“Yes. I have been waiting a lifetime for this moment. I will not be denied its simple pleasures.”
“Who are you?” Von Straker said staring suspiciously at his interrogator. There was something familiar about those deep brown eyes. A memory from long ago began to surface but quickly receded.
“It is not important who I am, Herr von Straker. Now tell me.”
“All right,” von Straker said in a whisper. “What exactly do you want?”
“You know what I want. I want to know the real truth. I want to know why you saved the child.”
“I had to. He would not let me . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Kill him?” the interrogator finished for him.
“Yes. Kill him. He would not let me do it.”
The interrogator angrily shook his blistered, hairless head. “All of the unnatural things that had happened up to that point should have been warning enough; the phantom fighters and the comets of fire and the terrible sandstorm that buried everything. None of it was natural.”
“But how do you know . . .?”
“Never mind that.” The interrogator held the syringe just out of reach. “Do you want this?”
“Yes,” von Straker hissed.
“Then continue with the story.”
Von Straker heaved a deep and pain-filled sigh. “The storm was too much . . . my men were all dead. After killing the child’s father I had to . . . find shelter, like I said. I discovered a building . . . and I slept . . . and I dreamed . . . I’m not sure now what the dream was about, but it was something terrible, something prophetic . . . oh, Jesus, please . . . can’t take this pain anymore!” Von Straker’s emaciated body convulsed. “Please, I beg of you, send me to hell now!”
“In time, Herr von Straker. The devil has been patient. He can wait a little longer.”
Von Straker’s body shook with convulsions.
“But I will not let you die until you tell me the truth. Do you understand?”
Von Straker looked down at his trembling hands. They were red and blistered, covered in weeping sores. “How many?” he said, his voice filled with sorrow.
His interrogator’s ruined face twisted into an angry sneer. “How many, you ask? How many lives were lost? How many were vaporized by the firestorms or sickened by the radiation? Is that what you want to know? How many cities were incinerated? I’ll tell you how many. All of them! Now tell me why you did not kill the child when you had the chance.”
Von Straker lowered his head. Sweat dripped from his blistered cheeks and ruined nose onto the earthen floor. Another spasm of pain ripped through his frail body and he sagged back against the boards. “I should have,” he gasped. “I know I should have. But when I held him in my arms I felt . . . something . . . and I could not bring myself to do it. He had the amulet by then and it was far too late, I tell you. I did not have the strength to resist. I did not have the strength to do it.”
“So you took him and the two of you vanished?”
“My orders were to bring him home to Germany, to my Führer, but I saw something in his eyes and felt something in his touch . . . and I knew . . . I knew what would happen if I followed my Führer’s orders. I knew that they would use him . . . and I could not allow that to happen.”
“And you did not think that saving his life would result in the same end?”
Von Straker collapsed in sobs. “I thought that by keeping him out of the Führer’s hands, by raising him with kindness and compassion none of it would happen. I thought I was doing the right thing. But I was betrayed. I never thought any of this would happen.”
“But eventually you suspected, didn’t you? And you did nothing about it.”
“By then it was too late. He was too powerful and I was too old and too weak to stop him.” Von Straker halted, looking at his interrogator with circumspect eyes. “Wait,” he said, straining to identify the face of the man beneath the terrible radiation burns. “I do know you. I killed you.”
“You thought you killed me. You were wrong.”
The light of a million suns suddenly lit up the shelter in which the ancient and emaciated form of Gerhard von Straker sat dying of radiation sickness, followed by the locomotive roar of some colossal beast that rumbled across the earth like a quake.
“Like an animal you left me for dead, Herr von Straker,” the interrogator said. “But I survived and I have hunted you relentlessly. You disappeared into America’s heartland and I never suspected until—”
In that instant a scorching wind carried everything away and the dream fragmented.
Chapter 26
The violent storm of wind, sand and fire that Joseph Kumara encountered when he exited the underground chamber was one of epic proportions, perhaps worse than the wrath of all the gods combined. He wanted to go back inside the funeral temple; he doubted his chances of survival out in the storm, but behind him the temple was crumbling, belching its ancient dust high up into the fury of the storm where it mixed with the driving sand and was carried away into the desert.
Perhaps the seeds of that dust would drift up into the atmosphere and be carried across the earth in great storms, only to rain down on an unsuspecting populace, delivering pestilence and mayhem to all that it touched. These thoughts were Joseph Kumara’s dreams born out of fear and madness. Round and round they went, in a death spiral with darkness at its center, Joseph fleeing into that darkness like a spirit on the scorching wind.
All consciousness finally deserted him, and for this, Joseph was grateful. But alas, living things churned like a nest of poisonous serpents inside his soul for the remainder of that long and nightmarish eternity.
As twisting coils of windswept sand swirled around his body, he dreamed that he was wandering through the deserted and gloomy streets of a ruined city with skeletal buildings that reached toward the heavens, their spires lost to sight far above him in a roiling bank of angry clouds from which solid shafts of bitter acid rain fell. At times he caught glimpses of things in the gloom to his left or right: once he made out a pair of stone legs rising to meet the body of a great pharaoh not unlike that of a human Sphinx. The Sphinx turned his stone face down and peered directly at Joseph with two blazing red eyes; another time he spied what appeared to be a giant crystal scarab rotating far above him, its insides ablaze with angry light before it exploded in a colossal detonation.
Finally Joseph stopped wandering. Far behind him he could hear what sounded like a great conflagration, entire cities and forests burning, and he knew in that moment that he was being given a glimpse of an apocalyptic future, and of the man destined to be its architect. Though he tried to put the peering face with the blazing red eyes from his mind he could not do it, so he willed himself back down into a sleep as deep and dark as death.
Chapter 27
Dawn: Joseph awoke and the world was silent. He lay curled like a sleeping child, the upper part of his robes wrapped snuggly around his head.
He was haunted with the hope that everything had been imagined: the storm, the tomb, Winston, the prophetic dream. But in his heart he knew that it had not been.
Joseph removed the wrappings from around his head and opened his eyes. The great endless sky spread out beyond the dim shadows of the sandy bank that rose above him, showing clear skies all the way to Karnak. The rising sun sat fat and red on the lip of the escarpment. Sunlight filled the tiny space in which he lay. Somehow he had been spared the storm’s wrath. Breathing deeply he began struggling free of his sandy prison, his injured hand still clutching the golden Amulet.
He rose, moving clumsily, almost falling, until he regained his equilibrium. He looked back into the small hollow in which he had lain, choking and coughing blackness from his lungs. There was no evidence that the great temple of the dead had ever existed. He was very frightened. He knew that it was a sign. He had warned Winston, and now Winston was gone.
Joseph made his way down the treacherous slope toward camp. Everything had been destroyed in
the night; vehicles, fuel tanks, tents, animals and men alike had all been consumed in some immense conflagration. Though there was still evidence of the camp’s existence and of the great fire that had consumed it, the desert had already begun reclaiming it. In a week, two at the most, all would be gone and forgotten. But now, the smoke issuing from the fire’s steady defeat was still thick in the air, choking the entire area like a fog.
He searched frantically for some sign of life but found neither man nor beast. And then, as if from a great distance, he heard the cry of a child. Searching the dunes he discovered a vehicle buried to its roof in sand. The cry of the child came from within, muffled and hysterical. He tied the golden chain around his neck and dug at the sand until his already sore hands were raw and dripping blood. Finally a door was uncovered and he was able to get at the child. He picked the newborn up and looked into its surprisingly vital eyes, eyes that seemed older and somehow more aware than a newborn’s should be. The child, bawling hysterically, reached out and tried to grasp hold of the amulet. The gesture made Joseph shudder in revulsion even as he remembered Winston’s dying words: “See that the child gets this. He is special. The amulet was meant for him.”
Joseph placed the child carefully back on the seat, not liking the feel of its squirming mass in his hands. He removed the amulet from around his own neck and looped its chain over the child’s head. Its bawling ceased immediately and Joseph knew in that moment that Winston had been right. This was where the amulet belonged.
On the seat beside the child lay a bag of stores and a note scrawled in English.
Joseph picked the note up and read.
I have betrayed my master. I was told to take the child to the river, but I could not obey. A great spirit has risen and I believe that it is somehow inside the child. Everyone else is dead. He who finds this child beware, for he has great power; power not yet reasoned. If he is good the world will rejoice. If he is evil the world will know his wrath. If the child dies in this desert then it is meant to be, for the world will never know its influence, and maybe this is a good thing. It is not for me to be the life taker. I was spared for some purpose of which is yet unknown. I will leave the child to the devices of God and nature; I must. I can no longer bring myself to touch the wretched thing. The cool waters of the Nile beckon. My hope is that I can find solace on its banks. I shall never return to this evil place, for it is a place not for man, but for gods and demons.
Anwar
An odd and disturbing expression shimmered across the child’s face, and Joseph’s attention was unwittingly drawn to it. For a long moment he stared, trying to decipher what he was seeing. Then he remembered his fevered dreams of the night past and of the giant stone face with the blazing red eyes. In that moment Joseph recognized the face inside the child. Shuddering with revulsion he looked away.
The thought crossed his mind that he could place his hands around the child’s neck and squeeze. No one would ever know or care, perhaps the future would be better served for his deed. But just as quickly as the inspiration was upon him, making him feel furtive and ashamed, it left, and Joseph was deeply aware that the child was reading him, knowing his thoughts and influencing his actions.
With something close to revulsion he removed the child from the automobile, and using the sling that his old friend Anwar had fashioned, Joseph Kumara strapped the child to his side and began a slow but steady slog through the drifting dunes toward the Nile River.
Chapter 28
Colonel Gerhard von Straker came awake with a start, his body beneath the military uniform bathed in cold sweat. He was breathing in labored rasps, shaken to the very foundations of his being. For a long time he could only lay cowering in terror at the vivid memory of the terrible and prophetic dream. It was as if he had actually been there in that far future place where some terrible force yet unreasoned had wreaked havoc upon civilization. Impossible, he knew. Surely it had been a dream. As far as he knew, no man was able to see the future. And no weapon was able to wreak the sort of havoc he had witnessed. Still, something inside him, something real, something primal, was telling him that he had been witness to a dreadful truth; a future apocalyptic event that he had no understanding of, yet his actions would help to shape. He had never been more certain of anything in his life.
And if he was right, if he had indeed seen the future, then there might still be time to set it right. Surely the future wasn’t set in stone. He must find the child before it was too late, before the prophecy (and that is surely what it felt like now) came true. He would do the opposite of what he’d been sent here to do. Instead of finding the child and taking it back to Berlin, as his orders stated, he would betray his Führer. He would find the child and he would make sure that its power was never unleashed upon the world.
He heaved himself up off his bed of packing blankets and tested the door. It would not budge. He pushed on it with all of his strength but still it did not capitulate. He searched around the storage shed looking for a tool heavy enough to break the lock and hinges. He found a hammer and went to work with it, staving the door again and again until it began to splinter. Finally it shattered from its hinges and was pushed inward by an avalanche of desert sand which buried von Straker to his knees. Two exhausting hours later he crawled from his sandy prison.
Outside he lay on the sand breathing in vast spasms. In the clear sky overhead vultures circled. “Not now, my carrion eating friends,” he said, finally staggering to his feet. “My work here is not done.”
Looking around him he was amazed at the extent of carnage that had befallen this place. Everything was destroyed—burned up and half buried in sand. Exhausted from his efforts and shaken to the very foundations of his being, Colonel Gerhard von Straker set off across the dunes toward the river, following the fresh tracks of another individual.
Chapter 29
Sometime toward late afternoon Joseph Kumara staggered to a halt atop a steep bank overlooking the blue waters of the Nile. As far as the eye could see both shores were ribboned with green vegetation. Out beyond the river stretched thousands of miles of desert, but here on its banks an oasis of life thrived.
He’d been checking on the child every half hour or so and each time found him to be awake and vital. Though the child was sheltered from the direct sun inside the linen sling, like some supernatural creature, he seemed to be immune to the terrible heat. To Joseph, it was almost as if he relished it.
Before leaving the encampment Joseph had mixed up a bottle of dried milk and fresh water and at intervals he had tried to feed the child, to no avail. He would not eat, and he seemed content, his tiny hands fiddling with the heavy golden amulet.
Joseph carefully made his way down the steep bank to the flat flood plain at river’s edge. Here date palms, papyrus, lilies and wild grapes grew in abundance.
Joseph saw no other human activity, but knew that shipping was common and that eventually a river craft would chance by. He found a place where the flood waters had washed away the roots of a gigantic cypress tree and carved out a hollow in the river’s bank. Here, beneath the overhanging roots he set about making camp, fashioning beds of papyrus leaves for himself and the child. He tried feeding the child again, making a watery paste of the dried milk and fashioning a crude nipple from a papyrus leaf. This time the child ate, taking the food greedily until it was satiated.
Experimentally he attempted to remove the amulet from around the child’s neck, knowing as he did so that there would be consequences. And he was right, the child pitched a grand fit, screaming and thrashing about. Joseph tried to ignore him, keeping the amulet from him for as long as possible. But it was no use, the child would not settle down. After a time, fearing for the child’s health and safety, he replaced the golden thong around its tiny neck. The child stopped its caterwauling almost immediately, and within moments fell fast asleep.
Joseph, weary, laid his head on the bed he had fashioned from papyrus leaves, and with the now sleeping child breathing
softly beside him, he fell into a deep sleep. And again he dreamed of the apocalypse and of the man who would be its architect.
He awoke to a sound he could not readily identify. He sat up in confusion not knowing where he was or how he’d gotten here. It was very dark. Joseph had been in dark places many times before with Winston, but no place had ever felt this dark or lonely, this far removed from reality.
His heart raced as he suddenly remembered the child. Feeling beside him he gently touched the sleeping infant. Its breathing was soft and rhythmic. Joseph quietly left his bed and discovered that it was not quite so dark once he exited the shelter. There was no moon, but the stars were in such abundance that their brightness was enough to cast the landscape in a soft glow. He saw the silvery surface of the river and heard its waters lapping gently at the shore. In the lowlands frogs and insects chirped, and in the distance came the mournful howling of a jackal. But these normal sounds were not what had disturbed his sleep. He was nearly certain of it. He stood very still, his ears straining to discern other sounds beneath the natural sounds of the night.
And then, from inside the shelter came the soft mewling of the child. Joseph moved toward the shelter and came to a dead stop as another figure emerged into the starlight. Joseph’s eyes had adjusted to the dimness enough so that he could see that the figure wore the uniform of a German Army officer, and in his arms he held Alex Whitehead’s newborn son. Joseph moved toward the soldier, intending to take the child from him. When he saw the gun pointed in his direction he abruptly halted.
“I came for the child,” the soldier offered.
“Yes, I can see that,” Joseph said. “But why? How do you even know of him?”
Servants of Darkness (Thirteen Creepy Tales) Page 20