"Yeah ... yeah..." She was dozing.
Stroud said, "Suppose for a moment that something of hellish dimension did visit Goethe and Marlowe, and did call itself Mephistopheles? Could such a creature have existed since the dawn of time? Another Mephistopheles? Alive since early Etruscan times?"
She started, her body twitching with a sudden violent reaction. She'd seen the trapped souls when she closed her eyes and it had shaken her.
He put an arm about her and she did not resist.
"What are we going to do, Stroud? What?"
"We're going to do what we've been doing; we're going to fight this thing with everything we have."
"But what if it's not enough? What if we're not--"
"Shhhhh! We're a great deal further along than we were this morning. Your serum saved Leonard, no doubt of that. It may save the others."
"Leonard fought it ... so many of the others have given up."
"Well, we're not giving up."
She snuggled into the crook of his arm, sobbing quietly. He held her close. "You've earned some rest. Come on, take it easy."
"Don't leave me tonight," she quietly asked.
"I won't," he promised. "I'm here."
-9-
Stroud sent the squad car on its way and he helped Kendra into the elevator and up to her room. She dropped her keys at the door and he picked them up. He let the door swing open. She stood there a moment, her eyes meeting his, blinking back the fatigue. She looked vulnerable, he thought.
"I've got a large room," she said, "with a view of the Hudson ... very nice."
She stared into his eyes as she spoke. Stroud bent to kiss her, bringing his lips to hers with a tentative, tender gesture. She quaked a bit before returning his kiss.
A bell rang, signaling that people would be getting off the elevator across from them. She pulled him inside and closed the door, covering his mouth with hers.
"Hey, hey, Kendra," he tried to protest. "You're beat, and it wouldn't be fair of me to--"
"Who asked you?" she said, covering his mouth again, filling it with her tongue.
"Whoa, easy, girl," he said, gasping. She had tasted wonderful, and she felt great in his arms.
"You talk too damned much, Abraham Stroud." She began unbuttoning his shirt, plunging her hands into the muscles of his chest. Stroud lifted her and carried her to the bedroom.
"I'm putting you to bed," he told her.
"Just as I wish." She kissed him and the fire within her, the smell of her, overwhelmed him. He returned her passion with his own as he knelt to cushion her where he placed her on the bed. She'd gotten his shirt completely open, and now Stroud removed her blouse.
He wanted to hide within the white texture of her skin, hide from all that was bad in the world, escape the evil, if for only a night. She pulled his head down to the center of her breasts, her body squirming, heaving below him.
"I need you," she repeatedly said, until Stroud joined her in a chorus of the three words.
After the lovemaking she fell into quiet, calm sleep, both spent and refreshed. Stroud lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling fan that had kept them cool, and in the rotating blades he saw no ghosts, no swirling dervishes, no bizarre shapes. He saw only darkness and movement and he felt only calm and warmth beside Kendra, listening to the sound of her breathing, his hand taking stock of her heartbeat. For the first time in recent memory, someone had stilled his own nightmares.
Dr. Samuel Leonard was fit to be tied. He wanted out. He wanted news and information. He wanted to talk to Wisnewski. He wanted to talk to Stroud. He was shouting these things when Stroud walked in and said, "Samuel, it's so wonderful to have you back!"
"Get me the hell out of here, Abe!"
"Processing it right now. Dr. Cline's seeing to the details."
"Where are my clothes?"
"Brought you some things from your home," said Wisnewski, who stepped in.
"Arthur! It's so wonderful to see you. I'm so anxious to get back to work," Leonard said as the two embraced.
"Put these on. We're breaking you out of here," Wiz told him, smiling. "So good to see you, Sam."
Downstairs they found Kendra Cline, who had finished processing Leonard. She told him that he was a free man.
"Free, yes," he agreed. "Free from hell."
He had recalled nothing beyond a horrid, overwhelming and engulfing feeling of being held down, trapped, the entire time he was under.
Stroud told him that he knew the feeling, and this made Kendra Cline look askance at him, trying to determine his meaning. She hadn't spoken very much to him about the previous night, nor he to her.
Wisnewski grabbed some flowers that were on a nurse's duty desk and began to give them out one at a time to patients along the floor. Save for this, he showed no tendency toward his earlier "madness." He greeted each patient with a large smile and a big "How are you, today?" This turned a lot of heads.
Stroud meanwhile brought Leonard up to date, ending with the fact that the parchment and the bones confiscated from the death ship were waiting for his examination.
"You don't propose we go back into that ... into that hole, do you?" Leonard said, trembling, his first sign of anxiety since coming out of coma. "Is that what you all have planned for me? Is it? Well, you can save yourselves the trouble. I'll be damned and gone to hell before I'll go back to that ... that ship."
This made Wisnewski rush to Leonard. "You old bird, these people, this city is counting on us to--"
"I'm no hero, Simon. Neither are you!"
"We must do what we can."
"It could come again for us anytime ... anytime!"
"All right, take it easy," said Stroud.
Kendra also tried to calm him. "You will not be forced to go anywhere, Dr. Leonard. You've been through quite enough already."
"Yes," he agreed, "through hell and back."
"Will you at least come to the lab?" asked Wisnewski. "To look over the items we brought back?"
Leonard looked from one face to the other, biting his lip. "All right ... all right. But no, I will not go near that place again."
"Agreed," said Stroud.
Wisnewski made a muttering sound as he left ahead of them for the waiting car, not hiding his disappointment with Leonard.
"Come along, Dr. Leonard," said Abe Stroud, ushering the other man, who nodded and allowed Stroud to guide him.
"I'll be along later," said Kendra. "I don't want to leave things in a mess here, and I want to break in the new guys."
"Sure ... sure," said Stroud, "and about last night."
"Yes?"
"I ... I hope we can do it again sometime."
She smiled warmly. "Me too."
Dr. Samuel Leonard's expertise was philology: ancient written documents, hieroglyphics and symbols. He had unraveled and unlocked more secrets of past civilizations than anyone living on the planet. Wisnewski brought him the parchment in a protective cover, flattened out to its worn edges, looking like an Arabic treasure map of bizarre origin. The paper was a yellowish gray, stony-looking. It told a full tale, the strange Etruscan symbols spilling over the edges, and there were no margins at either the top or the bottom.
Wisnewski told Leonard that he had worked up a theory to the meaning of the cryptic letters and numbers, working as best he could with his more limited knowledge of ancient lettering. He pointed out that the figure of 500,000 seemed to refer to the number of human lives that must be sacrificed to the Overlord, some creature of the Dark Side that threatened to destroy all Etruscan life if its hunger for human life was not fulfilled.
Wisnewski explained all this while placing the document below the two-foot-wide magnifying glass.
Leonard seemed at first oblivious of Wisnewski and what the other man was saying. Stroud watched both men carefully. Leonard now said calmly, "You don't know what you're talking about, Wiz. Stick to your bones."
It was curt for Leonard, uncharacteristic; but he now launched into studying
the document, saying it could take hours, days, before he knew what each word meant. He asked them to be patient. "You can't rush a thing like this. You do, and you make bad interpretations, assumptions, and then you base everything on a fallacy."
"Fallacy?" asked Wiz, but Stroud put up a hand to him, indicating the prudent thing to do now would be to leave Leonard to his work. Leonard went into a kind of work-induced trance familiar to Wisnewski, and so the white-haired older doctor nodded and gave Leonard his leeway.
As Leonard worked, Stroud and Wisnewski huddled around a table with coffee and the bones that had come out of the pit. Wisnewski was still involved in studying these, but for now Stroud told him of the progress that Kendra Cline had had in combating the disease in people who were fortunate enough to have only a mild case of the "supernatural flu." Wisnewski was amazed to learn the details, hanging on Stroud's every word. He was particularly curious about the residue the disease left behind which seeped from the ears and other orifices of those affected.
"I'd wondered about that," said Wisnewski.
"You expelled some of it, too? While you were in Bellevue?"
"Excreted is the operative word," he said, and left it at that.
The hours passed slowly, with Stroud helping Wisnewski build a complete log on the bones and with a silent Leonard going at the document in a grueling, nonstop examination which was creating extensive notes. Leonard was mesmerized by the document and several times noises escaped him but no words as yet.
Nathan had interrupted their work twice with phone calls, demanding to know of their progress. Stroud fed him what he thought prudent. On the second call, Stroud told him of Wiz's theory of the 500,000 sacrifices. Nathan gasped and said, "Is that it? We're supposed to sit idly by and watch hundreds of thousands succumb to this disease and do ... nothing?"
"Dr. Cline's already informed you of Leonard's recovery and what that means."
"But if this ... this thing in the pit wants 500,000 lives, what's our antidote to that? There is none! If it doesn't get what it wants ... what then?"
Stroud hesitated before saying, "The whole of the city, we believe. So far, there are as many unanswered questions as there are--"
"I don't want to hear about unanswered questions, Stroud! I want results. You promised when I got you Wisnewski that--"
"I promised you nothing, and we're going at this night and day, and we're doing our goddamned best."
"I'm running interference for you scientists, Stroud, and you have no idea the pressures I'm holding back off your asses, so level with me! Do we have a shot at beating this thing or not?"
"Yes, yes, we do, but we need time to develop--"
"We don't have time. The goddamned dogs and cats and rats in the city are getting it now! They've attacked people, further spreading the disease."
Stroud thought of the neurological causes of the disease as they were explained to him by Kendra Cline. It seemed perfectly logical that animals would be affected as well. "Commissioner Nathan, I promise you ... as soon as we have a defense against this thing--"
"Yeah, well, I'm not so sure there is any defense anymore. Five hundred thousand! Christ, Stroud, do you know there are people in this city who would gladly sacrifice that many for the sake of themselves? Let's keep this information under wraps, understood? I can just see the headlines on that."
"All right, agreed." Stroud had finally gotten him off the phone when Leonard shouted for the other two men to gather round him.
"I've got it ... I've got it."
"We may have to give it what it wants," began Leonard, "but it isn't going to entirely trust us to do so."
Stroud and Wisnewski stared across at one another, each man shaking his head in confusion. "Do you want to explain that, Samuel?" asked Wiz.
"You were wrong about the 500,000 it wants, Wiz."
"I know the Etruscan numerals, Sam, and--"
"Yes, it wants that number, but that number is not the same as the ones it has inflicted with this disease of ... of control."
"What does it want?" asked Stroud. "What do you mean, Dr. Leonard?"
Leonard got up, his back aching from the hours looking over the documents. He paced a moment before saying, "The zombies are an army."
"An army?"
"To do its bidding. They will become it; it will become they. They are an extension of it. They will move in this world for it, because it cannot leave the confines of the earth in any other form. The Etruscan writer says that it is trapped by the wind if it comes out of the earth on a warm day or--"
"Or if it is raining," finished Stroud.
"Yes, how did you know?"
He told them about the experiments that Kendra had conducted on the substance that had oozed from Leonard and Weitzel.
"To think this vile thing once inhabited my body," said Leonard, quaking.
"Go on, Sam," said Wiz. "What else? How will it gain its sacrifices if not by taking the zombies?"
"The zombies will herd the rest of us to it, surround and force people into the pit, into the ship ... preferably alive."
Stroud thought of the attacks on him by the various zombies that he had come into contact with. He recalled the crazed man with the claw hammer.
Leonard continued, stopping at one point to place a finger on one word of the parchment that looked to Stroud like the tail feather of a bird. "This creature has the power to blow storms into the minds of men, and to become a parasite in the brain."
Stroud wondered for a moment if Dr. Leonard had gone mad. He didn't know how much of Leonard's spiel he could believe. "Whoa, wait a minute, Dr. Leonard. Are you trying to say that the Etruscans understood the physiological mechanisms that this demon used against them, and is now using against us? That they had the capability to assess--"
"Apparently the author of this did," said Leonard, poking his finger in the direction of the document under the magnifying glass. Stroud stared at it for some time and then a word on the page leaped out at him:
Mysterious Photograph
COM:m="Walker-ZEyes-1.jpg"
HTM:
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PDF:INSERT IMAGE "Walker-ZEyes-1.jpg" HERE
The word seemed to have some meaning for Stroud, but he wasn't sure why. It was the last word on the document. He asked Leonard to translate it.
"That is the name of the author, a soothsayer or some such."
"I see."
"Not very often do we get such a document signed," said Wiz.
"What is the name?"
"Well, it lines up like this," said Leonard, showing him the written translation, which read:
ESROUD
Stroud stared dumbstruck at the name: Esruad. "Are you sure? There's no mistake?"
"It would seem the name has significance," said Leonard.
"You might say so. Weitzel spoke the name just before he died. He called me Esruad. You also, Dr. Wisnewski, when I first came to you in the psychiatric ward. Do you recall?"
Wisnewski shook his head vigorously. "Not at all."
"There seems to be something important in the name. Does it say what this man Esruad did during the plague time?"
"He speaks of despair, that no one would listen to him. He had been something of an alchemist, it appears," said Leonard.
"What about the monster itself?" asked Wiz impatiently.
"A dreadful thing to behold, it says. Esruad calls it the Ubbrroxx; describes it as life-eating, life-draining, diabolical ... unleashed ... uninhibited ... disease-carrying."
"Sounds like our creature," said Wisnewski.
"Remarkably so," agreed Stroud.
"And this fellow Esruad ... He sounds familiar to me, too," began Leonard. "I must go over some old notes of my o
wn. If memory serves, he was a kind of prophet, soothsayer. Very little is known about him, but recent archeological breakthroughs in Tuscany have provided a few rays of light."
Wiz added, "No Etruscan literature other than funeral inscriptions survives, which makes this little piece of paper priceless."
Pulling at his tie Leonard continued, "Until recently it was near impossible to understand all but a few words, but the alphabet is a mix of Roman, Phoenician and an unknown tongue--very likely the Etruscans' ancestors. They traded with the Greeks and the Phoenicians, and most of what we know about them is told us by these other peoples."
"Right at the moment, I think it more prudent to understand the creature," said Wiz. "We can play history games later. What does it say about destroying the thing?"
"Esruad was unsuccessful."
"Obviously."
"It took 500,000 lives in the year 793 b.c. There was no stopping it."
"Just as I said, 500,000 lives," replied Wiz.
"But not the lives of the zombies. They lived on after with the guilt of thousands of others on their hands. They--the diseased ones--herded the healthy ones into the pit. When the creature was sated Esruad convinced his people that it must be removed. Using mostly slave labor, this was accomplished. It had gone into a dormant phase, during which time Esruad removed it and placed it on a ship. It was buried in the ship, packed in its own earth ball, and literally sent off into what was then space. It was buried months later, far beyond the seas, still inside the belly of the ship, along with the bones of those sacrificed to it."
"The land beyond the sea ... here and now." Stroud began to pace the room wondering if this was some kind of eschatological rite of passage for the creature, the "last thing" to come. Every religion had a last coming, a last end to history, a final conclusion to the grand pageant of mankind on earth. He began to wonder if the lives of 500,000 were not a small price to pay. Wisnewski and Leonard were quiet, perhaps with the same thoughts, Stroud guessed.
"I wonder if 500,000 lives will be enough for it this time," Wisnewski said, as if reading Stroud's mind.
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