Joachim Hochheimer stayed where he was for a while, nodding. Then he stood up and said, ‘At least you know about it now. At least you have the option to try it, if you change your mind. Here – take my card. You can usually reach me at this number during the night.’
He put on his homburg hat and left the office. When he had gone, Klaus said, ‘What the hell was that all about?’
‘You were right,’ said Helen. ‘He was a screwball. One hundred and ten percent unadulterated FDA-rated screwball.’
She spent the next four and a half days checking every single mention of the roller-coaster Son of Beast since its official opening on May twenty-sixth, 2000 – on the Internet, in newspaper cuttings, in transcripts of TV and radio news reports.
When it had opened, Son of Beast had broken all kinds of records for wood-constructed roller-coasters. The tallest, the fastest, the only woodie with loops. It had cost millions of dollars to construct and used up 1.65 million board feet of timber.
She had almost given up when she came across an article from the Cincinnati Enquirer from April twenty-fifth two years previously. “Son of Beast Killed Our Baby” Man Loses Lawsuit.
‘A judge yesterday threw out a $3.5 million lawsuit by a Norwood man who claimed that a “violent and hair-raising” ride on the newly opened Son of Beast roller-coaster caused his pregnant girlfriend to miscarry their baby.
‘After his girlfriend confessed to the court that the roller-coaster ride had not been responsible for her losing the child, Judge David Davis told Henry Clarke, thirty-five, a realtor from Smith Road, Norwood, that he was dismissing the action against Paramount Entertainment.
‘Jennifer Prescott, thirty-three, admitted that she had booked in advance to have her pregnancy terminated at a private clinic in Covington, KY, and had used their ride on the King’s Island attraction to conceal what she had done from Mr Clarke.
‘Mrs Prescott is estranged from her husband Robert Prescott, also of Norwood. She told the court that she started an affair with Mr Clarke in November last year believing him to be a “kind and considerate person”.
‘But he became increasingly possessive and physically abusive, and she had already decided to leave him before she discovered that she was expecting his baby.
‘She invented the roller-coaster story because she was terrified of what Mr Clarke would do to her if he discovered that she had deliberately ended her pregnancy.’
Helen printed out a copy of the news story and took it into Colonel Melville’s office.
‘What do you think?’ she asked him.
Colonel Melville read the article, took out his handkerchief and loudly blew his nose. ‘Mr Clarke has a pretty good résumé, doesn’t he? A history of domestic violence. A motive for attacking pregnant women. And a reason for using the name Son of Beast. Let’s pick this joker up, shall we, and see what he has to say for himself?’
But there was no trace of Henry Clarke anywhere in Cincinnati or its surrounding suburbs. He had left his job at Friedmann, Kite Realty Inc only two weeks after he had lost his court action against Paramount. He had left his house in Norwood, too, leaving all of his furniture behind. His parents hadn’t heard from him, not even a phone call, and he had told none of his friends where he was going.
He had sold his Ford Explorer to a used-car dealership in Bridgetown, to the west of the city center, but he had taken cash for it and not exchanged it for another vehicle.
‘I have such a feeling about this guy,’ said Helen, the week before Christmas, when she and Klaus were sitting in the office eating sugared donuts and drinking coffee. ‘He’s vanished, but he hasn’t gone.’
The sky outside the office window was dark green, and it was snowing again. People with black umbrellas were struggling along the sidewalks like a scene out of a Dickens novel.
Helen went to the window and looked down at them. ‘That could be him, under any one of those umbrellas.’
‘Don’t let your imagination run away with you,’ said Klaus. ‘Do you want this last donut?’
Helen wasn’t letting her imagination run away with her. On Christmas morning the body of a young pregnant woman was discovered underneath the Riverfront Stadium. Her head had been wound round with four layers of Saran Wrap, and she had been raped. Her name was Clare Jefferson and she was twenty-three years old.
Helen stood underneath the gloomy concrete supports of the stadium, her hands in her pockets, watching the crime scene specialists at work. Klaus came up to her and said, ‘Happy Christmas. Did you open your presents yet?’
The red flashing lights on top of the squad cars were a lurid parody of Christmas-tree lights. Helen said, ‘Ten. Shit. Isn’t he ever going to stop?’
One of the crime scene specialists came over, holding up a roller-coaster ticket. ‘Thought you’d want to see this.’
She couldn’t sleep that night. She took two sleeping pills and watched TV until two thirty a.m., but her brain wouldn’t stop churning over and her eyes refused to close. She had arranged to see her parents tomorrow in Indian Hills Village, to make up for missing Christmas lunch, but she knew already that she wasn’t going to go.
How could she eat turkey and pull crackers when that young girl was lying in the mortuary, with her dead baby still inside her? Son of Beast had raped and suffocated ten women, but altogether he had murdered twenty innocent souls.
She switched on the light and went across to her dressing table. Tucked into the side of the mirror was Joachim Hochheimer’s visiting card. She took it out and looked at it for a long time. He was a lunatic, right? If sixteenth-century physicians had managed to cross a woman and a horseleech, surely it would have been common medical knowledge by now. At the very least it would have been mentioned in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.
And even if it really had happened, and Mathilde Festa really had managed to give birth to generations of descendants, surely the leech genes would have been bred out of them by now?
And even if they hadn’t been bred out of them, and it was still genetically possible for a woman to become pregnant with a creature like that, could any woman bring herself to do it?
She sat down on the end of her rumpled bed. She thought: if this is the only way that Son of Beast can be stopped from murdering more women and unborn babies, I’m going to have to find the courage to do it myself. I can’t ask anybody else. Not only that, it was the twenty-sixth day of the month, and she was ovulating. If there was any time to conceive a Vuldus baby, it was now.
She picked up her phone and punched out Joachim Hochheimer’s number.
He opened the door for her. The hallway was so gloomy that she could hardly see his face, only the reflection from his eyeglasses.
‘Come in. We thought that you might have changed your mind.’
‘I very nearly did.’
Inside, the apartment was overheated and stuffy and smelled of stale potpourri, cinnamon and cloves. It was furnished in a heavy Germanic style, with dusty brocade drapes and huge armchairs and mahogany cabinets filled with Eastern European china – plates and fruit bowls and figurines of fan dancers. It was on the top floor of a nineteenth-century commercial building overlooking Fountain Square, right in the heart of the city. Helen went to the window and looked out, and she could see the Tyler Davidson fountain, with the Genius of Water standing on top of it, with curtains of ice suspended from her outstretched hands. All around it, dozens of children were sliding on the slippery pavement.
‘The Vuldus family rented this apartment from the shipping insurance company who used to occupy the lower floors,’ said Joachim Hochheimer. ‘That was in 1871, and they have lived here ever since.’
He came up her and held out his hand. ‘May I take your coat?’
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m really not so sure I want to go through with this.’
He nodded. ‘It is a step into the totally unknown, isn’t it, which not many of us ever have the courage to take. If you feel you cannot do it, then of course you
must go home and forget that I ever suggested it.’
‘Is he here?’ asked Helen. ‘Richard Vuldus?’
‘Yes, he’s in the bedroom. He’s waiting for you.’
‘Maybe you can give him my apologies.’
‘Of course.’
For a long moment, neither of them moved. But then Helen’s cellphone played I Say A Little Prayer For You. She said, ‘Excuse me, Mr Hochheimer,’ and opened it up.
It was Klaus. ‘Foxley?’ he demanded. ‘Where the hell are you?’
‘I had an errand to run. I’m free now. What do you want?’
‘We just had a first report from the ME. Clare Jefferson was two hundred seventy-one days pregnant. About three days away from giving birth.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘Not only that, Foxley. She was expecting twins.’
Helen closed her eyes, but inside her mind she could clearly see Clare Jefferson lying on her back in the dark concrete recess underneath the Riverfront Stadium, her head swaddled in plastic wrap, her smock pulled up right over her breasts, and the red emergency lights flashing. Inside her swollen stomach, two dead babies had been cuddling each other.
‘Helen? You there?’
‘I’m here.’
‘Are you coming into headquarters?’
She cleared her throat. ‘Give me a little time, Klaus. Maybe an hour or so.’
‘OK. But we really need you here, soon as you can.’
Helen closed her cellphone and dropped it back into her coat pocket. Joachim Hochheimer was watching her intently and he could obviously sense that something had changed.
Helen said, quietly, and as calmly as she could, ‘Maybe you can introduce me to Richard.’
The bedroom was furnished in the same grandiose style as the rest of the apartment, with a huge four-poster bed with a green-and-crimson quilt, impenetrable crimson drapes, and a bow-fronted armoire with elaborate gilded handles. On either side of the bed hung oil paintings of naked nymphs dancing in the woods, their heads thrown back in lust and hilarity.
Richard Vuldus was standing by the window looking down at Fountain Square, wearing a long black cotton robe with very wide sleeves, as if he were a stage magician. He was tall, with long black curly hair that almost reached his shoulders. Helen saw a diamond sparkle in his left ear-lobe.
‘Richard,’ said Joachim Hochheimer. ‘Richard, this is the young lady I was telling you about.’
Richard Vuldus turned around. Helen couldn’t stop herself from taking a small, sharp intake of breath, almost like a hiccup. He was extraordinarily handsome, but in a strange, unsettling way that Helen had never seen before. His face was long and oval and very pale, and his eyebrows were arched, almost like a woman’s. His nose was thin and straight, and his lips were thin but gracefully curved, as if he had just made a deeply lewd suggestion, but said it in such a way that no woman could have resisted it.
He came up to Helen with his robes softly billowing. The cotton was deep black, but very fine, so that with the bedside lamp behind him, she could see the outline of his muscular body, and his half-tumescent penis.
‘Joachim!’ he smiled, holding out his hand to her. ‘You didn’t warn me that she was beautiful!’ His eyes were mesmerizing: his irises were completely black, and they glistened like polished jet. His voice had a slight European accent, so that ‘beautiful’ came out with five syllables, ‘bee-aye-oo-ti-fool.’
‘I’m Helen,’ said Helen. Her heart was beating so hard against her ribcage that it actually hurt.
‘I know,’ said Richard Vuldus. ‘And I know that this cannot be easy for you, in any way. But I assure you that I will do my best to make you feel at ease. Even if what we are doing today is not out of love for each other, it is out of love for innocent people, yes, and unborn babies who do not deserve to die?’
‘I – ah – I guess we could put it that way.’
‘Perhaps you would like a drink?’ Joachim Hochheimer asked her. ‘A glass of champagne?’
‘I have to go on duty later. Besides . . . if we’re going to do this, I’d rather just get it over with.’
‘Of course,’ said Richard Vuldus. He came closer to her and now she could see what Joachim Hochheimer had meant by mottled. There were faint dark-gray patches around his temples, and across his cheekbones, and down the sides of his neck. He had a smell about him, too. Not unpleasant – in fact it was quite attractive – but different from any other man she had ever known. Musky, but metallic, like overheated iron.
‘I’ll leave you alone now,’ said Joachim Hochheimer. ‘If there’s anything you need – if you have any more questions—’
‘There is just one thing,’ said Helen. ‘What do you get out of this? Don’t tell me you’re just being public-spirited.’
Joachim Hochheimer looked surprised. ‘I thought that was obvious, dear lady. What we get out of it is a new member of the Vuldus family – one with new blood. We have been trying for generation after generation to breed ourselves back to purity, and we are not too far away from that now. They cursed us, those physicians, all those centuries ago, by interbreeding us. But the time will eventually come when all of the monstrosity is bred out of us.’
Richard Vuldus took hold of her hand. His fingers were very cold, but they were strong, too. ‘You will be doing our family a great service, Helen, and we thank you and admire you for it.’
Helen nearly lost her nerve. Not only would she have to make love to this strange young man, she would have to carry his baby, and when she was nearly ready to give birth she would have to risk her own life and her baby’s life to trap Son of Beast. Even if she succeeded she would be faced with a nightmare. She would have to find a way of explaining to what had happened to Son of Beast, and a way of making sure that her new child escaped, and was safely returned to the Vuldus family.
It was madness. It was all madness. She was just about to turn around and ask for her coat back when Richard Vuldus laid both of his hands on her shoulders, and held her firmly, and looked directly into her eyes. His eyes were so black it was like looking into space.
‘The day we take no more risks, Helen, that is the day we lie down and die.’
She didn’t know what to say to him. Behind her, Joachim Hochheimer quietly closed the bedroom door.
‘Come,’ said Richard Vuldus. He led her over to the side of the bed, closer to the bedside lamp. He touched her hair, and her cheek. ‘Do you know what I see in you? I see a woman of such complexity. A woman who needs to show what she can do, but has not yet discovered a way to do it. Maybe this will be the way.’
He drew her soft blue-gray sweater over her head, so that for a moment she was blinded. When she emerged, he gently teased up her hair with his fingertips.
‘You should grow your hair,’ he told her. ‘You would look like a dryad with long hair. Free and wild. A child of nature.’
‘Can we just—?’
‘Of course.’
He tugged down the zipper at the side of her skirt, and unfastened the hook and eye. She stepped out of it, so that she was standing in front of him in nothing but her blue lacy bra and black pantyhose. He kissed her forehead, although she didn’t want kisses, in the same way that prostitutes never wanted kisses. This was business, not love. At least she supposed it was business. She began to feel light-headed and disoriented, as if she hadn’t eaten for two days.
With his long, chilly fingers, Richard Vuldus released the catch of her bra. Her breasts were small and rounded and high – drum majorettes’ breasts, Tony used to call them. Richard Vuldus touched her nipples and they crinkled and stiffened.
‘You should imagine now that we have been friends for a very long time,’ he murmured. ‘Maybe we knew each other at college. We were never lovers, but looked at each other from time to time and knew that if things had turned out differently, we might have been. Now, tonight, many years later, we have met again by accident.’
He slipped his fingers inside the waistband of her pantyhose
and gently tugged them down to her thighs. He cupped the cheeks of her bottom in both hands, and then he let his left hand stray round to her vulva. One long middle finger slipped between her lips, touching her clitoris so lightly that she barely felt it, but it was so cold that she became aware of her own wetness. She shivered – but against all of her instincts, she was aroused.
He lowered her into a sitting position on the bed. Then he knelt down in front of her, and drew her pantyhose all the way down and off her feet. As he did so, he took hold of each foot and kissed it in turn, his fingers working their way between her toes, his thumb pressing deep her insteps. She had gone to a reflexologist once, to relieve her tension, but she had never had her feet massaged like this before. Every time the ball of his thumb rolled around the bottom of her foot, she felt as if he were kneading her perineum, between her vagina and her anus, and the sensation was almost unbearably erotic. She began to feel delirious with pleasure.
He stood up, and leaned over her, and kissed her forehead. She found herself tilting her head back so that she could kiss his neck, and then his chin, and then his lips.
‘There is such darkness in the world,’ he whispered. ‘There is darkness so deep that sometimes we have despaired of ever finding our way out of it. But tonight you and I will light a light, no matter how small, and everything will gradually brighten, and we will see again.’
‘Kiss me,’ she said, and as he kissed her, she plunged her hands into the soft blackness of his robes, and felt his body underneath, his hard muscles, his ribs, his hips.
He straightened up, and drew the robes over his head like the great black shadow of a raven flying overhead. The robes fell softly on to the floor and he was naked in the lamplight. He was wide-shouldered, but his stomach was very flat, and Helen could see the definition of every pectoral and deltoid and biceps as if he were a living diagram of the human body. He was completely hairless – no chest hair, no underarm hair, no pubic hair – and his skin was smooth and faintly luminous, with a pattern of those darker patches down his sides and around his thighs.
Festival of Fear Page 23
