Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (4 page)

‘Now who is being indiscreet?’ Tony smiled up at him with eye-teeth

that were white and needle-sharp in a too-wide mouth.

Francesco leaned towards his brother - leaned at a peculiar angle -and answered through clenched teeth in a voice that was suddenly as black and bubbling as tar, ‘What, but can’t you
smell
that bitch back there?’ In another moment he straightened up, coughed to clear his throat, and continued in a more normal tone of voice. ‘Anyway, we need to be certain the fat fool will accept our offer. So drink your wine … and watch the stairs!’

He turned away. Two paces took him across the balcony and through a curtained archway into a corridor. He passed a gentlemen’s toilet on his left, a ladies’ on the right, and entered a door marked ‘Private’ into Julio’s office.

Skirting the desk, he passed through a second door into Julietta’s sick-room. And there she lay, with the old biddy Katerin, eighty years old if she was a day, in attendance. The crone was nodding. Startled, she glanced up at Francesco through rheumy eyes. ‘Who? What?’ Then, recognizing him, she smiled, nodded and made to rise.

‘No, stay,’ he told her. ‘Best that you’re here, in case that oily little fat man should look in.’ Katerin nodded again and sat still. In the dimness of the room, the grandam’s eyes were yellow as a cat’s watching her master.

He sat halfway up the wide couch where Julietta lay, and his sudden weight woke her. Or perhaps she’d already been awake … waiting. Her eyes opened big as saucers; her jaw fell open; knowledge and horror painted themselves with rapid strokes upon her lovely, oval, oddly palid face. But in no way odd to Francesco. And before she could cry out, if she would:

‘Did you think I would desert you? Ah, no!’ he told her. And his hand crept under her blanket, under her nightgown, to her thigh, so that she could feel his fingers trembling there. ‘No, for having loved you once, I shall love you all the days of your life.’ But he did not say
‘my
life.’

As his hand climbed higher on her thigh, so Julietta’s mouth closed and her fluttering breathing steadied; she began to breathe more deeply - of
his
breath. His essence was in it, as it was in her. And his eyes were uniformly jet, like moist black marbles in his face and unblinking, or like the eyes of a snake before he strikes. Except he had already struck, on that night six weeks ago. And the poison had taken.

He smiled with his handsome, devil’s face, and the horror went out of her as she lifted her arms to embrace him. But that could not be. ‘Soon,’ he told her. ‘Soon - at Le Manse Madonie! Can’t you wait? A day or two, my Julietta. Just a day or two, I promise.’ Her sigh, and her breathing suddenly quickening; the long lashes over her dark eyes fluttering, as Francesco’s cool hand discovered the inside of her hot thigh. Then her nod, and a gasp of weird ecstasy as her head flopped to one side in sudden shame, or defeat, or surrender, and her thighs lolled open.

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Brian Lumley

He held her lips open with his thumb and smallest finger, and let the middle three elongate into her. His hand was quite still, but the three central fingers stretched with a caterpillar’s expansion, throbbing with the effort of metamorphosis like a trio of sentient penises, with pouting lips opening in their tips. And into her body they crept, while his thumb and smallest finger closed on her bud, to gentle it like a nipple.

And with the old crone watching and
knowing
everything - laughing silently through a gap-toothed mouth whose eye-teeth at least were still sharp and white - so Francesco found the artery he sought and used his fingers to pierce and sip at the soft centre of Julietta’s sex where the marks, if he left any, would never be found, and the blood, if any continued to flow, would have its own explanation.

Then, in a few seconds, a minute - as the girl went, ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’ and turned her head this way and that, until her eyes rolled up - slowly Francesco’s jaws cracked open in a grin or a grimace, allowing a trickle of saliva to slop from a corner of his writhing lips. In that same moment his own eyes turned to flame, and then to blood! Julietta’s blood. But:
Brother!
It was Anthony; not a call as such (for the brothers were not gifted with the true art), but a warning definitely. A tingling of nerves, a premonition. Julio was coming!

A moment to withdraw from Julietta, and another to lean forward and kiss her clammy brow. Then he was out of the room, flowing from Sclafani’s office into the corridor, and the door marked ‘Men’ closing softly behind him. And his penis steaming as he plied it in the privacy of a cubicle, once, twice, three times, before it spurted into the bowl. And even his sperm was red where Francesco pulled the chain on it …

In the corridor, Sclafani was waiting for him. ‘Ah! Forgive me! I supposed you would be in there. Your brother asked me to tell you … Your man has returned from England … And your driver, Mario? … A radio message?’ He fluttered his hands, as if that were explanation enough. Which in fact it was.

Francesco was cool now. He smiled his gratitude, and made for the balcony with Julio hard on his heels. ‘It’s been such a pleasure to have you,’ the fat man was babbling. ‘I can’t possibly bill you. What? But I’m already too deeply in your debt!’

At the table, Mario stood by in his uniform and cap while Tony spoke into a portable radio-telephone. Francesco wheeled on Julio and almost knocked him over. ‘My friend,’ he said hurriedly. This is a private conversation. You understand? As for the bill: the pleasure was all ours.’ He pressed a wad of notes into the proprietor’s hand, more than enough to cover what they had
not
eaten. As Julio waddled off, Tony was standing up.

‘ETA in forty-five minutes,’ he said. ‘Even if we go right now, still the

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chopper will beat us to the Manse.’ He shrugged. Francesco nodded and said, Til speak to Luigi
en route.’

In the limo Francesco sat up front beside Mario. Outside Palermo the

static cleared up and he was able to make himself understood on the

car’s communication system. ‘Your patient?’ ‘Sedated,’ came back a tinny, almost casual voice. Threw up a little … doesn’t seem to travel too well. The sedative, I suppose.’ From the back of the limo Tony said: ‘Well, purging can’t hurt.

They’l

be seeing to that anyway, at Le Manse.’ Francesco glanced back at him. ‘I left instruction, yes.’ And into the radio: ‘Any problems at the other end?’

‘None. Smooth as silk. Everything should be that easy!’ ‘Good,’ Francesco was pleased. ‘And this end? Control?’

They’ve cleared me on to Le Manse Madonie. No problem.’ (Of course not. The Francezcis’ man in Air Traffic Control at Catania

had picked up more than a year’s wages for this!) ‘Our people at the Manse will see to your patient,’ Francesco finished. ‘We’ll be along later. Oh, and well done.’ Thanks, and out,’ the unseen pilot answered. There were no frills, not on the air …

At Le Manse Madonie, the brothers looked on while their people saw to the girl from the helicopter. Still sedated, she’d been stripped and bathed by the time they got there. The rest of it would take most of the night. They watched for an hour or so - the enemas, the operation of the pumps and mechanically forced voiding, the ‘purification,’ as it were - but after that they lost interest. The manicuring of nails, the cleansing and polishing of teeth, application of fast-acting fungicides to her various openings (lotions to be removed later in a final bathing), al of that would go on and on. Clinical but less than beneficial: health wasn’t the object of the exercise. Only cleanliness.

‘And all wasted,’ Tony Francezci shook his head in disgust as they made for their apartments about midnight. They wouldn’t sleep but merely rest; time for sleeping when it was over.

‘Wasted?’ his brother answered. ‘Not at all. Well, the girl herself, maybe, but not the effort. He likes them clean, after all. And she can’t lie to him, can’t hide anything.
Outside
her mind, we could merely prise for clues.
Inside
it … he can lay everything bare down to the electrons of her brain and patterns of her past, the memories in the mush of her grey matter.’

‘Poetic!’ Francesco’s brother seemed appreciative, but his voice almost immediately turned sour. ‘Ah, but will he
divulge
what he discovers? Or will he obscure and obfuscate, as he’s so wont to do? He gets more difficult all the time.’

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Brian Lumley

‘He’ll tell us something of it, at least,’ the other nodded. ‘It’s been a while and he’s hungry. He’ll be grateful, and she’ll make a rare tidbit. Why, I could even fancy her myself!’

Tony gave a snort. ‘What?
But you
could fancy old Katerin, if that’s all there was!’ And as they parted company at the top of a flight of stairs and made for their own rooms: ‘Oh, and on that same note: did you have Julietta, in Julio’s backroom?’

‘Something like that,’ his brother leered back at him. ‘If you’re asking will we be sending for her … yes, we will. Why? Would you perhaps like her for yourself?’

‘Not really,’ Tony told him. ‘For you’ve been there before me.’ There was no malice in it, nor in Francesco’s answer:

‘It never stopped you before,’ he said, evenly …

In the hour before dawn, the Francezcis met again in the secret heart of Le Manse Madonie. Beneath extensive cellars and ancient foundations, at a place deep in the bedrock - a place known only as ‘the pit’ - they came together to attend personally to the final stage of the operation: the lowering of the girl into an old, dried-out well.

The mouth of the well was maybe fourteen feet across, wall to wall; the walls were three feet high, and of massive blocks of old hewn masonry; a ‘lid’ of electrified wire-mesh in a circular frame was hinged to the walls on opposite sides, covering the opening like a grille. But the pit was silent for now, sullen and sinister even to the Francescis. Down there somewhere, at a depth of some eighty feet, it opened into a cyst that had once contained water. Now it housed their father.

A mechanical hoist stood to one side, its gantry reaching out over the pit. Suspended by chains, a metal table slowly rotated.

The girl lay naked on the table, with her hands folded on her stomach. In her entire life she had only once been cleaner, less toxic: in the womb, in the days preceding her birth before the first human hands were lain on her. Now mhuman hands would be lain on her.

But first the interrogation; not of the girl but the Old Ferenczy, the monstrously mutated Francezci in his pit. Only the brothers were present; it wasn’t work for lesser, more easily influenced or corrupted minds. But then, how might one corrupt the Francezcis?

The cavern containing the pit was a natural place, made
unnatural
only by its grotesque inhabitant. Rocky ledges swept back into darkness, but the pit itself was illuminated: a bank of powerful spotlights shone down on it from the nitre-streaked dripstone walls. Where the shadows crept, stone steps had been cut back into a shaft that climbed in a spiral to the Manse - the aerie - high overhead. At the foot of the steps an electrified pneumatic ‘door,’ a grille of two-inch steel bars, guarded the exit. The door’s control panel was set well back within the brightly lit shaft. Like the cover over the old well, this door to the exit shaft wasn’t designed to keep anyone or thing out.

Yet the place wasn’t specifically a prison but more properly a refuge, a sanctuary … an asylum. And just this once, perhaps the Francezcis were of a single mind where they stood at the rim of the well and Francesco quietly commented:

‘It’s as if the “Mad”-in Madonie were deliberate …’

Tony at once cautioned him: ‘Always remember, brother: he can hear you. Even when you’re sleeping - or lost in your lust with some slut -
he
can be there. And he’s here even now.’

And the other knew it was true. Down here their father’s presence was everywhere. It was in the echoes of their voices; and despite the glaring lights - or because of them - it was in the movement of the blackest shadows back there where there should be no movement. It permeated the very atmosphere, as if the place were haunted. But the Old Ferenczy was no ghost. Nor would he ever be, so long as he was their oracle.

Francesco looked at his brother. ‘Well, are you ready?’

Tony licked his fleshy lips, and nodded. He wouldn’t ever be ‘ready,’ not really, but what must be must be. He had always been the Old One’s favourite, ‘spoiled’ by a father who had had time for him. As for Francesco: he had been too precocious; his father had
never
had time for him! Knowing something of the future - indeed, of most things -perhaps the pit-dweller had foreseen the time when Francesco would relish his …
incapacity.

The electricity was off, the grille safe. ‘Father,’ Tony leaned over the rim of the old well and gazed down through the mesh on a receding funnel of massive blocks of masonry. ‘We’ve brought you something. A small tribute, a gift - a girl!’

A girl… a girl… a girl,
the well repeated, an echo carried on the miasma. But a miasma, here? A wisp of mist, anyway, rising from the pit. The heat of the spotlights vaporized it, turning it to stench. The thing below might not be especially active, but it was there. It was breathing, and …

‘… Listening!’ said Francesco, who was sensitive to such things. ‘Oh, he hears you, all right!’

‘Father,’ Tony leaned out more yet. ‘We’ve brought a gift for you, but we have our needs, too. There are things we need to know …’ For a moment there was nothing, and then the well seemed to sigh! It was physical - in that a gust of foulness rushed up from below - but it was also mental: the Old Ferenczy’s telepathy, which in the brothers’ case had skipped a generation. And despite that they were not mentalists, still their father’s power was such that finally they

‘heard’ him: