The Amulet (16 page)

"Jesus Christ, Derek-what have you got yourself into this time? I..."

His voice drifted away. I looked up to find him staring at the object I held in my right hand-the grotesque shape of the amulet.

"Is that it?" he whispered, and I heard the awe in his voice. His eyes were big and round, like a kid on Christmas morning.

"Right first time," I said. "Just get me inside and you can fondle it to your heart's content. I even promise not to get embarrassed if you get a hard on."

He put out a hand to help me and I howled as he grabbed my arm right beneath the wound.

"For fuck's sake, Doug-be careful," I managed to moan when the pain had died down enough.

Sorry," he said, looking as if he might burst into tears. I gave him my other arm and together we stumbled into his house.

I tried not to drip blood on his carpet as he led me through the hall into his small kitchen. I had a bad moment when he peeled off my coat and I thought I might pass out, but the nausea receded, and I leaned against Doug's kitchen cupboards as he helped me take off the bloody clothing.

I'd have to rethink my image. The coat was a bloody, streaked ruin, and the jacket underneath wasn't much better. There was a sharp intake of breath as Doug slowly stripped the remains of my shirt from the wound.

"Christ, Derek-I don't know where to start," he said, and there was doubt in his eyes.

"Just get on with it. You're the one with the first aid certificate."

He muttered to himself as he went to get his box of tricks.

"One week's training and I'm supposed to be a bloody expert."

His voice was raised as he called back to me. "Help yourself to the whisky. I think you're going to need it."

I managed to drag myself over to the cabinet above the fridge. I knew that's where he kept his booze; it was usually my first port of call. And one thing about Doug-he certainly knew his whiskies. I had a choice of six different malts. I poured myself a large glass of Talisker, hoping that its fiery heat would dull the pain enough, and slumped down in a battered chair.

The first sip burned on its way down, but the second went down easy, and so did the third. I was on my second glass by the time Doug returned with an armful of bandages.

I didn't feel too guilty about drinking it-after all, I'd bought the bottle in the first place, in return for some information on a previous case.

He looked worried as he put the bandages on the table in front of me.

"You really need a doctor," he said.

"At this time of night?" I said, "Do you know any doctors that'll come out after midnight?"

"Then we could take you to A&E at the Royal Infirmary. We could be there in half an hour?"

"No, thanks. They'll smell the whisky on my breath, assume I've been in a fight, and leave me sitting in a chair for a day or so. Come on, man...show some backbone."

He sighed deeply to show that he wasn't happy. He poured himself a whisky and sank a large gulp.

"I'll start with the arm first-that looks like the worst. I think your ear will be okay-it's only a nick," he said.

It might be only a nick to him, but it throbbed with a wet red heat, and it was all I could do to keep my fingers away from it.

"Talk to me," he said. "Tell me what happened tonight. It'll take both our minds off what we're doing."

I sipped whisky as he bathed the wound in my arm, and I told him the story. As I talked his gaze kept drifting to the amulet, and his expression ran the gamut of awe, disbelief and disgust.

"What, a real kitten?" he said as I got to the appropriate point. He suddenly looked pale, as if he might faint. Doug was a sucker for small furry animals. Give him a man with a festering hole in his arm and he'd patch it up with barely a qualm, but show him a kitten in distress and he turned to jelly.

"Yeah, a real one," I replied. To spare his sensibilities I glossed over the actual method of the cat's demise, but I didn't leave anything else out.

The story took a while in the telling, with interruptions for yet more whisky and questions.

"Run that bit by me again," he said when I had finished the story and he had finished bandaging. "The bit about the chanting. Could you repeat the words exactly the way you heard them?"

I tried, feeling at second hand the chill in my bones I had felt on first hearing them-even the air around us seemed to grow colder, as if the heat was being sucked out of the room. I looked up to see Doug nodding.

"Yes, I thought so. Don't go away," he said, and left the room at a hurry. I sat and drank some more of his whisky. I wasn't about to follow him...I'd had enough rushing about for one night, enough for many nights to come.

He came back several minutes later, cradling a book in his large hands, almost reverential in his handling of the old tome. The cover of the book crackled and whispered under his fingers, and I found myself hoping that he wasn't going to open it. He whispered when he spoke, as if afraid that the book might hear him.

"This is a modern transcription and commentary on an old medieval grimoire. It was originally written by a mad Arab, Abdul Alharazed, and it has to do with summoning creatures to do your bidding."

"What kind of creatures?" I asked.

"You don't want to know. Listen to this," he said, opening the book and reading. Strangely, his reading voice was a deep, bass register, reminding me of Orson Welles in his more solemn, self-important moments.

"Out beyond the stars they lived in blackness and chaos until the galaxies whirled into position and they came to walk the earth. The chief being of the mythos is C'thulhu, a god from beyond the stars, a once and future ruler of this planet. He walked the Earth many eons before man, and the ground trembled at his passing. He sleeps in Ryleh, his dreaming city beneath the seas, and when the stars are right he will awaken and chaos will once again walk the Earth."

He looked up at me and dropped me a slow wink.

"Good stuff, eh?" he said before continuing.

"The followers of C'thulhu have always been with us, from Atlantis to Mu, from Lemuria to Babylon, but perhaps the zenith of his priesthood came in Sumeria. The Sumerians inherited the lost wisdom of Atlantis, and were able to access the power of the Elder Gods through certain amulets of power."

"These amulets gave them dominion over the lesser beings of the ether and allowed them to perform works of great magic."

He was really getting on to it now, his voice reverberating round the room. It suddenly struck me that Doug would have made a good preacher-he had just the right mixture of plausibility and naivete. I forced myself to pay attention as he continued.

"It is said that many dark secrets lie buried in the sepulchres of Ur. Men have searched the sands for long years and come away with nothing more than sand and dust. The secrets of the ancients remain hidden, and it would be better for mankind if they stayed that way."

I think I laughed...it was either that or a sob. I felt too tired to know the difference by then.

"Come on, Doug. What is this shit? It's like something out of a bad horror movie. You can't expect me to believe it?"

It was only when I looked into his eyes that I realized he was serious-serious and excited.

"How else do you explain what has been happening to you? I think we should keep an open mind until we get a better handle on it."

And this from a reputable scientist, no less. It was time to put him right on a few facts of life.

"I've got no intention of getting a handle on it. I'm going to get this little beauty here back to its rightful owner, then I'm going to forget all about it."

He actually looked disappointed.

"Come on, Derek. These are real bad guys we're talking about. I thought that was your thing. Besides...the amulet belongs in a museum, not in the hands of some private owner who probably never looks at it."

God, I hated his idealism sometimes. I took another long gulp of whisky before replying, noticing with some dismay that I neared the end of the glass. I started to feel a pleasant buzz. Not enough yet, but I was working on it. Another couple of glasses and it would be a head dive into welcome sleep. I summoned up enough energy to get the words out.

"As far as I'm concerned he's welcome to it-the less people who see it the better. And yes, much as I like to smack the bad guys on the chin, this particular bad guy doesn't have one. Besides, I'm way out of my depth here. All this
Twilight Zone
stuff pisses me off-you know that."

I'd touched on a subject that we'd argued about in the past. Doug had always been an old hippie at heart, always willing to believe any old crap.

As for me, if I couldn't eat it, drink it, hit it or fuck it, I didn't want to know. I realize that as a philosophy of life it was pretty basic, but it had got me through-at least until yesterday. Now I wasn't so sure.

The sooner I got rid of the amulet the better. I certainly didn't intend spending a night in the company of the thing. Taking my whisky with me, I weaved my way to the telephone, managing not to hit any walls on the way.

The phone was answered immediately, and although it was again the early hours of the morning, Mrs. Dunlop didn't sound tired. There was something in her voice, a subtle draining of emotion, an inflection that told me that things weren't all well in the Dunlop household.

"Do you have it?" she asked. No preamble, just straight to the point. I decided to follow suit.

"I have it," I replied, then waited to hear her speak again. I could easily have fallen in love with that voice, and the more whisky I drank, the better it sounded.

"You'd better bring it to me now," she said. "Things are getting a bit out of hand."

I snorted down the phone at her.

"You don't know the half of it. I've got bad guys coming out of the woodwork-and I mean right out of the woodwork."

There was a long silence at the other end of the line, a silence that went on so long that I thought we might have been cut off. But then finally she spoke, and this time there was a certain wariness in her tone.

"I take it things have been getting a little strange?"

That was an understatement if I'd ever heard one.

"Yeah, more than a little." I tried to keep the tremor out of my voice, but didn't quite succeed.

"I think you would be safer here with us," she said. I didn't see how they could help, but I didn't argue with her. I would be safer just about anywhere.

She gave me directions as to how to find her, somewhere out of town near the Campsie Hills, and asked me to hurry.

"I don't think we have much time," she said. I didn't understand what she was talking about, but even over the telephone I could hear the fear in her voice. I hung up on her this time, but I couldn't take any pleasure in it.

I returned to the kitchen to find Doug scanning the pages of the book.

"Does this look familiar?" he asked, and showed me what he was looking at.

The bad thing for my peace of mind was that it did. There, in a woodcut from the twelfth century, was an exact representation of the tentacled creature, perfect down to the pumpkin head and the sharp pointed teeth. It stood in a clearing in a thick wood, and in its tentacles it held a collection of small woodland animals, each of which had been speared by one of the razor-toothed mouths.

It gave me the creeps just to look at it.

"It's known as the Gatekeeper," Doug said. "It is supposed to stand guard between this world and the ethereal dimensions beyond. But there doesn't seem to be anything else about it. Do you want me to look further?"

He was as eager to please as a puppy, but I'd had enough for one night. I leaned over to close the book and, as I did so, the tentacles wavered on the paper, and the great head turned, only a fraction, towards me. I sat back abruptly, almost spilling what little whisky I had left.

"Close the damn thing, will you," I almost shouted. "I've seen enough of that monster to last me a lifetime."

Doug shut the book and put it down on the table in front of me. I reached over and pushed it further away-it gave me the creeps. Doug stroked the amulet, a far-away look in his eyes.

"You know, nobody really understands where this thing came from originally. It certainly wasn't made by the Sumerians. The old books say that it's over twenty thousand years old. If I could just get it back to the University, we could run some tests on it, find out exactly when and where it was made. It would be a sensation, a world-wide sensation, if we could prove its provenance."

"Down, boy," I said. "You don't want to be famous, do you? Fast cars, loose women and cocaine parties?"

"You mean move to California, catch some sun and laze around a swimming pool, drinking Tequila all day?" he said.

Actually it didn't sound so bad put like that, but I wasn't tempted. The sooner I delivered the amulet, got paid and got back to a life of unrelieved tedium, the better. I took the amulet from him.

"I'm afraid the owner needs it back rather urgently."

After I told him of my proposed trip to the Campsies, Doug was adamant that he was going along.

"You've had far too much whisky to drive. Besides, if that thing turns up again, I'll be along with the book. There's several incantations in there for protection against the old ones-one of them might work."

I certainly laughed this time. "I don't think a few bits of paper are going to stop this guy," I replied, but he was right about the whisky, and I was grateful for his company.

"Just one thing, Derek: if we're going visiting, I think a change of clothes would be in order, for both of us."

I looked at him in his Mickey Mouse pajamas, and he looked at me with the bloody remnants of a shirt hanging from my shoulders, and simultaneously we burst out laughing. I could almost feel the tension drain out of me.

Doug showed me to his wardrobe. Luckily, we were both about the same size, but that was about the only thing I was thankful for. Doug's taste in clothes left a lot to be desired.

He had never really outgrown childhood, and the wardrobe was full of sweatshirts, denims and sneakers. I picked the least offensive sweatshirt. When I pulled on an old leather biker's jacket I felt like a refugee from an American teen movie.