by Brian Lumley
‘Because of my mother!’ Trace blurted, the words coming out before he could check them for content, like iron filings drawn from his tongue by a magnet. Khumeni’s hypnotic eyes, of course. Trace forced himself to look away.
‘You do well not to look at me,’ said Khumeni. ‘I might take it as a challenge and climb through your eyes into your brain, and read all the thoughts hidden there. Yes, and they might be such as to make me angry; in my anger I might blind you or turn you into a puling idiot, for my amusement. You see? And so you do well to avoid these eyes of mine. They have learned a lot in two thousand years.’
Trace said nothing, and eventually Khumeni continued:
‘Now, you say you hate me because of your mother – but I paid her great tribute when I filled her with my seed. Satan’s vast beauty and potency earned him his expulsion, so wondrous were they! You should feel honoured to own me for your father, and yet you answer with anger and hatred.’
Trace wanted to deny him, wanted to shout out that he was not Khumeni’s son – but that would be to ruin everything. It must be done at Chorazin, could only be done at Chorazin. And Trace wanted to be part of it there. He wanted to do it himself if he could, but at the very least be part of it. Still he could not resist a sneer. He glanced at Khumeni and looked away again, but at the same time he sneered. ‘Honoured? If you are what they think you are, who could feel honoured to have you for a father?’
‘They?’ Khumeni gave the word a razor’s edge.
Trace thought quickly. ‘Kastrouni said you were only half human, a beast.’
‘Kastrouni?’ the word came like a cough, fired explosively. Khumeni took Trace’s shoulders in his hands and forcibly turned him face-on. ‘He did speak to you at length, then. And what did he tell you, the Greek?’
‘He came – ’ Trace avoided looking directly into the other’s eyes, ‘– to kill me,’ he lied. ‘But then he weakened. He saw that I was only a man, not the monster he expected, and he couldn’t do it. Instead of killing me, he warned me. He said you were my father, and you were evil, and that he would destroy you if he could.’
Khumeni nodded. ‘He weakened, yes. You weakened him for me. He was so eager to convert you that when I found him his guard was down. And so, finally, I was able to kill him. I have you to thank for that.’
‘I saw you kill him,’ said Trace. ‘But it was a clean death. It won’t be like that for these men, will it? And it won’t be like that for me.’
Khumeni looked at the others, stared at them where they lolled, and Trace was glad of the respite from those burning eyes. ‘These two,’ said the beast, ‘they – are little more than fodder. Fuel for my next span of years. But you … who can say what lies ahead? And you are thinking: “Ah! But something also lies ahead for you, too”, eh? And do you suppose I don’t know they have schemed against me? I do know! But these others, these “friends” of your – Gokowski and the Halbsteins and the rest – can you really believe they know what they are dealing with? They only think they know. I scorn them, and my father will not forgive them, even though they know not what they do!’
‘Your father is the devil!’ Trace blurted. ‘Those words on your lips are a blasphemy. And now I understand the meaning of that word. I was never a true believer, but now I am. You might have duped me before, but now that I’m a believer you’ve lost me,’
Khumeni laughed, like ice on sensitive teeth. ‘What? Lost you? Fool! How could you ever really believe in my father without first believing in Him? No, I’ve not lost you, Charles, I’ve found you!’
Chapter four
Confused, Trace opened his mouth but nothing came out. ‘I …’ he said. ‘I …’
‘Nothing is what it seems, my son,’ Khumeni laughed again. ‘You talk of winning and losing; but when Satan spins the wheel, all the numbers are zeros! Just remember, nothing is what it seems. To win is to gain everything you detest, and to lose is to be bereft of all you hold most dear. And so, how may you win? A riddle for you to play with, perhaps? But before you attempt to fathom it, consider first my power!’
He threw off his robe, stood naked … And if there was any single shred of doubt left in Trace, now it was snuffed out like a candle, extinguished at once. A satyr stood there for a moment, Pan chuckled and smiled slyly - then reached out and caught Trace and drew him close. ‘So Kastrouni said that I was only half-human, eh?’ his voice bubbled like pitch. ‘But he was wrong. Nothing of me is human, Charles! Can’t you understand that the shape you wear is abhorrent to me and mine? For you are made in the image of the Ultimate Enemy. It is ugly! But this … this is the real beauty. Look at it. Can’t you feel it burning? What, revulsion? I felt that, too, at first – but now I feel only power!’
Trace fought with himself, struggled furiously, won. He turned away. Apparently astonished, Khumeni simply released his shoulders.
‘What?’ he said. ‘You defy me? You dare put me behind you? But I will not be defied.’ On his grotesque beast’s legs he loped to the others where they sat, tore open their robes. ‘See here, their marks!’ The Greek’s right leg was covered in coarse black hair from thigh to ankle; in the Turk’s left armpit, a full-sized woman’s breast, complete with huge nipple, depended like the udder of a witch.
Trace drew back, shuddering, but Khumeni only brayed with laughter. ‘Marks, yes,’ he nodded his scabrous head, ‘devil’s signs – but you have the true mark, Charles!’
Sudden pain shot through Trace’s left leg from his foot. He cried out, staggered, put a hand on the wall of the balcony to steady himself. And he knew that the pain had been sent, that Khumeni had taken control of him just when he thought he was the winner.
‘See my power!’ the beast was gleeful. ‘And you think I might be defeated? But let me show you more. Get up, my son – up on to the wall.’
Trace shook his head, felt sweat break out on him in a moment as he commanded his body to stay still – and it refused! He fought it every inch of the way – uselessly. He got up on to the wall, kneeled there on that narrow stone parapet, slowly stood up. His right leg was straight and strong, despite recent deprivations, but his left trembled violently. Only inches from eternity, he staggered.
‘Lean outwards,’ said the beast, ‘and look down!’
Trace tried to shake his head in denial, but Khumeni’s control was now complete. Inwardly screaming no, no, still his body leaned outwards. Far below the Lake of Galilee glittered in the rays of a sun three-quarters down . the sky; to the north the world’s rim was curved; Gravity, invisible, grew angry at Trace’s impertinent posturing.
‘More yet!’ Khumeni rasped.
Trace leaned out on thin air – and felt himself start to slip through it! Khumeni caught his left hand, leaned backward and swung him like a pendulum, turned him inwards even as he toppled. Jelly, he crashed down from the wall on to the balcony’s stone floor and lay there crying and wetting himself.
Khumeni put on his robe, turned the cowl up over his head, moved to the door. Before going through it he paused and pointed at Trace, commanding: ‘Now resist me no longer but lie there in your piss and sleep. And tonight we shall see what we shall see.’
And once more Trace could only obey him …
Consciousness came with cool updraughts from the lake, with a sky turning indigo, in which the ghosts of stars showed as flickering white fireflies, and with the sound of hurried footsteps on stone and a slamming of doors. The nunnery came awake and Khumeni’s entourage was on the move again.
Last to leave and climb the steps to the plateau where the vehicles stood under the first stars was Khumeni himself, behind the trio of staggering zombies he called his sons. For under the awesome power of the beast the three were walking now, though Trace knew that only one – namely Trace himself – should be able to walk at all. But though they reeled like drunkards, still his ‘brothers’ climbed the shallow steps to the plateau and were helped into the back of a landrover, and Trace with them. Amira got in too, keeping as close to
Trace as she could get. Decker was the driver and Khumeni sat beside him, leading the way. For no one knew the way better than Khumeni. In the second landrover, Professor Halbstein drove with Gabella and Vittori as his passengers. The ambulance was left behind.
Down below in the small oasis of greenery guarding the nunnery’s entrance, Rosco and Lancing watched the dipped headlights of the two vehicles out of sight, then went back inside. For them it was over, simply a matter of waiting now. So they thought.
But in the prison dormitory Anna Chinnova had sensed Khumeni’s departure, and already a stone flag in the floor had been prised loose to allow a pair of armed, uniformed figures to clamber stiffly into view. Israeli soldiers, combat-hardened veterans of many campaigns, they silently worked the stiffness out of cramped joints, quietly readied their automatic weapons and moved to the locked door.
Out in the corridor, Rosco and Lancing had resumed their game of poker at a small wooden table. Then there came the banging from within the dormitory, and the Mother Superior’s strident voice demanding that they open the door. ‘There are no … facilities in here!’ she protested. ‘We have our needs, you know.’
Rosco grimaced and stood up, picked up the weapon Vittori had left behind for them, went to the door. ‘Is that all they fucking do?’ he inquired of Lancing as he turned the key. ‘Pester and pray and pee?’
The door burst open on him to reveal the two Israelis crouched there, guns at the ready. Rosco’s eyes stood out in his pale face. ‘Shit!’ he said, swinging up his weapon – but not quite finding the time to pull the trigger. Both Israelis opened up, the yammering stream of concussions deafening as Rosco was picked up by the sleeting lead and hurled away like a rag doll. Lancing, too, was in the line of fire. Half-way out of his chair the withering blast caught him, laced him up and down and sideways, tossed his crimson corpse loose as an empty suit across the corridor.
With blue smoke and the smell of cordite still heavy in the air, and their ears still ringing, the soldiers went about their business. The senior man extended the antenna of his walkie-talkie, coldly and efficiently made his report.
And up on the heights over Chorazin cigarettes were extinguished and silent observers moved back into the shadows of rocks and ruins, and camouflage netting was checked where it broke down the shapes of vehicles and swivel-mounted general-purpose machine-guns, and a half-platoon of Special Forces grew vigilant as night deepened and the first clouds began to gather in ominous thunderheads out of the east …
In the lee of a domed hill to the north-east of Chorazin, Khumeni’s landrovers sat in silence and shadows until an hour before midnight. Then, at his signal, the engines coughed into life and dipped headlights came on, and the last half-mile of the journey was completed over bumpy ground and through the crumbling ruins of ages. And at last they came to the secret place.
Trace looked out from the back of the landrover at a scene he knew at once: a scene painted on his mind’s eye by Dimitrios Kastrouni and still fresh there, accurate in every detail.
Obviously the place had been, long, long ago, a large village or town. The foundations of many houses were still apparent, and in places, low, ruined walls still stood up from the stony ground. Here was the crumblng rim of the dried-out well Kastrouni had mentioned, in a now ghostly plaza under the stars, and here the almost fossilized trunk of a great olive tree, slowly turning to stone in a languid metamorphosis which had already taken more than six hundred years. And in the near-distance, where the cliffs had been split and weathered into an opening by some ancient watercourse, down there in the ‘V’ of the cleft, Galilee lay silver in moon and starlight. The place had magic, and mystery, and yet it was morbid. The last because Trace knew where he was.
Khumeni and his three thugs, and Amira and her father, gathered in a group beside the vehicle containing Trace and his ‘brothers’. And it was then, as the beast began to issue his last instructions, that Trace – probably the others, too – first noticed his rapidly accelerating deterioration, the physical and possibly mental decay bloating in him like a monstrous dry-rot mutation.
Words bubbled out of his now shrunken form like pockets of foul gas bursting over a swamp: ‘First we open the place up. Decker, I may need your great bulk, the weight of your gross body, and so you shall come below with me and my three. Vittori: you, too, accompany us. Gabella: you stay up here and keep watch. Especially these two, the girl and her father. Watch them well. You see, they have arranged a little trap for us – a puny threat which I shall deal with shortly!’
‘A trap?’ Decker nervously gazed all about in the dark. ‘I see no trap. And what do you mean, “below”? Where, below?’
‘A dig, I said,’ Khumeni chortled evilly. ‘And how may one get below without digging, eh? But bring me the length of chain from the back of that vehicle there and I shall show you.’
While Decker got the chain, Khumeni limped to a level area within a square formed by four large boulders. ‘Gabella, Vittori!’ he called. ‘Quickly, bring shovels, dig here.’
The two did as they were told but Gabella grumbled: ‘I don’t remember being paid to do any digging.’
Khumeni definitely seemed smaller now; his robe trailed a little on the ground under his feet, and the cowl seemed overlarge for his head. He was crumbling into himself as the transformation took hold and his years caught up with him – that rapid decline which forewarned that his time of renewal drew ever closer – but there was still power in his voice and great cunning in his black heart as he answered: ‘Payment? I may tell you, Mr Gabella, that you really won’t believe your rewards for this night’s work!’
He stooped, picked up an old bent stick, slowly straightened and leaned on the stick like a crutch while the two Mafia thugs began to dig. Under his cowl the beast’s eyes were alive: glittering red points that eagerly watched as every spadeful of dirt was thrown aside. And the night grew darker yet as the thunderheads crept out of the east and began to shut out the stars. An unseasonal chill settled and a breeze blew up that moaned in the old ruins and over the stony hills.
‘There!’ said Khumeni after a little while, his clotted voice awful in its eagerness. ‘There!’ And the grunting, grumbling pair of thugs threw drown their shovels and stepped aside.
A dozen inches down the outlines of a slab had come into view, with a huge, rust-red iron ring set in one end. ‘Take the chain,’ the beast instructed. ‘Loop it through the ring and secure it to that landrover there. Vittori, get into the vehicle and prepare to haul up the slab.’
In another moment the slab had been hoisted upright and a black hole gaped below. Khumeni hobbled on his stick to the rear of the second vehicle. He glared into the canvas-roofed interior, where Trace kept his eyes averted. ‘Out, you three,’ the beast husked, his eyes and voice hypnotic in their combined intensity. ‘Out into the night, with me, and down to your destinies.’
But things had now proceeded as far as Trace dared let them. He did not know what awaited down there in that black hole, and he didn’t intend to find out. Kastrouni had not been down there, and Trace wasn’t going either, not if he had anything to say about it. Whatever plan the Halbsteins had worked out between them – whatever ‘trap’ they had set for Khumeni and his hirelings – now was surely the time to spring it, before the horror started. If not … then Trace would have to set things in motion himself.
Since leaving the nunnery he had not sat still for a moment. He had exercised his arms and legs – particularly his left leg – and his entire body as best he might. But perhaps more importantly, he had also exercised his mind. Physically … one good punch would probably knock him down. But mentally he was one hundred per cent alert, switched on. And necessarily so, for it was here – right here and now – that the course of Charles Trace’s life, or the end of it, would be determined.
He got down with the others from the landrover, imitated their stumbling, jerky walk where they followed Khumeni toward the hole under the raised slab. There the beast p
aused and turned to face the rest. And while Trace frantically tried to decide what to do next, Khumeni addressed them:
‘All of you,’ he croaked, ‘listen carefully. It is half an hour before midnight. I shall be gone down into this hole for at least that long and perhaps a little longer, and then I shall return. Then, too, the rewards of this night’s work shall be seen. Mr Gabella, you will wait and watch as instructed, for these two are devious. I take it you are able to protect yourself if they should think to attack you?’
Gabella shrugged. ‘What, an old guy and a broad? No sweat. But just in case they do try it on – ’ There came a sharp click and Gabella produced a spring-loaded knife with a blade all of six inches long. The ugly weapon had seemed to grow right out of his hand; obviously he would be proficient in its use.
‘Good!’ Khumeni nodded his approval. But then he glared at Amira and her father and took a hobbling step toward them. He pointed a long forefinger accusingly from the loose sleeve of his robe. ‘And you two, father and daughter alike – did you think to fool me? Or more foolish far – did you think to deter me? And as for your “trap”: that is the utmost folly!’
‘I … that is, we, don’t know what you’re – ’ Amira began, her voice shrill with fear.
‘But you do!’ the beast turned on her, suddenly livid with fury. ‘You do!’ Amira fell into her father’s arms, apparently driven back by the power of Khumeni’s words alone. And now Khumeni snorted like the beast he was, and he directed his next statement at everyone present:
‘I will be obeyed – now, tonight, and for always – my father’s will be done. Whatever is seen or heard or sensed in the next half-hour, it will have been my doing. Gabella, you may well see things up here to frighten you – yes, even you. But you will stay and watch and wait.’ He turned his burning gaze on the dark hills nearby. ‘Unfortunately there are those who would interfere, coming down on you like jackals in the night when I have gone below and can no longer help you. But I have seen them, and so has my father’s familiar on this earth – Demogorgon!’