Sleepwalker (18 page)

“You must tell me everything you know about Skeldergate,” Davis urged. “Not simply the very old. But the more recent. I want to know why the owners of the warehouse there decided to move. And how long the buildings stood empty before anyone made a move to tear them down. Were there unusual injuries during the demolition? I want to know how many little crimes have happened there, within living memory. I need to know everything. There is only one thing that can defeat this, whatever it is. Knowledge. I need information.”

“You know enough,” said Mr. Foote. “You know a king's body was dumped there, without ceremony. Because of this brutal contempt for his remains, the spirit is vengeful. If you want me to speak plainly, I have done so. Must I simplify it any more for you? The site is extremely dangerous to everyone who has even the slightest contact with it. Now that you have spoken to me, I am tangled up in whatever powers emanate from the unholy place, and that is why my pipes burst. I don't need a plumber, I need a priest. Please go away, Mr. Lowry. You are a very dangerous man.”

“I need to know what to do.”

“I suppose I should write a simple instruction book with frightening drawings for you so you could understand. I am afraid. I am very frightened. I am terrified, and I want you to go away. The situation is beyond what mere knowledge can cure.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Go away from here. As far away as possible.”

Davis was glad to be back in the street. He passed a man in gray work clothes looking at the numbers beside various doors. Davis directed him to Foote's shop, and then walked quickly across Deangate, and across the Minster green, to the Minster Library.

Davis asked to be admitted to the room with the rare manuscripts. “It's extremely important.”

No one moved to help him. “You must be Mr. Lowry,” said a large man with a beard. “I was told that you might possibly pay us a visit. Mr. Langton has left a message for you. He would like you to ring him immediately.”

Davis was mystified, but used the telephone in the well-organized office.

“Stop whatever you are doing and come over here at once,” said Langton. This peremptory tone was very much unlike Langton. His voice sounded hoarse, close to hysteria.

“How did you know I was going to show up here?”

“At once, Davis. I must see you now.”

“My work here was only going to take a few minutes.”

“Now, Davis. Please.”

Davis hesitated before the door to the rare manuscripts. “Actually,” said the bearded man, “he also asked us to not, under any circumstances, let you use any of our manuscripts.”

The man offered this not simply as a way of forbidding entry. He was plainly extremely curious, and wondered if Davis might be a terrorist, or a madman.

Three other librarians eyed him from the desks.

Davis smiled, and the man returned his smile, with some misgivings. “Perhaps the confusion can be sorted out.”

“I left messages everywhere. All the museums. All the libraries. I need to talk with you.”

Mr. Langton looked collected enough. He wore a gray cardigan, and a green knit tie. Mrs. Webster brought in tea, and Langton made a great show of fussing over which sugar cube to use. Davis declined tea. Langton shook his head, very slightly. He did not like this. It was a bad way to start a meeting, and it was apparently a meeting that Langton had planned. A meeting between the two of them. A meeting that would hold, for Davis, bad news. “I wanted to talk to you before you could do anything.”

“What was it you thought I was about to do?”

“Nothing in particular. Anything in general. I wanted to stop you in your tracks, and this is what I have done.”

“Why?”

“No need to be irritated, Davis.”

Davis waited.

“I admire you, as you must know.”

Davis forced a pleasant expression onto his face.

“You are the only one of our entire side who wants to keep up the fight. Admirable.”

Davis would not make this easy for Langton. Davis did not speak, and he did not take one of the little yellow biscuits Langton pushed toward him.

“I want you to stop. I want you to take a short holiday. Go to London, perhaps. Or up to Edinburgh. Go somewhere, and do nothing.”

Davis stared.

“Or if you insist on staying here, do absolutely nothing regarding our dig here. Do not go into the lab. Do not go near the site. Do nothing. You understand me, I hope.”

“You forbid me.”

“Please don't use such naked phrases, Davis.”

“But you do forbid me.”

“At the end of the day, I am responsible for you, for Irene, for Mandy, Jane—for all of you. Every one of you. And our work here is stirring up this—this evil, you might say. Like making a hive of bees upset. If we calm down and turn to other matters, perhaps the—the evil—perhaps the unfortunate events—perhaps they might stop taking place, and there is no reason to stare at me like that, Davis.”

Davis stood.

“So you will turn to other matters for a while, won't you, Davis?”

“Knowledge is what we need. Not ignorance. Forthrightness. Not cowardice.”

“Well put, Davis, but you have a very small audience to sway, an audience of one, and I am not moved.”

Davis studied this bland man, realizing that he had never paid him much attention. Langton was a man who, like so many Englishmen behind desks, looked vague and preoccupied with detail, and he certainly lacked Dr. Higg's humanity. He was a colorless man, and he was a man you would easily lose in a crowd. He did know one thing very well. He knew how to say no.

Davis resented Langton, and he would, naturally, not follow the bureaucrat's instructions. But he had a grudging respect for what was, in this officious man, a certain toughness. He would thank Langton and say nothing more.

The telephone trilled, and Langton spoke briefly.

He hurried from behind his desk, and flung himself into a coat.

“Come with me, Davis. Something ghastly is happening.”

22

Alf was strapped into his bed. He cried out, but his words were impossible to understand, if they were words at all.

Gradually, though, Davis could understand them. “Get away from me! Please, get away from me!”

Again and again, imploring someone or something to leave him alone.

“I see him,” said Alf, his thick tongue making his words nearly indistinguishable. “I see him, at the window.”

There was a window there, beside Alf. Grass, and the trunk of a tree.

Nurses hurried in and hurried out. Davis took one look at Alf, and had to hang on to something—he found a chair to lean on. Langton trembled, and had to sit down. A nurse attended to him, putting a hand on his forehead, bringing him a glass of water.

Alf groaned and tossed. He glistened with sweat. His tongue was swollen and filled his mouth, brown and quaking, like a toad. The worst thing about this appearance, however, was his eyes. They had sunk far into his skull, and when his lids trembled open, there was nothing but dark holes.

The injured arm was a great white melon of bandages. The arm had been strapped into place, but it jerked from time to time.

Dr. Hall strode into the room, and gazed down at the thrashing figure. He glanced at Langton, and then crooked a finger at Davis.

“His nervous system is necrotizing,” said Dr. Hall. “The major nerves are simply disintegrating. I say ‘simply.' It isn't simple at all. I've never seen anything like it. The optic nerve is already gone. Dissolved, like so much overcooked porridge.”

“It has nothing to do with the explosion, does it?”

Dr. Hall pulled at his lower lip. He roused himself as though from a daze. “There's a law in medicine, as in every other science. I think of it as the Uniqueness Prohibition. If it happens in one place, it happens in many, is one way of putting it. There are rare syndromes, nearly unheard-of diseases. But virtually nothing that is literally unique. What is happening to this man is unheard of. What is happening to Dr. Higg is equally mystifying, although quite different. Both men are suffering from something apparently unique.”

“I think we should have a talk,” said Davis.

Dr. Hall gave him a hard look. “Yes, I think we should.”

“It will take a few minutes. I can't explain it all here. You won't believe it, anyway.”

Dr. Hall smiled, and Davis liked him. The man did not mind mysteries. What he really minded was death. “Let's take a quick walk, shall we? We can have some fresh air and some privacy at the same time.”

The District Hospital grounds were bright in the afternoon, and the trees, while black and bare, seemed to be tipped with the lightest gold from place to place. Naked rose stalks shivered on their stakes, and the earth was black where a gardener had worked it. It was winter and spring at once, and the green of the lawns as the two men talked was shocking, nearly unbelievable, as though the tint control on a television set overadjusted to produce a blazing green impossible in nature. There was a scent of wet earth, and, far away, the purr of a lawn mower.

Dr. Hall did not even ask a question until Davis had told everything, even the tale of the burst pipe in Mr. Foote's bookshop, and then Dr. Hall shook his head sadly. “How could so many bright people suffer such a delusion?”

Davis was irritated, but then he realized that Dr. Hall was reacting as any rational person would, as Davis himself would have reacted a few weeks ago.

“Now that you have lost all respect for us,” said Davis, with as much cheer as he could, “I suppose you still have no idea what is wrong with Alf and Dr. Higg.”

Dr. Hall shook his head. “Your interesting story has shed no light at all. We're wasting time, as well.”

As though to demonstrate the truth of this, a nurse stood in the distance, waving a white arm. The two men ran, and the nurse told them with a glance that something very bad was happening.

Alf's face was shriveled, gray and nearly unrecognizable. The skin of his uninjured arm was so withered that the tattoos had lost much of their definition. Black fluid streamed from Alf's nostrils.

Dr. Hall swore, and snapped instructions. Alf heaved against the restraints. For several minutes nurses and doctors wrestled with the struggling figure.

Alf howled, and his head seemed to burst.

Black, putrid matter spattered the ceiling and the walls, and Alf gave a long, broken groan.

He was silent.

Then the men and women slumped, fatigued. The body did not move. Dr. Hall gave quiet instructions, and turned to face Davis.

The doctor was thin and small suddenly. He looked away from Davis, and yet seemed to need to talk.

Davis had enough experience with postmortems to be able to hazard a guess or two. Alf had apparently suffered a massive infection that had attacked the nervous tissues. Davis had handled a number of skulls of syphilis victims. A massive infection could even eat into the bone of the skull, rotting it as worms rot wood. But syphilis took decades to accomplish its horror. This had taken hours.

Dr. Hall sighed and shook his head, indicating that he couldn't talk just yet. He gazed at the floor, and then turned angrily away from Davis, as though Davis reminded him of ghosts and poltergeists and other such foolishness.

It was hard to believe that cheerful, lively Alf was gone.

A fellow worker. A colleague.

Someone who needed to be avenged.

Mr. Langton had watched it all, and now sat with his arms folded. “They weren't much use, were they, all these well-trained people.”

One of the nurses glanced his way. She was using a white rag on some of the debris that had burst from Alf's body.

“They did their best, though,” Langton added quickly. “Admirable people.”

The older man stood weakly, and put his hand to the chair for support. Then he shook himself. “We mustn't give in to weakness, must we?”

Davis could think only, Alf is gone.

“Peter will be shocked,” said Davis at last. “He thought we would save Alf, even his hand. Peter's already pretty disturbed by all of this. This will be hard.”

“Peter knew something like this would happen,” said Langton. “He knew someone would die.”

Figures ran in the corridor.

“Another casualty,” said Langton vaguely.

Then the two of them hurried, too.

The crisis was in Dr. Higg's room.

A tall, heavyset nurse blocked the door. They would have no more criticism from Mr. Langton. “Just a minute, if you please,” she said.

Dr. Higg was wheeled out of his room, a tangle of transparent tubes and medical personnel. Davis could see only a glimpse of Higg's ashen profile.

“You see, Davis, what we are up against,” said Langton, when, he could speak.

Davis did not. What they were up against was entirely mysterious, although apparently malevolent and extremely powerful. Beyond that, he knew nothing. He had the bare beginnings of a plan, though. A sketchy plan. He needed information, and time.

“This is why we must stop working on anything associated with Skeldergate,” said Langton. “Perhaps we may even have to fill in the trenches.”

Davis wheeled, appalled. “And destroy all that work!”

Alf's work.

“Try not to hate me, Davis. None of us believe in such things. The Bible has its witch of Endor and other such devils and demons. So perhaps it's not unchristian to believe in such things. I really don't know what to believe. I know only one thing, Davis: there's nothing at all we can do.”

We shall see, thought Davis.

The Minster Library would close in half an hour. It was nearly dark in late afternoon. The Minster cast not only a shadow, but a dark that spilled everywhere, filling the sky.

“I require admission into the rare manuscript room. Not as a staff member of the Foundation. On my own business.”

Davis flashed his cards identifying him as a member of three different university faculties—two of the cards were out of date, but there was no need to explain that. There was one of Dr. Higg's cards expressing hope that “all courtesies would be extended,” a card Davis had carried for some fifteen years, and never had to use until now.