The Nightmare Man: (Child of the Vodyanoi)

by David Wiltshire

  Dunlop replaced the chalk in its ledge.

  “All right. So what have we got? Because we have got something, and it’s scaring the hell out of me.”

  There was a baffled silence.

  Fiona clipped the reel into its position on the right-hand sprocket, and carefully passed the film through the pathway of the editing machine until it emerged out of the other side. She slipped the end around the empty reel, turned it a couple of times with her finger to start it off, then set her eyes to the eyepiece and pressed the start button.

  It was all over in fifteen seconds. Fiona Patterson sat back, horrified. Her body shook with revulsion.

  After a moment she put her hand gingerly to the spool, forcing herself to touch it as though it was going to harm her. She released it from the holding clip and carefully placed the offending film into a metal carrying case.

  Reaching the door, Fiona snapped off the light and took a step out into the dark shop. She pulled up in alarm. Still with the images of the film in her mind, Fiona caught her breath at the sight of the towering shape of a man dimly outlined in the weak light coming from the red prescriptions sign.

  “Who’s there?”

  She panicked, dragging a pile of technical books off a shelf ' as her wildly clawing hand tried to re-find the light switch.

  “Please, who are you?”

  She was sobbing as the light flooded the room. Fiona slammed her back to the wall and, chest heaving, looked fearfully back through the doorway into the shop, expecting any moment to see the man appear out of the gloom into the shaft of light.

  There was absolute silence.

  It must have been three minutes before she moved, but it seemed like ten. Finally she edged out into the dark shop, lungs full of air to expel in a scream the moment hands reached out for her.

  It came as soon as she saw the shape, only to end in a choke as she recognized it for what it was. The tall cardboard cut-out of a figure used in a drug company advertising display had been moved from its corner site into more prominence, presumably by Mrs Fergusson, her sales assistant.

  Nevertheless Fiona still only moved with cautious, frightened little steps until she was absolutely sure that nothing was changed; that she was alone.

  She gave out a sigh of relief and sat for a moment in the customers’ chair, her legs still trembling. When she was ready she opened the door and went out, closing and locking it behind her. It was freezing cold. Fiona put her foot on the first step of the metal staircase that led to her flat, and her heavy coat. She stopped. Upstairs the windows were dark, forbidding.

  Despite the cold, Fiona made up her mind immediately. Without hesitation she set off for the hospital at a steady trot, slipping and slithering on the icy pavement. It would normally have taken under five minutes. It was a quarter of an hour before she arrived at the side gate to the pathology laboratory, and scurried up the path.

  Breathlessly she burst in on the assembled men in the office just as they sat in the silence following Dunlop’s despairing “So what have we got? Because we have got something, and it’s scaring the hell out of me.”

  Inskip, Robertson, Mackay and Dunlop looked at-the normally serene Fiona in amazement. Her hair was wild and speckled with crystals of ice, her face white with two. vivid red patches. Chest heaving, she leant back against the wall.

  Dunlop was the first to his feet. He crossed to her in large strides, putting his arm around her shoulders and leading her further into the warmth of the room.

  “What is it? Are you all right?”

  Fiona could only nod for the moment. She held up the film case, and gulped, “Here you are.”

  Dunlop took it, still looking anxiously at her.

  “Is it any good?”

  Fiona calmed down. With a strange look she said, “You’d better see for yourself.”

  Dunlop looked down at the case in his hands and felt an icy shiver in his spine as Mackay got up and started to wheel the Medical Society projector out from its corner.

  The doctor pointed to the end wall.

  “Can you drop the screen, Ian?”

  Gingerly Dunlop placed the film case down on the table and crossed to the bank of switches inset in the wall beside the blackboard. He flicked down the one marked ‘screen’.

  From its roll near the ceiling, the white painted canvas descended, accompanied by a whirring from the electric motor.

  Inskip and Robertson stood up and pulled their chairs around to face the screen.

  The Inspector leaned over Fiona.

  “It’s very good of you to go to all this trouble, but we need all the help we can get. Do you think it will tell us anything?”

  Irritably Fiona looked down at her hands, the fingers relentlessly winding and unwinding her handkerchief. She spoke with some difficulty.

  “I don’t know—really. The camera wasn’t in focus, and it’s all blurred and terribly over-exposed, white, really white. I wouldn’t know ... might I suppose.”

  She averted her eyes. Inskip frowned. The woman before him was unlike the Fiona Patterson the policeman had always known.

  Dunlop turned back, his eyes finding hers. Uneasily he recognized something he had never seen in them before. Fear. As Mackay tinkered with the projector and finally worked in the film, Fiona sat huddled in silence, looking and talking to no one.

  Mackay straightened up.

  “Right then, that should do it. Ian, will you turn off the lights?”

  Dunlop made for the switches. The last thing he saw as the room plunged into absolute blackness was Fiona, half turned in her seat, as though she was about to leave.

  What followed was horrific, made all the more obscene by the presence of the mortal remains in the next room of the person dying on the screen before them.

  At first there was an explosion of pure blinding whiteness as the powerful beam of light passed unhindered through the clear frames of the lead-in film.

  Sudden flashes of numerals, laterally inverted, jumped crazily in descending order and then disappeared.

  If Fiona hadn’t moaned, Dunlop and the others wouldn’t have immediately recognized that the actual film was running, it was so white and featureless.

  As Fiona, teeth biting into the side of her left hand tensed up, she did not realize that her cry of horror had alerted the others.

  Suddenly they could see that the whiteness was not smooth and featureless as before. Instead, something faint moved—and disappeared. It moved again, and became recognizable. The outline was a man’s head and shoulders, turning, the arms jerking up defensively, from what there was no sign.

  Inskip leaned forward, as though the few inches gained would make all the difference. Dunlop moved up from the back of the room, eyes never leaving the screen. Mackay held one side of the frames of his spectacles, pulling them forward off his nose to perfect the definition.

  Robertson just looked puzzled.

  And then it happened.

  From the side of the screen a strange broken line appeared, like the jagged sign for high voltage electricity, or lightning.

  It moved in queer jerky movements further into the middle, the outline of the man exploding in and out, shrinking away into the bottom left hand corner of the screen.

  The jagged outline disappeared, returned, and then suddenly grew large. Swiftly another line extended down from the top, then another. Like some awful quick sketch impression, the lines flashed in and with a rush formed a shape.

  For one brief, nightmarish moment they watched as a tall pointed outline, inset with round eyes that were the burnt blazing holes of spoiled yellow film, lunged down after the hapless victim.

  In the following seconds they saw confused lines whirling around, only the sinister pointed shape towering clearly above, the “eyes” flashing oily yellow and red.

  In the last few moments the figure of the man sagged down below the bottom of the picture, the other shape swelling and filling the screen. Jets of fluid shot up intermittently like a
faulty fountain.

  “Blood.”

  Fiona’s tight voice cut across the room.

  “Isn’t it, Doctor Mackay?”

  “Ay. Both carotid arteries were severed. He was a healthy big man. It would have pumped nearly six feet into the air.” The projector continued to whir in the eerie dreadful silence.

  16

  Fiona felt the bitterness rising in her throat. She leapt up and ran, hand pressed frantically to her tight-lipped mouth, kicking over an empty chair in her path. She reached the door to the small toilet, but the sound of liquid splattering on the floor as she vomited brought them to their feet.

  Concerned, Dunlop made after her, stopping and tapping on the half open door.

  “Are you all right?”

  Her voice was muffled, interrupted by a coughing fit.

  “Yes. Be out in a minute. Sorry.”

  The door closed. He turned back slowly to face the three men. Fiona’s dramatic ending to the horrific film had affected them all. White faced, made even whiter in the blinding light from the still running projector, they looked helplessly at each other.

  When she joined them again a few minutes later she was much better, almost her old self.

  Almost.

  But Dunlop could detect a difference in her, without actually being able to explain what it was. In some small indefinable way, despite her attempts to be bright and her usual self, he could feel something in her that was alien to the woman he knew, and loved.

  Smiling ruefully she looked around at them all.

  “The weak woman lets the side down, eh? Where’s your equality now, girl?”

  Relieved, the others were all over her, Mackay bringing to bear all his formidable, older man’s charm.

  “Come now, don’t be punishing yourself like that. Don’t forget we’re all very used to seeing the results of violence—me in my work, the Inspector in his, Ian in the army.”

  She frowned.

  “Violence I don’t mind.” Hurriedly she went on: “That sounds awful. What I mean is, I accept it as part of man’s very existence. But there are some things you accept more easily. If a child is knocked down in the street and killed, however awful, that’s a normal everyday thing. But to be taken by a shark for instance, the child pulled away from its family, loved-ones, other humans, to die a lonely death in the jaws of something so frightening, so loathsome, well to me that’s worse. Am I making sense to you?”

  Dunlop nodded for them all.

  Fiona pointed to the projector and could not suppress a shudder.

  “It’s like my childhood idea of what a bogey man looked like. Somehow it got right through to me. And that poor man was so alone when he died at the hands of that...” She spat the last word out “... thing”

  She dropped her head, frowning at her hands which were working unceasingly again at her handkerchief. She made a conscious effort to stop it.

  “And now it’s eaten part of him. It’s so God-awful disgusting, degrading. We’re just fodder as far as it’s concerned. It wouldn’t matter whether I was in love ...” Fleetingly she looked up at Dunlop. “Dispensing, playing tennis, doing anything of the ordinary human things, I’d be just food to it” Dunlop silently remembered the savage sexual assault on the woman, but anxiously Doctor Mackay was already trying to placate her with a reassuring, “Ay, just so.”

  Inskip thoughtfully scratched at his jaw.

  “A Bogey Man? You’re right about that. Those blazing eyes …”

  Dunlop shook his head.

  “That’s light-ruined film of course, but I reckon it’s because of reflection from the goggles it wears.”

  Fiona nodded in agreement.

  “That’s confirmed by the way it waxes and wanes. Obviously it flashed as it turned from side to side.”

  With a heavy sigh. Inskip started to pull on his jacket, Robertson standing up and helping by holding the sleeve.

  “Thank you. Sergeant. Well, it makes no odds to me whether it’s reflection or not. We’ve got more on our hands here than we can ever hope to cope with. There’s not much more we can do tonight, but tomorrow I’m going to get the rest of the able-bodied men of Inverdee out organized in patrols around the town perimeter, and others to help reach the isolated farms and bring them in.

  “Somebody with a boat from the south side will be sent over to the Mainland with this film and a request for urgent help.” He looked meaningfully at Dunlop.

  “And this time I won’t pull the punches. Okay?”

  Dunlop nodded gratefully.

  Mackay shuffled to his desk.

  “Good. I’ll put some of my slides into a box for travelling, and your casts of the teeth marks, Ian.”

  The Inspector nodded his approval.

  “I’ll use Symonds’ tape recorder to send a personal message describing the feeling here and what we’re doing and how urgently we need help. It might come over better that way.” Fiona looked up sharply.

  “Did you say Doctor Symonds’ tape recorder? You’ve got it, intact?”

  They all looked at her, sensing the edge in her voice. Cautiously Inskip nodded.

  “Yes. Why?”

  Fiona sank slowly back on to her chair.

  “You know what he used that for, don’t you?”

  Surprisingly, Robertson answered before any of the others. “Ay. My brother does a lot of bird watching over on Mull. He’s taken to recording birds. Says the noise patterns they make are the latest fascination.”

  Fiona nodded.

  “That’s right. Scientists use them to build up voice pictures, called sonograms. They can identify species and what’s going on just by the pattern it makes when the noise is translated on to a visual display unit.”

  Inskip stuffed his hands impatiently into his pockets. “Fascinating. But what’s that got to do with us?”

  Fiona looked at him as though he was an idiot.

  “Well, don’t you see? Doctor Symonds was recording the sound patterns of those geese.”

  “So?”

  “For every photograph there was to be probably a corresponding recording, the tape and camera were rigged in unison. That’s the way he always used to do it.”

  The dawn of perception was physically visible on Inskip’s face.

  “You mean, if the camera was firing off, then there’s a good chance that the tape-recorder was on as well?”

  Fiona nodded.

  “Just that.”

  “Jesus!” Dunlop exploded. “You’re saying that what we’ve just seen has been recorded as well.”

  “Yes, there’s a chance it wasn’t a silent movie, but a fully talking one.”

  Fiona looked green as she continued. .

  “You can probably not only watch the poor man being butchered, you can hear it as well.”

  But Mackay, making his point in the air with the stem of his cold pipe, added the corollary that they were all thinking about.

  “It follows therefore, that the voice of our friend, the monster, will also be present. That would be most helpful.” Inskip looked around, face drawn and haggard.

  “I was going to get some sleep. Now I must hear that tape.”

  Fiona moved her head slowly from side to side.

  “Count me out. I couldn’t take it.”

  She put her hand on Dunlop’s arm. .

  “Will you take me home?”

  For the first time since Fiona’s bombshell, Dunlop felt a marginal return to their normal intimacy. Or was he just jumping to conclusions? Clutching at straws? As much as he wanted to hear that tape, the sudden improvement with Fiona dominated everything. He closed his hand over hers.

  “Of course.”

  He turned to Inskip.

  “Couldn’t it wait till the morning?”

  The Inspector looked back at him from hollow, sunken eyes.

  “No.”

  Mackay glanced at his watch.

  “I must admit that’s how I feel. We have something here that’s unique, incredible.
I couldn’t sleep a wink knowing that there’s more information available.”

  Inskip led the way to the door and turned.

  “Come down and join us after you’ve taken Fiona home.”

  Dunlop shot her a sidelong glance. “Well...”

  She gave a quick smile.

  “Yes of course. It’s up to you really, isn’t it?”

  There could be no doubt in the tone of her voice. She needed him now. Dunlop knew that it was likely to be the only chance he would get.

  “I think not, Duncan. I’m bushed. I’ll see you first thing in the morning—you can tell me then.”

  “Right. I’m mustering the civilians at nine o’clock. Can you get out and organized by eight o’clock?”

  “Of course. Goodnight—and good luck.”

  “Ay, we’ll need it I’m thinking.”

  Fiona entwined her arm in his as they struggled down the path. The very dependence on him acted like a tonic in itself.

  Despite the vicious cold, since Fiona was wrapped in his coat which was miles too big for her, and gave her the attractive look of a waif, he felt a spring in his step.

  She looked up at him, face illuminated by the stars reflecting from the white covered earth.

  “You didn’t mind, did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  She squeezed his arm.

  “Ian, I’ve never felt so afraid in all my life, at least not since I was a child.”

  He cursed as he slipped, nearly dragging them both down. “I’m not surprised. I’m not exactly feeling happy either.” Fiona gave a little snort.

  “But it’s more than that with me.”

  Dunlop muttered something soothing, but anxiously stole a sideways look at her. She caught him, and smiled ruefully in return.

  “I can’t believe it yet either. An hour ago I was myself, reasonably well adjusted, not even timid, and now look at me. It’s as though that ... thing has triggered some secret basic fear in me, in that primitive part of my mind that comes from the racial past. I wasn’t joking when I said that about the bogey man.”

  Dunlop guided her across the street.