Walkers (56 page)

Daffy, Susan’s friend, kept
complaining that Susan was ‘eons away’ and that she just wasn’t
fun
any more. Susan apologised just as
often as Daffy complained, but there was nothing she could do to explain how
she felt. Even if she could have told Daffy about that day when the Devil had
kept her captive, even if Daffy had
believed
it,
she wouldn’t have been able to understand. Not even Henry and Gil and
Lloyd could understand. Because even though Susan had been alone, she had been
frightened that day beyond any fear she had ever known. That day, she had
understood exactly what she was, an assembly of bones and skin and convulsing
muscle, and she had understood that the difference between life and death was
nothing more than a fragile spasm.

That understanding brought her
closer to her grandparents. These days, she could even tolerate her
grandfather’s corny ribbing. But it took her further away from her own
generation, to whom death remained comfortably remote.

Daffy was right. Susan was no fun
any more. But she was far more caring and far more sympathetic than she had
ever been before; and she knew that when they defeated Yaomauitl at last, her
sense of fun would soon return. If only she could have told Daffy how hard it
was to laugh during a war.

Gil’s experiences had divided him
from his friends, too – and from his parents. Quite apart from the matter of
the borrowed gun, which had cost him two weeks’ allowance and a month of
working mornings in the store, he found that he was completely unable to
confide in his father and mother the way he used to. Phil Miller tried to talk
to him several times to find out what was wrong. ‘You’re not sick, are you?
You’re not in love?’ But Gil found it impossible to give his father any kind of
explanation that would have described how he felt, even remotely. He felt like
Tebulot, and how could he tell his father that? He felt strong, philosophical,
aggressive, moral, and dedicated. He felt a need to fulfil his destiny as a
Night Warrior by finding and destroying Yaomauitl, the Deadly Enemy. How could
he put any of that into words that his father could accept – his father, whom
he loved dearly, but whose horizons were bounded by pepper salamis and boxes of
Cap’n Crunch?

The changes that had occurred in
Lloyd’s life were more oblique. He had always been thoughtful, and deeply
involved in everything he did, whether it was schoolwork or athletics or
developing a friendship. His father was a serious man; a man of such honesty of
spirit that in his own small way he was almost a saint. Lloyd had inherited
that honesty, combined with the passionate enthusiasm of his mother, and so
when he had started to close himself away from the rest of the family to think
over his experiences as a Night Warrior, nobody had noticed anything
particularly unusual.

This time, however, Lloyd had begun
to feel that there was a great fulfilment awaiting him. Not just the fulfilment
of winning a five-hundred metre track race; not just the fulfilment of scoring
top marks in English. Not just the fulfilment of being black, and doing well in
a white man’s world. Lloyd had begun to smell greatness in the wind; the sharp
aroma that stirred up ordinary men and made them heroes.

One evening, in the sixth week of
looking for Yaomauitl, Lloyd’s father came into his bedroom and stood there for
a long time with his spectacles in one hand and his folded copy of the evening
paper in the other, and at last said, ‘Lloyd, I want you to tell me the truth.’
‘Daddy?’

‘Lloyd, are you sniffing anything?
You tell me the truth, now.’

Lloyd had actually smiled. ‘No,
Daddy,’ he had told his father, quietly, his face half shadowed by the light
from his desk-lamp. ‘No, I’m not sniffing anything.’

On the third morning of the seventh
week the skies along the Southern California coast were grey and hazy, but the
early weather forecast predicted that the sun would burn through the haze
before ten o’clock. After the weather forecast came the local news, and Henry
was sitting in the kitchen eating a bowlful of muesli when it was announced
that the body of a young woman had been found in a house on Prospect Street, La
Jolla, with massive abdominal injuries.

The newsreader said, ‘Police were
reluctant to say last night whether the slaying was the work of a ritual
killer, or whether the girl’s death resulted from some kind of bizarre
accident.’

Henry slowly put down his spoon.
Massive abdominal injuries. He wondered whether at last he had found the key to
Yaomauitl’s long silence. Leaving his breakfast, he went through to the
living-room and leafed through his telephone directory until he found the
listing for the San Diego Coroner’s Office. He punched out the number, and ran
his hand repeatedly through his untidy hair while he waited for an answer.

‘Mr John Belli,’ he said, when he
was eventually connected.

John Belli sounded tired and
unhappy. ‘Who is this?’ he demanded, clearing his throat.

‘Mr Belli, this is Henry Watkins,
Professor Henry Watkins. I was one of the three people who originally
discovered the body of Sylvia Stoner.’

‘Yes?’ John Belli asked,
suspiciously.

‘Well, sir, I’m sorry to bother you,
but I heard this morning that another girl had been found dead. On Prospect
Street, in La Jolla.’

‘Yes.’ Flatly this time. Cautiously.

‘Can I ask you just one question
about her?’

‘You can ask. I can’t guarantee that
I’ll give you an answer.’

‘Well,’ said Henry, ‘you don’t have
to say yes, if what I’m going to ask you is true. But if it isn’t true, then
I’d be obliged if you would say no.’

There was a pause. Then John Belli
said, ‘Go ahead, ask.’

‘The question is, does the evidence
indicate that the girl found at La Jolla was killed in the same way as Sylvia
Stoner?’

There was another pause. Then John
Belli hung up.

Henry held the receiver in his hand
for a moment, listening to the endless burring of the dial tone. Then he slowly
cradled it, and stood up. So that was it. Yaomauitl had been waiting for his
new offspring to be hatched. A girl at La Jolla had died; and who knew how many
more women had been impregnated by a Devil who could disguise himself as
anything and anyone he chose. There could be hundreds of eels, greedily eating
their way out of the wombs of scores of women. And even though they were not
yet grown – even though they were only embryos – they could begin to dream, and
once they could begin to dream, they could join their father and master
Yaomauitl as reinforcements.

Yaomauitl was preparing to
annihilate the Night Warriors, and carry his invasion through the dreams of
every living American. He might not be able to exert any influence during the
day, when men were rational and wakeful and alert, and sceptical of Devils. But
at night, as they slept, his evil influence could coax them and tempt them and
turn their minds. His shadows would rise up in their nightmares, and preach
intolerance and cruelty and self-indulgence; and all the achievements of
religious civilisation – those achievements which had been won by hundreds of
years of war and anguish and human suffering – would be toppled, and swept
away. Out of a nation’s nightmares, a new Dark Age would begin to flood,
staining the map of the world like ink.

Henry called Gil. ‘Gil? This is
Henry. Did you hear the news this morning?’

‘I was slicing corned beef.’

‘Listen, Gil, it’s happened again.
They’ve found a girl in La Jolla, dead, with her stomach eaten open. No eels –
at least the news didn’t mention any – so presumably they managed to get away
and bury themselves.’

Gil said, ‘What does this mean? I’m
not sure that I understand.’

‘The way I interpret it,’ said
Henry, ‘Yaomauitl has been waiting for the birth of some new embryo Devils, so
that he can outnumber us, and wipe us out completely.’

‘When? Where? Any ideas?’

‘Not yet. But I think we ought to go
out tonight, all of us, and see whether we can pick up his scent.’

‘All right, you’re on. Eleven?’

‘Eleven it is.’

Henry called Susan and then Lloyd.
Lloyd was out but his suspicious mother took a message. Susan sounded quite
grave on the phone, and asked Henry if he thought this was the showdown.

‘Showdown? You make it sound like
High Noon,’
joked Henry.

‘He wants to kill us, though,
doesn’t he?’ asked Susan, still grave.

Henry hesitated, and then he said,
‘Yes, he does.’ ‘And if he kills us when we’re Night Warriors?’ Henry reached
down and rubbed the leg that had been bruised during their last battle in the
depths of the clockwork city. ‘You know what Springer said. If he kills us as
Night Warriors, then our physical bodies will never wake up.’

Susan said, ‘Eleven o’clock?’

‘You don’t have to come if you don’t
want to,’ Henry replied.

‘You need me,’ said Susan. ‘How are
you going to find Yaomauitl without Samena’s sixth sense?’

‘You still don’t have to come. We’ll
find him somehow.’

Susan said, ‘Henry – the very worst
that can happen is that I get to rejoin my parents.’

Henry didn’t know how to reply to
that. It was both mature and mystical; a statement of adult resignation and a
statement of child-like faith. He said, with a thickness in his throat, ‘All
right, then. Eleven o’clock. I’ll look forward to seeing you.’

The day seemed to take an eternity
to pass. Henry went to the liquor cabinet even more frequently than usual, and
once he even went as far as unscrewing the cap of the vodka bottle. He sniffed
it, and let the fumes of it rise up into his nostrils. One drink, just to focus
his mind. One single solitary drink, just to prepare him for the battle that he
knew the night would be bringing him.

He screwed the cap up tight again,
and put the bottle back, and went outside for a short walk along the promenade,
breathing in the breeze from the ocean. He had thought that he was over the
worst of his desire for alcohol, especially after seven weeks without it.
Surely his system must have dried out by now. But the craving seemed to be
worse than ever, and he wondered if he would ever be rid of it. His mind was
already spinning out ready-made excuses for him to drink. You’ve been teetotal
for seven weeks, you deserve a drink.
One
won’t hurt you, you’ll be able to prove to yourself that you’re not an
alcoholic after all, if you just have one. If you have one, you’ll be drinking
like normal people do. You’ll be cured. After all – how you can say that you’re
cured if you’re still not drinking any alcohol at all? Staying completely on
the wagon is like admitting that you’re still sick.

He met by accident an old friend of
his called John Lund, a hoary old history professor who wore fraying Panama
hats and linen coats that looked as if they had previously done service as mail
sacks. John was short and bespectacled and voluble, and he didn’t drink, so
Henry suggested that they have lunch together. They linked arms and went to a
vegetarian restaurant further along the strip called Brother Bread, and Henry
managed to pacify his desire for vodka with a cool bowl of home-cultured
yoghurt and a plate of fresh-sliced melon. While he ate, he listened to John’s
latest interpretation of the War of Independence, which was something to do
with the English not wanting to win it anyway.

While John spoke, a man sitting
opposite, who was eating alone, opened out his copy of
the Los Angeles Times.
Henry only glanced at the main headlines at
first, out of the corner of his eye, but then he peered at them narrowly, and
read them with a rising sense of fright.
‘Killer
Eels Slay Wife, Attack Husband And Cops.’ ‘Officer,
emasculated, shoots self.’ ‘Medic and husband suffer multiple bites.’

‘And after Valley Forge . . .’John
was saying, earnestly, as he cut up his melon into small pieces.

‘John, excuse me,’ said Henry, and
went across to the man with the paper. ‘Could I borrow your front page for just
a minute?’ he asked him, and the man shrugged and peeled it off for him.

John Lund watched Henry through the
lenses of his smeary spectacles as Henry quickly read about the eels that had
attacked a middle-aged couple, as well as paramedics and police, on Paseo del
Serra in Hollywood. The wife’s body, the report said, ‘had been very severely mutilated...
with stomach wounds which Sergeant Garcia described as “worse than anything
that Jack the Ripper ever perpetrated”.’

Only a detailed examination of the
body would reveal exactly what had happened.

‘What is it?’ asked John. ‘You look
worried.’

Henry said, ‘I am worried. Actually,
I’m
more
than worried, I’m scared
stiff.’

‘You? Scared? What on earth does a
professor of philosophy have to be scared of?’

Henry handed the front page of the
newspaper back to the man at the opposite table. Then he said to John, with his
hands clasped in front of him, ‘Supposing you were told that you had to fight
one of those Japanese sumo wrestlers?’

John guffawed. ‘I’d lose,’ he said.
‘No question about that.’