The Night Lies Bleeding, page 11
part #5 of Craw Series
The man, luckily a political prisoner rather than an evangelising Bible Student, read the note with a blank expression.
‘My name is Michal Wejta. I am not a gypsy, I am a Pole from near Poznan. We are a middle-class family and are registered with all relevant authorities. Our family had a caravan that was used as a play hut. When the Germans invaded we took this and made for the Czech border, but we were taken prisoner by a regular army unit. We were robbed of everything we owned. I am not a homosexual. Neither am I a communist. I should be free to go. Please get my identity proof from the relevant Polish authorities.’
Max could hardly believe what he was reading. This boy had ended up at Wewelsburg by some freakish mistake. Relief came over him in a cold wave. He had to get back to his lab and get to his telephone. He had to speak to the concentration camp commander, Haas; he had to make him see that they were holding this boy unjustly, even by their own warped criteria.
He opened the door to the corridor with the electrician in it. He had gone. There was nothing there, just a bitter smell of cordite and a bloody stain about a metre up the wall. Max gulped. It was just the height a man’s head would be when kneeling. He had tried to protect the man, said he was an electrician, but von Knobelsdorff, with typical attention to detail, had checked, it seemed. Then he thought: Michal. He was still in the lab. What had von Knobelsdorff sent there? Whatever it was, Max doubted it was anything he would want to see.
10 A Surprise for Mr Craw
Craw was smoking underneath a cedar as the bandaged figure of Arindon was loaded into the ambulance. The bouquet of the blood was still in his nostrils; the fine red mist that had settled on his lips continued to give up its deep and enticing taste.
It was too much, he had decided. In the presence of the blood he had only just held on to his humanity. He couldn’t be sure that would happen next time. And yet, Arindon had spoken to him in the language of his forefathers. It was a connection to his lost wife, no matter how tenuous.
He’d needed to get out of the clammy air of the house and clear his head to think. He was under no doubt what his duty as a gentleman required. He should leave immediately and try to isolate himself as best he could. There were strong pulls within him, though – a vision of a young woman crying as she said goodbye, and the tantalising possibility that she had come back, as he was virtually certain she had done before and would again.
This wasn’t the sort of certainty you achieve by learning, or reading a book, or even from seeing evidence with your own eyes. It was a certainty stitched together from hopes, hunches and gut feelings, but it was a certainty nevertheless. He could no more account for the enduring power of his attachment to his wife than he could be free of it, even if he had wanted to.
From the ambulance, the squat figure of Balby made its way towards him.
‘How is Briggs?’ said Craw.
‘He’ll be all right. I’ve told him to pull himself together. A cup of tea and he’ll be back on his feet.’
The two men said nothing for a couple of minutes. Craw offered Balby a cigarette and the policeman took it. They stood shifting from foot to foot and breathing out smoke in the chilly autumn air. Wet leaves and bonfires were on the country breeze. Dark clouds brought the suggestion of dusk to the sky.
‘That’s a new one,’ said Balby, nodding towards the ambulance.
‘Yes,’ said Craw, ‘cannibalism normally restricts itself to other people for rather obvious reasons. A singular case, Inspector.’
‘You can say that again,’ said Balby, breathing out a heavy plume.
The age of explanations, of telling, of unburdening and confession was not yet upon the English. Balby had been shocked to his boots by what he had seen, so he did what his entire upbringing had conditioned him to do. He talked about something else.
‘I think yesterday was the last of the sunshine.’
‘Bad weather’s on its way, I think,’ said Craw.
‘Very likely.’
Craw, who was beyond shocks, who was himself a living shock, was at a loss as to know what to do. A werewolf must always think of himself first. This is not an egocentric act but a practical one. There are few situations that can be improved by biting someone’s throat out though – as Craw knew – such situations can exist.
Among the cedars, on the wind, in the still-present smell of blood from that awful cell, he could feel the change coming more strongly. It was like eyes on the back of his neck. He had no idea how long it would take. The unpredictability terrified him. Did his curse always follow the same course? Would it always take so long for him to change? What if he did indeed fall behind a sofa and come up howling for blood? He’d seen that in a trailer for a Lon Chaney film and it had given him quite a start.
The first time, with that meat in his hands, it had been a matter of weeks from start to finish. Had it? He thought so. An image. Awakening on a ship of corpses. He shivered. He would have to make preparations to go away, but to where?
Australia, he’d thought, sounded promising, with its miles of empty space – or America, where he’d been the last time. But America, now the USA, was contracting. There were places he could go but who was to say that some motorist – some settler – wouldn’t happen by. The war, though, made travel difficult. The passage east and west was teeming with U-boats and fraught with peril. It wasn’t the torpedoes he feared, but delay. Imagine if the hunger took him at sea. The results would be unimaginable.
But first he wanted to speak to Arindon. Forad. Monster. It was a connection to what he had been and, however tenuous, a connection to his wife.
Silence fell between the two men again. It was as if they were testing the resilience of the calm between them, seeing if it could bear the strain of what they had to discuss.
Finally Balby was ready to talk about what had happened.
‘What do you make of that?’
‘What?’
‘That!’ said Balby. ‘That mess.’
Craw scratched at the dirt with his shoe. He would walk away, he thought, as soon as it was practical to do so without exciting too much comment. Proving himself useless might be the best way of doing that.
‘Clearly something has affected his mind.’
Balby gave him a look that indicated he should aim his comments outside the range of the completely obvious.
‘Why did he do it just as we arrived? He had the whole morning out of the straitjacket if that was what he wanted to do.’
Craw shook his head. ‘I can’t imagine anyone wanting to do that.’
‘What if those marks weren’t for protection, Professor? You said there were other possibilities.’
Craw shrugged again. ‘What seems most likely?’
‘You’re the anthropologist,’ said Balby. Clearly he’d spent some time getting the word right. ‘We have several corpses and one lunatic covered in these marks, the only exception being Hamstry, who had no flesh at all. We agree the marks weren’t done by the victims themselves, so they were done by someone else.’
He breathed in, reminding himself not to run too far ahead in his deductions.
‘So,’ he went on, ‘did the person or persons who committed the murders inflict the marks? We cannot say conclusively that they did. If they did, then why would they want to protect someone they were about to kill? Is whoever inflicted the marks even the same person as who caused the murders?’
Craw nodded. The inspector’s thought processes were a good deal clearer than those of some academics he could think of.
‘There’s no real evidence one way or another,’ said Balby.
‘Indeed not, we are in the realm of speculation.’
Balby breathed out, the smoke pulled past him by the rising breeze. ‘Square one.’
Craw nodded. Nastrond, Forad. They were words he hadn’t heard out loud for a very long time. Nastrond: the corpse shore. Forad: Monster.
‘Tell me,’ said Balby, ‘what you can say for sure, and then give your guesses.’
Craw looked up into the trees, as if asking for inspiration.
‘We know for sure that we are dealing with some ritual practice that is capable of causing the most extreme forms of insanity, and we know it uses what appears to be body markings that have some sort of spiritual significance. They most closely resemble marks used by African hunter-gatherer peoples as identifiers of humanity. They do not resemble any form of sacrificial markings that I have seen. That, I’m afraid, is the limit of the certain. Beyond that, I should say it seemed sure that Arindon was keen to get those markings off his face. Perhaps he believes the markings may give away significant information that might prove useful to his enemies.’
‘The police are his enemies, and the marks mean nothing to me.’
‘Perhaps he fears he might suffer as a result of having the markings on his face, suffer more terribly than he would suffer by inflicting those injuries on himself. That might account for why he wanted to get them off. That leads us back to the sacrifice hypothesis. But it is not sacrifice, I am sure.’
‘Why not?’
‘For a start, Arindon’s alive,’ said Craw. ‘It’s not generally seen as much of a success if your sacrificial victim gets up, says “Is that the time?” and bids you adieu.’
‘This could have been botched.’
‘Very possibly, but what went wrong here that went according to plan in the other instances?’
An idea was forming in Craw’s mind, but he didn’t want to share it with the inspector yet. It was his original thought of Muti magic. There was nothing to suggest an African influence on these murders, but what if the principles employed were the same? What if the victims were being used as some sort of ingredient in a ritual? But which part – the part that was removed or the part that remained? Craw, in his rather callous way, imagined the victims as like oranges. There are dishes that require the zest and there are dishes that require the flesh. Perhaps Hamstry had been one, Arindon the other.
‘He must have been pretty scared of something to be able to do what he did,’ said Balby.
‘A terror known only to the insane,’ said Craw, once again throwing up his mask of banality.
‘If he was scared of us, then why didn’t he do that on our previous meeting?’
‘The straitjacket. Wouldn’t have stopped him having a chew at his face, though.’
‘Oh yes. But he was nowhere near as disturbed by us yesterday as he was today.’
‘What was different about today?’
‘Only you,’ said Balby.
Craw let the words sink in for a second. It was too much of a coincidence. Arindon was linked to him in some way. He would stay. No, he should go.
‘Why would he be scared of me?’
‘Well, he wouldn’t be, would he?’ Balby shrugged. ‘Square one.’
A heavy winter storm was coming. The light seemed to change in quality, the air darkened, and the wind moved beneath the trees. Craw shuddered. And then he remembered the uses of duty. To perform an uncomfortable but correct course of action it is not necessary to want to do so. All that is necessary is to perform it. It was beholden on him to try to leave. He spoke the words like an actor, hoping to be refused but feeling bound to speak them anyway.
‘And now you have it all, Inspector. Everything I know and all I can imagine. I shall gladly speak to Arindon again, should he recover sufficiently, and please keep me abreast of any other changes in the case, but now I really must return to my other work.’
Balby shook his head. ‘I would prefer you to stay. You have more to offer.’
‘I really must go.’
‘If I call the War Office I feel sure I could have you ordered to stay, given the nature of events.’
Craw breathed out. Balby’s refusal to allow him to do what was right and walk away emboldened him. He could protest more strongly, convince himself that he had exhausted every stratagem at his disposal to tear himself free and then, denied, stay with a clear conscience. He would have tried, and so he could justify the risk he would bring down on himself and those about him. He would not let himself off so lightly, though. He had to try, and try properly, or he could no longer consider himself a gentleman.
Craw sought a way to make the man release him. Then he had it. Fifty years before, under a different name, Craw had taught at Yale University. He had loved his time there, but had had to leave before the rumours regarding his perpetual youth could build up too much of a head of steam. The plight of the immortal who does not wish to be known as an immortal is to always move on. It had been a pity. In his last years at the famous college he’d met an extraordinary youth, Ezekiel Harbard, the Delaware Dynamo, the Small Wonder himself, the man who put the ‘aware’ in Delaware. Some people are bright; some are even gifted; but rarely does a human burn with the intelligence that Harbard exhibited.
The boy’s mind seemed to know no bounds. Physics, maths, anthropology and history all came easily to him. His work on linguistics alone, where he had worked out how Old Norse should be pronounced, marked him as a genius. When he’d spoken to Craw it was like listening to one of his kinsmen sitting at the fire by the shore. Craw would have liked to have replied, to have had a conversation in the old language, but he had not revealed to Harbard that he could speak it, more out of superstition than any genuine fear of exposure. And besides, he couldn’t have borne to have had to argue with Harbard on the subject. If there were areas of disagreement then Harbard would hold to his argument like a terrier to a stick. Craw couldn’t face being told that his Old Norse was lacking – and worse, to be told so very convincingly.
Ezekiel Harbard, however, had been made to leave Yale. He had what the university establishment regarded as a weakness. His fascination for ancient lore led him on to look at numerology and the occult. He’d set up his own institute in New Orleans dedicated to research into the paranormal, largely in the field of debunking fakes, but also with the aim of documenting and understanding man’s real occult experience.
Craw had followed his career from afar with interest. If there was any man alive who could interpret the message in the murders and madness, then it was Professor Harbard. Balby would have to telegraph his requests over to America, but he was sure Harbard could help. Craw regretted not being able to talk to him personally. Harbard at twenty had been the most fascinating person he had met since his wife. At seventy he would be something to behold. Still, a meeting was impossible. Harbard’s heart might not be up to the shock of seeing him just as he’d been fifty years before, not to mention the implications for Craw’s cherished anonymity. And, for all that Craw enjoyed Harbard’s intelligence, it in no way made him consider the professor his equal. The northern European aristocracy had always felt intelligence to be a little ‘trade’. Though Craw was very clever indeed, particularly by human standards, he didn’t value cleverness. He didn’t need to be bright. He had breeding, which was so much more important. To him, cleverness was no more valuable than an amusing trick. He appreciated intelligent company in the same way as, when he’d been a prince, he might have appreciated a fire-eater or a good cook. It was an adornment to life, not essential to it. The blood was what mattered. Always the blood.
‘I would very much like you to stay,’ said Balby.
‘You don’t need me, Inspector,’ said Craw, ‘this is outside my expertise. However, I know a man who will be more useful to you – a Professor Ezekiel Harbard of the Harbard Institute, New Orleans. I’ll write that down for you, the Home Office should be able to get your questions sent through. I’m sure Professor Harbard will be able to help you, he’s a remarkable man.’
‘That’s funny,’ said Balby. ‘He recommended you.’
11 Reptilian
‘A crocodile?’
‘Yes, a crocodile,’ said the SS guard standing next to the small crate outside Max’s lab.
‘What sort of crocodile?’
‘A green one.’
In other circumstances, Max might have laughed.
‘What am I supposed to do with that?’
‘Care instructions are enclosed,’ said the guard.
‘I don’t want it,’ said Max, ‘send it back.’
‘I have express orders that the crocodile is under no circumstances to be returned. It is in your care and its welfare is your responsibility.’
‘Is it bollocks! I have more than enough on my plate. Send it back or I’ll wring its neck.’
The guard passed Max a letter. It was in a beautiful ivory white envelope sealed with a wax stamp of a sort of multi-limbed swastika. He opened it.
‘Dr Voller. For help in your experiments. This crocodile is property of the SS, requisitioned from Dortmund Zoo. As such it is to be maintained in pristine condition. If any damage occurs to SS property then the severest sanctions will be imposed against those who have caused it. My men will be in to check on the creature’s progress periodically. I hope you enjoy your chats with it and look forward to hearing its telepathically garnered opinions very soon.’
It was signed by von Knobelsdorff.
‘This is a fucking joke!’ said Max. But when he looked up, the SS man was gone.
His voice seemed to echo in his mind. Why was he swearing so much recently? He hated swearing really, not for any prudish reason but because it always seemed so insecure to him, such an effort to prove yourself one of the boys. It was the stress, he concluded. He wasn’t himself.
He peeked into the crate. It was lined with straw and it stank, but he couldn’t see anything within. So there was going to be him, an adolescent boy and a reptile in the broom cupboard now. So much of what was happening to him was so ridiculous that it was almost funny, but also so much was definitely not.
