Descendant

Beneath the Trees

Bullet spent over fifteen minutes sniffing around the bus, downstairs and up. When Jill emerged from the tarpaulin she looked pale and upset.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before. That was too horrible for words.”

“Are you OK?” Her hair was damp with perspiration and I lifted a strand of it out of her eyes. “Do you want a drink of water or anything?”

“No, I’m all right. It’s the way that they’re just sitting there.”

Bullet looked up at me and barked, twice.

“I really think he’s getting to like me.”

“Actually he’s warning you not to get too close.”

“Oh. Sorry. Sorry, boy. Do you think he’ll ever get to like me?”

Jill smiled. “Once he gets to know you better, I’m sure he will.”

“OK, then,” I said, “does he have a trail for us to follow?”

“Yes, he does, and I think it’s quite strong.”

I called out to Terence. “Terence! We’re going Screecher-hunting. You want to go get your car?”

“Oh! OK, then! Righty-ho!”

Jill and I walked along the crown of the road, trying to keep up with Bullet, while Terence crept along behind us in his Humber.

Although the sky was cloudless, we could hear distant collisions of thunder, and the lime trees along the avenue began to rustle uneasily. After only ten minutes we reached the entrance to a large public park, where there was a tarmacadam parking lot surrounded by giant elms.

“What’s the betting the Screechers were planning on bringing the bus here?” I asked Jill. There was a bus stop close, only ten yards away, for numbers 403 and 403a, so the bus would normally have passed this way.

Bullet hesitated and lifted his head. He sniffed in several different directions, as if he couldn’t make up his mind which way to go.

“I think they must have split up somewhere here,” said Jill. She took the scarflike piece of linen out of her purse and held it in front of Bullet’s nose to refresh his memory. Bullet immediately galloped through the entrance to the park and crossed the parking lot until he reached the trees on the far side. There he stopped again, and barked.

“He’s confused,” said Jill. “He can still smell something, but it’s different.”

We led Bullet up and down the parking lot for over ten minutes. Every now and then he lifted his head and sniffed the air, but the strong scent that he had been following from the bus seemed to come to an end here, very abruptly.

“You know what this means?” I said. “The strigoi have a car. Or even cars plural.”

“That’s going to make things damned awkward,” said Terence, mopping his face with his handkerchief. “How can we follow them if they’re driving around in bloody cars?”

I got down on one knee and opened up my Kit. Bullet snuffled around me suspiciously while I took out my compass and opened up the silver-filigree cover.

“That’s rather fancy,” said Jill. “What is it?”

“Strigoi compass. For locating any nearby Screechers.”

“Really? It looks like an antique.”

“It is. It’s nearly three hundred years old. The priests of the Romanian Orthodox Church designed it, in 1682, on the instructions of the Voivode of Wallachia, Serban Cantacuzino.”

“The who of where?”

I held the compass up higher, and slowly moved it right and left. “Serban Cantacuzino was a great social and religious reformer. He had the Bible translated into Romanian, and it started a huge religious revival, like the King James Bible in the West.”

The compass needle spun around and around. “He was determined to root out the strigoi, all of them, because they were so unholy.”

“Obviously he didn’t have much luck.”

“No. the strigoi got him first. Some treacherous boyars allowed a strigoi mort to slip through the window of his palace one night, and the poor chap was sliced open and completely drained of blood.”

The compass needle suddenly stopped spinning, and started to see-saw in between north and northeast.

“I’m pretty sure the strigoi mort must have driven off,” I told Terence and Jill. “But there are still some other Screechers not too far away. Bullet can smell them, can’t you, boy?”

Bullet growled in the back of his throat.

“It’s quite a thing, isn’t it?” asked Terence, bending over and peering at my strigoi-compass. “How does it actually work?”

“Look at the needle. It’s made up of pearl, copper and silver. Silver is highly sensitive to evil and moral impurity. Copper is responsive to lies and deception — ask anybody who has ever taken a lie-detector test. And pearl goes dark when you expose it to hydrogen sulphide.”

“Hydrogen sulphide?”

“That’s the principal gas given off when human beings start to decompose.”

“Golly,” said Terence. “That makes it sound almost scientific, doesn’t it?”

I stared at him. Almost scientific, my rear end. He was talking about a theological tracking device invented and constructed by some of the leading intellects of the seventeenth century. I didn’t argue about it, though. I had a job to do, and very little time to do it in.

Gradually, nervily, the needle began to settle down, although it was still twitching from side to side. Whatever it had picked up, it was still quite a long way off, and the needle couldn’t seem to make up its mind exactly which way it wanted to point. To me, that meant that it had probably picked up more than one Screecher, and was dithering between the two, as Bullet was. Distance: maybe a half-mile. Direction: diagonally northeast across the park, across an avenue of poplars, and then a bright green playing field.

“Go on, boy,” said Jill. Bullet circled around for a while, sniffing and snorting and sneezing as if he had a head cold. Then, without warning, he tore off across the playing field.

“Bullet, slow down, boy! Bullet!”

Jill ran after him and I jogged after Jill, my metal Kit banging painfully against my knees. Terence had gone back to his car and was slowly driving toward us up the avenue of poplars, even though motor vehicles weren’t allowed inside the park. I could see two uniformed park-keepers in the distance, staring at him, although they were too far away to make out the expressions on their faces.

“Bullet!” shouted Jill.

Bullet crossed the playing field to the other side, and ran into a copse of horse-chestnut trees. At this time of the year the trees were dark green and heavy with pink blossom, and the ground beneath them was deeply shadowed. Jill disappeared into the gloom and I followed her. Bullet started barking again and this time he wouldn’t stop.

I had almost caught up with Jill now. Together, we burst into a clearing among the trees, and there was Bullet, barking and snarling and running from side to side.

“Oh God,” said Jill.

Standing in the middle of the clearing were four people. A young man with short, scruffed-up hair and a pale, bruised-looking face, wearing a torn sport coat and badly stained gray-flannel pants. A girl with gingery curls, as pale and bruised as the boy. She was plump, about seventeen years old, and she was wearing a white summer dress with red-and-gray cats printed on it, like the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp, but the front of her dress was flooded with dark maroon blood.

The young man was standing behind a round-faced middle-aged woman with permanent-waved hair. The woman’s flowerpot hat had been knocked askew and she was panting hysterically. Not surprising: the young man had one arm around her neck and he was holding a long wide-bladed kitchen knife right in front of her face.

The gingery-haired girl was holding the wrist of a skinny young boy, aged about eight or nine, who was so frightened that he had wet his khaki shorts and could barely stand up. The girl was holding a kitchen knife, too, and repeatedly prodded the boy in the chest and the shoulders with the point. The boy kept whining “Ow! — Ow! — Ow! — Ow!”

I reached behind my back and lifted my Colt.45 out of its holster. I held it up in both hands, cocked it, and took two steps closer.

“You don’t need me to tell you what to do,” I announced. “I’m going to give you till three and then I’m going to kill you.”

The young man looked at the gingery-haired girl and then he looked back at me. “Bugger off,” he told me.

“Not a hope, pal. You heard what I said. I’m giving you a count of three and then I’m going to kill you. One.”

“I thought I said bugger off,” the young man challenged me.

“You did. But I think you were under the misapprehension that even if I shot you, I couldn’t kill you. You’re a Screecher, after all, a strigoi vii, and as such you think you’re immortal.”

The young man frowned. “What do you know about it, you tosser?”

“I know very much more than you do, pal, if my old friend Duca is running true to form.”

The young man lowered his arm so that the point of his kitchen knife was digging into the woman’s blouse, just above her waistband. A small spot of bright scarlet blood appeared among the pattern of lime-green leaves. The woman whimpered and started to cry, and helplessly opened and closed her hands.

The young man said, “I don’t know who you are, mate, and to be honest with you I don’t give a monkey’s. But if you don’t sling your hook right now I’m going to get the right hump and do this poor old bag right in front of you.”

“Two,” I told him. “And for your information, the bullets in this gun were cast from the melted-down goblets that were used by Christ’s disciples at the Last Supper. Not only that, they’ve been plated with pure silver and rubbed with garlic from the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.”

“You’re having a bubble, mate.”

“You want to try me?”

“Beryl!” said the young man, half-turning toward the girl.

I took another step forward. I had never been Roy Rogers, but at this distance I could have blown at least half of the young man’s face off without too much risk of hitting the middle-aged woman.

“Three,” I warned him.

At that moment, the girl swung her elbow back and stabbed the little boy in the middle of his stomach. The blow was so forceful that I could hear the chop! as the blade went in. Without any hesitation, the girl whipped the knife upward so that he was cut open from his belt to his chest. The little boy let out a horrible high-pitched scream like a run-over cat. Then he fell backward on to last autumn’s leaves.

I fired once and hit the girl in the shoulder. The bang of a.45 is absolutely deafening, and disorienting, too. I fired again and hit her in the side. Lumps of red flesh flew off her hip, and she rolled over backward and sideways, just behind the boy. She tried to get up so I shot her again, blowing off her left kneecap.

“Jim!” screamed Jill.

I swung around, pointing my pistol at the young man. But I was too late. He had already thrust his knife into the middle-aged woman’s stomach, right up to the hilt, and her blood was running down his wrist and staining her skirt. She was staring at me in pain and shock and for some reason I couldn’t help noticing the large brown mole on her upper lip, as if she had suffered that blemish all her life, only to die like this.

I aimed at the young man’s head, but he ducked down behind her. I tried to dodge to the side, but he swung her around, as if he were dancing with her, with the knife still buried in her stomach. No matter which way I tried to get a clear shot at him, he kept her between us.

“Terence!” I yelled. I needed someone to outflank this young Screecher, and hit him from the side. “Terence, where are you for Christ’s sake!”

It was then that I turned to Jill. She was standing under the trees, her eyes wide, holding on to Bullet’s collar.

“Jill! Set Bullet on him! Jill, he’s going to kill her!”

But it was too late. The Screecher yanked his knife upward and the woman’s intestines piled out on to the ground, unravelling themselves like yards and yards of overcooked cannelloni. The Screecher turned and ran away through the woods, and he was running so fast that all I could see was a brief gray shadow and a flurry of leaves. There was no point in wasting a Last Supper bullet on him.

I turned around. The gingery-haired girl had gone as well.

“Did you see which way she went?” I asked Jill.

“We have to call for an ambulance,” she told me. Her voice was jerky and erratic and she was trembling uncontrollably.

I gripped her arms and shook her. “Did you see which way she went? The redhead? Send Bullet after her!”

“They’re going to die,” said Jill. She tried to turn around and stumble away but I wouldn’t let her.

“Listen, Jill, they’re probably dead already. Terence will call an ambulance. You and me, we have to go after the Screechers. That’s what we’re here for.”

She shook her head. “I can’t send Bullet after those people. I can’t. I can’t do this any more. I didn’t realize.”

“Jill, for Christ’s sake pull yourself together. We have to get after them now!”

“No,” she said. “I can’t do this any more. I thought I could but I can’t.”

I let her go. There was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t let Bullet run after the Screechers on his own, and he certainly wouldn’t listen to me.

I walked over to the little boy. His arms and legs were sprawled as if he were jumping into the air, but he would never jump again. He was white-faced and dead. The woman moaned and I crossed over to see how she was. Her intestines were stuck all over with leaves and twigs and she was staring at them in despair.

“Pray for me,” she whispered.

I nodded. “Every morning, from now on, until the day that I die. I promise you.”

“You’re a strange bloke,” she said.

I didn’t answer her. What can you answer, when a dying woman says that to you?