Descendant Page 4

  The Screecher kept his hands held up in front of his face, and didn’t answer me. Frank barked at him, but even Frank was sensible enough not to go too close. The Screecher may have looked like a down-and-out, but I knew from experience that he was quite capable of ripping Frank’s head off with his bare hands.

  “I’m giving you one last chance,” I said, in German. I took out my pistol again, and pointed it directly at his heart. “We can save you . . . give you back the life you used to have before. Think of it, your family, your sweetheart. All you have to do is tell us where your friends are.”

  I was lying, of course. I didn’t know if it was possible to return a Screecher to normality, even if we were to give him a massive blood transfusion. We had never tried. Every Screecher by his very nature had committed mass murder, so we had never had much incentive.

  “OK, then,” I told him. I cocked my pistol and gripped it with both hands. Even if I hit him directly in the heart it wouldn’t kill him, but it would stop him long enough for us to put the thumbscrews on him, and prevent him from escaping.

  I was just about to fire when the Screecher suddenly performed a backward somersault. Then he performed another, and another, right up the bars of the elephant cage, until he reached the ceiling, over thirty feet above our heads.

  I fired two deafening shots, but the ceiling was vaulted and I was terrified of ricochets. The Screecher crawled quickly across it, clambering over the vaulting like a huge brown spider, heading for the entrance. Frank started barking again, and Corporal Little took out his pistol, too, but I shouted at him, “No!”

  As the Screecher scuttled upside-down across the ceiling, I took the silver-wire whip out of the Kit and flicked it so that it unravelled. The whip was heavy and springy and jumped around with a tensile life of its own. I swung it back and lashed out with it, catching the Screecher just as he reached the architrave around the door. There was a small barbed grappling hook on the end of the whip, and it snatched at his coat. I yanked the whip hard, but his coat tore and the hook came free.

  Frank was hurling himself up and down, barking insanely. Corporal Little maneuvered himself until he was right beneath the doorway, his pistol raised. I lashed out again, and this time the grappling hook caught the Screecher in the back of the head, burying itself in his scalp. He cried out in pain, and reached around with one hand, trying to pull the hook loose. It was then that I gave another yank, and he lost his grip on the ceiling and slammed on to the floor on his back.

  Immediately, while the Screecher was still concussed, Corporal Little and I seized his arms and wrenched off his overcoat. We pulled off his coat, his shirt, and his pants. I hated this part of the job. Live Screechers always stank of decay, like that chicken you should have cooked the day before yesterday, and their skin had a chilly greasiness about it which took carbolic soap and very hot water to wash off. Like all Screechers, this one was dead white, with a slightly bruised look across his abdomen and his inner thighs, the telltale sign of internal putrefaction.

  Even before we had finished stripping him, he started to come to. His head lolled from side to side, and he coughed, and said something that sounded like German, although I couldn’t understand what it was. Then he twisted his back, and tried to flap at Corporal Little with his right arm.

  Without hesitation, I took the thumbscrews out of the Kit and fastened them tightly, so that his hands were forcibly held up in front of his bony chest. Then I pinioned his big toes together with the toescrews.

  In English, he said, “What—what are you doing? What are you doing? I will kill you!”

  “I gave you an eighteen-carat golden opportunity, didn’t I?” I retorted. “All you had to do was tell us where your friends are hiding.”

  “Go to hell. My friends will hunt you down and they will cut you open like pigs!”

  “Oink! Oink!” Corporal Little taunted him.

  Between us, we dragged him across to one of the Egyptian-style pillars. He was wriggling and struggling and trying to bite us, and he was unnaturally strong, considering how wasted he looked. It took a whole lot of grunting and shoving to press him up against the pillar, but while Corporal Little held him in position, I wound the whip around him six or seven times and made it fast. The silver wire cut into his skin as if it were candle wax.

  “All right, then,” I panted, “I’m going to ask you again. Where are your friends hiding?”

  “You think that I will tell you anything?” he said, speaking in German again. He spat at me, although I was too far away, and the thick saliva ended up swinging from his chin.

  “Listen,” I warned him, “I don’t want to hurt you, fellow, but if you won’t cooperate . . .”

  “Go to hell.”

  I went over to the Kit and took out the dental forceps. Then I came straight back to the Screecher and gripped his nose tightly in my left hand, so that he couldn’t breathe. He tried to waggle his head from side to side but I held him fast. “Mmmmmhhff!” he protested, trying to keep his mouth closed. “Mmmmmhhff!”

  But he couldn’t keep his lips together for longer than a minute and a half. When he opened them, gasping for breath, I immediately forced my thumb under his upper lip. Then I gripped his left front incisor with the dental forceps, and wrenched it, hard. His gum made a sharp cracking noise, and welled up with blood, but the tooth was reluctant to come out. I had to jerk the forceps backward and forward three or four more times before I managed to extract it altogether. Immediately I gripped his right front incisor, and started to tug that, too.

  “Aaaaggghhhh!” he choked, as I pulled the tooth out by its roots. Without hesitating, I moved the forceps across to his canines.

  “You want me to stop?” I asked him.

  He said nothing, but coughed, so that a fine spray of blood covered his chest.

  “OK . . . maybe you need something more persuasive. What do you think, Corporal, something more persuasive?”

  “Sounds good to me. Think of all the innocent people he must of killed.”

  “That’s right. Like Ann De Wouters. Now, why did you and your friends want to murder Ann De Wouters?”

  “I told you to go to hell,” the Screecher spluttered.

  “Well, yes, you did. But you and I have to talk first, and you have to tell me what I need to know.”

  “You can’t kill me.”

  “What? Is that what they told you?”

  “You can hurt me as much as you like but you can never kill me. When you have been lying in the cemetery for a hundred years, I will still be alive to piss on your grave.”

  “Sorry, pal,” I told him. “I hate to be the one to break this to you, but somebody’s been shooting you a line. Not only can I kill you, but I can kill you in such a way that you will wish you had never been born.”

  The Screecher spat out more blood. “You’re lying.”

  “I’ll prove it to you. That’s unless you tell me where your friends are.”

  The Screecher struggled against the silver wire, but he succeeded only in cutting himself, so that blood ran down his skinny white thighs. When I thought back on it after the war, I sometimes found it hard to believe that I could have treated anybody with such cruelty, even a Screecher. But then I remembered all the times we broke into houses in France and Belgium and the Netherlands and found heaps of men, women and children, massacred so that the Screechers could feed on them. When I remembered that—the smell and the flies and the tangles of pitiful bodies—what I was doing, by comparison, seemed almost restrained.

  I took the bottle of holy oil from the Kit, unstoppered it, and held it up in front of the Screecher’s face. “With this oil, I thee anoint,” I told him.

  “You think that scares me, you shitbag?”

  “No, I don’t. In fact I don’t think your or your friends are scared of anything, which makes you very dangerous. And because you’re so dangerous, that makes me all the more determined to kill you.”

  I poured about a tablespoonful of oil
over the Screecher’s head, so that it ran down his face and dripped from the end of his nose. He shuddered, and took a deep snorting breath. To him, in his state of utter unholiness, consecrated oil would have felt scalding.

  I took hold of his oily hair and twisted it up into a point, like the wick of a candle. Then Corporal Little stepped forward, and handed me his Zippo.

  “Last chance,” I said, flipping back the lid. “You could save yourself a whole lot of pain here, believe me.”

  The Screecher said nothing, so I snapped the lighter into flame. The Screecher stared at me with such venomous hatred that I wished that I had blindfolded him.

  “I’m going to count to three,” I told him. “Then you’re going to burn like a church candle.”

  “I’ll do the counting for you,” he said. “Eins—zwei—drei—now do whatever you have to do!”

  I lit his hair, and immediately the whole of his scalp caught fire. His hair shriveled and his skin blistered and even his ears were alight. He managed to bear it for nearly five seconds without moving and without crying out, and he even managed to keep his eyes open. But then the oil on his face burst into flame and he closed his eyes tight shut and screamed. I had never heard a man scream like that before. It sounded just like a French woman in Normandy whose legs had been crushed by a Sherman tank. Three soldiers had pulled her out but her legs had stayed where they were.

  The Screecher tossed his head wildly from side to side, which only had the effect of fanning the flames and making them burn more fiercely. He screamed and screamed for nearly half a minute but then he stopped screaming, and let his head fall back against the pillar. The flames died down and he was left smoldering, his whole head blackened and raw, his lips enormously swollen and his nostrils clogged with blood.

  I used the Zippo to light a cigarette. I waited for a while, smoking, and then the Screecher slowly opened his eyes.

  “Now that smarts, doesn’t it?” I asked him.

  “You can’t kill me,” he said, his voice thick with pain.

  “Oh yes I can. Do you want to know how?”

  “You can’t kill me, whatever you do.”

  I reached into the Kit and produced the nails. “You see these? Do you know what these are? These are the same nails that the Romans used to nail Christ to the cross. And do you know what I’m going to do with them? I’m going to hammer them into your eyes, and right into your brain. That won’t kill you, I admit, but it will have the effect of paralyzing you, so that you won’t be able to stop me from doing what I’m going to do next.

  “I’m going to cut your head off with this saw, and I’m going to take your body to the Calvary Garden of Sint Paulus Kirk, and I’m going to bury it there, because I have special dispensation from the Dominican monks to do that. Then I’m going to take your head and I’m going to boil it until the flesh falls off and your brains turn into broth. And that is how I kill people like you.”

  “Whatever you do, we will have our revenge on you. I can promise you that.”

  I smoked my cigarette right down to the very last eighth of an inch, and then I stepped on it. “Corporal Little,” I said, “how about passing me that holy oil again?”

  Corporal Little did what I asked him. I took the stopper off the oil and said, “This is what we call burning the candle at both ends. Just our little joke.”

  With that, I poured oil between his legs, all over his scraggy pubic hair and his penis, and relit Corporal Little’s Zippo.

  The Screecher stared at the flame out of his swollen, half-closed eyes.

  “I want you to know that I am doing this simply for the pleasure of it,” I told him. “I don’t care whether you tell me where your friends are, or not. I’m going to kill you whatever. I just want to hurt you as much as I possibly can before I do.”

  Corporal Little was holding his collar but Frank made a strangled whining noise and scrabbled his claws on the floor, as if he wanted to get away. I don’t know if that was what convinced the Screecher that I was serious, but he suddenly said, “Seventy-one Schildersstraat, on the corner of Karel Rogierstraat. They’re hiding in the attic.”

  “How many of them?”

  “Two. A German called Pelz and a Romanian called Duca.”

  “Is Duca the dead one?”

  “Dead? What do you mean? He’s not dead.”

  “What I’m asking you is—is Duca strigoi vii or strigoi mort?”

  “I still don’t understand what you mean.”

  Corporal Little said, “Sounds like this guy doesn’t even know half of what he was getting himself into.”

  “Oh, I think he has the general idea. It’s just that they didn’t fill him in on all the gory details. They promised you that you’d live forever, didn’t they? That’s what they said. They said you were going to be a hero, and turn back the tide of the war. I’ll bet they offered to pay your family a fortune, too. Take care of your folks and your girlfriend.”

  “What are you going to do now?” asked the Screecher.

  “What do you think I’m going to do now?”

  “You said you could give me back the life I had before.”

  “Did I? Did I really say that?”

  “You promised me that if I told you where my friends were, you would let me go.”

  “Well, that was very stupid of me, wouldn’t you say? Because I have no way of checking if your friends are really where you say they are, or not.”

  “I swear that I am telling you the truth. Seventy-one Schilderstraat. Fourth floor, in the attic.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Ernst . . . Ernst . . . Hauser,” he said, almost as if he could barely remember.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Drensteinfürt. It’s a village near Münster, in West-falen. Why?”

  “After the war, I want to write your family, and tell them where you died. I think they deserve that much. Not how you died, of course. They wouldn’t want to know that. But where.”

  “You’re really going to kill me, aren’t you?”

  I nodded. “It’s what I do, Ernst. It’s what I came here for.”

  Corporal Little handed me the mallet and one of the nails. I positioned the nail so that the point was only a half-inch away from the Screecher’s eyeball.

  “I can’t tell you that I regret doing this,” I told him. “The plain truth is that I don’t.”

  The Stations of the Cross

  Father Antonius opened the small garden door at the side of Sint Paulus Kirk, on the corner of Veemarkt and Zwartzusterstraat, and the hinges shuddered as if they were in pain. Father Antonius was bald and almost comically ugly, with enormous ears and drooping jowls, so that he looked as if he were distantly related to Frank.

  “I didn’t expect you so soon, Captain,” he told me, in a thick, phlegmy voice. “In fact, to be truthful, I didn’t expect you at all.”

  “Well, God was on our side and we caught up with one of them at the Zoo.”

  “You’ve—?” asked Father Antonius, making a cutthroat gesture with his finger.

  “We have his body in the back of the Jeep. Is it OK to bring it in?”

  Father Antonius didn’t look at all happy, but he said, “Yes, we agreed. So, yes. I will make sure that we bury it right away.”

  Corporal Little and I went back to the Jeep. Between us, we lifted the rough hessian sack off the backseat and carried it through the gates and into the Calvary Garden. At this time of the night, the garden was a deeply unsettling place to visit, not only because of its Gothic arches and its dark shadowy corners, but because it was crowded with sixty-three life-sized statues depicting Christ’s journey to the cross, culminating in a crucifixion on top of a stone mound. The figures stared at us blindly as we shuffled between them like a pair of grave-robbers. The sack in which we had tied up the Screecher’s body swung heavily between us, and my end of it was soaked in blood.

  Up above us, searchlights flicked nervously across the sky, alth
ough the night was unusually quiet, and there was no sound of bomber engines or artillery fire.

  “Here,” said Father Antonius, pointing to an open area of grass. “If you leave him here, we will do the rest.”

  “Thank you, Father.” I lowered my end of the sack and wiped my hands on my handkerchief. “There may be two more. We’ve been given an address but we’re not yet sure if it’s genuine.”

  Father Antonius crossed himself. “I wish you God’s protection in your work. I don’t pretend to understand what you are doing. I don’t even know if I believe in such things. But these have been terrible days, and anything which can help to bring them to an end . . .”

  A bitter wind was blowing across the Calvary Garden as we walked back between the silent stone figures, and dead leaves rattled against the walls. Corporal Little said, “When are we going after the other two, sir?”

  “Not until it gets light. If they’re hiding where Ernst said they were hiding, I don’t think that they’ll have tried to make a break for it yet. They’re probably still waiting for poor old Ernst to come back.”

  We closed the garden gate behind us and climbed in the Jeep. On the floor in front of the backseats was a cardboard box which had originally contained cans of condensed milk. One corner of the box was stained dark brown.

  “Let’s just make sure that he never can come back, shall we?”

  Frank barked and shook his head so that his ears made a flapping noise.

  Ground Zero

  I slept until well past oh-seven-hundred hours, which I hadn’t done for months. Most nights I had terrifying dreams about shadows chasing after me, and I woke up with a jolt while it was still dark. One of the hotel maids tapped on my door and came in with a pot of coffee and two bread rolls with red plum preserve. She was a shy young girl, plump, with a pattern of moles on her cheek.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her. I could see myself in the closet mirror and my hair was sticking up like a cockatoo.