One Foot in the Grave - The Halflife Trilogy Book I

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  Too late by at least a year.

  Chapter Nineteen

  In my dreams the rabbi tells us to roll away the stone. We uncover the hollow carved into the hillside.

  “Lazarus, come forth!” he says.

  The sloping ground opens and a figure, wrapped in grave clothes and spiced linen bindings, emerges.

  “Loose him and uncover his face.”

  I do as the rabbi bids. I step forward and tug the linen napkin from his face.

  Only it is her face.

  Jennifer’s clear, clean features gaze back at me.

  I turn, but the rabbi is gone. The burial place is swept away in a tide of sand. The hill is now a pyramid and I hold in my hands not a linen napkin but a golden mask wearing a serpent crown.

  “Unbind me,” she says. And her mouth is . . . right. Her teeth are white, her eyes bright and unshadowed, the hollows are gone from her cheeks.

  “Free me,” she says.

  I search the bindings in vain: there are no knots or loose ends to unravel.

  “You will need help,” she says. “Ask Thoth.”

  Hurry, Daddy!

  I bolted awake at the sound of Kirsten’s voice echoing from inside the tomb.

  I stared up at the night sky, at Bassarab’s face hovering overhead.

  Felt the grassy mound of earth against my back, turned my head and saw dozens of other landscaped hillocks, each with its own stone or marker to give it a pretense of individuality.

  “An interesting place to take a nap,” he said. “Perhaps you are changing more than you realize.” He sat on my wife’s headstone, leaning over to observe me like some great, dark vulture. “It will be dawn, soon.”

  I turned my head to the east, finally noticed the colorshift of night sky from black to deep cerulean at the horizon. “It was the only place I could think of to go to,” I croaked, my throat gone rusty with ground vapors and dew. “I must have fallen asleep.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps you even dreamed.”

  I sat up with an ache-induced groan. We are such things as dreams are made of, I thought.

  “And our little life is rounded with a sleep,” Bassarab said. “But did you truly dream? Or did you make contact?”

  “Contact?” Annoyance pushed the grogginess from my head.

  “What did your wife tell you?”

  I struggled to my feet. “She seemed to think I had been unfaithful to her this past year.” I tested my legs: they didn’t seem entirely trustworthy.

  “I asked what your wife told you. I was not speaking of the thing that nests in her remains. Dance at the masquerade, if you will, but do not be taken in by the costumes.”

  I glared at him. “What do you know about my wife? Or my daughter, for that matter?”

  “I know that they could not be undead,” he said gently. “They were not infected with vampire blood as you were. What infested your house was only an illusion, a pantomime of shadows.” He sighed, looking strangely human for a moment. “Your wife and daughter are gone, Christopher.”

  “You don’t know how much that comforts me.”

  “I am glad.”

  My hands balled into fists and then reluctantly relaxed: how does one explain irony to someone who’s been around about five hundred years longer than you?

  “How did you find me?”

  “It is the blood-bond. Your blood calls to me; if I concentrate, I can hear it singing from many miles away.”

  “How poetic,” Mooncloud interrupted. She was making her way toward us through the maze of grave markers. “Lupé and I had to follow the fire trucks to his house and then guess where he’d go next.” She gave him a look. “I can hear your blood singing,” she mimicked. “Oh, please.”

  “How clever of you,” Bassarab said sourly. “Where is Garou?”

  “Back at the car. Dressing.”

  “And your quarry?”

  “Got away. How about the creature?”

  Bassarab scowled. “The same: got away.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa; hold on a moment!” I reached out and grabbed the lapels of his scorched greatcoat. “It couldn’t have survived that inferno!”

  “Christopher,” Bassarab’s voice was flecked with traces of defeat and resignation, “you cannot kill something that is already dead.”

  I stared at him. Something stirred at the back of my brain, just below the surface of my mind. “Can you be killed?” I asked finally.

  After an even longer pause, he nodded.

  “Then it—that thing—can also be killed.”

  The old vampire shook his head. “I said that you cannot kill something that is already dead. I am undead. There is a difference.”

  “Yeah?” A red light began to bloom behind my eyes. “Well, what exactly is that difference?” For a moment I thought the sun was bursting over the inky horizon—but it was still dark all around us: the terrible, burning brilliance searing into my brain was something worse. “You son-of-a-bitch!” I cried, remembering, “you know that thing! You spoke to it!” The burning brightness intensified, blinding me. “You called it by name!”

  “Kadeth Bey.”

  “You set us up!” I roared, lifting him off the ground and shaking him like an unrepentant doll.

  “No! I want him dead as much as you do!”

  “Liar!” I flung him backwards and a tombstone, fifteen feet away, toppled over backwards in breaking his fall.

  “New York is using him,” Bassarab panted, “to track me—”

  “I know that!” I yelled. “I’m not stupid! Time after time I’ve been the fall guy for you, but no more! And you don’t want him as dead as I do! You can’t!”

  “Christopher, even a man who is five centuries undead doesn’t want to die.”

  I reached down and wrenched up the headstone from my wife’s grave. “But maybe it will find you and you’ll die anyway! And then what?” I panted, raising the massive granite block over my head. “It’ll be over! You’ll be dead! Like you were meant to be—five hundred years ago! Like all men are meant to be at the end of their allotted time!” I took a step toward him, arms and legs thrumming with the strain. “No one will dig you up! No one will want you coming back! You can rest!”

  I turned and flung the headstone at the iron fence a couple of plots away. The monument took out ten feet of iron fusillades with their concrete anchors and posts. “You can rest—” I fell to my knees “—under the cool green grass and have peace,” I sobbed. “But not my little girl. Not my Jenny.”

  “It’s not them anymore. They’re not—”

  “Shut up,” I screamed, “shut up!”

  Off in the distance a siren wailed, echoing the sound of my pain.

  “I have,” I panted, “every reason in the world to save that thing the trouble and kill you now.”

  “He’s not your enemy, Chris,” Mooncloud said softly, “Kadeth Bey is.”

  I looked up at her. “This isn’t about friends or enemies, anymore. The one thing that you and Dracula here have taught me these past few weeks is that one controls or is controlled. One dominates or is dominated. In the end it’s results that count. Not feelings.

  “And now we’ve gone too far beyond who started what and whose fault lies where. That thing—Bey—dug them up! Dragged my baby and my wife back up out of the ground.” I slammed my fist against the earth between my knees. “Violated them to get to me! To get to him! And it still has them! It still . . . has . . . them. . . .”

  “We’ve got to destroy it,” Bassarab said, climbing to his feet. “I had hoped you might succeed where I had always failed. You must understand that we both want the same thing—”

  “No!” I said, climbing to my feet. “You don’t seem to get it, do you? This thing has my family and it will do anything, anything to bring you down. If I can find a way to destroy this thing, I will. But if I can’t, I’ll set Jenny and Kirsten free the only other way I know how.” I stabbed a shaking finger at him. “It won’t need them if you’re dead. So
you’d better pray I can figure out how to kill something that’s already dead. You can stake your un-life on that!”

  Red and blue lights strobed the early morning mist at the cemetery gate. A side searchlight cut the predawn twilight and circled us in a porthole of light. “Don’t anybody move,” admonished an amplified voice from the speaker mounted on the roof of the squad car.

  There’s nothing happening here, I thought furiously. Go away!

  The searchlight remained on. But now it passed over us and on as the police car continued up and around the circular road. By the time it had circled back out the gate, we were climbing into the Duesenberg.

  “His name was Kadeth Bey and he was an Egyptian sorcerer,” Bassarab said. He frowned at the glow of daylight that framed the shades drawn down over another motel room’s windows. “I really know little more than that.”

  “How did you meet?” Garou asked.

  “The Turks brought him late to our conflict. That was back in the—let’s see—fifteenth century. I had, of course, developed my own reputation as a master of the black arts by then. The Ottoman Empire was losing battles that it should have won without effort. They were frustrated and demoralized. The sultan had exhausted his reserve of holy men in trying to counter the demonic forces I brought to the conflict. When they proved ineffective, it was decided that perhaps they should counter with an unholy man, instead.”

  “Bey,” I said.

  He nodded. “The little I know was difficult to come by. And it has done me little good through the long centuries up to this very day.”

  “Perhaps your information is less than reliable.”

  “It was reliable.” His gaze turned reflective. “At great cost to my own troops I was able to capture two of his acolytes. I was exceedingly careful in my questioning—more so than usual: the long stake loosens most tongues even before the process is begun. Toward the end, all falsehood is stripped away. They confess, not to me, but to the God they are about to face, to whom they must commend their souls. No, Csejthe, these men spoke the truth as they knew it.”

  “And what truth was that?” Mooncloud persisted.

  “That Kadeth Bey was both vampire and necromancer. That he was a high priest of the Egyptian god Set and became a vampire after his death by means of sorcery. That he was entombed as a royal high priest in the Egyptian manner, hence your problem of driving a stake through his black heart.”

  I snapped my fingers. “Egyptian burial. The organs are removed and placed in separate burial urns when the body is prepared for mummification.”

  Bassarab nodded. “Canopic jars.”

  “So what do we do?” Garou asked. “Find his jar and slam a stake down inside? There must be hundreds of those things in Egypt, alone, not to mention museum exhibits throughout the rest of the world.”

  “Anything else?” I asked Bassarab.

  “Leaves. Bey was always preparing potions involving leaves that he had to have brought back from the valley of the Nile. About the only thing I could do to thwart him back then was ambush the returning trains of packmules and squeeze his supplies to a minimum.” He paused, ruminating. “That’s about it.”

  “Tanis leaves,” Mooncloud said.

  “What?”

  “It sounds just like those old mummy movies that the Satterfields were talking about.”

  I remembered now. “Right. They had some at their house, in fact.

  “Tanis leaves,” Garou said.

  “Yes.”

  “No,” she corrected, “you said tanis leaves. In the movies they’re called tanna leaves.”

  We all looked at her.

  Bassarab cleared his throat. “Is there a point?”

  Garou shrugged. “My mother always said that the Devil is in the details.”

  “Hollywood,” Bassarab muttered.

  I leaned back in my chair and stared up at water-stained ceiling tiles that might have been white back in the 1940s. Back when the old black-and-white Universal horror movies were being shot on Tinseltown’s back lots. “She’s right,” I said. “Maybe this particular detail isn’t significant. But we can’t discount any potential piece of information at this point. And an inconsistency could be a red flag.”

  “Oh, well, if it’s inconsistencies you want,” Garou said, “there’s a rather largish one at the beginning of The Mummy series.”

  Mooncloud gave her a look. “I had no idea you were such an old movie buff.”

  “When you’re on call for the graveyard shift, cable doesn’t exactly offer a smorgasbord of culture.”

  I cleared my throat. “I believe we were discussing inconsistencies.”

  “Oh, right. Boris Karloff played the first mummy. Then it was mostly Lon Chaney, Jr. though there were two or three others.”

  “Christopher Lee, as I recall,” Mooncloud mused.

  “Now there was an actor. . . .” Bassarab rested his chin on folded hands. “I did not mind so much when I was portrayed by the likes of him. And Langella, of course.”

  “And Lugosi?” I murmured.

  “Bah! That dwarf?”

  “Lee came later,” Garou continued, “during the Hammer Films era. I’m talking about the old Universal classics.”

  “Jack Palance?” I whispered.

  Bassarab looked at me.

  “Dan Curtis production back in the seventies. Two-part made-for-TV movie.”

  “Hmmmm.” Bassarab looked thoughtful.

  “In the original Mummy, Karloff utilized the Scroll of Thoth to raise the dead,” Garou elaborated. “The tanna leaves angle didn’t show up until Chaney was gimping around in three-thousand-year-old duct tape after Princess Ananka’s reincarnation.”

  “Two different mythologies,” Mooncloud observed.

  “But could both hold a portion of the truth?”

  Bassarab roused from his reverie. “You are not serious.”

  “Yeah,” I echoed. “Vampires, werewolves, three-thousand-year-old dead guys still walking around—get serious!”

  He scowled at me. “There must be better sources of information.”

  “Find me one.” Then I told them about what I had seen in my garage before escaping the fire.

  “So, he’s using both the tanna leaves and the Scroll of Thoth,” Garou said when I was done.

  “Tanis leaves,” I corrected.

  “No,” said Bassarab simultaneously.

  I turned to him. “You’re starting to sound like a broken record.”

  “No,” Bassarab insisted. “Bey would not use scrolls or anything else involving the god Thoth.”

  “He’s right,” Mooncloud said. “If Bey is a disciple of Set, he dabbles in black magic. Thoth, in many ways, was Set’s nemesis.”

  “Thoth,” I said, “Thoth. . . .” The name resonated in my mind like a half-remembered melody. “Tell me more about this Thoth.”

  Mooncloud looked thoughtful. “My Egyptian mythology is a little rusty. As I remember it, Set murdered his brother Osiris. Thoth gave power to the goddess Isis to resurrect her husband. Out of that process, the Egyptians say, the process of embalming was handed down to mortals.”

  “And the Scroll of Thoth,” Garou said, “is what was used in the first Mummy movie to animate Boris Karloff. The tanna leaves came later, during the Lon Chaney, Jr. series.”

  “Your friends back in Kansas City,” I said to Mooncloud, “they have a Scroll of Thoth.”

  She smiled. “An authentic copy.”

  “This is madness,” Bassarab muttered.

  “And tanis leaves,” I concluded, pulling a cellular phone out of my backpack.

  “Where did you get that?” Bassarab wanted to know.

  “Kansas City during our recent shopping spree.” I turned to Mooncloud. “The Satterfield’s number?” I asked.

  “I forbid it,” he said as Mooncloud gave me the information.

  As I started punching in the area code I could feel the old vampire’s mind force enveloping me like a musty shroud. “When I’m don
e I’ll need Smirl’s number so we can arrange some fast transportation.”

  “You will put the phone down,” Bassarab ordered. His mental domination intensified. “I command you!”

  The color drained from Mooncloud’s face.

  Garou’s eyes were filled with pain.

  I was getting seriously pissed off.

  “I command—”

  “Hey, Vladamir,” I said, “bite me.” The phone began to ring at the other end of the connection.

  The hat, sunglasses, and sunblock were less effective now and, during the drive to the airport, I drifted through that no man’s land between pain and discomfort.

  I welcomed the burning lancets of sunlight pricking my skin, loose photons seeming to turn the air noxious as I breathed it in. I was tired and it slapped away my lethargy, I was thirsty and it offered preeminent diversion. I was moving out onto thin ice and I would need my wits about me for the next forty-eight hours.

  Smirl was waiting at the Pittsburg field with a plane and a pilot. I got out of the car and waited for Mooncloud. She had removed the keys from the ignition and unbuckled her seat belt, but remained seated behind the steering wheel.

  She looked up at me with a stricken expression. “I can’t.”

  I stared back, puzzled. “You can’t what?”

  “Get out of the car. He won’t let me.”

  “What?”

  “Bassarab.”

  It took me a moment. I had developed my own vampiric immunity to Bassarab’s mental domination, but Mooncloud was still human and susceptible. “Posthypnotic suggestion,” I asked, “or is he using some kind of telepathic remote control?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, how about this?” I opened the driver’s door. “I command you to get out of the car and follow me.” She sat, unmoving, and I pushed a bit with my mind. She clutched at her head and moaned.

  “Never mind,” I said, relenting. “Stay here and help Lupé keep the trail warm. I’ll be back tonight.”

  “The Doman isn’t going to like this,” she said.

  “Tough. Under the circumstances, Stefan Pagelovitch is the least of my worries. And if the plan fails, I’ll be beyond caring.”