Pullet
came
running back, breathless.
“You’re out of
condition,” said Skrolnik. “Why don’t you take up jogging? Listen, run back to
the car and get my accident signs, will you? I don’t want any of this stuff
moved until Rabinowitz’s boys have had a go at it.”
Pullet said,
“What the hell do you think he was doing? Are those swords?”
“Samurai
swords,” Skrolnik nodded. “Whatever he was up to, it was something to do with
that attack on Admiral Thorson. Just, for Christ’s sake, don’t ask me what.”
“I’ll get the
signs,” said Pullet; but the moment he turned around, every floodlight in the
hospital grounds was suddenly switched on, and the alarm began to bellow
through the trees. Skrolnik said, “Thorson,” and took out his gun again.
T
hey arrived at the doors of the hospital puffing and blowing. But
Skrolnik forced his way in, past a screaming nurse and a dazed security officer
who was waving his gun around at nobody and nothing, and jogged heavily down
the corridor toward Admiral Thorson’s room.
Another
security officer came cantering toward them, shouting, “Get back! Get back!”
but Skrolnik and Pullet simply dodged aside to let him run past, and he didn’t
Tengu even attempt to clear them out of the corridor. “That guy’s frightened,”
remarked Skrolnik.
“Aren’t you?”
asked Pullet.
They turned the
corner and collided with Admiral Thorson’s doctor. His hair seemed to be standing
on end, and his eyes were as wild as Harpo Marx’s.
“What the
hell’s going on here?” Skrolnik shouted at him, with all the coarseness he
could muster. “What the hell is everybody running for?”
“It’s that
thing,” garbled the doctor. Then he tore himself free from Skrolnik and ran off
toward the hospital lobby.
“That thing,
huh?” asked Skrolnik, wiping his nose with the back of his gun hand. “This is
beginning to sound like some kind of monster movie.
The Thing
from Rancho Encino.”
Pullet said,
“We’d better go take a look in any case.”
“I was afraid
you’d suggest that,” Skrolnik retorted. “You’re becoming far too conscientious
for a rookie.”
They turned the
last corner, into the corridor that took them directly to Admiral Thorson’s
room, and Skrolnik froze. At the end of the corridor was a wired-glass door,
and through the distorting, refracting glass he could see a short, bulky shape,
like a man with his head bent forward in contemplation. Skrolniksaid,
“TheThing?” and Pullet shrugged. “How do I know? I never met a Thing before.
Challenge it.”
Skrolnik raised
his .38. “You!” he shouted harshly.
“You, behind that door!
Come out of there with your hands on your head!’’
For a long
moment, the bulky silhouette remained motionless. Skrolnik said, “Cover me,”
and took one or two apprehensive steps forward, his gun still raised.
“Do you hear
me?” he shouted. “Come on out from behind that door with your hands on your
head! You don’t have a chance!”
The silhouette
raised its arms, slowly and deliberately. “He’s giving up,” said Pullet, with
relief, half-lowering his revolver. But then, with a terrifying, rending smash,
the silhouette thrashed its fists into the glass door, tearing it apart in a
wreckage of tangled wire, broken glass, and splintered wood.
“ Oh
, Jesus,’’ said Pullet.
The creature
that forced its way through the broken door may have been human once, but it
was human no longer. It was the Tengu from the morgue, revived, and walking,
mutilated not only with the scars of Doctor Gempaku’s hooks, but with the gaping
bloodless bullet wounds it had sustained from the Encino police. The worst
thing of all, though, was that it had no head, only that raw pipe that rose
from between its shoulders and the gristly remnants of its neck.
Skrolnik said,
“It can’t be.
Pullet, that
damned thing can’t be.”
The headless
Tengu took one heavy step after another, dragging itself clear from the glass
and the wire, heading toward Admiral Thorson’s door. It may have been an
optical illusion, but Skrolnik could have sworn that he saw tiny blue flames
dancing in the air around the Tengu’s shoulders.
He fired into
the Tengu’s chest, twice. Dead, white flesh flapped up as the Tengu’s body
absorbed the bullets, and the Tengu appeared momentarily to hesitate. But then
it continued to shuffle toward Admiral Thorson’s door, and at last it bumped
against the oak veneer, its mutilated but muscular shoulder cracking the wood,
its hands clawing toward the handle, Skrolnik, white-faced, sweating, fired two
more shots, only an inch apart, into the area of the monster’s heart. The Tengu
jolted with the impact and swayed, but then continued to beat dully against the
admiral’s door. Smoke from the bullets that had entered its chest cavity rose
from the open pipe of its severed neck.
Pullet
shrieked, “You can’t kill it! For God’s sake, it won’t die!”
Hesitantly,
Skrolnik approached the creature, his gun Tengu held out in front of him. He
fired two more shots, from pointblank range. One of the bullets went right
through the Tengu’s stomach and exited from its back. The other hit it in the
chest.
Neither bullet
seemed to make any impression at all, except that the fires which flared around
the Tengu’s shoulders seemed to roar and grow fiercer.
Skrolnik,
sickened and scared, but high on the adrenalin of sheer danger, tried to reach
out and seize the monster’s arm. But with a sideways chop, the Tengu knocked
him aside, so that he collided heavily with the opposite wall of the corridor
and twisted his ankle.
With six or
seven splintering blows, the Tengu tore down Admiral Thorson’s door and stepped
into the dimly lit room. Skrolnik, wincing with agony in the corridor, knew now
that there was absolutely nothing he could do. He also recognized that for the
first time in his life he was up against something completely unstoppable;
something which refused to obey any of the laws of nature, or at least the laws
by which Sergeant Skrolnik organized his life and his police work.
This thing,
whatever it was, was supernatural, a ghost or a ghoul or a zombie, a thing that
was undead and couldn’t be killed by any conventional weapons, or defeated by
any conventional prayers. Skrolnik knew that for certain: his brain had been
spinning with frenzied appeals to the Lord his God ever since the Tengu had
burst through the glass door.
“Pullet!”
shouted Skrolnik. “Break
open
that fire cabinet down
there! Get me that fire ax!”
Through the
doorway, Skrolnik could see the Tengu approaching Admiral Thorson’s bed;
standing there, headless, swaying slightly as if it were recovering from a
great and painful effort of will. The blue flames still jumped and blazed
around it, but now it appeared to have a dark glow of its own, a frightening
and almost visible aura, like a torturing iron that has just lost its red-hot
radiance but is still capable of searing a man’s flesh.
“Admiral!”
bellowed Skrolnik. “Admiral, if you can manage it,
get
the hell out of there!”
Skrolnik limped
on his one good ankle to the torn-apart doorframe. Now he could see Admiral
Thorson sitting up in bed, his face papery and wrinkled,
his
sunken eyes bright with fear.
“Admiral!”
shouted Skrolnik.
But the
admiral’s eyes were on the Tengu alone. The Tengu took one shuffling step
nearer after another, until it was standing right up against the admiral’s bed.
Knut Thorson stared at it in horror and recognition.
“I never
believed it could be real,” he whispered. “Not even then.”
Skrolnik said,
in a determined hiss, “Admiral, I want you to roll off that bed, roll away from
the monster onto the floor. Then dive right under the bed and leave the rest to
me. Pullet, where the fuck’s that fire ax? For Christ’s sake, move your ass.”
Whether he had
heard Skrolnik or not, the admiral stayed where he was, propped up on his
pillows, his monitoring equipment betraying every overstimulated beat of his
heart, every jump of fear in his brain. He gave no indication that he had
understood a single word, nor that he was going to try to save
himself
. But just then, Pullet came jostling up with the
fire ax and handed it clumsily to Skrolnik, as if it were the baton in an
amateur relay race.
“Stand back,”
grunted Skrolnik, and took one limping step forward into Admiral Thorson’s
room, swinging the long-handled ax in both hands.
Admiral Thorson
shouted, “Mary at the top of his quavery voice, and then Skrolnik whirled the
ax around and chopped it deep into the Tengu’s severed neck, splitting its
breastbone with an audible crack. Skrolnik stumbled backward on his twisted
ankle, toppling Pullet over as well, but there was nothing they could do to
save Admiral Thorson now. With the ax handle still sticking out from its back,
the Tengu seized Admiral Thorson by the neck and wrenched him out of his bed,
half lifting him in the air. Admiral Thorson hung in the headless creature’s
powerful hands, awkward and powerless; his Tengu cafdiopulmonary monitor giving
one last screech as the monster wrenched the wires loose.
With one
flailing tear, the Tengu ripped off the admiral’s hospital nightgown, baring
his scrawny, ribby body; then, without hesitation, it plunged its fist through
the flesh of the admiral’s stomach, in a spattering welter of blood and fluid,
and seized the admiral’s backbone as if it were grasping the skeleton of a
snake. Soundlessly, wordlessly, because it could never speak, or hear, or
see–because whatever it could do, it could do only through the possession of
the ancient demon Tengu–it pulled the admiral’s spine right out through his
torn-open belly, virtually turning his body inside out.
Skrolnik was
utterly unable to speak, or even to think. All he knew was that the headless
Tengu with the ax still stuck between its shoulders was throwing the admiral’s
gory corpse aside, so that nerves and intestines and tendons slid in
bloodstained strings onto the floor, and that now it was turning toward him.
“Pullet,” he
said. “I do not want to be here.” Together, they scrambled to their feet, and
with Skrolnik leaning his weight on Pullet’s shoulders, they hopped and hobbled
and half ran down the corridor to the hospital lobby, closing and locking the
last door behind them. A crowd was already gathering there–nurses and medics
and police, including a furiously disgruntled-looking Harry Calsbeek.
“Why do you
foreigners always bring trouble?” he snarled. “What’s going on here?”
Skrolnik caught
Calsbeek’s sleeve and pulled him aside, shoving away an inquisitive reporter
from the Encino Star. “What I’m going to say I’m only going to say once,” he
told Calsbeek, scarcely opening his mouth as he spoke. “That creature you shot
last night is still alive, and still walking around. It’s just burst into
Admiral Thorson’s room and tore the poor old guy to very messy shreds. I don’t
know how it can still be alive. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s all just a
nightmare. But if it is, then you’re in it too, and you’re going to have to act
accordingly. My best suggestion is that you go get a couple of cans of
gasoline, and as soon as the creature appears, we set fire to it.”
“We can shoot
it, can’t we?” asked Calsbeek. Then, “What am I talking about? I don’t even
believe you. Are you off your head or something? What’s going on here?”
He was answered
almost immediately. There was a screech of tearing wood and ripped-off hinges.
Then a massive
smash,
and a low moan of fright among
the hospital staff and patients gathered in the lobby. One of the nurses
screamed, and then another, and then everybody
was
rushing for the main doors, jostling and pushing and knocking over potted
plants.
“Don’t panicl”
yelled Skrolnik, the veins standing out on his neck. “
Don’tpanic,
or somebody’s going to get crushed.’’
Calsbeek said,
“Oh, my God.”
The door to the
lobby
came
sailing over their heads, tumbling and
turning, to crash noisily into the ornamental pool. Dark, and yet still
radiating that awesome aura, the headless Tengu stood in the open doorway, the
ax protruding from its neck, its scarred and mutilated chest rising and falling
with the breath of one of man’s oldest and most terrible enemies, a devil even
more vicious than Lucifer.
Skrolnik said,
“Now will you get the gasoline?”
“Evans!”
bellowed Calsbeek.
“Guttierez!
Get out to the wagon
and bring in those spare cans of gas, and do it so damn fast I don’t know
you’ve gone!”
Calsbeek’s two
officers elbowed their way as quickly as they could through the last stragglers
pushing each other to get out of the hospital, while Skrolnik and Calsbeek and
Pullet retreated toward the reception counter, drawing their revolvers and
watching the Tengu warily. For a while, the Tengu stayed where it was, in the
doorway, no flames dancing around its shoulders at the moment, no movement to
suggest what it might be considering next. But as Evans and Guttierez came
clanging back with their heavy cans of gasoline, the Tengu took one clumsy step
forward and raised both arms as if it were feeling its way across the lobby,
sensing the presence of vulnerable humans through the nerves in the palms of
its hands.
To Skrolnik,
the Tengu looked like a bloody carcass of beef, headless and gutted; or the
hideous human corpse in Goya’s painting of Saturn devouring his children. The
body was human, but the missing head had taken away all its identity, all its
humanity.
“Get your men
to splash as much gas on that thing as they can,” said Skrolnik. “Just tell
them to keep out of its way. Once it gets hold of you, you’re dead beef.”