The anatomy of fear is the unknown. The essence of terror is contained in the phrase "What if?" Suppose the dead should return? Are there invisible phychic entities hovering on the fringe of the physical world? Can the power of evil manifest itself in tangible form and launch world shattering violence against humanity?
The most gripping fear lies within the human mind. Lana Davis was a normal, healthy, sane young woman to all outward appearances but the Unknown was laying siege to her mind. By day her work kept the worst of the Terror at bay, but at night it returned. Time passed and Fear grew greater...Fear was embodied in a mysterious effigy which stood beside her bed . . . Fear lurked in a weird voice on the telephone.
Lana Davis ran screaming into the night - unable to face Fear any longer. The stranger who found her apparently knew more about her problems than she did; Lana found herself involved in a macabre new environment where Fear had expelled reality leaving the stranger as the only link with the world she had once known. Dark supernatural powers contended with insanity for Lana's very soul, as she hovered on the brink of unreality and annihilation.
Release date:
June 30, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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“WHY, Uncle Tyman, this is a surprise!” Lana Davis flung open the window of her Knightsbridge flat and waved with pleasurable excitement to the balding, spreading figure of the Greek.
“Hello, my dear, how are you?”
“I’m fine. Come on up!”
Tyman, despite the onset of a middle-aged paunch, was as broad shouldered and as athletic as most of his fellow countrymen are by tradition. He was the descendant of men who had pioneered the Olympiad. He was in a direct line with the men who had listened to Pericles and made a glad, beautiful world five centuries before the start of the Christian era. There was the warrior, the philosopher, the sailor and the business man in the blood of Lana Davis’ Uncle Tyman.
‘Uncle,’ she thought, as she led the way into the living-room of her flat, was something of a courtesy title. The bespectacled, pallid spinster in the adjoining flat was quite convinced that Lana was Tyman’s ‘kept woman,’ a delightfully Victorian phrase which somehow fitted the pallid frigidity of Lana’s unwholesome neighbour. Certainly he was not her uncle, but he had looked after her for almost as long as she could remember. After she had grown from a girl into the independent beauty of full womanhood, she had still valued Uncle Tyman’s help and advice, his visits, and his friendly face, as much as she valued her independence itself.
He sat now in the deep comfort of an uncut moquette chair, patterned in green and gold. His eyes were wide, and what was left of his black, Hellenic hair was unruly, as though he had been running fast against a wind.
“Uncle, is anything wrong?”
“Yes.” His affirmative was scarcely recognizable as human speech.
“What?” The word came incredulously from Lana’s parted lips. “Uncle—what can it be?”
He gulped.
“There are so many things that I ought to tell you Lana, things that I have kept to myself because I did not want you worried by them. Now——” he broke off, got up, went to the window, flattened himself against the wall, and drew the curtains with a rapid, nervous movement. If there was one thing Lana had never seen before it was fear in Tyman’s face.
“You’re frightened,” she said, almost accusingly. Then she arched a quizzical brow in his direction. “Is it the police?”
“I wish to God it was! I’d give myself up. Twenty years on the moor would be nothing, nothing at all! It would be a cheap price to pay if I could abandon the job that has been thrust upon me.”
“Uncle, are you well?”
He shook his head.
“I’ve had no sleep for two days, very little food …”
“I’ll get you something——”
“There’s no time!”
She had never heard him speak harshly, like that. As though he had sensed the pain that his words had inflicted he clenched his teeth and she could see a pulse flickering near his left cheek bone, in the muscles on the side of his face.
“I’m sorry.” He grated the words out as though they were torn from him by some great physical effort. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
“It’s all right.” Lana had regained control.
“There’s so much I ought to have told you. I’m not quite what I seem.”
“What do you mean?”
“You think I’m a business man, a café proprietor, the owner of a delicatessen store; yes, I am these things, but it is not the whole truth. There is so much to tell I cannot possibly hope to more than scratch the surface, but I have one ray of optimism, in an otherwise dark picture.”
“Yes?” She looked questioningly.
“Lana, I have always done everything I could for you——”
“Of course you have! You’ve been like a father to me, better than a father.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Yes, I do!”
She knew that this was a time for seriousness. Normally she would never have dreamt of wearing her heart on her sleeve. He smiled, and some of the fear, some of the anxiety went out of his eyes, just for a moment.
“Then something has been worthwhile, even though I have failed in the greatest task of all.”
Lana shook her head.
“See this.” He fished in his brief case which bulged in an odd way and produced a statuette, a small one; it was broken.
“This?” said Lana, wrinkling up her nose. It had a face, barely recognizable as human. It was ugly, blemished, twisted and distorted. A face of evil, an obdurate, vile face. It was carved from some stone Lana had never seen before.
“I am one of a long line of guardians,” said Tyman.
“You mean more people have acted for me——?”
“Not your guardians!” Tyman laughed, but there wasn’t very much mirth in the sound.
“I’m sorry, I just don’t understand,” said Lana again. He got up, went to the window, and glanced out once more.
“Ah, I thought so! I must not stay any longer. I must try and lure them away. They don’t know yet which house I have entered.”
“I don’t understand,” said the girl. “Is somebody out there? Is it the police?”
“No, I have told you.”
Lana’s mind went back to a film she had seen recently.
“Do you owe some money to a bookmaker, or anything? I’ll gladly pay. I’ll pay anything you like. I won’t let them hurt you.”
“You are very kind, and very naive,” replied Tyman. “Maybe your very innocence will protect you, where guile has failed utterly to protect me.”
“I just don’t understand,” whispered the girl again.
“Never mind. Perhaps one day you will. Pray God that all goes well.”
“You’ve got to tell me,” she urged. “What is it?”
“The statue. There is power in it such as you never dreamed. More I cannot say. Perhaps I ought——” he looked at it with a mixture of loathing and admiration. “I leave it with you.”
She shrank from it as though he had offered her a poisonous snake.
“Believe me, there is nothing else I can do,” he said. “To leave it with you is to expose you to a terrible danger. Not to leave it with you is to risk its falling into the hands of the Brotherhood, and if they get it, you and the whole world will be in danger—terrible danger.”
“This?” she said, almost laughingly.
“This,” he averred. He glanced out of the window again. “I must go, and go quickly.” He took her in his arms, suddenly, and kissed her gently on the forehead. “Good-bye, my child. God bless you, and all the powers of light protect you.”
She had never heard him so serious. The statuette in her hand seemed almost to turn, or to vibrate of its own volition.
“Hold it tightly, and keep it safely,” he said quickly, and then the door opened and closed behind his retreating figure.
“Good-bye.” Lana half-whispered the word to the closed door. Some deep, feminine intuition told her that she was not going to see Uncle Tyman again in this world, at least, not alive. She heard his footsteps on the stairs, and for a moment she wanted to draw back the curtain and look out, but something held her back. It was as though a warning voice counselled against moving the curtain. She strained her ears for the sound of footsteps in the street. They grew fainter, and then, like the note of doom itself, she heard the sound of a car engine. It was no ordinary note, it was a note of purpose, a sound charged with significance. Lana heard the Angel of Death singing in that engine tune.
She felt the blood drain from her face, her knees turned weak. She heard the engine changing gear, and there was a sudden, sickening thud. This time she did run to the window. Outside people were screaming. A man, in the crumpled remains of a brown suit, a deep nigger-brown suit of the kind that Uncle Tyman had always worn, lay awkwardly against a wall. Voices drifted up to Lana.
“He didn’t stop.”
“The swine!”
“He seemed to do it on purpose.”
“Drove straight at him.”
“It was murder!”
Lana held the statuette in her hand. It was trembling. She put it down to the movement of her own nerves. She had no need to go down. She knew the dead man was Uncle Tyman. Could his death have had anything to do with their strange conversation?
Could his murder, if it had been murder, have any nexus with the weird statuette he had left in her keeping? What had he said——If he left it anywhere else, or if he didn’t leave it safely, the world would be in danger? But how could a statue harm the world? How could a piece of carved stone threaten the globe, and organized, civilized humanity? It seemed ridiculous, and yet, despite the apparent folly of the concept, Lana Davis felt fear tugging at her heart as though it were a tangible thing. She realized that she was already too late to think about her afternoon’s work, and somehow, torn as she was by ambivalent emotions, she felt exhausted. Part of her wanted to go down and see Uncle Tyman, part of her, all that was feminine, maternal, gentle and kindly, wanted to see if anything could be done for the pathetically still figure beside the wall, victim of the hit-and-run driver. But the other part of her mind, warned by the urgency of the dead man’s words, kept her away from the curtain.
“I must appear not to know him. If I go running down and let them know where the statue is—whoever ‘they’ are—he will have died for nothing.” Whatever else he had been, she thought, Tyman had been tough, tough as nails. I’ they had dealt effectively with him, she would be a mere fly in comparison, something which they could brush aside, as lightly and as easily as a strand of gossamer, or a wafer of tissue paper.
The ambivalent desires finally resolved themselves. She put caution before caution and the advice of Uncle Tyman, rather than the urge to fling her arms around the neck of the cadaver in the street below. She knew that he would have wanted it that way. And if, in some remote and mysterious way, the soul of Uncle Tyman was watching her, she felt sure that it would approve her caution. It seemed that a disembodied voice, very faint and far away, was congratulating her already for keeping control and not panicking, but the emotional battle had taken more out of her than she had been prepared to admit at first. She felt completely drained of energy. She went through to her bedroom and reached for a small cardboard pillbox of sleeping tablets. With fingers that shook more than a little, she took one, poured a glass of water from the cara. . .
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