but Frank ran straight through the turnstiles and disappeared.
“Frank!” shouted Corporal Little. “Frank, you’d better come to heel, boy, or else there’s no more marrowbones for you!”
We heard him bark, but he didn’t come back. Then we heard him bark again, even farther away.
“He’s found one, for sure,” said Corporal Little.
“We’d better get after him, then.”
I opened the stud of my holster and tugged out my Colt.45 automatic. This was only the third time since we had landed in Normandy that I had taken it out, and I had never fired it at anyone. It was loaded with bullets that had allegedly been cast from the pewter goblets from which the Disciples had drunk during the Last Supper, so it wasn’t the kind of weapon that you would fire indiscriminately. But the Zoo grounds were impenetrably black and very extensive — nearly twenty-five acres of parkland and trees and animal houses, and if there were Screechers here I didn’t want to be caught by surprise.
Corporal Little and I climbed awkwardly over the turnstiles and made our way along the path to the mock- Egyptian square where the elephant house stood. Our flashlights made shadows jump across the buildings like hopping hunchbacks, and a couple of times I was tempted to fire.
“
We heard him bark again, and this time his bark echoed, like somebody shouting in a swimming pool.
“He’s in there,” said Corporal Little, shining his flashlight on the elephant house.
There were no elephants in there, of course. When the Germans had first entered Antwerp, the zoo staff had shot all of the animals — elephants, tigers, gorillas, giraffes — in case they broke out of their cages and escaped. Apart from that, there was little enough food for the human population, let alone animals.
We entered the elephant house cautiously, with our weapons raised. It was like walking into Tutankhamen’s tomb. The columns were gilded and decorated with acanthus leaves, and Egyptian hieroglyphs had been painted all over the walls. It was also dark and smelly and the tiled floor was gritty and wet, so that our boots made a scrunching noise.
“Frank?” called Corporal Little.
Frank turned around, and we saw his yellow eyes reflected in our flashlights, like some kind of hound from hell.
“
Cowering in the corner, one hand clinging on to the bars of an elephant pen, the other hand raised to shield his face from my flashlight, sat a Screecher. He was tall and emaciated, with thinning brown hair, and a pallid, bony face. He was wearing a dirty gray overcoat with a deluge of brown stains down the front of it, and a cheap brown business suit, and his shoes had holes in the soles. Most people would have passed him on the street without a second glance, but Corporal Little and I had seen enough Screechers to recognize him immediately for what he was. It was the way he couldn’t look directly at the light, and the way that his eyeballs kept darting from side to side, like cockroaches. He looked anxious and scheming, rather than terrified. Like most of the Screechers we’d encountered, he obviously believed that humans couldn’t kill him, no matter what we did to him, but he did know that we could hurt him. What he was looking for with his shifty little eyes was a way to escape.
“Well, well,” I said, walking right up to him. I sniffed, and I could smell the unmistakable odor of rotting poultry and dried dill. “Where are your friends, then?”
He said nothing, so I holstered my.45, knelt down on the floor and opened up the Kit. I took out the shiny silver mirror and held it up at an angle so that I could see his face in it. Contrary to what you’ve seen in the movies or read about in
Sometimes, of course, you can make a mistake, and a smelly, homely-looking character that you suspected of being a Screecher looks just as homely in the mirror. In that case you apologize and let him go on his way without banging nails into his eyes. But what I saw in the mirror that night at the Antwerpse Zoo was a good-looking young man in his midthirties with wide-apart eyes and a heavy jaw. He looked German, or Austrian, or maybe Swiss.
“
The Screecher kept his hands held up in front of his face, and didn’t answer me. Frank barked at him, but even Frank was sensible enough not to go too close. The Screecher may have looked like a down-and-out, but I knew from experience that he was quite capable of ripping Frank’s head off with his bare hands.
“I’m giving you one last chance,” I said, in German. I took out my pistol again, and pointed it directly at his heart. “We can save you. give you back the life you used to have before. Think of it, your family, your sweetheart. All you have to do is tell us where your friends are.”
I was lying, of course. I didn’t know if it was possible to return a Screecher to normality, even if we were to give him a massive blood transfusion. We had never tried. Every Screecher by his very nature had committed mass murder, so we had never had much incentive.
“OK, then,” I told him. I cocked my pistol and gripped it with both hands. Even if I hit him directly in the heart it wouldn’t kill him, but it would stop him long enough for us to put the thumbscrews on him, and prevent him from escaping.
I was just about to fire when the Screecher suddenly performed a backward somersault. Then he performed another, and another, right up the bars of the elephant cage, until he reached the ceiling, over thirty feet above our heads.
I fired two deafening shots, but the ceiling was vaulted and I was terrified of ricochets. The Screecher crawled quickly across it, clambering over the vaulting like a huge brown spider, heading for the entrance. Frank started barking again, and Corporal Little took out his pistol, too, but I shouted at him, “
As the Screecher scuttled upside-down across the ceiling, I took the silver-wire whip out of the Kit and flicked it so that it unravelled. The whip was heavy and springy and jumped around with a tensile life of its own. I swung it back and lashed out with it, catching the Screecher just as he reached the architrave around the door. There was a small barbed grappling hook on the end of the whip, and it snatched at his coat. I yanked the whip hard, but his coat tore and the hook came free.
Frank was hurling himself up and down, barking insanely. Corporal Little maneuvered himself until he was right beneath the doorway, his pistol raised. I lashed out again, and this time the grappling hook caught the Screecher in the back of the head, burying itself in his scalp. He cried out in pain, and reached around with one hand, trying to pull the hook loose. It was then that I gave another yank, and he lost his grip on the ceiling and slammed on to the floor on his back.
Immediately, while the Screecher was still concussed, Corporal Little and I seized his arms and wrenched off his overcoat. We pulled off his coat, his shirt, and his pants. I hated this part of the job. Live Screechers always stank of decay, like that chicken you should have cooked the day before yesterday, and their skin had a chilly greasiness about it which took carbolic soap and very hot water to wash off. Like all Screechers, this one was dead white, with a slightly bruised look across his abdomen and his inner thighs, the telltale sign of internal putrefaction.
Even before we had finished stripping him, he started to come to. His head lolled from side to side, and he coughed, and said something that sounded like German, although I couldn’t understand what it was. Then he twisted his back, and tried to flap at Corporal Little with his right arm.
Without hesitation, I took the thumbscrews out of the Kit and fastened them tightly, so that his hands were forcibly held up in front of his bony chest. Then I pinioned his big toes together with the toescrews.
In English, he said, “What — what are you doing?
“I gave you an eighteen-carat golden opportunity, didn’t I?” I retorted. “All you had to do was tell us where your friends are hiding.”
“Go to hell. My friends will hunt you down and they will cut you open like pigs!”
“Oink! Oink!” Corporal Little taunted him.
