God, he thought angrily; how could a man be so horribly wrong!
But wrong he certainly was, and it wasn’t too farfetched to believe that Bartholomew knew it all, and had come to some sort of demonic pact with his inflicted brother. How the man had been transformed from human to werewolf was a question he might never be able to answer, but that was secondary now to saving Johanna’s life.
Pelting across Chancellor, he had to swerve sharply to avoid being struck by the Harley coach, and the driver yelled epithets at him, swung out his whip and would have caught the top of his head had not the horses reared at the commotion and thrown off his aim.
He stumbled on the slick cobblestone as he rounded sharply into Northland.
The clouds above had been driven off by the force of the nightwind that parted them, shredded them, cleared the sky for the stars, and the last night of the full moon.
He looked up as he ran, and looked away quickly. An object once of amazement and wonderment, now it filled him with terror at what its cold light could produce. Heels loud and echoing; breath loud and gasping.
A dog barked at him fiercely from behind someone’s fence, and he swung his gun around, just barely holding fire when he saw what it was; a cat hissed when he slipped as he jumped the curbing and fell into a rain-laden hedge; a horseman slowed back at the intersection and watched in puzzlement, called out to ask if he needed any help.
By the time he reached the iron fencing he had to use it to pull himself along while he kept his gaze on the house itself, on the light that shone from the top window, center.
When the gate didn’t give immediately, he vaulted it without effort; when he leapt to the stoop he didn’t bother to knock — he slammed the door open and stood panting in the foyer.
The house was quiet, overly warm, the wind slipping in behind him stirring fringes and curtains, the moon creating a long shadow that stretched before him to the stairs.
He could smell it then; he could smell the fresh blood.
Not knowing which way to turn, he was about to call out Johanna’s name when he heard voices, urgent low voices drifting down the stairwell. Quietly pulling back the hammer, cocking the trigger, he began to climb, testing each step for betrayal before moving to the next.
By the time he was halfway up he could hear them, arguing.
“You’re a fool! How could you do this, bringing them here for the kill. Do you want to have the entire place down around our heads?”
“Brother, if you’ll stop ranting for a moment and give me a hand, we can take care of this.”
“Of course, certainly, let me do all the work.”
“Well, I’m hardly in a position to carry them myself.”
The sound of grunting, and something heavy scraping across the floor.
“This is insane.”
“Shut up, Bart, he’ll hear you.”
“I never should have . . .”
“Damn you, man, hold your tongue! And be careful, you’ll drop her.”
“Slut. She was only a slut.”
A low rumbling laugh. “If she could only see herself now, eh, Bart? If she could see . . .”
“Enough, Lawrence, that’s enough. Let’s just get it done.”
A door opening on hinges badly wanting oil.
The voices muffled for a moment, then clear once again as they returned to the hallway.
“Now him.”
“Do him yourself. I’ve got to get the girl and . . .”
“She’ll wait, brother, she’ll wait. She’s not going anywhere, at least not tonight.”
“She’ll wake up soon. I don’t want her screaming her fool head off.”
The laugh again, this time mocking. “A bit much for you, was she? I could have told you that. Old Charlotte was a pushover compared to that one, believe me.”
Again the sound of something being dragged awkwardly across the hall.
“I didn’t know there was supposed to be seven.”
“What’s the difference after the first one?”
“Lawrence, you’re disgusting.”
“No, just practical. I want that money just as badly as you. In fact, probably worse. You can always make more because you’re good at that sort of thing.”
“You would be too if you weren’t so damned simpering.”
“You got me into this.”
“You agreed. You didn’t have to.”
“Bart, there are times when I’d like to kill you as well.”
Lucas had heard enough. Disgust at their bickering even in the midst of all that death lifted him from his crouched position on the top step, had his hand reaching for the gaslight on the wall by his head. He turned the beveled knob, and the light glowed sharply, and he had to bite down on his lip to prevent himself from gagging.
Lawrence and Bartholomew Drummond were standing in front of an open door midway along the hall; Lawrence was holding Charlie’s bloodied head, Bartholomew his feet. Lucas did not have to look closely to see the gap in his friend’s chest, or the thickening pools of blood that darkened the carpet.
The two looked up, startled, dropped the corpse as one and Lawrence kicked shut the door.
“Good evening,” Lucas said.
Bartholomew, with a wild look of desperation, reached into his pocket and pulled out his derringer. Lucas didn’t bother to order him to stop; he aimed straight at the man’s chest and gladly pulled the trigger.
The gun’s retort was loud in the narrow hall, Bartholomew’s body thrown back against the wall. He looked down at the hole in his shirt, at the blood seeping through, silently begged his brother for assistance as he crumpled to the floor.
“Very nice,” Lawrence said, raising his free hand over his head. “Good shooting, Chief. I’ll commend you to God the next time I see Him.”
“Where is Johanna?”
Lawrence smiled. “Johanna who?”
Lucas cocked the hammer again, and aimed at the man’s head. “I’ll do it, Drummond, don’t think I won’t. For all you’ve done to this town I will gladly put a bullet into your brain if you don’t tell me where she is.”
For the first time, Drummond seemed indecisive. He looked at his dead brother, then down at the young constable sprawled at his, feet. A hand brushed resignedly back through his hair.
“It was too good to last, I suppose. Sooner or later someone would believe, and it would be all over.”
“Johanna,” he repeated flatly. “Tell me where you’ve put her.”
Drummond jerked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing to the room at the end of the hall. Lucas couldn’t believe it; they had put her in with their father. He took a deep breath to keep control of his embroiled emotions, then gestured angrily with the Colt, moving Lawrence ahead of him. The man obeyed with a slight shrug, his crutch banging on the floor as he limped toward the door. Lucas followed, closing his eyes briefly when he skirted the body of Charlie Notting.
“It was that stupid old woman, wasn’t it?” Drummond guessed as he moved ahead of Lucas’s shadow. “That housekeeper of yours. She’s the one who put you onto it, wasn’t she? Told you all the stories about werewolves and things.”
“Yes,” he said, then raised his voice. “Johanna, can you hear me? It’s Lucas. Lucas Stockton.”
Relief almost made him lower his gun when he heard her muffled cry. They had probably gagged her, but at least she was still alive.
“The hero,” Drummond said when he reached the door, suddenly turned and shook his head. “How does it feel to be a hero, Chief? Feel all good and cozy inside?”
His finger tightened on the trigger; Drummond saw it and winced, tensed for the impact, and did not relax when the gun did not fire.
“The seven,” Lucas said then, motioning the man to one side. “What did you mean about the seven.”
Lawrence giggled, hiccoughed, and covered his mouth. Close to him now, Lucas could see the glint of sly madness full in his eyes.
“Seven hearts, my dear Chief. Seven hea
rts to fill the gullet, and keep the dear diner young.”
“Christ, how could you do it, Larry?” he blurted. “My god, man, what made you do it?”
“Why, the money, of course,” Drummond said, rocking slowly on his good foot while the crutch described tiny circles over the bloodstained carpet. “The money, the money, it’s always the money.”
Lucas frowned; he didn’t understand.
“The money, you idiot,” Drummond said in disdain. “A man will do just about anything for half a million in gold.”
Lucas straddled the threshold, looked in and saw Johanna trussed and gagged on the bed. She was sitting up against the wall, her head shaking side to side. He looked back to Drummond, and motioned him ahead of him. And once inside he saw the old man in his rocking chair, still backed against the window.
“What about the gold,” he demanded as he covered Lawrence with the gun and moved to untie Johanna with his free hand. “I still don’t get it, about the gold.”
“You really are stupid,” Lawrence said, giggling louder. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
Suddenly, he lunged for the revolver, and Lucas had no choice but to fire pointblank into his chest. He shrieked, his momentum carrying him forward, dropping him to the floor just before he reached the bed. Lucas, his anger at what they’d done to Johanna poisoning his reason, fired again, and again, directly into the man’s back.
Then he sagged, energy spent, without even the strength to look at the old man for forgiveness.
Johanna, meanwhile, was struggling, kicking her feet to gain his attention. Finally, like a man roused from a deep sleep, he yanked at the knots, pulled them free at last, and was astonished when she slapped his hand away and pulled free the gag.
“Lucas!” she shouted. “For god’s sake, it’s not him!”
“Indeed,” said Claude Drummond.
And rose from his chair.
Taller, wider, the light from the hallway giving Lucas a perfect view when the old man began the change.
Johanna screamed.
Claude Drummond snarled, casting aside his shawl and blanket as his body twisted and writhed, tore through his shabby clothes, rippling black to white while his eyes changed to amber.
Lucas climbed onto the bed and thrust Johanna behind him. It was impossible, it was Lawrence who was supposed to be the enemy, not an old man held prisoner in his own room. Lawrence, he thought wildly, it was Lawrence, damnit, Lawrence.
The thing that had been Claude Drummond lifted its head, and howled.
The thing that needed one heart more swayed like a serpent coiling to strike.
Then the gun fired, and the nightbeast was slammed backward into the rocker, which caught its legs and spun it around while Lucas blindly fired again.
And this time the bullet entered the back of its head, propelled it against the window sill; still howling its rage, screaming its pain . . . glass shattering . . . the nightbeast howling . . . Drummond falling to the ground two stories below.
Chapter 18
“I am of the perfectly sound opinion,” Lucas said for the hundredth time that September, “that I shall never permit a dog into my house.”
He was walking along the main path of Oxrun’s park, his white suit long since discarded for one of dark brown tweed. He did not wear a hat, and his revolver was nesting unobtrusively in a holster beneath his left arm.
“Well, if you want my opinion —”
“Which I don’t.”
“ — you are being absolutely unreasonable,” Johanna said, ignoring the interruption. “There’s nothing wrong with a dog, nothing at all. Give it a year, and you’ll soon change your mind.”
He laughed, albeit uncertainly, and hugged her arm close to his side. It was a beautiful day, the leaves beginning to change from green to the rainbow, the grass still rich, the children playing in the field to their right lifting high laughing voices into the chill twilight air.
Oxrun Station was back to normal, and he had been spared the task of trying to convince his neighbors that they had been stalked by a creature spawned of a hellish dream. The official version of the crimes’ solving declared that the Drummond brothers, in conspiracy against their father, had brutally murdered anyone they suspected of getting in their way. At the end, before Lucas could stop them, they had struggled with the old man and he’d fallen from the window, all because they were impatient to gain the family fortune.
Most believed it. Those who doubted kept their silence.
Lucas, however, had spent many long nights puzzling it out, and had finally, with Johanna’s aid, come to the conclusion that it was the brothers’ surliness and disdain for them all that blinded them to the common knowledge that Claude had been to Europe as well. And there, he surmised, the old man had been bitten, had returned ahead of his sons and had in the resulting madness locked himself in his room.
When Lawrence came back from the War, when Bartholomew returned from the Tour, he promised them each a half million dollars in gold if they would keep his secret, help him find victims; the seven hearts supposedly would restore his youth to him.
Jerad had died more tragically than the rest; he had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The young Tripper was lucky. When he’d seen the beast that night on his father’s farm, he had fainted dead away, and for some unknown reason the beast had passed him up.
When he awoke later, he crawled immediately into his secret hiding place to wait for rescue.
Now he lived happily with Johanna.
They paused at a break in the shrubbery that lined the path, and Johanna lay her head against his arm. Above them, the sky was indigo, shading to black, and the moon was climbing over the park’s low hill.
“Lovely,” she said.
Lucas shuddered. “I still can’t look at it without . . . well, you know what I mean.”
“My Lucas,” she sighed. “The world’s chief worrier, and the world’s only protector.”
“Jo, that’s not fair.”
“No,” she said, “But you’re so easy to tease, Lucas, I can’t resist it.”
A gang of children swept past them shouting, and on the other side of the open grassy expanse they could see Aunt Delia hustling toward them, skirts flaring.
“Oh lord,” he groaned, “what’s the boy done now?”
“Nothing at all, if I know her,” she said. Delia had agreed only reluctantly to taking in the child, and had had her hands full ever since. His energy was boundless, and she complained to anyone who would listen that he would put her in an early grave.
“Lucas,” Johanna said then, not taking her eyes off her aunt, “Do you remember what you told me last month?”
He stiffened. “I told you a lot of things last month, if you recall.”
“I mean, after I said that Bart had proposed.”
“Oh.” He sniffed, and fussed with the knot of his tie. “Oh, that.”
“Yes, that,” she laughed, slapping him lightly on the chest. “And I want to know if you’re going to make an honest woman of me. I warn you, if you don’t I’ll have a word with Delia.”
At that moment Delia confronted them, huffing, red-faced, pointing wordlessly back across the field.
“What is it?” Lucas asked, not really caring. “Where’s Jeddy?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” the old woman said. Then she held up her hand. “That little bastard bit me.”
On Devon Street, behind the Stockton cottage, beyond the slow dying garden, Maria Andropayous knelt fearfully on the cold ground and uttered a short prayer.
In the light of the full moon . . .
. . . the wolfsbane was blooming.
with friends
The Universe of Horror Volume 2: The Dark Cry of the Moon (Neccon Classic Horror) Page 12