“I’m not worried about the goddamn smell,” Greg said. “But if there are more of those things down here – ”
Suddenly his foot struck something, something that clattered as he stumbled back. The flashlight beam dipped down toward the stone surface, sweeping over the sprawled length of arm and leg bones, the ridged rib cage and nacreous neck of the skeleton.
It had no skull.
The rush came so quickly that Greg almost dropped the flashlight. Its beam wavered because his hand was shaking. No skull. No head. It was one of them.
Ibraham moved forward; his harsh whisper echoed through the darkness: “Here’s another.”
Greg raised the flashlight, semicircling its dim beam, then wished he hadn’t.
The floor ahead was littered with bones. Some, heaped against the walls, were partially joined: a leg attached to a pelvis, a collarbone to a humerus, radius and ulna to the metacarpals. Two other skeletons were fully articulated but, like the first, they lacked skulls. Greg’s stare swept across the scatter, but Ibraham’s attention was elsewhere. He skirted the bonepile, threading his way between heaps and jumbles, then approached the makeshift wooden shed rising along the right side of the cellar. More skeletal fragments lay there, piled almost at random, amidst shreds of rotted cloth.
There was a door at the far end of the shed’s wall, and Ibraham pulled it open slowly, revealing the wooden shelving ranged along the far side within.
“Get some light over here,” he said. Greg started toward him, raising the flashlight. Its beam sought the shelves – long, low shelves bearing wide mouthed, deep-bodied clay bowls. There were perhaps a dozen pots of them resting side by side like the pots in a florist’s shop, but what bloomed in each were not flowers.
Greg stared at the rows of human skulls. And they grinned at him in greeting, grinned as though sharing some grisly secret that only the dead can know.
Ibraham moved beside him. “You see what’s happened here? Those bowls must have been filled with vinegar.”
“To shrink the intestines.” Greg nodded. “But why didn’t it work?”
“You can’t store liquids in leaky containers,” Ibraham explained. “And every one of these bowls is cracked.”
Now, peering more closely, Greg could see what he meant. Most of the cracks were visible just above the base of each bowl to form a pattern, almost as though they’d been gouged out by some sharp tool or instrument.
Greg frowned. “Didn’t they realize it was wrong to use these?”
“They had no other choice,” Ibraham said. “She must have broken them after the raid. Probably that’s how they escaped the madam’s fate – they hid down here while the raid was going on. Maybe the raiding party killed the bartender too. Stands to reason they took the bodies away and got rid of them.” He glanced down at the scattered bones. “But the penangallans were safe here. They must have stayed in hiding a long time, and when they came out they were hungry. And you know what happens when there’s no food in the house.”
Greg nodded. “You go out to eat.”
“Exactly. They flew off to try their luck at hunting. But there’s not much around, just birds and perhaps some small game. Since they couldn’t fly down from here, that’s all they could find. The only way they could survive was to hibernate.” Ibraham gestured. “The one upstairs was smarter. She must have known how little success they’d have out there, because she didn’t go. And when they returned and came down here she had a surprise for them.”
“Like you said, she’d broken the bowls.”
“That’s what I figure. While their bodies rested out in the cellar, they settled their heads and entrails in the bowls here, but most of the vinegar leaked out quickly; before it could be effective it was gone. The girl we saw upstairs was gone too, after locking them in. She probably had her own bowl and vinegar supply tucked away somewhere upstairs, because she’d already planned what she was going to do.”
“But what could she do?” Greg said.
“You still don’t get it.” Ibraham glanced down. “Don’t these bones and skeletons tell their own story? The heads rested helplessly in those dried-out jars while the stomachs burst and rotted away. And trapped out here, the headless bodies, blind and squirming in the dark.”
Greg grimaced. “And the thing upstairs –?”
“She ate them,” Ibraham said. “That’s what kept her alive all these years.” He nodded at the skeletons and the piles of bones. “She didn’t need to fly in search of food. Not with a dozen bodies down here, bodies that still moved, bodies filled with blood. She stripped the flesh from these bones bit by bit, sucked arteries and veins dry. It must have been done over a long period, and most of the while she slept, just as we found her.”
Greg’s stomach knotted convulsively. “I’m outta here,” he panted, turning to seek the stairs.
“First we get what we came for.” Ibraham’s weapon pressed against Greg from behind as he climbed. And back upstairs the gun prodded Greg to the rear of the room.
“Take a look behind the staircase,” Ibraham ordered. “The madam could have had her office under there.”
Greg swore silently. Of course the office would be in someplace like that, close to the action but not easy for outsiders to spot. If he’d only looked around more carefully before going upstairs on the first visit, chances are he might not have had to go upstairs at all. The office would be where the madam kept the stuff. If he’d used his head and thought things through, he wouldn’t be here now in the middle of the night, middle of nowhere, this crazy house with that crazy thing upstairs and a crazy gook downstairs pushing a gun into him for half of what they’d find.
“Let’s go,” the crazy gook was saying. “I tell you it’s got to be here.”
And that’s where they found it, under the stairs. The door was metal, closed but unlocked, and behind it was the office. Or had been, until the intruders burst in, tore the drawers out of desks and filing cabinets, smashed them with crowbars and an ax that still lay atop shelving wrenched from a battered bookcase on the right wall.
Across from it, on the left wall, was an open safe.
Open, and empty.
Greg blinked at the bare steel shelf. “Gone; those bastards took the stuff with them – ”
“Take another look,” Ibraham said softly.
Greg followed his gaze, traveled with it across the bare concrete floor to the center of the room. His eyes followed a paper trail – or a trail of what had once been paper. Now it was just a brownish-gray muddle of charred shreds speckled with tiny glints from flecks of burned photos. From the trail rose an odor, faint as the scent of vinegar: the reek of long-dead ashes in which all hope lay buried.
“Outta here,” Greg whispered.
Ibraham shook his head. “You think I don’t know how you feel? I want to forget it ever happened. But before we put it behind us, there’s one more job. The penangallan – ”
“It’s dead,” Greg said. “We killed it. You know that.”
“Not so. Remember, the penangallan isn’t like other bloodsuckers. As long as the head remains attached to the digestive tract it can still fly and feed. A stake is not enough.”
“It’s enough for me,” Greg told him. “I’m not going to tangle with that thing.”
“The stake probably paralyzes it, at least for a time,” Ibraham said. “But we can’t take chances. We must cut off the head.”
“Forget it. I’m finished.”
Ibraham ignored him, but his weapon did not.
Would he shoot? Greg thought of Bernie Tanner for a moment and he didn’t need an answer. Instead he asked another question. “What do you want me to do?”
Ibraham nodded toward the toppled shelving at his right. “Over there,” he said. “Get the ax.”
Greg turned, imagining the impact of a bullet in his back. And perhaps it wouldn’t have been imagination if they’d found that blackmail material intact. No reason for Ibraham not to shoot him then, kill him an
d take all the loot; nobody’d ever know. But that could still be true now. If they got rid of the penangallan, Ibraham would get rid of him too – because Greg was the only one who could tie him to Bernie Tanner’s murder.
So there really wasn’t much choice but for Greg to do exactly what he was told: reach out and pick up the ax. But it was his own idea to turn swiftly, raise the ax and bring it down right between Ibraham’s eyes.
The gurgle was still dying in his victim’s throat as Greg ran, reeling through the office doorway, the barroom, the hall, the open front door.
He squeezed into the car, fumbling for his keys, cursing the broken air conditioner but grateful for the breeze from the windows. The air was still warm and moist, but it was clean, free of must and dust, the scent of vinegar, the mingled odors of stale ashes and fresh blood.
Blood. He’d killed a man; he was a murderer. But nobody knew, nobody would ever know if he played it cool. Even if somebody wandered up to the house there was nothing to connect him with what they’d find. Get himself a set of tires tomorrow and the old tread marks wouldn’t match the new. They might get prints off the doorknobs and ax handle, but they’d have nothing to match them with; he’d never been fingerprinted. And they wouldn’t be looking for him in the first place, with nothing to go by.
So he was home free, would be now that the car had started, now that he was wheeling down the hillside, with every twist and turn taking him farther away from that damned house and that damned thing; taking him closer to the lights and the streets, streets where you could find a fast fix, find it and forget what had happened. It would just be like a bad trip, he didn’t really kill anyone, and there wasn’t really anything like that thing with the golden face and the almond eyes and the gleaming, pointed teeth in the crimson mouth he was seeing now in the rearview mirror, rising up from the back seat.
Greg screamed, and so did the brakes of the car as he spun the wheel, spun and lost because there was no way to win, no way to turn from that narrow, tangled trail.
And then the thing was hovering behind him, rising up and swooping forward, its viscera lashing and looping.
The slimy coils twirled and tightened around Greg’s neck, and from the stalklike stem above it the golden face dipped, lips fastening on Greg’s flesh as the fangs found his throat. Ibraham had been right, after all.
Now Greg knew why a stake through the heart was not enough.
NICHOLAS ROYLE
The Homecoming
NICHOLAS ROYLE’S début novel, Counterparts, was published by Penguin Books in 1995, and it will be followed by his second, Saxophone Dreams, in 1996. A third, with the working title Omphalos, is set in London, New Orleans and Western Australia.
He is the award-winning author of more than seventy stories, some of which have been selected for The Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and The Year’s Best Horror Stories, as well as many other anthologies and periodicals. As an editor, his British Fantasy Award-winning small press anthologies, Darklands and Darklands 2, were reprinted in the UK as mass-market paperbacks, and his publishing imprint Egerton Press has recently released a collection of stories by Joel Lane.
“Although my novels are being published as mainstream, that doesn’t mean I intend to stop writing horror stories,” reveals Royle. “I love horror stories. The good ones.”
About “The Homecoming”, he explains: “I travelled widely in Eastern Europe before the round of revolutions that concluded the 1980s, and no country was more depressing than Romania, no city more palpably infested with paranoia than Bucharest. Rich, but only in source material for writers, pre-Revolution Bucharest pops up again in parts of my second novel, Saxophone Dreams . . .”
BELGRADE’S DANUBE RAILWAY station was cold and dark, its staff unhelpful. Daniela had to suppress a desire to turn back and return to her little room off Yuri Gagarin Boulevard. But she had taken the decision and there was no going back on it.
Belgrade had been comfortable – the standard of living far higher than anywhere in Romania – but never quite home. Her grasp of Serbo-Croat just about allowed her to order a beer and buy a bus ticket. It was with the help of other Romanian exiles that she had been able to find a room and furnish it with a large sofa and an old TV.
When reports of the Timisoara massacre first leaked out of Romania she stayed indoors round the clock waiting for further news. She was watching bleary-eyed from lack of sleep when the crowds massed in central Bucharest ostensibly to demonstrate support for President Ceausescu. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The Berlin Wall had crumbled and the Czech communists had been ousted only weeks before. And the Romanians were going to let the Ceausescu regime get away with the slaying of thousands of people in Timisoara, not to mention the subjugation of the entire country for the last twenty-four years.
The people in the square waved their banners and listened while Ceausescu droned from his balcony. Then the unthinkable appeared to be happening. Daniela tensed on her sofa, hardly daring to breathe in case she missed anything. Parts of the crowd had thrown down their banners and begun to berate their president. More joined in and Ceausescu became confused. He believed the people loved him because his sycophants assured him of it daily. He began a chopping, sweeping motion with his arm as if he wanted to brush the trouble-makers aside or erase them like an error committed in haste.
That night, troops from the ranks of the Securitate – the hated secret police – reacted with force. Dozens died but the spirit of the people was not broken. At eleven the next morning state television reported that the defence minister was a traitor and had committed suicide. The crowd sensed it as a turning point and attacked the central committee building.
Daniela was crouching on the floor, her mouth alternately dry and filling up with the juices of fear and excitement. Her whole body vibrated like a tightly coiled spring.
Ceausescu was still in the building when the revolutionaries gained access and began to rampage through it. The TV pictures showed him taking off in a helicopter at the same time as the revolutionaries swarmed on to the roof.
Daniela spat at the screen, pleaded with God to let the helicopter crash.
She watched the feared Securitate fight their desperate counterrevolution and was still watching on Christmas Day when the Ceausescus were shown lying dead on the ground after their summary trial and execution by firing squad.
She sat so close her nose touched the screen. There he was, the Conducator, the President of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Grand Leader of the Peoples of Romania, the despot who had bled the country dry with his insane obsession to pay off all foreign debt, so that his people queued for bread at 5 a.m. and considered chicken’s feet a feast. The paranoid tyrant, who had his toilet seat scrubbed with alcohol before and after use and sent anyone making a joke about him to jail for two years, lay in the dirt, his collar tightly fastened, his grey old face puffy, his eyes closed forever.
She clasped the television set to her and rolled on to her back.
Two months later in Belgrade-Danube railway station she was thinking of reneging on her decision to go back home to Romania. No, she couldn’t. She climbed on board the train. The guard wanted her to pay in US dollars for a sleeper. She offered him ten. He shook his head.
“How much?” she asked him.
“Thirty,” he muttered sourly.
It was Daniela’s turn to shake her head. “No way,” she snorted and stalked off to find a seat. The problem with Romanian Railways was that you acquired a seat reservation at the same time as you bought your ticket. But only if your journey started inside Romania. She couldn’t reserve a seat in Belgrade. When they crossed into Romania people would board the train at Timisoara with reservations for unmarked seats and Daniela could find herself with nowhere to sit. But she wasn’t paying $30 for a sleeper. It was a disgrace and hardly in the spirit of the revolution.
The train rolled through northern Serbia, through the province of Vojvodina, and Daniel
a grew bored of the unchanging scenery. She felt tense and nervous about returning to Romania.
Several weeks had passed since the revolution. The counterrevolution had been put down inside a week, after which time Securitate agents were smoked out of the ruins and either killed or sent for trial. So she had nothing to fear. On the contrary: she was excited to be going back. But excitement always smelt a little like fear.
The motion of the train lulled her to sleep.
She dreamt pictures from the revolution. They were things she’d seen on television but now without the protection of the screen. Tanks rumbled through the streets of Bucharest belching exhaust fumes and shelling buildings indiscriminately. Automatic fire scored deep scratches in the plaster finishes of rundown apartment buildings. The muzzle of a gun appeared at a window, followed by a face and immediately a burst of fire directed at the street. A soldier fired back from behind the tank. He hit his target and the man fell back into the room while his gun toppled to the street. The tank’s gun turret swivelled thirty degrees and shelled the building. Masonry and glass shattered like toys and flames blew out of several blackened windows. The gun twisted further round and shelled the next building, and the next.
It was a kind of purging process, she realised dimly. An exorcism by mortar and fire of the city’s evil presence.
She woke up worrying about the tunnels. Apparently a secret network of tunnels existed underneath Bucharest accessible only to the Securitate. But with terrified agents scampering like rabbits for cover, the hiding places could not have remained inviolable.
She fell asleep again. Border guards woke her. They impinged on her exhausted senses as uniformed automata. Sleep took her once more. At Timisoara there was a mighty scuffling and shambling of feet and bodies as denizens of the persecuted town crammed on to the train. “Reservat! Reservat” they protested in a flat, toneless whine, but she snored louder and they died away.
Bucharest was still several hours distant. Daniela slid in and out of sleep as if it were a bath full of tepid, scummy water. She confused glimpses of the forlorn compartment and its huddled occupants with snatches of dreams. At one point she jumped when she thought she saw Ceausescu and his wicked wife slumped in the opposite seats, their faces puffed up and pockmarked by sooty bullet wounds, their jaws collapsed.
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