklin’s wrist fiercely in both hands. Then she suddenly shuddered, and shook, and screamed out loud. The bathwater churned as wildly as if it were full of piranha fish. Fascinated and horrified by what he had seen, but strangely aroused, too, Lloyd turned quickly away. He tiptoed back along the corridor until he reached the door of Kathleen’s room. Franklin had left the key in the lock, so all he had to do was quickly to turn it, open the door, and slip inside.

  Kathleen was awake and sitting up in bed. When he came in, she switched on the bedside lamp, a cheap clip-on with a broken plastic shade. ‘Lloyd? What’s happening? How did you get out? Somebody’s screaming!’

  ‘Don’t worry about that—that’s Helmwige, having a little bathtime fun. Listen—that boy came into my room a few minutes ago. It seems like he’s had it up to here with Otto and Helmwige, and he wants us all to make a break for it.’

  ‘You mean escape? Do you think you can trust him?’

  ‘I don’t see any reason not to. He’s not exactly Albert Einstein, but he seems willing enough. And he doesn’t have any reason to double-cross us, does he?’

  ‘But what if Otto catches us? He’ll burn us alive!’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure that he’s not planning on doing that anyway. He’s determined to start where Hitler left off, and, believe me, he’s not going to let anybody stand in his way.’

  Kathleen brushed back her hair with her hand. ‘He’ll never manage it, though, will he? The police are bound to track him down sooner or later.’

  Lloyd shrugged. ‘I’m not so sure. He’s got people who can burn you as soon as look at you—people who can live for ever. How are you going to stand up against people like that? And how many other people are going to be tempted to join him, once they realize that they really could be immortal? Besides, you’ve got Otto himself to contend with. You heard what he d
id to Sergeant Houk. He could do that to anybody who tries to stop him. One glance and you’re humanburger.’

  He heard water emptying out of the bathtub, and the sound of voices. ‘Listen—I’d better get back to my room. The plan is that we sneak out of the house at three o’clock in the morning, when Otto and Helmwige are really out of it. Franklin is going to wake us up, if we’re asleep.’

  ‘Franklin? I thought he didn’t have a name.’

  ‘I christened him. He was as pleased as a dog with two tails.’

  ‘Lloyd . . . do you really believe that we’re going to be able to get away? I mean, safely? If anything should happen to me . . . well, I don’t know what Thomas would do.’

  ‘Do you want to stay?’ Lloyd asked her.

  Kathleen shook her head. ‘I guess it’s just that I never felt frightened before. Not like this.’

  ‘Franklin told me that Otto wouldn’t harm Celia at all, if I escaped. I guess he wouldn’t harm your husband, either.’

  Kathleen said, ‘That man lying out in the garage, Lloyd—that isn’t Mike Kerwin. Leastways, it’s not the Mike Kerwin I married. The Mike Kerwin I married was burned to death on that bus in the desert.’

  Lloyd saw the tears glisten in her eyes. He couldn’t help admiring her bravery and her realism. He hadn’t yet accepted that he had lost Celia for ever. Somehow, with a Disneylike optimism, he had kept on believing that the Celia he had hoped to marry was still there; that she would reappear just as she was before and say, ‘Fooled you!’

  But he knew now that he was going to have face the truth. Celia had been burned, Celia was gone. The creature that had taken her place was a creature of fire and sorcery, a creature that he would never be able to accept back into his life. He could understand why Celia had chosen youthful immortality over a gradually worsening disability and an early death. But the more he learned about Otto and his Salamanders, the more difficult he found it to come to terms with the fact that Celia had embraced his idea of a master race. The Celia that Lloyd had loved would never have accepted a single minute of life that had been bought at the price of thousands of innocent people being deliberately incinerated.

  He had lost Celia now, lost her for good. The world had had enough of camps, enough of gas-chambers, enough of ovens.

  Kathleen must have sensed what he was feeling, because she put her arms around him and laid her head against his chest. Tears slid down his cheeks and dropped into her hair like warm pearls.

  ‘Ssh, it’s over,’ she said.

  Lloyd wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I guess I’ve been the victim of my own bravado.’

  She kissed his cheek. ‘I’ll see you at three.’

  Lloyd went to the door, listened, then opened it. He returned to his room, quietly closed the door behind him, and lay back down on his mattress.

  He hadn’t expected to be able to sleep, so he had recited the lyrics of all the rock songs that he could think of, then all the poems that he could remember (By the shore of Gitche Gume . . . by the shining Big Sea Water . . .); then the address section of his Filofax, with the full telephone numbers and zip codes of all of his friends; then the Padres’ batting averages for the past three seasons.

  He was only aware that it was three o’clock when he felt Franklin shaking his shoulder and whispering, ‘Mr Denman? Mr Denman? Wake up, Mr Denman, it’s time to go.’

  He stared into the darkness. ‘Is it three o’clock already?’ he asked, his mouth thick and woolly. He sat up, and rubbed his eyes. ‘Jesus, I dreamed I was having dinner at Mr A’s.’

  ‘Come on,’ breathed Franklin. ‘as quietly as you can. Otto is so deeply asleep that he’s practically dead, but Helmwige is very jumpy.’

  Lloyd cleared his throat. ‘I’m not surprised, the way she was playing in the tub tonight.’

  ‘She will do anything and everything,’ said Franklin. ‘What does she care, she’s going to live for ever? She’s a morphine addict, Hermann Goering got her on to morphine during the war. But she takes every kind of drug you can imagine. She has sex with anybody she feels like it. She doesn’t have to care about AIDS. She will perform any kind of sex act you can imagine, and some that you can’t. I’ve seen her have sex with two dogs, while Otto watched her and ate flies.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Lloyd. He didn’t particularly want to hear any more. He stood up, and caught his head on the sharply sloping ceiling. He swore more foully than he had sworn for years, not so much because it hurt but because he was tense and tired and frightened. In some ways, Helmwige frightened him more than Otto. At least Otto was mortal, at least Otto could be killed. But how could you fight against somebody who had no regard for their own life whatsoever?

  Franklin opened the door, and crept out into the corridor, with Lloyd following closely behind. They crossed to Kathleen’s room, and Franklin quietly turned the key. Kathleen must have heard them whispering, because she was waiting for them right behind the door.

  ‘Are they asleep?’ she breathed. Lloyd nodded, and took hold of her hand.

  Quickly and silently they tiptoed along the corridor, past the half-open bathroom, and then past Helmwige’s bedroom, which was wide open. By the light of a flickering black-and-white television movie, they could see Helmwige sprawled naked on her frilled four-poster bed, her legs wide apart, her mouth open. She was breathing coarsely and irregularly, as if she were having a nightmare. The movie was The Thin Man, with William Powell and Myrna Loy.

  ‘I read you were shot five times in the tabloid.’

  ‘It’s not true. He didn’t come near my tabloid.’

  With infinite care, they went downstairs. Franklin was so heavy that the treads squeaked whenever he put his weight on them, and Lloyd winced. But at last they reached the darkened hallway, and the house remained silent.

  Franklin beckoned Lloyd and Kathleen to come closer. ‘All we have to do now is get out of the front door, head for the car, get into it, and go.’ He held up the car keys. ‘I lifted these from Helmwige’s purse this afternoon.’

  ‘What about the other cars?’ asked Lloyd.

  ‘Only the coupé works, and I let down the tyres.’

  ‘Where does Otto sleep?’ Lloyd whispered. ‘Will he hear us leave?’

  ‘Oh, he’ll hear us leave all right. He works in the living-room every night till one or two o’clock, playing his records and drinking brandy. Then he goes to sleep on the couch, fully dressed. He doesn’t even bother to wash.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ Lloyd replied. ‘He’s already won the Lloyd Denman Award for the Man Most Likely to Make You Barf On Sight.’

  ‘Okay, let’s go,’ Franklin told them. ‘But let’s make it real quick.’

  He released the security chain, and then silently slid back the bolts. He opened the latch, and the front door swung open with the faintest of creaks. Outside, the night was as black as only a Southern California night can be. They could barely distinguish the faint gleam on the roof of Otto’s Mercedes sedan.

  ‘Okay, go!’ whispered Franklin. Together, they ran across the porch, into the drive, and quarter-backed their way between the parked Mercedes. Kathleen caught her knee against the rear bumper of the 380SL, and hissed, ‘Shit!’ but they reached the sedan, wrenched open the doors, and threw themselves into the leather-upholstered seats. Franklin pushed the key into the ignition, roared the car into life, and switched on the headlights.

  ‘Oh, God, no!’ said Kathleen, in panic.

  The headlights had instantly illuminated the thin uncompromising figure of Otto, standing in front of them in a short-sleeved shirt and grey slacks, his arms folded, his withered mouth puckered with anger.

  ‘Run the bastard down!’ Lloyd shouted at Franklin. But Franklin sat in the driver’s seat staring at Otto in complete paralysis. Franklin had been bred by Otto and raised by Otto. Franklin’s will had bee
n subjugated by Otto from the moment he was born.

  Otto walked up to the side of the car and held out his hand. ‘The keys, please,’ he demanded.

  Eighteen

  ‘Franklin, go!’ yelled Lloyd, and yanked the Mercedes’ gearshift into drive.

  Franklin stared at him as if he didn’t recognize him. ‘I. . . what . . .?’

  ‘Go, Franklin, go for Christ’s sake!’

  Otto snapped, ‘Don’t you dare!’

  But at that critical instant, Lloyd had one call on Franklin’s loyalty that Otto couldn’t match. He had given Franklin a name.

  ‘Go, Franklin, go!’ he shouted at him, almost screaming.

  Franklin slammed his foot on to the Mercedes’ gas pedal, and the huge sedan swerved and snaked, its rear tyres blasting out pebbles and dust. Otto made a desperate bid to snatch the keys out of the ignition, but he couldn’t quite reach them. However, he seized hold of the steering-wheel and wouldn’t release his grip, and as the Mercedes roared out of the driveway, and bucked on to the road, he was still clutching it, running at first, then allowing himself to be dragged.

  His white face glared into the window of the moving car like a nightmare. They had reached over twenty miles an hour on the curve toward Rancho Santa Fe, and they were still accelerating. ‘Du bist ein Verräter!’ he shrieked at Franklin. ‘Wo ist deine Dankbarkeit?’

  Franklin whimpered in terror, but Lloyd continued to shout at him, ‘Keep going! Keep going! He can’t hurt you now!’

  ‘Verräter!’ cried Otto. ‘Schon bist du Tot!’

  Franklin frantically twisted the steering-wheel from side to side, trying to dislodge Otto’s grip, and the car rolled and dipped from one side of the road to the other, its tyres giving out a chorus of continuous howls. But Otto hung on, his shoes dragging and scrabbling on the tarmac, showers of sparks flying from his heels.

  They slewed into the brightly lit streets of Rancho Santa Fe, with Otto still holding on.

  ‘Stop the car, you traitor!’ he panted at Franklin. ‘Stop the car or I’ll kill you now!’