Robert W. Walker (3 page)

The others, particularly the sensitive Dr. Patel, felt his recent change, the obvious no-longer-at-ease stance he had taken. The others believed that he was beginning to worry about the locals, rightly afraid for his life, and likely wondering why he, an American, and a wealthy one at that, should have bothered exiling himself in this way from his homeland.

"Dr. Stroud, you must get some rest,"
Ranjana
said to him, making him look away from the skull and into her jet-black eyes. She was a small woman, middle-aged, always a smile of reassurance on her face. "You must be tired."

There were a few cots at the back, but he could also go to the Hilton on the other side of town where he had kept a room that he had used very little in all his days here.

"Yes, perhaps you're right. I think I will take some time."

"The work will be here when you return, I assure you," agreed Dr.
Mamdoud
, a lusty, well-built Arab who was lighter-skinned than most Arabs. The Egyptians often treated him rudely, even those in the Antiquities Organization. He had had an American education, and he was considered by the Egyptians as an American since it was
Mamdoud
who had organized the U.S. financing of the sewage project at the outset. Consequently, the Egyptians didn't trust him much more than they trusted Stroud or other Americans on the project.
Mamdoud
wore soft-soled oxfords and the coat and tie of a professional, even in the Egyptian heat at noonday. The locals considered him quite mad.

Stroud said at the door, "I'll be back."

Within an hour after arriving at the Hilton, showering and shaving and having a light snack tray sent up, Stroud knew he would not be going back to the dig. His door was knocked on and men with guns stood outside, the Egyptian police. They held him at gunpoint while searching his room, ostensibly for stolen artifacts. Some earlier people working on the dig had made off with a few incidentals, knives, stone pieces, jewels--or so the Egyptians claimed. His sudden departure from the dig had worried someone high up in the Ministry of Antiquities, Stroud supposed. He let them search. And they did so with abandon, angering Stroud, who stalked and shouted at the police when they began to toss things about.

"Come on, take it easy with that!" he yelled when they hurled open a briefcase filled with papers.

"Here, here it is, Captain," shouted one of the young officers to his commander, holding up a small, bejeweled bracelet.

Stroud knew instantly he was being hustled, and that the bracelet had not come from the Cheops burial temple. "All right, so your boss wants me off the dig."

"You are in serious trouble here, Dr. Stroud," said the smiling Egyptian commander, a curl lifting his cheek. "I think very bad trouble for you."

"What is it you want?"

"I think it will save the state some difficulty, Doctor, if you were on the next flight to your country."

"I thought so."

"We will, of course, escort you to the airport." He ordered his men out as Stroud tried to clean up the mess they had made. Then the officer said, "I will give you time to dress and pack your belongings, Dr. Stroud."

"Thank you ever so much."

"Not necessary for thank-you." He was gone, but knocking for Stroud to rush before a few minutes had passed. Stroud packed, attempted to contact
Mamdoud
or Patel at the site, and failing this, he went with the authorities to the airport. Over the police radio he heard that the field laboratory had been the scene of street violence when police and locals clashed there. There were reports of gunshots and wounded. Stroud silently prayed for Patel and
Mamdoud
and the beautiful skulls of Cheops.

On the flight that would take him to New York, Stroud leaned back in the chair and fell asleep, the face of a stranger to him, a man named
Weitzel
, crystallizing in his mind. A face ... just a face ... sad and empty and devoid of all emotion ... just a face ... yet something deep within the mind of the emotionless face, buried but striving to climb to the surface ... a hunger or thirst or longing or all three; a hunger to be destroyed. But this death wish was also opposed by the same source. The dual nature of the longing to live and the longing to die represented a powerful life force.
Bizarre, perhaps; perhaps unnatural.
Either way, the abject sadness of the little man and the force that kept him alive seemed shrouded in a mystery that Stroud would never unravel, for the impressions and the vision wrought in his brain were fleeting, giving way to oblivion and sleep.

He dreamed of a normal life, a life without the Stroud
curse
upon it. Like his great-grandfather,
Ezeekiel
, and his grandfather,
Annanias
, Abe Stroud possessed an uncontrollable and often annoying precognitive power. Stroud had even seen the terrible event of his parents' deaths in an automobile accident, but not soon enough to alter it. As a child he had seen plane crashes, had even known the number of the flight and the airline before the plane went down. On the occasions when he tried desperately to warn anyone in authority, he was put off, ignored until it was too late.

It was not until his own brush with death much later, as a young man in war, that he truly became a seer, and this was after he had had the steel plate firmly affixed to his skull. The genetic "gift" or "cursed" gene handed down to him from generation to generation had been intensified and honed by the metal in his cranium, and sometimes it seemed to act like a bloody beacon, picking up psychic waves and auras from anyplace on the globe. In Andover, Illinois, the site of his ancestral home, it had sent him a vision of a small boy who had fallen prey to a cannibalistic vampire that the locals had come to regard as the Andover Horror. His psychic antennae had received pictures of slaughter and terror in a small Michigan town where people were being devoured alive by a werewolf that eventually made its way to Chicago. In both instances, Stroud's investigations had uncovered whole colonies of supposedly supernatural creatures, first vampires in Andover and then werewolves in Michigan.

Prior to becoming an archeologist, and prior to taking control of Stroud Manse in Andover, he was an ex-Marine turned policeman in Chicago. It was his near-death experience on a battlefield in Vietnam, the resultant steel plate given him by the V.A., and his ancestry that made his life a "curse." It was as if the metal plate had electromagnetically charged what nature had already given him. Without the plate, he doubted, for instance, whether he could "receive" the voices of his dead grandfather and great-grandfather, as he did on occasion.

When he was a policeman in Chicago, the
Tribune
and the
Sun-Times
had begun to refer to him as the "Psychic Detective." He soon grew tired of the freak show treatment he received even from guys in his own precinct.

A big man, broad-shouldered, in good health and shape, he towered over most men, and this, along with the "gift," scared lesser men. The result was that he knew few men whom he could call friends, and he had learned to be suspicious of those who tried too desperately to get close.

His dreams sometimes saw the thin anchoring of pressed alloy that one expert at the V.A. hospital outside Chicago claimed to be causing the pressure inward against the neurological center of the brain. It was the same area known to be most active during REM sleep, and during ESP.

For a time after his part in the war, there at the V.A., he had become a living laboratory to psychic researchers from all over the country, until he became sick and tired of the role they had handed him. Not waiting around for a second botched job on his head, the surgeons anxious to have another go at him, he abruptly left the V.A. center.

Pressure on the brain or no, ill-fit or no, seizures or no, he went on to make it through the police academy a year later. He'd spent thirteen years as a policeman, most of them as a detective. But in all his years as a detective, he had never put together the details of a crime scene
so
clearly as the picture of a man now nagging and pulling at him, a man named Simon Albert
Weitzel
. So clear, like high-tech resolution, the details of the man's hangdog expression, the blank stare in his eyes,
the
green hue to his aura where he stood teetering on the brink of a pit that gaped below him like the mouth of Hades itself. In the pit a black world filled with lost souls, and now
Weitzel
mechanically turns and leans in toward the maw of darkness when Stroud's hand leaped into his dream and took sudden hold of the man's arm, but it slid through his grasp like vapor, and the ill-conceived dream itself vaporized.

It
left him in peace. The image of the man left him in peace. It was what he wanted, to be left in peace. He was tired, and the disturbing dream was unwanted. And the curse he had fallen heir to was also unwanted. And yet to cast it away he must remove his own skull.

His sleep persona told him to focus his mind on the lovely, soothing beauty of the Egyptian artifacts he had helped to uncover and document, and he settled on the image of the crystal skull. A calm peace came over him that nothing, he prayed, could shake.

-2-

Stroud was awakened by the sound of the pilot's voice calling for all passengers to fasten their seat belts, telling everyone of the dismal weather outlook below the blanket of clouds they now skimmed through as they approached Kennedy. A stewardess became solicitous as she passed him, telling him he had slept through dinner.

"I hope you worked right 'round me," he told her.

"Will you be staying over in New York?" she asked, her pert red hair bobbing about an innocent-looking face with huge brown eyes.

"No, I'm going on to Chicago."

"Good ... good, so am I."

"See you on the last leg," he promised.

When they came out of the clouds, Stroud saw a city painted in gray and blue, her streets dappled in slick moisture. Obviously, it had been raining for some time, and the giant that was New York was being irritated now by a steady drizzle, hardly visible in the lack of light filtering through from above her. Above and around them, the underbelly of the clouds reflected the city lights, creating strange shapes in the night sky, shapes that looked like Grecian sculpture.

Stroud was soon watching people pass by and out of the plane, waiting until the place was near empty, as was his habit, before grabbing his carry-on, anxious to get to the rest room where he might shower his tired eyes with water, get a quick shave. He had a two-hour layover, and very little to occupy his time. He'd look for a
New York
Times,
maybe look through the book racks for the latest potboiler by Steve Robertson, his favorite author, whose books always dealt with Chicago cops.

Stroud's mind was filled with ways to keep
himself
occupied--as he hated a wasted moment--when, coming down the ramp, he realized that he was being met by policemen in uniform. Christ, he wondered, did it have anything to do with the Egyptian incident? He imagined an international ballyhoo over his having been escorted out of the other country.

"Dr. Stroud? Dr. Abraham Stroud?" asked one of the officers.

"I am Stroud, yes. What is it?"

"Would you come with us, sir?"

"To where?"
Stroud saw the stewardess he'd spoken to watching the scene, imagining the worst, he supposed.

"There are some people who would like to see you, sir, just outside on the tarmac," he replied, taking him to a window in the ramp. Stroud looked down at the strange entourage of official motorbikes and a limousine. He recognized police brass when he saw it, and this was it, but two men who stood outside the limo, staring up at him from below drenched umbrellas, looked anything but official, and were certainly not like cops he had ever seen before.

"Who are they?"

"C.P. and his aide," said the second cop. "Wants you pronto. Now, can we go?"

"Commissioner of police?"

The commissioner was most certainly inside the limo where it was dry. The two men standing on the tarmac with wet pant legs were dressed in the careless manner of scientists or professors, Stroud thought. One of these men was trying to tie a tie and failing miserably, as if he had either never learned or forgotten how. The other man's pin-striped coat clashed horribly with his brown dungarees.