The Boy Who Liked Monsters (Commander Shaw Book 19)

by Philip McCutchan

  This seemed very like the end. No one had reacted, and old Gallepe had never been found to give his directions, to say that I had paid him a visit and had then gone to the Perro house.

  “Drive on,” Perro said. Gantier got in and started the car, and we drove on for the house. We entered the driveway and crossed the pit concealed by the gravel, and went into the garage the door of which was opened from inside. Just before we entered I heard again the hoot of the owl, almost as though it had followed us, and at the same time saw the gloomy cypresses in the cemetery, waving over the old bones of the dead.

  Then we were inside and the door had shut behind us with a very final sound.

  Fifteen

  We were taken into the hall and then again into the room where the original interrogations had taken place. The big bearded man was there, armed with an automatic rifle. My handcuffs were removed, a bad omen I thought. In their eyes I was done for. James was told to sit down. He sat in a big armchair, looking small and lost and desperately frightened of the men and his surroundings and of what the future held for him.

  Perro asked me, “You are aware of the time, Commander Shaw?”

  I said I was, more or less.

  “The arms talks will reach their culmination tomorrow at 1900 hours eastern American time. That is at midnight here in France. That is when Mackenzie and Kulachev are scheduled to sign the formal documents, along with the ministers of the other interested nations. You and the boy will see the ceremony on television.”

  “Put out specially for your benefit, I suppose?”

  Perro smiled. “Not quite so, no. But I am able to link into the satellite system, and receive the pictures – you will see. There will be a demonstration earlier, one that I think you will find of some interest. You will see the delegations in full session as they move towards the climax of their efforts. And the boy will see his grandfather.”

  “Is that necessary?” I asked. “Surely there’s no point in gratuitous cruelty?”

  Perro shrugged. Time, he said, would provide all the answers. There was a definite use for the boy in person. We must be patient for a little longer yet. Until we were required again, we would be put back in the cellar where we would find our friends. Miss Mandrake and Marcus Bright, he said, were alive and well.

  *

  So it was back down the steps into the filth and stench and slime of the cellar. In the light that followed James and me down the slippery steps, I saw Felicity and Marcus Bright; they were hollow-eyed and dirty but otherwise seemed to be all right and they greeted us with mixed feelings, for our presence, of course, meant failure on my part. When the door was clamped shut I could no longer see them, but Felicity moved across towards me and sat by my side, with the boy between us.

  I told them briefly all that had happened.

  I said, “Perro has some extra use for the boy, I gather.”

  “What use?”

  I said I didn’t know, but he was to come in on the act when the television cameras picked up the finale. Felicity sat in silence for a while then suggested that Perro might want him as a standby lever, and I asked her in what way.

  She said, “It’s hard to formulate … but if he can be put on the air … you said, didn’t you, that Perro had the means of radio or telephone communication with Washington?”

  Yes, I said, that was the case. I reminded her that James had already been made to talk to Mackenzie earlier.

  “Perro might get him to plead with his grandfather at the last, mightn’t he? Put on the real pressure?”

  It would be real pressure, right enough. The boy’s urgent voice, with all the terror so close at hand, would be very convincing. But I didn’t see it happening that way at all. The whole point was secrecy, no one knowing the mental pressure, the torture of Ross Mackenzie. This, I put to Felicity; but she saw it differently.

  She said, “Look at it like this: the kidnap, once out in the open, can be blamed on Kulachev, can’t it?”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said impatiently, “very easily! The right words put into the boy’s mouth, you know the sort of thing. And then what happens? Kulachev is branded before the world as a kidnapper, trying to get his way by dirt. All the world loves a little kid. I can’t see Kulachev being very popular even inside Russia. Can you?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t, certainly. But – ”

  “And that does Perro’s work for him. Kulachev is seen to stop the talks in their tracks, Kulachev is discredited. Mind, I’m only suggesting that as the last alternative, if Mackenzie decides not to play ball and has his hand, with pen, hovering over the treaty. How’s that for a scenario?”

  I still didn’t see it that way but had to admit it as a possibility. It would certainly, the way Felicity had put it, mean the end of the road for Kulachev. The Soviets don’t like their emissaries to show dirty hands to the world; they like them to be seen as pure so far as possible. There was obviously no particular reason for Kulachev to mount a kidnap. But a reason could be postulated mendaciously after the event, the damage would be done already and the dirt would stick.

  I said, “We’re getting nowhere, really. As Perro said, we have to wait and see. And then try to throw a spanner in the works.” Even as I said that, I knew we would never get the chance. Perro wouldn’t be taking any risks with us. Before I could say anything further, Felicity had something of her own to say.

  “Bricks,” she said.

  “What about bricks?”

  “Marcus and I have been left mostly alone here. We’ve not been visited except for food and other necessities of life. We’ve just done some exploring in the dark.”

  “And?”

  “Loose brickwork. We’ve dislodged a number of bricks and put them back again, looser than before. They’re out of range of the light down the steps. And – ”

  “What’s behind them?” I asked.

  “Earth. Fairly soft, very moist.”

  “Have you tried – ”

  “We haven’t tried burrowing, no. There’s not been time. We meant to have a go and see what’s there, then you turned up.”

  “Any theories?”

  “Not really. It could be just that – earth. It most likely is.”

  “It’s worth a look,” I said.

  “Come and have a look, then. Keep hold of my shoulder.”

  Felicity moved across the slimy floor of the cellar and I hung on, shuffling behind her. When she stopped, I stopped, and felt her take my hand and guide it to the wall. I pushed at the bricks; they were certainly loose enough. Together with Marcus Bright we removed about a dozen and I groped through, meeting earth, damp and with a revolting smell of decay. I felt the slither of worms across my wrists, and wondered how far below the surface worms could live. We just might not be all that far under. We scrabbled away and met earth and more earth. It seemed a wasted effort but we had nothing else to do so we persisted. We built up quite a mound of earth, a mound that grew as Marcus Bright, who was smaller than I, managed to get through the hole in the brickwork, and scrabble to better effect. We’d been working for an estimated hour when I heard the door being opened up, and I warned Marcus, who backed out just in time. As Felicity had said, the light from the doorway didn’t reach the hole we’d made, or the pile of earth. Nor was the earth on our hands and clothing very remarkable: the cellar was dirty enough in any case. And the shambling, bear-like man, whom I remembered from my last incarceration, was none too intelligent.

  Guarded from above, he laid down platters of food and a jug of water. The food was meagre and quickly eaten, and then he gathered up the platters and went away again and the door was bolted on us.

  We resumed work.

  I had a suspicion we were burrowing beneath a section of the cemetery. Soon after, I knew we were: I contacted bones, identifiable by their shape, the knobbly ends of forearms and thighs. And another skull. Taking into account the earlier skull, which had leered from the roof of the tunnel to Perro’s cont
rol outfit, I reckoned we were more or less on a level with the vital innards of Perro’s fortress and that in itself might prove interesting if we were given enough time.

  The boy came to the entry of the hole we’d made and called through to us. I stopped work immediately and wormed my way back.

  “You mustn’t make any noise, James,” I said. “That’s very important. Understand?”

  He said, “Yes, Mr Shaw. But I – I’m – ”

  “You’re frightened. Of course you are. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’ve been very brave all along. Just keep it up, right?”

  “All right,” he said in a small voice. “But I don’t like the dark.” There were tears in his voice and I wondered at the basic spirit that had kept him going all along; he had plenty of guts. He went on, “There could be monsters.”

  I said there were no monsters. “Monsters don’t exist really.”

  “Oh yes they do, Mr Shaw.”

  “No they don’t.”

  “Yes they do.”

  “No they don’t.”

  “Yes they do.” He began to giggle; it was a game we were playing, seeing who could hold out the longest, but it couldn’t go on even though we were whispering. Anyway, he sounded a little better and I told him to stay by the hole so he wouldn’t feel too lonely. And I promised solemnly that whatever happened he wouldn’t be left behind if we happened to find a way out. I said there was always hope; but I knew that to be very wishful thinking indeed. There was a theoretical possibility that we might be able to angle upwards at a flattish gradient and break surface, but we weren’t going to have the time for that, nothing like. We probably had hours only, not the days, weeks, months that the wartime escapees from the German POW camps had had. We were carrying on with the job simply because we just might have a stroke of luck and find some thinner ceiling where a grave had fallen in. We had to pursue every chance available to us.

  So we worked on.

  We got filthier. We sweated like pigs, and the sweat turned the earth to mud.

  *

  Marcus was ahead of Felicity and me when he found something. He’d been thrusting out with a fist, cursing as it met more than usual resistance.

  “Bloody hard,” he said.

  “What does it feel like?”

  “Brick.”

  “From brick to brick,” I said bitterly. “We might have saved the effort.”

  Marcus said, “It’s all right, it’s crumbly. Like it was in the cellar.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Give it more push, then.”

  He did. After a while, a long while it seemed to me, he reported some success. A brick had shifted; then another. A load of earth fell and then I heard Marcus’ excited voice and on the heels of it I saw light. Electric light, faint. Marcus shifted some more bricks and then reported again.

  “There’s a sort of chamber. The light’s coming through a grille in the wall opposite.”

  “Let’s get through,” I said.

  Marcus worked away and made space for me to slide alongside. In the same way as we had left the cellar, we entered the chamber. We stood up, breathed slightly better air. I went to the grille and looked through. I looked along an electrically-lit passage, brick-lined. I believed it to be the passage I had already suspected we were near, the one that led to Perro’s mainspring, his control room.

  I said, “Damage. If we could get through, we might at least use the element of surprise to do a vandalism act.”

  “Only we can’t get through,” Felicity said in a flat, defeated tone. “No exit.”

  I looked around in the light coming through the grille: she was right, no exit. The place was a tomb, a vault set in the earth below the cemetery, perhaps a burial place for a family long since extinct. I could see coffins in the gloom, five of them, covered with cobwebs and fine dust that glinted in the rays of the light.

  Felicity asked, “What now?”

  “None of the brickwork’s in very good shape, is it? Maybe the overhead bricks are as bad. The roof’s probably not all that far below the surface.”

  “Some job!”

  “It’s the only possible way out,” I said. “We have to try. But first things first. I’m going back for the little lad.”

  I wormed my way back into the tunnel we’d excavated. There had been falls as we’d come along but they could be cleared; and in spite of the time taken I didn’t think we’d tunnelled all that far. Going back would be faster even with the falls of earth. Or so I thought; in fact it took me what seemed a hell of a long time and when I broke through once again into the cellar young James was frantic with anxiety and a feeling of desertion. But he was able to tell me that no one had come down the steps even though, as he confessed, he’d called and called hoping someone, whoever it was, would come and reassure him that I was safe and would let him out. That, in a way, had been good cover: Perro and his thugs would merely think the boy was overwrought and it would never have occurred to them that he’d been left alone.

  I said, “It’s all right now, James. I’m here. We’re going back along the tunnel to join the others.”

  “Where are they?” he asked.

  “In a better place than this cellar. Now, I’m going through the hole. Go in after me, hold onto me and don’t whatever you do let go. All right?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Worm your way along, shove with your feet. Let me know if I go too fast for you.”

  I got myself through and waited for James to grab hold of me, then I began worming my way back, having once again to clear falls of earth. James kept going well, though he was whimpering now with fear of the unknown, probably of being buried alive, and with sheer tiredness that must be fast approaching exhaustion. I kept giving him words of encouragement, but the journey must have been a nightmare and a never-ending one. He probably half expected to meet a monster at any moment, a monster that would devour him or blast him with fiery breath. Just in case, I told him that monsters positively did not live down here: I knew that, I said, for a fact. Since it was gospel truth, it probably carried conviction. I added that the majority of monsters lived in Scotland anyway, and we were certainly a very long way from Scotland … I think that cheered him; I found it incredible that he placed such trust in my utterances.

  *

  When we emerged into the comparatively easier ambience of the vault I found that some progress had been made. Marcus and Felicity had piled two of the coffins on top of another so that the roof could be reached and they were chipping away at the overhead brickwork with a couple of long, very heavy screws that Marcus had found in a corner, probably coffin screws. The brickwork was crumbly and one brick had been dislodged, allowing a slight fall of earth. Felicity was looking pretty whacked and I said I would take her place. I helped her down from the pile of coffins and hauled myself up. After some time I had more bricks down, and more earth, but couldn’t see daylight. No fresh air came down. We must be deeper than I’d hoped. I was pushing hard against the bricks and the earth above when the top coffin lurched and slid and I landed in a heap on the floor, cursing savagely and worried about the racket: falling coffins are far from silent. We all more or less held our breath, and I went over to the grille and looked through.

  There was no one around: we’d been lucky. I was about to re-pile the coffins when Felicity said, “Look.”

  She was pointing to the coffin that had been on top. It was on its side and the lid was gaping along one edge. Gaping fairly wide; I gave it a wrench and saw the occupant.

  I had a big shock. The corpse was fairly well-preserved and I was able to recognise beyond doubt the features of Villiers-Smith, late of the British embassy in Brussels.

  Sixteen

  “Villers-Smith,” I said. “Five coffins. Five vanished diplomats?”

  “You think – ”

  “It’s a fair deduction. But we haven’t the time to find out now.”

  I helped Marcus Bright to lift Villiers-Smith, lidded again, back onto the othe
r coffins and we heaved ourselves up and began worrying away at the bricks and earth. The broken coffin lid moved up and down as I worked, bearing down on Villers-Smith from time to time. I wondered if the corpses had been intentionally preserved; there was no smell, nothing putrid. If they had been, why? I could see no point. It would be something to ask Perro at a later date, after we were out and away and back in force with police and security men just as soon as I could get into Montignac …

  If. There were any number of ifs around. Montignac was a fair distance on foot. But I did know, just a moment later, that we were going to get out. I felt fresh air streaming down. No light; it was night now, or nearly night. I saw a faint loom still in the sky. It was nice to see that sky. I jumped down, saw the relief in Felicity’s and Marcus Bright’s faces, saw James hopping up and down with excitement. I ripped at the broken coffin lid and pulled away a jagged piece of wood. I went up again and thrust at the hole, widening it. A lot of earth came down, and grass roots. I called to Felicity to come up and I helped her through the hole. Then Marcus, who, once out in the open, reached down to take the boy from me. Then I followed, using the coffins as a springboard.

  We saw the loom of the house, not in fact far off, just a matter of maybe a dozen yards, and the distance probably even shorter from the cellar wall that we’d breached. I saw the gravel of the drive, and I saw a car parked, not the hire car we’d come in from Bordeaux. A visitor? Another of Perro’s mob, turned up for the final act?