Walkers (14 page)

In spite of their fear, in spite of
their anger against Springer, Henry and Gil and Susan looked at the girl
intently. Her face was beautifully structured, the face of a fashion model. Her
breasts were large; white globes patterned with tree-traceries of blue veins, and
rippled with palest pink. Her waist was slim, uncreased: she had obviously
never had a baby. Her thighs were slim and well-shaped. She wore a thin silver
chain around her left ankle.

‘
We know nothing about her... not even her name... but she is the first,.’
said Springer.
‘Watch what happened
to her.’

Gradually, the girl’s expression
altered. She gave a smile, a little distant, but still a smile. She held out
her arms, and although they could see nobody else there, she appeared to be
holding somebody, and kissing them, some invisible lover. Her thighs rubbed
rhythmically together in a slowly quickening erotic rhythm, and she kissed the
air in front of her more and more fiercely, using her tongue and her teeth.

She opened her mouth wide now, and
began licking at the empty air in the lewdest and most suggestive way. Her
tongue ran down some invisible length; then her lips stretched wide to contain
something delicate and pendulous, which she lightly thrummed with the tip of
her tongue. After a while, her mouth went deeper, and her tongue protruded
stiffly into some tight but unseen crevice. All the while she was doing this,
she squeezed her breasts with her own hands until the nipples rose so hard that
they jutted between her fingers, and her hips rotated around and around and
around.

Now she arched her head back, and
let her hands slide down her stomach and between her thighs. She opened herself
up with her fingers, just a little way at first, pinkish glistening folds; but
then she kissed and kissed and kissed again, and with each kiss she stretched
herself wider and wider open.

Then – as Henry and Gil and Susan
watched her in fascinated horror – something extraordinary happened. She
appeared to be penetrated by something invisible, but huge, and she was stretched
even further to accommodate it. She squeezed her eyes tight with pain, and
opened her mouth in a silent scream, but the remarkable thing was that there
was nothing there – at least nothing that Henry and Gil and Susan could see.
The girl began to buck her hips backwards and forwards, holding her arms
outwards with her hands clenched as if she were tightly gripping the back of
some furious assailant. Her thighs were wide apart now, and she was opened up
beyond anything that Henry had ever seen.

The girl’s bucking movements reached
a frenzied crescendo. She shuddered, and twisted and she was abruptly flooded
with pints of viscous white fluid, so much of it that it coursed down her
thighs. Then she closed her eyes, and crossed her hands over her breast and for
a long time she was motionless, as if she were sleeping.

‘Time passes... days pass . . .’
said Springer’s voice. The light in the room
flickered on and off, swivelling as it did so from one side of the room to the
other. Henry suddenly realised that he was watching a living diary; a record of
passing days, with the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, over and
over and over again, like a speeded-up movie.

Almost imperceptibly, the girl’s
stomach began to swell. She woke and slept, woke and slept. Her stomach grew
larger and larger, until it was the size of a woman three or four months
pregnant. It was then that it began to show movement. Not the uneven bumping
movement of a baby’s arms and legs and shoulders, but an extraordinary
twitching, writhing movement.

The girl’s eyes opened. She
registered pain. Her stomach began to knot and twist and ripple. Her eyes
opened and closed. She clenched her teeth in agony. She opened her eyes again.
She was screaming, then she stopped screaming. The days poured past, sun
rising, sun setting. Her stomach began to heave and churn. Her eyes bulged. She
opened her mouth in a long shriek that never seemed to finish.

Henry and Gil and Susan could hear
nothing, but they could see her face, and they knew that the pain she was
suffering was intolerable. The scream never seemed to come to an end.

There was a strong, convulsive jerk
in her stomach, a localised movement quite near to the girl’s navel. Suddenly,
her skin rose in a narrow chisel-shaped protrusion, dark grey like a cancer.
But this wasn’t cancer. The dark grey was the head of an eel, showing through
her last few layers of skin. And then the skin burst open, and a vivid streak
of blood slid quickly down her stomach, and the waggling head of an eel appeared,
staring out at the daylight with its yellow slitted eyes, its scales slicked
with blood.

‘Do you want more
. . .?’ asked Springer, as three or four more eel-heads burst out of the
girl’s stomach like obscene asparagus.
‘Do
you want everything .
. .?’

‘Stop it.’
roared
Henry. And as quickly as she had first materialised the girl disappeared. The
lights in the room abruptly brightened, and everything was back the way it was.

Susan screamed at Springer, ‘You’re
sick!
Do you know that? You’re
sick!’
She was shaking all over, and her
tears had streaked her eye make-up.

Gil stepped towards Springer and
demanded, ‘What are you, some kind of perverted person or something? Somebody
who gets kicks out of – what was that? – some kind of 3D stuff movie or
something?’

But Henry held Gil’s arm,
restraining him. ‘Whatever we feel about Mr Springer, Gil, I don’t think you
ought to misjudge him. Nor you, Susan. What he just showed us was disgusting,
but it was also true. It was a playback of what happened to that girl we found
on the beach. I don’t know how it was done, but I expect Mr Springer can
explain it to us.’

‘A small but comprehensive sample of
DNA taken from the girl’s brain was quite sufficient to help me recreate her
memories,’ said Springer, without emotion.

‘It sounds as if the Lord Thy God is
a scientific God,’ Henry commented, not altogether kindly.

‘Science is only the human discovery
of everything Ashapola created,’ retorted Springer. ‘I call it DNA because that
is the name by which you will recognise it.

Ashapola calls it something else
altogether.’

Henry said, ‘I read something in my
ex-wife’s book on eels. It said that in ancient Scandinavia, eels were
sometimes referred to as the “sperm of the Devil”.’

Springer nodded, almost with relief.
‘What you saw -those images – they were an exact recreation of what happened to
that girl in the last few months of her life. In late February of this year,
she had intercourse, as you so graphically saw. As the year progressed, she
became increasingly gravid, but not with child. At least, not with
human
child. Whatever she had
intercourse with, she was impregnated with creatures that appeared to be eels.
Eventually, they killed her. How she got into the sea, I don’t yet know. But I
suspect she may have been dumped there, in order to make her death seem less
suspicious.’

Susan whispered, ‘You don’t know
what – what it was that had sex with her?’

Springer shook his head. ‘Henry
referred to the Devil. But the opponents of Ashapola take on many different
forms, some of which you would identify as animals, others as men. This girl’s
memory has been blotted out – by shock, perhaps, or by the deliberate
intervention of the creature that had sex with her, or by a version of the same
spiritual technique that I used in the restaurant to avoid being remembered by
the waiters. Whichever it was, she remembers the sexual act, but she cannot
remember what it was that had sex with her, human or animal or something else
altogether.’

Henry saw that Susan was still
trembling with shock and disgust. He put his arm around her shoulders and held
her close. He looked at Springer defiantly.

‘Very well. You’ve shown us what
happened to that girl we discovered. You’ve told us that she was – well, that
she had sex with something. We’ve seen what the consequences were. I think I
can speak for all of us and say that we believe you, although I must question
the necessity of your showing it to us so graphically, especially to poor Susan
here.’

‘And?’ asked Springer, bland-faced.
‘What is your point?’

‘I have no point, except that we
believe you, and that we wish logo now.’

‘I second that,’ put in Gil. ‘There
might have been some kind of a reason for that little picture-show, but what it
was sure beats me.’

Springer laid one hand flat across
the other, and carefully examined his fingernails.

‘The reason for it was simply this,
my friend. It was necessary for me to make you believe me; and none of what I
have been telling you is easy to accept. I am not only asking you to believe in
Ashapola. I am asking you to understand that it is desperately urgent that the
beast which impregnated this girl is found.’ ‘Not by us, Charlie,’ Gil told
him, sardonically.

Springer raised his eyes. ‘Yes, my
friends, by you. You see, there is nobody else.

You saw the girl, you saw the eels.
You are the only ones who truly believe. You were brought together by the will
of Ashapola, believe me. By design, rather than by accident. Your destiny was
laid out for you this morning, when you found the girl lying on the sand. You
have to find the beast, and find it quickly. You have to destroy it.’

Henry’s lower lip wouldn’t stop
juddering, but he managed to say, ‘What if we refuse?

What if we just go about our
business and refuse? What if we don’t want to have anything to do with it?’

Springer slowly shook his head. ‘You
have no choice whatever, my dear sir. Because if you fail to find the beast,
then the beast will almost certainly find
you.’

N
ancy’s eleven-year-old Cutlass had
almost reached the turn-off at La Jolla Drive when the steering stiffened and
the brakes went mushy and the oil warning light blinked on. The car rolled
slower and slower, and it was only by wrenching the steering wheel violently to
the right that she managed to manoeuvre it off the freeway. It stopped, and she
applied the hand-brake. She said, ‘Shit.’

It had been the scrappy evening to
end all scrappy evenings. Now she was stranded on the northbound freeway at
eight o’clock in the evening, all dressed up in her best blue linen suit and
her matching blue shoes, angry, frustrated, and unhappy.

It had been her second date with
John Bream, who worked alongside her in the creative department at Sutton &
Ramirez, the second-largest advertising agency in San Diego. John was
advertising’s answer to Richard Gere. At least, that was what Nancy had thought
at first. He was athletic, argumentative, highly creative, and sullenly
handsome; and when he had asked her out on a date two weeks ago, she had spent
half a week’s salary on a new silk dress from Capriccio and three hours at
Young Attitude having her bright red hair cut and styled in a wave.

The first date had been wonderful. A
Korean dinner at the Seoul House, disco dancing and then a drive out to the
seashore to watch the surf. They had kissed, and John had told her how
vivacious she was. ‘You’re the most vivacious girl I ever met, bar none.’

Tonight, though, when she had called
around to his apartment in the Old Town, he hadn’t booked dinner and he hadn’t
planned on dancing. He had been wearing nothing but a bright green towelling
bathrobe and what he must have thought was a seductive smile. When she had
protested, he had lost his temper. ‘Do you know how much money I’ve spent on
you already? And now you’re telling me you’re not going to come across, because
it’s against your principles? Jesus, you women! Some feminist revolution!
You’re only independent when it happens to suit you!’

His crudeness had appalled her. She
had read letters in
Cosmopolitan
about
men who expect sex in direct repayment for money invested on dates, but she had
never encountered it before – at least, not so blatantly. She had turned around
and left. He had shouted at her down the staircase, ‘You tight-assed bitch!’

She twisted the key again and again
in the Cutlass’s ignition. The starter-motor whinnied and whinnied, but then
after a while it began to sound like a regurgitating horse, and finally it
refused to do anything at all but click. Her previous boyfriend, an overbearing
know all called Ned, had warned her several times that her alternator was on
the way out. She climbed out of the car and stood glaring at it with her hands
on her hips, as if there was a possibility that it might start up out of sheer
embarrassment.

Although it was summer, there was a
cool wind blowing up here, where the freeway cleaved between the grassy hills
of La Jolla Village. The sky was the colour of pasque flowers, blue fading into
violet, and southern swallows soared high above Nancy’s head. Oh well, she
thought wryly, at least they aren’t vultures.

Traffic whizzed and whistled past
her, orange lights glowing smugly, interiors dark and private, and even though
she raised the Cutlass’s bonnet, and switched on her emergency flashers, nobody
wanted to stop. There had been too many rapes and too many muggings on the
freeway lately. Too many motorists had stopped to assist stranded ladies, only
to find themselves attacked by two or three hoodlums jumping out from the
bushes.