Descendant. Part 1

GRAHAM MASTERTON.

Descendant

Diana.

It was a sweltering Thursday afternoon and I was caught in the usual southbound traffic jam on the Kennedy Bridge when WRKA played "Diana," and I felt as if my entire skin-surface was shrinking.

"Diana," by Paul Anka. That song has haunted me for the past fifty years, and I guess it always will. Whenever I hear it, I can't stop myself from turning my head around, just to make sure that I'm not being followed, or that somebody isn't watching me from some shadowy doorway on the opposite side of the street.

"I'm so young and you're so old." It brings everything back. The gla.s.sy heat of the South London suburbs in the middle of summer, the large 1930s houses with their red-tiled roofs and their tennis courts, the flat sweet smell of British pubs, the shabby clothes and the tiny little cars.

And those things that ran through the streets, dark and voracious and utterly cruel. Clinging to ceilings, rus.h.i.+ng up walls. You think that you know what it's like to be frightened? You don't have any idea.

When I finally arrived back home in Kenwood Hill, I closed the front door and stood for a long time with my back pressed against it, and my heart was beating like a jackhammer. Two semicircles of crimson light shone on the wall from the stained-gla.s.s window at the top of the stairs, like bloodshot eyes. It was then that I thought, dammit, whatever the government might do to me, it's high time that you knew the truth. That's why I'm going to tell you what really happened during that summer of August 1957, and what hideous carnage we had to face. I'm going to tell you what happened afterward, too, and for me that was even more of a nightmare. All I did was put off the evil day. Sooner or later, the decision that I could never bring myself to make is going to be yours. back pressed against it, and my heart was beating like a jackhammer. Two semicircles of crimson light shone on the wall from the stained-gla.s.s window at the top of the stairs, like bloodshot eyes. It was then that I thought, dammit, whatever the government might do to me, it's high time that you knew the truth. That's why I'm going to tell you what really happened during that summer of August 1957, and what hideous carnage we had to face. I'm going to tell you what happened afterward, too, and for me that was even more of a nightmare. All I did was put off the evil day. Sooner or later, the decision that I could never bring myself to make is going to be yours.

I was officially warned never to talk about it. Two days after I was relocated to Louisville, a pimply young man came round to my house in a s.h.i.+ny gray suit and warned me not to say anything, ever, not even to my wife Louise. Even after all these years, I guess the government could still have me arrested for breaching national security, or lock me up in a nuthouse, but they can't terrify me the way that I've been terrified every single day for the past fifty years.

Because vampires never, ever forgive you for anything.

Antwerp, 1944.

Captain Kosherick led me up the uncarpeted stairs of this narrow, unlit building on Markgravestraat, in the northwest part of the city. Two small children with grubby faces were standing in a doorway on the second landing, a girl and a boy, and Captain Kosherick said to them, "You're going to be OK, you understand? We're going to arrange for somebody to take care of you."

Behind them, in the gloom of her sitting room, an old woman was sitting in a sagging brocade armchair. Underneath her black lace widow's cap, her hair was white and wild, and her face looked like a shriveled cooking apple.

"Somebody from the children's services will be calling around later!" Captain Kosherick shouted at her. Then he turned to me and said, "Deaf as a f.u.c.king doorpost."

"Mevrouw!" I called out. "Iemand zal binnenkort de kinderen komen halen!"

The woman flapped her hand dismissively. "Hoe vroeger hoe beter! Deze familie is verloekt! Niet verbazend dat hij de mensen van de nacht heft gestuurd om het mee te brengen!"

"What did she say?" asked Captain Kosherick.

"Something about the family being cursed."

"Well, I think she was right on the money about that. Come take a look for yourself."

He led me along the corridor and up another flight of stairs. I could smell boiled cabbage and another smell much stronger and more distinctive: the smell of blood. Although it was mid-October, it was unseasonably warm; the stairwell was alive with glittering green blowflies.

At the top of the stairs there was a much smaller landing, and then a door with two frosted-gla.s.s panels in it. The door was half ajar and even before we opened it I could see a woman's leg lying on the floor with a worn-out brown brogue lying close by.

Captain Kosherick pushed the door wide so that I could take in a full view of the room. It was a one-room apartment, with a large iron-framed bed in one corner, a fraying beige couch and a wooden wheel-back chair. There was a small high window over the sink, which had a view of a light gray sky and the dark thirteenth-century spires of the Vrouwekathedrall. Beside the sink there was a small homemade shelf with a red-and-white packet of tea, a blue pottery flour jar, a gla.s.s dish with a tiny square of b.u.t.ter in it and three potatoes that were already starting to sprout.

A picture of the Virgin Mary hung on the wall beside the shelf. Both of her eyes had been burned out with lighted cigarettes.

I looked down at the young woman lying facedown on the streaky green linoleum. She must have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight, with wavy brown hair that she had obviously tried to color with henna. She was wearing nothing except a reddish wool skirt that had been dragged halfway down her thighs. Her skin was very white and dotted with moles. dragged halfway down her thighs. Her skin was very white and dotted with moles.

There were spots and sprays of blood all around her, and several footprints, some whole and some partial, including some smaller bare footprints that must have been those of her children. But considering what had been done to her, there was remarkably little blood.

"Want me to turn her over for you?" asked Captain Kosherick.

I nodded. I was sweating, and the air was clogged with the brown stench of blood, but I had to make sure.

Captain Kosherick hunkered down beside the young woman and gently rolled her on to her back. She was quite pretty, in a puffy Flemish way, with bright blue eyes. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were small, with pale nipples. She had been split wide open with some very sharp implement from her breastbone to her navel. Her heart had been forcibly pulled out from under her rib cage and her aorta cut about three inches from her left ventricle. It looked like a pale, saggy hosepipe.

"You seen this kind of thing before?" said Captain Kosherick. "The MPs told me to call you in as soon as they found her."

I lifted my khaki canvas bag off my shoulder, unbuckled it, and took out my Kodak. I took about fifteen or sixteen pictures from different angles, while Captain Kosherick went out on to the landing for a smoke.

After I had finished taking pictures I searched the young woman's room.

Captain Kosherick came back in again. "What are you looking for, if you don't mind my asking?"

"Oh, you know. Evidence."

He was very young, even though he had a streak of gray hair and a bristly little mustache. But I guess we were all very young in those days, even me.

I lifted up the thin threadbare mat beside the bed. There were signs that one of the floorboards had been lifted, so I went to the sink and took out a knife to pry them up. Underneath, in the floor s.p.a.ce, I found a rusty can of cooked ham, two cans of Altmecklenburg sausages, three cans of condensed milk, a box of cocoa powder and a box of powdered eggs, as well as three packs of Jasmatzi cigarettes.

"Quite a h.o.a.rd," said Captain Kosherick, peering over my shoulder. "All German, too. Where do you suppose she got these from? Fraternizing with the enemy?"

"Something like that."

"So somebody from the resistance found out and they punished her?"

"That's one possibility."

"Listen . . . I know this is all supposed to be top secret and like that, but who do you think might have done this?"

I looked down at the young woman lying on the floor. A blowfly was jerkily walking across her slightly parted lips.

"Oh, I know who did it. What I don't know yet is why."

The Night People.

I went downstairs again and knocked on the old widow's door. The two children were kneeling on the window seat looking down at the street below. A ray of sunlight was s.h.i.+ning through the boy's ears, so that they glowed scarlet.

The old widow lifted her head to see me through the lower half of her bifocals, and made a kind of silent snarl as she did so.

"Did you see anything?" I asked her, in Flemish.

"No. But I heard it. b.u.mping, and loud talking, and footsteps. They were Germans."

"The Germans aren't here any more. The Germans have been driven back to the other side of the Albert Ca.n.a.l."

"These were Germans. No question."

I looked at the children. I guessed that the girl was about six and the boy wasn't much older than four. In those days, though, European children were much smaller and thinner than American children, after years of rationing.

"Do you think they saw anything?"

"I pray to G.o.d that they didn't. It was three o'clock in the morning and it was very dark."

"You want a cigarette?" I asked her.

She sniffed and nodded. I shook out a Camel for her, and lit it. She breathed in so deeply that I thought that she was never going to breathe out again. While I waited, I lit a cigarette for myself, too.

"You mentioned the night people," I told her. Mensen van de nacht Mensen van de nacht. I hadn't told Captain Kosherick about that.

"That's what they were, weren't they? You know that. That's why you're here."

I blew out smoke and pointed to the ceiling. "What was her name? Had she been living here long?"

"Ann. Ann De Wouters. She came here last April, I think it was. She was very quiet, and her children were very quiet, too. But I saw her once talking to Leo Coopman and I know they weren't discussing the price of sausages."

"Leo Coopman?"

"From the White Brigade."

The White Brigade were the Belgian resistance. Even now they were helping the British and the Canadians to keep their hold on the Antwerp docks. Antwerp was a weird place in the fall of '44. The whole city was filled with liberation fever, almost a hysteria, even though the Germans were still occupying many of the northern suburbs. Some Belgians were even cycling from the Allied part of the city into the German part of the city to go to work, and then cycling back again in the evening.

I gave the old woman my last five cigarettes. "Do you mind if I talk to the children?"

"Do what you like. You can't make things any worse for them than they already are."

I went over to the window seat. The boy was peering down at three Canadian Jeeps in the street below, while the girl was picking the thread from one of the old brown seat cus.h.i.+ons. The boy glanced at me, but said nothing, while the girl didn't look up at all. down at three Canadian Jeeps in the street below, while the girl was picking the thread from one of the old brown seat cus.h.i.+ons. The boy glanced at me, but said nothing, while the girl didn't look up at all.

"What's your name?" I asked the girl. My cigarette smoke drifted across the window and the boy furiously waved it away.

"Agnes," the girl told me, in a whisper.

"And your brother?"

"Martin."

"Mrs. Toeput says that Mommy was sick so she's gone to Hummel," Martin announced, brightly. The Flemish word for "heaven" is "hemel" so he must have misunderstood what the old woman had told him. The girl looked up at me then, and the appeal in her eyes was almost physically painful. He doesn't know his mommy's been killed. Don't tell him, please.

"Our uncle Pieter lives in Hummel," she whispered.

I nodded, and turned my head so that I wouldn't blow smoke in her face.

"Did you see anything?" I asked her.

She shook her head. "It was dark. But they came into the room and pulled Mommy out of bed. I heard her say, 'Please don't-what's going to happen to my children?' Then I heard lots of horrible noises and Mommy was kicking on the floor."

Her eyes filled up with tears. "I was too frightened to help her."

"It's good for you that you didn't try. They would have done the same to you. How many of them were there?"

"I think three."

Three. That would figure. They always came in threes.

The little girl wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her frayed red cardigan. "I saw something s.h.i.+ning. It was like a necklace thing."

"A necklace?"

"Like a cross only it wasn't a cross."

"Those are the good good men," interrupted the little boy, pointing down at the Canadians. "They came and chased all the Germans away." men," interrupted the little boy, pointing down at the Canadians. "They came and chased all the Germans away."

"You're right, hombre," I told him. Then I turned back to the little girl and said, "This cross thing. Do you think you could draw it?"

She thought for a moment and then she nodded. I took a pencil out of my jacket pocket and handed her my notebook. Very carefully, she drew a symbol that looked like a wheel with four spokes. She gave it back to me with a very serious look on her face. "It was s.h.i.+ning, like silver."

I gave her a roll of fruit-flavored Life Savers, and touched the top of her dry, unwashed hair. Not much compensation for losing her mother, but there was nothing else I could offer her. I still think about them, even now, those two little children, and wonder what happened to them. They'd be in their sixties now.

The old widow said, "You see? I was right, wasn't I? It was the night people."

I didn't say anything. I wasn't allowed to tell anybody what my specific duties were, not even my fellow officers in the 101 Counterintelligence Detachment.

Captain Kosherick came back in. "You done here?" he asked me. "I got two corpsmen downstairs ready to take the body away."

The little boy frowned at him. You don't know how glad I was that he couldn't understand English.

Frank Takes a Drink.

Frank was sitting on the cobbles when I came out of the house, his purple tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth.

Frank was a four-year-old black-and-tan bloodhound who had been specially trained for me in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, by the man-trailing expert Roger Du Croix. Actually Frank's saddle spread so far over his body that he was almost entirely black, but Roger had explained to me that he was still officially a black-and-tan.

In Belgium, they called him a "St. Hubert hound," after the monk who had first trained bloodhounds in the seventh century, the patron saint of hunters. Frank's real name was Pride of Ponchatoula but I had re-christened him in honor of Frank Sinatra, who happened to be my hero at the time. When I walked along De Keyserlei, with my greatcoat collar turned up, I liked to think that I looked as cool and edgy as Frank Sinatra did.

"How's it going, Frank?" I asked him. "Hope you've been conducting yourself with decorum."

Frank was a pretty obedient dog but now and again he had a fit of the loonies, which Roger Du Croix said was brought on by him picking up the smell of dead rats.

Corporal Little said, "He's been fine, sir. I fed him those marrowbones and then he took a dump around the corner."