by E. E. Knight
She was met by the owner, a man who spoke only a little English, but he made the point that Von Krebs was out with his wife and daughter on his yacht and was expected back soon. He mostly communicated with “the” plus “noun” constructions. When he gestured out the vast windows looking toward the gulf, he said, “The sea.” When he took her into the kitchen, where he was puttering around with a knife and some vegetables, he said, “The cooking.”
He called himself “Harald,” but whether that was a first or last name Duvalier could only guess. Finnish names, especially surnames, were brutal, so she believed it to be his first name.
In the living room there was a stereo in a heavy wooden cabinet. An old-fashioned phonograph for playing vinyl records and a device that played large tapes interested her for a half hour or so while he rattled around in the kitchen. The open interior of the house let them share the space in such a way that he still was able to act the host while making dinner. Every now and then he held up a glass—the first for water, the second for wine—making pantomime inquiries if he should pour her a drink. She smiled and declined.
The bathroom and toilet were in a deep red with white accents that reminded her of fresh beef. She used the toilet and briefly luxuriated in the waterfall-style fixture for the sink, using liquid soap that filled the room with a summery aroma she couldn’t quite identify.
The house was set well back from the shore, perhaps two hundred yards or so, and the ground sloped down sharply (she assumed, she didn’t make the walk right away) to the actual shore. The stretch of plain, unbroken grass between the two lines of trees reminded her a little of a bowling alley or some kind of sports arena. Whoever had built the house must also have had the grounds leveled.
Someone kept the lawn intact—it looked like it was mowed at least weekly. Again, that bespoke wealth. Nobody these days kept more than little patches of grass; grounds tended to be put to use growing vegetables or keeping turkeys or pigs.
Feeling oddly like a character in a Swedish film about upper-middle-class ennui, she paged through a book on art, wondering how Valentine was getting on with Stepanek’s paintings in Helsinki. She wondered if he was enjoying the nightlife in the big city, if “nightlife” was the right word for a place where the sun didn’t set until it was approaching midnight.
Every now and then Harald wandered through the room, inquiring about her needs in a labored fashion, as though he’d just been in another room consulting an English phrasebook. Finally, she saved him the trouble by curling up in a comfortable chair and pretending to sleep. The pretense turned into reality.
She woke when Von Krebs returned with the wife and daughter, typical Finnish blond specimens of skin and hair that made her feel like a thin, freckly mess.
They smelled like wind and sea. They’d been checking out the post-refit Windkraft.
They ate a nice dinner of just-caught lobster, with some kind of cream-based sauce. It was delicious, but a rather awkward party since the family refrained from all but necessities in Finnish out of well-mannered regard for their guest, not wishing to exclude her from the talk. Von Krebs was the only one capable of speaking fluently to both sides. They asked polite questions about America and the suffering of the areas under Kurian control.
She wasn’t sure how to answer that. Drawing any kind of an honest picture would ruin everyone’s dinner.
The conversation moved on to the loveliness of the coast and the health of the Finns living on it, with the mixture of fresh seafood and a land diet. It appeared that Harald’s family chose to live here for his health. She mentioned her frequently sour stomach.
“You need a night on the water,” Von Krebs said. “Salt water cures everything; did you not know this?”
“Seems like it’s tough on the skin, but I’ll take your word for it,” Duvalier said.
“Do you remember the little lighthouse we passed on our way into the harbor?”
“Yes.”
“It is a lovely spot. We can take the Windkraft and visit it tomorrow, if you like. It has a small garrison of the Finnish defense forces. But they do not mind visitors. We can make an outing of it. The sunsets are spectacular from there. Shall we go?”
That sea-hardened face of his was hiding something. He might just want to spread her out on a lonely beach and use her just to see what sex with an American was like—she’d heard a joke once about a Frenchman making love to a corpse on a beach thinking she was an American—or perhaps he was seeking an in with Sime, though what good either could do the other was beyond her.
“We’ll make you a hamper,” Harald said. “Some wine, too.”
“You are all so very kind. Honestly, this is the big surprise of the trip.”
They set out the next day, early, with her as the only passenger. Thanks to a few delays with the Windkraft, they didn’t actually leave for the lighthouse until it was after ten in the morning.
Only two of his white-pants crew remained on the Windkraft. They were sufficient to handle the boat under Von Krebs’s direction. He let her take the wheel while they adjusted the sails.
He seemed strangely alive. Maybe it was the influence of being at the wheel of his own boat; but if so, why did he employ someone like Stepanek?
They arrived at the island, wooded like the rest of Finland’s Bothnian coast, after an hour’s sailing, thanks to fluky winds. Docks with skewed, weather-beaten planks led up to the edge of the little island settlement like a fun-house path.
The lighthouse island had a steepish, rocky slope up from the beach and the tiny marina. But the navigational tower wasn’t the only sign of habitation. She could just make out some big, barnlike roofs above the trees and weather-beaten old houses. The lighthouse itself was nonfunctional, according to Von Krebs, but still served as a landmark for Kokkola harbor. It was painted in red and white stripes. They had faded over the years, but the contrast was still striking enough that they were the first colors you could distinguish from the blue of the sky and the green of the island.
She’d learned to trust her intuition over the years. The fishy smell on the island unsettled her.
“Wow. I was in an agricultural fertilizer plant once. They used ground-up bits of fish. It’s the same smell.”
“I suspect someone had a catch go bad in the summer warmth. This is a mostly unvisited anchorage. The Kokkola harbormaster would go mad if you dumped your load of rotting fish to bob around in his harbor.”
They skirted the depressingly abandoned buildings and made for the lighthouse. Von Krebs said there were animals living in the abandoned buildings and he feared rabies and hantavirus. So they took a more picturesque path through the trees, climbing the lighthouse hill.
Other than a little more wind than she liked, it was a perfect day, with not a cloud in the sky.
They found a few tables and benches of a design common the world over beneath the striped lighthouse. It had a marvelous view of the bay.
“Here’s a nice spot for our picnic.”
“You’re unhappy here. Homesick?” Von Krebs asked.
“I’d like to head home, to tell the truth. There’s nothing for me to do here, at least nothing more important than what I could be doing back home.”
He looked up, nodded.
Nets, heavy and wet, fell all across her. She struggled, and the more she fought, the heavier and more entangled she became.
They rolled her up in the nets like a rug, with a few kicks for good measure, and she felt herself being hoisted across two men’s shoulders.
Three strong men helped secure her. They had that same horribly fishy smell she’d noticed earlier. They put her in handcuffs before unwrapping her from the nets. She was put into a cheap tube-steel chair, with her arms around one of the metal supports for the wooden back brace.
“What the fuck is this?” she asked.
They were inside the lighthouse
, at the bottom. The stairs up reminded her a little of a nautilus with its natural ascending spiral. It reeked of decay, overlain by a fresher, fishier smell, as though someone had just shoveled the day’s catch out the door.
Von Krebs stood as though posing for a photograph with one leg up on a sea chest, leaning forward across his thigh with arms casually crossed at the wrists.
“Are you just an ordinary bastard, or the traitorous kind?” she asked.
He smiled, and the room got a little colder. “You know, I have a great interest in pain. Just how much pain an individual can take before they vomit, void their bladder and bowels, pass out, even die. Yes, you can die from pain, even though the injuries providing the source for the pain are themselves nonlethal. Let me tell you another way I am beyond the sadists of old. I can savor it in ways they could not imagine. I will feed off your aura as it slowly, agonizingly, leaves your body.”
“I gave myself up for dead years ago. I feel like I’ve lost this aura your kind finds so precious. I’ll probably disappoint you.”
He opened the chest, unrolled a small chamois sheet, and began to extract what looked like medical instruments, laying them on the chamois. There were scalpels, probes, clamps, scissors. The stainless steel took on an unnatural shine in the darkness.
He also had rope and surgical tubing. Perhaps he was a vivisectionist.
She noticed her sword-stick was in the corner. No one had investigated it closely, so they hadn’t found the switch that unlocked grip from sheath.
“You three, out. Wait outside the door. You may hear her screaming.”
The fishy-smelling men retreated.
“Meet Chien,” Von Krebs said.
The small nude Asian woman, who had what looked like a barbed octopus with long folds of skin between its limbs riding across her back, descended the stairs from the shadow above. Its limbs engulfed her neck, breasts, and waist, offering a sort of obscene modesty.
One dreadful tentacle reached out and tapped Duvalier, once, twice, three times.
Chien shimmered for a moment, then Duvalier found herself looking into an exact duplicate of herself, down to the smallest freckle and chipped tooth.
“Chien speaks good Midwestern English. Her Spanish is also excellent, but I do not believe she will need that. It’s one of the reasons we selected her when we found out you were coming.”
“When did you learn that?”
“Ah, I never reveal sources. Even to those with but five minutes left to live. Chien, how do you do?”
“Very good,” Chien said.
“See? She does not say ‘very well.’”
“Well, maybe I do,” Duvalier said tightly.
“A risk few will notice.”
“Security won’t let her get much done, unless she’s got a backpack nuke along with that Kurian.”
“Oh, you think the disguise is to work a nasty mass murder of delegates? You could not be more wrong. This disguise is just a temporary one, in order to get in close enough contact to—well, it is best if that stays a secret as well.
“We don’t need the original anymore,” Von Krebs said. “I intend to mix pleasure and pain with you from here until your death. It will only help me evolve into the higher form the Kurian Order has put me on the stairs of becoming.”
He was insane.
She tested the cuffs. He’d put them on too tightly for her to wriggle out. Once an Oklahoma police reservist had taken her into custody and put her in cuffs. When she whined that they were too tight, he loosened them—after all, she was in the back of his car and there was a steel grate between them… .
He was dead within two minutes of loosening the cuffs. She’d straightened the wire necklace she’d been wearing—it was an old coat hanger—and stabbed him in the eye when he turned around to check on her after she faked a bloody nose.
They’d made a mistake. The handcuffs were sound enough, but the chair they’d put her in was a relic. She kicked herself backward, and as she hit the ground the backrest splintered.
She bent her spine, wriggled through the cuffs, a difficult feat for anyone but a young gymnast or a Cat. She got her foot against the chain and pushed hard. A hand came out, bloody.
The pain would only help.
The Kurian doppelgänger backed away. It was odd to see herself look panicked.
Von Krebs stepped forward, a long-bladed Liston knife in his hand. She picked up the broken chair and hurled it at him. He ducked just long enough for her to get to the Other Duvalier.
She got nails and teeth into the bitch and the disguise vanished. Instead she was wrestling with a living umbrella of muscle.
Von Krebs came, blade held high, and she rolled, putting the Kurian between herself and the Mitteleuropean. He altered his slash, but still took a chunk out of the Kurian’s back.
That sent a shock through the Asian girl and her face writhed in pain. Well, dance with the devil and he’ll step all over your toes. Von Krebs himself recoiled in horror that he’d injured a Kurian.
No time to let up. She drove stiffened fingers into Chien’s throat and the girl coughed blood like she’d been given the Heimlich.
The Kurian released its grip on the naked girl and humped across the floor. Duvalier stomped hard on its back and it folded up around her leg, clawing. She drove the heel of her foot in hard, dragging it across the floor as she went after Von Krebs, leaving a trail of bloody bluish slime that was the Kurian’s juice. The grip began to relax, but it still had the hook-tipped tentacles in her flesh.
“Stay back,” Von Krebs said, waving the long knife.
“Fuck you. Traitor.”
He probably saw the hate in her eyes. He came at her while the Kurian was still fighting. She dropped and he overshot, tripping over her and dropping the knife.
They both reached for it and she got the handle before he did; his fingers closed on the blade in what turned into bloody agony. She relished the feel of pulling the blade out of his grip, knowing she was severing flesh and blood. She threw herself across him and opened his throat, cutting off his scream with a wet, blubbering cry.
Throwing on her coat, she hurried away from the lighthouse. No telling what kind of alarm had been sounded. Of course, they were expecting a version of her to be returning to the conference… .
Risking a trip through the dilapidated little village that they’d avoided on the way up, she saw a small house under guard. Boards were nailed across the windows and the door had a chain on it. Perhaps the small Finnish garrison was being held prisoner inside.
Why not just kill them and free up the manpower? she wondered.
Perhaps the Reapers needed feeding.
She hurried down to the dock that held the Windkraft.
“Ist das—”
“I’m Chien, you idiots,” Duvalier said tightly.
“Where to?” the one who spoke English asked.
“To Kokkola harbor—where else?” she said.
They looked at each other uncertainly. “Where is Herr Von Krebs?”
“There is a problem with the Finns. He is smoothing things out. Hurry, I haven’t all night!”
They raised anchor and used the pilot motor to move away from the island. Once into a better breeze, they worked the sheets and caught a favorable wind for the harbor. The sleek white vessel kicked up a wake.
Speaking of the wake…
The black thing she’d seen returned, this time multiplied a hundred times over, rising and falling in the bay waters.
“Christ on his cross,” Duvalier said.
The crewmen expressed alarm in German, variants of “what the hell,” it seemed to her.
“Faster!” she cried. “Surprise is essential!”
One of them stood still, looking from her to the pursuers as though trying to figure out the connection.
The lights of the harbor side were distinct now. She could make out details on the dock and wharf.
The black backs of the Big Mouths were gaining. Did this thing have a siren? Fireworks? Anything?
“Have you a flare gun?” She mimicked the firing and sputtering of a flare.
One of the men nodded and pointed to a small box strapped just below the wheel. She took it from its bracket and opened it. It was similar to the ones she’d seen in Southern Command’s arsenal, perhaps a little larger. She aimed it over the pursuers and fired.
Dazzling white light shone in the harbor. She saw, briefly, the details of the Big Mouths, eyes and teeth breaking the water briefly as they pursued.
The sailors moved, trying to shorten sail.
“Don’t,” she said, pointing the empty flare pistol.
Now they could hear shouts over the water.
The crew had had enough. They moved toward her. She drew her sword and struck first, cutting down and across, opening up the first from shoulder to groin. The second saw what had happened to his mate and he turned to run, perhaps for a weapon, perhaps to hide belowdecks. She leaped after, slashing at his legs, and opened the tendons behind his knee. Wanting no delay, she slashed again across the buttocks.
She left him flopping there in a growing pool of his blood.
They were almost at the wharf when she made it back to the wheel.
At the last second she threw the Windkraft hard over. The sails flapped and sagged, fighting to do their duty. The stern came up hard against the wharf, just missing a fender and crushing and splintering woodwork.
She left the wounded crewman to the mercies of the Big Mouths and cat-jumped to the dock. Soldiers, police, and a few Finnish men in civilian clothes were gaping out at the bay. Dozens, if not hundreds of the Big Mouths were rising out of the water and climbing onto the wharf and docks.
“Varo! Varo! Varo!” she shouted, as loudly as her small frame could manage, jumping and pointing out into the bay.