Descendant

House of Flies

For my first night in England, the SIS had booked me a room at the Strand Palace Hotel. It was comfortable in a well-worn, shabby way, although the traffic was so noisy that I had to close my window, and the furniture reeked of cigarettes. I booked a transatlantic call to Louise, and tried to take a shower. The showerhead gurgled, and sneezed, and then dribbled. I took a shallow bath instead.

I was lucky. It could take hours before a call to the States came through, but the operator rang me back after only twenty minutes. Louise answered, and although she sounded quite close, I kept hearing an echo, so that she said everything twice.

“I’m going to the Marriotts’ this evening. They’re having a cookout they’re having a cookout.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Are you going to see your sister this weekend?”

“I don’t know, it depends if Dick’s coming home if Dick’s coming home.”

“Listen, I have to go, but I love you.”

“Be careful, Jimmy, won’t you please won’t you please?”

“I’ll be careful.” I hadn’t been allowed to tell her what I was doing here in England — only that it was connected with my work for the intelligence services during the war. But Louise wasn’t the kind of woman to be easily fooled. She had stood in the bedroom doorway watching me pack as intently as if she were making an 8mm home movie in her head — a home movie that she could play back later, in her mind’s eye, if I never came back to her.

I had known Louise since college. We had dated once or twice, and had a good time together, but Louise was always much more serious than I was. She liked string quartets and art galleries and live theater, while I preferred beer and swing music and W. C. Fields movies. Not that I wasn’t academic. You couldn’t help being academic, with a father like mine. But I wasn’t a sensitive academic. I didn’t carry a lily around, and I didn’t lisp.

As it happened, though, Louise and I met up again in 1949, at a friend’s party in North Beach, and I invited her to Mill Valley for the day. We were both different people by then. She had been through a violent marriage and lost a baby. I had been chasing strigoi in Europe. We saw qualities in each other that we hadn’t been able to appreciate when we were younger. In Louise, I saw thoughtfulness, and a deep appreciation for the value of human life, but an unexpected willingness to have fun, too. I don’t exactly know what she saw in me, but I always tried to be kind to her, and protective, and I even pretended to like her cheese and macaroni.

Terence called for me at 2:30 PM and we drove to Croydon. Terence was right, Croydon was “pretty grotty” — a densely overcrowded suburb with mile after mile of Victorian and Edwardian shops and pubs, interspersed with sorry-looking semidetached houses and filling stations and used-car lots. The sky was beginning to cloud over, although the heat was still unbearable. Terence was steadily perspiring in his coat and necktie, but he didn’t make any attempt to take them off.

We reached an ugly redbrick pub called the Red Deer, where the main road divided. Terence took a right up a steep, narrow street lined with scabby-looking plane trees. We passed a huge Victorian church, faced with flint, and then pulled up outside a large three-story house. There were two men standing around outside the front gate, smoking. Terence said, “Couple of our chaps. Couldn’t have the constabulary here, somebody might ask awkward questions.”

I climbed out of the car and looked up at the house. It was massive and clumsily proportioned, built of the same shiny red brick as the pub we had passed, with a gabled roof and window frames painted bright blue. The front garden sloped up from the street, and was crowded with laurel bushes. The soil was so chalky here that the flowerbeds were strewn with big white lumps of limestone.

Terence introduced me to his “chaps.” Like Terence, they both seemed to be far too young to be MI6 operatives, like two schoolboys. One of them said, “Don’t know what the latest score is, by any chance?”

“Last I heard, Evans took four wickets for sixty-four.”

“Crikey. I thought he’d broken his finger.”

“Our dog handler not here yet?” I asked.

“Shouldn’t be too long. Do you want to take a quick shufti inside?”

“Sure, why not?”

One of the chaps led the way up the steps to the front door, which was propped open with a dog-eared telephone directory. Six pint-bottles of lumpy-looking milk stood on the doorstep, the family’s last delivery. I followed the chap into a high, airless hallway, which had a wide staircase on the left-hand side.

“House was shared, you see,” the chap told me. “Mister and missus and three children lived on the ground floor, while the grandparents lived upstairs.”

Although the house was detached, it stood only six feet from the house next door and the windows were all glazed with yellow and green glass, so the hallway was deeply gloomy, like an aquarium. On the wall hung a damp-spotted print of a miserable-looking maiden, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

“Window cleaner looked in and saw the bodies,” said Terence. “Otherwise, who knows, it might have been weeks.”

We went through to the dining room, which was thick with the smell of decaying food and human blood, and noisy with the buzzing of hundreds of flies. Dark brown woolen drapes had been drawn across the bay window, but enough sunlight penetrated the room for me to be able to see what had happened here.

The dining chairs had been set back against the walls, presumably so that the family could stand around the dining table and help themselves to the buffet. Plates and cutlery were scattered on the mustard-yellow carpet, as well as trodden-in sandwiches and cakes. On the sideboard stood bottles of Scotch whiskey and Gordon’s gin and Emva Cream sweet sherry, as well as six or seven bottles of light ale and Mackeson’s stout. I was reminded that the British liked their beer warm.

The words HAPPY BIRTHDAY JACKIE had been cut out of colored paper and stuck on to the mirror.

“Difficult to tell how the buggers got in,” said Terence. “Back door was locked, and all of the main windows were closed.”

I stepped carefully across the dining room and drew back the drapes. Three of the small upper windows were open. Even a child would have found it impossible to climb through them, but a strigoi mort could slide through the narrowest of gaps. Once inside, he would have opened the front door for any strigoi vii who might have accompanied him. It wasn’t easy to tell how many strigoi had been here, because there was so much blood and so much mess, but they usually went out feeding in threes.

I looked back at the dining table. All the food had been splashed with dark brown blood — the birthday cake, the sausage rolls, the mashed-sardine sandwiches — and now flies were crawling all over it so that the whole table looked as if it were rippling.

I went to the door. There were bloodstained fingerprints on either side of the doorjamb. “You say that one of the bodies was found upstairs?”

“Eleven-year-old boy, yes.”

“See these fingerprints? My guess is, the kid was trying to escape, and somebody blocked the doorway to stop the Screechers from going after him. Unsuccessfully, of course. Because, look.”

I pointed to some smudges of blood on the wallpaper. They ran diagonally up the wall, each one higher than the next, until they reached the ceiling. I stepped back into the hallway and looked up. The smudges continued across the ceiling toward the staircase, and up the sloping ceiling above the stairs, too.

“Footprints,” I said. “The boy tried to get away and one of the strigoi chased him.”

“On the ceiling?” said Terence. He looked at the chap and the chap raised his eyebrows and puffed out his cheeks, but didn’t say anything.

“You have to understand what we’re up against here,” I told him.

The other chap came in from outside. “Your dog handler’s here,” he told us. “Bit of all right, as a matter of fact.”