Descendant by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

sir?”
    “Not until it gets light. If they’re hiding where Ernst said they were hiding, I don’t think that they’ll have tried to make a break for it yet. They’re probably still waiting for poor old Ernst to come back.”
    We closed the garden gate behind us and climbed inthe Jeep. On the floor in front of the backseats was a cardboard box which had originally contained cans of condensed milk. One corner of the box was stained dark brown.
    “Let’s just make sure that he never
can
come back, shall we?”
    Frank barked and shook his head so that his ears made a flapping noise.

Ground Zero
    I slept until well past oh-seven-hundred hours, which I hadn’t done for months. Most nights I had terrifying dreams about shadows chasing after me, and I woke up with a jolt while it was still dark. One of the hotel maids tapped on my door and came in with a pot of coffee and two bread rolls with red plum preserve. She was a shy young girl, plump, with a pattern of moles on her cheek.
    “What’s your name?” I asked her. I could see myself in the closet mirror and my hair was sticking up like a cockatoo.
    “Hilda,” she whispered.
    “Well, Hilda, maybe you could open the drapes for me so that I can see what kind of a day it is.”
    “It’s raining, sir. It’s a bad-luck day.”
    “A bad-luck day? What makes you say that?”
    “It’s Friday the thirteenth.”
    “You’re not superstitious, are you?”
    She shook her head, but then she said, “One of the girls downstairs thinks that you’re a
tovenaar
.”
    Tovenaar
is Flemish for a black magician. The girl must have seen my Bibles and my crucifixes and all the paraphernalia of Screecher-hunting.
    “No, I’m not a
tovenaar
. Tell her I’m a
goochelaar
.” A
goochelaar
is a conjuror, the kind who pulls rabbits out of opera hats and strings of colored bunting out of his ears.
    “Yes, sir.” She tugged back the heavy velvet curtains and she was right. The sky was gloomy and the window was speckled with raindrops. “You should be careful today, sir.”
    “I’m always careful. Here.” I reached over to the ashtray on my night-table and fished out a couple of francs to give her a tip.
    I met up with Corporal Little and Frank in the lobby downstairs. The hotel was bustling with activity because some of the British were leaving. Outside, Keizerstraat was crowded with Jeeps and trucks and British Tommies wearing rain-capes.
    “You had something to eat, Henry?” I asked Corporal Little.
    “Sure thing. Frank and I shared some sausage.”
    “You know what the Belgians put in those sausages?”
    “Hate to think, sir.”
    “Reconstituted Nazis, with additional cereal.”
    Corporal Little had parked around the corner. We climbed into the Jeep and maneuvered our way toward Schildersstraat. Frank took the rain as a personal insult and kept shaking himself impatiently.
    No. 71 was a tall gray building right on the corner of Karel Rogierstraat. The downstairs windows were covered with grimy lace curtains and all of the upstairs windows were shuttered. Corporal Little parked halfway up the curb and we went to the brown-painted front doorand knocked. The knocker was cast in bronze, in the shape of a snarling wolf. A knocker like that was supposed to keep demons out of the house, but if Ernst Hauser had been telling us the truth, it certainly hadn’t worked here.
    We knocked three times before the door was opened. A plain young woman in a white muslin cap and a plain brown dress stood in front of us, holding a mop. From inside the house, I could smell bleach and fish boiling.
    “We’re looking for three men,” I told her, holding out my identity card. “Do you have anybody staying here?”
    “Nobody now. Only my grandfather.”
    “How about before?”
    “Before? Yes. We had five Germans here before the Allies came, and another man, but they’re all gone now.”
    “Another man?”
    “I don’t know what he was. He didn’t speak German. I don’t know what