Mister White: The Novel Read online

  Praise for

  John C. Foster's

  Mister White

  “John C. Foster’s Mister White is a lightning-paced, globetrotting mashup of espionage, adventure and truly disturbing occult horror. Fun and nasty in all the right places.”

  —Paul Tremblay, New York Times Bestselling Author of A Head Full of Ghosts

  “Mister White is a potent and hypnotic brew that blends horror, espionage and mystery and may cause confusion, disorientation, terror, disruption of sleep and the inability to stop turning pages. John C. Foster has written the kind of book that keeps the horror genre fresh and alive and one that will make fans cheer. Every writer who reads it will mutter, ‘I wish I’d written that,’ and every reader will make note of Foster’s name. Books like this are the reason I love horror fiction.”

  —Ray Garton, Grand Master of Horror Award-winner and Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of Live Girls and Scissors

  “Mister White is like Stephen King’s The Stand meets Ian Fleming’s James Bond with Graham Masterton’s The Manitou thrown in for good measure. It’s frenetically paced, spectacularly gory and eerie as hell. Highly recommended!”

  —John F.D. Taff, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of The End in All Beginnings

  “John C. Foster keeps you turning the page with prose as propulsive as a bullet. Mister White is a skillful blend of horror and international intrigue, Ian Fleming by way of Stephen King. An impressive, accomplished novel you won’t soon forget.”

  —Nicholas Kaufmann, Thriller Award-nominated author of Dying is My Business and Die and Stay Dead

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Grey Matter Press except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This novel is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  MISTER WHITE

  ISBN 978-1-940658-61-2

  First Grey Matter Press Electronic Edition

  April 2016

  Copyright © 2016 John C. Foster

  Design Copyright © 2016 Grey Matter Press

  All rights reserved.

  Grey Matter Press

  greymatterpress.com

  Grey Matter Press on Facebook

  facebook.com/greymatterpress

  I remember the poem, Dad. I'll never quit.

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  More from Grey Matter Press

  CHAPTER ONE

  - 1 -

  “Who is Mister White?”

  There was a pause and a crackle of static over the phone. Abel was about to speak again when the connection was severed.

  Um einen weiteren Anruf tätigen, legen Sie bitte—”

  Abel hung up before the mechanical, feminine voice could finish telling him how to make another call. He turned back toward the crowd in the dimly lit bar, letting his gaze wander from face to face, his eyes stinging from the haze of smoke hovering beneath the low ceiling. He was grinning faintly and chuckling, as if he had just finished listening to a clever story.

  He returned to his spot at the bar and ordered another beer. “Bitte,” he said to the stocky bartender when a fresh pint glass was placed before him, adding another wet circle to the collection of moist rings that reminded him vaguely of the Olympic symbol.

  Who is Mister White?

  Click.

  He sipped, licking the foam off his upper lip and nodding at a man holding court with a stein in one hairy fist. He was at ease. A somewhat familiar face around this part of Schwedenplatz in the center of the city. It was warm inside, and everyone was talking themselves into having at least one more drink before heading out into the snow.

  Abel turned, leaning one elbow on the bar, another happy regular at Das Hupfen Schwein. He didn’t look Austrian, but his wardrobe and hair seemed as though it was possible he came from Ireland or Scandinavia, and his flawless German refuted any possibility he was American.

  He forced himself to sip slowly, relaxing his shoulders, outwardly at ease.

  “Danke,” he said to the barman’s back, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror behind the bar. Good. He projected relaxation.

  He looked anything but afraid.

  - 2 -

  The train clacked and rattled as it raced southbound along underground tracks toward the outskirts of Vienna. It was late, and only a few second-shift workers returning home shared the coach with Abel. A big man reading the newspaper. A couple of city workers in stained coveralls hanging from the overhead rail. A woman in a domestic’s uniform sitting across from him.

  Abel sank onto the bench, wrinkling his nose at a rank under-smell that infected the atmosphere on the car. He had already stepped off the train twice and boarded the next in line, keeping an eye out for familiar faces and postures. Indicators of interest.

  There was nothing. Nothing at all out of place, but he still felt on edge. Maybe it was the smell.

  “Who is Mister White?” He muttered in English, looking up to see the domestic eyeing him with a flat stare. He glanced over to see the two city workers giving him the once-over as well. Or were they?

  He forced himself to look away, studying the laces on his shoes and the slush puddle forming around them from the melting snow. He looked up and heard the men in their coveralls talking to each other in guttural German. When he glanced across the aisle, the woman was still staring at him.

  Abel closed his eyes, playing the language game to distract himself, listening to the two men. Austrians, by and large, had a liquid sound to their speech, and he placed them as immigrants from the eastern part of Germany.

  He suddenly opened his eyes, and the woman was leaning her head back against the glass window, sleeping. A slight string of drool adorned the corner of her mouth. He noticed that the floor beneath her feet was bone dry and wondered how long she had been riding the train.

  Who is Mister White?

  Click.

  Is it time to leave Vienna? He asked himself. To shift the operation to another city? He pictured Munich in the spring and chased that image with a memory of sipping brandy on the shore of Lake Geneva.

  The car went black and Abel jerked in his seat, sweat beading on his forehead. The roar of wheels on tracks smothered his hearing, and he looked desperately to the left as something moved at the corner of his vision.

  The lights flickered back on and Abel blinked, already aware that something was different. The big man with the paper, where had he gone? Abel heard the metallic slide of the door at the end of the c
ar as it closed and could vaguely make out the big man walking into the next car.

  He sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly, calming himself. He thought of the dinner he would have after the drop. A backstreet restaurant that kept its kitchen open late and served the most amazing platters of pork shoulder with roasted apples and spaetzle.

  “Nachte station, Simmering,” a voice barked from the speakers.

  Abel rose and grabbed a hanging strap, fumbling to close the buttons on his long coat.

  The woman was watching him again. Dark skinned, hair escaping from the imprisoning bun on the back of her head. She hadn’t bothered to wipe the saliva from her mouth.

  “Fuck you,” Abel said with a congenial smile as he picked up his briefcase from the seat. “Have a fucking fuckity night.”

  The doors slid open and he stepped out onto the platform. A moment later the train hissed into motion and roared away. He caught a quick glimpse of the woman staring at him through the window, upraised middle finger pressed against the glass. Then he was alone on the platform.

  In the silence that followed the vanishing train, Abel knelt and placed his briefcase on the ground, pretending to tie his shoe while he carefully scanned his surroundings.

  It was darker than the platforms near Vienna’s nightspots. Dingier. Crumpled fast food wrappers and soft drink bottles were scattered about. Curling posters on the walls advertised performances that had gone dark a year ago, and he smelled the odor of finely aged urine.

  The familiar disorder, at least by Austrian standards, reassured him. Simmering, the last stop on the line, attracted some visitors, but never eager ones.

  Graveyards don’t attract eager visitors.

  - 3 -

  Abel pulled his collar tight to keep the falling snow off of his neck and worked the pick into the lock with numb fingers. By the time he heard the click of the mechanism release, he had aged several decades, his hair and beard coated with a dusting of white.

  He slid through the maintenance gate and pulled it closed behind him.

  The Zentralfriedhof was the largest graveyard in Vienna, home to the disintegrating remains of Beethoven and Brahms. Abel trudged in the opposite direction of those notables, ghosting between marble gravestones gone blue in the dark, the falling snow shrouding him, muffling his footsteps. As he descended deeper into the sea of the dead, the perimeter lights faded and the shadows seemed to melt and flow into dark lakes across his path.

  It was said that there were more dead in Vienna than living, and Abel found the Zentralfriedhof a perfect place to conduct business. He had worked with the Koecks before and knew that meeting in the cemetery would give the couple a not-so-subtle thrill.

  The muffled crunch of his shoes through the snow faded as a sudden gust of wind blew a white curtain into his eyes. Wiping the wet coldness away, Abel was startled to see a tall figure staring down at him.

  “Jesus,” he said, the realization that he stood before a stone angel not coming swiftly enough to douse a surge of adrenaline.

  He started forward impulsively, as if to curse at the angel, then stopped.

  Crunch.

  Abel turned slowly in place, rewinding the mental audio file and replaying it again. Had it been his own footstep, the sound distorted by the increasingly heavy snowfall?

  Unaware, he backed into the stone angel and looked straight up as his back met marble. It was a dark figure against the white snowfall, hook-nosed and deep-eyed. Judging.

  Abel jerked away and his nose wrinkled as he again smelled the rank scent from the train. A third-world odor of rotting flesh, blackened toes and gangrene.

  “Ridiculous,” he muttered. He was working himself up like a kid waiting for ghost stories around a campfire. Still, he thought he might take his coat to the dry cleaners tomorrow because the odor seemed to be sticking with him.

  “Abel? Sin sie das?” A woman’s voice floated through the night.

  Abel grunted in disgust. Amateurs. Of course it was him, who else would be out here in this weather?

  “Ja, ja,” he said, breaking his own silence. Masha hadn’t shouted yet, but she might if she was getting nervous, and the silly bitch had used his name.

  He crunched his way toward the sound, thinking of the Go Bag back at his flat and the heavy automatic hidden inside among the cash and identification cards. Only amateurs carried weapons in his profession—or so he had been taught—but he kept one for a rainy day or a snowy night.

  “Abel? Sin sie das?”

  Abel stopped, the hair on the back of his neck prickling. Something was wrong with the question.

  He began to back away from the voice when he heard the rapid footfalls of steps behind him. He spun around, catching a quick glimpse of a white face that seemed to float in the darkness. Abel blinked snow from his eyes and looked again, but the row between the gravestones was now empty.

  “Abel? Sin sie das?” The voice came again from beyond a vast marble mausoleum. Abel? Is that you? Asked in exactly the same way, with exactly the same volume.

  Break contact right now.

  Abel darted into another row, moving quickly away from the voice, not returning to his path of entry. He caught a slither of movement from the corner of his eye and heard a loud cry followed by a splash. The gurgling death throes were unmistakable.

  Panic seeping in, Abel reversed directions and ran through the rows of gravestones. He slipped and landed hard, the briefcase jarred from his grip.

  Fuck it. He left it where it fell, scrambling on hands and knees.

  “Abel? Sin sie das?”

  “Shit,” he said as he realized he had been herded back to the meeting point. He clawed his way to his feet, determined to sprint past whatever might be waiting for him. He ran, coat streaming, darting around the corner of the mausoleum.

  “Oh hell,” he said to Masha. His feet slid out from under him as he tried to stop and he fell again, the breath knocked from his lungs.

  Masha had been crucified against the back of the mausoleum, railroad spikes driven through her outstretched wrists. Her chest was covered by a red bib flowing from the tear in her throat. A flashlight planted in the snow at her feet threw its light upward, transforming her expression into a ghoulish mask and causing the freezing blood on her blouse to glisten like rubies.

  “Abel? Sin—”

  “No…” he moaned over the recorded voice emanating from her coat pocket.

  Abel turned away from her, crawling through the snow, the bonds holding back his panic shattered. A pair of boots blocked his path, and he looked up to see the white face floating in the night.

  “Don’t,” he shouted in the instant before the shadows swarmed him.

  There was a bright flash of pain, then darkness.

  - 4 -

  A familiar rumble became identifiable, and Abel fought a surge of nausea, his head throbbing. He felt like he was coming off of a three-day bender, but that didn’t seem right.

  He opened his eyes just in time to see a young couple watching him before he doubled over, retching.

  “Verdammt ekelhaft,” the girl said, her face wrinkling in disgust.

  “Lässt uns gehen,” the boy said, grabbing her arm and pulling her towards the door to the next car.

  He looked down at the string of vomit stretching from his mouth to the bench, his nose choked with a sweet, antiseptic smell.

  I’m on a train, he thought, and then, chloroform.

  Abel sat up, clutching his aching head. His pants were wet with snowmelt and he shivered, struggling to clear the mental fog from his memory.

  He wiped yellow bile from his mouth as the puddle of puke sent streamers down the bench towards his briefcase.

  “Shit.”

  The door to the next car opened and a member of the Polizei stepped onto the car. He had the look of a man off duty, carrying his hat, tie undone.

  “Bist du betrunken?” He snapped, eyes narrowing.

  Abel shook his head, “Not drunk. Sick.”


  The cop gave him a doubtful look. “Sie, die sich sauber.”

  “I will. I’ll use my coat.” Abel realized he was speaking English and made a mental effort to switch languages.

  He picked up his briefcase and something sloshed inside as he placed it on his lap. He had fumbled off his coat and was sopping up the vomit when he felt a warm wetness on his thigh. Red liquid was seeping from the briefcase.

  Abel looked up instinctively at the Polizei officer, but the civil servant had turned away in disgust, and Abel quickly used his coat to smear away the blood.

  As the train pulled into the lighted platform of the next station, the cop muttered a disgusted command over his shoulder. “Nach hause gehen und schlafen sie ab.” Go home and sleep it off.

  He got off the train and Abel tensed when another man stepped on, but the odor drove him back out in search of another car.

  As the train resumed its clamorous transit, Abel looked down at his briefcase. What the hell happened tonight?

  Trembling fingers worked the clasp open and he lifted the lid.

  The severed human foot was resting in a sticky soup of blood. An amazing amount of blood. It dripped like red rain from the upper lid and Abel let out a high-pitched keening sound.

  He remembered everything.

  - 5 -

  Abel’s walk from the underground station to his flat was a paranoid dream set in motion. Every face turned to watch him, eyes shadowy pits like Masha’s. White snow hats looked like skulls, and a man in a light-colored balaclava nearly gave him a heart attack when he stepped out of a doorway.

  The befouled coat was in a public wastebasket somewhere behind him. He shivered as the snow coated his shoulders and cold reached through his sweater to drag icy claws across his ribs. He grimly hung onto his briefcase, unsure what forensic telltales he had left on it, hearing the foot thump and slosh as the case swung from his hand.