Descendant (12 page)

“Quite yucky? Yes, I guess it must have been.”

Out of her navy blue pocketbook, Jill pulled a strip of brownish fabric about the length of a woman’s scarf. She held it up against Bullet’s snout so that he could sniff it and lick it. “This is a piece of the linen shroud they found in the casket,” she explained. “If the same Screecher has been here, then Bullet will be able to tell.”

“Good for Bullet. Let’s take a look, shall we?”

I led her through the hallway into the dining room, with Bullet trotting obediently beside her. I think she was determined not to show that she was nauseated, but as soon as she entered the door she clamped her hand over her mouth and couldn’t stop herself from letting out a high, cackling retch. “Oh my God, it’s disgusting.”

“Do you want to go back outside?”

She shook her head. “I can manage, thanks. It’s the flies, more than anything else. I can’t stand flies.”

“Join the club. But this is fairly typical of a Screecher attack. The
strigoi mort
gains entry first—in this case I’m guessing that it came through one of the skylights here. It probably came in so fast that nobody saw it—or, if they did, it would have looked like nothing more than a dark blur, whizzing through the room. It would have opened the front door and let in its companions, and then the three of them would have come back in here and had themselves a feast.”

Bullet was snuffling around the carpet, occasionally licking it with his thick crimson tongue.

“How many victims were there?” asked Jill.

“Seven. The Screechers would have sliced their stomachs open first, and cut the Achilles tendons in their heels so that they couldn’t get away. Then they would
have gone from one to the other, cutting them open even wider, pulling out their hearts, and drinking their blood directly from their aortas.”

“That’s so horrible.”

“Yes, it is. But if you and I don’t stop them, the Screechers are going to multiply. I don’t know how much they told you when they briefed you, but there are two kinds of Screechers—the infected ones who are still alive, the
strigoi vii
—and the dead ones, the
strigoi mortii
.”

“I didn’t completely understand that when they briefed us. The
strigoi mortii
—they’re really dead? I mean
dead
dead?”

“Dead in the sense that they’re not human any more, and never will be. They can be
nostalgic
, for sure, in a very selfish way. They can shed tears for their lost humanity. They can even have relationships with humans. You’d never know if you passed a
strigoi mort
in the street, except that they usually look unnaturally flawless. Perfect skin, perfect teeth. It’s just that they have no soul.”

“They said that the dead ones spread the infection.”

“That’s right . . . by sharing their blood or other bodily fluids with human beings who attract them. They call it ‘the Embrace’ or ‘the Witch’s Kiss.’ ”

“There must be a cure for it, surely?”

I shook my head. “Once you’ve caught the infection, that’s it. You have a raging thirst for blood and you can never get enough of it. It’s like being a drug addict, only a thousand times worse.”

“So what happens to you?”

“In the end, you can’t stand it any longer and you go looking for the
strigoi mort
who first infected you. You drink more of its blood, which poisons you, and so you
in your turn become a
strigoi mort
. Very good-looking, an idealized version of yourself. But utterly dead, and unable to rest, forever.”

Bullet came up to Jill and let out another bark. His tail was beating furiously against the table leg.

“He’s picked up the scent. He wants to go after it.”

“In that case, we’ll let him, shall we?”

“Of course. I hope you’re fit.”

“Are you kidding me? I swim, I play tennis. I paint fences. Painting fences . . . you’d be surprised what good exercise that is.”

Bullet was already heading for the door. Jill looked at me and shrugged, and so we followed him.

I went to the car and heaved out the battered metal case containing my Kit. “I think we have a trail,” I told Terence.

“Oh.” He didn’t look very pleased about it. It was one thing to talk about
strigoi
. Hunting them was something else altogether.

Bullet made his way out of the house and up the street, with Jill and Terence and me trying to keep up with him. Unlike Frank, he didn’t turn back once to see if we were following. At the top of the hill we reached a small public park called Haling Grove. There was a brick-and-concrete air-raid shelter by the front gates, which could have made a good hiding place for
strigoi
, but its doorway was sealed with corrugated iron, and its ventilation holes had all been bricked up.

We walked through the shadow of some horse-chestnut trees until we reached an open space. The park was strangely deserted, even though it was such a hot day,
in the middle of the summer vacation period. In those days, the British didn’t fly to Spain or France or Florida during the summer. They couldn’t afford to. They went to the seaside for a week, and then they spent the rest of the time at home, tending their gardens or building shelves.

The park was probably no more than three or four acres, surrounded by mature oaks and beech trees. Bullet loped across the bright green grass ahead of us. On the other side of the grass stood a large stained-oak summerhouse with a dark thatched roof, where an elderly woman sat, wearing a black dress and tiny green sunglasses. She was so white-faced that I could have believed she was dead.

“They would have been long gone by now, wouldn’t they?” panted Terence. Perspiration was trickling down the sides of his cheeks.

“Oh for sure. This will probably come to nothing. But if we can pick up more than one trail, we can begin to work out where they’re hiding themselves.”

“Triangulation,” said Jill. She must have been much fitter than Terence or me, because she wasn’t out of breath at all, and she looked as cool as a Pimm’s No. 1.

Bullet had passed the summerhouse, and now he was standing beside a wide flowerbed planted with dahlias. Along the back of the flowerbed ran a brick wall, over eighteen feet high, which looked as if it marked the park’s southern boundary. Bullet sniffed at the soil and barked three or four times.

“Go on, Bullet!” Jill told him. “Follow up, boy!”

Bullet crossed the flowerbed and went up to the wall. He turned around for the first time and looked at us in frustration.

“Clever,” I said. “I’ll bet you ten bucks they climbed the wall and ran along the top of it.”

“There’s a door farther along,” said Terence. “We could check the other side, couldn’t we?”

The door was half-open, and led through to an overgrown area of old glasshouses and abandoned wheelbarrows and compost heaps. Jill guided Bullet along the length of the wall, sniffing at it, but it seemed as if I was right, and the
strigoi
had made their way along the top of it. Even if we could have lifted him up there, there was no way that Bullet could have balanced along the coping to follow their scent. About three hundred yards away, the wall passed under the branches of several large oak trees, and it was my guess that the
strigoi
had used them to climb down from the wall and escape into the street nearby.

We spent a half-hour crisscrossing the street and the park’s pathways, but Bullet had lost the scent completely. Jill gave him a handful of black-and-red dog biscuits, patted him on the head and said, “Well done, Bullet. Never mind.” Bullet ate his biscuits with a crackling sound like gunfire and I had never seen a dog look so furious. Jill said, “He’s very annoyed. He hardly ever loses a trail.”

“We’ll get them,” I told her. “Screechers have to come out and feed, and that’s their greatest weakness.” I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. “Jesus, it’s hot. Anybody feel like a drink?”

Terence looked at his watch. “It isn’t opening time for another two and a half hours. But there’s a sweetshop on the corner, down at the bottom of the road. I could get you a bottle of Tizer.”

I hadn’t realized that British pubs were closed all afternoon,
until 6:00
PM
. And so it was that I was driven back into central London, drinking this fizzy bright orange cordial out of a heavy glass bottle, feeling sweaty and tired and more than a little sick.

I slept badly that night—as badly as I used to sleep during the war.

The Strand Palace had no air-conditioning and the endless
knock-knock-knock
of taxi and bus engines seemed to penetrate right through my pillows. I had a nightmare in which I couldn’t find my way out of Haling Grove Park and the old woman with the white face and the green sunglasses was sliding after me as if she were on wheels.

I took a tepid bath around 7:00
AM
and then I went down to the dining room for breakfast. I ordered a “full English”—bacon, sausages, fried eggs, grilled tomatoes and mushrooms. Everything was cold and lying in congealed grease and I could only conclude that I must have been hungrier during the war, or younger and less discriminating. The coffee tasted like weak beef stock.

While I pushed my food around my plate, I read the
Daily Express
. Cairo radio had incited Arabs to rise up against the British and sabotage the RAF Venom jets at Sharja airfield, where they were being used against rebel forces in Muscat and Oman. Pan Am had announced that they were beginning trans-Polar flights to London from the West Coast, flying time about eighteen hours.
A British doctor had been killed by the polio epidemic in the British Midlands because he had vaccinated all of his patients but hadn’t thought to vaccinate himself.

In spite of the warm weather, British roads were unusually empty because “motorists feared bonnet-to-tail snarls in traffic.”

Not a word about mass killings in Croydon or Selsdon or anywhere else. Not a word about
strigoi
. On television that night were
Sir Lancelot
,
Criss Cross Quiz
and
Gun Law
.

The waiter came over and looked at my plate. “Not to your liking, sir?”

“No, it was great. Just a little too much.”

“Perhaps you’d care for something else, sir? Porridge, perhaps?”

“No, thanks.” I had seen the porridge and it looked like badly poured concrete.

I was crossing the lobby on the way back to my room when the receptionist called me. “Captain Falcon, sir—you have a telephone call!”

I went into the phone booth at the side of the lobby. It was Terence calling me. “We’ve had another one, ‘Jim,’ really bad this time. I can’t tell you anything over the blower but I’m coming to collect you in fifteen minutes. It’s South London again.”

“OK.” I could see my eyes in the small mirror at the back of the telephone booth. They looked expressionless, as if they didn’t belong to anybody at all.

We drove to Wallington, another suburb on the far side of Croydon Aerodrome, a wide grassy field which—up until the war—had been London’s principal airport.
Wallington was avenue after avenue of 1930s semidetached houses, with white-painted pebbledash walls and monkey-puzzle trees in their front gardens. Bank-clerk land.

Terence was wearing the same shirt and green necktie that he had been wearing the day before. He smoked even more furiously than ever, and it was obvious that he was very nervous and upset. “Seventeen killed, that’s what they told me.”

“Seventeen? Jesus.”

This time, a whole avenue had been cordoned off by police. Two bobbies stopped us and made a meal of checking our identity cards. “You’re an
American
, sir?” asked one of them, peering at me as if he had never seen a real live American before, and was wondering why I wasn’t wearing a Stetson hat and a bolo necktie.

Eventually, they let us through and we drove about a half-mile to the end of the avenue. Here we found more police, as well as two fire trucks and five ambulances. I could see Charles Frith, wearing an immaculate light-gray suit, talking to a senior police inspector. This must be really serious, if Charles Frith had actually ventured out of his office.

The avenue was crossed by a low, green-painted railroad bridge. A green double-decker bus was wedged under the bridge, so that the front half of its roof had been ripped backward. Six or seven policemen were erecting high canvas screens around the bus, while two firefighters were up on the bridge, lowering a tarpaulin over the top of it.

“Ah, Jim,” said Charles Frith, as I approached him.
“This is Inspector Ruddock, Metropolitan Police. Inspector, this is our American friend, Captain James Falcon.”

Inspector Ruddock was a stocky man with a scarlet face that looked as if it were just about to explode. He had pale blue eyes with colorless eyelashes, like a pig’s. He eyed me up and down and said nothing at all.

“This happened at about six thirty this morning,” said Charles Frith. “The bus comes down Demesne Road here but I’m told that it usually turns off at Chesterfield Avenue, which is ah—the
second
side road just back there. This morning it kept straight on and as you can see. Tremendous bang apparently. Residents came out to see if they could help but ah—no survivors, I’m sorry to say.”

“I’d better take a look,” I told him.

Inspector Ruddock said, “I’m not happy about that, sir. Not until my men have finished their job. Don’t want any evidence buggered up.”

“No need to worry about that, Inspector,” said Charles Frith, in his urbane drawl. “Captain Falcon here is a very experienced investigator who specializes in this sort of business.”

“All the same, sir, I’d—”

Charles Frith gave him the coldest possible smile, and said, “Carry on, Jim.”

Inside the bus, I breathed in a strong smell of blood and fat, like a butcher’s shop, but it was far less nauseating than the house in Croydon, because the passengers were freshly killed. All the same, it was stifling in there, especially now that it was draped in a heavy tarpaulin, and the windows were speckled with flies.