by Brian Lumley
“Yes,” The Chemist had answered. “Yes, of course there is—but not until you’ve finished your task in Edinburgh. Now then, see what I have here.” And he’d moved out of view, returning in a moment to hold up three phials of variously coloured liquids.
And again Mike had nodded. “I see: three supposed cures for three alleged diseases. Three colours, too: red, black and pale yellow. But are the cures genuine, or just another lie?”
“Oh, they’re genuine!” The Chemist had answered. “The Francezcis may enjoy their little jokes, but I am The Chemist, and I pride myself in my work. These deadly strains I’ve developed, they are the real thing, yes, and likewise their cures.”
“So what’s to stop me from taking them?” Mike had inquired. “I mean, as soon as you turn me loose.”
The Chemist had grinned like a madman. “Three small phials: red, black, and yellow, yes…but only two of them are cures, Mike, while the third is an accelerant! Drink the two cures and your diseases will be cancelled, wiped out within the hour. But if you should drink the accelerant—then you’ll rot! And even more rapidly! So then, dare you choose? I think not.”
At which, shaking his head in confusion, frustration, Mike had scowled and commenced to ask, “But then, how will I—?”
“How will you know which ones to consume?” The Chemist had cut him off. “Mike, the Francezcis have agents out and about in the world, including Scotland. You’ll be watched, observed most closely. You may not even see your observer, for I know him and he’s a veritable shadow among shadows! But he will see you, and he will also be watching your target. He’ll know when your task has been completed, and then he will supply you with the solution to your problem: which two of my phials you may drink from, and which one to avoid, er, like the plague? Oh, hah, hah!”
“How will the watcher know these things?” Mike had asked.
“Because by then he will have contacted me,” The other had replied, “and I shall have told him. That is, if I am alive and well. But if for any reason I am unwell or even unhappy—if I should feel indisposed, disinclined—well, you’re not stupid, Mike. I’m sure you follow my meaning…?” And:
“Oh, I do,” Mike had answered. “So now you can loosen these chains and set me free.”
“Ah, no, I think not,” The Chemist had replied. “You have a certain look about you, Mike; I’m quite sure you’re the impulsive sort and I wouldn’t want to tempt you. So I’ll just lie you down again under your blanket and give you a shot, and when you wake up at dusk the chains will be gone—as will I. But don’t worry, for I’ll leave these phials close by. My only advice: Do look after them, won’t you?”
With which he had returned the table to its horizontal position, given Mike a shot and left him prone beneath his blanket again. And as the basement’s clinical blue light faded Mike had turned his head a little and watched The Chemist climb the concrete steps, seeing no sign of any infirmity about the man, and no walking-stick aiding his quick and agile movements…
The Chemist had been as good as his word and better—or maybe worse. Mike had awakened as dusk was settling; he had found the dimmer knob, brightened the lighting in the basement, and collected the three phials from a workbench, where he found them in a small padded box like a cigarette case. Along with the phials there had also been this note:
Mike—
Behind the curtain in the corner you’ll find a caged animal. Just three days ago I used it to test the efficacy of my new synthetic bacilli—you’ll know the ones I mean. Of course, as a man you are much bulkier than the poor dog by perhaps six or seven times; also, your vampire blood will try to fight off the infections…and fail. But this is an example of what you can expect should you fail. I calculate you have somewhere in the region of eleven, possibly twelve days, before you need to take the antidote, by which time you should certainly have begun to resemble the canine in its cage…
In the specified corner of the spacious subterranean room, while the smell had been offensive Mike had nevertheless opened the curtains and revealed The Chemist’s “experiment.” He’d felt little or no pity as he at once noted that the dog in the small cage was close to death and quite beyond help; indeed his emotions had been entirely self-centred as he also noted the bursting pustules all over the animal’s scrawny body, the madness of hydrophobia, rabies, in its glaring eyes and foaming jowls, and the way its extremities appeared to be disintegrating. Leprosy, surely? Having found his gun with The Chemist’s phials and note, Mike might easily have put the creature out of its misery there and then; but no, that would have been the waste of a bullet.
Then, as he had left that poisonous dwelling in the misted shade of the mountains, the thought had occurred to him to burn it down, raze it to the ground; at least until he recalled what The Chemist had warned of the dangers of his being made “unwell or unhappy, disinclined or indisposed”—and then he’d at once reconsidered all such incendiary notions.
Following which, biting the inside of his cheek until blood spurted, he’d driven furiously from the house up into the mountains, and begun retracing his route to the airport in Sofia…
Mike had been fortunate to board a plane to Munich that night. The flight had taken off late; it had lasted for two hours; he had spent the rest of the night and following day in a transit hotel room not far from the German airport. Later, his evening flight to Edinburgh had seen him into the city around midnight, which had suited Mike perfectly. Plenty of time to get himself a room in this seedy so-called hotel, not too distant from his target’s wine bar, and then to step out in the night in search of food. Blood, of course.
Prostitutes had been Mike’s main prey ever since the Francezcis turned him, and like every big city Edinburgh had always had its fair share of ladies of the night. Now, with Mike Milazzo, the city was also possessed of a creature of the night, if not the first of his kind. For indeed the Francezcis had their agent or watcher there, and there was also B.J. Mirlu and her pack. But while Mike wasn’t the first, he was nevertheless an especially brutal member of his species.
Within an hour of leaving his room he had found a girl in a maze of steep alleys not far from the great Castle-on-the-Rock. She had taken him back to her place—a pair of grubby rooms in a once-proud building, now a block of flatlets—where they had sex. Following which she’d demanded payment, which Mike had delivered in the form of a bite; indeed far more than a bite, for yet again his hunger and appetite had driven him to the edge.
It was only at the last possible moment, when she was about to fall unconscious or worse, that Mike had recognized her symptoms and remembered the Francezci brothers’ precept with regard to making more of their kind. And so, remaining by her side, he had let her sleep, watching over her until he was satisfied she would survive his feeding. Then, in searching her squalid flat, he had come across evidence of the girl’s drug addiction, which as an ex-dealer he had at once recognized. He had then reasoned that this was why she’d seemed so weak, which meant that if she died later it wouldn’t be down to him entirely. He knew that if he’d drained her to the dregs she would be dead already! And so he had seen no need to cover his tracks: a serious error, as he would discover soon enough. For Mike wasn’t “merely” a vampire, he was also a plague-bearer!
The incident had taught him a lesson, however: that he must be more careful in how he conducted himself. If the Francezcis’ agent knew he was here and was already watching him, he did not want any sort of adverse report finding its way back to Sicily! For he desired that his life, or his undeath—his very existence—should continue long after this unfortunate episode was over and done with.
And so for eight of the last nine nights he had managed to control his hunger—barely—and aware that time was narrowing down had concentrated on studying the comings and goings of the Mirlu woman and the girls who worked at her wine bar. There had been many occasions when he’d followed one or another of the latter from the bar to their places of domicile and back again, learning th
e routes which they habitually used, and in the main he had succeeded in avoiding attracting their attention. On one such occasion, however, as Mike had followed the black girl, he had come a little too close and it was possible she had noticed him: the way she’d spun on her heel at the entrance to the wine bar, spun in that abrupt, startled manner, and looked back. But Mike had ducked quickly out of sight and it seemed that nothing had come of it…
Also, there had been that incident four nights ago, when he had thought to put an early end to the game. With the phials in their container in an inner pocket—a pocket which in his paranoia he kept patting to ensure they were still there—and with the first small purple lump swelling in his left armpit, he had felt disinclined to bide his time. Why should he, when it would take just one bite, a mere nip, to pass his poisons on to whichever victim he chose to infect?
A single nip, yes! Then, letting his saliva do the work for him, he would “take fright,” run away, and in all innocence his victim—believing him to be a sexual deviant or common mugger—would eventually infect the rest of the pack. Even B.J. Mirlu herself…
Bonnie Jean. Ah! It would have been something to single her out for the pathogenetic transfer! But no, B.J. was seldom seen outside her wine bar; and anyway it probably wasn’t such a good idea to even consider an attack on the leader of the pack: somebody the Francezci twins had described as “a bitch on the brink of ascendancy.”
And so Mike had decided on one of the girls: the young one. She would be the vessel for the dispersal of his poisons. First hydrophobia: rabies, making her sick and feverish, inducing her to do some biting of her own. Then the bubonic plague, or Black Death: one of the worst scourges in mankind’s long history. And last but not least leprosy: the so-called “bane of vampires”—or perhaps on this occasion, and more fittingly, “wolf’s bane?” Or even “werewolf’s bane?”
Mike found that last a wryly amusing notion, if not one he could laugh at himself. For all three of these monstrous synthetic afflictions—the creations of a madman, and all the worse for that—were even now making themselves manifest in him. And rapidly!
Even now, yes. And still looking out on the darkening city, he uttered a frustrated, self-pitying, introspective grunt. The purple lumps in his armpits and groin were opening and starting to weep; when he flushed the toilet he could no longer bear the sound, the sight, or even the thought of running water; and more ominous yet, there was little or no feeling in the two smallest fingers of his left hand, which were now grey and stick-like…
And it was that, mainly: the living (or dying?) undeniable evidence that indeed The Chemist’s diseases were already burgeoning within him, which had prompted Mike’s initial attempt at the contamination of Bonnie Jean Mirlu and her pack by means of a strictly limited attack on the youngest of her girls. And but for the girl’s fighting spirit, Mike’s rotten luck, and a trick of fate he would have had her. He had in fact had her, had been about to sink his teeth in her neck when that police patrol car had appeared out of nowhere!
And as he had fled the scene—oh, how Mike had cursed! For he’d had to accept that when B.J. heard of this she must surely realize that something strange and sinister seemed to be happening here…
Worse, and more recently, there had been a further complication when Mike’s monstrous hunger, or more properly his thirst had raged out of control to such a degree that he’d been unable to resist the call of blood. And yet again, probably because The Chemist’s rabies strain was running rampant through his system, animal savagery had pushed him over the edge and his victim had died. But at least this time he’d followed the Francezci brothers’ precepts in attempting to cover his tracks, except that in his furious passion the method he had used had far exceeded any normal requirement.
And once more cursing his luck, he had stood off in a small group of late-night people on the corner of a street in the red light district, and watched the flames bursting from the window of the squalid room where he’d first drained, then beheaded and set fire to his second dead, never-to-be-undead, prostitute victim. For then—within only a minute or two of the blaze taking hold—some passerby had alerted the night watch at the nearby fire brigade, and a pair of great fire engines had come howling on the scene to fight the fire. The place had been gutted, sure enough, but not before the firemen had dragged the girl’s steaming body and severed head free of the inferno…
That had been last night, and this morning’s newspapers had carried headline banners of the grisly details, doubtless offering them up as breakfast fodder to B.J. Mirlu and her wine-bar crew. Of course, it was always possible that despite the manner of Mike’s attempted disposal of the woman’s remains, still B.J. would consider it nothing more than a vicious murder along with the rest of the paper’s readers. He could only hope so, for all that he knew any such hope was probably in vain.
For according to the evening broadsheet he’d had delivered to his room, his earlier victim—in mob parlance “that junkie whore”—had after all died some two nights after his attack! And worse: a post mortem was now ongoing, “in order to resolve certain anomalies.”
What if anything might such a post mortem reveal, Mike wondered? That something other than drugs had assisted the girl on her way out of this existence? Not at all unlikely.
On the other hand, assuming these events had indeed come to Bonnie Jean’s attention and Mike wasn’t worrying unnecessarily, she might believe both cases the work of a serial killer—even the same maniac who had followed her girls! Yes, she might just think so; but in view of such suspect circumstances that seemed unlikely. For it must be remembered that the Francezci brothers considered B.J. Mirlu “a bitch on the brink of ascendancy,” and as such she’d be nobody’s fool…
But quite apart from B.J. herself there was someone else—or there should have been someone else—who might have turned out to be an additional problem or cause for concern. A shadowy figure whom the Francezcis had warned of in the vaguest possible terms, who yet remained in the back of Mike’s mind unknown and unresearched purely because of his absence for the last six or seven days. B.J.’s male companion, yes: if not her lover, or paid minder or hanger-on, then a moon-child thrall and possibly one with limited talents, but in any case a mystery man of whom the twins had known little or nothing other than his existence.
Mike had seen him once only, on the evening of his second day here in the city: a pale unremarkable-seeming specimen who ordinarily he would pass in the street without a second glance. And yet Bonnie Jean Mirlu had stood with him in the entrance to her wine bar, embracing and kissing him before waving him what had appeared to be a lingering goodbye.
Mike had followed some fifty yards behind when the man had walked off down the pavement, entered a side-street and passed from view. But twenty seconds later, on turning the same corner…there had been no sign of the mystery man among the handful of people out walking in the cool evening air; and not far from the corner only one small, late-opening store where he might be browsing. But he wasn’t, for even then the storekeeper had been closing up and locking the doors.
Since when nothing more had been seen of him. It was as if he had chosen that evening to disappear, before his place in the scheme of things could be ascertained; which might in the long run be as well. For Mike had arrived at that so-called eleventh hour juncture where he could do without any further problems.
These in the main were his frustrated thoughts, memories that flickered in kaleidoscopic procession through his twisted mind, as he turned from the fly-specked window of his room and prepared to venture out into the gloom of the Edinburgh night. And now more than ever before he could feel the weight of time and the immanence of his situation, and knew an enormous sense of urgency! For it must be tonight or at the very latest tomorrow night that he completed the Francezci brothers’ task.
But as he stepped out into the darkness he could never have anticipated that in addition to all his self-inflicted problems—and with little more than twenty-
four hours to go before The Chemist’s poisons were set to complete their task on him—tonight would present yet more complications.
For the Necroscope Harry Keogh was also out and about. And not only Harry but someone else: an extremely patient Other who for now and for countless decades past had simply stood off and observed all, but in particular the moon-child, B.J. Mirlu, her pack, and their wine-bar lair.
A sleeper and trusted agent of the Francezcis.
Their watcher…
VIII
That same night, before leaving the wine bar and while talking to young Kate, Harry had glanced through the recently delivered evening paper and had come across an item buried in a back-page column which he’d found both interesting and troubling; either way it was something he would have to look into, and soon.
As for Harry’s conversation with Kate: He had enquired not only about the routes the girls took when going to and on leaving the bar, but also their shifts or work rosters. For depending on the number of thirsty customers, B.J.’s with its private members’ licence frequently stayed open until the small hours. And the Necroscope’s interest had picked up, albeit guardedly, on noting that she, young Kate herself, would be finishing in just an hour’s time when Zahanine took over for the late shift.
Harry knew the bar and its precise location well enough; he had long since acquainted himself with many “safe” Möbius coordinates: secure places which he could use covertly to enter into or exit from the general area. But while the bar itself was in a well-frequented road and locale, the districts bordering upon it included several veritable warrens of steep, narrow, cobbled streets and alleyways. Depending on the locations of their various lodgings, most of B.J.’s girls weren’t required to navigate the lonelier alleys and would normally keep well away, but for two of them the danger was more or less unavoidable.