The King of Terrors (a psychological thriller combining mystery, crime and suspense)

by Mitchell, D. M.

  ‘But if she’s immortal surely she can’t die,’ he said helplessly.

  ‘She’s not invulnerable. She ain’t no Superwoman. If she got hit by a bus, or a bullet for that matter, the effect is the same as on your ordinary person. We’re all mortal. So my advice is not to go around thinking you’re Superman, either. If I kick you in the balls then you’re going to feel it.’

  ‘What makes you so sure I’m like her? We don’t know who my father is.’

  ‘We’re not sure. But there’s a good fifty-fifty chance you are. Lambert-Chide was willing to bet you inherited her longevity gene, and Doradus wasn’t going to take any chances at all; he was going to bump you off just to make doubly sure. Something he’ll continue to do until he finishes the job.’

  ‘And you? Why are you taking a chance for someone who might turn out to be just another ordinary Joe?’

  Caroline took bread out of its cellophane wrapper and poured soup into two plastic dishes. She handed one over to Gareth. ‘Don’t expect me to play house all the time,’ she said.

  ‘You’re avoiding my question again,’ he said. ‘Why are you involved in all this? Was it simply to get at Tremain?’

  She blew over the hot soup, steam flaking off like spirits. ‘Pipistrelle is my father,’ she said, then checked herself. ‘Well, not really my father. I’ve no idea who that is. But he cared for me, brought me up when my mother died. He’s the only family I’ve got. I haven’t got anyone else. Regular orphan Annie.’

  ‘What is he, some kind of vigilante?’

  She smirked. ‘Hardly the type,’ she said. She put the dish on the floor. ‘Look, final history lesson, so listen up. Pipistrelle – real name Charles Rayne. This all began when his grandfather, Inspector Thomas Rayne, a cop in the Met, investigated the murder of a man called Jimmy Tate back in 1929. It’s a murder that’s never solved. In fact a lid seemed to be put on the case, and Thomas Rayne finds himself put conveniently out of action when he starts to get close to the truth. Anyhow, he continues with his investigations privately. Charles Rayne, his grandson, takes over the project when his grandfather dies. He gradually builds upon his grandfather’s studies and is amazed to confirm what his grandfather had posited. See, once he realised Evelyn Carter had used one false ID after another, always following the same pattern of taking on a dead person’s identity he was able, over twenty years additional painstaking research, to build up a bigger picture as to how long she’d been doing it. And it turns out that stretched back a mighty long time.

  ‘Evelyn Carter and Jimmy Tate had something in common. First, they both used dead people’s identities – the first clue for Rayne that they were connected in some way; secondly, Evelyn’s reaction to the recounting of Jimmy’s death by David Lambert-Chide, as mentioned in Rayne’s journal, suggested she might have been closely attached. Turns out she was. So Charles did more digging around Jimmy Tate, using his trail of false IDs as stepping stones all the way back to a man called Stephen de Bailleul, a man who shared her death-defying genes, who taught her to survive. Charles’ conclusion was the bizarre possibility that there had obviously been a number of people who had lived a tad more than their allotted three score and ten. Not only that, his investigations into the medieval symbol uncovered the continuing presence, albeit in secret, of the Church of Everlasting Bliss. It soon became apparent to him that people like Evelyn Carter and de Bailleul had been systematically hunted down and exterminated by this Church. Condemned by the Church as being Serpentiles – you remember, the descendents of the original Eden serpent – they used some kind of God’s Holy Hit Man called Camael, otherwise known as the Dark Angel of Doradus, to despatch the unlucky victims in a sick and time-honoured ceremony. You’ve seen what that looks like and it isn’t pretty. So not only did these poor people have to continually reinvent themselves every few years so as not to draw unwanted attention to themselves, they had to contend with the Church of Everlasting Bliss on their tails determined to wipe out every last one of them. Anyhow, at the beginning the Lunar Club didn’t know fully about the Church and its workings. For Charles Rayne and his grandfather before him it all began with Evelyn Carter. It starts out as historical inquisitiveness – what would it be like to speak to a woman who has lived four hundred years? Every historian’s dream. Charles, however, has an illness that keeps him indoors out of sunlight so he thinks it’s time to go to his two colleagues who make up the Lunar Club, fellow historians whom he trusts. He convinces them she exists and they pool resources and skills, eventually managing to locate the woman they think might be Evelyn working as a maid in a hotel under an assumed identity.

  ‘They don’t want to spook her so Howard Baxter keeps a low profile, and just as he’s about to make first contact at the woman’s home men turn up and take her away. At first he thinks it’s Doradus, but he follows them to the Lambert-Chide building in Brentwood on the Golden Mile. More to the point they enter by the back door. She goes in but she doesn’t come out. The Lunar Club do some historical digging and discover that labs below the building had been used for clandestine research into chemical warfare during the Second World War.

  ‘They don’t fully know what’s going on, but by putting two and two together they suspect Evelyn is being held as part of some kind of experiments into ageing. They needed to get her out and that’s where my mother, Stephanie Jacobs, comes into it. Howard Baxter managed to secure a secondment in the archives at Brentford in order to spy out the comings and goings of staff. Eventually he spotted, and was able to target, my mother. Pipistrelle persuaded her to help get Evelyn out of the lab complex. She died freeing her.

  ‘Evelyn’s heavily pregnant with twins. You’re born OK, but as you know your twin sister dies during birth. Evelyn is moved to a safe house the Lunar Club have prepared. At first, they don’t agree about what they should do next. They know they’re sitting on weird stuff here. One of them argues for going public. The others urge caution. Whilst they’re arguing it out Doradus comes sniffing too close to Evelyn’s safe house. She suspects, wrongly, that the Lunar Club is in cahoots with Doradus and she makes a bolt for it with you as a babe in arms. Lambert-Chide was right: she chose to abandon you rather than risk Doradus finding you with her. That couldn’t have been an easy choice for her to make.

  ‘But that’s not quite the end of the story. Charles loses all sign of Evelyn but traces you to a welsh orphanage. He knows you are Evelyn’s child; you are found with a tiny coin on a chain which he saw her make for you after you were born. It was almost as if sooner or later she knew you must part ways, but needed some way of demonstrating who she was if she had to come back into your life. And that had to happen at some point, in order to help you survive.

  ‘As for the Lunar Club, things get a little heated. It dawns on them they’re dealing with something far more sinister, far bigger than they bargained for with the Church of Everlasting Bliss, meaning they dare not go public. That would have been virtual suicide when they realise the depth of Doradus’ influence in society. Two of them – Carl Wood and Howard Baxter decide it’s best to let the entire thing drop, for their own safety, so the Lunar Club collapses and the men hardly see each other again, keeping quiet about the entire affair. But Pipistrelle can’t forget Evelyn or you. He tries to find her again, but he can’t do it on his own. That’s why he eventually needed me.’

  They ate in silence. Gareth’s mind had reached overload, all manner of conflicting emotions swirling sickeningly within him and adding to his utter sense of confusion. The overriding feeling was one of despair. It hung in the cold, clammy air, wrapped its chilled arms around him. Erica laid still, her face slightly twisted by pain. He put his barely-touched soup on the floor and lifted her head carefully so that it rested on his lap. He stared fixedly at the few strands of her hair that draped thread-like over his fingers.

  ‘She knew she had to help you survive, in the same way she’d been taught by de Bailleul,’ Caroline said. ‘She’d prepared false ID, and the box of gold was f
or you. It wasn’t stolen. It had been acquired over a long period of time. Gold is truly portable. She always avoided banks. Safer to have something stashed away you can exchange for money rather than traceable accounts. And she generally only took jobs where she could keep her head low, where few questions are asked about the comings and goings of employees, working for cash-in-hand, leaving as little a trail as possible. But Doradus discovered where she’d been working in Manchester, made a botched attempt at killing her then came close to discovering who you really were. So she was forced out of hiding earlier than planned. The rest is history,’ she said, not fully realising the irony of her words.

  ‘I still don’t read you,’ he said. ‘I still don’t get why you do this, why you’ve put your life at risk for us. We can’t mean anything to you.’ He saw how she looked at him, a strange, almost fond light in her eyes. She turned her head away from him. ‘What’s driving you, Caroline Jacobs?’

  ‘Hate,’ she said, though the word carried not an ounce of feeling. ‘The hatred of all the evil we are capable of. Religion, science, they’re both as bad as each other, both of them searching for their own Final Solution. Unspeakable things have been done in both their names. And science, well that’s just religious extremism in another guise, the search for the Holy Something that can never be found. Lambert-Chide and his kind are as bad as Doradus and every group that ever put a bomb under a car or flew a plane into a building. And in-between them both, ordinary people get crushed.’ She turned to study him, the angle of her chin lit by the faint blue glow from the primus stove which she’d left burning. ‘You and me, we’re not so different. Both of us alone. Both of us don’t know where we came from, don’t know where we’re headed.’ She rubbed at her temple with her index finger. ‘I do what I do to ease the hate, but it doesn’t work. I guess it never will. It’s like a cigarette for the soul. One last drag and it will all feel better. But it’s never one last drag, is it? You’ve gotta keep lighting up.’

  ‘Your mother was very special, to give her life for another. I don’t know if I could do that.’ He thought back to Fitzroy. All he had to do was say no but he couldn’t even manage that. He felt small, pathetic, useless, surrounded by all these brave people that held up a mirror to his own cowardice.

  ‘I guess it was hatred that drove her too,’ she said. ‘This time it was hatred of herself, at what she’d become. She was a Polish Jew, born in early 1945 shortly after her mother, my grandmother, arrived in Auswich. She was born into the camp. Stephanie and her mother survived, but her entire family were wiped out. Not an aunt, uncle or cousin remaining. They came to England after the war, settled in the north, Stephanie being put through university on the back of my grandmother’s hard graft in the cotton mills. She never really saw her daughter’s success, because ill health brought on by her time in the camps eventually killed her, leaving Stephanie all alone. All alone except for her medical career, which she threw all her energies into, doing the best she could for her mother’s sake. She got spotted and recruited by Lambert-Chide as an exceptional researcher for Project Gilgamesh.

  ‘But she finds herself involved in experiments that she convinces herself are for the greater good. She looks like she has everything – money, a bright career ahead of her and the patronage of one of the world’s wealthiest men. But the Lunar Club did some digging into her past, looking for some kind of emotional lever, maybe even something they could use as blackmail. Being historians they soon found out what had happened to her family during the Second World War. Pipistrelle used that information to make her see things as they were, and the evil nature of what they were doing to another human being. Confronted with this she realised that she was no better than those sick bastards at Auswich and she was horrified, felt compelled to do something to help. I don’t know, maybe it was partly some kind of atonement for her part in things; maybe by getting your mother out of Project Gilgamesh she was helping her own mother out of Auswich. Who knows exactly what goes on in people’s fucked-up heads?’ She tore off a chunk of bread and stuffed it into her mouth. ‘As for me, well I’m the product of one of a number of short-term relationships she had. Seems she struggled to hold them down.’ She gave a flicker of a smile. ‘Same trouble here. Like mother like daughter, eh?’ Then the smile wafted away as if on a breeze.

  ‘You don’t fool me,’ he said. ‘You come over as cold and heartless, but that isn’t you.’

  ‘No? What do you know?’

  ‘I know that it’s a mask you wear. It’s because you care that you are like you are, that you’ve done what you’ve done. So what is it, your time out in Afghanistan?’

  She got hurriedly to her feet. ‘That’s not open for discussion.’

  ‘Who are you really fighting here, Doradus or your own little demons?’

  ‘Cut it, Davies.’ She went to the door.

  ‘Something screwed you up, that’s for sure,’ he said. ‘I’m betting this is the tale of a lonely young woman, missing a mother she never knew. I reckon she’s the worst kind of angry teenager and needs somewhere to let it all out, something to kick at when she’s finished kicking at all the doors she can. So somehow she ends up in the army. She finds comradeship, yet she can lose herself in a faceless mass. She’s good at her job, because she’s good at anything she does, launches herself into whatever it is with a passion, because passion burns up energy, helps burn up the hatred in her. Maybe they put her on special ops or something. Whatever it was they trained her for she witnesses things that screws up her head even more, because war isn’t therapy; it’s hell. She’s discharged but the war doesn’t go away, and neither does the lonely teenager kicking at doors. It’s all still in there, poisoning the soul. Then somehow she stumbles across what Pipistrelle’s been involved with. She persuades him to tell her about Evelyn and me. More importantly, she finds out how her mother really died. I don’t know, maybe Pipistrelle has to tell her because he needs her help. Whatever happened, she gets involved too. In some ways it suits her. It’s what she needs. Doradus is another door to kick against. She’s found her own private War on Terror.’ She had her back to him. He saw she was breathing heavily. ‘Tell me I’m wrong,’ he said.

  ‘It’s going to be light in a couple of hours,’ she said dully. ‘We can stay here for a while but we need to be out by nightfall.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m not leaving her,’ he said.

  Caroline came across and bent down to her. She felt at Erica’s neck for a pulse. ‘You don’t need to worry about that. She’s dead,’ she said evenly. Then her eyes softened. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Gareth was choked into silence. Whilst he’d been talking Erica had slipped quietly away. He stroked the woman’s shoulders tenderly, and without warning, against his will, he burst into a fit of uncontrollable tears. Caroline left him alone, going outside to stand in the cold, her arms folded tightly around her. She stared up at the massive cathedral-like dome of the sky as dawn began to furl back the chill of night.

  * * * *

  47

  An End to All This

  ‘What time is it?’

  She glanced at her watch. ‘Five minutes to six.’

  ‘You let me sleep for too long,’ said Gareth, rising to his elbows. He looked over to Erica’s blanket covered body, and the events of the previous night came thundering in on him again. At least sleep had blotted it all out for a time, exhaustion dulling the pain and the implications of it all. He was surprised, though, that he’d slept the entire day and into the early evening.

  ‘You needed it,’ she said. She was messing around with a small digital radio, flipping through channels. She looked agitated.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘You need to hear something.’

  ‘Lionel Ritchie is hardly appropriate, given the circumstances.’

  ‘Tough.’ A guitar blasted out.

  ‘Turn it off. It’s not right. She’s dead, if it escaped your notice.’

  ‘She’s hardly likely
to complain about the noise, is she?’ When she turned to face him he could tell something was troubling her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong,’ she said, lowering the volume for his benefit. She took out two boxes from the army satchel. ‘What do you think; black or chestnut brown?’

  ‘Look, Caroline, forget the bloody hair dye! We’ve got to talk…’

  ‘Black, I reckon.’ She stuffed the other box into the satchel.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ he said.

  ‘About what in particular?’

  ‘Jesus, Caroline! About Erica here, about Tremain, Lambert-Chide and Doradus! We’re in a whole heap of shit and all you’re concerned about is listening to Radio Two and hair dye!’

  She shrugged. ‘Can’t argue with you there,’ she said.

  He swept back the blankets, his body feeling stiff and sore from long hours on the hard floor. In spite of the many hours sleep he still felt immensely tired, his head still heavy, mind unfocussed. He was drawn against his will to keep looking at Erica’s shrouded body, and each time he felt a ballooning anger that he couldn’t tamp down. Before sleep claimed him he’d sat there with his grief gradually morphing into rage, turning the gun over in his hand, no longer afraid of it, needing to use it, needing to enact swift revenge. He scraped it up off the floorboards now; already the gun felt all too familiar, too comfortable.

  ‘If I’d just gotten into the damn car earlier she might be alive today,’ he said. ‘It’s my fault.’

  ‘Stop beating yourself up. There’s nothing you can do. Let’s face it, she’s had longer than most of us.’

  ‘And that’s supposed to make things alright? She’s been murdered!’

  ‘What else do you want me to say?’ she asked. ‘I did my best.’ She lowered her head, and then sat down with her back against the wall, the box of hair dye twirling in her hand. The radio hummed in the background. ‘I got a text from Pipistrelle early this morning,’ she admitted. ‘Doradus knows who he is now. You want to know what’s eating me? I’ll tell you: I’ve got to go help him, even though I know he would want me to stay here with you, to ensure both you and I are safe from them. But he’s my father, or the nearest I’ve ever got to having one. I can’t desert him when he needs me. I can’t let Doradus get to him. He’s as good as dead if he does.’