‘I know what happened.’
‘We’ll see.’
She moved on the bed and Creed edged away, almost rising. Cally settled once more. ‘Don’t be nervous, Joe. I told you, it’s over. Belial has left this place for the time being.’
‘That’s something else I don’t understand. Why did Mallik kill himself last night?’
‘Belial was never alive – at least never in the sense that we’ve been conditioned to believe in. He destroyed the shell he’d been using for so many, many years, along with the secrets and the prizes he had gathered during that time. Quite simply, he had wearied of the game.’
‘Is that all it is, a game?’
‘More or less. It’s always been such.’
‘And it’s finished?’
‘Oh no. There’ll be a fresh start, but I don’t know when or where it will originate. Perhaps in a place where the old beliefs are still strong. South America, India – who knows? The Middle East is already being used by others. But there are still scores of dark zones on this earth, countries, even continents, where the demons can thrive.’
‘That’s it, though? He’s packed his bags and left here for good?’
‘He took nothing with him. He needs nothing, not even his loyal servant, Bliss. He grew weary of him, too.’
‘Has everything been destroyed at the Retreat?’
‘Everything of importance.’
‘And you let your mother die there.’
Her head snapped up as though he had surprised her. ‘I keep forgetting how little you understand,’ she said. ‘Lily Neverless was my mother. Nicholas Mallik, Belial incarnate, was my father.’
It took a while for that to sink in. Creed rubbed his forehead, then the back of his neck. He opened his mouth to speak and closed it when he realised his thoughts were not quite there yet. He tried again. ‘There is no Grace Buchanan?’
‘Joe, everyone knew Lily had a daughter, and they naturally assumed that Edgar Buchanan was the father. Haven’t you realised by now? I am Grace Buchanan.’
His voice was even, but very grim. ‘She’d be old, she’d be at least—’
‘You’ve witnessed so much, yet still you doubt the Delphian forces. We can control the ageing process just as some of us can control our shape. I chose to remain of a certain age, although it meant I could not be known as Lily’s daughter after a time. That was why Grace was kept away from the public eye, why stories of mental illness were deliberately rumoured.’
‘But your brother . . .’
‘Daniel? Not my brother, Joe – my son. Sired by someone not unlike yourself, and with no demonic powers because of it.’ She spoke in a whisper: ‘But then all our powers are waning more rapidly now that Belial has forsaken us.’
Something dredged the lower regions of Creed’s stomach. Cally was still in shadow, although the light shining through the gap in the curtains had grown stronger since he’d entered the bedroom. He could see her eyes, but there might have been a thin veil over the rest of her face so indistinct was it. He rose from the bed and went to the window; he drew back the curtains and allowed the grey dawn full incursion. Creed turned back to the figure sitting on his bed.
He (and possibly you, too) expected to find an elderly woman there, maybe even a wrinkled hag, given the physical trauma of a young body ageing overnight. But Cally was no Ayesha: she had hardly changed at all.
She smiled at him. ‘It’ll come, Joe. But not for a while.’
He was relieved and, perhaps naturally enough, far less wary of her. He went back to the bed and sat closer to her. He frowned.
There was a difference. Cally’s skin was still clear, her features fine and unsagging. It was her eyes that revealed the passing of years, for they were not just tired, they were dispirited.
He reached to touch her hand, but she swiftly withdrew.
‘Please don’t, Joe. For your sake, don’t.’
‘Laura . . . you . . .?’
She nodded. ‘God knows why, but I had some feelings for you at the beginning, I really did want to help you. I’m afraid the human condition has always been one of my failings. I wanted you, but those desires changed to something more, an unholy kind of lust. I became something else, something basely carnal so that I could take full pleasure in you, and even that mutated to something more, something worse . . .’
‘But you saved me that day at . . .’ He stopped, thinking hard. ‘Liable and Co.’ He clucked his tongue. ‘I thought there was something about that name. A simple anagram of Belial, right? Not very smart, but then who would know, who would care? You did come and rescue me, though.’
‘The game had to go on. It was only your friends who saved you last night.’
‘My pals the paparazzi.’
‘How did they know Lily would be there?’
‘They didn’t, and neither did I. I just felt I was getting into something way over my head so I arranged a little insurance. I asked someone at my newspaper to put the word around that something big was going down at the Mountjoy Retreat last night. I figured there might be safety in numbers, and I wasn’t wrong. You didn’t see me hiding near the drive, did you? You just knew I’d be along at any time, that’s why you were waiting for me. That fat receptionist knew who I was when I spoke to her in the afternoon. You had me half-suckered, Cally, I’ll give you that.’
‘Will you tell everything, Joe?’
‘You mean will I sell the whole story to the highest bidder? I’d be crazy to. I’ve got enough without the demon stuff, anyway.’
‘You’ve no evidence of Nicholas Mallik’s existence. No photographs, no negatives. I’m glad of that.’
He shrugged. ‘It would have added a little spice. A child murderer and mutilator who supposedly was hanged back there in the ’thirties, assuming a new identity and still plying his old trade behind the harmless façade of a rest home for gentlefolk. Even after all these years his mug shots compared pretty well with the old newspaper copies.’ He sounded regretful.
She managed a weak smile. ‘You won’t change, Joe. Perhaps it was your low-life nature that ultimately got you through all this.’
‘I like to think so.’
The smile stayed and she lifted a hand towards him. ‘You’re not so different from us,’ she said.
A softness melted into his mind, a seductive and pleasing infiltration that slurred his thoughts. Cally was breathing deeply, watching him with hooded eyes. He remembered the changeling, the one who had called herself Laura, and he thought of her pale skin, the deepness between those albescent thighs . . .
Cally breathed him and he pressed forward to—
He froze. Her image had become less defined, had begun to waver.
‘Noooo,’ he heard her moan.
But he was sinking into her, his senses aroused both through memory and the allure of Cally herself. The musky smell of her sexual desire was strong, intoxicating. He was close, so close, his lips an inch away from hers . . . from Cally’s . . . from Laura’s . . .
‘No!’ This time it was a sharp cry and she pushed at his chest, sending him toppling to the floor.
And she was Cally again, her eyes clear, yet somehow distant. For a fleeting second she seemed to shrink within herself.
‘It’s over,’ she said, her voice dry and passionless.
Creed steadied himself. Yeah, it was over, he knew that, but for a moment there . . .
He stood up and went back to the window, blocking half its light. ‘You’d better go, Cally,’ he told her, unsure of himself.
She nodded, and did not move. Maybe she was getting control of herself. Finally she rose from the bed and she seemed smaller, somehow less vital, less forceful. She moved to the door.
‘Where will you go?’ he asked, not wanting her to leave, yet desperate for her to.
‘I’ll wait. And then I’ll find him again.’
‘D’you have to do that? Can’t you just live a normal life?’
Even her laughter was worn.
/>
‘I’m his daughter,’ she said.
She pulled the dark red garment around herself and went through the door.
Creed followed, but not right away; the ‘impulse’ required a few seconds’ thought.
‘Cally!’ he called, but when he reached the landing only Grin was waiting for him there, the dead mouse in its mouth spoiling its smug expression somewhat.
‘Not now, you bloody fool,’ Creed muttered, stepping over the cat, who swished its crooked tail in exasperation.
The front door was open and Cally had gone. Creed ran downstairs and out into the cobbled mews. ‘Cally!’ he called again, but even when he reached the corner she was nowhere to be seen. He looked this way and that, wildly at first and then more moderately. ‘Cally.’ This time he spoke the name.
Creed shivered – with the cold, he thought – and took one last look towards the mews entrance. Was that it? Had she really gone for good? A part of him hoped so. A smaller part, tucked down somewhere on a level between the conscious and subconscious, the place where all kinds of perversities like to skulk, hoped not. He groped in his pocket for a cigarette.
Shit, he didn’t need her kind of aggravation.
He strolled back to his front door, pausing on the step to light the crumpled roll-up. It was going to be a heavy day. An hour or so of sleep, phone off the hook. Evelyn would be burning wire before very long and he wanted a good story ready for her when he finally took the call, something that would make him the hero. Hell, he was the hero; his son had been kidnapped and he had rescued him single-handedly. No knight in shining armour could have been bolder and no father more courageous. The media would be beating a path to his doorstep as soon as the first edition of the Dispatch hit the street, but they wouldn’t get much from him. The chequebook deal had already been struck with his own newspaper, God bless the wealthy proprietor and all his forefathers, so after a short rest it was back to the office to fill in some more of the story. But first, when the hour was a shade more civilized, a little detour to Fix Features where a contact sheet was waiting to be examined, the shots from the second roll of film he’d used in the cemetery on that fateful day. The roll that had a clear shot of Nicholas Mallik approaching Lily Neverless’ grave. Wouldn’t prove anything, might not amount to much; but it would just add that little extra spice.
Yeah.
Creed went into the house and closed the door behind him. This time he bolted it, top and bottom.
Creed
James Herbert is not just Britain’s number one bestselling writer of chiller fiction, a position he has held ever since publication of his first novel, but is also one of our greatest popular novelists, whose books are sold in thirty-three foreign languages, including Russian and Chinese. Widely imitated and hugely influential, his twenty-three novels have sold more than forty-eight million copies worldwide.
Also by James Herbert
The Rats
The Fog
The Survivor
Fluke
The Spear
The Dark
Lair
The Jonah
Shrine
Domain
Moon
The Magic Cottage
Sepulchre
Haunted
Portent
The Ghosts of Sleath
’48
Others
Once
Nobody True
Graphic Novels
The City
(Illustrated by Ian Miller)
Non-fiction
By Horror Haunted
(Edited by Stephen Jones)
James Herbert’s Dark Places
(Photographs by Paul Barkshire)
First published in Great Britain 1990 by Hodder and Stoughton
This edition published 2001 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2011 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-447-20339-1 EPUB
Copyright © James Herbert 1990
The right of James Herbert to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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James Herbert, Creed
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