The Tomb

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Looks like this is it,” he said to Arnold. He glanced at the meter, calculated what he still owed of the total, added 20 percent for goodwill, and handed it through the window. “Thanks. You’ve been a big help.”

  “This ain’t such a good neighborhood during the day,” Arnold said, glancing around. “And after dark it really gets rough, especially for someone dressed like you.”

  “I’ll be okay,” he said, grateful for the concern of a man he’d known for only a few hours. He slapped the roof of the car. “Thanks again.”

  Jack watched the cab until it disappeared into the traffic, then he studied his surroundings: a vacant lot on the corner across the street, and an old, boarded-up brick warehouse next to him.

  He felt exposed standing here in an outfit that shouted “Mug me” to anyone so inclined. And since he hadn’t dared to bring a weapon to the UN, he was unarmed. Officially unarmed. He could permanently disable a man with a ballpoint pen and knew half a dozen ways to kill with a key ring, but didn’t like to work that close unless he had to. He would have been much more comfortable knowing the Semmerling was strapped against his leg.

  He had to hide. His best bet would be under the West Side Highway. He jogged over and perched himself high up in the notch of one of the supports. It offered a clear view of the pier and the ship. Best of all, it would keep him out of sight of any troublemakers.

  Dusk came and went. The streetlights came on as night slipped over the city. He was away from the streets, but he saw the traffic to the west and south of him thin out to a rare car cruising by. Still plenty of rumbling overhead on the West Side Highway as the cars slowed for the ramp down to street level just two blocks from where he crouched. The ship remained silent. Nothing moved on its decks, no lights showed from the superstructure. It had all the appearances of a deserted wreck.

  What was Kusum doing in there?

  Finally, when full darkness settled in at nine o’clock, Jack could wait no longer. In the dark he was pretty sure he could reach the deck and do some hunting around without being seen.

  He jumped down from his perch and crossed over to the shadows by the pier. The moon was rising in the east—big and low and ruddy now, slightly rounder than last night. He wanted to get aboard and off again before it reached full brightness and started lighting up the waterfront.

  At the water’s edge Jack crouched against a huge piling under the looming shadow of the freighter and listened. All quiet but for the lapping of the water under the pier. A sour smell—a mixture of sea salt, mildew, rotting wood, creosote, and garbage—permeated the air. Movement to the left caught his eye: A lone wharf rat scurried along the bulkhead in search of dinner. Nothing else moved.

  He jumped as something splashed near the hull. An automatic bilge pump was spewing a stream of water out a small port near the waterline of the hull.

  He was edgy and couldn’t say why. He’d done sneak searches under more precarious conditions than these. And with less apprehension. Yet the nearer he got to the boat, the less he felt like boarding her. Something within him warned him away. Through the years he’d come to recognize a certain instinct for danger, listening to it had kept him alive. Right now that instinct was ringing a frantic alarm.

  Jack shrugged off the feeling of impending disaster as he took the binoculars and camera from around his neck and laid them at the base of the piling. A rope, better than two inches thick, ran up to the bow of the ship. Rough on his hands but easy to climb.

  He leaned forward, got a firm two-handed grip, then swung out over the water. As he hung from the rope, he raised his legs until his ankles locked around it. Now began the climb: Hanging from a branch like an orangutan with his face to the sky and his back to the water, he pulled himself up hand over hand while his heels caught the finger-thick coils of the rope and pushed from behind.

  The angle of ascent steepened and the climb got progressively tougher as he neared the gunwale. The tiny fibers of the rope were coarse and stiff. His palms were burning; each handful of rope felt like a handful of thistles, especially painful where he’d started a few blisters playing tennis yesterday. It was a pleasure to grab the smooth, cool steel of the gunwale and pull himself up to eye level with its upper edge. He hung there and scanned the deck. Still no sign of life.

  He pulled himself over the gunwale, then ran in a crouch to the anchor windlass.

  His skin prickled in warning—danger here. But where? He peered over the windlass. No sign that he’d been seen, no sign of anyone else aboard. Still the feeling persisted, a nagging sensation, almost as if he were being watched.

  Again he shrugged it off. He had to reach the deckhouse. Well over a hundred feet of open deck lay between him and the aft superstructure. And aft was where he wanted to go. He couldn’t imagine much going on in the cargo holds.

  Jack set himself, then sprinted around the forward cargo hatch to the kingpost and crane assembly that stood between the two holds. He waited. Still no sign that he’d been seen … or that there was anyone here to see him. Another sprint took him to the forward wall of the deckhouse.

  He slid along the wall to the port side where he found some steps. He took them up to the bridge. The wheelhouse was locked, but through the side window he could see a wide array of sophisticated controls.

  Maybe this tub was more seaworthy than it looked.

  He crossed in front of the bridge and began checking all the doors. On the second deck on the starboard side he found one open. The hallway within was dark but for a single, dim emergency bulb glowing at the far end. One by one he checked the three cabins on this deck. They looked fairly comfortable—probably for the ship’s officers. Only one looked like it had been recently occupied. The bed was rumpled and a book written in an exotic-looking language lay open on a table. That at least confirmed Kusum’s recent presence.

  Next he checked the crew’s quarters below. Deserted. The galley showed no signs of recent use.

  What next? The emptiness, the silence, the stale, musty air were all chafing Jack’s nerves. He wanted to get back to dry land and fresh air. But he couldn’t leave until he’d found Kusum.

  He descended to the deck below and found a door marked Engine Room. He was reaching for the handle when he heard it …

  A sound … barely audible … like a baritone chorus chanting in a distant valley. It came from somewhere behind him.

  Jack turned and moved silently to the other end of the short corridor where he found a watertight hatch. A central wheel retracted the lugs at its edges. Hoping it still had some oil in its works, Jack grasped the wheel and turned it counterclockwise, half expecting a loud screech to echo throughout the ship and give him away. But he heard only a soft scrape and a faint squeak. When the wheel had turned as far as it would go, he gently swung the door open.

  The odor struck him an almost physical blow, rocking him back on his heels. The same stink of putrescence that had invaded his apartment, only now a hundred, a thousand times stronger, gripping him, jamming itself against his face like a grave robber’s glove.

  Jack gagged and fought the urge to turn and run. This was it. This was the source, the very heart of the stench. Here he would learn whether the eyes he’d seen outside his window Saturday night were real or imagined. He couldn’t let an odor, no matter how nauseating, turn him back now.

  He forced himself to step through the hatch and into a dark, narrow corridor. The dank air clung to him. The corridor walls stretched into the blackness above him. And with each step the odor grew stronger. He could taste it in the air, almost touch it. Faint light flickered maybe twenty feet ahead. Jack fought his way toward it, passing small, room-sized storage areas on either side. They seemed empty—he hoped they were.

  The chant he’d dimly heard before had ceased, but he heard rustling noises ahead, and as he neared the light, the sound of a voice speaking in a foreign language.

  Hindi, I’ll bet.

  He slowed his advance as he neared the end of the corrido
r. The light was brighter in a larger, open area ahead. He’d been traveling forward from the stern. By rough calculation he figured he should be almost to the main cargo hold.

  The corridor opened along the port wall of the hold; across the floor in the forward wall lay another opening, no doubt a similar passage leading to the forward hold. Jack reached the end and cautiously peeked around the corner. What he saw stopped his breath. Shock swept through him front to back, like a storm front.

  The high, black iron walls of the hold rose and disappeared into the darkness above. Wild shadows cavorted on them. Glistening beads of moisture clung to their oily surfaces, catching and holding the light from the two roaring gas torches set upon an elevated platform at the far end. The wall over there was a different color, a bloody red, with the huge form of a many-armed goddess painted in black upon it. And between the two torches stood Kusum, naked but for some sort of long cloth twisted and wrapped around his torso. Even his necklace was off. His left shoulder was horribly scarred where he’d lost his arm; his right arm was raised as he shouted in his native tongue to the crowd assembled before him.

  But it wasn’t Kusum who seized and held Jack’s attention in a stranglehold, who made the muscles of his jaw bunch with the effort to hold back a cry of horror, who made his hands grip the slimy walls so fiercely.

  It was Kusum’s audience. Four or five dozen of them, cobalt skinned, six or seven feet tall, all huddled in a semicircular crowd before Kusum. Each had a head, a body, two arms and two legs—but they weren’t human. Weren’t even close to human. Their proportions, the way they moved, everything about them was wrong, all wrong … a bestial savagery combined with a reptilian sort of grace. Reptiles, but something more, humanoid but something less … an unholy mongrelization of the two with a third strain that could not, even in the wildest nightmare delirium, be associated with anything of this earth. Jack caught flashes of fangs in the wide, lipless mouths beneath their blunt, sharklike snouts, the glint of talons at the ends of their three-digit hands, and the yellow glow of their eyes as they stared at Kusum’s ranting, gesticulating figure.

  Beneath the shock and revulsion that numbed his mind and froze his body, Jack felt a fierce, instinctive hatred of these things. A subrational reaction, like the loathing a mongoose must feel toward a cobra. Instantaneous enmity. Something in the most remote and primitive corner of his humanity recognized these creatures and knew there could be no truce, no coexistence with them.

  Yet this inexplicable reaction was overwhelmed by horrid fascination with what he saw.

  And then Kusum raised his arm and shouted something. Perhaps it was the light, but he looked older to Jack. The creatures responded by starting the same chant he’d faintly heard moments ago. Only now he could make out the sounds. Gruff, grumbling voices, chaotic at first, then with growing unity, began repeating the same word over and over:

  “Kaka-jiiiiiii! Kaka-jiiiiiii! Kaka-jiiiiiii! Kaka-jiiiiiii!”

  Then they were raising their taloned hands in the air, and clutched in each was a piece of bloody flesh that glistened in the wavering light.

  Jack didn’t know how he knew, but he was certain he was looking at all that remained of Nellie Paton.

  That did it. His mind refused to accept any more. Terror was a foreign sensation to Jack, unfamiliar, almost unrecognizable. All he knew was that he had to get away before his sanity completely deserted him. He turned and ran back down the corridor, careless of the noise he made, not that much could be heard over the din in the hold. He closed the hatch behind him, spun the wheel to lock it, then ran up the steps to the deck, dashed along its moonlit length to the prow where he straddled the gunwale, grabbed the mooring rope and slid down to the dock, burning the skin from his palms.

  He grabbed his binoculars and camera and fled toward the street. He knew where he was going: to the only other person besides Kusum who could explain what he’d just seen.

  4

  Kolabati reached the intercom on the second buzz. Her first thought was that it might be Kusum, then she realized he’d have no need of the intercom. She’d neither seen nor heard from him since losing him in Rockefeller Plaza yesterday. She hadn’t moved from the apartment all day in the hope of catching him as he stopped by to change his clothes. But he’d never appeared.

  “Mrs. Bahkti?” It was the doorman’s voice.

  “Yes?” She didn’t bother to correct him about the “Mrs.”

  “Sorry to bother you, but there’s a man down here says he has to see you.” His voice sank to a confidential tone. “He doesn’t look right, but he’s really been bugging me.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jack. That’s all he’ll tell me.”

  A rush of warmth spread over her skin. But would it be wise to allow him to come up? If Kusum returned and found the two of them together in his apartment …

  Yet she sensed that Jack would not show up without calling first unless it was something important.

  “Send him up.”

  She waited impatiently until she heard the elevator open, then went to the door. When she saw Jack’s black knee socks, sandals, and shorts, she broke into a laugh. No wonder the doorman wouldn’t let him up.

  Then she saw his face.

  “Jack! What’s wrong?”

  He stepped through the door and closed it behind him. His face was pale beneath a red patina of sunburn, his lips drawn into a tight line, his eyes wild.

  “I followed Kusum today…”

  He paused, as if waiting for her to react. She knew from his expression that he must have found what she’d suspected all along, but she had to hear it from his lips. Hiding the dread of what she knew Jack would say, she set her face into an impassive mask.

  “And?”

  “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what, Jack?” She watched him run a hand through his hair and noticed that his palms were dirty and bloody. “What happened to your hands?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead he walked past her and stepped down into the living room. He sat on the couch. Without looking at her, he began to speak in a dull monotone.

  “I followed Kusum from the UN to this boat on the West Side—a big boat, a freighter. I saw him in one of the cargo holds leading some sort of ceremony with these”… his face twisted with the memory … “these things. They were holding up pieces of raw flesh. I think it was human flesh. And I think I know whose.”

  Strength flowed out of Kolabati like water down a drain. She leaned against the foyer wall to steady herself.

  It was true! Rakoshi in America! And Kusum behind them—resurrecting old dead rites that should have been left dead. But how? The egg was in the other room!

  “I thought you might know something about it,” Jack was saying. “After all, Kusum is your brother and I figured—”

  She barely heard him.

  The egg …

  She pushed herself away from the wall and started toward Kusum’s bedroom.

  “What’s the matter?” Jack said, finally looking up at her. “Where are you going?”

  Kolabati didn’t reply. She had to see the egg again. How could there be rakoshi without using the egg … the last surviving egg? And that alone would not be enough to produce a nest—a male rakosh was needed.

  It simply couldn’t be!

  She opened the closet in Kusum’s room and pulled out the square crate. It was so light. Was the egg gone? She pulled the top up. No … still there, still intact. But she remembered that egg weighing at least ten pounds …

  She reached into the box, placed a hand on each side, and lifted it. It almost leaped into the air. It weighed next to nothing! And on its underside her fingers felt a jagged edge.

  Kolabati turned the egg over. A ragged opening gaped at her. Bright smears showed where cracks on the underside had been repaired with glue.

  The room reeled and spun about her.

  The rakosh egg was empty! It had hatched long ago!

  5r />
  Jack heard Kolabati cry out in the other room. Not a cry of fear or pain—more like a wail of despair. He found her kneeling on the floor of the bedroom, rocking back and forth, cradling a mottled, football-sized object in her arms. Tears streamed down her face.

  “What happened?”

  “It’s empty!” she said through a sob.

  “What was in it?” Jack had seen an ostrich egg once, but that had been white; this was about the same size but its shell was swirled with gray.

  “A female rakosh.”

  Rakosh.

  He didn’t need any further explanation to know what had hatched from that egg: It had dark skin, a lean body with long arms and legs, a fanged mouth, taloned hands, and bright yellow eyes.

  Moved by her anguish, he knelt opposite her. Gently he pulled the empty egg from her grasp and took her two hands in his.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You must.”

  “You wouldn’t believe…”

  “I’ve already seen them. I believe. Now I’ve got to understand. What are they?”

  “They are rakoshi.”

  “I gathered that. But the name means nothing.”

  “They are ancient creatures, from the dim past, long before the Vedic scriptures. Descriptions by the primitive people who glimpsed them or survived them gave rise to the myth of the raksasha, the demons used for ages to spice up stories told at night to frighten children or to make them behave. Every child in India has heard, ‘The raksasha will get you!’ Only a select few through the ages have known that they are more than mere superstition.”

  “And you and Kusum are two of those select few, I take it.”

  “We are the only ones left. We come from a long line of high priests and priestesses. We are the last of the Keepers of the Rakoshi. Through the ages the members of our family have been charged with their care—to breed them, control them, and use them according to the laws set down in the old days. And until the middle of the last century we discharged that duty faithfully.”

  She paused, seemingly lost in thought. Jack impatiently urged her on.