Dark farm, p.39
Dark Farm, page 39
“You’ll find some new distractions, I’m sure.”
“In this virile body, yes indeed.” He raised his glass and stared at the room through the bubbles. “How’s yours going? What’s his name again?”
“Ronald. Ronnie.” Simon heaved a long sigh. “I’m not sure he’ll last the year, to be honest. It’s such a bother having to find a new one. The kidnapping, the spell, the taming of the spirit. Such a bother.”
“I can help, if you like. You being so decrepit and everything. Snyder loves that kind of thing.”
Ignoring the insult, Simon turned the page. After a few moments, he said, “I may well take you up on your offer of the calling spell. Why wear glasses when you can have laser surgery? There must be some distant relative out there who’ll respond. He wouldn’t have to be a baby, like yours.”
Wilfred bent forward in delight. “Aha! I knew it! Not so much the Sphinx now?”
“Let’s say your good fortune has inspired me.”
He raised his glass high. “To me! To my inspiration and good fortune!”
Simon was eyeing him closely. “So tell me how you did it. How did you switch bodies with the boy?”
Twisting in his seat, Wilfred threw a leg over the arm. He wasn’t in the mood to discuss history when there were so many new plans to make … and their present victory to savour.
“We’ll discuss that some other time. Tonight is for celebration.”
“No, Wilfred, tell me. You know me: need to know now.”
“It was a highly elaborate ritual.”
“One you promised to share with me.”
“One minute you don’t want eternal life; the next, you need to know right this moment. You do frustrate me, Simon.”
“I’ve been thinking about what I could do with a body like yours. All the beauties I could attract.”
Wilfred’s face warmed. Lately, he’d been having a recurring daydream about walking into an exclusive men’s club, one that had Moët on tap and the most beautiful young women in the world: mobbing him, desiring him, eager to do any sexy, depraved, painful thing he demanded of them. The fantasy would come to him night and day, distracting him from his long-held plans to open the gate between the dimensions and command a new world order. He wondered whether the distraction was caused by his new body’s rampant hormones or the simple fact that he’d never before in his life been attractive. Now, suddenly, he had the world at his feet. He could have his pick of what this world had to offer. Suddenly he had choices.
Simon was looking petulant. “Forgive me if the thought of womankind makes me impatient. I’m only human.”
“I suppose you haven’t had much in the way of feminine company lately, looking like that.”
“As with you in your gnome’s body, before you acquired the young Gates boy.”
“Touché,” said Wilfred, tipping his glass.
Simon’s continual staring was making him angry, so he said, “First summon a responsive soul, one who shares your blood.”
“I know that part.”
Now he was really getting on his nerves. “Simon, find yourself a host and then ask. Now, raise your glass and drink a toast to our success in retrieving the Necronomicon.”
“I’m really not that thirsty.”
“If you don’t drink, I’ll take it as a personal insult. I don’t like drinking by myself. We’re supposed to be celebrating, not mooning about like two old men.”
“If I drink with you, you’ll tell me about the spell?”
A nerve twitched beneath his eye. “Very well.”
He watched as Simon raised his glass and drank.
“There now, isn’t that better? Now drink up, so I can begin the summoning of Yog-Sothoth.”
“The Messenger, you mean?”
“No. Yog-Sothoth.”
When Simon looked perplexed, he said, “While you were out, I had a little play with my new friend, and I extracted a shortcut from him. No more messy Messenger to get in the way.”
“That’s handy. How?”
Wilfred motioned for him to drink up. Simon tossed back the champagne like someone drinking a shot.
“Excellent. Top up?”
He waved no. “So, Wilfred, tell me about this shortcut.”
“All in good time.”
“You keep saying that.”
Wilfred made a gesture with his hand that implied Simon’s words were as meaningless as the air.
“If you won’t tell me about Yog-Sothoth, the least you can do is tell me how to transfer into a more suitable host. I find a subject, and then what?”
Wilfred huffed angrily. Simon’s nagging never failed to raise his hackles. “I will ask Gilles to write it down for you. Suffice to say, it’s no simple task to dislodge a boy from his body.”
“No doubt.” Simon returned his attention to the Necronomicon. “But an old man squatting in a young boy’s body is another thing altogether.”
Placing both hands on the page, he began mouthing something.
Wilfred felt the room rock. It wasn’t the champagne; it was something he’d never felt before: a disconnection of reality, like the room was jerking away from him.
Meanwhile, Simon went on whispering, oblivious to Wilfred’s discomfort, ignoring his boyish cry when champagne spilt in his lap.
“What –” he sputtered, “are you – doing – Simon?”
Simon glanced up, his face a picture of innocence. “Oh, I forgot to tell you: I already had a little chit-chat with Gilles. And he told me all about the tri-spell. And how I might adapt it, so to speak. To our current situation.”
With a little shrug, he returned to the book and began whispering again.
Now Wilfred was feeling a growing heat in his head, a pressure in his skull, like his brain was pushing his eyeballs from their sockets. Thoughts that weren’t his were crowding in on his own: Simon’s whispers; they were inside his head.
“Get out, you fiend!” he cried, leaping to his feet, sending the glass flying off his lap. “Find your own damn body!”
“But this one is so handsome. And so young and convenient.”
Wilfred pressed his palms against his temples, trying to trap his thoughts inside his head. Drawing long breaths, blowing out air through his nose, he strained with all his might to eject the intruder. With desperation on his side, he soon felt himself regaining control of his young brain.
Simon began chanting louder, unfazed by Wilfred’s temporary victory.
Once more, Wilfred felt his mind getting squeezed out of his head. He knew Simon’s spell was too strong to resist. Simon had double-crossed him again, and this time he was planning to play the game all the way to the end, to Wilfred’s end. This was no body swap; this was Simon obliterating Wilfred’s thoughts until there was nothing of Wilfred left.
Through gritted teeth, he said, “Do you remember – what I said – would happen – if you crossed me?”
“Oh, Wilfred, it’s a pity your talents have never measured up to the scale of your threats.”
“A greater pity for you – I don’t – need you anymore.”
A look of horror struck Simon. His face went bright red; the whites of his eyes turned black. Howling, he scratched at his clothes, pulling them away from his throat, tearing buttons as he tore his shirt open. Smoke trailed from the corners of his mouth, from his nostrils, from his eyes and ears. Throwing himself off the chair, dropping to the floor, he scrambled back until he hit the wall.
“Professor Orwell,” said Wilfred, bending over the table, pulling the Necronomicon towards him, “say hello to Varafti, Sultan God of Fire.”
Simon opened his mouth to scream, and out flew a spear of flame. As hoarse yelps coughed from his seared throat, the flame rose into the room like a burning snake, then twisted down and wrapped itself around his body. Suddenly his clothes were alight, then his skin and beard and hair. Rolling around on the floor, he bucked and jerked in agony, as the stench of burnt flesh filled the chamber.
Finally, with a shudder, his body went limp, a scream gurgled out of his lungs, and then his throat closed up, and all that could be heard in the room was the cackle of fire.
Wilfred, pouring champagne into Simon’s glass, said, “I suppose I owe you an explanation. You see, Varafti agreed to help me summon Yog-Sothoth in return for the soul of a powerful wizard. Fortunately, I convinced him to take you instead.”
As Simon burned from the inside, the ropes of flame squeezed him tighter and tighter, until the fire collapsed into itself and only smouldering embers were left on the floor.
Wilfred raised his glass. “Farewell, dear friend. You’ve no idea how helpful you’ve been to me.”
He sank into his chair, took a long sip of champagne, smiled into the air. With Dylan Gates’ body reclaimed, with the Necronomicon in his hands, with two-faced Simon out of the way, with Magacanta just around the corner, his carefully-laid plans were back on track. The world would soon be his.
Suddenly he shot forward. “Hell and damnation!” he cried, glaring at the ashes on the floor. “I forgot to ask what you did with my Borellus!”
49
Going in
“What are you freaks up to in there?” Morgan muttered, pulling the binoculars away from his face.
Stifling a yawn, he glanced over at the two-toned Bentley and white Honda parked side-by-side near the gate. They looked strange together, like Orwell and Gates themselves, the odd couple shacked up in Wilfred Waite’s farmhouse raising zombies and monsters to unleash on the world. The cars had been disabled, but Morgan was under no illusion about the wizards’ power. Staring up at the hole in the roof, he half expected them to come barrelling out astride broomsticks, wands primed to zap the whole attack force into oblivion.
Tapping his phone against his leg, he stepped through the plan once more in his mind. Early that morning, during a series of tactical meetings with senior officials across the NSO, it had been determined that the odds the wizards would surrender under any scenario were close to zero. This led to agreement on two primary tactics. First, the attack would be dynamic entry, so the wizards would have little or no chance to cast a spell or release any zombies or other nasties from whatever restraints they were presently held under. Second, it would happen in daylight, so the zombies would be at a disadvantage if they emerged into the light after so long spent in darkness.
He smiled at Henri, who was standing next to the military truck scrolling through her phone. She’d dressed sensibly, if a little unfashionably, in a mustard-coloured long-sleeved blouse, burgundy slacks and black schoolgirl shoes. Uncharacteristically, she’d overdone her make-up – he guessed to hide her drawn complexion and the bags under her eyes. Not only that: just before dawn, after lying awake worrying for most of the night, Henri had taken her scissors and cut off her braid. When Morgan first saw her, he gave her a queer look and asked, “Are those new glasses?” and she reminded him of the braid and told him about her wake-dream of dead people grabbing hold of it and taking bites out of her neck. Even now, five hours later, she couldn’t stop rubbing the spot her phantom attackers had sunk their teeth into her.
Morgan’s phone rang. Spinning back to the farmhouse, he pressed the phone against his ear. “Morgan. Talk.”
He frowned. He’d expected it to be Posniak, ringing with further orders about the attack, but it was Arika Livingston. She’d been calling his office all morning, to the point where he went from ignoring her because he had so much to organise, to ignoring her in retaliation for her pestering. And now someone had stupidly patched her through.
“Arika,” he puffed. “Look, I’m sorry: I can’t talk. You’ll have to speak to my assistant. I’m in the –” He held the phone away from his ear. “Okay, okay, calm down. What’s this about?”
As Morgan listened, his mouth fell open. His eyes moved back to Henri.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. Then: “Are you sure?” He listened a few seconds more. “Hey, wait. Hold on.”
He put the phone on speaker, whistled at Henri, waited as she toddled towards him through the mud, and then said into the phone, “Now, Arika, repeat what you just told me. I’ve got someone here who needs to explain to me how this is in any way possible in a sane world.”
Kane was fixing the bandage on Dylan’s arm when Arika appeared at the bedroom door.
He glanced up, forced a half smile, then let his eyes fall back to the greenish forearm he was wrapping in a white dressing.
“This should keep the flesh on those old bones a bit longer,” he said, raising his brow, trying to make it sound like a perfectly normal thing to say to his seventeen-year-old brother. Despite his flippancy, he was having trouble keeping his voice steady, and when he wasn’t busy wrapping, he had to hold his hands under his thighs so Dylan wouldn’t see them trembling.
“Kane, can we talk?”
When he looked again at Arika, his heart rate doubled in an instant. There was something unnatural in the tone of her voice, a quaver he hadn’t heard before. A few minutes ago she was energised by righteous anger. All he could think was, What now?
“In private,” she added.
He went back to winding the bandage around his brother’s rotting arm. “Anything you can say to me, you can say to Dylan.”
She seemed ready to argue with him, but then entered the room and sat on the bed. Staring at Dylan, she said in a flat voice, “NSO – or whoever they are … Something’s happening.”
Kane scrunched his face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I told Morgan about last night, and all he said was leave it to him and don’t worry.”
“Isn’t that same as what he said last time?”
“It was the way he said it.”
He shook his head in annoyance. Arika’s words reminded him of January, who was always finding hidden meanings in phrases or tones or glances. It was a weapon she used to try to control him, and though Kane knew it wasn’t Arika’s style, it was still a trait that irked him.
“Did you tell him about Dylan?”
“He definitely reacted to that.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Did he say he knew anything about where Dylan’s body is?”
“I asked him, but he wouldn’t say either way. But Kane, he said there was an incident at the hospital last night, something involving out-of-control dead people; and when he had to go, he apologised and said something like, ‘We all have to make sacrifices’, like he was talking about us.”
Kane looked at her. “Out-of-control zombies?”
“That was the gist of it.”
He stared into the air. “Did he say anything else?”
“Just that they contained it – whatever that means.”
“Hmm, Snyder must have left some of his zombie horde behind. I wonder why. Did you tell him about the book?”
“I figured I had to. He needs to know what we’re up against.”
“And he’s still not inclined to help us? Doesn’t he know we can help each other?”
“It was after I told him about the Necronomicon, he was suddenly in a hurry to get off the phone.”
“Hardly surprising, I suppose.”
Collecting the bandages and scissors, Kane got up from the bed.
“I think they’re planning to attack the farm, Kane – and I think they’ve decided Dylan is expendable.”
Kane stared down at his brother’s corpse. His arms and legs were fully bandaged, as well as most of his head, and fortunately this had reduced the stench of decomposition to an almost bearable level. Perhaps Arika was right: with the right care, they may have months, even years, up their sleeve.
“Nah,” he countered, shaking her words out of his head. “That’s a big leap in logic from a quick phone call.”
“It’s not just the call, Kane. They’ve had the farmhouse under surveillance, and plenty of time to prepare for a raid. Now there’s been two zombie attacks in one night, not to mention Hugo. If I was them, I wouldn’t be waiting around for the next disaster to happen. I wouldn’t. I’d go in. It’s what Dad taught me, and if anyone knows how the armed forces think, it’s him.”
Kane went to the window and gazed down at the empty street. He was mentally exhausted and only half-comprehending what Arika was saying. He didn’t want to believe that everything was about to go south, but if she was right, Dylan’s body – his real, seventeen-year-old body – might be blown to smithereens before the end of the day, and then all he would have left would be this rotting, stinking carcass. This would be his life – their life – for God knows how long.
He turned back to her, alarm escalating inside him.
“You sure he understood what you were saying about Dylan?”
“Definite. I had to repeat it to someone else who was with him. A woman.”
“You told him it was Waite in Dylan’s body?”
Now it was Arika who looked annoyed. “Twice.”
“And what did he say to that?”
“He said, ‘Leave it to me. And don’t worry.’ And when I asked what he was planning to do about it, he said he couldn’t tell me, but it was under control. Then he said he had to get off the line, and said that thing about us all having to make sacrifices.”
“Ring him back.”
She pulled out her phone and rang Morgan’s office number. It went straight to voicemail.
Kane walked in a tight circle. A mixture of fear, anger and panic was whirling in him, threatening to explode into the room. He breathed shallowly, trying to hold it down.
“They can’t kill him,” he murmured. “They can’t. That’s murder. It would be his death warrant. He’d have to – We wouldn’t –” Stopping, he gaped at the bandaged figure on the bed.
Arika got up and took him by both arms. “They can do whatever they like, Kane. They don’t care about one casualty if it saves other lives.”
