Sepulchre

by James Herbert

"Sure, when they passed the garage."

  So had Halloran, but there was no need to repeat it to his operatives: they were too well trained to have made any mistakes. "Call Base, get them to use their influence to run a check."

  "Will do. As it was a Peugeot, it's probably been stolen, not rented."

  "I agree. Check it out though. Scout the area for a while, then make your way to Home. Out."

  "Catch you later. Out."

  Halloran drove on, moving briskly without breaking any speed limits, using the roadway to the full when he could, ever-watchful at side roads and bends, even though instinct told him they were now safe.

  "Who were they, Felix?" he heard Cora ask from the back, nervousness still in her voice.

  "How should I know?" was the reply. "Thugs, lunatics!"

  "Take it easy," Halloran soothed. "It won't be long before we reach your place."

  Kline peered out the windows. "Oh yeah? Well, this isn't the fuck the way."

  "No, but it'll get us there eventually. I worked out various routes this morning before I picked you up. My team will use another way and meet us there. Monk, you can put the gun away, you won't be needing it."

  The pony tailed bodyguard reluctantly obeyed.

  "I told you, Cora," Kline said, his words rushed, his breathing excited. "I said I was in danger, I told you all." He was once again the Felix Kline Halloran had first met, nervous, arrogant, too many words spilling from his lips. "I sensed the danger, I damn well knew, didn't I? Bastards! Halloran, I need more of your men to protect me. I could've been hurt back there."

  "Wasn't it your idea that we limit our forces?"

  "Yeah, yeah, you're right. You'll do. You got us out of a tight spot. No more manpower required. Right. I don't feel too good."

  Cora immediately reached for him.

  "Leave me alone!" Kline snapped, sinking back into his seat. "I'm tired, I need to rest. You all want too much from me, you all expect too much. Let me rest, will you?"

  Halloran heard a clasp being opened, a rattling of pills in a container.

  "Felix," said Cora, "take them, they'll calm you."

  "You think I want drugs at a time like this? You trying to make me weak?"

  There was a slapping sound and the pills sprinkled onto the seat and floor.

  "I've got to stay alert, you stupid bitch! Those bastards want to hurt me and you're trying to dope me up."

  "They're only Valium, Felix, that's all. You need to calm down."

  Monk's seat jerked as Kline kicked its back. The bodyguard continued to watch the passing countryside as if he hadn't noticed.

  Kline's voice had risen to a high pitch. "You know what I oughta do with you, Cora? You know what? I oughta dump you right now, out of the car into the road. Leave you here. How would you like that, Cora, huh? How would you get by then? What fucking use are you to me?"

  "Don't, Felix." There was a mixture of misery and low panic in her voice. "You've had a bad scare, you don't mean what you're saying."

  "Don't I? Oh, don't I? You think I give a shit about you?"

  Halloran heard the smack of flesh on flesh, heard the girl's small, startled cry. He brought the Mercedes to a smooth halt by the side of the road and turned around to face Kline, one arm resting casually on the back of the driver's seat. Cora was leaning her forehead against the window, eyes closed, a watery line slowly seeping onto her eyelashes; there were red marks on her cheek.

  "Kline," he said evenly, "you're beginning to irritate. I can do my job better if you don't. I want you to sit quietly so I can think, observe, and get you to our destination unharmed. If by the time we arrive you're sick of me too, you can make a phone call and have me replaced. It's no skin off my nose, know what I mean? Do we have an arrangement?"

  Kline stared openmouthed at him, and for the merest instant Halloran saw something in those liquid eyes that he couldn't recognize. He'd faced killers and fanatics before, and each had a distinctly similar and identifiable glint adrift in their gaze; he'd looked upon gunmen, abductors, and extortionists—child murderers even—and a certain mien linked them all, setting them apart from others of the human race. But there was a glimmer shining from deep inside this man that was like nothing else he'd witnessed before. Kline's stare was almost mesmeric—until whatever held him became dulled or, at least, was veiled by a creeping normality.

  Kline laughed, and it was a full, rich sound, unexpected and unlike his usual cackling. "Whatever you say, Halloran," he said good-humoredly. "Yeah, whatever you say."

  Halloran turned and shifted into drive. The Mercedes pulled away, heading into the winding country roads. And during the last part of that journey, Halloran frequently checked the rearview mirror. But this time he was mostly studying the man who was resting, with eyes now closed, in the backseat.

  While Monk, from the comer of his eyes, watched Halloran.

  MONK

  A PILGRIM'S PROGRESS

  It was a lousy name anyway. But none of the other kids ever added the ey. Monkey. Nah, too easy. They called him Ape. Up until he hit fourteen, that is. That was when the ape pissed right back out of the cage.

  Theo, or Theodore Albert, as his mama always called him, was never gutsy. Every day it was the same thing. "Theodore Albert you wuz baptized, and Theodore Albert you be called, honey mine," she'd say as she parted his hair right down the middle, slicking either side with a licked palm, every fuckin' morning before she pushed him out the door and along the path to where good ol' Uncle Mort waited in the pickup. "You'd look real purty, boy, if you wunt so porky," Uncle Mort often observed as they drove down to Coatesville Junior High where the boys bent their knees and dragged their knuckles along the ground behind him, lumbering from side to side in an ape waddle, imitating his high wheezy voice, another affliction which didn't help, until he finally flipped his lid and whirled around and knocked them squat. No, that was a lie: he cried, he always fuckin' cried, 'cos he was a mama's boy, he knew it and they knew it and they all knew he'd never raise a pudgy fist because he was too chickenshit to hit back, but . . . But he hadn't been chickenshit those few years later at West Chester High when he struck the fire under the assembly hall on prize-giving (no prizes coming to him anyway) morning, when all those turds had been up there nudging and sniggering and whispering, but soon wailing and screaming and punching, falling over each other to break out of that burning hell hall, where only three were really roasted by the fire, but fifteen (no teachers damaged—the parents hated them for that) kicked off from chokin' and crushed ribcages.

  That day was the turning point for Theodore Albert Monk, "pissin'-out day," the day he discovered every person had a power. Anyone—big, small, fat, or skinny—could decide for someone else when their Pay-Off Time (POT) had arrived. You didn't need to be Einstein or Charles Atlas (or even Charlie fuckin' Brown) to choose their day for 'em. Point a stubby finger and raise a meaty thumb like a cocked gun and that was it. Bingo. Not right there and then, of course; but that was decision time, that was as good as. After that you waited for the right moment. Could take days, weeks, maybe months. Thing was, it always came. You got them when they and nobody else expected it. When you were safe.

  He'd shown it to insects first, graduating to animals, mice, frogs (slice 'em, dice 'em), Grandma Kaley's old cross-eyed cat (weed killer in its milk bowl), a stray mutt (lured by half a salami sandwich into a rusted freezer left to rot on the town's rubbish dump. He'd opened it up two weeks later and the stink had made him throw up). Then on to the big time.

  Four of 'em he'd wasted (he enjoyed the macho sound of wasted), two boys, two chicks. And nobody the wiser.

  When he'd moved on to Philly, there'd been two more— three if you counted the spic. In LA almost—almost—one (the hooker had fought like a wildcat when, on the spur of the moment—maybe just to get himself excited—he'd decided to cancel her subscription, and the stiletto-heeled shoe she'd been treading him with for his pleasure had nearly taken out his left eye, hurting him so bad that he'
d had to leave her there moaning and hollering in a way he didn't think possible with a snapped neck and a bellyfull of bruises).

  Things had gotten a mite tricky after that. The pigs had a description, they knew who they were looking for. The hooker had seen him around before, that was the piss-puller, seen him hanging loose with Glass-Eye Spangler (an inch to the left with that stiletto heel and they'd have been calling him Glass-Eye, too). And good oP boy Spangler knew his drinking buddy's name, where he was from. Turned out there was a small matter of an unsolved crime and a missing delinquent back there in Coatesville. Nah, not the two boys, two chicks —one drowning, one car burning (the lighted rag stuck into the gas filler had blown the tank right under the backseat that the boy and girl were using for a make-out pad at the time), and one rape with strangling as the dessert (or maybe the main course, it was hard to remember now), not those. There was the little mystery of Mama and Uncle Mort, brother and sister, found locked together in bed (joined at the loins, that is) with bedbugs buddying up with maggots on what must have been one sweltering, rotten feast week. Rosie Monk's sixteen-year-old, the one they figured was a semi-imbecile because he never talked much and lumbered around like . . . like . . . say it . . . like one of them fuckin' orangy-tans and just about as smart (this was in the days before Mr. Smith), had lit out, making him number-one suspect, since no one in his right mind would even think about kidnapping the big fucker (oh yeah, Theodore Albert aka Ape had filled his fat with muscle in the two years after POT power), after bludgeoning Mama and that groin-groping bastard Uncle Mort with his battered old Jim Fregosi baseball bat in the bed where they'd grunted and heaved and made the springs sing along.

  So the pigs were on his tail again, years after the event, hot for his ass. And maybe now those cops were finally figuring the big ape had something to do with those other unexplained homicides, and if not, why not? Neatened up things to hang them on Monk too. Yeah, let's go for it, let's nail the mother-killer, the uncle-pounder, let's hand him the check for them all. They recalled nobody'd liked the fat creep anyway.

  Escape. To Vegas. Some stuff on the way, most of it a blur now. Teaming up with Slimeball and Rivas in the glitz city, rolling drunks and mugging hookers for their purses nights, dealing crack days. Fine until the pimps ganged up (a pimp posse no less), sorely aggrieved that their take margin was down because three stooges from outa town hadn't yet learned their place in subsociety. This very point was explained to Monk one night by a big buck who had razor blades glued to the insides of the fingers of one hand so that when he slapped —palm or backhand, made no difference, the blade edges stuck out from either side—neat red lines would crisscross your cheeks until the cuts got closer and closer to eventually become one huge open wound, while five other hoods crushed Slimeball and Rivas's fingers and toes before chopping off an ear from each and making the boys chew on it (each other's ear, that is). They were saving him for something else because he was the muscle and he had badly altered one of the girls' features two months ago, turning her into an asset loss, no good to no muthuh.

  But what the razor-toting buck hadn't counted on—he had a crazy grin to match his crazy eyes—was that pain hardly meant a pig's ass to Monk (it took extreme and prolonged agony to give Monk any pleasure, even in those days), so the slicing steel could have been chopping cheese for all he cared. Monk did what he had come to know best. POT—Pay-Off Time—had arrived for the nigguh and introduced itself in the form of Monk's hawked phlegm in his eyes (ol' Uncle Mort, in between feeling him up, had taught young Theodore Albert how to do that to dogs straight out of the pickup windows) and a grinding of the black's privates by Monk's raised knee. The buck's own razor-blade fingers were used to sever his own jugular.

  This last upset had proved too much for the rest of the vigilante squad who, pissed enough already by the cash loss, decided that what they'd had in mind for the ape-walking creep (their girls' description had pinpointed Monk nicely) wasn't quite special enough. This bozo required something more permanent.

  They came for him with open switchblades and surgeon's hatchets, that season's "in" weapon, and Monk would have been chopped ape if he hadn't used the still-gurgling black man as a battering ram.

  Oh yeah, he'd gotten away, but had been damaged in the getting, although not as damaged as the two dead he'd left behind. A knife stuck firmly in his shoulder blade had proved uncomfortable as well as a bad feature for walking the streets. Fortunately, a shithead who knew him on a supplier/client basis and whom he ran into several blocks away obliged him by tugging the knife free after much jiggling and muttering "man-oh-man" and some giggling. Jiggle and giggle. The junkie had paid for the enjoyment with a windpipe so badly flattened that he talked like Popeye for the rest of his short years.

  Once again, Monk was on the hoof, and this time both pigs and mob were after him. He robbed a drugstore for some traveling money (no gun necessary for a crude dude like Monk), leaving the druggist seriously splattered among his pills and potions.

  The old flaky Dodge he stole only took him as far as the outskirts of town before coughing oil and chunking to a permanent demise.

  Shoulder all fiery and already beginning to fester in the heat, ragged oozy cheeks like fast-food counters for flies, Monk legged his way down U.S. 95, a fat thumb hoisted every time he heard an engine motoring up from behind. But who would stop for a hiker with a dark bubbly stain on his back and tomato-ketchup spread across his face? Right. No fucker. Nobody normal.

  Except one car did stop.

  The black car, its windows all tinted dark and mysterious, glided to a soundless halt beside him, the movement as easy as a vulture landing on a carcass.

  Monk shifted his bulk so that he was facing the silent car (no grace in his movement, none at all), pain and fatigue stooping him by now, his clothes and ponytailed hair powdered with dust, his face, with its scarlet-rose cheeks, puckered up into a shit-eating grimace. For a few moments he wondered if the occupants were Big Guys who kept Small Guys down (to keep the law in your pocket you had to maintain a certain law yourself) and he waited for a snub-nose to poke through a lowered window like some black viper sliding from its hole.

  But a window didn't sink down. And no gun was pointed toward him when the rear passenger door was opened wide.

  He squinted to see into the big gloomy interior and could only just make out the dark shape sitting in there among the shadows.

  Then a voice said in a persuasive way: "Need a lift, Theo?"

  (That was the first and only time Kline had called him by his first name.)

  12

  NEATH

  "Not far, Liam," said Cora, leaning forward slightly in her seat. "Look for the gates, just ahead on your left."

  Kline, beside her, opened his eyes and for a moment that seemed no less than infinite, he and Halloran stared at each other in the rearview mirror. It was Halloran who averted his gaze, and he was surprised at the effort it took to do so.

  Thick undergrowth and trees crowded either side of the road, the greenery even more dense beyond, the few gaps here and there almost subterranean in their gloom; these were woodlands of perpetual dusk. The high, old-stone wall that appeared on the left came as a surprise: it looked firmly rooted, as though having grown with the trees, a natural part of the forest itself, organic life smothering much of the rough stone and filling cracks. Twisted branches from trees on the other side loomed over, some reaching down like gnarled tentacles ready to snatch unwary ramblers.

  He noticed the opening in the near distance, the forest withdrawing there, allowing the smallest of incursions into its territory. Halloran slowed the Mercedes, turning into the drive, the roadway here cracked and uneven. The rusted iron gates before them looked impregnable, like the forest itself. Letters worked into the wrought iron declared: NEATH.

  "Wait for a moment," Kline instructed him.

  Halloran waited, and studied.

  Tall weathered columns hinged the gates, stone animals mounted on each, their
blank eyes glaring down at the car, their lichen-filled mouths wide with soundless snarls. Griffins? he wondered, but they were too decayed to tell. The gates would be easy to scale, he noted, as would be the walls on either side. No barbed wire and, as far as he could tell, no electronic warning system. And all the cover between wall and road that any would-be intruder could desire. Security was going to be difficult.

  Then he noticed, beyond the gates, the lodge house.

  It was a two-story building with stone as seasoned as the walls and windows as black as the Devil's soul.

  Halloran frowned when the thought sprang into his mind.

  . . . as black as the Devil's soul.

  A phrase remembered from early years in Ireland, only then it had been: The Divil's owhn soul. Father O'Connell, thrashing the living daylights out of him, had said it. Thrashing Liam because of the heinous wickedness into which he had led the two Scalley boys (the younger one had confessed, fearful of the mortal jeopardy in which his soul had been placed because of Halloran's leadership). Thrashing him because of the sacrilege against St. Joseph's, breaking into the church in the hush of night, leaving the dead cat—the boys had found it crushed at the roadside—inside the holy tabernacle, the animal's innards dripping out onto the soft white silk lining the vessel's walls, its eyes still gleaming dully when Father O'Connell had reached in for the chalice the next morning. Beyond redemption was Liam's soul, the priest had told the boy with every sweep of his huge, unpriestlike hand, beyond saving, his spirit as graceless and as black as the Divil's owhn soul. A creature spawned for Hell itself, and a rogue who would surely find his way there with no problem at all. His troublesome ways would . . .

  Halloran blinked and the memory was gone; but the disquiet lingered. Why think of boyhood iniquity at that moment? There were worse sins to remember.

  "The gates are locked?" The trace of Irish in his voice once more, the unexpected reverie tinting his speech.