by Ward Parker
Finally, the housekeeper returned, breathless as if she had been running, and handed a telegram to William. He tore open the envelope and cursed under his breath when he read the page inside.
“He said he can’t come.”
“Did he say why not?” Follett asked.
“’Cannot come.’ That’s all he said.”
“We have to change his mind,” Diana said, “before Darryl is killed.”
“And the rest of us as well,” Follett said, recalling the sight of Brezinski’s mauled body.
“My father is not in the habit of changing his mind,” William said.
“Mr. Stockhurst, you must go see him in person,” Diana said. “He obviously doesn’t understand the gravity of our situation.”
“I’m afraid I have very little sway over the old man. But how about you, Miss Strom? He’s always had a weakness for beautiful women.”
“But I—”
“I’m serious,” William said. “I think he’d listen to you. He’s met you before and you have a certain credibility as a teacher. And you, Doctor—how could he not respect your advocacy?”
William didn’t know that Follett had already met his father, the man who had ordered him killed. Follett wasn’t very eager to see him again, but he didn’t know of any other way of stopping Astogani.
“We better hurry down there,” Follett said, “before he sets sail for the Philippines.”
* * *
The music woke Darryl up. It was a catchy ragtime tune, popular with the commoners in the music halls of New York, but Darryl was quite fond of it as well. “Sunflower Slow Drag” was played tonight by a piano and small brass band and it made Darryl come out of the haze that had entrapped him for days. It reminded him who he was, that he existed. That he had a life, a history with memories.
He lay upon a wooden floor in darkness. Cracks of light coming through a door helped him see enough to tell that he was in a small room. He stood, surprised to feel muscles that were sore yet strong and vibrant. He extended his hands and touched unfinished wood studs along the walls and ascertained he was in a shed of some sorts. The cracks of light outlined a door and he pushed it, but it was held closed by a simple latch that he could see through the space between the door and the jam. He concentrated and tried to open the latch with his mind, but nothing happened. His mind was too weak and unfocused. He rattled the door, frustrated, and was about to try to break it open with brute force when he saw, in the faint light coming from the crack, a stack of cedar roof shingles nearby. He took one that was of the thinnest wood and found that it fit through the space along the door. He successfully lifted the latch and opened the door.
He was in an alleyway behind a building. The alley was dark, but there were electric lights in the front of the building which he recognized as West Palm Beach’s theater, where variety shows were performed most nights of the week. Darryl’s father didn’t let him attend these, because they were for the middle and lower classes. Darryl was only allowed to attend opera back in New York, since the family had a box at the Metropolitan where he could wear his hood and remain relatively unnoticed.
But Darryl did recognize this song and he relished hearing the last few bars while he hid in the shadows, pretending that he was his old self and nothing had gone wrong.
The music ended and applause seeped from the theater. Then there must have been a comedy act; he could hear actors’ voices, but not what they said, punctuated by a couple of drums beats, a cymbal crash, and howls of laughter from the audience. And that’s when the veil began to descend over his mind. He became increasingly disoriented and disconnected with his body. The voice of the ferryman filtered through his brain.
He was losing himself again to that evil entity. The feelings of loss and sorrow that swept over him were like those of someone who was about to die. He was going away and didn’t know if he’d ever come back or get his body and life back. And he feared that he had done terrible things while he was possessed, acts that would not go unpunished.
Then he was gone. What remained was the monster consisting of Darryl’s body and controlled by the spirit of the ferryman formerly known as Astogani.
The monster remained in the shadows, reading the thoughts of its next victim who was inside the theater watching the show, planning where he would go to enjoy the rest of his night off after the show was over.
In a half hour, Dowling, the Royal Poinciana’s soon-to-be-ex-security chief, would exit the front of the theater, turn left and pass the entrance to the alleyway. He would hear what he would believe to be the cries of a young woman in distress. He would walk down the alley, having trouble seeing in the darkness. He would find a form huddled on the ground next to the building, whimpering. His question to the woman if she were all right would go unanswered. Bending down to examine the shadowy form, a thought would flit through his mind that this person was much too large to be a young woman. And that would be the last coherent thought his mind would ever have before it would be traumatically destroyed along with the rest of him.
* * *
The sharpie, its sail luffing, drifted off the stern of Stockhurst’s ship, waiting for their request to board to be granted. Diana and Follett’s rail journey to Miami had been uneventful and at the port in Biscayne Bay it hadn’t been difficult to find a boat to take them to the Wanderer. But Diana worried that Stockhurst would refuse to see them.
“William sent at least two telegrams telling him we were coming,” she said. “This is nothing less than rude.”
“I’m sure a man of his power doesn’t appreciate the little people like us coming by without invitation.” He laughed ironically. “Especially if his ship is filled with a secret cargo of half-human creatures.”
Diana had no patience with the mores of stratified society. Among the pioneer families in the area was a code of egalitarianism and cooperation born out of the struggle for survival. Despite working for William Stockhurst, the high society of Palm Beach still felt alien to her.
“You’ve never seemed unsettled by how all this has unfolded,” Follett said.
“What do you mean?”
“Learning about another species that can change into human form and finding out that your student is a hybrid of the two—doesn’t that disturb you?”
She studied him a moment to make sure he wasn’t poking fun at her. “I live in a state where bears and panthers eat your livestock, twelve-foot-long alligators could possibly eat you, mosquitoes cover you like a blanket, and hurricanes wipe entire towns off the map. And I’m supposed to be frightened by a cral?”
Follett laughed heartily and looked at her with approval.
Just then two deckhands appeared at the rail of the Wanderer and beckoned for the sharpie to come astern. Their skipper adjusted the sail until it caught enough breeze to move them gently forward. As the sharpie glided up to the ship he tossed two lines to the deckhands who tied them off. A rope ladder was dropped to the sharpie and Diana and Follett made the awkward climb up the tall hull of the ship and through an opening in the rail.
Benjamin Stockhurst was waiting for them on deck. He took Diana’s hand graciously but barely acknowledged Follett. He made no move to invite them inside.
“I delayed our departure for you, so let’s get this over with quickly. I have no interest in playing games with the spirit of an enemy I dispatched decades ago.”
“But, Mr. Stockhurst, what about Darryl?” Diana said.
He sighed. “I feel sorry for him but there’s nothing I can do. And I refuse to even acknowledge Astogani.”
“Astogani was his name?” Diana asked, moving closer to him. She knew the old man had a weakness for women and though she hated to stoop to using her feminine charm to manipulate him, she would do what was necessary. “Tell me about him.”
“There’s nothing worth saying about him. He had no honor whatsoever, and even delved into the black arts to get his way. I don’t know how he managed to possess my grandson, but I don’t want
to give him the pleasure of negotiating with me. Astogani no longer exists as far as I’m concerned.”
Diana tried to appear awestruck and vulnerable as she gazed into his eyes. They were coal-black and she imagined she could see the non-human lurking within.
“If you meet with him it won’t be to his benefit at all,” she said. “You would defeat him again, humiliate him, show him that he still is inferior to you and will be so no matter whose body he takes over.”
Stockhurst grunted and stared off across the water.
“But if you do nothing, he will kill Darryl. And very likely kill William—and me, too. You could sail away with your pride, but at a terrible, terrible cost.”
He said nothing but give a slight nod.
She moved closer to him and placed her hand on his sleeve. “Would you condemn me to die?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Samuel Clemens sipped turtle consumé facing the massive, carved-wood mantelpiece in the dining room of Henry Flagler’s Whitehall mansion. The woman to his right, the aunt of someone rich, was chattering to him about horse racing. When the next course arrived, she would turn to the gentleman to her right and proceed to bore him, while Clemens had to suffer whatever inanity the woman on his left had to share until the next course when he would have to listen to the aunt of the rich person again. That was one of the absurd social conventions you found at dinner parties like this. The robber barons and nouveau riche always tried too hard pretending to be proper aristocrats, whereas the actual gentry in Europe that Clemens had met behaved more naturally. And they were more fun, too.
At the head of the table, Flagler was bucking convention by ignoring the woman next to him and talking across her to her husband, a stockbroker. The conversation was animated and Clemens strained to overhear, but then the butler entered the room, made a beeline to Flagler and whispered in his ear—something about Mr. Dowling being murdered.
But how had he heard that? Clemens hadn’t been able to pick up over the din of conversation what Flagler had been saying at normal volume, so how could he have heard a whisper? Then a thought struck him and he smiled. Maybe Darryl was right and Clemens did indeed have a latent ability for telepathy. Exercising those “muscles” as Darryl had suggested might actually be working to bring out his ability.
Clemens’ smile faded as he picked up the words that Dowling had been “torn to pieces” and was “barely recognizable.” Darryl had struck again.
* * *
The monster vaulted over the tall, wrought-iron fence and made it through the grounds to the mansion unseen by the guards on patrol. Using keen animal senses along with telepathy helped it keep its distance from each guard and it had a natural instinct for using the landscaping and shadows for cover. It was drawn to the room where it sensed most of the people in the building were, a large space at one end of the structure. It passed through the shrubbery, pulled itself up the stone sill and peered into the tall, many-paned window. It was the dining room, with 20 people seated around a large table and several servants attending to them. The monster inhaled the myriad food scents, along with the smells of the flower arrangements, the perfumes and powders and human skin. Its stomach growled.
With his back to the window sat a man with bushy white hair wearing a white suit. Astogani could sense that it was someone whom Darryl was fond of. No one else in the room evoked that feeling from the body he inhabited, or any feeling at all, except the stern man at the head of the table. This person inspired definite animosity.
Who, then, should the monster kill—the man Darryl liked or the one he disliked? Probing Darryl’s memory, Astogani soon discovered that both Darryl’s father and grandfather hated this man at the head of the table. If he was a foe of Benjamin Stockhurst, that was reason enough to let him live.
So, then, the white-haired man in the white suit would be the monster’s dinner tonight.
* * *
With smoke from his cigar encircling his head and rising to the Swiss Chalet-style ceiling beams, Clemens sank the eight ball and dispatched another opponent in the Whitehall billiards room. The banker from Providence—Clemens couldn’t quite remember his name—retreated hastily from the room muttering an excuse about indigestion.
“You do know your way around a billiards table,” Flagler said. He was the only one left in the room after the other men retired to the library with their brandies.
“Would you care to join me in a game?”
“No thank you. I don’t play actually.”
“Then it’s safe for me to admit that I installed a billiards room in my home back in Riverdale.”
“Let me ask you something, Mr. Clemens, and I beg for your complete honesty. What do you make of this Darryl Stockhurst? My director of hotel security was murdered today and they think the freak did it.” He paused and took a deep breath. “And they say the body looked like it had been savaged by a lion or a pack of wolves. What kind of human can do that?”
Clemens rolled a billiards ball across the table, watching it bank off the sides.
“The good doctor Follett could answer that better than I,” he said.
“But I hear you’ve met the freak,” Flagler pushed on. “I hear that he can read minds and is obviously of superhuman strength. Is he a man or a monster?”
“I’ve met a lot of men who are monsters, Mr. Flagler.”
Flagler slapped the table. “Just tell me, is he a human or some sort of…beast?”
Clemens continued to avoid answering. He’d been exposed to so much in a short period of time that was beyond belief. That there was actually a species of humanoid creatures living here undetected until the discovery of the mass grave was stunning. That Benjamin Stockhurst also was not human and that he had fathered Darryl was something a man like Flagler with no imagination could not be told—especially not when he had a private army of Pinkertons at his command. It would be so much easier to shoot Darryl if they believed he was less than human. Or, if Clemens thought of it differently, greater than human.
“Darryl is gifted, Mr. Flagler. He has the ability of mental telegraphy and, yes, great strength. But he has also been cursed with his gross deformities, which can all be explained by medical science. His gifts and curses combined are what make him seem so monstrous.”
“He’s murdering people left and right. That’s what makes him monstrous!”
“True,” Clemens said, feeling a bit foolish. “Although he seems to be possessed by a demon or at least to have lost his mind.”
Flagler snorted with derision. “Dash all this nonsense,” he said. “I’m joining the others in the library.”
Alone in the billiards room, Clemens absent-mindedly rolled balls across the table. Why did he continue to defend Darryl? He had felt a bond with the young man over the topic of mental telegraphy, but even if he truly were possessed the carnage had grown too great. The hotel was abuzz today over the grisly deaths of two businessmen and now the chief of security, too?
A rustling came from outside one of the windows. A shout in the distance. A gunshot.
Then the window imploded in a spray of broken glass and something large jumped into the room, covered by the curtains torn from their rods.
It was Darryl. But when their eyes met, Clemens realized it wasn’t Darryl at all—that he had indeed been taken over by some entity.
Without thinking, Clemens threw the cue ball at the monster and heard it hit bone as he ran from the room.
Racing down the hall, he realized he had no idea where to go for his best chance of escaping the monster. There was no safety in joining the others; it only meant more people would be slaughtered. He ran past the empty ballroom and a glass-walled inner courtyard. Long, loping strides were coming down the hall behind him. Turning the corner, he saw a narrow door ajar and went through it, thinking it was a closet. It was actually one of the many hidden passageways used by the servants. He closed the door, saw a steep staircase to his left and quickly ascended.
He paused on
the second-floor landing to listen; there was no sound of the monster coming up the stairs behind him. He peeked from the doorway to see a hallway lined with bedrooms on the outside of the house and windows to the courtyard on the inside. The building was basically a rectangle enclosing the open courtyard. Entering the hall, he headed east toward the front of the house, passing an empty bedroom with blue-striped wallpaper and a mahogany four-poster bed. Women’s voices were moving down the front main hallway. Rather than endanger the women, he retreated and walked quickly to the back of the house, turning the corner to a hall with servants’ bedrooms. A maid carrying folded sheets hurried past him, giving a polite nod. When he saw a closet with its door not fully closed, he guessed it might be the linen closet. Deciding to hide there temporarily, he opened the door.
The monster stood in front of him, filling the closet. It gave him a toothy grin.
Clemens yelped and raced back to the door to the servant’s stairway. He bounded the stairs to the third floor, the monster’s footsteps close behind, pain searing the back of his right calf as claws raked it. He reached the third floor, slipping through the door and sprinting down the dimly lit corridor past servants’ quarters.
And then silence.
Panting, Clemens looked behind him to find the hallway empty. But, he realized, what if the monster was coming around from the other side of the house to meet him head-on?
He was having a hard time catching his breath and his chest hurt. Calm down old boy, you can’t have survived a life in the writing business only to die of fright.
Clemens turned back the way he had come. This floor was apparently all servants’ quarters and the doors he passed were closed except for one. It was uninhabited, with a bare mattress, a dresser and small table and chair.
