There were six women in the room, two blondes, three brunettes, and an Asian. They were all naked, their smooth flanks glistening in the dim colored light of the room as they lounged unceremoniously along the heavy padding of the floor.
There were no courtesan's squeals to greet the Dutchman as he entered; he was only annoyed by such preliminaries. He took the one nearest to him, a blonde, and directed her languid hand to his body. Her jaw was slack. As she brought him mechanically to readiness, he saw the pinpoint pupils of her eyes beneath the heavy, sodden lids.
Roughly he pulled her left arm up toward the light to confirm the inevitable appearance of the track marks on the bruised skin. An addict. She would be sent away tomorrow. He did not tolerate drug usage among the women he hired. It emptied their minds. They could be of no use to him beyond providing receptacles for his passion.
He pushed her aside. The girl slumped to the floor where she had stood. The Dutchman grabbed the hair of the next girl and forced her head back, pulling up the skin of her eyelids to check for the same symptoms. When he was convinced she was in normal health, he eased her to the floor. Silently she submitted to him while the others in the room sat back, their expressions bored, as each waited her turn.
He went through four of them, each shattering climax fueling his terrible energy more than the last until his pale skin shone with sweat and his nerves were as sensitive as live electric wires.
The Asiatic took his thrusts with stoic docility, her almond eyes veiled and impersonal.
"You are a tigress," he said to her in French, her language. He wanted no one in the Castle who spoke English, to better guard his privacy. The Dutchman himself spoke eight languages, plus the arcane sign language he used with his mute servant, so there was no privacy from the Dutchman.
The girl's quiet eyes suddenly burned with bright fire. "You are an animal of the jungle," the Dutchman whispered. "Your claws are sharp. Your teeth shine with the promise of death." With an effort, he restrained the girl from raking his back with her long, blood-red fingernails. She bared her teeth in a cat's grimace. Something deep in her throat growled with feline pleasure.
He fought her, there on the padded white floor, as her knee-length black hair whipped around them both in frenetic passion. Her curled hand struck at his face. He slammed it to the floor above her head and rode her until she screamed in defeat and satiation.
He was ablaze. He was ready now. Naked and slick with sweat, he left the girl panting on the floor with the others and walked into a small courtyard lined on one end with straw dummies. In the open end of the yard, he performed the difficult exercises he had begun when he was a child. He was twenty-four years old now. He had been slowly mastering the exercises for fourteen years.
The Dutchman came out of a sustained three-finger stand and vaulted in two triple flying somersaults to the straw figures standing like sentries. With a stroke of his hand, he lopped off the head of one of the dummies, which had been affixed to its body by a four-by-four-inch post. He removed the arms with thrusts of each elbow, the thick wooden supports cracking and splitting with each lightning-fast jab.
He took on the dummies as he had the women, swiftly, methodically, emotionless. When he had finished, the courtyard was strewn with straw and sawdust and splinters of wood. The Dutchman was at peak now, his muscles prepared, his mind ranging like a predator around the isolated yard.
He had never learned to control the wild, awesome thing inside his brain that sought release only through destruction. Perhaps it was impossible to control. There had only been a few cases like it throughout all of human history, and those rare specimens had spent their lives in confinement, under the fearful scrutiny of scientists. They had lived like rats in a laboratory cage.
The Master had seen to it that Jeremiah had not shared their fate. Instead, he had prepared the boy's body to become as lethal as his mind. Together, the combination was to have helped the Master gain the world.
But death had claimed the Master before the boy came of age, and his murder had gone unavenged. During that time the Dutchman trained and practiced and waited for his twenty-fifth year— the year when, according to the Master, Jeremiah would be ready to undertake the responsibilities of his destiny and come a man into his Master's world.
"There are only two others on the earth who can match me," the Dutchman roared into the silence of the courtyard. "Two who can match me in strength and skill. And even though I face them before my time, they will be dead before the week is out because they do not possess my mind!" In a rage, he lifted up one of the blocks of wood that had fallen from the straw dummies and hurled it high into the air, over the courtyard wall, beyond the castle grounds, and out of sight.
"Chiun!" his voice echoed savagely off the stone courtyard walls. "Remo! You have stumbled into my domain to meet your end."
He was pulled out of the insensate roarings of his mind by the close yapping of a small animal. Already out of control, he turned slowly to see with his madman's eyes a dog darting back and forth in the courtyard, barking bravely at the Dutchman whom all animals feared.
His eyes automatically trained themselves on the dog. With a yelp, the animal began to run faster and faster around the courtyard, panting, stumbling over its own feet, until it collapsed. Its tongue lolled out in exhaustion.
The Dutchman tried to pull his mind away from the dog. It belonged to the Asiatic girl, and she was his favorite. But he could no more quell the violent power of his thoughts than he could halt the tide. He felt the thing, the ugly, unwanted thing inside him that had given him no rest since the moment he had discovered it, stir within him. The dog would have to die another horrifying death to add to the Dutchman's long list.
The thought was emerging on its own, red and blistery, the colors growing brighter... Then the sound of fast, shuffling feet momentarily broke his concentration as the girl, clothed in a white sleeping gown, her black hair flying behind her, dashed into the courtyard and scooped the dog up in her arms. She was whimpering and her hands shook as she picked up the animal, careful not to look at the Dutchman.
But the thought had already formed. Boils. And suddenly the girl screamed and tore at her clothes in a grotesque frenzy. The white gown hung in tattered strands over her once-perfect body, now covered with seeping sores. The dog scurried into the interior of the castle as the girl clawed at her eyes. Her ragged cries echoed, feeding the Killing Picture in the Dutchman's wild, transfixed eyes.
It was near the end. The girl's knees buckled and she fell to the earth, still screaming. Then the doorway opened, and the mute stood within its arch, the little dog at his feet.
"No!" the Dutchman shouted, but the mute would not leave. When would it stop, the horror, the killing, the revulsion at himself? Would he spend the rest of his life killing everyone who dared to come near him? Would he end his days a senseless monster with no will to perform anything but acts of death? With an effort so great that he felt his heart would stop, the Dutchman's feet began to turn. One step, then another, each harder than the last, until he was facing the wall.
"Go," he whispered hoarsely. The mute ran into the courtyard and lifted the bleeding girl in his arms. Then they fled with the little dog whining beside them through the big oak and iron door leading inside the castle.
The Dutchman clung to the top of the wall with white-knuckled hands. He could not hang on much longer. Soon he would have to turn back, commanded by the demon inside him, and everything in his way would be obliterated.
When he heard the soft thump of the door closing, the tension lessened. He felt some strength return to his hands and legs. Jumping high into the air, he vaulted over the wall and ran over the scrub of Devil's Mountain to the sea, where he swam for several miles until his energy began to dissipate.
Far out in the deep waters of the Atlantic, the demon calmed. The Dutchman turned on his back to see the bright, clean streaks of sunset clouds in the sky. His nostrils filled with the salt fragrance of the sea. His body floated motionless on the waves, soothed and cooled by the water. It would be so easy here, now, to dive to the depths of the sea, attach himself to a rock, and release the life from him that would float to the surface with the air in his lungs and burst in the salt spray. Death would be the most welcome event in his life.
But death was a luxury he could not give himself before his task was completed. He had made a promise to the Master, and he would fulfill it. Remo and Chiun would die first. Then the Dutchman would rest.
With long, weary strokes, he swam back to shore.
The mute was waiting for him when he returned to the castle. With his usual stony expression, he prepared the Dutchman his bath and a solitary meal of rice and tea. After he had finished, the Dutchman said, "Thank you, Sanchez." It was the first time he had used the mute's name. Sanchez's expression did not change, but the Dutchman thought he saw, for a brief moment, something like pity flicker in the mute's eyes.
The Dutchman spoke no more. In sign language, he asked Sanchez to make preparations at the shipyard. He could not allow more incidents to occur in his own home. The straw dummies were not adequate to contain his strength. He needed live victims.
The mute nodded and left. My power is becoming frightening, the Dutchman thought. Soon I will have to make contact with the young American and the old Oriental, Chiun. The time is coining.
Soon.
?Four
Pierre came to get Remo in a red Datsun pickup. Its fenders were riddled with dents, and the tailgate clanked open and shut with each bump on the winding dirt roads. Both headlights were smashed.
"Is this thing safe?" Remo asked.
"Safest car on de road," Pierre said, his teeth shining brilliant white against the ebony blackness of his skin. He patted the pitted dashboard of the Datsun as it labored up the steep hill roads near the island's west shore. "When Pierre get in accident, he drive away. Other guy— splat." He grinned with homicidal glee.
"Isn't that illegal?" Remo asked, amused.
Pierre dismissed the objection. "Not much illegal in the islands," he said. "Killing with gun, that illegal. Squashing with car, that legal." He poked Remo in the ribs. "Good thing for you Pierre got big car, huh?"
Remo smiled wanly. On his right, far below the cliff road, he spotted an industrial complex surrounded by an electric fence replete with high-voltage signs in English, French, and Dutch. Two television monitors atop high metal poles tracked the area constantly. The entire place was lit with bright floodlights.
The elaborate security system made the compound seem out of place in its primitive, night-blackened setting. "What's that?" Remo asked, pointing to it.
"Dat the Soubise shipyards," Pierre said.
"Soubise? Fabienne's father?"
"Dat the one. Only Soubise, he dead now. It all belong to the Dutchman now." He whispered the name in a low, mysterious whisper designed more for intrigue than communication.
"That Dutchman again. Everybody keeps bringing up the Dutchman, like he's some kind of a ghost. Who is this guy, anyway?"
"Nobody know the Dutchman," Pierre said, his voice that of a master storyteller beginning to spin his tale. "Never see nobody, never go noplace, that one. Some say he the devil himself. Look. Look up there." He skidded the truck to a halt on the steep mountain road, causing the vehicle to shimmy precariously close to the cliff.
"What's that?" Remo said, squinting through the darkness at a barbaric-looking white fortress on a hill in the distance.
"Dat the castle where he live, the Dutchman, up on Devil's Mountain."