Festival of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  His penis was fully erect now, and it was enormous, with a gaping plum-colored glans, already glistening with fluid. Helen reached out and took hold of the shaft, and gripped it tight, and his distended veins felt like the twisted creepers around a tree trunk.

  She lifted her head, so that she could kiss his penis, but he gripped her shoulder and pressed her back. ‘Not that way,’ he said. ‘We must conserve everything we can.’

  She said, ‘You’re incredible. I never met a man like you before. Ever.’

  He climbed on to the bed next to her. He said nothing, but firmly turned her over on to her stomach. Then he knelt behind her and took hold of her hips and lifted her into a crouching position.

  ‘I am the father of your child,’ he said. ‘I am nothing more than that.’

  With that, he parted the cheeks of her bottom with his thumbs, and positioned the head of his penis between the lips of her vulva. Helen lowered her head. She felt as if the pattern on the quilt were alive, and that its swirls and curlicues were crawling underneath her like green-and-crimson centipedes.

  Richard Vuldus slowly pushed his erection inside her, and it felt so large that she couldn’t help herself from gasping. He drew himself out again, hesitated for a second, and then pushed himself inside her a second time, so deeply that she could feel his naked testicles against her lips.

  God, she had never had sex like this before, ever, with anybody. She almost felt as if she were going mad. The blood pumped through her head so hard that she could hear it, and she started to tremble. Not only was her body completely naked, but her soul, too. She felt subjugated, dominated, but lusted-after, and needed. She pressed her head down against the pillow and reached behind her with both hands, spreading the cheeks of her bottom even wider so that Richard Vuldus could penetrate her deeper. There was a brutal urgency in Richard Vuldus’ love-making, and he forced his penis into her faster and faster. She was so wet that they were both smothered in slippery juice.

  Helen could feel an orgasm beginning to rise between her legs, and her thighs started to quiver. She squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth and gripped the quilt tight. All the same, it hit her before she expected it, like a huge black locomotive coming out of the darkness with its headlight glaring and its whistle screaming.

  ‘Ahhhh!’ she shouted. ‘Ohmygod ohymygod aaahhhhhh!’

  As Helen quaked and jumped, Richard Vuldus climaxed too. She actually felt the glans of his penis bulging, and the first spurt of sperm. He pumped again, and again, and again, as if he had been storing up this semen for years, and could at last release it, every drop of it, and find relief.

  He continued to kneel behind her for a few seconds, his hands grasping her hips, but then he slowly rolled over and lay on his back. Helen rolled over, too, and lay close beside him.

  ‘You, Richard Vuldus, are simply amazing.’ She reached out to touch his lips with her fingertip.

  He took hold of her wrist and moved her hand away, gently but firmly. ‘This was not for love, Helen. Not my love for you, nor your love for me. This was for justice, and revenge.’

  She stared at him, and then she sat up. ‘You mean to tell me that meant nothing to you?’

  ‘It meant everything. More than you can know.’

  She hesitated for a moment. Then she climbed off the bed and retrieved her clothes from the floor.

  ‘Thank you, Helen,’ he said, softly.

  She pulled her sweater over her head. ‘Don’t mention it. I’ll let you know if you’ve succeeded in knocking me up.’

  When she left the apartment, Joachim Hochheimer took hold of her hand, and tried to raise it to his lips, but Helen pulled herself away.

  ‘Thank you, gnädige Fraulein,’ he said. ‘We are forever in your debt.’

  Toward the end of January, she began to feel tired, and her breasts began to feel swollen, but she was still not convinced that Richard Vuldus had succeeded in making her pregnant. He had made love to her only once, after all; and besides that, she was beginning to convince herself that she had dreamed the whole incident. She had gone back to Fountain Square several times during the evening, and she had seen no lights in the Vuldus apartment. She had called Joachim Hochheimer, too, but nobody had picked up.

  ‘What’s bugging you?’ Klaus asked her, as they sat in First Watch café one morning, eating bacado omelets and drinking horseshoe coffee.

  ‘Please?’

  ‘I said, what’s bugging you? You haven’t heard a word I’ve been saying.’

  ‘I don’t know. Sorry. I feel weird.’

  They had driven only a few blocks down Walnut Street before she tugged at his coat and said, ‘Stop the car! Stop the car, please!’

  She just managed to open the door and lean over the gutter before she was sick – half-chewed bacon and avocado and eggs, in a steaming gravy of hot coffee.

  That evening, she took a home pregnancy test, and yes, it was positive. She stood staring at herself in her bathroom mirror. My God, what have I done? What kind of a baby is growing inside me?

  She went back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. At that moment the phone rang.

  ‘Detective Foxley? Helen? This is Joachim Hochheimer speaking.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Everything is well, yes?’

  ‘It depends on your point of view, Mr Hochheimer.’

  ‘You are expecting Richard’s child, is what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Hochheimer.’

  ‘Thank you, dear lady, from the bottom of my heart.’

  She put the phone down. Almost immediately, it rang again.

  ‘Foxley? It’s Klaus. S.O.B. has done it again.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Serpentine Wall, Yeatman’s Cove. Do you want to meet me down there?’

  ‘On my way.’

  She pulled on her sweater and took her duffel coat out of the closet. She was just about to leave the apartment when her stomach tightened and she felt a rising surge of nausea. She hurried into the bathroom, knelt down in front of the toilet, and brought up a fountain of chili and Cheddar cheese.

  Klaus said, ‘You’re pregnant? You’re kidding me? By whom? You didn’t tell me you had a new boyfriend.’

  ‘It’s nobody I’ve ever talked about.’

  ‘So what are you going to do? You’re not going to have the kid, surely? How are you going to be a single mom and a detective at the same time? I mean – I’m assuming that the guy isn’t going to marry you. Maybe he is.’

  ‘No, he’s not going to marry me.’

  Klaus swirled the remains of his beer around his glass and shook his head. ‘You’re full of surprises, Foxley. I have to give you that.’

  ‘I surprise myself, most of the time.’

  ‘Well,’ said Klaus, ‘just make sure that you check with me before you choose your maternity clinic.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  He took a roughly scrawled diagram out of his inside pocket. ‘I may be wrong, but I’ve been looking into the records of the various clinics which were attended by Son of Beast’s victims. There’s nothing in any of them to suggest that Son of Beast could have hacked into any medical records. But today I realized that his eighth victim was a patient at the same clinic as his first victim, and his ninth victim was a patient at the same clinic as his second victim, and so on. It appears to me that he has a list of seven clinics and that he’s picking his victims from each clinic in rotation. I could be wrong, but it’s beginning to look like a pattern.’

  Helen took the diagram and frowned at it. ‘So he wouldn’t necessarily need any access to medical records. He simply goes to the next clinic on his list and follows his victim out of the building when she leaves.’

  ‘It’s beginning to look that way.’

  ‘But why should he do that? That means that we can predict which clinic he’s going to pick his next victim from, and we can stake it out.’

  ‘That’s right. And the next one is . . . The Christ Hospi
tal on Auburn.’

  But when winter melted away, so did Son of Beast. After the killing of a thirty-one-year-old mother-to-be at Yeatman’s Cove, there were no more Moms-to-Be murders for seven months, and they began to wonder if he had given up, or left Cincinnati for good.

  Eventually, Colonel Melville decided that the stake-out at The Christ Hospital was no longer cost-effective, and assigned the surveillance team to other duties.

  For Helen, that summer seemed to last for ever, one sweltering day after another, week after week, month after month. The city was suffocating, and this year there was a teeming plague of cicadas, sawing away noisily day and night, and penetrating every crevice of every building, cramming themselves into office ventilation systems, and tangling themselves in people’s hair. The windshield of Helen’s Pontiac was permanently smeared with cicada guts.

  Meanwhile, the baby inside her grew and grew. Her sickness passed, but she still felt exhausted, especially when the baby started to wriggle and heave inside her all night. Every Thursday afternoon she went to The Christ Hospital, waited for fifteen minutes in the ladies’ room, reading a book, and then left. If Son of Beast were still in the city, watching and waiting for his next opportunity, she wanted to make sure that she gave him a victim with regular patterns of behavior.

  She didn’t actually attend the maternity clinic. This birth had to be off the books, unregistered. All the same, she bought books on pregnancy and made sure that she took plenty of vitamins and kept her blood pressure down. She developed a desperate craving for five-way chili – spaghetti, chili, cheese, kidney beans and onions – and she found it a daily struggle to keep her weight down.

  It was a lonely time. She kept away from her friends and her family because she wanted as few of them as possible to know that she was expecting a baby. And as the months went by, and Son of Beast failed to reappear, it seemed to be increasingly likely that she had suffered this pregnancy for no purpose.

  Only Klaus came round regularly to see her, and each time he brought her flowers, or a box of candies. In August, when she was eight months’ pregnant, he brought her a little blue-and-white knitted suit, with a hood.

  ‘How do you know it’s going to be a boy?’ she asked him.

  ‘Because I can’t imagine you having a girl.’

  On a thundery afternoon in the first week of September she drove up to The Christ Hospital as usual and parked her car. It was only four thirty p.m. but the sky was black, and lightning was flickering over the hills. She was walking toward the hospital entrance when she noticed a man in a gray raincoat standing under the trees. She made a point of not looking at him directly, but when she went through the revolving doors into the hospital lobby, she quickly turned her head, and she could see that he had been watching her.

  She went to the ladies’ room and sat in one of the cubicles. Baby was being hyperactive today, churning and turning inside her. There was no reason to suppose that the man in the gray raincoat was Son of Beast, but somehow she felt that the time had arrived, that the cogs of her destiny were all beginning to click into place. Baby turned over again, and she began to feel deeply apprehensive.

  She waited for twenty minutes. Then she left the ladies’ room and walked across the lobby and out of the revolving door. It was raining, hard, so that the asphalt driveway in front of the hospital was dancing with spray. There was no sign of the man in the gray raincoat.

  She pulled up her hood and hurried toward the parking lot as fast as she could. Lightning crackled, almost directly overhead, followed by a deafening barrage of thunder. She reached her car and unlocked the door, and was just about to climb in when somebody’s arm wrapped itself around her neck and lifted her upward and backward, throttling her.

  ‘You’re going to do what I tell you!’ said a thick, sinus-blocked voice.

  ‘I gah – my baby – gah – can’t—!’

  ‘You’re going to come around to the back of the car and you’re going to open the trunk and you’re going to climb in. You got that?’

  ‘I can’t – breathe – can’t—!’

  With his right hand, the man reached around and twisted her car keys away from her. ‘If you don’t do what I say, I’m going to cut your belly right open, here and now. Give me your cell.’

  ‘Please – I – gah—’

  ‘Are you going to do what I tell you? Give me your cell!’

  The man was compressing her larynx so hard that Helen could see nothing but scarlet, and stars. She fumbled in her pocket and took out her cellphone, and handed it to him.

  ‘You’re going to do what I tell you, right? And you’re not going to scream, and you’re not going to try to run away?’

  She nodded.

  The man shuffled her round to the back of the car, as if they were a clumsy pair of dancing partners.

  ‘Open the trunk. Go on, open the trunk. Now get in there. Hurry it up, before somebody sees you. And don’t try anything stupid.’

  Awkwardly, she lifted one foot into the trunk. As she did so, however, she twisted around and yanked her gun out from under her coat.

  ‘Freeze!’ she screamed. But the man was too close to her, and far too quick. He grabbed her wrist with both hands and twisted it around so hard that it ripped her tendons, and the gun clattered on to the ground.

  ‘You’re a cop?’ he shouted at her. ‘You’re a fucking cop?’

  He pushed her violently into the trunk, next to the spare wheel, and shoved her head down.

  ‘You’ve been trying to trap me? Is that it? You got yourself pregnant on purpose, just to trap me?’

  Helen tried to lift her head but he jammed it down again. Then he slammed the trunk lid and she was left in darkness.

  She heard him climb into the driver’s seat and start the engine. Then he pulled out of the hospital parking-lot and made his way toward Auburn Avenue. As he drove, Helen was swung right and left and jostled up and down. She tried to work out which direction he was taking, and how far they had driven, but after a while she gave up.

  He seemed to drive her for hours, and for miles. But at last he slowed down, almost to a crawl, and she could hear traffic, and sirens, and people’s footsteps. He must have taken her downtown, to the city center.

  He turned, and turned again, and then she felt a bump, and the car drove slowly down a steep, winding gradient. An underground parking facility, she guessed.

  At last the car stopped, and she heard the man climbing out. The trunk opened, and he was standing there, looking down at her, a fortyish man with gray hair and a heavy gray moustache. He had a broad face which reminded Helen of one of her uncles, but he had piggy little eyes and thick, purplish lips, as if he had been eating too many blueberries.

  He had brought her down to what looked like the lower level of an office building. It was gloomy and cold, with dripping concrete walls and a single fluorescent light that kept flickering and buzzing as if it were just about to burn out.

  ‘All right,’ the man ordered her. ‘Out.’

  ‘You’re not going to hurt my baby?’

  ‘What do you care?’

  ‘You can do whatever you like, but please don’t hurt my baby.’

  ‘Oh, my heart bleeds. When did any woman ever really care about her baby? Now – out.’

  Helen climbed out of the trunk. The man reached up to pull down the lid, and as he did so, Helen dodged to the left, and started to run. Almost immediately, however, he caught up with her, and seized her arm, and tripped her up. She fell on to her back on the rough concrete floor, her head narrowly missing the rear bumper of a parked Toyota.

  She twisted and struggled, but the man clambered astride her and pressed her down against the floor, with his knees on her upper arms. He was very heavy and strong, and even though she had graduated best in her class in unarmed combat, she found it impossible to throw him off.

  ‘Women—’ he panted. ‘You conceive babies, don’t you, but you only give birth to them so long as it suits you. You d
on’t give a shit about human life. All that matters to you is your own convenience. In fact – you – you’re worse. You’ve used your baby to try to trap me. You don’t even care that your baby is going to die, when you die. How fucking sick is that?’

  ‘Please—’ Helen begged him.

  But the man lifted her head and banged it hard against the concrete. Then he banged it again, and again, until she was half concussed and she could feel the wetness of blood in her hair.

  He took a roll of Saran Wrap out of his coat pocket, and he pulled it out and stretched it over her face. She was so stunned that she couldn’t stop him. She tried to take a breath, but all she managed to do was suck the cling wrap tighter.

  The man wrapped her head around and around. Helen couldn’t move and she couldn’t breathe and she could barely see. The man loomed over her as if he were in a fog.

  In spite of her training, she panicked. She thrashed her head from side to side and kicked her legs. But the man opened her coat, and dragged up her blue corduroy maternity dress, and then he pulled her pantyhose down around her ankles. Her blood was thumping in her ears, and all she could hear was a deep, distorted echo, as if she were lying at the bottom of a swimming pool.

  She couldn’t see the man unbutton his own coat, but she felt him lever her thighs apart. He pushed his way inside her with three grunting thrusts, until he was buried deep. Then he leaned forward and stared at her through the cling wrap, his face only an inch away from hers. He looked triumphant.

  Suddenly, she felt a warm gush of wetness between her thighs. At the same time, there was turmoil inside her stomach, as if the baby were rolling right over. The man screamed like a girl and pushed against her chest.

  ‘Aaagghhh! Christ! Let go of me! Let go of me! For Christ’s sake you witch let go of me!’

  Helen felt an agonizing spasm, and then another, and then another. The man kept on screaming and cursing and trying to pull himself out of her. Helen tore at the Saran Wrap covering her face, and managed to rip most of it away. She took a deep swallow of air, but then she started screaming, too. The pain in her back was more than she could bear. She felt as if she were being cracked in half.