And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) (32 page)

But there had been no paraphernalia of the ma-gician there, not even spares, assuming he took some with him. No magic books, either-no potions or signs or formulae of any sort. Mac didn't care how power-ful the sorcerer was, he couldn't possibly carry everything in his head-and you didn't dare make even a tiny mistake in his business. And yet that room was where he did his evil work. That meant that the things he required had to be close by, so close as to be on instant call as needed.

Mac was sure he had the answer within his grasp, if only he could take the last little step the evidence de-manded. Where was Sherlock Holmes when you really needed him?

Burial? No, that was out. It would take a metal container to safeguard all of it, and the denizens of the Underearth were very jealous of that and clearly had authorized no such burial-nor could O'Malley have trusted them in any case. Not there. Not in the house. Not on the grounds. Not in the immediate neighborhood, either. Yet the stuff had to be very close by ...

Under water? He considered that, turning his gaze to the lethal-looking lake. No, not under water, either, since again O'Malley would have to trust the sea-sprites and freshwater mermaids, not to mention the major water elementals. He didn't dare sink the stuff-it would no longer be his, but the property of the water worlders by law and treaty.

The boats!

Mac cursed himself for a fool. A yacht basin. Three hundred-plus yachts out there, all neatly anchored, with a speedboat tied to O'Malley's pier. The perfect hiding place for the records and books and all the magical stuff O'Malley would use-close by, easily accessible, but should the cover ever be blown, explosive charges would destroy the stuff as well as send it to the bottom.

He studied the boats well, wishing just this once he could get to the Hall of Records when it was open to see which boats in the batch were registered to Constanza, O'Malley, or one of their fronts. But that wasn't any good, anyway-it would take days just to unearth the faces behind those fronts.

The lake glowed its lethal. color against which the ships were silhouetted perfectly. He edged over as close as he dared, at one point actually skimming the water about five meters up. He felt the effect even from where he was-a sapping of strength, a general malaise. He could not cross the water on his own, he knew that.

And cross it to where?
he wondered. On one of those three hundred ships out there was Theritus and the jewel, of that he was now certain. The problem was that he didn't know which one-and it was sure to be guarded.

He studied the boats again carefully. For the first time he realized that circumstances had placed him at a disadvantage in being a vampire. He considered the woman in the house but rejected that idea. She would do his bidding, of course, but he could not
become
her; even after finding the demon he would have to figure out how to get the jewel from him.

He racked his memory. It had been a long time since he'd seen
Dracula
on television. Had that master vampire been stopped by running water? If Mac remembered it right, the Count was from Rumania but the movie was set in England. How had he reached England? How had he returned?

Of course! He'd shipped himself as freight on a ship! He'd even killed the crew and beached the ship! He
could
travel over running water!

Mac alighted near the speedboat. The keys weren't in it, of course. He stopped short. What was he think-ing of? It might
look
like a speedboat, but it couldn't be, not in
this
world. They didn't have internal-combustion engines.

Not a rowboat, though. There was a steering wheel, a pilot's seat, and-

"Well I'll be doubly damned!" he swore aloud. "Pedals!"

It was like riding a bicycle-easy once he got the hang of it with his superior strength. He was down a bit from the sapping feeling the water around him gave him, but still stronger than an ordinary man, and in life he'd been an athlete. He was nervous, though: first that some guard might notice the boat was miss-ing, or that somebody might spot him; and also because if he fell or was pushed overboard, that would be the end of him.

He had to put both possibilities out of his mind; he still had to find out which boat was which.

It turned out to be fairly easy. First there were the guards with submachine guns occasionally walking up and down the decks of nearby ships-but the real tip-off was the line in the water. He was almost on it before he realized it-a rope or something kept afloat with marker buoys. All the guards were on boats outside the line, which went from that boat to that boat to that boat to that boat to that boat and back again.

A pentagram. A pentagram in the water, with another ship in the center, a big luxury ship with two masts and a smokestack as well-a two-way side-wheeler-and-sail combo.

But first he had to get past those guards.

They hadn't spotted him, despite the torches around, because he'd been cautious as well as lucky. Guarding is one of the most boring businesses there is. You can't be as dumb as those house servants, since you might be called upon to foil some very clever thief or cop or interloper, yet you had about the same thrills as that girl who waxed floors. Less even.

Those men were there, but they weren't looking for anything.

He pulled up close to one of the boats and hoped he had judged the distance correctly. He made a mighty leap and clung like a spider to the hull of the yacht. The small boat was pushed away by the force of the leap and he made some noise when he grabbed onto the hull, but that couldn't be helped.

He hoped the noise would be put down by the guards as just the sounds of boats at anchor, but no such luck. A man was coming along the deck directly above him at a dead run, a directional lantern in one hand and a submachine gun in the other. He peered anxiously over the side, then spied the small boat drifting away and became suspicious.

A strong arm suddenly grabbed the man's neck and held it in a viselike grip; he was pushed backward before the power of the vampire's grip on his windpipe. He could not cry out. His eyes bulged and his tongue swelled, and suddenly his eyes rolled and he sank limply onto the deck.

Mac didn't know whether he'd killed the man or not, but he no longer cared. He crept along the deck, all too conscious of the glaring torchlights that turned the area of the basin almost into daylight.

He wondered idly if he could fly and then decided not to risk it. There were still a lot of problems, he saw. They'd left the place less heavily guarded than they could have-no more guarded than such a col-lection of fancy shipping should be-to avoid attract-ing attention to their hideaway. And yet- There were still three guards around, possibly more if there were any on the central ship,, and that central ship was about ten meters from any other craft. Ten meters! He couldn't fly over there, close as it was-he dared not risk doing so over water. He had lost his small boat, too. He couldn't even risk raising anchor on this one, since it was part of the pentagram. He hardly wanted to free the demon, loose him before he got what he'd come for.

The ships were unnaturally steady, anyway, prob-ably held to the shallow lake floor by concrete posts. It wouldn't do for storm or ice to disrupt the protec-tion, either.

The pentagram was even more cleverly designed than he'd thought. It was designed not to keep people out but to keep people
in.
You had to have some spe-cial counter, like the guards, to walk out, although the guards could probably take you out. That, too, was bad. He had perhaps four hours to complete all this or he'd be trapped here at sunup, unable to return to the culvert.

He'd have to abandon subtlety and depend on the fact that the pentagram was supposed to work to keep the nonhumans out and that the guards were there to keep people out. Nobody had considered vampires.

He looked around nervously. None of the other guards had apparently seen or heard anything out of the ordinary, but he would have to cross the distance to the central key boat in full torchlight and with noth-ing to hide behind. The machine guns the men had couldn't hurt him, but they would have impact, per-haps enough impact to knock him into the water. He examined the yacht itself-deserted, of course, prob-ably used only for the guard's quarters. He checked below and found signs that at least two others lived there-probably not the other guards but the rest of the shift now off in town. Down in the hold, below the water line, he saw that he'd guessed correctly. Two huge steel and concrete pilings, fixed in concrete, came up through the bottom of the hull. There was a trickling of water which convinced him to get out of there. He wanted no part of water regardless of how shal-low and still it was.

Mac also found the massive dynamite charges as well, which confirmed his overall hypothesis about this boat. There was no doubt-the wire was the pentagram and the ship in the center was where the demon was being held.

This yacht would be a beauty if it weren't so firmly fixed to its spot-a three-masted schooner with every conceivable luxury. He considered the masts. Accept-ing the fact that he could not cross the ten meters to his target ship undetected, he had to grant that all hell would break loose.

That meant eliminating the other guards if at all possible. Well, he had the dead guard's submachine gun. If he could just make enough of a disturbance to bring them all out into the open, then cut loose on them . . . It might work. But still, how would he cross the ten meters?

He spent a quiet hour trying to figure out the means, and even more time, after he had come up with a solution, wishing he knew more about physics or at least something about lumberjacking.

It took still more time to set it all up. The dynamite in the hold was bound together with straps in groups of six sticks, all connected from their blasting caps to a common copper wire. The wire branched at several points, each leading to a plunger-type detonator that used static electricity generated by the plunger, caus-ing interaction with fine metal brushes to provide the motive spark.

A simple system, and with this many detonators a cornered guard could trigger them from almost anyplace on the ship and, with a nice little delay circuit in the emitter of the plunger box, have at least a few seconds to get away.

The system did not seem to be booby-trapped. Mac gingerly removed one stick and its blasting cap from the assembly after cutting the binding straps, then cut the copper wire after the junction.

It took a lot of time and effort to follow the wire to its plunger box and then to get the wire, which was wire-stapled, to come free. Finally he had it and reached the second big problem in his plan.

Placing the single charge would be easy, although he had no idea just how much of an explosion one stick would make. A hell of a bang, he guessed, if the old movies were right. He intended to blow up the mast nearest the target ship-he hoped without break-ing the pentagram or sinking the yacht-and take advantage of the disturbance to use the guards and the mast itself to cross to the target ship. The only problem was, where did you plant the charge in order to take out the mast and have it fall in the direction you wanted? How, in fact, could you contain the dynamite blast so that it wouldn't spend its force equally in all directions and splinter the 16+-meter mast?

At least he didn't have to worry yet about the guard being missed. Once or twice others had called for him, but, upon receiving no answer, had assumed he was goofing off below decks, perhaps grabbing a catnap. It seemed to be a common enough practice among them that they thought nothing of it. They were secure here; any attack would come from massed federal boats moving in hard or rival gangsters with guns blaz-ing.

They hadn't counted on a lone outsider.

There was enough room around the mast support hole in the upper superstructure to plant the stick of dynamite if he could decide where to put it. He remembered seeing some logging once where the tree had fallen toward the largest cut. That meant, if all things held, placing the dynamite between the mast and the target boat. This he did, dampening it from underneath as best he could with pillows, bedding, whatever he could get his hands on.

Satisfied, finally, that he'd done all he could, he
ran
the copper wire outside and got down near the stern of the boat. He had no desire to be blown overboard by the force of the explosion. He held the guard's submachine gun; he was as ready as he'd ever be.

He pumped the plunger up and down from a prone position. It started to whine, and he saw a small meter on the top climb rapidly into the red zone. When it reached that point, he let go and braced himself.

The brushes inside continued to interact for a few seconds, then the whine started to decline and the meter started to drop. He worried now that he hadn't adequately understood the mechanism, that the wire had come loose, that the dynamite had fallen from its position-anything that would prevent an explosion.

The whine continued to diminish and the seconds dragged on. He grew panicky but wasn't about to move as long as any sound issued from the box. He remembered tales of people having been blown apart when they'd gotten up to check about why some explosive hadn't gone off. Not that he could be blown apart, but he could be thrown into the water. Even a stake through the heart seemed preferable to drown-ing.

And then it went off. The explosion was louder and of a magnitude stronger than his wildest imaginings; the whole ship shook despite its foundation, and a large part of the bridge superstructure flew in all directions. The mast itself was snapped like a twig and blown backward from the bottom. It fell forward, as he'd hoped, but crashed over into the water, missing the target boat by the smallest of margins, perhaps a meter from the stem. It simply wasn't long enough-the added six meters didn't quite compensate for its distance behind the bridge nor for the distance it would be blown back at the base.

It would have to do, he decided. The explosion's roar was still echoing from the shore, and lights began coming on all over the place. The guards on the picket boats rushed on deck, as he'd hoped. He stood up and opened up on the nearest one, cutting him down, then leaped to the roof of the ship's superstructure and continued firing at every moving creature he could see on the ships. The right and wrong of killing the men had never entered his mind. These were mob-sters, anyway.