by Nick Marsh
‘Milos,’ I said, ‘it would be murder.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Milos.
The man beneath me was silent, listening to our words. He may have been a fanatic, but Milos’s intent was plain.
‘I say nothing!’ he suddenly cried. ‘I say nothing! Nothing!’
Milos looked at me, still holding the knife. I nodded. Milos squatted beside the man, and grabbed his hair, pulling his head up. Exposing his throat. The man began wriggling and crying out in Turkish, cursing and shouting. Milos lifted the knife, and then paused, frowning. He let out a gasp and let go of the man’s hair, and I looked down at our captive. At first I thought it was only sweat pouring down his face, but as the man’s shouts became muffled the terrible truth dawned on me.
The skin of the assassin’s face had started to run like water. Rivulets of flesh poured from his brow, exposing the muscle and sinew beneath. I jumped to my feet as the man writhed and flipped onto his back, flapping like a fresh-caught pike. The liquid skin poured into his mouth like water draining from a bath, and he began to claw at his throat, his fingers pulling long strands of skin away as he did so, his cries fading as his mouth filled up with the awful rubbery substance. His struggles became weaker, and within a minute his arms fell back to the floor, his head and neck a red mess, liquid flesh still dribbling from the twitching mouth.
‘Seems the cult has its own ways of keeping people silent,’ Milos said, placing the knife next to the corpse.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I suggested.
We quickly washed the blood off us using the tub of water that had previously kept Beylab cool, and walked out of the baths. None of the other patrons looked at us. The attendant who returned our clothes seemed surprised to see us, but said nothing. We dressed quickly, and left to find our taxi still waiting. After the heat and madness of the bathhouse, stepping back onto the streets of Constantinople felt like waking from a dream – even describing it now it doesn’t seem real.
‘The police will be after us now,’ I said quietly to Milos as our cab began the journey back to the Golden Horn.
‘I’m not so sure, Colonel,’ Milos said, looking more composed now – although that may have been simply because his balaclava was back in place. ‘This cult has its own way of dealing with people. They do not want us arrested. They want the statue.’
He was right. They would not want the police involved, and the owners of the bathhouse were probably in the pay of the Cult of the Skin – how else had the assassin sneaked in with a knife? No, the authorities would not be looking for us. Beylab’s death would be noted by the underworld of Constantinople, but not by its rulers. Beylab himself knew such an end was an occupational hazard.
We returned to the hotel to the great relief of Betty and Grace. Sketching over the details, we explained what we had learned in the bathhouse, and what we must do next. Tonight, we take the statue to the cemetery.
By tomorrow, this will all be over.
Diary of Mrs Betty Sunderland, Sunday, 22nd November, 1925
We were so relieved to see the men return – those few wretched hours at the hotel waiting for news were some of the longest of my life. Grace and I sat in our room, drank strong Turkish coffee, and tried not to worry about our friends.
Grace told me whilst we waited that Milos and her were ‘seeing each other’, as they call it nowadays. Quite a lot of each other, by the sounds of it. There was a time, only a few weeks ago, when I would have been delighted by the news. Although I tried to look pleased, it only made me sadder. We’ve lost so much on this cursed trip, and I don’t want Grace to go through... well, anything like that.
We talked about Violet, and Alphonse, and the fabulous places we’ve seen. We talked about London and Yorkshire. Eventually, we ran out of words, and sat in silence, each of us glancing at the clock every few minutes and willing it to move faster.
Hours passed like years, but suddenly the door was open and Neville and Milos walked into the room. Grace jumped up and ran into Milos’s arms. I caught Neville’s eye, and we silently let the young couple enjoy their reunion. Then our two brave boys sat down and recounted what happened in the bathhouse.
Murder, death, betrayal. The bathhouse was a trap, as we feared, but the cultists underestimated both Beylab and our men. It feels strange to write it, because I feel I have been on this mission for years, rather than weeks, but the end is in sight. It’s good to have something to do again. We have a location – the Üsküdar graveyard – and we have a name. Garaznet, the scholarly thief.
Neville is at the Grand Bazaar procuring new batteries for our electric torches, as well as shovels, ropes, and whatever else he feels we may need. Milos and Grace have gone to retrieve the Simulacrum. We are all aware we’re taking a dreadful risk, but the prospect of it finally being over with tonight is too tempting. If we find the ritual, we’ll perform it then and there, and get rid of this damned statue once and for all. If not – well, maybe we’ll leave Constantinople. This place is too dangerous for us. We’ll find somewhere to hide the statue so that the cult never finds it.
We haven’t much time. We don’t know what the cult might know, or how long it may take to piece things together. We must go tonight, or not at all.
Neville has returned. More later.
Diary of Mrs Betty Sunderland, Monday, 23nd November, 1925
Aktar has given us a little time to ourselves, so I am taking the opportunity to write before we go to... do what must be done. It seems likely that this will be my final entry. My plan was to send this journal to the British consulate in Constantinople before we left tonight, but Aktar feels it would be too risky. Instead, I will have to keep my diary with me, and hope that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. I don’t suppose that it matters, now. What more harm could my diary do, after our failure at the graveyard?
Üsküdar Cemetery. I have jumped ahead, of course. I need to explain what happened there, to explain why tonight we must venture into the lion’s den.
The cemetery, like everything in Constantinople, is enormous. It sprawls across a hill to the southeast of Üsküdar – a large municipality of the city on the eastern side of the Bosphorus. There is no bridge across to the Asian side of the city, and as we took the ferry across from Stamboul, it struck me as small wonder; a bridge would have to be nearly a mile long to traverse the strait (and not, as Grace keeps calling it, the ‘river’. I keep reminding her that it is a passage of water between two seas. When I did so on the ferry she muttered, rather too loudly, ‘Well, you’d still drown in it if I pushed you overboard, wouldn’t you?’). Foolishly I voiced my opinions on the difficulties such a bridge would present out loud, quite forgetting Neville had spent forty years in the Royal Engineers. He scoffed and told us about a bridge on the Danube that was four times as long as that, and built thirty years ago. He then started talking at some length about stress levels, buttresses, crowns, cantilevers and arches until my own stress levels had been pushed to bursting point. Grace fell asleep, and even Milos, normally the embodiment of politeness, looked glazed under his balaclava. Eventually I snapped and told the silly old fool to be quiet, and we spent the rest of the crossing in tense silence.
In Üsküdar we hired a car, not wishing to take a taxi to the graveyard, unsubtly laden as we were with picks, shovels and torches. Milos drove south out of the city, and it was only then, as we approached the graves, that the enormity of our task was brought home to us. The hill upon which the cemetery was built was more like a mountain, and it was covered with graves, marble tombs, cypress trees and even, at the north end, what appeared to be a convent. We walked glumly past rows of new headstones toward the older parts of the necropolis, our torches off to avoid attracting the attention of the groundskeepers. It was freezing cold, and I didn’t relish the thought of digging through the semi-frozen ground, but the possible nearness of victory drove us through the chilly ocean breeze.
Eventually, high up on the southern slope of the hill, we found a section w
hich appeared to be mostly occupied by graves of Kurdish origin, and largely from the sixteenth century. After two painstaking hours, Neville cried out and we hurried over to find him standing before a weathered, ancient mausoleum of carven stone, hemmed in by other tombs and graves. Only just visible in the dim light of the torch was the word ‘GARAZNET’, almost worn smooth by the passage of time.
The stone mausoleum was half-covered with soil. Neville rolled up his sleeves and took up a shovel, and I was reminded of Poissy, all those weeks ago. Grace evidently remembered too, as she grabbed hold of a pick and gritted her teeth. I steadied the torch, shivering in the darkness, whilst the others worked at clearing away the soil from the scholar’s resting place.
After nearly an hour’s solid work, we had cleared away enough of the dirt and vegetation that Milos and Neville were able to force their crowbars under the huge stone slab overlying the remains of the scholar – or thief. Having being labelled as both in my time, I felt a certain sympathy for the four-hundred-year-dead man we were preparing to exhume. I hoped that the cult had not been involved in his death – or, if they had, that he might take some measure of satisfaction for the help he was offering us from beyond the grave.
The two men strained until Neville’s face turned an alarming shade of red, and his response to my words of encouragement cannot be recorded here. Despite their efforts, the slab barely moved, so Grace wedged her pick in the widening gap and added her strength to theirs. Slowly, the great mass of stone lifted and began, ponderously but with gathering momentum, to slide off the mausoleum. It fell from the grave and cracked in half with a noise like a cannon exploding. Neville and Milos staggered back, whilst Grace fell backwards with a cry onto the sack which contained the Sedefkar Simulacrum. Neville, Milos and I rushed forwards to inspect the stone box.
The smell hit us before I had even managed to shine the torch inside. Milos gagged and Neville took out his handkerchief to hold over his face as the pungent, sickly smell of rotting flesh washed over us. Bile rose in my throat as I lifted the torch, confused. The man had been dead and buried for four centuries; there should be nothing but bones left inside.
A wooden casket stood on a low stone plinth in the centre of the stone mausoleum, leaving little room for anything else. The base of the casket had long since rotted away as a consequence of the fluids that had seeped from the corpse, and those fluids had coalesced into a thick pool of sticky goo which coated the floor of the stone box. As I leaned closer, I was hit with the full force of the foul and acrid stench emanating from the tomb. I couldn’t hold my supper down any longer. Neville followed suit, whilst Milos peered into the mausoleum, his hand over his mouth.
‘I don’t understand,’ Grace said, still sitting next to the cloth sack, a look of absolute disgust on her face. ‘Why does it smell so much? I thought he’d been dead for centuries?’ She showed no inclination to look closer.
‘Perhaps the sea air?’ Milos said. ‘The salt saved the body somehow?’
‘Doesn’t seem likely to me,’ I said, wiping my mouth and building up the courage to approach again. ‘But sometimes freak conditions can lead to unlikely preservations, perhaps something like that is going on here.’
‘Perhaps,’ Neville said.
I shone the torch back into the grave. The coffin was little more than a rotten mass of wood, and the gloop at the bottom of the mausoleum glistened unpleasantly in the torchlight.
‘Can anyone see any sign of a scroll?’ I asked. ‘Or anything at all?’
The three of us covered our noses as we examined the putrid contents.
‘I can’t--’ Milos said, but Neville’s voice, hoarse and cold, cut him off.
‘Dear God,’ he said. ‘It’s moving.’
At first I thought it was just the clouds passing overhead, making the liquid shimmer in the moonlight, but as I watched I saw swirls and patterns forming in the brownish liquid. As we stared, horrified, the whole puddle began to bubble like a kettle on the boil.
‘What--?’ I said.
‘Get back!’ Milos cried, but it was already too late. Tendrils of the foetid slurry shot up from the base of the grave, and before we even understood what was happening the three of us were bound in thick, glistening ropes of the hideous substance. Then, the whole mass of slime suddenly reared up in a monstrous, dripping carpet of rotting flesh, and began to crawl out of the box, wrapping us with more ropy tendrils every second. I screamed in horror as my arms were quickly pinned to my sides, and my torch clattered to the floor, smashing against the hard stone.
‘Grace,’ Neville cried, similarly immobilised as the flesh-thing crawled over the top of the stone box. ‘Run! Take the statue and run! Now!’
Grace stood, open mouthed in horror, as the putrescent pool begun to crawl up our legs.
‘He’s right,’ Milos cried. ‘It’s a trap! Run, run now!’
I shivered as I felt the horribly warm and sticky liquid begin to slither up my knees. ‘Go, Grace,’ I cried. ‘You can’t help us! You’ve got to keep the statue safe! It’s what they want!’
Grace looked at the sack by her legs, then back to Milos. Tears filled her eyes. ‘I can’t! I can’t leave you!’ She took a step forward, unsure of how to help.
‘You must!’ Milos said, desperately, as the tide of flesh crawled over his waist.
Grace looked from his face to mine, her eyes wide. She picked up the sack on the floor, then turned back to us. ‘I won’t--’
We never found out what she wouldn’t do, however. A hand appeared out of the darkness and clamped over her mouth. Grace dropped the sack and tried to scream, but the hand prevented this. A hooded man dressed in dark robes held her firmly, pinning her with one hand and silencing her with the other. She struggled and wriggled in his grasp, but he was too strong for her.
More robed shapes materialised out of the darkness, their heavy hoods concealing their faces. The bubbling flesh-thing continued to crawl up our bodies, and I felt the moist, horrid damp seep through my clothes and into my skin.
‘Grace!’ Milos called, but the robed figure pulled her away into the night. Another picked up the sack containing our prize.
One of the figures stepped forward, and lowered his hood to better observe our helpless struggles. He was an ancient, extremely frail-looking man, his skin wrinkled and liver-spotted. His dark eyes were shrunken deep into his skull, and his lips were thin and bloodless. Nevertheless, those lips twitched in a parody of a smile as he watched the flesh thing work its seething way up to our heads.
‘Let Grace go!’ Milos yelled, his face red and his voice breaking. ‘You have the statue! Leave her! Let her go!’
The man’s eyes narrowed slightly, questioningly, as if he had expected us to say something else. He shrugged, and continued to watch. Apart from the ghost of a smile, his face was blank and dispassionate, like a scientist observing the result of an experiment.
‘Let Grace go,’ I said, as calmly as I could, trying to reason with the man though my mind screamed in fear as I felt the flesh-thing crawling higher. ‘You have what you want. You don’t need her as well.’
The old man’s gaze switched to mine, and I saw that it was hopeless. Those deep, black eyes were devoid of compassion. He wasn’t interested in bargaining. He merely wanted to watch us die.
‘Grace!’ Milos called, again and again, but she had long since vanished into the darkness. Neville turned his head to me.
‘Well, I think this is it, Betty,’ he said, as the flesh reached his neck.
‘I’m afraid so,’ I agreed. ‘I’m sorry I got us into this.’
Neville smiled sadly. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I forgive you.’
I smiled back as I felt the rotten liquid begin to crawl up my own neck. ‘Everything’s all right then,’ I said.
Suddenly, the old man cocked his head curiously, and looked away, down the hill. We followed his gaze, and saw a faint group of lights, bobbing up and down. Torches, heading towards us! We started to
hear shouting and calls from the group.
The old man raised his eyebrows, surprised. He nodded to us, politely, and disappeared into the darkness. We were left alone.
The surge of hope I had felt soon died, however. Whoever the people were that scared away the cultists, they would never reach us in time. The flesh-thing had not stopped its hideous advance. Milos’s mouth was already covered, and as I watched Neville’s mouth was sealed over too. Then the thing slithered greasily over my face, blocking my mouth, nose and eyes, and I shivered in the darkness, waiting to die. I remember thinking that it was just a bit of unpleasantness to get through, and then I would see Violet, and Alphonse, even dear, dear Richard, once again. The stench of the thing was overpowering as it smothered me, but that soon faded into nothing as my head grew light and I felt myself begin to drift. From far away I thought I heard a voice calling my name, but I ignored it. My time was done.
‘Betty!’ The voice called again. Neville!
Then I became aware of the cold ground on my back, and the salty-sea smell of the air, and I realised I was breathing. I opened my eyes to see Neville and Milos looking down at me, their faces lined with concern.
‘Betty!’ Neville said again, shaking my shoulders.
‘All right, all right,’ I said, ‘I can hear you! And don’t be so rough, please, Neville, remember my arthritis.’
Milos helped me to my feet as I brushed the mud and dirt from my clothes.
‘It is good to see you alive, Mrs Sunderland,’ he said.
‘The feeling is mutual, believe me,’ I said. ‘It takes more than... whatever that thing was to keep this old bird down. Now, what on earth happened?’
‘We don’t know,’ Neville said. ‘The thing just... stopped. Slithered away. You must have passed out.’
‘Why wouldn’t it kill us?’ I said. ‘The cult surely wants us dead, don’t they?’