by Brian Lumley
Kastrouni looked up, looked washed out, weary to death. ‘At least I’ve warned you,’ he said.
‘Never come anywhere near me again,’ Trace told him. ‘You’re an old man and crazy, but if I do see you again – and if I ever hear you mention my mother’s name again – I swear I’ll shove you under a fucking bus!’ He went out and slammed the door behind him.
But there was a door in his mind, opened by Kastrouni, which for all his anger he knew he could never close. Not completely. For the moment he had turned his back on that portal, refused its invitation. Beyond its threshold lay fantasy, and Trace’s feet were set firmly in reality.
Waiting for his taxi under the awning outside the lobby, he became aware that he was tapping his left foot nervously on the pavement. Kastrouni had wanted to tell him more, show him things. What things? Stuff from Guigos’s saddle-packs? Had there ever been such a man as George Guigos? What difference did it make anyway? Kastrouni was crazy, possessor of a few facts around which he’d constructed an entire realm of nightmare and … and fantasy. Sheer fantasy.
Balls to him and his bloody story!
But Trace’s foot – his left foot – kept on tapping for all that …
Trace rarely slept during the day, but that Saturday he slept right through what was left of the afternoon. Slept like a dead man, dreamless and motionless as a log, so that when he came gropingly awake he found his bed untumbled, with only the long, single hollow his body had made to show he’d been there at all. A roll of carpet may just as easily have lain there, would have moved as much or more than he had.
It had been the whisky, of course. Half a bottle of the stuff: like an anaesthetic to a mind suddenly assaulted by an unknown past, or more properly by someone else’s warped fancies. Kastrouni and his bloody mumbo-jumbo.
Kastrouni …
All the way from Athens.
Words leaped to the forefront of Trace’s mind. Words from a fantasy, but unforgotten. Ab … Demogorgon … Chorazin …
‘Stigmata … ?’
He got out of bed, checked Yellow Pages for the number of Kastrouni’s motel and started to dial it – then stopped. Hell, no! His life was complicated enough without getting mixed up in someone else’s nightmares.
And anyway, he was supposed to be at Jilly’s place in – (he glanced at his watch,) in fifty minutes!
Frustration and momentary panic came together in an explosion of confused mental activity and frantic physical motion.Trace knocked over the telephone table, tripped on the TV cable, banged his shins on the washbasin’s pedestal before he could bring himself under control.
Then … he deliberately printed up Kastrouni’s name on the computer of his mind, and even more deliberately erased each letter of it one by one. That was that. And as for Jilly – she could damn well wait!
He put his mind and body into a lower gear, took an hour to clean up and get dressed, arrived at Jilly’s place exactly one hour and twenty-five minutes late …
Jilly was blonde and beautiful, long-legged, big-eyed and just three inches shorter than Trace. Her breasts were classically pear-shaped, with nothing of sag to them, and when she and Trace made love she had this habit of putting her arms up over her head so that he could see them displayed to their best. She liked sex as much as he did and no position was taboo. She did have a brain but had largely lost the use of it after discovering her normally devastating effect on men. Nor was she unacceptable to women: her model looks and natural flair for style had made her top salesperson at a well-frequented shoe shop in Oxford Street. She worked every other Saturday and this had been one of her ‘off’ days; which meant, to her way of thinking, that Trace’s refusal to spend the day with her had been a complete waste.
His turning up late didn’t go down very well either, and he hadn’t booked a table as promised; but he had taken her to a top restaurant for an expensive meal, and at the casino in the Cromwell Road he had diligently directed her in the placing of her chips at the roulette tables. In an hour she’d won more than three hundred pounds which he insisted she keep (‘Buy yourself some knickers or something …’), following which he’d driven her red Capri back to her place.
That was where his preoccupation – which he had thought well hidden – finally got through to her: the fact that his mind wasn’t on the job.
Normally they’d have a drink, bathe each other and stretch out naked on huge cushions in front of her video watching soft-porn films until they got caught up in it. But tonight was different. They got through the preliminaries but then … after tempting him for the best part of an hour she’d suddenly asked:
‘Where are you, Charlie?’
‘Eh?’
‘I mean, your things are here – almost – but you’re somewhere else!’
He’d turned from the screen to look at her, and slowly his eyes had focused. ‘My things?’
She’d stroked his genitals, barely touching him with only the tips of her fingers, and kissed his chest. ‘These things. But where are you? Have you met someone?’
He had started to make love to her then but half-way through had paused, as if on afterthought, to answer: ‘Yes, I’ve met someone.’
‘Oh!’ And she had pouted in typically mindless fashion.
‘A man,’ he’d explained. ‘Business.’
Then she had put her hands up over her head and Trace had concentrated long enough to bring them both to climax. Afterwards she’d said: ‘It’s funny, that’s all. I mean, you’ve never let business interfere with “business” before.’ Which for Jilly was uncommonly clever.
But then she’d said something to spoil it, something to annoy him out of all proportion. ‘Have you hurt yourself, Charlie? I mean, ordinarily you walk so straight, but tonight I’ve seen you limp now and then. Is your foot giving you trouble? Your funny foot?’
His ‘funny’ foot. He’d told her before about saying things like that to him. But her dejection had been obvious when Trace dressed and phoned for a taxi. On his part it wasn’t so much pique as the fact that after what she’d said their nakedness seemed suddenly obscene.
While he waited for his cab she put on a dressing-gown and sat smoking, saying nothing. Normally he would stay the night and they’d make love over and over. So maybe he really had met someone else. But she kept her thoughts to herself and when he left she hadn’t asked when she’d be seeing him. And Trace had been glad for that.
Now, in the taxi where it headed east on the North Circular, he lay back and considered the day’s events. They hadn’t been especially strenuous – grotesque, but not strenuous – and yet he felt thoroughly exhausted. And this after an afternoon spent sleeping! He was normally this way on the night before a job, not the night after. All the planning, the tension and suspense as the time drew closer.
But this Kastrouni – him and his half-told tale – and his alleged too-intimate knowledge of Trace’s beginnings …
And his very genuine fear of summer storms.
Of course if there was a single grain of truth in his story (there couldn’t be, but if there was) then it was only to be expected that he’d be afraid of lightning. The rumble of thunder must sound like the very knell of doom to him, and –
– And what the hell! Trace gave a loud snort, sat up straight in the back of the taxi. Why, he’d actually let the crazy Greek bastard get through to him! Ridiculous!
He looked out of his window at the night-grey buildings drifting by. And talk of the devil, there over the rooftops the sudden bright flash of lightning.
Talk of the devil.
Satan.
Ab.
Demogorgon.
Stigmata …
‘We’re driving right into it, Guv!’ the cabby commented, glancing at Trace over his shoulder. ‘The storm, I mean. Bleedin’ weather!’
Trace nodded, said nothing. His left foot ached, felt trapped in its specially modified shoe.
The taxi arrived at his place dead on 2:15 A.M. and just as it started to rain
. Five minutes later Trace was in bed and almost as quickly asleep …
… And almost as quickly awake.
What was that? A knock on his door – at this time of night?
He got out of bed, went to the door and used the fisheye lens to stare out onto the dark landing. He stared harder, blinked, brushed a stray hair from his brow. A shadow, descending the stairs and so out of view? Someone had softly knocked, certainly, for listening intently Trace now heard the accustomed creaking of tight treads from half-way down the stair-well. Then the banging of the main door on the ground floor confirmed it, a banging almost immediately drowned out in a long, rumbling peal of thunder. The storm was now at its peak.
But who would have come here in this weather and at this hour? Trace opened his door, moved to step out onto the landing and put the light on – and went sprawling!
He had tripped over something lying immediately beyond the threshold, something both bulky and heavy. On the gloomy landing on all fours, the shuddery thought flashed across Trace’s mind that perhaps it was a body. Where that idea came from he couldn’t think, but it had him up on his feet in a moment and groping desperately for the light switch.
And then he was gulping air thankfully, and tremblingly reaching to touch the battered old brown leather suitcase where it stood against his door. A sheet of notepaper had been rolled up and pushed through the time-blackened handle. Trace saw it, snatched it free and read:
Trace,
He is here and knows that I too am here. Once more I am pursued. I know you think me a madman, but the contents of the suitcase may yet serve to convince you. This is as much as I can do for you. Good luck!
D. Kastrouni
Kastrouni! It had been him. But why had he run? Why hadn’t he waited for Trace to open the door, let him in? Trace started downstairs, a cry rising to his lips – which died as he realized he was naked. Cursing under his breath he hurried back into the flat, ran to the bathroom. The window there opened over the street and the main entrance to the house; Trace threw it open, stuck his head out.
Down the street a running figure in a light suit drew up to a waiting taxi. Getting into the taxi, the figure looked back once, turning its face toward Trace. It could be Kastrouni, but Trace wasn’t sure. Again Trace went to cry out, and once again found himself stalled. A wind had come up, was blowing in his face, would whip his words uselessly away and waste them. Anyway, the man was already inside the taxi, which was drawing away down the street.
But it wasn’t only the wind that had stopped Trace calling after the man in the street, neither the wind nor the huge pellets of rain which seemed to deliberately slap him in the face. They were only products of the storm, after all. But the storm itself, that was something else.
It was alive. It had purpose. Crazy, yes, but Trace could feel it. It pricked at his skin, brought up goose-flesh on his naked arms and legs. It swirled in past him and filled the flat. The wind was full of strange energy, alive with a monstrous sentience. Trace felt himself scrutinized.
The taxi had reached the corner, was indicating a turn and slowing down. Its brake lights glowed red. Around that corner was an open space, a park, where the tops of tall trees showed over the rooftops. The topmost branches of those trees were in a frenzy now, whipping to and fro. And that was when lightning came striding from the north, marching on legs of white fire from a low ceiling of boiling clouds.
Trace had never seen anything like it. Only a second or two separated the flashes, which seemed to head in a straight line directly toward him – no, toward the taxi where it turned the corner and passed behind the brick bulk of a building. The sudden violence of the storm was terrifying as a hissing, crackling bolt struck down into the street and ran in rivers of molten light down the gutters – followed immediately by another that sizzled down to strike at something just around the same corner!
The thunder and the detonation came together: the first from the sky, a drawn-out roll of drums that rattled the tiles on all the rooves, and the second from the exploding taxi. The red rim of a fireball blazed briefly from behind the corner house, lighting up walls in an orange glare, and in the next moment flaming fragments of the car itself were blown back into view.
A twisted door bounded in the street, spraying glass. An axle with a blazing wheel intact performed ill-balanced pyrotechnic somersaults among the higher branches of the trees. Black smoke shot with fire boiled upward and outward.
‘Christ!’ Trace heard himself croak. ‘Jesus H. Christ …!’
But down inside he knew that this had had little or nothing to do with Him …
Chapter Three
Trace’s hands were shaking so badly he had difficulty getting dressed; by the time he was down on the street at the scene of the shredded, burned-out car, a redundant ambulance was already in attendance, police cars, even a fire-engine damping down shrubbery which blazing debris had set on fire. Windows in the corner house and its neighbour had been blown in; the damp pavements were full of people in dressing-gowns and slippers; the road was cratered where smouldering remains hissed and crackled as hot metal and small pools of glass cooled and contracted. Nothing in the mess much resembled human remains, for which Trace was glad. But in any case it had been instantaneous; no one had suffered and nothing could possibly have lived through it.
As for the lightning storm: it had passed on, burned itself out. The sky was bright and clear above a perfectly normal summer night. Perfectly normal …
Knowing there was nothing he could do and having no wish to get himself involved – not wanting his name in any way in the limelight – Trace stayed only a few moments before returning to the flat. There he opened the suitcase and tipped its contents out on the floor of his bedroom, sat staring for a long time at a mass of books and documents and fat envelopes. The fruits of Kastrouni’s lifelong obsession, the bulk of his ‘evidence’, the accumulated substance of a phobia which, ironically, in the end had killed him. That was what all this stuff must be, Trace thought. And that was the strangest part of it: he’d been frightened of lightning, and sure enough lightning had done for him.
Phobia? said a voice at the back of Trace’s mind. Obsession? The crazed fancies of a madman? Do you really believe that, Charlie? What is it, Charlie? What are you afraid of?
His left foot was aching abominably, felt confined in the soft warmth of his slipper. Trace kicked off the slipper, drew his feet up under him cross-legged on the bed, sat glaring at that left foot. In general outline it was very much a human foot, but its sole was thicker by half an inch, and the small toes were all joined. Not webbed, joined. Only the bones themselves were normal, the bones and nails and the cleft between the big toe and the rest of the foot. It fitted into a shoe, yes – albeit a special shoe – but in fact it was more a hoof than a foot. A cloven hoof …
‘Not physically perfect …’
‘Stigmata …’
And that monstrous sentience he had felt in the storm. There had been no denying that. No avoiding it, either. Black magic? Hallucination? There had been more than enough of both in Kastrouni’s story.
Trace got up off the bed, sat down again on the floor amidst the jumble from the suitcase. And slowly he began to examine each item, piece by piece. ‘This is as much as I can do for you,’ Kastrouni had said in his note. Well, and now Trace supposed it was the least he could do for him.
There was a slim notebook, its flyleaf bearing the neatly inscribed initials D.K., Kastrouni’s initials. Trace glanced into the pages, let his eyes skip over the entries without really seeing anything, laid the book aside for now.
And there were maps. A good many. Some of them were little more than sketches on ancient scraps of parchment; others were modern and presumably accurate, of-the Ordnance Survey sort and possibly to that standard; there were even battle-maps (plainly Israeli) showing areas of good natural advantage, elevated observation points, harbour areas for troops, tanks and so forth. And with very few exceptions all were of the same r
egion: the Sea of Galilee. Chorazin had been clearly marked on all of them, lying at the central points of inked crosses.
There was also a map of Karpathos in the Aegean, not recent – not in the last ten years, anyway, for on the legend the island’s name was spelled with a ‘C’ as opposed to the more romantic ‘K’ of the travel agencies – but fairly detailed for all that. It, too, was marked with a cross, the location of some ruin or other in the coastal mountains of the south-east, and there was also a name inked in but it was in Greek and Trace couldn’t read it.
Then there was an A-4 sized manila envelope of cuttings, even entire pages, from several Cypriot newspapers, all dated either 27th or 28th July ’57; and stapled together with these was a poor photocopy of a six-page report in English, addressed to the GOC Cyprus District and signed by the Deputy Assistant Provost Marshal, Middle-East Land Forces. Remembering Kastrouni’s story of what he believed had occurred that night at his father’s villa north of Larnaca, Trace decided to read this report first, but not before he’d at least glanced through the rest of the suitcase’s contents.
There were Holy Bibles, some huge and antique and full of explanatory notes, others Trace could hold in one hand, whose print was minuscule. He remembered seeing a list of biblical references in Kastrouni’s notebook and made a mental note to check it out later. But what on earth could anyone want with more than one Bible? It could be, of course, that Kastrouni had fooled around with bibliomancy or some such (certainly he had been a ‘true believer’, as he himself had readily admitted) but to Trace a Bible was simply another book.
He began to go a little more quickly, barely glancing at the stuff now. There were several crumbly parchments marked with esoteric designs that looked decidedly occult; these were preserved against further disintegration in plastic sleeves or between stiff laminates; and a very worm-eaten book in Arabic, held together by rubber bands, whose leaves almost without exception had come loose from the spine and flaky bindings; a fat bundle of papers in a large clear-plastic envelope labelled ‘Demogorgon & Associated …’; several volumes of world history since biblical times, with special reference to wars, invasions, disasters and the like …