Festus? Yes, Festus — but, again, in what connection?
Then I heard it. A name: chanted by the three worshippers, but not by Funny-Mouth who still sat aloofly upright. “Summanus, Summanus, Summanus…” They chanted; and suddenly, it all clicked into place.
Summanus! Of whom Martianus Capella had written as being The Lord of Hell… I remembered now. It was Pliny who, in his Natural History, mentioned the dreaded Tuscan Rituals, “books containing the Liturgy of Summanus Of course; Summanus — Monarch of Night — The Terror that Walketh in Darkness; Summanus, whose worshippers were so few and whose cult was surrounded with such mystery, fear, and secrecy that according to St Augustine even the most curious enquirer could discover no particular of it.
So Funny-Mouth, who stood so aloof to the ceremony in which the others were participating, must be a priest of the cult.
Though my eyes were fixed — my centre of vision being a picture, one of three, on the compartment wall just above Moustache’s head —I could still clearly see Funny-Mouth’s face and, as a blur to the left of my periphery, that of Jock. The liturgy had come to an end with the calling of the ‘God’s’ name and the offering of bread. For the first time Funny-Mouth seemed to be taking an interest. He turned his head to look at the table and just as I was certain that he was going to reach out and take the bread cakes the train lurched and Jock slid sideways in his seat, his face coming into clearer perspective as it came to rest about half-way down Funny-Mouth’s upper right arm. Funny-Mouth’s head snapped round in a blur of hate. Hate, livid and pure, shone from those cold eyes, was reflected by the bristling eyebrows and tightening features; only the strange, painted-on mouth remained sterile of emotion. But he made no effort to move Jock’s head.
It was not until later that I found out what happened then. Mercifully my eyes could not take in the whole of the compartment — or what was happening in it. I only knew that Jock’s face, little more than an outline with darker, shaded areas defining the eyes, nose, and mouth at the lower rim of my fixed ‘picture,’ became suddenly contorted; twisted somehow, as though by some great emotion or pain. He said nothing, unable to break out of that damnable trance, but his eyes bulged horribly and his features writhed. If only I could have taken my eyes off him, or closed them even, to shut out the picture of his face writhing and Funny-Mouth staring at him so terribly. Then I noticed the change in Funny-Mouth. He had been a chalky-grey colour before; we all had, in the weak glow from the alternatively brightening and dimming compartment ceiling light. Now he seemed to be flushed; pinkish waves of unnatural colour were suffusing his outré features and his red-slit mouth was fading into the deepening blush of his face. It almost looked as though … My God! He did not have a mouth. With that unnatural reddening of his features the painted slit had vanished completely; his face was blank beneath the eyes and nose.
What a God-awful dream. I knew it must be a dream now — it had to be a dream — such things do not happen in real life. Dimly I was aware of Moustache putting the bread-cakes away and folding the queer table. I could feel the rhythm of the train slowing down. We must be coming into Grenloe. Jock’s face was absolutely convulsed now. A white, twitching, jerking, bulge-eyed blur of hideous motion which grew paler as quickly as that of Funny-Mouth — if that name applied now — reddened. Suddenly Jock’s face stopped its jerking. His mouth lolled open and his eyes slowly closed. He slid out of my circle of vision towards the floor.
The train was moving much slower and the wheels were clacking over those groups of crisscrossing rails which always warn one that a train is approaching a station or depot. Funny-Mouth had turned his monstrous, nightmare face towards me. He leaned across the aisle, closing the distance between us. I mentally screamed, physically incapable of the act, and strained with every fibre of my being to break from the trance which I suddenly knew beyond any doubting was not a dream and never had been …
The train ground to a shuddering halt with a wheeze of steam and a squeal of brakes. Outside in the night the station-master was yelling instructions to a porter on the unseen platform. As the train stopped Funny-Mouth was jerked momentarily back, away from me, and before he could bring his face close to mine again Moustache was speaking to him.
“There’s no time, Master — this is our stop…” Funny- Mouth hovered over me a moment longer, seemingly undecided, then he pulled away. The others filed past him out into the corridor while he stood, tall and eerie, just within the doorway. Then he lifted his right hand and snapped his fingers.
I could move. I blinked my eyes rapidly and shook myself, sitting up straight, feeling the pain of the cramp between my shoulder blades. “I say …” I began.
“Quiet!” ordered that echoing voice from unknown spaces — and of course, his painted, false mouth never moved. I was right; I had been hypnotized, not dreaming at all. That false mouth — Walker in Darkness — Monarch of Night — Lord of Hell — the Liturgy to Summanus …
I opened my mouth in amazement and horror, but before I could utter more than one word — “Summanus…” — something happened.
His waist-coat slid to one side near the bottom and a long, white, tapering tentacle with a blood-red tip slid into view. That tip hovered, snake-like, for a moment over my petrified face — and then struck. As if someone had taken a razor to it my face opened up and the blood began to gush. I fell to my knees in shock, too terrified even to yell out, automatically reaching for my handkerchief; and when next I looked up coweringly, Funny-Mouth had gone.
Instead of seeing him — It — I found myself staring, from where I kneeled dabbing uselessly at my face, into the slack features of the sleeping Jock.
Sleeping?
I began to scream. Even as the train started to pull out of the station I was screaming. When no one answered my cries I managed to pull the communication-cord. Then, until they came to find out what was wrong, I went right on screaming. Not because of my face — because of Jock …
A jagged, bloody, two-inch hole led clean through his jacket and shirt and into his left side — the side which had been closest to … to that thing — and there was not a drop of blood in his whole, limp body. He simply lay there — half on, half off the seat — victim of ‘a bleddy heathen ceremony’ — substituted for the bread-cakes simply because the train had chosen an inopportune moment to lurch — a sacrifice to Summanus …
The Thief Immortal
This next is a story about the most virulent vampire of all time. A mere glance, and… but please read on, for I’d hate to spoil it for you. Oh, and just to be topical, it’s also a human tragedy and an ecological disaster story — on a grand scale! So if you thought the Gulf War was something …
Klaus August Scharme was born in a tiny village called Paradise close to Koln in the middle of the year 1940. The name of his birthplace has nothing to do with Scharme’s story; the village was anything but paradisiacal, being a collection or huddle of farm buildings, some middling private dwellings and a grubby gasthaus, all reached along unmetalled roads which for at least four months of the year were little more than ruts around the perimeters of boggy fields.
Therefore, neither the date nor location of his origin was especially auspicious. The best we can say of them is that they were uninspired … drab beginnings for a man whose longevity would make him a legend of godlike proportions, not only in his own lifetime but also in every one of the countless millions of lives which would come and be lived and go — often in unseemly haste — before Scharme himself was yet fifty years old.
But here the paradox: he achieved that age not as might be expected in 1990, but in the summer of 2097. And the following story includes the facts of how that came about.
Aged sixteen years and three months, Scharme left Paradise and became an apprentice sign writer. He took up lodgings in Koln at the house of his master, where for the next five years he learned how to paint those intricate Kreise signs, which signify with heraldic sigils the boundaries of the many and
various districts of Germany. At that time such signs could be found on all major roads where they approached any specific district, and where for many years they had been the prey of avid ‘art collectors’ from England, France, the USA — the troops of NATO in general — energetically maneuvering and war-gaming across the long-since conquered German countryside. But this too is a mere detail and should not be allowed to detract … except that it also served as Scharme’s launching point on his trajectory of four hundred years’ duration.
It started as a dream: Scharme dreamed that he was growing old at an unprecedented rate. He aged a day for every hour, then a week for every minute, finally a year for every second, at which point he collapsed in upon himself, died, crumbled into dust and blew away.
He woke up screaming, and it was the morning of his twenty-first birthday. Perhaps the dream had come about through a subconscious awareness of his proximity to the age of manhood; perhaps it had dawned on him that the first part of his life was done, ended like a chapter closed. But that same day, as Scharme replaced a purloined sign upon its post, he saw speeding by him a military Land Rover … and reclining in the open back of the vehicle a good half-dozen of these very signs over which he laboured so long and hard! The driver of this vehicle, a young Corporal in British uniform, laughed and waved as he sped into the distance; Scharme, wide-eyed in anger where he gazed after him, thought: “Damn you … you should age a year for every sign you’ve stolen!”
At which he was horrified to see the Land Rover swerve violently from the road to strike a tree!
Leaping onto his bicycle, Scharme raced to the scene of the accident. The Corporal, alas, was dead; also, he was old; moreover (and as Scharme would later work it out), it was probably the instantaneous aging that had caused him to swerve — making Klaus August Scharme a murderer! And he knew it was so, for at the moment of his wish — that the Corporal should age commensurate with his thieving — he had felt himself the beneficiary of those years, some thirty-five in number. The Corporal had been twenty-five years of age; he was now sixty. Scharme had been twenty-one and still looked it, but some strange temporal instinct within told him that he would be fifty-six before he began to age again. Somehow — in some monstrous and inexplicable fashion — he had stolen all the young soldier’s years!
And so for the next thirty-five years Scharme aged not at all but remained twenty-one; but — and most monstrously — in the twelve-months after that he aged altogether too many years, so that while by rights (?) he should only be twenty-two, his internal hourglass told him that in fact he had spilled the sands of ten whole years! It was the summer of 1997; K. A. Scharme had lived for fifty-seven years, should have aged by only twenty-two of them, and yet knew that physically he had aged thirty-two of them. In short, he knew that he was now getting old at ten times the normal rate, and that therefore he had started to pay the world back for the time he owed it. In just two and a half more years he’d be pushing sixty, and all the pleasures of an apparently eternal youth would be behind him and senility just around the corner. It was all grossly unfair and Scharme was very bitter about it.
So bitter, indeed, that the guilt he had felt over the past thirty-five years quite melted away. He determined to do something about his predicament, and of course it must be done quickly; when one is aging an entire year for every five weeks, time grows very short. But still Scharme was not a cruel man, and so chose his next victim (the very word left an unpleasant echo in his mind) with a deal of care and attention.
He chose, in fact, a crippled greypate who suffered incessant arthritic pains, stealing his last four years with the merest glance. The old man never knew what hit him but simply crumpled up in the street on his way to collect his pension. And Scharme was pleased that (a) the old boy would know no more pain, and (b) that the state was plainly a benefactor, likewise every taxpayer, and (c) that he himself, K. A. Scharme, would now live for a further four years at the constant age of only thirty-two and some few months. Which would surely be sufficient time to work out some sort of humane strategy.
Except … no sooner had his mental meter clocked up the defunct dodderer’s four years, than it inexplicably halved them, allotting Scharme only two! Alarmed, he returned home and collapsed before his TV, where at that very moment they were showing an interview with a prisoner on Death Row. It was reckoned that this one could stave off his execution by a maximum of only two years, and that only at great expense. Scharme decided to save him and the state both money and trouble, and snatched his two remaining years right through the screen! The prisoner died right there in full view of many millions (good riddance, the majority said) but Scharme only gasped as the stolen time registered within him at a mere fraction of the time perceived: namely, six months!
It didn’t take much of a mathematician to work out the implications. Complete this sequence: If thirty-five equals thirty-five, and four equals two, and two equals one-half…
Patently Scharme was only going to get one-eighth of his next victim’s span of years; and after that one-sixteenth; then only one small thirty-second part, und so weiter. Which was precisely the way it was to work out.
But… let’s not leap ahead. Scharme now had two and a half years of other people’s time in which to think about it and plan for his vastly extended future. Which, diligently, he now set about to do. Nor did it take him thirty months by any means but only one day. You’ll see why if you apply yourself to his problem:
His seventh victim would yield only one sixty-fourth of his remaining span, his eighth perhaps four or five months … good God! … By the time the vampire Scharme had taken his tenth victim — and even were that tenth a newborn infant — he would only be gaining a matter of weeks! Twenty victims later and he’d be down to seconds! Then half-seconds, microseconds, nanoseconds! By which time, quite obviously, he’d have arrived at the point where he was taking multiples of lives, perhaps even entire races at a gulp. Was that his destiny, then: to be a mass murderer? To be guilty of invisible genocide? To be the man who murdered an entire planet just to save his own miserable life?
Well, miserable it might be, but it was the only one he had. And life was cheap, as he above all other men was only too well aware. And so now he must use his two and a half year advantage to its fullest, and work out the real way it was going to be.
Scharme’s grandfather had once told him: “It takes hard work to earn a sum of money, but after that all it takes is time. Money in the bank doubles every ten years or so. That’s something you should remember, Klaus August Scharme …” And Scharme had remembered.
And so for now he lived as frugally as possible, saved every pfennig he could get his hands on, banked his wages and watched the interest grow month by month, year by year. And while his money was growing, so he experimented.
For instance: he knew he could steal the lives of men, but what about animals? Scharme had read somewhere that no man knows the true age of sharks; so little is known about them that their span of years is beyond our scope. And he’d also read that barring accidents or the intervention of man, a shark might live for as long as two or three hundred years! Likewise certain species of tortoise, lizard, crocodile. Testing out the sharks, crocs and such, Scharme gained himself a good many years. But at the same time he lost some, too. The problem was that he couldn’t know in advance how long these creatures were destined to live! A hammerhead off the Great Barrier Reef earned him three whole years (miraculous!), but another, taken the same day, was worth only an hour or two. Obviously that one had been set to meet its fate anyway. As for crocodiles: he ensured that several of those would never make it to the handbag stage!
And so eventually, without for the moment doing any further damage (to the human race, anyway) Scharme clocked up one hundred years on his mental chronometer and was able to give it a rest. He was more or less happy now that he could take it easy for a full century and still come out the other end only thirty-two years and some few months old. But rich? Oh, be cert
ain he’d come out rich!
Except … what then, he wondered? What if — in the summer of 2097 when he’d used up all his stolen time — what if he then began to age too fast again? And just how fast would he age? Would it be ten years for every ordinary year, as before — or a hundred — or … a thousand? Or would he simply wither and die before he even knew it, before he had time to steal any more life? Obviously he should not allow that to happen. But at least with an entire century to give it a deal of considered thought, he wasn’t going to let the knowledge of it spoil what he already had. Or what he was going to have …
The spring of 2097 eventually came around, and Scharme was a multi-millionaire. Back in the Year 2000 he had had only 23,300 Deutsch Marks in his Koln bank; in 2010 it had been 75,000; in 2050 the sum was 3,000,100; and now he was worth close to one hundred millions. (Not in any bank in Koln, no, but in several numbered accounts in Switzerland.) And Scharme was still only thirty-two years old.
But as the spring of that year turned to summer the thief immortal was prepared and waiting, and he sat in his Hamburg mansion and listened to the clocks in his head and in his very atoms ticking off the seconds to his fate. And he knew he was taking a great chance but took it anyway, simply because he had to know!
And so the time narrowed down to zero and Scharme’s internal time clock — the register of his years — recommenced the sweep, which he had temporarily stilled back in 1997. And so horrified was Scharme, so petrified at what transpired, that he let the thing run for a full three seconds before he was able to do anything about it. And then, on the count of three and when he was capable again, he pointed a trembling but deadly finger at a picture of Japan in his Atlas and absorbed the lives of all its millions — yes, every one of them — at a stroke! And saw that he had only clocked up five extra years!