Robert Walker - Zombie Eyes

But the following day, on public television, Nathan defended Stroud, who was being crucified in the tabloids as a modern-day Rasputin who charmed city officials into allowing an elaborate seance as extravagant as a David Copperfield magic stunt to go on for days in the city. Nathan warned others across the nation that men like Abraham Stroud were scarce, men who were willing to sacrifice life and limb for total strangers. People ridiculed him afterward.

An official inquiry into what was being termed the "Zombie Disease" incident was in full swing, and it appeared the questions would go on endlessly. Stroud was subpoenaed to appear before a board of inquiry that had been set up primarily by political hacks who were interested in getting their faces on the tube and their names in the columns.

Stroud, in a wheelchair, still in great physical pain, wearing a pair of black Oakley dark glasses, playing the blind man part to the hilt, since it afforded some protection from both press and public, answered politely the questions put to him. He did so knowing that few of the people here wanted to know the truth. That no one wanted to hear about human accomplices involved in human sacrifices to an unheard-of demon. He simply repeated again and again such tired phrases as, "There is more between Heaven and Hell, dear Horatio, than we know" and "Suffice it to say that we were dealing with supernatural elements beyond our control and human understanding."

He was debunked in most circles, held up as a hero by fringe elements in the community, invited to speak at any number of functions that involved psychics and Wicca people. He wound up hiding in the sanctuary of the hospital feeling a lot like Quasimodo without a bell to swing. The papers and most of the editorials regarded him as a freak of some sort. It was the same sort of publicity he had run ahead of in the past, the reason he had forsaken American continental archeological pursuits for foreign digs such as the one in Egypt.

Strangely, he had gotten more well-wishing letters from foreign ports than home. He had even gotten a telegram from Mamdoud who seemed to understand best what he was going through. Most well-wishers here had a hand out, a thousand requests to visit some haunted place in the heartland of America to vanquish some evil spirit that was causing harm and destruction to a community or a single family.

Haunted America, he had thought, no end of work for a Peter Hurkos or other ghost hunters, but he was not a goddamned ghost hunter, or a vampire stalker. He was an honest archeologist with the credentials to prove that he had worked hard to become who he was. But the press twisted who he was and what he was beyond recognition, to the point where sometimes now he was wondering himself.

He had to seek safer ground. He must go home to Andover, Illinois, sort out his feelings there amid his grandfather's presence in the old manse, a positively haunted place indeed. He wondered if his best friends after all were not among the dead ... his grandfather, his parents, Esruad ...

They would not question him, deride him. They alone understood. Stroud reached for the crystal skull and gazed into its smoothly fashioned indented eyes, watching the fire refracted by light slicing through the opened blinds there in the hospital. The inquiry hadn't gotten to the root of the evil, hadn't placed it where it rightly belonged, as Esruad and Stroud knew.

In all this time none of Stroud's champions or detractors had any idea of the shameful causes of the body count racked up by Ubbrroxx and the terrible human accomplices of the demon. It seemed only Nathan, Kendra, Wiz and a handful of others appreciated the true horror of the day, the guile and the fear residing in the species called man. There was no undoing what people had done to one another here, given the catalyst of the ancient god of the Etruscans.

Mankind's only hope, it seemed, was to keep the genie in the bottle, or in this case, to keep Ubbrroxx in the skull ... In the wrong hands, the skull could be a true Pandora's box, unleashing untold powers.

Some days later Stroud was on a 747 jet, bandages still encircling half his body, the arrangements made between his doctors in New York and doctors in Chicago. James Nathan had taken more time from his busy schedule to see him to the airport in the limousine that had driven him that first day to the Gordon Construction site. He'd told Stroud that despite Gordon's death, the tower was going up, getting back on schedule. Gordon had many associates who were anxious to take over his tower and they'd formed a pool to do so.

Stroud was simply glad to be on his way home, anxious to see his Andover prairie and home again, Stroud Manse. It had become a haven for him, a place to hide away from the publicity-seeking that not even the hospital had been able to completely stay. It had also been a long time since he had sat by the pool, and a long time since he had opened his mail. No doubt stacked to the chandelier by now.

He thought of his people at the manse, his housekeeper, gardener, his butler and stable man, his helicopter pilot ... all people he had, at one time or another, saved from some black form of demonic evil. The only people who didn't fear him.

Even the stewardess who had approached him some weeks before on his flight from Egypt to New York, flirting with him then, pretended now to not know him at all.

Stroud wondered what effect it would have on her if he asked her for a date; wondered what effect he'd have on the pilot if he dropped in on the cockpit and announced himself.

"People," Nathan had said in exasperation, "damned people. Most fear themselves, their own shadows, Stroud. Can you really blame them if they fear you? Can you? A man like you? A man who has grappled with the supernatural and won?"

"No," he said quietly to himself now. "Can't blame people..."

As for Kendra, she promised to keep in touch, and she had promised to visit him in Andover soon. He knew that she wasn't like most people. He knew that she would make good her promise and that soon, very soon, they would be in one another's arms again. For now, couched in his arms was the carry-on luggage he had hugged to himself the entire way, and inside it, the crystal skull, a "supernatural" gift which had made him feel immortal for a time down there in the boiler room of the demon's own hell. Esruad's power had coursed through his veins and part of that power still lingered like salt spray in the pores after a walk on the deck of a ship. Stroud had also come away with a new knowledge of his ancestry, and he was a better man for knowing the noble Esruad.

"I ... I didn't know you ... you were the Abraham Stroud when we first met," said the stewardess, who'd come to him with a pot of tea, remembering how he liked tea. "Maybe when we reach Chicago ... you ... I ... perhaps..."

"A meal, a show?" he asked, surprised at her sudden turn.

"Yes, yes ... I'd like that."

"You don't mind living ... dangerously?"

"Try me."

Stroud smiled inwardly as he watched the beautiful woman return to her duties, giving him another glance as she did so. She was sultry and naturally pouting unless she smiled, and her smile was like moonbeams. Perhaps he had misjudged her after all ... or perhaps she was part of an Egyptian plot to recapture the skull on the seat beside him, wrapped in linen and wedged into a carry-on. It had managed to draw curiosity when it was run through the video display at the metal detector baggage check, but Nathan had calmed the guard with a few words. It belonged at Stroud Manse with him, with the ghosts of that place, below his grandfather's portrait.

But Mamdoud had already wired him that the Egyptian government believed the "missing" skull belonged in their country and had begun a worldwide search for it. Stolen by common criminals, passed through hand after hand until it was brought to the court of the Pharaoh, Stroud now reclaimed it for his lineage, and damn the Egyptian government.