“I never knew any of this until just before my mother died, several years ago. What she told me made me suspect the same thing you did, but I couldn’t get over here immediately.” Ibraham glanced at the gun. “In my country there is still a war going on.”
“You’re in the army?”
“The military became my career after I graduated from university in Singapore. Now I wish to retire.”
Greg shifted cautiously. “Look, do you have to do this shtick with the gun?”
Ibraham lowered the weapon. “Probably not. After all, we’re partners.”
Greg fought for self-control, and lost. “No way!”
“It’s the only way,” Ibraham said. “You know how to find the house. And my mother told me what’s hidden there. We go together. Tonight.”
Greg shook his head. “Didn’t Bernie tell you what happened to me – what I saw?”
“I know.” Ibraham seemed to have no problem with self-control, Greg noted – but then, he had the gun. “My mother warned me. I know what to do.”
Greg took a deep breath, “Maybe so. But do it tomorrow, when we can go up there in daylight.”
“No. We can’t afford delay.”
“Do you think Bernie might start talking – ”
“Only through an ouija board.” Ibraham glanced down at his gun.
Fear iced Greg’s spine. “Why?” he murmured.
“The old man was the only one who’d know where we were going. No sense taking chances.”
“How can you say that, knowing what we might run into up there?”
“What we’re going after is worth the risk. I’m sure you’re aware of that or else you’d never have gotten into this in the first place. That house holds a fortune, and we’re going to get it.”
Greg glanced at the gun. “And when we get it, you’ll get me,” he said.
“I give you my word.” Ibraham rose. “Either go with me or stay behind. Like Bernie.”
Greg swallowed hard. “Look, man, I’ve had a rough night, you know? Let me get my medication – ”
“What are you on?”
Greg told him, and Ibraham gestured quickly. “You’re not going up there stoned,” he said. “Could be bad for your health.”
A muzzle moved to press against Greg’s spine; that was bad for his health too.
“Move,” said Ibraham.
And they did, in Greg’s car, with him behind the wheel, Ibraham at his side, and the gun riding against his rib cage. The midnight air was humid; both men were perspiring moments after the car swung out into the deserted street.
“Roll down your window,” Greg said.
“Don’t you have any air conditioner?”
“Can’t afford it.”
“You can, after tonight.”
Ibraham was smiling, but Greg frowned. “This thing I saw up there – what is it?”
“Penangallan. A kind of vampire, but not exactly.”
“Meaning what?”
“A penangallan doesn’t need to rest in grave-earth or a coffin. Like your western vampires it seeks human blood for nourishment, but it can hibernate for years if necessary. Maybe the difference is in their metabolism. Vampires require a greater supply of energy to walk abroad each night. But the penangallan survives indefinitely in some sort of suspended animation. And when it does move, it flies.”
Greg nodded. “You mean it turns itself into some kind of a bat.”
Ibraham shook his head. “That’s just superstition. The penangallan still retains human form – or part of its human form.”
“I don’t get it.”
“These creatures can detach their heads from their bodies. And the head has the power of flight. When the head is removed, the stomach and intestines are pulled out and stay attached to it, receiving the blood it drinks.”
The words triggered Greg’s memory – just a flash, but enough. The golden girl, sitting up and lifting her head from the open stump of the neck. He’d seen it. It was true.
He felt a jarring movement and beside him Ibraham stirred in his seat. “Watch what you’re doing,” he said.
What Greg was doing was turning onto the concealed side road. Had they really come this far this quickly? Of course there was no traffic up here, no lights. Strange how easy it was to locate the hidden opening this second time around, even in the dark. But then again, it was associated with something he wasn’t likely to forget.
The car entered and moved upward in a tunnel formed by the overhanging trees lining the roadway. Greg switched headlights, but even the brights were of little help here. Then the trees thinned, but the underbrush thickened and the car began to lurch around the sharp curves.
“Watch it!” Ibraham warned.
But Greg had already warned himself with the memory of what lay ahead. A head –
“I can’t cut it,” he said. “We’ve got to wait. Tomorrow. We’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Now.” The gun jabbed against his ribs; Ibraham’s voice jabbed his ear. “You’re going now. Either behind the wheel or dumped in the trunk.”
“You’re bluffing – ”
“That’s what the old man thought.”
Greg’s hands were wet on the wheel, but they stayed there as the car inched forward over the rutted roadway and climbed around a curve. Now he glanced at the Malayan. “Suppose we’re wrong. Suppose we don’t find anything there?”
“I told you what my mother said. It’s there and we’ll find it.”
“One thing I don’t understand,” Greg said. “If the stuff they had on their customers was so valuable, why wasn’t it used?”
“My mother wondered about that too, but she didn’t learn the plan until later, from the Marquess’ lover.”
“Plan?”
“Bit by bit the pieces fit together. The Marquess had bought the place with more than just profit in mind. Back in Kelanton she had a reputation as a pawang – a sorceress, you’d call it – and she gathered together and brought the penangallans, which she controlled for her own purposes. Which were to use blackmail money to take over other vice operations and gradually gain political power in the area. The penangallans would deal with those who stood in her way. She was ready to carry out her plan when the end came. You know the rest.”
Greg frowned. “Your mother could have gone to the police – ”
“She was a fifteen-year-old girl, an illegal immigrant with forged papers, who spoke almost no English. Even if she’d found a way to contact the authorities – do you think anyone would go along with what she said about hookers who remove their heads, and all the rest of it?”
Greg had no answer for that, only another question as they angled up the tortuous trail. “The thing I saw,” he said. “Why would it still be there after all these years? Why didn’t it leave the place when the Marquess was killed?”
“The penangallan flies low,” Ibraham said. “It can’t soar like a bat, and it must protect its dangling stomach sac and intestines from harm. In Malaysia, homes are often guarded by garlands of Jenyu leaves hung on doors and windows. The penangallan fears the Jenyu plant’s sharp thorns.” He glanced at the looming pines and the clumps of underbrush clustered beneath them. “Here your hillsides are covered with cacti and all kinds of spiky vegetation. It would rip the creatures’ guts if they tried to escape.”
“But they wouldn’t have to fly,” Greg said. “They could go down staying in their bodies just as they did up there.”
Ibraham shrugged. “A penangallan preserves its body by drinking fresh blood. Without it the body will decay just like any other corpse. So if they did try to come down in human form before decay set in, there’d be problems. I don’t think they’d last very long if word got out that human heads were flying around Beverly Hills and sucking blood in Bel Air. Besides, they’d have to have a place to hide. And to store the vinegar.”
“Vinegar?”
“If the penangallan flies, its entrails swell up when exposed to the open air. So afterward
it must soak its lower parts in a jar or vat of vinegar to shrivel the stomach and bowels to normal size. Then it fits them back in the body when the head is replaced.”
No way, Greg told himself. Either this guy is crazy or I am. There are no such things, no such place, no house –
They rounded the turn and there it was.
If the place had looked ghostly by day, it looked ghastly in the grayish shroud of moonlight filtering through lowering clouds. Its dark silhouette seemed to slant toward them as the hatchback halted amidst spirals of steam from the hood. Greg stared numbly at the house. If it was real, then what about the rest –
“Out,” Ibraham said.
Greg hesitated, then took a deep breath. “Look, I’ve told you everything I know, everything that happened. There’s no reason for me to go in again with you now.”
“What about the material you were looking for?”
Greg took another deep breath. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want any part of it.”
“Afraid?”
“After what you told me? Damned right I am.”
“You expect me to go in by myself?” Ibraham asked. “So you can drive off and leave me stranded?”
“I’ll wait, I swear it. Hey, you can take my car keys – ”
“I’m taking you.”
The gun rose, and so did Greg. Ibraham tensed as Greg’s hand went to the glove compartment, then relaxed as the younger man brought out his flashlight.
Together they left the car and moved to the entrance in silence. Even the sound of the wind had died; everything had died here.
Greg halted before the door, and his companion eyed the broken lock. “You’re making a mistake,” Greg said. “If what you told me is true, a gun won’t protect us from that thing I saw.”
“There are other ways,” Ibraham said, raising the weapon as he spoke. “Inside.”
Inside was pitch blackness pierced by the pinpoint flashlight beam. Greg adjusted it so that they stood in a wider circle of radiance, but the light was dim against the darkness beyond. The silence itself seemed more intense than outside; there was nothing to disturb it here, nothing until they came.
“Leave the front door open,” Greg whispered. “We might want to get out of here in a hurry.”
Ibraham shrugged. “As you wish.” Moving forward, he peered toward the right archway. “What’s in there?”
Greg described the parlor, and his captor nodded.
Now he glanced to his left. “And here?”
“The bar.”
The two men halted just past the archway as the flashlight beam roamed the room.
“All that damage,” Ibraham said. “This must be where the fighting took place.” He peered at the stairs on the far side.
Greg spoke quickly. “You don’t have to go up there. I told you there’s nothing in those bedrooms.”
“Except the last one,” Ibraham countered. “That’s reason enough. We’ve got to go up.”
“You know what’s there. You admitted your gun won’t help.”
Ignoring him, Ibraham scanned the tile shambles of the littered floor. His eyes swept over the toppled tables, overturned chairs and broken glass. His eyes halted. “This will do,” he said.
Greg followed his gaze to a chair turned upside down, two of its legs wrenched half-free from the base of the seat. “What do you mean?”
Ibraham told him what he meant. He told him what to do, then watched, gun in hand, while Greg did it. Getting the chair leg loose wasn’t difficult and locating a sharp knife in a drawer behind the bar wasn’t a problem for him either. The hard part was whittling away at the wooden chair leg until the end was trimmed into a tapering shaft with a narrow point. It was Ibraham, rummaging through shelving beneath the bar counter, who came up with the bung-starter.
“Good,” he said. “We’re ready.”
Greg didn’t feel ready. He felt he needed out of here. Ibraham had already goaded him to the base of the stairs, and it was there that he turned.
“Hey, man,” he said. “I thought we came here to look for that stuff.”
“We will.”
“You’re wasting your time. It’s not upstairs.”
“But something else is. And we won’t be safe looking around here until we dispose of it.”
The gun muzzle guided Greg up the staircase. In the upper hallway the floorboards creaked, and so did the doors as Ibraham opened them in turn. But it was the sound of his own heartbeat that Greg heard as they reached the end of the hall and stood before the last door on the left.
It was Greg who opened the door, but Ibraham was the one who gasped as the flashlight beam encircled the burnished golden beauty of the naked girl on the bed.
Her eyes were closed, and this time she did not stir. Ibraham gestured impatiently, but Greg stood immobile at the bedside, staring down at the golden girl.
This was what he’d needed. Proof that he hadn’t freaked out from dropping acid, that what he’d seen here before was real.
And if it was real, then so was the rest of what he’d seen, what had sent him screaming down the hillside. That’s why he was standing here now, holding the sharpened stake. He knew what he must do, and this was the worst reality of all.
He took a step backward. He couldn’t go through with this, no way, now was the time to get out of here –
The muzzle of the gun bit against his spine. Greg heard the faint click signaling the release of the safety catch.
The girl on the bed heard it too, for she stirred for a moment, stirred but didn’t awaken.
Once she did, once she opened her eyes, it would be too late. Greg remembered the rows of pointed teeth, remembered the hands that tugged the head away from the neck swiftly, so very swiftly. Which meant he had to be swift too.
He belted the flashlight.
He lifted the stake with both hands.
Gasping with effort, he plunged it down into the cleft between the golden breasts.
Then her eyes did open, wide. Her lips retracted and he saw the teeth, saw the talons rise to slash at his face, claw at his wrists as he held the stake fast.
Snakelike she squirmed, and like a snake she hissed, but Ibraham was standing on the other side of the bed and he brought the broad head of the bung-starter down, driving the stake deep.
The golden hands tore frantically at the shaft imbedded between the golden breasts, but Greg’s grip remained unbroken. He held the stake firmly as Ibraham hammered it home. There was a single shattering shriek as a gout of crimson geysered upward, then sudden silence.
Talons loosened their hold; the golden face fell back on the pillow, slant-eyed stare veiled by the billowing black hair. No sound issued from the open mouth, and the blood around the base of the stake ceased further flow. Mercifully, there was no movement or hint of movement to come. The golden girl was dead.
Greg turned away, panting after his exertion, filling his laboring lungs with the acrid odor of blood. His stomach cramped and for a moment he thought he might pass out. Then he became aware that Ibraham was speaking.
“– not finished yet. But it should be safe to go now.”
Greg unhooked his flashlight. “Go where?”
“To get what we came for.” Ibraham motioned him to the door, and Greg noticed that he was again holding the gun.
So nothing had changed, really. Except that they’d come here this crazy midnight to pound a stake into the heart of a dead girl or an undead girl; it didn’t matter which, because she was dead now. We killed her and the stake went in and the blood spurted out just like in those horror movies only this wasn’t a movie just a horror, God I need a fix –
But there was no fix, not in the hall or on the stairs or down at the bar.
Ibraham’s gun urged him along to the hall before the mottled mirror on the back wall. “Should be just about here,” Ibraham said. He reached out and ran his free hand across the inner edge of the bar, muttering, “If my mother was right.” A panel under the bar
slid back silently, revealing a black rectangular opening.
“She was,” Ibraham said.
Greg’s flashlight dipped toward the darkness. “Lower,” his captor said. “Must be some stairs.”
There were. Greg descended first, beam fanning forward until he reached the bare stone surface below the fourteenth step. Ibraham followed, but this time his gun wasn’t aimed at Greg. Like the flashlight, it swerved and circled, as if seeking possible targets in the cavernous cellar before them.
The two men moved slowly, silently. Nothing to hear but the thud of their own footsteps, nothing to see but the beam tracing a path along the stone floor beneath their feet.
Here the air was cooler, but the odor it carried, a mingling of dust and decay, was almost stifling. There was another smell, faint but pungent, which Greg couldn’t identify.
Now Ibraham identified it for him. “Vinegar,” he said. “Remember, I told you the penangallan shrinks its entrails in vinegar in order to squeeze them back down into the body? I was wondering where they kept their supply.”
“But we didn’t find any others – ”
“My mother thought there could be a dozen among the Marquess’ girls.”
Greg started to speak, but Ibraham waved him to silence. “The scent is almost undetectable here. Probably evaporated.”
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