Fortnight of Fear by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

can feel you – you and all the rest of them – right inside my head. I can hear your voices. I can feel your pain. I took your souls. I took your spirits. That’s what you gave me, in exchange for your lust.”
    He coughed blood, and then he said, “My God … I wish I’d understood this before. Because you know what’s going to happen now, don’t you? You know what’s going to happen now?”
    David stared at him in dread. “Anna, listen, you’re not going to die. Anna, listen, you can’t. Just hold on, I’ll call for an ambulance. But hold on!”
    But Gil could see nothing but darkness. Gil could hear nothing but the gray sea. Gil was gone; and Anna was gone, too.
    David Chilton made it as far as the garden gate. He grasped the post, gripped at the privet-hedge. He cried out, “Moo! Help me! For Christ’s sake help me!” He grasped at his throat as if he were choking. Then he collapsed into the freshly-dug flower-bed, and lay there shuddering, the way an insect shudders when it is mortally hurt. The way any creature shudders, when it has no soul.
    All over the world that night, men quaked and died. Over seven hundred of them: in hotels, in houses, in restaurants, in the back of taxis. A one-time German officer collapsed during dinner, his face blue, his head lying in his salad-plate, as if it were about to be servedup with an apple in his mouth. An airline pilot flying over Nebraska clung to his collar and managed to gargle out the name
Anna!
before he pitched forward on to his controls.
    A 60-year-old Member of Parliament, making his way down the aisle in the House of Commons for the resumption of a late-night sitting, abruptly tumbled forward and lay between the Government and the Opposition benches, shuddering helplessly at the gradual onset of death.
    On 1–5 just south of San Clemente, California, a 55-year-old executive for a swimming-pool maintenance company died at the wheel of his Lincoln sedan. The car swerved from one side of the highway to the other before colliding into the side of a 7-Eleven truck, overturning, and fiercely catching fire.
    Helplessly, four or five Mexicans who had been clearing the verges stood beside the highway and watched the man burn inside his car, not realizing that he was already dead.
    The civic authorities buried Anna Huysmans at Zandvoort, not far from the sea. Her will had specified a polished black marble headstone, without decoration. It reflected the slowly-moving clouds as if it were a mirror. There were no relatives, no friends, no flowers. Only a single woman, dressed in black, watching from the cemetery boundary as if she had nothing to do with the funeral at all. She was very beautiful, this woman, even in black, with a veil over her face. A man who had come to lay flowers on the grave of his grandfather saw her standing alone, and watched her for a while.
    She turned. He smiled.
    She smiled back.

Laird of Dunain
    Inverness, Scotland
    The charming Scottish county town of Inverness is situated on the River Ness, at the head of the Caledonian Canal. It is calm and clear and peaceful in the summer, with the spires of St Mary’s Church and the High Church reflected in the river, although you always feel a bracing sense of dramatic history when you walk its streets. Not far away, to the east, a cairn marks the spot where the hopes of Bonnie Prince Charlie were finally crushed at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Over 1,200 Highlanders were killed around Leanach Cottage, which still stands today. Most were brought down by the English army’s opening cannonade, and then by the English tactic of ignoring the charging Scotsman in front of him, and bayoneting the exposed side of the Scotsman to the right.
    Laird of Dunain
is dedicated to Ann Nicoll, of Dunain Park hotel and restaurant, on which the setting for this story is loosely based. If you haven’t eaten Ann Nicoll’s saddle of lamb in