The Uncanny, page 31
“It will become your nature, Bernard, I swear. It is your nature now, if you would only confess it. You can’t help but feel it as I speak. You can’t help but imagine it: lifting the knife over the infant’s body, unafraid of capture, unafraid of sin. Taking its blood for your own life. You can’t help but imagine it and feel how exciting it is to you. It is exciting to you, isn’t it, Bernard? Isn’t it?”
Bernard lay barely breathing; staring. Arms dead, legs dead, eyes open. Love has the human form divine.
Then, slowly, as on a rusty hinge, his mouth moved.
“Yes,” he said distinctly.
He thought he heard Iago sigh.
“You see, it can be done,” came the smoke of the voice above. “We can be honest with each other about who we really are. Now,” he went on, his tone growing more charged. “Now—will you let me release you? Will you let me free you from your coffin? Will you travel with me for a while—just a little while—and mix your life with mine, and give me my fair chance to prove my case to you?”
Love, thought Bernard senselessly. Lying, staring, not even aware of the tears that had started to run down his cheeks.
“Will you agree?” said Iago.
And Bernard, at last, said, “Yes.”
At once there was a thick, scraping sound. Bernard’s head remained where it was, but his eyes moved slightly. He looked upward. The deep grind of stone on stone came again. He let out a silent sob of relief. The lid of the sarcophogus was shifting.
Now he heard other voices, murmuring. A grunt of effort. Another deep scrape. A long grating rumble.
Suddenly, a line of gray light slashed across his face like a sword. He shut his eyes, but the light throbbed red behind his lids. The cool air poured down over his cheeks, and his body seemed to seize it, drag it in.
“Oh,” he whispered.
He stirred now, opened his eyes. Turned his head to look up as the line of light expanded. The light was not bright but it seemed to him a Niagara of blinding radiance. He squinted into it. Gasped the fresh air. A milkshake in the desert. He gasped and gasped it, his stomach rolling over with its unaccustomed richness. Exquisite. The pain in his head, the aching throughout his body: it was all exquisite, it was exquisite life, the promise of this exquisite life forever.
His shoulders began to shake as he started crying harder, with joy this time. He peered up into the cascade of light. It seemed to separate like swimmers in a water ballet, it seemed to bloom like flowers, changing from a downpour to a spreading canopy of streaming beams.
And there—at the center of those rays—there was Iago.
It was difficult for Bernard to distinguish between the surge of passionate pleasure that went through him at the opening of his tomb, and the powerful, bewildering warmth he felt upon finally seeing that face. The long, dark hair framed features chiseled in brutal planes and angles. But the eyes were as cool and smoky as the voice had been, relaxed, even witty. The smile was gently welcoming.
This was his father.
“Now you’ll see,” Iago said, the voice washing down with the radiant light. “With me, above all else, you will never be ashamed of who you are.”
Bernard tried to nod. “Love …” he almost whispered. But his eyes sank closed, and he fainted.
18
When Bernard looked again, Iago was gone. Another face had replaced his.
The scarred man leaned over the side of the sarcophagus. His piggy eyes were bright under the tawny, sharply cut hair. His disfigured mouth was disfigured even further by a grin. He wrinkled his nose comically.
“Phwor! Who’s made a mess, then? All right, lad. Come on, up you go. Let’s get you spruced and lovely for the road.”
He reached down and grabbed Bernard’s slack arm. Oofing and urring, he worked the young man’s body up into a half-sitting position. With each fresh jolt of motion, Bernard felt a zig-zagging bolt of green lightning lance through him, nerve-end to nerve-end, top to toe. His head fell to one side, and he felt as if it had fallen on a bed of nails. He clutched at the scarred man’s thick, muscular shoulders for support.
“There you go. Easy now,” the scarred man said.
With his help, Bernard managed to roll one leg up over the sarcophogus wall. The scarred man was practically carrying him as he rose from the coffin’s depths. He lifted Bernard easily, lowered him to the floor easily as if he were no weight at all. Bernard felt himself set down gently. He stood there, his back hunched, his mouth hanging open, his hand resting on the edge of the tomb. He stared down with glazed eyes, stared through the pools and puddles of bloody pain that kept spreading and evaporating just behind the screen of his vision.
“Now then, now then,” the scarred man said. “You can’t go anywhere looking like that, can you. We’ve got to get you out of those clothes.”
Bernard waved him away at first, or tried to. He tried to undress himself. For a moment, his hand tugged ineffectively at the collar of his shirt. Then it fell to his side again. He stood still again, staring dully at the stones of the floor. The scarred man took hold of the shirt collar and worked it up over Bernard’s head as if he were a child. He undid Bernard’s belt and pulled his black pants down to his ankles.
Bernard swallowed, fighting off the nausea. When he managed to raise his eyes, he saw the dim recesses of an underground crypt tilting and turning around him. Columns and arches, spandrels and darkened niches rising and falling as if at sea. Stone tombs, carved effigies of the dead, plaques set in the wall and floor—they telescoped sickeningly in and back. It was all shadowy. It was all empty. It was all turning round and round.
Bernard licked his lips, swaying where he stood. He felt something damp in his hand, and closed his fingers around it. The scarred man had given him a sponge. He knew that he was naked now.
“Here, you do this,” the man said gruffly. “Face too, there’s blood all over it.”
Bernard nodded. Love has the human form divine, he thought. And in loose, sloppy swipes, he began to sponge himself down.
“Put some grease into it,” the scarred man muttered impatiently. “We haven’t got all night.”
Bernard nodded vaguely. Went on sponging himself the same as before. And it was good to feel the warm rivulets running down his skin. He stood, bent and staring, thinking about that face, Iago’s face.
With me, above all, you will never be ashamed.
Love, thought Bernard, has the human form divine.
“All right, that’ll do,” said the scarred man. He pried the sponge from Bernard’s resistless fingers. “Here, put these on.”
Bernard had to stare for a long moment at the folded clothes that were being held out to him. Gray sweatpants, white sweatshirt, white socks and tennis shoes on top. Drawing in a breath, he yanked at the shirt. He struggled to get his arms into the sleeves, wrestled the rest down over him. For the sweatpants, he had to hold on to the scarred man’s shoulder. The pain pulsed in his head, as he bent down, as he went through the long, complex process of drawing his trousers on.
“All right. Here,” said the scarred man, not unkindly. Bernard rested against his sarcophagus as the other knelt before him. The scarred man tugged one sock over Bernard’s bare foot, then another over the other. He fitted on the tennis shoes as Bernard held weakly to the coffin’s wall.
Love, thought Bernard. He tried to concentrate on that, tried to bring the full force of his focus to bear on it.
Then the scarred man stood up and the two men were face to face. The scarred man clapped Bernard on the shoulder. His pinkish eyes gleamed.
“There you are, bright as a button,” he said. “And a face like an angel, haven’t you?”
Bernard nodded and straightened from the coffin, still holding on to it, still holding on to the edge. He had to work his mouth open and closed a few moments before he could speak.
“Do you know …” he said thickly. “Do you know what I kept … what I kept thinking all the while he was talking?”
The scarred man laughed once, his big body heaving up and down. “No. I give up. What was you thinking?”
Bernard licked his lips again. “Love,” he said. “I kept thinking … Love has the human form divine. No matter what he told me. I just kept thinking that.”
“Uh-huh,” said the scarred man.
“That’s what saved me,” said Bernard.
And he hit the scarred man in the throat.
It wasn’t a powerful strike. It didn’t have to be: it took the scarred man so completely by surprise. The knife hand caught the thug in the Adam’s apple. His mouth opened. His eyes widened. His tongue poked out. He gagged.
Bernard grabbed him by the testicles.
The scarred man’s body bent violently. His butt went back, his torso jerked forward. Bernard staggered away a step. He clasped his hands together. He raised his two arms high. A great wave of pain broke over his head, and he cried out. Then he dropped his hands like an axe on the back of the scarred man’s neck.
The blow drove the scarred man’s face into the edge of the sarcophagus. Bernard saw blood spray out on either side of the thug’s head.
Bernard reeled and dropped to his knees, retching a thin, black gruel. Still retching, he scrabbled at the floor, tried to stand again before the scarred man could recover, could attack.
Love … he thought.
The scarred man did not recover. He hung on the edge of the sarcophagus as if he were searching for something within. Then, slowly, he began to slide off it. Then more quickly. Then his big body dropped to the crypt’s stone floor.
Bernard climbed to his feet. He stumbled to the coffin and grabbed hold of it before he fell again. He bent over the open tomb, his stomach convulsing.
The smell from within the coffin rose up to him. His own smell, the smell of his own death. And there, in the dust at the bottom of the thing, sat the human skull, its mandible missing, its eye sockets scored and broken. It looked bucktoothed and stupid there, staring blind.
Panting, Bernard reached down for it. The bone was rotten, it was soft and thin to the touch. As he clutched it, a circle of brain pan caved in under the pressure of his thumb. He lifted the skull and brought it up before him. Bernard, with his bald head, with his gray skin, his sunken cheeks, his deathlike grin, might have been looking at his own reflection.
He whispered to it almost sweetly, “Sell your soul to the devil, you bastard. Because your ass belongs to me.”
And with a deep, animal growl, he hoisted his arm. Dashed the rotting thing back into the tomb. It crunched against the stone, spitting fragments, then fell broken on its side.
Bernard turned away from it, and his eyes were wild with fury. The scarred man lay curled and unconscious at his feet, the blood pooling on the floor around his head. Bernard pushed off the coffin and stepped around him.
He started staggering towards the stairs.
They were stone, the stairs, and winding. He mounted one by one. A rope run through a set of metal rings in the rock wall was the only banister and he clutched it in both his hands. Pulled on it. Lugged himself upward. The curving stairwell seemed to close and widen like an accordion around him. He began to feel sick again. His head felt as if a chisel were being pummeled through it from within. The blow fell repeatedly as he climbed. He gritted his teeth against it and went up, went on. The staircase grew blacker and blacker around him. The splashes of red grew brighter and brighter behind his eyes.
“Goddamn it,” he gasped.
Bile bubbled up over his tongue to his grit teeth. He swallowed it back. Pulled himself up hand over hand, stair after stair.
And then he fell against the door. His shoulder hit the heavy wood. The jar of the collision seemed to drive a stake of pain straight down through the top of his skull. But under the pressure of his shoulder, the door was already swinging open. He was falling after it. Falling, for one wheeling second more. Then he stumbled into the church.
Dizzy, he looked around him. It was the same church. Where he had seen the men talking at the foot of the cross. Where he had witnessed the crucifixion. It was all over now, though. The place seemed deserted. A strange, false light hung behind the shapes on the stained-glass windows, but there was no light within. The aisles, the pews were dark. The altar to his right, the nave, the transept across from him: all were shadowy, dark.
Bernard snarled. “Come on. Come out,” he whispered.
He staggered a step away from the crypt door. Staggered another step, and another, into the crossing where the transepts met the aisles. He looked around everywhere, his eyes so wide with anger he felt them bulging from his face. Everywhere, undelineated figures of stained glass gazed down at him dispassionately.
“Come on!” he screamed at them, at anyone. His voice seemed to tear out of his throat, to tear through his flesh, a killing pain. But the high church ceiling swallowed his shout without an echo. And there was no answer.
“Come out and fight,” he shouted. “Come out and fight like an immortal demon!” He giggled. “You cock-sucker!”
He giggled again. Fight like an immortal demon—that was a good one. He bent over helplessly, swaying where he stood, giggling until it hurt his lungs. His head was pounding. The stained-glass figures gazed down at him from their heights.
With a roar, he suddenly threw back his head. He howled, “Come on, Daddy-o! It’s Oedipus time!”
He was laughing too hard to continue. He was crying too hard. He shook and tears poured down his cheeks. Snot dangled from one nostril, a white string. He wiped at his mouth and nose with a broad swipe of his palm. He staggered in a small circle, crying, laughing. Gripping his middle. Finally, he came to rest. Stood crouched and snarling like a wounded animal.
And it was only then that he realized he was surrounded.
Dark figures were moving in on him. Moving in stealthily from every side. From the deepest blackness against the walls, they came slowly into the grayer shadows. They converged upon him step by step.
Uh-oh, was his first thought. Me and my big mouth.
He turned to face them in one direction, then another, then another. The sturdy figures moved towards him. Down the aisles, out of the transepts. He spun again. Even from the altar, out of the penumbra of the ambulatory, they came. Tall, thick, husky figures, their arms ready at their sides.
Swallowing fear and nausea, Bernard kept swiveling, to one, another, another. He raised his hands, ready to defend himself and strike.
In the brief time he had left to reflect, he realized that he was not sorry it had come to this. They were going to kill him, he knew. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t mind. In point of fact, he wasn’t even certain he wanted to live anymore anyway. Knowing what he knew. About his past. About himself. And this way, he reckoned, at least he might get to take one of them with him. To close with one of them, maybe even two. Rip a throat out, tear open a ribcage. It would feel good. It would send a message. A little E-mail to the old man …
“Come on,” he muttered, swinging from one to the other as they kept moving in. “Come on.” Swallowing his tears.
The circle was closing. The approaching shapes had come out of the aisles and the transepts. They had joined together and were all around him in the crossing where he stood. Any moment now, he expected them to rush in at him all at once.
But now they stopped.
Bernard spun, his knees bent, his knife-hands lifted, loose.
He cried out once more, loudly, despairingly. “Come on, will you!”
But only a single figure detached itself from the others, broke from the circle and came forward, towards him, down the center aisle.
Bernard faced that lone attacker, his breath scraping from his throat in feral growls. He waited, ferocious.
And yet, as he waited, some sound confused him. Some repeated sound. It reached him through the nimbus of his pain. He was flustered by it. Shook his head.
The figure came closer. Bernard blinked. He knew that sound. A steady, resolute, rhythmic clicking: the sound of a walking stick on stone.
He stared through the shadows. He made out, at last, the small, squat, waddling silhouette approaching. He made out the contours of the Borsalino. The line of the cane from hand to floor.
The figure stopped before him. Slowly, Bernard sank down onto his knees. He raised his arms. He waved them in front of him to cover his face.
“Don’t look at me!” he cried out.
Harper lay a withered hand on his shoulder.
“It’s all right, lad,” she told him quietly. “You made it.”
19
The body of Jervis Ramsbottom—the late Dr. Mormo—still hung from the cross. His arms had been released from the horizontal bar, but stout cord, wrapped around his throat, held him to the vertical. He hung there with his face purple, his eye sockets raw, his cheeks streaked with blood and jelly. His tongue protruded black under the light of PC Slade’s torch.
“Poor bugger,” the PC said.
“Poor bugger, by Jove,” Harper murmured behind him.
“And look here.” Slade lowered his torch a little. “That mark carved on his chest. The same as with that German antiques dealer who got killed around Christmastime.”
Harper only nodded to herself, thinking. It bothered her, this. The dead Mormo, the tortured Mormo. What was Iago playing at, after all? The warlock had been a coward of the first water. He would have grassed on his mother at the slightest hint of a threat. What had Iago thought to get out of him this way?
The rays of police torches were arcing and crisscrossing all around the church interior now. Areas of char and ruin, piles of rubble, fallen beams stood out beneath their circles of illumination. The faces of saints and patrons frowned from the walls and windows as the light touched them, then slipped back into obscurity.
Beneath the swiftly sweeping shadows, Bernard sat in a front pew, his head hanging, his hands hanging down between his knees. A nurse sat beside him, washing the swollen bruise on his brow. DI Pullod stood over them both another moment. Then he moved away, and came to join Harper and Slade beneath the cross.
