Festival of Fear (31 page)

‘Come,' said Richard Vuldus. He led her over to the side of the bed, closer to the bedside lamp. He touched her hair, and her cheek. ‘Do you know what I see in you? I see a woman of such complexity. A woman who needs to show what she can do, but has not yet discovered a way to do it. Maybe this will be the way.'

He drew her soft blue-gray sweater over her head, so that for a moment she was blinded. When she emerged, he gently teased up her hair with his fingertips.

‘You should grow your hair,' he told her. ‘You would look like a dryad with long hair. Free and wild. A child of nature.'

‘Can we just—?'

‘Of course.'

He tugged down the zipper at the side of her skirt, and unfastened the hook and eye. She stepped out of it, so that she was standing in front of him in nothing but her blue lacy bra and black pantyhose. He kissed her forehead, although she didn't want kisses, in the same way that prostitutes never wanted kisses. This was business, not love. At least she supposed it was business. She began to feel light-headed and disoriented, as if she hadn't eaten for two days.

With his long, chilly fingers, Richard Vuldus released the catch of her bra. Her breasts were small and rounded and high – drum majorettes' breasts, Tony used to call them. Richard Vuldus touched her nipples and they crinkled and stiffened.

‘You should imagine now that we have been friends for a very long time,' he murmured. ‘Maybe we knew each other at college. We were never lovers, but looked at each other from time to time and knew that if things had turned out differently, we might have been. Now, tonight, many years later, we have met again by accident.'

He slipped his fingers inside the waistband of her pantyhose and gently tugged them down to her thighs. He cupped the cheeks of her bottom in both hands, and then he let his left hand stray round to her vulva. One long middle finger slipped between her lips, touching her clitoris so lightly that she barely felt it, but it was so cold that she became aware of her own wetness. She shivered – but against all of her instincts, she was aroused.

He lowered her into a sitting position on the bed. Then he knelt down in front of her, and drew her pantyhose all the way down and off her feet. As he did so, he took hold of each foot and kissed it in turn, his fingers working their way between her toes, his thumb pressing deep her insteps. She had gone to a reflexologist once, to relieve her tension, but she had never had her feet massaged like this before. Every time the ball of his thumb rolled around the bottom of her foot, she felt as if he were kneading her perineum, between her vagina and her anus, and the sensation was almost unbearably erotic. She began to feel delirious with pleasure.

He stood up, and leaned over her, and kissed her forehead. She found herself tilting her head back so that she could kiss his neck, and then his chin, and then his lips.

‘There is such darkness in the world,' he whispered. ‘There is darkness so deep that sometimes we have despaired of ever finding our way out of it. But tonight you and I will light a light, no matter how small, and everything will gradually brighten, and we will see again.'

‘Kiss me,' she said, and as he kissed her, she plunged her hands into the soft blackness of his robes, and felt his body underneath, his hard muscles, his ribs, his hips.

He straightened up, and drew the robes over his head like the great black shadow of a raven flying overhead. The robes fell softly on to the floor and he was naked in the lamplight. He was wide-shouldered, but his stomach was very flat, and Helen could see the definition of every pectoral and deltoid and biceps as if he were a living diagram of the human body. He was completely hairless – no chest hair, no underarm hair, no pubic hair – and his skin was smooth and faintly luminous, with a pattern of those darker patches down his sides and around his thighs.

His penis was fully erect now, and it was enormous, with a gaping plum-colored glans, already glistening with fluid. Helen reached out and took hold of the shaft, and gripped it tight, and his distended veins felt like the twisted creepers around a tree trunk.

She lifted her head, so that she could kiss his penis, but he gripped her shoulder and pressed her back. ‘Not that way,' he said. ‘We must conserve everything we can.'

She said, ‘You're incredible. I never met a man like you before. Ever.'

He climbed on to the bed next to her. He said nothing, but firmly turned her over on to her stomach. Then he knelt behind her and took hold of her hips and lifted her into a crouching position.

‘I am the father of your child,' he said. ‘I am nothing more than that.'

With that, he parted the cheeks of her bottom with his thumbs, and positioned the head of his penis between the lips of her vulva. Helen lowered her head. She felt as if the pattern on the quilt were alive, and that its swirls and curlicues were crawling underneath her like green-and-crimson centipedes.

Richard Vuldus slowly pushed his erection inside her, and it felt so large that she couldn't help herself from gasping. He drew himself out again, hesitated for a second, and then pushed himself inside her a second time, so deeply that she could feel his naked testicles against her lips.

God, she had never had sex like this before, ever, with anybody. She almost felt as if she were going mad. The blood pumped through her head so hard that she could hear it, and she started to tremble. Not only was her body completely naked, but her soul, too. She felt subjugated, dominated, but lusted-after, and needed. She pressed her head down against the pillow and reached behind her with both hands, spreading the cheeks of her bottom even wider so that Richard Vuldus could penetrate her deeper. There was a brutal urgency in Richard Vuldus' love-making, and he forced his penis into her faster and faster. She was so wet that they were both smothered in slippery juice.

Helen could feel an orgasm beginning to rise between her legs, and her thighs started to quiver. She squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth and gripped the quilt tight. All the same, it hit her before she expected it, like a huge black locomotive coming out of the darkness with its headlight glaring and its whistle screaming.

‘
Ahhhh
!' she shouted. ‘
Ohmygod ohymygod aaahhhhhh
!'

As Helen quaked and jumped, Richard Vuldus climaxed too. She actually felt the glans of his penis bulging, and the first spurt of sperm. He pumped again, and again, and again, as if he had been storing up this semen for years, and could at last release it, every drop of it, and find relief.

He continued to kneel behind her for a few seconds, his hands grasping her hips, but then he slowly rolled over and lay on his back. Helen rolled over, too, and lay close beside him.

‘You, Richard Vuldus, are simply amazing.' She reached out to touch his lips with her fingertip.

He took hold of her wrist and moved her hand away, gently but firmly. ‘This was not for love, Helen. Not my love for you, nor your love for me. This was for justice, and revenge.'

She stared at him, and then she sat up. ‘You mean to tell me that meant
nothing
to you?'

‘It meant everything. More than you can know.'

She hesitated for a moment. Then she climbed off the bed and retrieved her clothes from the floor.

‘Thank you, Helen,' he said, softly.

She pulled her sweater over her head. ‘Don't mention it. I'll let you know if you've succeeded in knocking me up.'

When she left the apartment, Joachim Hochheimer took hold of her hand, and tried to raise it to his lips, but Helen pulled herself away.

‘Thank you,
gnädige Fraulein
,' he said. ‘We are forever in your debt.'

Toward the end of January, she began to feel tired, and her breasts began to feel swollen, but she was still not convinced that Richard Vuldus had succeeded in making her pregnant. He had made love to her only once, after all; and besides that, she was beginning to convince herself that she had dreamed the whole incident. She had gone back to Fountain Square several times during the evening, and she had seen no lights in the Vuldus apartment. She had called Joachim Hochheimer, too, but nobody had picked up.

‘What's bugging you?' Klaus asked her, as they sat in First Watch café one morning, eating bacado omelets and drinking horseshoe coffee.

‘Please?'

‘I said, what's bugging you? You haven't heard a word I've been saying.'

‘I don't know. Sorry. I feel weird.'

They had driven only a few blocks down Walnut Street before she tugged at his coat and said, ‘Stop the car! Stop the car, please!'

She just managed to open the door and lean over the gutter before she was sick – half-chewed bacon and avocado and eggs, in a steaming gravy of hot coffee.

That evening, she took a home pregnancy test, and yes, it was positive. She stood staring at herself in her bathroom mirror. My God, what have I done? What kind of a baby is growing inside me?

She went back into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. At that moment the phone rang.

‘Detective Foxley? Helen? This is Joachim Hochheimer speaking.'

‘Oh, yes?'

‘Everything is well, yes?'

‘It depends on your point of view, Mr Hochheimer.'

‘You are expecting Richard's child, is what I mean.'

‘Yes, Mr Hochheimer.'

‘Thank you, dear lady, from the bottom of my heart.'

She put the phone down. Almost immediately, it rang again.

‘Foxley? It's Klaus. S.O.B. has done it again.'

‘Where?'

‘The Serpentine Wall, Yeatman's Cove. Do you want to meet me down there?'

‘On my way.'

She pulled on her sweater and took her duffel coat out of the closet. She was just about to leave the apartment when her stomach tightened and she felt a rising surge of nausea. She hurried into the bathroom, knelt down in front of the toilet, and brought up a fountain of chili and Cheddar cheese.

Klaus said, ‘You're
pregnant
? You're kidding me? By whom? You didn't tell me you had a new boyfriend.'

‘It's nobody I've ever talked about.'

‘So what are you going to do? You're not going to
have
the kid, surely? How are you going to be a single mom and a detective at the same time? I mean – I'm assuming that the guy isn't going to marry you. Maybe he is.'

‘No, he's not going to marry me.'

Klaus swirled the remains of his beer around his glass and shook his head. ‘You're full of surprises, Foxley. I have to give you that.'

‘I surprise myself, most of the time.'

‘Well,' said Klaus, ‘just make sure that you check with me before you choose your maternity clinic.'

‘Why's that?'

He took a roughly scrawled diagram out of his inside pocket. ‘I may be wrong, but I've been looking into the records of the various clinics which were attended by Son of Beast's victims. There's nothing in any of them to suggest that Son of Beast could have hacked into any medical records. But today I realized that his eighth victim was a patient at the same clinic as his first victim, and his ninth victim was a patient at the same clinic as his second victim, and so on. It appears to me that he has a list of seven clinics and that he's picking his victims from each clinic in rotation. I could be wrong, but it's beginning to look like a pattern.'

Helen took the diagram and frowned at it. ‘So he wouldn't necessarily need any access to medical records. He simply goes to the next clinic on his list and follows his victim out of the building when she leaves.'

‘It's beginning to look that way.'

‘But why should he do that? That means that we can predict which clinic he's going to pick his next victim from, and we can stake it out.'

‘That's right. And the next one is . . . The Christ Hospital on Auburn.'

But when winter melted away, so did Son of Beast. After the killing of a thirty-one-year-old mother-to-be at Yeatman's Cove, there were no more Moms-to-Be murders for seven months, and they began to wonder if he had given up, or left Cincinnati for good.

Eventually, Colonel Melville decided that the stake-out at The Christ Hospital was no longer cost-effective, and assigned the surveillance team to other duties.

For Helen, that summer seemed to last for ever, one sweltering day after another, week after week, month after month. The city was suffocating, and this year there was a teeming plague of cicadas, sawing away noisily day and night, and penetrating every crevice of every building, cramming themselves into office ventilation systems, and tangling themselves in people's hair. The windshield of Helen's Pontiac was permanently smeared with cicada guts.

Meanwhile, the baby inside her grew and grew. Her sickness passed, but she still felt exhausted, especially when the baby started to wriggle and heave inside her all night. Every Thursday afternoon she went to The Christ Hospital, waited for fifteen minutes in the ladies' room, reading a book, and then left. If Son of Beast were still in the city, watching and waiting for his next opportunity, she wanted to make sure that she gave him a victim with regular patterns of behavior.

She didn't actually attend the maternity clinic. This birth had to be off the books, unregistered. All the same, she bought books on pregnancy and made sure that she took plenty of vitamins and kept her blood pressure down. She developed a desperate craving for five-way chili – spaghetti, chili, cheese, kidney beans and onions – and she found it a daily struggle to keep her weight down.

It was a lonely time. She kept away from her friends and her family because she wanted as few of them as possible to know that she was expecting a baby. And as the months went by, and Son of Beast failed to reappear, it seemed to be increasingly likely that she had suffered this pregnancy for no purpose.

Only Klaus came round regularly to see her, and each time he brought her flowers, or a box of candies. In August, when she was eight months' pregnant, he brought her a little blue-and-white knitted suit, with a hood.