New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (9 page)

The breeze wherever he went was full of patterns, and there were always shadows flitting around him without any apparent source. Seeing him coming, workers stopped in the fields and blew high lonely notes on whistles made from the wing bones of seabirds.

Once, as he drifted down the back road of a slum, a very tall woman with yellow eyes and wild crowfeather hair came out of a shack carrying a child. She laid the infant in the white dust, stood before Henley, and lifted her skirts. Her eyes were charged with sorrow like a dying horse, and Henley understood that the baby was dead. With long fingers, she touched her breast, then slowly, slowly, her sullen eyes staring, she glided the tips of her fingers down over her belly to the cloud of hair below. That moment, a swirl of shadows like a shifting pattern of clouds played around the small corpse, and it stirred.

There was a muffled outcry from the onlookers who had stayed hidden in their huts. The woman fell to the side of her child, her face slippery with tears of joy. But Henley could see there would be a horrible price to pay. The baby was looking up at him not with the wonder-bright gaze of an infant but with a fully alert, seductive stare that promised violent knowledge deeper than innocence or guilt.

Another time, on a side street in North End, two blacks wearing cutoff denims and bulky pyjamastriped jackets over clean white T-shirts confronted him.

They looked malicious. One was missing half of an ear. The other had on a large hat and dark glasses.

The one with the glasses had grabbed his arm, but when he felt the spongy consistency of it, he let it go like a hot wire and jumped back. The abruptness of his action spun Henley around to face them and dropped back the hood of his anorak. The two men gaped stackfaced, unable to move for a long moment.

Then the one with half an ear drew a gun out of his jacket. Henley's stomach muscles tightened in a spasm, and the gunman was blown backward, tumbling to the ground. Henley drew his hood up, walked down the street, and turned a corner. In the secluded alley, his stomach knuckled again, and he was hoisted into the air, lightstepping over tin roofs until he settled into a garden patch several houses away.

Henley was no longer awed by such feats. The terror of being dislocated from his will had numbed him to all surprise. The memories of his previous life were remote, and he watched the events shaping themselves around him as if in a dream. Even when Autway led him up into the mountains to see the star pools, he was unmoved.

Beyond the spectral shapes of moss and fern and tall cypresses that spired above enchanted swamps, far up in the smoky hills, they came to a series of large ponds devoid of all vegetation. The sides were banked with hewn logs and packed gravel, the work of many generations. On their shores at irregular intervals were monoliths of black rock, the inscriptions carved into them exhausted by time.

Standing there, beneath a quail's-breast sky, with the wind blowing in off the pools and swirling around their heels like a discarded garment, Autway let out a low moan and began chanting. The red light of dusk was moving as if it were a breeze on the water.

They stood facing east until darkness had settled around them. Henley's body was becoming very excited.

He felt a ringing in his collar bones at the sound of the old man's droning voice, and the thick muscles massed in his legs were stirring. Barely able to remain still, his shuffling feet sounding like breath, his breath like a forgotten language, he watched the stone star, the moon, rise over the black water.

By moonlight, he could see something stirring under the water. There were many shapes, massed as one shadow. They were moving closer beneath the surface, and the expectation of their arrival nailed his breath. A splash sounded far to the left followed by a loud scuttling noise on the rocks.

Something was approaching.

Henley's body unsealed its breath and breathed deeply. Slow as a planet, it turned to face the darkness.

Laboured wingbeats sounded from a distance. A hulk loomed on the dark edge of the pool. Outlined in moonlight, Henley couldn't make sense of it. It was writhing gouts of flesh, a tangle of limbs, and then, abruptly, it narrowed and slipped back beneath the glass-grained water.

A torpid langour overcame Henley's body. It felt heavy, tired. Autway took him by the elbow, which was gelatinous and limp, and steered him away from the shining water. He felt wrong. His body had never felt so weary before. By the time they got back to trenchtown, he was stiff, almost rigid with exhaustion. The next day, Autway led him out to a remote channel where the shore was thickly covered with limestone dust that fluffed in from the quarries. Three white huts squatted on the shore, and, beyond them, an albino horse was corralled. Henley's curiosity about the previous night dissolved in a fright of recognition. To his left, drifting in the lazy current, was a white catboat with one man standing up in it.

Autway rattled his calabash, and the boatman steered towards the shore. With great trepidation, Henley watched him moor his boat and remove a black jug.

'De lurkers will naw come until we purge you,' Autway said.

Purge me! Henley thought with terror, watching the white horse's pink eyes staring at him while it champed. He wanted to face Autway, but his body wouldn't move.

'Yas. We must make room for de Host. We gone take you out. Too bad we can't kill you, but dat dere is bad for de Host. You naw get with your bruthers, les morts. Nyarlathotep cotch you and now let go. De l'eau noir, de black waters cotch you. You gone dere. You gone to go.'

The boatman was approaching with the jug in his hands. His face was cretinous, blank and washed as the sky.

Autway stepped closer, whispered in his ear. 'If even de earth itself knew. But dere is naw way to know. Speak to de dead and what do dey say? "I can be anyone you need." Give up de terrible arrogance of de past, give up de root of de present, and all dat de future can tell you is where it is you was never goin'.'

Henley's bones filled with a cold mist as the idiot offered Autway the jug. The gangan took it reverently and turned to face Henley. His face was a crust of harsh planes, and the shard of mirror was clouded. He spoke, and there was steel in his voice. 'Silence be your shepherd. What is beneath you be triumphant.'

Autway tilted the jug so that its mouth gaped before Henley's eyes. Its darkness mawed and he felt himself leaning out of his body toward it. He looked down, and there were lights, tiny and dim, moving there. They swung closer, and he saw that they were swirls of stars, galaxies, misty ballerinas flying apart through a dread night. He was falling, baffled, booming with fear. The midnight black gulfed him, and there would have been a scream, a yowl, but for the soundlessness of those blind depths.

Ralf rounded the corner of the scabrid hotel where he had left his attache. He peered through a chink in the wall that he had made with his knife when he first moved in. There was movement within, and he cursed under his breath when he saw that it was Duke Parmelee and Hi-Hat Chuckie Watz. They had scattered his underwear on the floor and were cutting open the mattress of his bed.

Ralf entered the hotel and edged up to his door. He unholstered his Walther, touched the body-warmed metal to his lips, and banged into the room.

Crouched in the doorway with his gun swinging from man to man, he hissed, 'You move, screwfaces, and I'll kill you!'

Ralf entered and closed the door behind him. Quick as wit, he had the two men sprawled against the wall while he removed their weapons. The Duke was carrying a forty-five Magnum, a switchblade, and a pair of handcuffs. Hi-Hat had handcuffs, a thirty-eight, a serrated blade in a sleeve-harness, and a hand-grip fitted with razor blades. 'Feisty,' Ralf said, waving the knuckle-grip. He threw it down on the bed with the other weapons and made the men crouch down with their heads between their knees. With his foot, he pulled off their shoes and kicked them across the room.

'Okay, eggplants, strip down,' he said, and when they hesitated, he kicked each of them in the butt so hard their heads clunked against the wall.

When they were naked, he had them handcuff their right wrists to their left ankles, then he lowered his gun, and picked up Hi-Hat's serried blade. 'You know, my better judgement says I oughta kill the two of you.' He yanked the mattress off its springboard. 'But I believe in justice.' Using the thick blade as a lever, he pried loose two hard-coiled springs and all the wire they were attached to. 'Now, you fellas were real cordial to me the last time we met. And I feel obliged to reciprocate.' He pried loose more wire and began intertwining it. When he had a long length of tightly reeved wire, he measured it against the length of their bodies and made a few adjustments. 'It's a good thing I got an even temper or I'd mutilate you skanks. But, as my more used to say, I don't get mad. I get even.'

'Gusto wants you wasted, wimp,' the Duke growled. 'So you better kill us while you got the chance.'

'You should be so lucky.' Ralf laughed, took more measurements with the wire and fashioned it into two crude harnesses. '! got a little Cong trick I wanna pull on you monkeys. Besides, I don't want you dead. I want Henley.'

'Forget Henley,' Chuckie whispered. 'why so, pretty boy?' 'Henley's freaked.'

'Yeah? Well, reserve your opinions till after I jump him.'

'Man, Henley's out,' the Duke said. 'I mean he's not even human anymore.'

Ralf smiled. He had finished. He used the Duke's switchblade to cut their clothes into long cords out of which he made binding. As he was tying Hi-Hat's ankles together, the Duke swung around with his free hand and sunk his fingers into the back of his neck. Ralf's knife hand whipped back and skewered the Duke's palm.

'Mother!' Ralf bawled. He rubbed the back of his neck and pointed the bloodied tip of his knife at the Duke who sat silent and brooding. 'For that you jokers are gonna get an added attraction.' He finished binding their legs and arms and undid the handcuffs. Gently and with some pride, he slipped the nooses of wire around their necks. The nooses were adjustable and attached to another wire that he hooked by an ingenious rider-knot to the springs. He did the same with their feet before handcuffing them and cutting off the rags.

"The beauty of your situation, fellow deviants, is that the more you struggle, the tighter the wire gets. If you squirm enough, you die. But if you're good and sit rock-steady, somebody, someday, may find you here.'

Ralf stuffed their underwear into their mouths and gagged them with a rag-cord. Before leaving, he pulled the shade and put the weapons and his clothes and money in his attache. In the lobby, he found the proprietor. His eyes were meat-coloured and his mouth a black hole, sucked in. With strained courtesy, Ralf paid the money to rent his room for another month.

There were rats in the back alley, and after some hassle, Ralf managed to box two big ones. He hauled the oil-soaked box to his room and let them loose. Hi-Hat jerked violently when he saw them, and the wire drew blood from his throat. 'Don't get excited, boys. This is just my way of saying good-bye.' He closed the door and fidgeted with the lock until he was able to jam it closed.

Ralf headed north. For several days he went in and out of small hill villages asking about Henley.

No one had seen him, and even if they had, Ralf had the distinct feeling he'd be the last one they would tell. Wherever he went he was sure he was being followed. Once, he glanced over his shoulder to see one of the young bay pirates working a nail into a footprint he'd left in the dust. The people he met were awed by his talisman, but no one would speak with him. Finally one morning, after finding a rusted jackknife near his campfire, the blade closed on a shred of paper with his crude likeness scrawled on it, he decided to call it quits. He still had most of the money Pantucci had given him, and he considered going someplace exotic to hide out from Gusto. The next day he spotted Henley. Or what looked like Henley. Ralf saw the coral-red hair from a long way off. It was in a decrepit trenchtown several kilometres out of North End. Here and there among the glinting litter of tin and broken glass a seabird poked, some perched on stumps and tall bamboo poles.

Above, a high wind was thinning clouds into long fish shapes. A lone bird was riding a ring of wind. Ralf kept his eye on the red hair as he jogged into town, his attach~ wagging beside him, his white jellaba swelling behind. The closer he got, the less like The Star Pools 89 Henley it looked.

For one, the character was too tall, way over six feet. And there was something about the way he was standing, legs akimbo, head tilted to the side like a puppet, that wasn't Henley and, very nearly, wasn't human. But his back was to him, and Ralf wasn't sure. His attention was so rigidly fixed on the figure ahead standing alongside a rusted-out jeep with large eyes painted on its fender, that Ralf didn't see the old man. He stepped from behind a tarpaper shack and grabbed Ralf by the arm. His hold was peculiarly strong. When Ralf turned to face him, he had to squint., Sunlight flashed from his face in a glare. "Scuse me, fella. My name is Autway. I want words with you.' Autway turned his face, and Ralf saw himself in the mirror shard of his eyes. What do you want, old man?' 'Dat mon over dere is not de mon you lookin' for.' 'How do you know I'm looking for anybody?' Autway shook his calabash. He had a dog-crucifix around his neck, and he touched it. 'I'm a gangan. I know why you are here.''Yeah? Why's that?' To find Henley Easton.' Ralf's eyes narrowed. For one delirious moment he thought he had been found by one of Gusto's men. But then the old man rolled his eye and leered, showing black teeth. He wasn't one of Gusto's.'How do you know that?' 'I told you. I'm a gangan.' He rattled the calabash, touched the dog-crucifix. 'You are Michael Ralf, eh?'

Ralf screwed up his face, reached out to grab the old man's stained mantle, thought better of it. '

eah, and who fingered me? Henley?'

'Naw. I'm a gangan.'

Ralf shook his fist at Autway. 'You will be gonegone if you don't start giving me some straight answers.'