Greely's Cove

by Gideon, John

  Robbie buzzed the window down and lit a cheroot. “Are you sure Carl will come back here?” he asked, tucking his lighter away.

  “Not positively, but I strongly expect that he will. He’s a shattered man, and he’ll want the comfort and familiarity of the place he calls home. At the moment this is the only home he’s got, so he’ll come here to collect himself.”

  “And we’ll be waiting for him. I can’t say I envy him, considering what he’s going to hear.”

  “We must be gentle with him,” said the old witch, checking her lipstick in the rearview mirror, “but we must hold nothing back from him. If he is to be our ally, he must know the whole truth.”

  “Even about Lorna?”

  “Especially about Lorna.”

  “What if he doesn’t believe us? You’ve got to admit that this whole thing sounds a little farfetched. To your average old boy in the street, it’d be nothing more than a Halloween story.”

  “The Giver of Dreams has, in fact, inspired many Halloween stories. Its victims have given rise to the legends of vampires and werewolves and zombies. Carl Trosper will believe, though; of that you can be certain. Don’t forget that he has visited the undercroft and seen things that defy reason. I’m certain that he encountered at least one victim of the Giver of Dreams while there. If this is the case, he will believe anything. You should know, having yourself encountered one.”

  Robbie watched as she straightened her blond wig, and he hoped that her aged body was up to the rigors that lay ahead. For that matter, he hoped that his own body was up to the rigors that lay ahead.

  They fell silent as a 1954 Buick convertible approached from Frontage Street. It slowed and swung into the driveway of 116, then halted. A lean man with reddish-blond hair and a short matching beard got out, stood beside the car, and eyed Hannie’s Jaguar, which was anything but unobtrusive in this modest neighborhood. He waved feebly. Hannie returned the wave, and the witch and the psychic got out to meet Carl Trosper.

  KRAZLOV, GADRIAN (ca. 1590-?), early 17th-century magician and physician around whom numerous dark legends emerged throughout eastern and western Europe...

  Lindsay Moreland read the first line of the entry and developed a sudden case of gooseflesh. She shifted her weight and braced the bulky volume against the bookshelf, popped out her foggy contacts, and groped through the pockets of her coat to find her horn-rims. The light in the Man-And-Magic Bookstore was not conducive to reading, and there were no tables at which to examine the goods—only high-walled canyons of dusty books about magic, witchcraft, vampires and werewolves, and virtually everything else worthy of the term weird. The one that she cradled in her arms was An Encyclopedic History of Western Occultism, by a scholar named Charles Frederick Stout.

  ... often with varied spellings of the name. Though virtually nothing is known of Krazlov’s actual origin, most occult historians agree that he was born in what is now Bulgaria sometime in the 1590s, and that he traveled throughout Europe during his adult life.

  Among the outrages ascribed to him was the murderous practice of antinopomancy (reading the future in the entrails of women and children), for which ecclesiastical and secular authorities often sought to put him to death. Krazlov always managed to escape capture and prosecution, however, often with the help of wealthy clients for whom he had effected cures or told the future.

  Lindsay closed her eyes a moment and breathed deeply of the stale air, hoping to cure the mild nausea she felt coming over her. The name Krazlov, she told herself, probably was not a variation of Craslowe, notwithstanding that the given names were identical but for the first letters.

  In 1657, the witch-hunting “Law-Giver of Saxony,” Benedict Carpzov, obtained an ecclesiastical decree from Lutheran authorities in Leipzig, branding Krazlov as the direct descendant of an ancient sorcerer named Hadrianus Craslovius (ca. 1100 a.d.), who according to legend had found the secret of resurrecting the dead. At the time of the decree, Krazlov was under suspicion in connection with the disappearance of more than a dozen Leipzig citizens, whom Carpzov insisted were victims of “lycanthropy and vampirism.” Once again Krazlov managed to escape.

  Lindsay bit her lower lip so hard it hurt, but she read on. The passage told of other cities and regions visited by the notorious Gadrian Krazlov during his lifetime, where people disappeared but sometimes returned as “vampires” and “werewolves”—Augsburg and Strasbourg and Cologne—where he was vilified and hunted but never caught, never burned at the stake, as so many thousands of others were.

  The Krazlov legend revived from time to time in later centuries, notably in England and France. The most recent and best-documented case occurred in Coggeshall, Essex, in 1840, when charges of murder and kidnapping were brought against an itinerant actor and mesmerist who called himself Hadrian Craslowe.

  A tremor of disbelief shook Lindsay, nearly causing her to drop the heavy book. There it was. The name. Not under C for Craslowe, but under K for Krazlov, which she had checked merely on the off chance that there might be variations in spelling.

  No rationalizing it now: There was some connection between the legendary Krazlov and the Dr. Hadrian Craslowe of Greely’s Cove, Washington.

  ... no direct evidence implicating Craslowe, he disappeared along with his small retinue of actors and stage helpers before he could be apprehended to face the charges.

  Lindsay left the bookstore and drove to her house on Capitol Hill, her mental gears grinding. She quickly shed her business suit and donned a bulky cowl-neck sweater of dark green and jeans that were faded nearly to white. From her study, she telephoned Carl Trosper in Greely’s Cove. He answered on the fifth ring, with a voice that sounded weak and distracted.

  “Carl, it’s Lindsay. I’ve got to talk to you, and I’d rather do it face-to-face. Are you going to be home this afternoon?”

  “Well—yes, I think so....”

  What’s wrong with him? Lindsay wondered. He sounded unsteady and fearful. She thought she heard another voice in the background, but it did not sound like Jeremy.

  “Sorry this has to be on such short notice,” she said, “but I’ve found out some things I think you should know. How about if I catch the next ferry? I can be there in”—she stole a glance at her watch—“about forty-five minutes.”

  “That’ll be fine. I—I have something to tell you, too.”

  “Okay, I’m leaving right now. Bye.”

  Later, she sat on the observation deck of the ferry, sipped coffee from the snack bar, and carefully composed the disclosure she planned to make to her former brother-in-law, replete with rebuttals to his inevitable charge that she had gone out of her skull.

  Hadrian Craslowe was a phony—a talented one, perhaps, but a phony nonetheless. His credentials were bogus, a circumstance that surely demanded that Carl find another therapist for Jeremy, one properly papered and vetted.

  But Craslowe has been the only doctor who’s been able to help, Carl would counter. Why tamper with success?

  This one would be difficult to handle, and Lindsay worried over how much more to tell about Craslowe. She wondered just what she herself believed about the man.

  If she were to believe Hannie Hazelford, he was an ancient sorcerer who had lived at least a thousand years, the servant of a monster that ate people. If Hannie was right, then Stout’s Encyclopedic History was wrong—the numerous stories about Krazlov were all about the same man, not about imitators or descendants. But this was lunacy, of course, despite the coincidence of the recent disappearances in Greely’s Cove.

  Lindsay had read about people who believed themselves to be vampires or werewolves and behaved accordingly—actually killed people and drank their blood or ate their flesh—the sickest of the sick, certainly. The present-day Hadrian Craslowe might have read the legends surrounding the original Gadrian Krazlov and made himself the namesake. He might even be insane enough to think that he was the original fiend. Therefore he could be dangerous.

  But then Carl might sugges
t that the good doctor really was the innocent descendant of someone named Hadrian Craslowe, maybe even of the same guy who was suspected of kidnapping and murdering people in nineteenth-century Essex. Why would that be so outrageous? You can’t hold against someone the fact that he had poor taste in ancestors.

  Which would bring her back to the fact that the good doctor had phonied up his sheepskins and misrepresented himself to the state health authorities, which in itself should be a sufficient outrage, certainly enough to justify changing therapists.

  Lindsay hoped intensely that Carl would see things her way.

  28

  “... And, as I was saying, it was at this time that the Sisterhood came very close to destroying Hadrian Craslowe and his Giver of Dreams,” continued Hannie Hazelford as Carl returned from the telephone. He sat down again on the sofa next to Robinson Sparhawk, the crippled Texan who professed to be a psychic.

  “The Sisterhood was much stronger then, and I was not so—so alone. In the south of England we had seven initiates, all of whom reinforced the magic of the others, protected one another, urged a Sister on when she became weary or frightened. We were very much a family back in those days. And in the English countryside were a simple, robust folk who remembered the old ways, many of whom were willing to help us.” She paused for a sigh of sadness. “Ah, but as it turned out, Hadrian was able to evacuate his master—hidden in a large trunk—to a ship in the port of Plymouth, and from there to the island of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean.”

  “Aboutas far away from England as it’s possible to get,” put in Robbie, who had heard the tale before, “and still be on the planet. Craslowe’d had enough of this old girl and her friends, so he meant to make himself scarce for a while.”

  Carl nodded, trying to keep his composure. The story simply got worse and worse, and he longed for the strength to disbelieve it.

  “So everything Mrs. Pauling told me was true,” he said, just to fill the gap in the conversation. He had never doubted the woman.

  “True indeed,” said Hannie, her turquoise contact lenses glittering in the afternoon sunshine that streamed through the living-room window. “In Sumatra, Hadrian procured an abandoned Hindu monastery in which to hide the Giver, and he set about in his typical manner to corrupt the local population—one of whom was a young American trader named Tristan Whiteleather, who had just taken a Batak tribeswoman for a wife. That was in 1873, and they were, of course, Ianthe Pauling’s great grandparents. They could not have known the price that they and all their line would pay for the wealth and success Hadrian’s magic brought them. This is what happens, you see: A man goes in league with Hadrian and the Giver, only to discover that he has cursed his sons and daughters, even his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, with the burden of those obligations. No amount of wealth can be worth the price.”

  “So it was Whiteleather who brought the Giver of Dreams here to Greely’s Cove?” asked Carl.

  “Yes. You see, the Giver of Dreams undergoes a period of deep sleep once every three centuries or so, and the sleep lasts roughly a hundred years. We’re not sure why this happens. All we know is that shortly after the sleep ends, the Giver of Dreams attempts to procreate. As it happened, Hadrian’s Giver was about to lapse into its sleep sometime in the early 1890s, which suited Hadrian, because he detested Sumatra. Too hot, too barbaric, and the local Bataks were becoming increasingly hostile as they deduced that Hadrian had something to do with the rash of disappearances among their people. He was eager to return to Europe, where he meant to pursue his intellectual passion for medicine, of all things.

  “After the Giver went to sleep, Hadrian charged Captain Whiteleather with the task of providing a safe resting place for the master, which the captain had no choice but to do. The resting place was the undercroft of Whiteleather Place, which the captain designed for that very purpose. Of course, he had other obligations, the captain did, and he was most competent in seeing them through.

  “I doubt that he ever returned to Sumatra, for he took an American wife and lived with her here. Little did he know that one day Hadrian would track down his great-granddaughter from the line of his first wife, murder her husband, and cast a crippling spell on her brother, all to secure her servitude. Hadrian needed a new servant, because the Giver was about to awaken from his sleep.”

  “Yes, Ianthe told me about that,” said Carl. “She’d married an Englishman and gone to England with her husband. They’d sent for her brother—Lionel, I think she said his name was.”

  “Yes, all very tragic,” said Hannie. “Ianthe may pay dearly for having helped you this afternoon.”

  “But she helped me, too,” said Robbie, stubbing out his cigar in an ashtray, “last Saturday night. If she hadn’t stepped in when she did, old Monty Pirtz would’ve dragged me down to the undercroft. Why do you think Craslowe let her get away with it?”

  “Possibly because he was and still is distracted by the matter at hand,” said Hannie, in a tone that suggested some reluctance to go on.

  “You mean Jeremy, don’t you?” said Carl, massaging a sweaty fist. “Jeremy and the offspring?”

  “Yes,” said Hannie. She avoided Carl’s eyes and glanced down at the heavy silver witch’s ring that adorned one of her fingers. “This isn’t easy to say, Carl,” she went on finally. “You must promise to be strong, to hear me out and not go dashing off...”

  Carl looked first at her and then at Robbie, silently asking what could be worse than had already happened, what he had already heard. What greater horror could there be than losing a son to the Giver of Dreams?

  “Do you remember when you and I first met, the day that followed Lorna’s death? I accosted you and Stuart Bromton in the receiving room of the Old Schooner Motel.” Of course he remembered, and his eyes told her so. “I made quite a to-do over the matter of an autopsy for Lorna. I had a reason for doing so, Carl.” Another pause, more painful this time. “An autopsy, you understand, displaces the organs of a corpse in a way that mere embalming does not. During an autopsy—”

  “I know what happens during autopsies,” interrupted Carl, showing impatience. “A doctor pulls the organs out of the body, weighs them, cuts them up and examines them or whatever, then sews them back in. What does all this have to do with Lorna? She was cremated, just like I told you she would be.”

  “I’m afraid not, Carl,” said Hannie, her voice heavy with regret. “I’ve discovered that her body was stolen, that she was forced to—”

  Carl’s shoulders jerked and heaved as the horror hit him.

  “—give birth to—”

  He choked and gagged with rage, covering his face with his hands in a pitiful attempt to shut out the egregious truth, to wash it away with his lava-hot tears. But the truth became larger and more sickening with every word from Hannie’s mouth. Had it not been for Robbie’s strong arm around his shoulders, he could not have faced it.

  Lindsay gasped when Carl answered the door. His face was slack with exhaustion and his eyes ringed with red. His voice, his movements, everything about him suggested a man who had lost something precious or would soon. Seeing him like this was a shock, but she held her tongue and followed him into the house.

  Having noticed Hannie Hazelford’s Jaguar outside, she was not surprised to find the old woman seated in the living room, outlandishly attired as usual, her face as aged and leathery as ever. Lindsay greeted Hannie with as much civility as she could muster. The other man in the room, however, was a surprise: He was fiftyish, square-jawed and tan, dressed like a cowboy but wearing a curious little pouch on a thong around his neck. Carl introduced him as Robinson Sparhawk, a “forensic psychic” from El Paso, Texas.

  Robbie struggled gallantly to his feet, sans crutches, and managed to stand long enough to shake Lindsay’s hand.

  “Right pleased, ma’am,” he said with Texan charm. “I’ve met some pretty women in my time, but I can’t say any of ’em had anything on you.” The remark would have rankled her had it come fr
om a man who lacked Robinson Sparhawk’s combination of age and brown eyes brimming with sincerity. From him it seemed okay. Lindsay liked him immediately, “psychic” or not.

  “Carl, where’s Jeremy?” she asked, after the Texan had taken his seat again.

  “He’s—he’s not here. He’s with Dr. Craslowe.” Something about Carl’s answer seemed incomplete.

  “Oh, that’s right. Today’s therapy day, isn’t it? Just as well, because what I have to tell you concerns him, and I wouldn’t want him to overhear. For that matter”—she threw a quick, narrow-eyed glance at Hannie, who had not moved from her armchair—“it might be best if we talked in private.”

  “I don’t have anything to hide from Hannie and Robbie,” replied Carl.

  “Really, Carl, I don’t think—”

  “Like I said, I don’t have anything to hide from them. Now, what is it you want to tell me?”

  Lindsay felt a mild thrill of annoyance. “Very well, it’s about Hadrian Craslowe. I’ve done some checking on him, and I’ve found out that he’s not who he says he is. The credentials he gave to the state licensing board are phony. On top of that—”

  Carl’s emotion-savaged face suddenly broke into a wide, very disturbing grin. He chuckled, and the chuckles evolved into sharp laughter, but not the laughter of joy.

  “Do you mind telling me what the hell is so funny?” she asked.

  “Is that all you wanted to lay on me? That Craslowe’s a phony? That his credentials aren’t what they should be?” Another string of chuckles wheezed out of Carl’s throat, the kind that could easily become sobs. “That’s funny, really funny. You see, we’ve been talking about him, too—Robbie and Hannie and I—but we’re not worried about his fucking credentials. We’re worried about something else, something a lot more frightening than credentials!”

  “Wait a minute,” interrupted Lindsay, frowning with suspicion and glaring at Hannie Hazelford. “I think I know what’s been going on here. You’ve been hearing a lot about something called the Old Truth, haven’t you? Demons and stewards and curses, all kinds of gibberish about corpses giving birth to monsters—am I right?”