Night warriors, p.1
Night Warriors, page 1
Also by Graham Masterton
HORROR STANDALONES
Black Angel
Death Mask
Death Trance
Edgewise
Heirloom
Prey
Ritual
Spirit
Tengu
The Chosen Child
The Sphinx
Unspeakable
Walkers
Manitou Blood
Revenge of the Manitou
Famine
Ikon
Sacrifice
The House of a Hundred
Whispers
Plague
The Soul Stealer
Blind Panic
The House at Phantom Park
THE SCARLET WIDOW SERIES
Scarlet Widow
The Coven
THE KATIE MAGUIRE SERIES
White Bones
Broken Angels
Red Light
Taken for Dead
Blood Sisters
Buried
Living Death
Dead Girls Dancing
Dead Men Whistling
Begging to Die
The Last Drop of Blood
THE PATEL & PARDOE SERIES
Ghost Virus
The Children God Forgot
The Shadow People
What Hides in the Cellar
THE NIGHT WARRIORS
Night Warriors
Death Dream
Night Plague
Night Wars
The Ninth Nightmare
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Days of Utter Dread
NIGHT WARRIORS
Graham Masterton
An Aries book
www.headofzeus.com
First published in the UK in 1986 by Sphere Books
This edition first published in the UK in 2023 by Head of Zeus, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Copyright © Graham Masterton, 1986
The moral right of Graham Masterton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PB): 9781035903986
ISBN (E): 9781035903979
Cover design: Matt Bray / Head of Zeus
Head of Zeus
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Contents
Welcome Page
Copyright
Out of Innocence Came Forth Unspeakable Evil ...
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Out of Innocence Came Forth Unspeakable Evil ...
Henry was the first to reach the body, while Gil and Susan walked cautiously closer, and then stood watching. It was the body of a beautiful young girl, naked, like a peacefully sleeping mermaid. Never in their most traumatic nightmares could they have imagined the convulsive violence which followed ...
Then each is visited by a mysteriously androgynous figure who reveals that the girl had been used as innocent host to the most hideous malevolence known to man, a horrific presence that, through grotesque acts of impregnation, is madly insinuating itself into the bodies and minds of thousands of unsuspecting people. The only hope is to destroy the original evil seed and together, Henry, Gil and Susan become NIGHT WARRIORS, an ancient Order of men and women charged with the power to enter and search for the abomination in a fantastic dream world of soaring exhilaration and searing terror, driven by the inescapable reality that if they fail to find the beast, then the beast will certainly find them ...
‘For one thousand years, Devils shall live in the dreams of men, and hold dominion over the dark realms of the night. But then shall come a company whose name shall be the Night Warriors; and it shall be charged unto them to banish the Devils and to rid the darkness of all evil influences forever. And those who are Night Warriors shall be secret, and their names shall not be known. Nevertheless they shall be counted as the greatest heroes of any age, and they will be remembered in the chronicles of Ashapola for all eternity.’
The Great Book of Darkness, Chapter IX, published by the Camden Society, 1844.
Chapter One
T he three of them approached the body on the beach as if their meeting had been preordained. Henry was the first to reach it, and he hunkered down beside it, but wouldn’t touch it, while Gil and Susan walked cautiously closer, and then stood silently watching, with their bare toes half buried in the sand.
‘No doubt that she’s dead,’ said Henry, in his clear lecture-room voice. He brushed back his white windblown hair with his hand.
‘I thought it was a dog, at first,’ said Gil. ‘You know, an Afghan or something.’
Henry stood up. ‘I guess we’d better call the police. There’s nothing that we can do.’
Susan kept her arms folded close across her tee-shirt, and shivered.
Henry said, Would you and this young man like to go call the police? I’ll stay here and make sure that nobody disturbs it.’ He hesitated, and looked down at the body, and then corrected himself by saying, ‘Her.’
Susan nodded, and the two of them jogged away across the beach. Henry remained where he was, his hands clasped behind his back, tall and stooped in the silvery mist of the early morning. Almost unseen, the grey Pacific disobediently roared as the moon tugged it inch by inch away from the shore, and seagulls shrieked like anxious women as they swooped for fish. It was April, but it was chilly, and the sea-mist would probably envelop the coastline for most of the day.
Henry hadn’t yet been to bed. He had been sitting in the study of his beach-house all night, under the light from his brass-shaded lamp, working on his new article for Philosophy Today: ‘The concept of life after death’, by Professor Henry Watkins. He had been writing in thumb-cramping longhand, and rewarding himself after the completion of every page with a large vodka and tomato juice; and so at six o’clock he had taken a walk along the beach not only to clear his mind often centuries of philosophical morbidness, but the cumulative effects of twelve large Bloody Marys.
And here she was, lying dead on the sand, a naked young woman. Stark and direct proof that everything he had been writing all night was pretentious nonsense; hot-air balloons and horsefeathers. He felt almost as if he had been fated to find her; as if stern gods had directed his footsteps this way, to show him in the most jarring way possible just how ridiculous his theories were. Nobody can ridicule the living quite as effectively as the dead.
She was lying face down, her bare skin covered in fine grey grit. Her long blonde hair was ribboned with seaweed, and fanned out on the beach like a mermaid’s. One dead hand seemed to be clutching at the sand as if she had been trying to stop herself from being dragged out to sea again, as if to be drowned twice was more than she could endure. Her body was so white that in the pearly-grey mist it was almost luminous.
Henry walked around her. Alone, he felt suddenly so sad for her that he found that his throat was tightening up, and that the sea-wind was bringing tears to his eyes. Perhaps he was drunk, but she could have been any one of his philosophy students, she was so young. Although her face was hidden, she couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty years old. She had a long, well-shaped back, and wide-flared hips. One of her legs was drawn up, so that he could glimpse blonde bedraggled pubic hair. There was a fine silver chain around her left ankle, but that was all the jewellery she wore. The white blue-veined curve of one half-exposed breast showed that she had the kind of figure that most men would turn around to look at twice.
The sea foamed briefly around her outstretched foot, and then retreated, as if it had sourly decided that it had done enough.
Henry thrust his fists into the pockets of his fawn-coloured windbreaker and deliberately turned away, towards the cliffs. He had never had children of his own. His four-year marriage to a lady oceanographer from the Scripps Institute had been barren in every conceivable sense. He had learned to drink during that marriage; he had also learned to be alone. Now he taught philosophy to successive waves of cheerful young men and women, and occasionally played chess with his next-door neighbour; and that was sufficient to make him feel fulfilled.
At least, it was sufficient to stop him from taking two bottles of sleeping-pills and going to bed with a copy of Thus Spake Zarathus
His students at UC San Diego called him Bing, because of his faint resemblance to Bing Crosby. He had grown his hair to try and make himself look more like Timothy Leary than Bing Crosby, but the nickname had stuck.
After five minutes or so, Gil and Susan came back down the concrete ramp which led up to the oceanside parking-lot, and half jogged, half walked across the sloping beach.
‘The police are on their way,’ Gil said, breathlessly.
‘Thank you,’ Henry acknowledged.
Susan said, ‘I never saw anybody dead before.’
‘She was young, too,’ Henry remarked. ‘Nineteen, twenty.’
They waited, uncomfortable and fidgety. There was no sound of a police siren yet. The sea kept on snarling, and the seagulls fluttered silently against the wind.
Gil said flatly, ‘I was just jogging, you know? I really thought it was a dog at first.’
Susan couldn’t take her eyes away from the body, from the fanned-out hair and the clutching hand, and the shoulders sparkling with grit.
Gil was one of those young Southern Californian men who defy immediate classification. He could have been a student or an automobile mechanic or a barman or anything at all. He was very thin, very tanned, with a narrow serious face and a prominent freckly nose. His hair was thick and dark, and mussed up into a fright-wig by the wind. He wore a navy-blue sweatshirt with Crucial stencilled on it in white, and sawn-off denim shorts.
Susan had all the hallmarks of the spoiled but rebellious daughter of a middle-class family. Her fair hair was cut short and spiky, and she wore a white Italian-style tee-shirt with red and green lightning flashes on it, and white satin running-shorts that were tighter than tight. She was plump faced but pretty. Henry could see that in two or three years some very striking features would emerge from that teenage roundness. Her eyes were already large and blue and dreamy lidded, like the eyes of one of those girls in a romance comic.
‘I guess the police will want us to make statements,’ said Henry.
Now they could hear the whip-whip-whip-whooo of a distant police siren, followed by the scribbling of an ambulance.
‘What can we say?’ asked Susan. ‘We just found her here, that’s all.’
‘That’s all we have to say,’ Henry reassured her.
The police car drove right down the ramp on to the beach, and drew up only fifteen feet away. It was hotly pursued by an ambulance from the county coroner’s office. Henry and Gil and Susan waited in silence as three detectives climbed out of the police car, and two medics noisily dragged a folding stretcher out of the back of the ambulance. A second police car arrived, slewing across the sand, and two uniformed officers got out.
The detectives came over and looked down at the body, standing with their hands on their hips. Two of them were big bellied and white, Tweedledum and Tweedledee; the third was lean as an adolescent wolf, a dark-eyed Hispanic with a drooping black moustache and a cinnamon-coloured three-piece suit that looked as if it had been chosen by his wife at Sears.
‘Lieutenant Ortega,’ he announced himself. ‘These are Detectives Morris and Warburg.’
‘Henry Watkins,’ said Henry.
‘And these young people?’
‘We haven’t had time to introduce ourselves.’
‘You don’t know them?’
‘This is the first time we ever met. I guess we all caught sight of the body at the same moment.’
‘Your name, please?’ Lieutenant Ortega asked Gil.
‘Gilbert Miller.’
‘And yours, young lady?’
‘Susan Sczaniecka.’
Lieutenant Ortega said over his shoulder, ‘You get those names?’
Detective Warburg said, ‘No, sir.’
Lieutenant Ortega let out a short, testy breath, and then went across to inspect the body. He stared at it for a very long time; then walked around it; then peered at it close with his hands on his bended knees, still without touching it.
‘Any of you people know this girl’s identity?’ he asked, without looking towards them.
‘No.’ they replied. Henry felt strangely guilty that he didn’t; but he supposed that everybody felt the same when they were interviewed by the police.
‘Looks like a straightforward drowning t’me,’ said Detective Morris, clearing his throat as if he were about to give a recitation. ‘Kind of early in the year, but the pattern’s familiar. Nude bathing off Cardiff Beach, too much to drink, and there’s a pretty sharp undertow there, once you get out a ways. You get pulled out to sea. It’s cold in April, you die of hypothermia in less than ten minutes – that’s if you can swim. Then the tide brings you down here.’ He checked his watch. ‘Right on time, I’d say.’
Lieutenant Ortega stood up straight. ‘You people were down on the shoreline exceptionally early,’ he said, waving his finger loosely from Susan to Gil to Henry.
‘I was jogging,’ said Gil. ‘I hurt my leg in a motorcycle accident last December. I have to jog for a couple of hours each day to exercise it. Early morning is the only free time I get.’
Lieutenant Ortega raised his eyebrows at Henry.
‘I, um – I was working on a magazine article all night,’ Henry explained. ‘I live right up there ... the cottage with the white-painted balcony. I finished up around five-thirty, then I decided to take a walk.’ He hoped Lieutenant Ortega couldn’t smell his breath.
Lieutenant Ortega turned to Susan. ‘How about you?’ he asked her. ‘Exceptionally early to be down on the shoreline, wouldn’t you say?’
Susan said, ‘Guess it is.’
‘So what were you doing here, so exceptionally early?’
‘Walking, that’s all. Thinking.’
‘You had a row with your parents?’
‘My parents are dead. I live with my grandparents.’
‘You had a row with them?’
‘I just went for a walk, that’s all.’
Lieutenant Ortega worried something out from between his front teeth with his thumbnail. Then he sucked at his teeth, and said, ‘Okay. I want you all to make statements to my officers here; full statements: how you found this dead person here, everything.’
‘Straightforward drowning,’ Detective Morris repeated.
At that moment, two more cars arrived on the beach, a dilapidated Buick Regal and an olive-drab station-wagon from the coroner’s department.
‘Ah, the photographer,’ said Lieutenant Ortega, rubbing his hands together. ‘And the medical examiner, too, remarkably prompt for a change.’
The photographer was a dour young man with a monk-like tonsure and a repetitive sniff. He began work straight away, laying out measurement markers and then photographing the young woman’s body from all sides. The medical examiner, a short bull-necked man in a loud black-and-white hound’s-tooth sports jacket, whistled tunelessly between his teeth while he waited for the photographer to finish.
‘Straightforward drowning, what do you think?’ Detective Morris asked him.
The medical examiner stared at him. ‘Do you want to do the post mortem, or are you going to leave it to me?’
Detective Morris gave him a hesitant grin. ‘No, sir, you go right ahead.’
‘Can we turn her over now?’ asked Lieutenant Ortega. ‘I’d like to see what she looks like.’
The medical examiner didn’t answer him, but carefully brushed the sand away from the dead girl’s shoulders, and ran his hands down the length of her bare back. He stood up straight, and frowned, and then he looked out along the beach.
‘Do any of you know this beach at all well?’ he asked, thoughtfully.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Detective Morris. ‘I’ve lived here just about all of my life.’
‘Have you attended drownings here before?’
‘Five or six.’
‘Can you recall how far up the beach those other five or six bodies were discovered?’ the medical examiner asked him.
Detective Morris looked puzzled. ‘On the waterline, I guess, just like this one.’
‘You take a look at that washed-up weed and that other debris,’ the medical examiner told him. ‘See where it lies. Most of it’s lighter than a body, and far less bulky; yet it’s way down the beach by comparison.’
Lieutenant Ortega came forward and looked down at the body uneasily. ‘So what do you infer from that?’ he asked the medical examiner.
