Read Rook & Tooth and Claw Online
Authors: Graham Masterton
He vanished; but Russell rolled himself away from the door just as the shoulder of his shirt was sliced open. “Get back!” Russell yelled at Sue-Robin and Seymour. “Get the hell out of here! Run!”
The door rattled ominously; and then there was a long sucking sound, as if a current of air were streaming underneath it. Russell couldn’t see it, but Umber Jones had just poured under the bottom of the door, and now he was making his way back upstairs.
Russell said, “What’s Ray’s number? Tell him that Umber Jones has come back!”
Sue-Robin scrabbled with her mobile phone, but even
when she managed to get Ray’s number right, she heard nothing at all.
“Oh, Jesus, this is all getting out of control,” said Russell.
They heard a car speeding toward them, and then a squeal of brakes. They turned around and saw that Jim had arrived, with Beattie and John.
Jim looked at Russell’s shoulder. It was bleeding slightly, but the wound wasn’t too deep. “What happened?” he said. “Where is he now?”
Russell nodded up toward Umber Jones’s apartment. “I think we blew this one, Mr Rook. All we’ve managed to do is to make him pissed off. And I mean
seriously
pissed off.”
An upstairs window opened and Mr Pachowski peered out. “What’s going on down there? Get away from that door or I’ll call for the cops!”
Jim ignored him. He gave the front door a hefty kick with his left foot, then another. The frame cracked a little but still the door wouldn’t move.
“Hey! What are you doing down there?” Mr Pachowski demanded. “That’s vandalism! That’s criminal damage!”
“Oh shut up you old idiot!” Sue-Robin retorted.
Jim kicked the door again but still it wouldn’t budge. Russell said, “Here – get out of the way. You got to leave this kind of thing to experts.” He stepped back six or seven paces, and then came running at the door shoulder-first, all 300 pounds of him, and knocked it clear off its hinges and into the hallway.
“Come on,” said Jim. “Let’s hope to God we’re not too late.”
They reached the door of Umber Jones’s apartment. It was an inch or two open. Maybe Tee Jay had left it like
that so that his uncle’s smoke-spirit could return more easily. From inside, they could see only the dimmest flicker of candlelight, and they could hear voices, too.
Jim eased the door wider. He turned around to Russell and Sue-Robin and Seymour and put his finger to his lips. “Ssh, follow me.”
They crept across the darkened living-room to the bedroom. For all of his bulk, Russell was remarkably graceful. The bedroom door was wide open, and Jim could see Umber Jones’s feet in their dusty black patent shoes, lying on the bed. The candles circled and dipped in their saucers, making the light swivel across the walls. He stepped closer. Through the crack at the side of the door he could see Tee Jay, standing with his back to him, tufted with feathers and fur. He could see part of Sharon’s skirt, too. Ray lay sprawled in full view, his face pale, unconscious.
Jim edged just a little bit nearer, so that he could see around the doorframe. There he was, Umber Jones’s smoke-spirit, standing beside the bed on which his own body lay comatose. Thank God he hadn’t yet decided to breathe his smoke-spirit back in.
“We will cut them one after the other,” said Umber Jones. “One hundred and twelve cuts each. A great, great sacrifice to Vodun and to Baron Samedi.”
“To die for Vodun is the greatest honor of all,” Tee Jay told Sharon. “It is the most painful death of all … so painful that you will welcome Baron Samedi when he comes for you.”
“Screw you,” said Sharon, although Jim could tell how frightened she was.
He glanced back at Russell and Sue-Robin and Seymour. “Russell,” he whispered, close to Russell’s ear. “You go barging right in and tackle Tee Jay. I’ll make a grab for
the
loa
stick. If I miss it, you go for it, Sue-Robin, and when you’ve got it, run like hell. Into the car, and away, OK – as far and as fast as you can.”
“You are conscious,” Umber Jones told Sharon. “We will kill you first.”
Jim could see him slowly twisting his right hand and exposing his knife. Right, thought Jim. It’s now or never. He touched Russell’s shoulder, and said, “
Go
!” and they went.
Russell cannoned into the room and knocked Tee Jay flat to the floor with one of the greatest body-tackles that Jim had ever seen. Sharon screamed. Umber Jones whirled around, his eyes staring in surprise and fury. He slashed at Jim’s face, but Jim managed to duck his head sideways.
He reached across for the
loa
stick, but Umber Jones slashed at him again and again, and cut the edge of his hand. “This time I’ll kill you, my friend,” he spat. “This time I’ll bury you for ever.”
Jim dodged toward the
loa
stick again, and again Umber Jones’s smoke-spirit sliced his knife in the air from side to side. But as he did so, Sue-Robin scrambled right under the bed to the other side, reached up with one hand, and dragged the stick out of Umber Jones’s grasp.
Umber Jones’s smoke-spirit bellowed with rage, and sprang around after her. But Sue-Robin called, “Catch, Mr Rook!” and tossed it over to him.
Jim caught it, and threw it to Seymour. “Go, Seymour!” he shouted. Seymour immediately disappeared out of the door and ran through the living-room on to the landing, colliding as he did so with Mr Pachowski.
Umber Jones started to go after him, but Jim suddenly
thought:
if I could will myself to leave my body – if I could will my spirit to pick up solid objects
–
then I can will myself to stop Umber Jones.
As Umber Jones rushed toward the door, Jim went after him and punched him hard in the jaw, and then the stomach. Totally taken by surprise, Umber Jones fell back against the wall, staring at Jim in astonishment.
Jim went to hit him again, but this time his fist went through nothing more than wind. All the same – he had delayed Umber Jones for long enough. Outside in the street he could hear Seymour’s tyres shrieking as he drove away.
Umber Jones stared at Jim for a long, long time, his eyes hollow with malevolence. Then he started to shuffle back toward the bed, where his physical body lay. “One day, my friend, I will find another
loa
stick, and then I will come back for you. I promise you that.”
He stood beside his body and laid his hand on its chest. Then without warning, David Littwin came climbing in through the window. He ignored everybody else, and walked right up to Umber Jones’s body. Sticky-outy ears, with the light shining through them. Serious expression.
“Careful, David,” said Jim. Although Umber Jones’s smoke-spirit no longer possessed a
loa
stick, and couldn’t call on the
loas
to help him to hurt human beings, it was better to be cautious.
But David pointed his finger at Umber Jones’s body and said, loudly and clearly, “
Babai babatai m’balatai … hathaba m’fatha habatai
.”
Umber Jones’s smoke-spirit stared at him in disbelief. Then he twisted around and stared at Jim. His expression was one of utter horror. “He has hexed me! Your child has hexed me! I can never go back into my body!” He
rushed from one side of the room to the other, a tornado of smoke – but only of smoke, with no power or influence at all. At last he came to rest in the far corner, shuddering with fear and desperation.
Jim walked up to him and said, “Let’s hope that all the people you killed are going to be more forgiving than you ever were.” With that, he twisted the knob of the air-conditioning unit under the window.
“No,” whispered Umber Jones, as the motor whirred into life. “I want to keep my shape … I want to keep my soul.” But he was helpless. The air-conditioner began to fray the edges of his coat, and then it sucked in his sleeves. Umber Jones gradually collapsed into a spiral whirl of smoke, and was drawn through the air-conditioning vents like nothing more substantial than a bad memory.
Jim went over to Russell, who was still sitting on top of Tee Jay. “Thank you, Russell, for a memorable performance. Thank
you,
Sharon, for being so knowledgeable about your own heritage. And thank
you,
Sue-Robin, for a pretty cute move.”
He put his arm around David’s shoulder and said, “As for you, David, you’re excused speech therapy for the rest of the semester.”
He met Susan as he walked across the parking lot after college. She came right up to him and kissed him on the lips. “Hi,” she said. “Where are you going to take me tonight?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking about a barbecue
chez
Rook. Salmon steaks and a little salad?”
“That sounds good.”
They walked arm in arm toward his car. “Have you heard anything about Tee Jay yet?”
“He has to take a whole bunch of psychiatric tests. His Uncle Umber really messed him up. But, you know, give him a little time …”
“He really thought he was a voodoo sorcerer?”
“Oh, yes. And in a way, he was. He was young, you see, and strong. He had an aura filled with energy and life. Other spirits love that energy … that’s why ghosts so often appear to young children, rather than old people.”
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well… it doesn’t matter now,” he said, opening the car door for her. Although he understood now why Umber Jones had appeared so often in his classroom. His dark and dried-up soul had reveled in all that youthfulness. He had literally devoured it, and it had made him stronger. The past feeding off the future.
That evening, as they sat by the pool, Susan snuggled up close to him. She kissed his lips and nibbled his earlobe.
“You know something,” she said, “the moment I set eyes on you … it was love at first sight.”
He smiled and kissed her back and said nothing.
“You know something else?” she said. “I had such a sneezing fit today. I think I must be allergic. It was just after lunch … just after you and I were talking together. I sneezed and I sneezed and I couldn’t stop. I felt as if I’d been sniffing up pepper.”
Jim kept on smiling at her. Not pepper, sweetheart. Memory powder. And now you remember falling in love with me; the same way that I remember falling in love with you.
The charcoal in the barbecue briefly glowed, but it was starting to die. Jim disentangled himself from Susan’s
arm and said, “There’s something I have to do. Hold on a minute.”
He left the side of the pool and walked across to the parking-lot. He opened up the trunk of his car and took out the
loa
stick.
Myrlin was walking past, and he stared at the stick and commented, “Ankle problems, Jim?”
Jim gave him the sweetest of smiles. “Nose hair problem, Myrlin?”
Myrlin looked confused and hurried off.
Jim returned to the barbecue carrying the
loa
stick. He held it up for a moment and looked at the silver skull on the top. He couldn’t even guess what power this stick contained, but then he didn’t really want to know. He lifted his knee, and broke it in half, and then he dropped the pieces into the barbecue charcoal.
They smoldered for a while, while Jim and Susan lay watching them. Then they suddenly flared up, and began to burn with a crackling, firecracker fierceness. Thick grey smoke poured out of the flames, and rose up into the evening sky. For a moment, Jim could have sworn that it took on the shape of Umber Jones.
He didn’t see the faint outline of an old woman standing in the shadows; a faint outline with the faintest of smiles. She was smiling because her prophecy had come true, and Jim’s fate had been sealed by fire.
“I love you, Mr Rook,” said Susan, and kissed him again.
Jim didn’t say anything, but watched the smoke drifting through the yuccas; until a cross-breeze caught it, and whirled it out of his life for ever.
He came out of the kitchen to find his dead grandfather sitting in the green armchair on the other side of the room. His grandfather was wearing the same clothes that he had worn on the last day that Jim had seen him: rolled-up shirtsleeves and maroon suspenders. The early-afternoon sunlight turned his glasses into polished pennies. His tobacco-stained moustache bristled like a yard-broom.
“Hullo, Jim. How’re things?”
“Grandpa?” said Jim. He was holding a can of Schlitz in one hand and a Swiss cheese sandwich in the other. His tortoiseshell cat tangled herself between his ankles and almost tripped him up.
“What’s the matter, boy?” his grandfather smiled. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Jim put down his beer and his sandwich and approached his grandfather until he was standing close enough to touch him. But he didn’t touch him. He didn’t know much about visitations, but he knew enough to realise that – if they made any kind of physical contact – his grandfather would instantly vanish. Visitations were nothing more than light and memory, mixed.
The sun shone across his grandfather’s face, illuminating his grey-green eyes, the wrinkles of his neck, his white hair cropped as it always used to be cropped, by the barber on Main Street, in Henry Falls. He had the same dark mole on his upper lip.
“You don’t need to be worried, boy. I just came to pay you a friendly visit. Thought we could talk about the old days, and maybe the new days too.”
Jim pressed his hand against his chest. His mouth was as dry as a tray of cat-litter and his heart was thumping. “I never thought that I would ever see you again,” he said. “Not sitting here in my apartment, anyway. Not to talk to.”
“You’ve got the gift, Jim. You can see anybody, live‘n’kicking or dead‘n’gone. You know that.”
“It just takes some getting used to,” Jim told him. Then, “Listen … how about a beer?”
His grandfather ruefully shook his head. “Being here is all I can do,” he admitted, “and that’s not easy. Beer … hunh, that’s a pleasure of the past.”
Jim dragged across the other armchair, a dilapidated brown affair with its yellow foam stuffing trying to burst out of it wherever it was worn. “So tell me,” he said. “What’s it been like? Do you still see grandma? I mean, is it like heaven, or what?”
His grandfather smiled. “I guess you could say it was heaven, in a way. Every day is different. Sometimes you wake up and you’re nine, and it’s summertime, and the sun’s shining. Other days you wake up and you’re old and sick and the rain’s running down the windows and you wish that you could die for a second time.”
“And grandma?”
The old man shook his head. “I don’t see her too much. You see, what you do when you die is pretty much try to settle up your unfinished business, the things you couldn’t do when you were alive, or maybe the things you
failed
to do.”
“What did you ever fail to do, grandpa?” Jim asked him. “You were the greatest grandpa that anybody could have wanted.”
“That was your childish eyes, Jim. When I was nine, I failed to collect enough Ralston’s boxtops for a Tom Mix six-shooter. When I was nineteen, I lost the girl I should have married to the college football hero. I was passed over for promotion three times when I worked at General Electric.”
“You’re trying to make yourself sound like some kind of failure. You were never a failure. I always thought you were a winner.”
“You did?” asked his grandfather, querulous but obviously pleased.
“I still do. I mean, the fact that you’re dead … what difference does that make?”
“It makes the difference that I can’t touch you any more, boy. I can’t hold you, the way that I’d like to. But I can do this. I can give you a warning.”
“A warning?”
“It’s the least that the dead can do for the living. The dead can see around the curve, so to speak – see what’s coming.”
“So what
is
coming, grandpa?”
His grandfather licked his lips, the way that old men do. “It’s coming out of the east, whatever it is. It’s dark, and it’s very old, and it kind of
bristles,
if you get my meaning. More like a wild animal than a man; but cunning, like a man is, and cruel, like a man can be.”
“So what the hell is it?”
“I can’t see it distinctly, or else I’d be able to tell you. But I warn you, boy, it’s coming real quick, and when it comes there are people who are going to be wishing that they’d never been born.”
His grandfather wouldn’t say any more than that – wouldn’t, or couldn’t. Jim asked “what?” and “when?”
and “where is it going to come from?” but his grandfather lifted his hands because he really didn’t know.
They talked for a while more, as the sun gradually moved across his grandfather’s shoulders. They talked about the times they used to go swimming in the waterhole close to his grandfather’s house. They talked about grandfather’s pride and joy, his scarlet-and-cream 1947 Pontiac Streamliner Sedan, which Jim used to polish until it looked as if it had just been driven out of the showroom. They talked about football – and then Jim suddenly checked his watch and said, “My God … I’m twenty minutes late. West Grove are playing Chabot this afternoon, and one of my students has made the team.”
“Well, then, you’d better get going,” said his grandfather. He stood up, and held out his hands as if he wanted to give Jim one last parting embrace. “I hope your boy does well.”
“I’ll see you again?” Jim asked him.
“I don’t know … things aren’t exactly the same after you’re dead. Let’s say they’re less predictable.” He paused, and then he said, “You won’t forget my warning, will you? Keep your eyes open. Keep your ears pricked up. You might hear it before you see it.”
“Goodbye, grandpa,” said Jim, and he didn’t make any attempt to hide the tears in his eyes.
His grandfather turned, and as he turned he vanished, as immediately as if he had walked out through the door. Jim stood where he was, staring at the place where his grandfather had been, until the feline formerly known as Tibbles jumped up on the arm of the chair next to him and rubbed his hand with her head.
“Guess you want feeding, you insatiable ball of fur,” he told her. “Then I have to run. Russell’s never going to forgive me if I miss his first game.”
He drew up outside the college football field with an operatic chorus of tires, and his ’69 Rebel SST let out an explosive double backfire. He was over twenty minutes late, but he was surprised to find that the game against Chabot hadn’t even started yet, and that students and parents were impatiently milling around outside. He climbed out of his car and negotiated his way through the crowd until he found Ben Hunkus, the football coach. Ben was short and bulky, and his close-cropped head looked like one of those pieces of gristle you try to hide under your side salad. He was talking to some of his team, Russell Gloach included. The boys were all looking disappointed and bewildered, and they were still wearing jeans and T-shirts.
“What’s up?” asked Jim. “You scratch the game, or what?”
Ben said, “You’re not going to believe this, but we’ve had a vandalism situation. Someone broke into the locker rooms and tore up all of our uniforms. They even broke our goddamned
helmets
.”
“You’re kidding me. When did this happen?”
“We don’t know. Sometime this morning, between eleven and eleven-fifteen. I’m mad. Believe me, I’m mad.”
“Do you have any idea who did it?”
“What? Godzilla, by the look of it. You should see the damage.”
Martin Amato, the team captain, said, “The second team are lending us their uniforms. The trouble is, most of them are back at home, in the wash, or all crumpled up in the trunks of their cars. I mean,
gross.
And it’s going to take us at least another hour to get started.”
Martin was tall and square-jawed and handsome. He had curly blond hair and deep brown eyes and a slow, deliberate way of talking. He was supremely dim, but he
was one of the best captains that West Grove had ever had, and if the rest of his players had been as athletic as he was, they probably would have won every single game. As it was, the West Grove Community College football team had earned themselves the nickname ‘The Fumblers.’
“Did anyone call the police?” asked Jim.
“Unh-hunh,” said Ben. “I don’t think Dr Ehrlichman is particularly enthused about having a law-enforcement scenario during a college football game.”
“In that case maybe I’ll go take a look at it myself. Good luck with the game, Martin, if I don’t see you before. You, too, Russell.”
Russell Gloach gave Jim a friendly salute. Russell was the biggest student in Special Class II, nearly 250 lbs, and he had struggled hard all summer to cut down on cakes and hamburgers to get himself fit enough to be picked for the football team. He was still too slow, but Martin had chosen him because of the sheer effort he had put into his training, and because he had the stopping capacity of a small wall.
As Jim walked up toward the college building, he almost collided with Dr Ehrlichman, the principal, who was hurrying back to his office. Dr Ehrlichman was wearing an off-white seersucker suit and he looked as flustered as the White Rabbit in
Alice.
“Dr Ehrlichman? I’ve just heard what happened in the locker room.”
“I’m sorry, Jim. No time. I have to take a VIP phone call.”
“Ben Hunkus tells me you didn’t call the cops?”
“I’d rather we carried out our own investigation first. God
knows
we’ve had the police around here enough times this semester. You have to think of our reputation.”
“Yes, Dr Ehrlichman, I guess I do.”
Jim pushed his way through the double doors that led to the boys’ locker room. A few students were still standing around outside, but the locker room itself was being guarded by the college security officer, Mr Wallechinsky, in his tight brown uniform, blocking the entrance with his beefy sun-reddened arms folded.
“Mr Rook?”
“How’s it going, Mr Wallechinsky? I just came to take a look.”
“I warn you, Mr Rook. Your heart’s going to bleed.”
“Don’t you have any idea how it happened?”
Mr Wallechinsky shook his head. “Up until eleven o’clock, everything was fine. By half after, somebody had managed to turn the whole damn locker room into a disaster area.”
“Nobody heard anything? It must have caused a hell of a racket.”
“Nobody
heard
nothing. Nobody
saw
nothing. The last person that anybody saw near the locker room was that Red Indian student of yours.”
“Native American, Mr Wallechinsky, if you don’t mind.”
“Ah, come on, Mr Rook, what’s in a name? I’m a Polack, right? You can call me a Polack if you like. There’s no name never hurt me.”
“All the same, Catherine White Bird is a Native American. Or a Navajo. You can call her either.” He paused, and then he said, “So what was she doing here? Did you ask her?”
“Sure. She just came back to fetch Martin Amato’s wallet. I guess you know that she and Martin Amato have been dating.”
Jim nodded. “Sure.” He always did his best to keep up with his students’ love lives. It often made it easier to understand why a particular student was depressed, or
dreamy, or exceptionally touchy. And he wasn’t at all surprised that Catherine White Bird and Martin Amato had fallen for each other – they made a brilliantly attractive young couple. Jim could have fancied Catherine White Bird himself if he’d been fifteen years younger, and he hadn’t made it a cast-iron rule never to get involved with any of his female students. Apart from calling Dr Ehrlichman a bureaucratic pinhead, that was the quickest way for any teacher to find himself looking for work.
“Catherine didn’t see anything either?”
“Not a thing. And there’s no way she could have done anything like this herself.”
“You’d better show me,” said Jim.
Mr Wallechinsky opened the door of the locker room and let Jim inside. It was gloomy, because the fluorescent strip-lights had been shattered, and there was water hissing all over the floor from three basins which had been completely wrenched away from the wall. There were grey steel lockers lying on their sides, on their backs, and all kinds of angles. But they hadn’t just been pushed over: they had been bent and twisted, some of them almost in half. Three or four of them had been gouged and ripped, as if by the teeth of a mechanical excavator.
Heaps of football uniforms were strewn around everywhere, and every one of them had been torn into shreds. West Grove’s bright new green-and-orange outfits had been donated by West Grove Screen & Window, at a cost of more than $3,500. Now they were reduced to slews of sodden rags. Even their shoulder armour was torn apart, and their green-and-orange helmets were split open. Jim bent down and picked up one helmet that was crushed like a trodden-on M&M. The mystery was, you couldn’t crush a helmet like this with a sledgehammer, or by driving a Jeep over it.
The walls of the locker room were scarred, too. All across the far wall, the white porcelain tiles had been scratched right through to the clay. Jim walked across to the wall and ran his fingers down the grooves. There were five of them, in parallel, almost like clawmarks. Yet even a full-sized grizzly bear wasn’t capable of making deep scratches on high-glazed porcelain.
Ben Hunkus came in and stood beside him. “Pretty damned tragic, isn’t it?” he said.
“No question about it, I think we should call the cops,” said Jim. “Whoever did this was totally berserk. Apart from that, he must have had some kind of pick or farm implement that could pierce right through the sides of these lockers. Imagine what could have happened if somebody had disturbed him.”
He dropped the smashed helmet onto the floor. “What I can’t understand is, why would anybody want to bust up a college locker room? I mean, what the hell
for
?”
“Maybe somebody from Chabot wanted to make sure that West Grove would lose.”
“Are you kidding me? Chabot could flatten The Fumblers with shopping bags over their heads. They wouldn’t have to do anything like this.”
“Listen, Jim, West Grove have a pretty good chance of winning this game. Or at least of not losing by very much.”