Festival of Fear (32 page)

‘How do you know it's going to be a boy?' she asked him.

‘Because I can't imagine you having a girl.'

On a thundery afternoon in the first week of September she drove up to The Christ Hospital as usual and parked her car. It was only four thirty p.m. but the sky was black, and lightning was flickering over the hills. She was walking toward the hospital entrance when she noticed a man in a gray raincoat standing under the trees. She made a point of not looking at him directly, but when she went through the revolving doors into the hospital lobby, she quickly turned her head, and she could see that he had been watching her.

She went to the ladies' room and sat in one of the cubicles. Baby was being hyperactive today, churning and turning inside her. There was no reason to suppose that the man in the gray raincoat was Son of Beast, but somehow she felt that the time had arrived, that the cogs of her destiny were all beginning to click into place. Baby turned over again, and she began to feel deeply apprehensive.

She waited for twenty minutes. Then she left the ladies' room and walked across the lobby and out of the revolving door. It was raining, hard, so that the asphalt driveway in front of the hospital was dancing with spray. There was no sign of the man in the gray raincoat.

She pulled up her hood and hurried toward the parking lot as fast as she could. Lightning crackled, almost directly overhead, followed by a deafening barrage of thunder. She reached her car and unlocked the door, and was just about to climb in when somebody's arm wrapped itself around her neck and lifted her upward and backward, throttling her.

‘You're going to do what I tell you!' said a thick, sinus-blocked voice.

‘I gah – my baby –
gah –
can't—!'

‘You're going to come around to the back of the car and you're going to open the trunk and you're going to climb in. You got that?'

‘I can't – breathe – can't—!'

With his right hand, the man reached around and twisted her car keys away from her. ‘If you don't do what I say, I'm going to cut your belly right open, here and now. Give me your cell.'

‘Please – I –
gah
—'

‘Are you going to do what I tell you? Give me your cell!'

The man was compressing her larynx so hard that Helen could see nothing but scarlet, and stars. She fumbled in her pocket and took out her cellphone, and handed it to him.

‘You're going to do what I tell you, right? And you're not going to scream, and you're not going to try to run away?'

She nodded.

The man shuffled her round to the back of the car, as if they were a clumsy pair of dancing partners.

‘Open the trunk. Go on, open the trunk. Now get in there. Hurry it up, before somebody sees you. And don't try anything stupid.'

Awkwardly, she lifted one foot into the trunk. As she did so, however, she twisted around and yanked her gun out from under her coat.

‘
Freeze
!' she screamed. But the man was too close to her, and far too quick. He grabbed her wrist with both hands and twisted it around so hard that it ripped her tendons, and the gun clattered on to the ground.

‘You're a
cop
?' he shouted at her. ‘You're a fucking
cop
?'

He pushed her violently into the trunk, next to the spare wheel, and shoved her head down.

‘You've been trying to trap me? Is that it? You got yourself pregnant on purpose, just to trap me?'

Helen tried to lift her head but he jammed it down again. Then he slammed the trunk lid and she was left in darkness.

She heard him climb into the driver's seat and start the engine. Then he pulled out of the hospital parking-lot and made his way toward Auburn Avenue. As he drove, Helen was swung right and left and jostled up and down. She tried to work out which direction he was taking, and how far they had driven, but after a while she gave up.

He seemed to drive her for hours, and for miles. But at last he slowed down, almost to a crawl, and she could hear traffic, and sirens, and people's footsteps. He must have taken her downtown, to the city center.

He turned, and turned again, and then she felt a bump, and the car drove slowly down a steep, winding gradient. An underground parking facility, she guessed.

At last the car stopped, and she heard the man climbing out. The trunk opened, and he was standing there, looking down at her, a fortyish man with gray hair and a heavy gray moustache. He had a broad face which reminded Helen of one of her uncles, but he had piggy little eyes and thick, purplish lips, as if he had been eating too many blueberries.

He had brought her down to what looked like the lower level of an office building. It was gloomy and cold, with dripping concrete walls and a single fluorescent light that kept flickering and buzzing as if it were just about to burn out.

‘All right,' the man ordered her. ‘Out.'

‘You're not going to hurt my baby?'

‘What do you care?'

‘You can do whatever you like, but please don't hurt my baby.'

‘Oh, my heart bleeds. When did any woman ever really care about her baby? Now –
out
.'

Helen climbed out of the trunk. The man reached up to pull down the lid, and as he did so, Helen dodged to the left, and started to run. Almost immediately, however, he caught up with her, and seized her arm, and tripped her up. She fell on to her back on the rough concrete floor, her head narrowly missing the rear bumper of a parked Toyota.

She twisted and struggled, but the man clambered astride her and pressed her down against the floor, with his knees on her upper arms. He was very heavy and strong, and even though she had graduated best in her class in unarmed combat, she found it impossible to throw him off.

‘Women—' he panted. ‘You conceive babies, don't you, but you only give birth to them so long as it suits you. You don't give a shit about human life. All that matters to you is your own convenience. In fact
– you
– you're worse. You've used your baby to try to trap me. You don't even care that your baby is going to die, when you die. How fucking sick is that?'

‘Please—' Helen begged him.

But the man lifted her head and banged it hard against the concrete. Then he banged it again, and again, until she was half concussed and she could feel the wetness of blood in her hair.

He took a roll of Saran Wrap out of his coat pocket, and he pulled it out and stretched it over her face. She was so stunned that she couldn't stop him. She tried to take a breath, but all she managed to do was suck the cling wrap tighter.

The man wrapped her head around and around. Helen couldn't move and she couldn't breathe and she could barely see. The man loomed over her as if he were in a fog.

In spite of her training, she panicked. She thrashed her head from side to side and kicked her legs. But the man opened her coat, and dragged up her blue corduroy maternity dress, and then he pulled her pantyhose down around her ankles. Her blood was thumping in her ears, and all she could hear was a deep, distorted echo, as if she were lying at the bottom of a swimming pool.

She couldn't see the man unbutton his own coat, but she felt him lever her thighs apart. He pushed his way inside her with three grunting thrusts, until he was buried deep. Then he leaned forward and stared at her through the cling wrap, his face only an inch away from hers. He looked triumphant.

Suddenly, she felt a warm gush of wetness between her thighs. At the same time, there was turmoil inside her stomach, as if the baby were rolling right over. The man screamed like a girl and pushed against her chest.

‘
Aaagghhh
! Christ! Let go of me! Let go of me!
For Christ's sake you witch let go of me
!'

Helen felt an agonizing spasm, and then another, and then another. The man kept on screaming and cursing and trying to pull himself out of her. Helen tore at the Saran Wrap covering her face, and managed to rip most of it away. She took a deep swallow of air, but then she started screaming, too. The pain in her back was more than she could bear. She felt as if she were being cracked in half.

There was a moment when she and the man were locked together in purgatory, both of them shrieking at each other. But then suddenly the man managed to heave himself backward, and Helen felt her baby slither out of her. The man fell on to his side, crying and whimpering, his heels kicking against the concrete.

Helen sat up. She was so stunned that everything looked jumbled and unfocused, but she could see that the man was fighting to pull something away from him.

‘
Get it off me
!
Get it off me
!
Get it off me
!'

She held on to the Toyota's bumper and tried to pull herself up. Gradually, her vision began to clear, and what she saw made her slowly sit back down, quaking with horror.

Between the man's legs, biting his penis right down to the root, was a black bladder-like creature with glistening skin. It was the same size as a newborn baby, but it wasn't human at all.

The man was slapping it and pulling it, but it was obviously too slippery for him to get any grip, and the thing was stretching and contracting as if it were sucking at him.

‘
Christ, get this off me
!' the man screamed, and it was more of a prayer than a cry for help.

In front of Helen's eyes the black bladder-like creature swelled larger and larger, and as it did so, the man's struggling became weaker and jerkier. After only a few minutes he gave an epileptic shudder and his head dropped back, with his neck bulging. But the creature wasn't finished with him yet. It continued its stretching and contracting for almost twenty minutes more, its formless body growing more and more distended, until it was nearly the same size as he was. Then it rolled off him with a wallowing sound like a waterbed and lay beside him, unmoving.

Helen felt another twinge of pain, and another, but after a third contraction her afterbirth slithered out. It was black, and warty, unlike any afterbirth she had ever seen before. She kicked it away, underneath a car. If there had been anything in her stomach, she would have vomited.

After what seemed like hours, she managed to stand up. She crept over to the man and looked down at him. He looked like a parody of a man, made out of pale brown paper, like a broken hornet's nest. Even his eyeballs had been drained of all their fluid, so that they were flat.

She sat down again, resting her back against a pillar. What the hell was she going to do now? She could retrieve her cell from the dead man's body and call Klaus. But how was she going to explain what had happened here?

She looked at the creature. She doubted if it was going to lie there for very much longer, digesting the fluids that it had sucked from its prey. What was she going to do with it if it started moving again?

She heard the sound of a vehicle driving down the ramp. A black panel-van came around the corner, its tires squealing, and stopped a few yards away from her, with its headlights full on. The doors opened and Joachim Hochheimer appeared, closely followed by Richard Vuldus, both wearing long black coats.

‘My dear lady,' said Joachim Hochheimer, reaching out his hand to help Helen to her feet. ‘How are you feeling?'

‘How did you know that I was here?' she croaked. Her throat was so dry that she could barely speak.

‘We have been following you every day, ever since you became pregnant.'

‘I never saw you.'

‘Well, let us say that after all of these centuries of persecution, we have learned how not to be noticed.'

Richard Vuldus went straight over to the creature and hunkered down beside it, laying his hand on it with pride and awe.

‘We have done it, Joachim! At last we have purified the genes.'

Helen took Joachim Hochheimer's elbow, for support. ‘What
is
that disgusting thing?' she asked him. ‘I thought I was carrying a baby all that time . . . not a thing like that. I feel sick to my stomach.'

‘You shouldn't be revolted, Detective. It is not a baby, no, but a horseleech,
hirudo medicinalis
. The Vuldus family have been trying for generations to return to their original form, and with your help they have achieved their aim at last. This horseleech will now breed others, with the size and intelligence of humans, but all the qualities of a leech.'

‘But how is it going to survive? Where is it going to live?'

‘Caesar Creek lake. It covers two thousand eight hundred acres, and there are dozens of inlets where it can conceal itself, and flourish. Richard, you must help me lift it into the van, before its skin dries out too much.'

‘And what about
him
?' asked Helen, nodding at the flattened body of Son of Beast.

‘Don't worry . . . we will dispose of him for you. He will vanish as if he had never been born.'

Joachim Hochheimer helped Helen to climb into her car, while Richard Vuldus retrieved her keys and her cell from Son of Beast's coat. He gave her his wallet, too. Helen opened it and found six tickets for the roller-coaster ride, and a Kentucky driver's license in the name of Ronald M. Breen. But there was no doubt that the man in the ID photograph was Henry Clarke, one-time realtor of Smith Road, Norwood.

‘You have our deepest gratitude,' said Richard Vuldus.

‘Sure,' said Helen. She started the engine and backed up. Richard Vuldus raised one hand to her, in salute, but she didn't wave back. She drove up the ramp, out of the parking lot, and into the afternoon rain.

She drove slowly back home to Walnut Street, trembling, with tears streaming down her cheeks.

GIRL WAS ‘SUCKED DRY' SAYS CORONER

A seventeen-year-old girl Waynesville girl whose body was recovered from Caesar Creek Lake early yesterday was said by the Hamilton County Coroner to have been completely drained of all her blood and all bodily fluids.