Popping the top with her thumb, she dipped the tip of her tongue into the thick liquid. Swishing saliva, Judith brought her mouth close to his. Her breath was vile.
"How about a kiss, darling?" Judith purred.
Her free hand pried open his mouth. It was easy now. The fight was gone. Even as his lips formed an O she was already spitting the sickly warm goo onto Mark's tongue.
She slammed his mouth shut and massaged his throat.
He knew he should resist. But the urge to swallow came anyway. She eased up the pressure just a little, and Mark felt the thick liquid slide down his constricting throat.
The world began to spin. She whispered a few quick words in his ear before letting him go.
As he fell against the desk, he caught a final glimpse of Judith White. She was crouching on the windowsill, the heavy BostonBio lab case dangling lightly from her hand.
She flashed a toothy smile.
"Be seeing you, precious," she growled. And then she was gone.
Mark reeled. Somewhere deep within him, he felt a terrible, primal stirring. His stomach clenched. He pressed both hands to his gut, trying to hold back the pain, desperately trying to hold on to himself.
His head whirled. The room danced a kaleidoscope across his double vision. Through it all, one thought passed over and over through his mind.
One arm. Remo said she had one arm. This Judith White had two.
They don't know. I have to tell them. Have to warn them.
But it was too much. Mark Howard felt all that made him human slip gently away. He fell. On the way to the floor, his temple cracked hard against the corner of the desk.
And a darkness greater than the cold, collapsed center of a dead universe washed over him.
Chapter 28
Remo and Chiun felt the draft of forest air the instant they burst into the Lubec Springs offices.
They raced up the hall to the open office door. The picture window was gone-shattered in a million pieces across the floor. A few shards stuck from the window frame like crooked teeth.
Afraid Mark Howard had been kidnapped, Remo bounded across the floor to the window. He nearly tripped over the young man. Howard was sprawled on the floor behind the desk.
Because Remo had not detected him the instant he entered the room, he was certain Howard was dead. But all at once, the younger man came back to life.
Howard sucked in a pained gasp of breath. Like a newborn testing its first gulp of air. His heartbeat seemed to reset. Like tumblers in a safe, the muscle fell click-click into a new pattern.
Remo had heard the pattern before. "Christ," he hissed.
On the floor, the assistant CURE director stirred. Remo glanced worriedly at Chiun. Standing somberly beside the desk, the Master of Sinanju looked down on Howard, his face gathered in a mask of wrinkled worry.
Remo had hoped he was wrong. But with the look on his teacher's face, his worst fear was confirmed. "Watch him," Remo snapped.
In a shot, he was up on the windowsill. Loafer soles disturbed not a single fragment of glass as he launched himself outside.
He hit the backyard at a sprint.
It was mostly rotting leaves on scraggly weeds. Howard's attacker would have been easier to track through fresh grass, but there was no back lawn to speak of.
Here some leaves had been recently overturned. Over there something had kicked a stone.
Judith White was good. Judith White would not leave big, blundering tracks.
By the time Remo reached the tree line, he knew it was hopeless.
There were tracks in and out of the woods. Some a few days old, some as new as that day. White's creatures probably used the woods as cover for their nightly forays to the local dairy farms. He found a path that looked as if it could have been broken recently.
No, not her. Too old. Too clumsily formed. Maybe with Chiun they could each go in a different direction. Expand their range by fifty percent.
But Chiun had his hands full. Remo was forced to admit defeat.
Running back to the building, he bounded back through the broken window.
Chiun was kneeling on the floor beside Mark Howard. The cushion had been removed from Owen Grude's office chair. The Master of Sinanju had tucked it gently under Howard's head. A nasty red welt was rising on the young man's temple.
"She got away," Remo said, slipping up beside Chiun. He crouched beside his teacher.
"We must hie to Fortress Folcroft at once," the old Korean intoned solemnly.
"You put him under?"
Chiun shook his head. "There was no need. The Regent sleeps for now. But he is gravely afflicted." As if to offer proof, a withered finger brushed Mark Howard's right eyelid. Folding back the thin flesh, the old man exposed an orb of twitching brown. All the green in the young man's iris was gone. When Chiun looked up once more, his mouth was a razor slit of worry.
On the floor, a soft sound came from the back of Mark Howard's throat. It was a contented purr.
Chapter 29
Dr. Lance Drew had seen much that was strange during his tenure at Folcroft Sanitarium.
There had been the time many years before when the old Asian-who was either an acquaintance of Director Smith or a former patient; Dr. Drew could never figure out which-had succumbed to a hitherto unknown viral infection. Somehow he had been miraculously cured by a simple electric shock.
That was one for the medical books.
Then there were those dark days ten years back during a highly stressful IRS raid when mass hallucination had caused people within Folcroft's ivy-covered walls to see purple pterodactyls and pink bunnies. Dr. Aldace Gerling, head of psychiatric medicine at Folcroft, had wanted more than anything to present that episode at a national conference. His request had been denied. Folcroft's privacy policy.
Then there was the comatose girl whose brain showed no signs of synaptic activity whatsoever. Even so, the night she was brought in, Dr. Drew swore he heard her muttering in a voice that sounded like that of a thousand-year-old man. Not only that, her body reeked of a sulfur stench that would not wash away. And to compound the strangeness of that case, for a time the girl's body had released clouds of noxious yellow smoke. That had long since stopped, but the girl was still on the premises. Clearly she was a candidate for the supermarket tabloids. Any one of them would have made her their cover story.
In that as in each case, Dr. Smith would hear none of it. The families of Folcroft's patients, Smith maintained, had not entrusted the care of their loved ones to Folcroft so that their tragedies could be exploited or sensationalized.
There were times in the past when this stubbornness of Dr. Smith had almost driven Dr. Drew to resign. Nowhere else in medicine were healers forced to sign a draconian gag order like was required of the medical staff at Folcroft. At any other institution, he would be able to talk and write freely. But, unfortunately for a man as intellectually curious as Dr. Lance Drew, there was no other place he knew of on the planet that offered such fascinating cases as Folcroft Sanitarium.
And the best benefit of all, for the most part when he left work at the end of the day, he could put it all behind him. The sanitarium ran with such efficiency, thanks to its priggish director, that rarely was Dr. Drew bothered by work at home.
Folcroft Sanitarium was far from his mind as picked up the jangling kitchen phone in his Milford, Connecticut, home.
"Hello," he said absently. With the tip of his tongue he stabbed at the tiny bits of steak and corn that were stuck between his front teeth.
Dr. Drew had just picked up a new Barbecue King 3000 at the local hardware store. He had been enjoying a late supper with his wife, burned with his own two doctor hands.