The young man raised one hand to protect its face, and started to edge its way toward me again. But then I
handed the Bible to Jill, and said, “Open it where it’s bookmarked, and hold it up high.”
She took the Bible and found the faded red ribbon. Then she opened it wide and held it up. It was marked at Revelation, Chapter 20: “
A prins balaurul—arpele eel veche, care este Diavolul i Satan, l–a legat pentru o mie de ani
.”
Both Screechers found it almost impossible to see. When I had first used this Bible on a Screecher, during World War Two, I hadn’t been able to believe that the word of God could have such a blinding effect on them. But they were totally unholy, and it did. It was like throwing salt on slugs.
I shoved my gun back into its holster and took out my silver-wire whip. I made Jill take a step backward, toward the door, and then I lashed it sideways so that it wound itself around the young man’s chest, pinning its arms. I gave the whip a sharp yank, and the young man fell onto the worn-out carpet, struggling and swearing.
“What you done to me, you bastard? What you done?”
You never forget how to restrain a Screecher. After you’ve done it often enough, you could almost do it in your sleep. Kneel on its chest, fasten its thumbs together with the silver thumbscrews, then drag off its rancid shoes and fasten its big toes together, until you hear the screws crunch into the bones. The gingery-headed girl kicked and wrestled me, too, but for a Screecher it was very weak. I must have hurt it badly when I shot it, and Jill helped me by holding the Bible right in front of its turquoise-mottled face so that it was completely dazzled.
When I had tightened up their thumbscrews and toescrews, I pulled the young man so that it was sitting
upright, and unwound the whip. Then I dragged the girl off the couch so that
it
was sitting upright, too, back-to-back, and I wound the whip around both of them, so hard that it was cutting into their arms.
Jill looked at me, and I could see that she was disturbed.
“You’re going to regret this, you bastard,” the young man told me.
“Not half as much as you are, sunshine.” You see how British I was becoming, and I’d only been there a couple of days. “Especially if you don’t tell me what I need to know.”
“I’m not telling you nothing. You can effing eff off.”
“I want to know where Duca is, that’s all.”
“Micky’ll split you wide open and I’ll drink you dry,” the girl spat at me.
“Um, I don’t think so. You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that I can’t kill you. The truth is, I
can
, and I’m going to.”
Jill was still holding up the Bible. I said, “It’s OK, Jill, you can put that down now. The only way these characters are getting out of here is in a sack.”
She slowly closed the Bible and put it back into my Kit. “You’re not really going to . . . ?”
“Kill them? Of course. They’re half-dead already. But I need some information first.”
“Why should we tell you anything?” said the young man. “If you’re going to kill us anyway, what’s the effing difference?”
“The difference is that if you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’m going to hurt you both very badly.”
Jill said, “Jim—can I talk to you? Outside, if that’s all right.”
“Sure. These two aren’t going anyplace.”
She went out into the front garden. I could see that she was very agitated. Bullet stayed close to her and kept looking up at her anxiously.
“Jim, they told me that you were going to kill the Screechers, when you found them, but I never realized that it was going to be like this.”
I didn’t know what to say. She was a lovely and sensitive young woman and I really didn’t want to distress her, but she had to realize that we were hunting some of the most disgusting parasites on the face of the earth and there was no easy or humane way of exterminating them.
“Listen,” I said, “why don’t you go back to that laundry and call Terence for me again? Tell him where we are and tell him that we’re going to need an unmarked van. He’ll know what you mean.”
“I don’t know how you can do this,” she said.
“If it’s any consolation, neither do I.”
“How long do you need?”
“Give me ten minutes, OK? If they’re going to talk, that should be long enough.”
“And if they don’t?”
The two Screechers looked up at me as I came back into the house and I don’t think that I have ever seen such hatred on any creature’s face, human or not.
“You still don’t want to answer my questions?” I asked them. “All I need to know is where Duca is hiding himself, and how many people he’s infected.”
“You can kill us but we won’t die,” said the young man, contemptuously. “You can even cut our heads off and we won’t die.”
“Oh, yes, I know that. But that can only happen if your body is able to escape from the place where I put it, and your head is still reasonably intact. Since I’m going to bury your bodies in consecrated ground, and I’m going to boil your heads until there’s nothing left of your brains but soup, which I’m going to pour down the drain, there isn’t much chance of that happening.”
“Duca will find you, and Duca will make sure that you suffer.”
“Duca doesn’t have to worry about finding me. I’m going to find it first. I have a score to settle with Duca.”
“Well,
we’re
not going to help you find him,” said the gingery-haired girl.
“You want to bet?” I asked it. I went to the windows which overlooked the backyard, and pulled down the grubby net curtains. Then I came back and wrapped the curtains around the Screecher’s heads.
“What are you doing, you tosser?” the young man said, spitting to get the net curtain out of its mouth.
“Guy Fawkes’ Night just came early,” I told it.
“What?”
I took the holy oil out of my Kit, unstoppered it and poured it over their wrapped-up heads.
“Bloody hell, that burns!” the young man shouted, tossing its head violently from side to side. The girl didn’t say anything, but sucked in its breath because the oil hurt so much.
I took a box of Swan Vestas and struck one, holding it up in front of them so that they could see the flame.
“Now do you want to tell me where Duca is hiding?”
“You’re mad, you are!” the young man screamed. “I’m not going to tell you nothing!”
“The choice is yours, buddy. How about
you
, sweetheart, are
you
going to tell me where Duca is?”
“Go to hell,” the girl retorted, its voice muffled under the nets.
“In that case, you don’t leave me any alternative.” The match had burned right down to my fingers and I had to blow it out and take out another one.
At that moment, though, Jill came back into the living room. She looked wide-eyed at the two Screechers with the net curtains wrapped around their heads, but she didn’t ask me what I was doing. Instead, she said, “I’ve just spoken to Terence. He’s identified the car.”
“Well, that’s good news for these two. Comparatively speaking.”
Jill had written the car-owner’s address on the back of a laundry bill. “It belongs to Dr. Norman Watkins, the Laurels, Pampisford Road, South Croydon. He’s in general practice, but most of his patients are private.”
“So . . . I wonder what a
strigoi mort
is doing, driving his car around?”
“Terence is leaving now. He’s going to collect his car from Beddington Park, and then he’s coming over here with a van. He says that he shouldn’t be more than an hour.”
“That’s plenty of time. Do you want to take Bullet for a walk while I do the necessary?”
Jill said, “All right. Come on, Bullet.” But when she reached the door she hesitated. “Do you have to do this? I mean, is there really no other way?”
“Come on, Jill—you saw for yourself what these two jokers are capable of. And once they become
strigoi mortii
they’ll spread their infection like wildfire.”
“Can’t they be given a proper trial?”
“Jill—justice is a human right. These goddamn things are halfway to losing their humanity already.”
“Duca will drain your blood, even if we can’t,” said the gingery-haired girl. “I promise you that, you piece of shit. I promise both of you.”
“Watch your language,” I told it.
Terence arrived just after 5:00
PM
, followed closely by a dark blue Austin van. Jill and I were sitting on the low brick wall in front of the house, with the mid-August sun in our eyes.
The van was driven by a whippet-thin man in a brown boiler suit, with a sharp purple nose and hair that stuck up at the back of his head. His companion was big and silent, with a blue-shaved head and a scar under his nose where his harelip had been sewn up.
Without a word, the two of them opened the back doors of the van and carried two folded-up coal sacks into the house. Terence went in after them and came out almost immediately, looking queasy. “My God, ‘Jim.’ ”
“Nobody said that it was pleasant.”
“I know, but all the same.” He pressed his hand over his mouth and held it there for a while, his eyes watering. “My God. I wish I hadn’t had those sausages for lunch.”
Micky and Beryl hadn’t been easy to kill, especially since I was on my own, and I wasn’t nearly as young and as fit as I used to be during the war. The only way to kill them together was to force Beryl facedown onto the
floor, with Micky on top of her, facing upward. Even though they were both restrained, they still twisted and fought and cursed, and I had to wedge their shoulders underneath the legs of a dining chair to keep them still. I hammered each nail directly into Micky’s eye sockets, and at nine inches they were just long enough to penetrate the back of Beryl’s skull, too, which was sufficient to numb her. Then I got out my saw and cut through their necks, leaving both of their heads in the kitchen sink.
The driver and his companion came shuffling out of the house, with one of the sacks swaying heavily between them. Terence winced and looked in the opposite direction. “What do you plan to do about Duca?” he asked.
“Go after it,” I told him. “But this isn’t something we can rush. Duca’s going to be a hell of a lot wilier than these two, and much more difficult to nail down. We need to do some reconnaissance first.”
“What’s your suggestion?”
“Well, it’s posing as a doctor, isn’t it? So let’s make a doctor’s appointment.”
Pampisford Road was a three-mile-long avenue that ran along the east side of Croydon Aerodrome. Most of its houses had been built in the mid-1930s—large detached residences hidden behind laurel hedges—but they weren’t as opulent as Jill’s parents’ house, and most of them weren’t nearly so well maintained. Their front gates were sagging on their hinges and their gardens were overgrown with weeds.
We parked on the grass verge about fifty yards away from the Laurels and walked the rest of the way, leaving Bullet in the car. On the gatepost there was a tarnished
brass nameplate with the name Dr. Norman Watkins, FRCS, General Practitioner, engraved on it. Beyond the gate there was a shingled driveway, where Dr. Watkins’s Armstrong-Siddeley was parked. The house was pebble-dashed and painted white, although the pebble-dash was gray from years of weathering and there was a bright green streak of damp down one wall, where the guttering was broken.
I said, “You can see why Duca chose a practice like this. Dr. Watkins was running it single-handed, and from the looks of things, he was probably pretty old. He wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a fight.”
“What’s the plan, then?” asked Terence. The windows of the house were black and curtainless, and the interior looked deeply forbidding, with dark antique furniture and mirrors on the walls. In the dining-room mirror, we could see ourselves standing in the driveway, our faces pale and distorted, like reflections in a lake.
“Why don’t you keep watch from the road?” I told Terence. “Jill and I will go in and try to see Duca.”
“You’re actually going to go in and talk to him?”
“
It
,” I corrected him. “Never forget that it’s an it. But, yes. We can make out that we’re just about to get married, and we need some information on birth control.”
Jill looked at me and gave me a nervous smile.
“Well,” I said, “we don’t want a whole lot of baby Falcons around, do we? Not just yet.”
“Do you need your Kit?” asked Terence.
I shook my head. “This is a recce, that’s all. But if you hear any gunfire, bring it in—and bring it in quick.”
Terence retreated to the sidewalk just outside the Laurels, standing behind the hedge and lighting a cigarette.
Jill and I crunched over the shingle to the maroon-painted front door. There was another brass sign on it—polished, this time—which said
KINDLY ENTER
. I turned the doorknob and we went inside.
The house was stuffy, as if nobody had opened a window in a very long time, and there was an underlying smell of boiled fish. The hallway was tiled in a diamond pattern of black and white, with a hideous oak coat stand, and four or five dead flies lying on their backs on the windowsills.
A doorway to the left-hand side was open, and I could hear typing. I went in, and Jill followed me. A middle-aged woman in a pale green tailored suit was sitting very upright at a desk, her head slightly raised so that she could see through the lower half of her bifocal spectacles, pecking away at a huge black typewriter.
Opposite her stood a row of bentwood chairs, and a low table with a collection of dog-eared magazines on it—
John Bull
and the
Illustrated London News
and
Horse & Hound
.
The woman looked up and said, sharply, “Can I help you?” as if helping us was the last thing she wanted to do.
“I—ah—we don’t have an appointment, but we were wondering if we could see Dr. Watkins.”
“I’m afraid surgery finished half an hour ago, and in any case Dr. Watkins is away.”
“It’s just that this is the last chance we’ll get before Saturday.” I gave Jill an indulgent smile and took hold of her hand. “We’re getting married, and there were one or two things we wanted to talk about. You know, personal things.”