Rook & Tooth and Claw (16 page)

That was enough for Chill. He shouted to his two remaining minders and they climbed into the car as if the devil was after them. And he was. Before Chill’s driver could start up the engine, the black smoky shape of Uncle Umber glided over to the Cadillac and literally poured itself in through the half-open window at the back.

The Cadillac’s engine whoofed into life. The tyres screamed, and smoke billowed out of the rear wheel arches. Then the car pulled away from the curb and out into the street.

It didn’t get very far. It hadn’t even reached the end of the block before it abruptly swerved and collided with a deafening smash into the back of a double-parked garbage truck. There was a moment’s silence and then it exploded. A ball of orange fire rolled up into the night. The blazing spare tyre was hurtled thirty feet into the air
and landed on top of a parked car on the opposite side of the road.

Jim thought that everybody in the car must have been killed. But suddenly the passenger door opened and Chill dropped out on to the road, the back of his hair smoking. He managed to get up onto his hands and knees and crawl away from the wreck like a beaten dog. The heat from the burning car was so intense that the soles of his yellow suede shoes momentarily burst into flame. At last he was dragged to safety by two garbage collectors, who laid him on the sidewalk and covered him with coats.

Jim stayed where he was, watching the car burn itself into a skeleton. Only he could see the ashy-faced figure in the Elmer Gantry hat who was watching the wreck, too; unmoving; but with a look of ghoulish satisfaction.

At three o’clock in the morning, Jim was awakened by a light, insistent tapping noise. He sat up in bed, suddenly alert, listening. There was a moment’s pause but then he heard the tapping noise again, like somebody’s fingernail against the living-room window.

He climbed out of bed. The feline formerly known as Tibbles had been curled up against his legs, and she opened one eye and gave him a look of intense irritation. He padded on bare feet across the living-room carpet. The cotton blinds were drawn down over the window, but there was a three-quarter moon tonight, and Jim could clearly see the shadow of somebody standing out on the balcony.

He stood in front of the blind for a very long time, wondering if he ought to put it up, or pretend that he was asleep and that nothing could wake him.

But then he could see the shadow raise its arm and tap at the window once again. It would probably tap
all night if he didn’t answer it, and he was exhausted enough already. After he had gone to bed, he had fallen asleep almost at once, but he had woken up after only ten minutes beating and flapping wildly at his bedsheet because he thought that he was on fire.

He had managed to get back to sleep shortly after two – but now he was faced with this. A shadow who stood outside his window, patiently tapping.

At last he took hold of the toggle and tugged the blind open. Standing in the moonlight was Elvin, so pale that his skin was almost luminous, his wounds looking even more than ever like the gaping mouths of dead fish. He tapped the glass yet again. He was smiling in an odd defensive way, the way that blind people smile when they think that they’re approaching an unfamiliar obstacle.

Jim covered his face with his hands. He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take. But when he took his hands away Elvin was still there and he knew that he didn’t have any choice but to open the door.

Elvin came shuffling into his apartment and stood staring at nothing at all.

“Hallo, Elvin,” said Jim. The smell of decay was much stronger now and he thought that Elvin looked much worse. How long could Umber Jones’s magic drag this poor mutilated body around, carrying his messages?

“Umber Jones wants you to go see Charles Gillespie again,” said Elvin, his voice almost unintelligible. “He wants you to tell Umber Jones the same thing you told him the last time. If he still won’t agree, he wants you to give him this.”

He reached with a white, spongy hand into his suit and produced a chicken’s wingbone tied with hair and feathers and coloured thread. It looked like a giant fishing-fly. Jim stared at it but he wouldn’t touch it.
Elvin waited patiently for a moment and then laid it down on the table.

“Another voodoo curse, I suppose,” said Jim.

“Another way to make Charles Gillespie see sense,” Elvin replied.

He turned to go, but Jim sharply said, “Elvin!” and he stopped where he was, with his back turned. His hair was tufty with dried blood.

“Elvin – is there anything left inside you of what you used to be, before Umber Jones took control of you?”

There was an achingly long pause, and then Elvin said, “I don’t understand the question.”

“I just want to know if I’m talking to Elvin Clay, the real Elvin Clay, Mr and Mrs Clay’s favourite boy, Elvira’s brother; or whether I’m just talking to a lump of submissive meat.”

“Umber Jones is my
houngan.
I do whatever Umber Jones asks me to do.”

“I know you do, Elvin. But what I want to know is whether there’s anything left of
you.
Any will-power. Any strength. Any mind of your own.”

Elvin hesitated. Despite his revulsion, Jim put his hand on his shoulder. His flesh felt unnaturally soft beneath his suit. Jim could feel his putrescing muscles slide across his bones. Elvin bowed his head and the wounds around his neck opened up as if they were capable of speaking on their own.

Then he turned around, and his face – as hideously mutilated as it was – was filled with almost childish pleading. “Why doesn’t he let me go, Mr Rook? Why doesn’t he just let me die?”

“I don’t know, Elvin. It seems like he needs you, the same way he needs me.”

“Can’t you just ask him to let me go? You don’t
know what it’s like, feeling yourself rot. It’s like there’s something gnawing inside of my guts, something that won’t stop gnawing and gnawing, and I’m scared that it’s maggots.”

Jim swallowed, and then he managed to say, “Listen, Elvin … I’ll do everything I can. I promise.”

Elvin gave him a blind, pathetic nod. Then he turned around again and shuffled out of Jim’s apartment. Jim watched him grope his way down the steps and out into the night. God alone knew where he was going, or where he stayed when Umber Jones wasn’t sending him out on errands. Maybe the cemetery. Maybe some cellar. And what was going to happen to him when his body began to decompose so badly that he couldn’t even walk?

He picked up the chicken-bone fetish. There was something indescribably nasty about it. It was dry and old but it had a strong, unpleasant smell that put him in mind of everything that had ever made him nauseous, from a lump of gristle to the stench of sewage. He didn’t know what Chill would make of it, but it certainly frightened
him.

He couldn’t think of going back to sleep. He went into the kitchen and made himself a strong cup of coffee. He sat at the table, wearily staring at the fetish and wondering if he were ever going to be able to free himself from Umber Jones’s service. He was still sitting there when he heard a sickening, regurgitating noise from the living-room. It sounded like somebody choking for breath on their deathbed.

Cautiously, he slid open the cutlery drawer and took out the largest knife he could find. Then he tiptoed out of the kitchen and stood outside the living-room door. The noise was repeated – a horrible gagging, cackling sound.

He said to himself: come on, you managed to face Elvin. You
touched
him, even. Whatever this is, this can’t be worse.

He reached around the living-room door to find the light-switch. He counted to three, and then he simultaneously switched on the light and swung into the living-room with his knife held high, shouting, “
Right
!”

The feline formerly known as Tibbles looked up, startled. She had just vomited all of her supper on to the carpet. Jim stood and stared at her, his knife in his hand, and he was sorely tempted to use it. But then, well, it was his own fault for giving her jambalaya. He knew that chillis always made her sick.

He went back to the kitchen to find a bucket and a wet cloth. He had never felt so tired and dejected in his whole life.

When he came into class that morning he found his students all standing around or sitting on their desks, talking to each other. He dropped his folder with an emphatic slap, and then he said, “What’s this? You’ve started a debating society? What’s the motion for today? This house believes that all teenagers should tuck their shirts in?”

Russell Gloach came forward. He still had Twinkie filling around his mouth, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. “No, sir. The motion is, what are we going to do about Tee Jay’s Uncle Umber?”

Tee Jay was there, too, sitting at the back of the class. Jim approached him and said, “What do you think, Tee Jay? He’s your uncle. What he’s doing, it’s all connected with your religion.”

“He’s gone too far,” said Tee Jay. “I never knew that he was going to start wasting people.”

“He’s gone too far and you don’t know how to stop him? You couldn’t try appealing to his better nature?”

“Uncle Umber doesn’t have a better nature.”

Sharon said, “You can’t expect Tee Jay to stand up to his uncle. He’s going to get himself killed, same as Elvin.”

David Littwin put in, “W-w-we’ve b-b. Been trying to find a w-w-way to g-get rid of him.”

“Any ideas?” Jim asked them.

“We could go round to his apartment and beat the shit out of him,” Mark suggested.

“What the hell good would that do?” said Ray Vito. “He hasn’t done anything against the law, has he? Not that we can prove. We’ll end up in the slammer ourselves, for assault and battery.”

“We could wait till he leaves his body,” said Titus Greenspan. “Then we could board up his front door so that he couldn’t get back to it again.”

Jim said, “That wouldn’t work. In his smoke form, he can slide through any gap that smoke can get through.”

Sharon said, “There’s a voodoo ritual in one of my books. It’s got all the words and everything. It’s how to put a curse on somebody so that when their spirit goes out walking, it can’t get back into its physical body.”

“That could be useful,” Jim told her. “But what we need more than anything else is Umber Jones’s
loa
stick … the stick which he uses to call on the help of all of the lesser spirits. Without that stick, he has no power at all.”

“Can’t you lift it when your uncle’s asleep?” Ricky asked Tee Jay.

Tee Jay shook his head. “If I could, I would. But I don’t dare to touch it. It’s like, sacred.”

“Sacred or not, if it’s the only way of stopping your uncle …”

“You don’t understand,” said Tee Jay. “It’s
sacred.
It’s carved out of a ghost oak which grew in a cemetery … a tree which was fed on dead bodies. The dead bodies belonged to Baron Samedi, and so the tree belongs to Baron Samedi – and that means that the
loa
stick belongs to Baron Samedi, too.”

“Tee Jay,” said Beattie. “Baron Samedi is one of those things that aren’t real.”

“A myth,” said Seymour.

Tee Jay said, “Baron Samedi is as real as you and me, Beattie. And when I started to study voodoo, I gave my solemn oath that I would never disrespect his name or steal his property or defy his law. If I tried to take that
loa
stick away from my uncle, I would have the most powerful spirit in the whole damn Western world hunting me down. He’d have my ass. Let me tell you something, man: I’d be lucky to end up like Elvin.”

There was hubbub of scepticism from the rest of the class. But Jim raised his hand for silence and said, “Listen – whatever the rest of us think about voodoo, Tee Jay’s a believer and we can’t ask him to compromise his beliefs. If he and his uncle were Muslims, we wouldn’t expect him to disobey the will of Allah, even if it
was
a question of stopping a murderer. Plenty of people have found themselves in the same dilemma in the past, like Roman Catholic priests who hear confessions from serial killers. I think we can count ourselves fortunate that, whatever Tee Jay believes in, he’s drawn the line here and said no more killing, and he’s prepared to help us insofar as he doesn’t commit a heresy.”

Not many of his class knew what a ‘heresy’ was, but they got the gist. They also began to realise that Jim was making an effort to draw Tee Jay back into the family, and he was asking them not to isolate him.
Tee Jay had been attracted to voodoo because in spite of his popularity and his outward cool, he felt isolated and inferior. What was so good about being popular and cool if you were struggling to read
Green Eggs And Ham
in the remedial-teaching class of a trashy college like West Grove?

Sharon said, “Maybe Tee Jay can help us by telling us when his uncle’s left his body … then we can go around and take the
loa
stick for ourselves.”

“You won’t be able to get in there,” said Tee Jay. “When my uncle takes on The Smoke, he locks himself in good. He doesn’t want nobody tampering with his body while he’s away.”

“Can’t you let us in?”

“No way. He locks his room from the inside and he’s also got this security bar. It would take a tank to get in there. Besides … that would be aiding and abetting you to steal the
loa
stick, and I’m pretty sure that Baron Samedi wouldn’t take too kindly to that.”

“I don’t know why you ever wanted to start believing in a mean dude like Baron Samedi,” said Muffy. “As if there aren’t enough mean dudes in the world already.”

Jim said, “If we can’t physically break in and take the
loa
stick, then we’ll have to break in another way. I don’t know whether you’re really ready for this, but since all of your lives are in danger, I think you’re entitled to hear it.” And as briefly and as matter-of-factly as he could, he told them what had happened to Mrs Vaizey, and all about Elvin, too.

When he had finished, the classroom was so silent that Dr Ehrlichman peered in through the window to make sure that they were still there. Jim walked up and down the aisles waiting to hear their reaction.

Jane Firman had tears in her eyes. “Is this really, really true?” she asked him.