Descendant

Body Count

I clattered down the stairs and into the street, but there was no sign of them. I saw a black saloon pulling away from the curb on the opposite side of the road, with a puff of exhaust, but I couldn’t make out who was driving it.

I needed a man-trailing dog, and I needed it fast. But Terence had the keys to the car and without the keys I couldn’t get access to the radio-telephone to call for assistance. The counterintelligence corps had trained me how to fire a whole variety of weapons from crossbows to bazookas, and how to break down a reinforced door using explosives, but they had never taught me how to hot-wire a car.

I looked around. Only about thirty yards along the road, on the corner of Allenby Avenue, stood a lighted red phone booth. I panted my way up to it. Inside, chattering and laughing and smoking a cigarette, there was a plump-faced girl with a ponytail. She was wearing a pink skirt with so many net petticoats underneath it that it practically filled up the whole booth, and a white back-to-front cardigan, and pink popper beads. I rapped on the window and mouthed, “Are you going to be long, honey? I have an emergency!”

She opened the door and a cloud of smoke came out. “What’s the matter with you, mate? I’m talking to my boyfriend!”

“I have an emergency. I really need to use the phone.”

“I just put three bob in. Go and have your emergency somewhere else.”

I took out my wallet and pulled out a ten-shilling note. “There. You’ve made seven bob profit. Now can I use the phone?”

I called MI6 control. As it happened, Charles Frith was still in his office, and the operator put me directly through to him.

“Captain Falcon? You were lucky to catch me, old man. What’s the latest? Mission accomplished, I hope?”

I told him what had happened. He listened in silence. The only time he interrupted was when he said, “A flare?”

“Just because the strigoi come from a bloodline that’s over three thousand years old, that doesn’t mean they’re not technically sophisticated. Duca turned the tables on us completely. It blinded us, and at the same time it gave itself all the light it needed to see in the dark.”

“Well, look here, I’ll get in touch with Inspector Ruddock and get him to start looking for Mitchell right away. As for a dog, perhaps Miss Foxley has recovered sufficiently to help you out. She’s nearest, after all. If she’s still hors de combat, let me know right away, and I’ll arrange to have another dog handler sent down.”

“OK. I’ll call you when I get to Miss Foxley’s.”

“Good man. By the way, a Mrs. Rosemary Shulman has been trying to get in touch with you, from the Home Office. She rang two or three times, so far as I know. Daphne’s got her number.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Captain Falcon — ”

“Yes, sir?”

“You will keep a very low profile, won’t you? I’ve had the press hounding me all day. Sooner or later, one of the buggers is going to find out what we’re up to.”

“Yes, sir.”

I hung up. The girl with the petticoats said, “About bloody time, too. My boyfriend’s probably left me for somebody else by now.”

“A terrific-looking girl like you? He’d have to be nuts.”

“Oh,” she said, flattered, and giggled.

I went back into the South Croydon Observer building and collected up my Kit. The building was dark, and it echoed, and it smelled strongly of burned-out flare. I was reminded of World War Two, searching through bombed-out apartments for signs of Screechers.

When I had reassembled my Kit and shut the case, I went back outside to flag down a black taxi. I asked the cabbie to take me to Jill’s house in Purley, which was only about five minutes away.

“I’ll be glad when this bleedin’ ’eat lets up,” complained the cabbie, with a skinny cigarette dangling between his lips. “Makes me feet swell up like bleedin’ balloons.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“Then there’s all this Korean Flu going around. People dropping like bleedin’ flies. That’s all because of the ’eat, if you ask me, and they say that next year’s going to be even ’otter. Do you know what I was readin’? By the year nineteen-seventy-nine, the ’ole of England’s goin’ to be like the Sahara desert, and we’ll all be ridin’ around on bleedin’ camels.”

We reached the Foxleys’ house and I asked the cabbie to wait. The Foxleys were obviously at home, because the drapes were drawn and the living room lights were on, but the house seemed unusually quiet. I couldn’t even hear a TV.

After a few moments, however, Mr. Foxley opened the door, holding Bullet by his collar.

“Captain Falcon!” he blinked. “We weren’t expecting you, were we?”

“No, you weren’t. But we have a crisis on our hands, and I was wondering if Jill could maybe help us out.”

Without hesitation, Mr. Foxley shook his head. “I’m sorry, Captain, but Jill isn’t very well at all. She’s been in bed since yesterday, and we’ve had the doctor around twice.”

“Do you know what’s wrong with her?”

“She’s very feverish. The doctor thinks it might be Korean Flu. He’s given her something to keep her temperature down, but I don’t think she’s out of the woods yet.”

“I’m very sorry to hear it. The problem is, I desperately need a tracker dog.” I looked down at Bullet, who was straining so hard against his collar that he was wheezing. I thought: I’ve seen how Corporal Little handled Frank. I’ve seen how Jill handles Bullet. It can’t be too difficult to manage a man-trailer. They go running off on their own most of the time.

“Maybe I could take Bullet myself,” I suggested.

“Oh. I’m not so sure about that. I mean, Jill and Bullet, they’re tremendously close. I don’t know whether he’d take instructions from anybody else.”

At that moment, Mrs. Foxley appeared, in an orange silk robe. “Who is it, dear? What’s going on?”

“Hi there, Mrs. Foxley,” I said. “I’m sorry that Jill is feeling so low. I was wondering if I could borrow Bullet for a few hours.”

Mrs. Foxley looked dubious. “You could try, I suppose.”

I hunkered down on the front doormat and held out my hand. “Here, Bullet. Good boy, Bullet. How about coming out to play with your Uncle Jim?”

I stroked his ears and he seemed to like that. “Do you have a leash?” I asked Mrs. Foxley.

She went to the hall closet and came back with Bullet’s leash. “Here, boy,” I said, soothingly. “Let’s go walkies, shall we?”

I started to clip the leash on to his collar, but Bullet immediately snarled and twisted his head round and his teeth crunched into the fleshy part of my thumb. I toppled back, knocking over all of the Foxleys’ empty milk bottles.

“Oh, I am so sorry!” said Mrs. Foxley, coming outside to help me up.

“You’re a wicked dog!” snapped Mr. Foxley, slapping Bullet’s nose. “What are you? You’re a very wicked dog!”

I stood up, holding my bleeding hand. The bite wasn’t too deep, but it damn well hurt. “Hey, it’s not Bullet’s fault. Poor mutt hardly knows me. I’ll just have to call for another dog handler, that’s all. Can I use your phone?”

Just as I was about to go inside, the cabbie came up, carrying my Kit. “Sorry, mate. I can’t wait any longer. It’s me mother-in-law’s wedding anniversary tonight. If I turn up late for that, I’ll get all kinds of grief from ’er indoors.”

“It’s all right,” said Mr. Foxley. “You can borrow Jill’s car. It’s the least we can do. I’ll get the keys for you.”

I called MI6 again. Charles Frith had left the office, but his deputy George Goodhew said that he would arrange for a dog handler to meet me in South Croydon as soon as he possibly could. I prayed that it wasn’t Skipper and that pompous Stanley Kellogg.

I was anxious to see Jill. I wanted to find out what Duca had done to her, if anything. Her doctor might have believed that she was suffering from “Korean Flu” but I knew damned well that there was no such illness. It could have been nothing more serious than stress. After all, I had left her in Duca’s surgery for only a matter of minutes. But she had been very disoriented when she came out, and I would have liked to check her out.

There was no time. I had to get after Duca without delay, and in any case Mr. and Mrs. Foxley seemed to be keen for me to leave. I didn’t blame them. Since I had first arrived on their doorstep, I had brought them nothing but trouble.

It was past 9:30 PM now. I tried to think where Duca might have gone. It must have infected at least a dozen strigoi vii, so maybe it had taken refuge in one of their homes. Once I had a man-trailing dog, I would have a much better chance of hunting these Screechers down. But it also occurred to me that many of Duca’s recent victims were likely to have been patients of Dr. Norman Watkins. Once Duca had installed itself as Dr. Watkins’s “locum,” it wouldn’t have had to go out searching for new people to infect. Every day, unsuspecting victims would have come to the Laurels expecting medical treatment, and it would have been simplicity itself for Duca to taint their blood with an injection of its own blood, or simply give them an oral dose of cough linctus blended with its own saliva.

I drove to the Laurels. There were still two bobbies standing outside, with cigarettes cupped behind their backs, and a line of marker tape was fluttering across the gates. I parked outside and showed the officers my MI6 pass.

“I need to take a quick look inside.”

“Rather you than me, squire. I reckon it’s haunted, that house.”

“Haunted?”

“We thought we saw somebody looking out of that upstairs window.”

“When was that?”

“About nine o’clock, just before it got dark. We went inside and made a search. Cupboards, under the beds, everywhere.”

“Not a sausage,” said the other officer, emphatically.

“Well, maybe you’re right, and it is haunted,” I told them. “On the other hand, reflections can play some pretty funny tricks.”

I went into the house, switched on the lights and headed straight for the receptionist’s office. The police and MI6 had obviously searched it, because all of the drawers of the filing cabinet had been left open, and the pictures taken down from the walls. Two of the chairs were tilted over and magazines were scattered all over the floor.

I found what I wanted almost at once, but then of course the police and MI6 hadn’t been specifically looking for it. The receptionist’s diary was still lying open on her desk, and the name and address of every patient who had visited “Dr. Duca” was meticulously listed, along with the time of their consultation. Once my new dog handler had arrived, we could visit every one of these patients, starting with the earliest, and it wouldn’t take us too long to sniff out any Screechers.

I closed the diary, tucked it under my arm, and I was about to leave the office when I thought I heard a creaking noise upstairs. It wasn’t like somebody walking across floorboards — it was more like hinges, followed by a complicated click. There was something else, too: a noticeable change in atmospheric pressure, as if a window had been opened, and a draft was blowing in.

I went out into the hallway and stood at the foot of the stairs, listening. I was sure that I heard more creaking, and then a shuffling sound. The police officers hadn’t been mistaken. There was somebody in the house. I listened and listened, but I didn’t hear anything else. I had the impression that whoever it was, they were listening to me, too.

I waited a few moments longer, and then I went outside to Jill’s car. I opened my Kit and put the receptionist’s diary inside it, along with all the other artifacts I needed for hunting Screechers.

“Everything all right, sir?” one of the bobbies asked me.

I gave him a thumbs-up but I didn’t say anything. The less that anybody else knew what was really going on, the better.

Back in the house, I laid my Kit on the receptionist’s desk and unfastened the clips. I took out my Screecher compass and opened the cover. Immediately, the needle swung around and pointed, shivering, toward the stairs. Its response was so quick and so positive that I knew there must be more than one Screecher in the house.

I could guess what had happened. Once they were infected with the Screecher virus, several strigoi vii had been forced to leave their homes, or had left voluntarily because they didn’t want to be tempted to kill their loved ones or their neighbors. I had seen this happen many times before, during World War Two. They had gathered together in a nest, close to the strigoi mort who had infected them.

Judging by the way my compass needle was trembling, Duca’s nest of living Screechers was here, someplace upstairs, in this house.

I took out my Bible and my whip, coiling my whip loosely around my waist. Before I attempted to destroy the Screechers, I had to find out how many there were, and where they were. And this wasn’t wartime. I couldn’t throw in a hand grenade and attack them while they were still stunned and maimed and disabled.

I went to the foot of the stairs again and looked up. The house was silent again, and the second-floor landing was in darkness. I tried the light switch but the bulb had burned out, or the Screechers had removed it.

Holding my gun in my right hand and my Bible in my left, I carefully mounted the stairs. They creaked, so I stopped every two or three stairs and stood totally still, in case the Screechers had heard me. Somewhere in the distance a plane was droning.

I reached the top of the stairs and looked right and left. No Screechers on the landing. I went into the bedrooms, one by one, switching on the lights. I opened the wardrobes and looked under the beds. No Screechers here either.

I nudged open the bathroom door. There was a huge black spider halfway up the side of the bath, but no Screechers.

Maybe the police officers had been hallucinating. Maybe I had been hearing things.

I was just about to go back downstairs when I heard a sharp shifting sound right above my head. I looked up and saw a trapdoor, and finger marks on the white ceiling all around it. That’s where they were: in the attic. The noise of springs and clicking must have been a loft ladder coming down.

This was going to be difficult. I would have to pull down the loft ladder to get into the attic, so there was no chance of my taking them by surprise, and as soon as I stuck my head through the trapdoor they would tear my face off. There was only one way to deal with them, so far as I could see, and that was to seal them in the attic so that they couldn’t get out — at least until I had thought of a way of rousting them out of there and killing them.

I went into the main bedroom and carried out an antique wooden chair, which I positioned directly underneath the trapdoor. Out of my Kit I took a large ball of yellow wax, and two full heads of garlic. The wax had once formed part of a death mask of St. Francis of Assisi, and I had used it several times before to prevent strigoi mortii from sliding out through narrow gaps around windows and doors.

I rolled a large lump of wax between the palms of my hands until it was warm and soft. Then I climbed up on to the chair and started to press it into the crack around the edge of the attic door.

I had only filled in a few inches when I heard a loud scrape, and a clatter. Before I could jump down from the chair, the trapdoor was pulled upward, and a staring-eyed man in a gray suit appeared, his gray hair sticking up as if he had been walking through a hurricane. He lunged down and seized my wrists, trying to drag me upward. I kicked and struggled, and the chair tipped sideways, so that I was left in the air with my feet furiously pedaling.

Another man reached down and grabbed my left sleeve. My shirt tore, but he got a grip on my elbow. Between the two of them, the Screechers started to haul me upward through the trapdoor, scraping my shoulders on the wooden frame. It was dark inside the attic, but I could see five or six more of them, including two women, and they all came clustering around me, snatching at my shirt and pulling at my hair. I saw knives shining, and I suddenly felt a sharp wet cut across my knuckles, and another one across my forehead.

Christ, they were going to cut me open and drink my blood, and there were enough of them in this attic to drink me dry.

I realized then that they were too strong for me, and that they were going to pull me up into the attic no matter how hard I struggled. So I stopped kicking and swinging my legs, and instead of trying to wrench myself free, I took hold of the gray man’s coat and hauled myself upward.

The Screechers were all pulling me so hard that I almost jumped up into the attic, and the gray man lost his balance and fell backward. I rolled over and rolled over again, colliding with a stack of suitcases and knocking over an old standard lamp, but as I rolled over the second time I was able to reach behind me and pull out my gun.

The gray man was practically on top of me, so close that my nostrils were filled with the sweet smell of his rotting insides. I pointed the gun at his face and fired, and even in the semidarkness I could see a large lump of his head fly off, including his ear. He fell sideways on top of the suitcases, his heels drumming on the floorboards like a stricken horse.

I fired again. The noise of the shot made my ears ring, and the attic was filled with gunsmoke. I fired a third time, and one of the women Screechers fell backward and toppled through the open trapdoor. A fourth shot brought down another man — and even though their knives were raised, the rest of the Screechers hesitated. They knew that I couldn’t kill them, even if I blew bits off their heads, but they weren’t impervious to pain, and even Screechers don’t relish disfigurement.

I stood up and approached them, pointing my weapon at each of them in turn. The dim light that came up through the trapdoor showed me what a sorry, hideous collection of lost souls they were — their faces haggard, their clothes caked in dried blood, their eyes milky. They were in the last stages of degradation as strigoi vii, and it wouldn’t be long before they would be craving one final poisonous drink of Duca’s blood — the blood that would transform them forever into strigoi mortii.

From down below I heard shouting. “You all right, sir? What’s the ’ell’s going on?”

“I’ve found your ghosts!” I shouted back. “There’s a woman down there. hold on to her and don’t let her get away!”

I edged toward the open trapdoor, keeping my gun pointed at the Screechers. They were growing bolder now, and one of the women lunged toward me, hissing in contempt, and crisscrossing her knife in the air. I pointed my gun at her head and pulled the trigger but all that I heard was a metallic click. All of my Last Supper bullets had been fired, and the clip was empty.

I didn’t hesitate. I swung myself through the trapdoor and jumped down to the landing below, stumbling over the fallen chair. The woman who had fallen through was already halfway down the stairs, her hair wild and her blue cotton dress spattered with dried blood. The two police officers had just reached the foot of the stairs below her, and they were staring up at her in horror.

“Bloody ’ell, you’ve shot ’er!”

“Stop her! Don’t let her get away!”

The woman threw herself down the stairs toward them, screeching. The officers made a fumbled attempt to hold her, but she flailed her arms and wrenched herself free and ran along the hallway to the open front door.

“There’s another one!” exclaimed one of the officers, pointing to the trapdoor above my head.

Another woman Screecher was climbing out of the attic. She was wearing a green skirt and a stained yellow cardigan. Unlike the first woman, she didn’t drop to the floor. Instead, she crawled upside down along the ceiling, so that her skirt hung down and I could see her laddered stockings and her garter belt. She crawled all the way down the sloping ceiling above the staircase, above our heads — all the way along the hallway ceiling, and out of the front door. We couldn’t have reached her to pull her down to the floor, even if we had had the nerve to do it.

As soon as she had gone, the man in the gray suit appeared in the trapdoor. His hair was sticking up wildly and the left side of his skull looked like broken, bloodstained china. I could see the other Screechers crowding close behind him, and I knew that it was time to get the hell out of here.

I jumped down the stairs, three and four at a time. “Come on, there’s too many of them!”

The man in the gray suit was already crawling across the ceiling, and a balding middle-aged man with liver-spotted hands was following him. There must have been more Screechers in the attic than I had realized, because they came pouring out like spiders, swarming down the walls. I didn’t stop to count them, and neither did the two police officers. I grabbed my Kit from the receptionist’s office and we ran out into the night.

Halfway toward the front gates, one of the officers turned around and drew out his baton. “Right, then!” he said, defiantly. “Let’s see how they like having their ’eads cracked!”

I seized hold of his arm and pulled him away so violently that he almost fell over. “You’re out of your frigging mind! They’ll kill us! Let’s go!”

“Come on — they’re only a bunch of women and old geezers!”

“Listen to me — do you want to have your goddamned heart cut out? Because that’s what they’ll do to you!”

The officers hesitated. “Let’s go, guys!” I shouted at them — and, confused, they followed me. We all scrambled into their unmarked Wolseley and slammed the doors. The officer in the driving seat immediately reached for the radio, but I said, “Let’s get out of here first, OK?”

The Screechers were already running out of the front door and across the shingled driveway. The officer suddenly realized that they were intent on coming after us and doing us serious harm, even if they were women and middle-aged men. Three or four of them reached the car and started to beat their fists on the windows and pull at the door handles, and it was then that the officer started up the engine and jammed his foot on the gas pedal. We roared off the grass verge and bounced on to the roadway, with the Screechers still banging on the roof and trying to mount up on to the running board.

A mile up the road, the officer slowed down, although he kept looking nervously in his rearview mirror.

“What the hell were they?” said his fellow officer, turning around in the passenger seat.

“What the hell were what?”

“Those people. Normal people can’t crawl across the ceiling. Jesus Christ.”

I was dabbing at my forehead with my handkerchief. The cut extended all the way from my hairline to the side of my left eye, but fortunately it wasn’t very deep.

“We never saw any people, crawling on the ceiling or otherwise.”

“But — ”

“Official Secrets Act, OK? Now, can you patch me through to George Goodhew at MI6? He needs to know what hasn’t happened.”