Charnel House (16 page)

“Redwood City?” asked the lieutenant. “What's at Redwood City?”

“Elmwood Foundation finances a cryogenic research center at Redwood. We can put him on ice for as long as we like.”

“What are we going to do about
that
?” I pointed toward the bulky shape in the intensive-care unit. “We can't just leave it the way it is.”

Lieutenant Stroud gave me an impatient glance, as if to tell me to mind my own goddamned business, but he went up to Jim and laid his hand confidingly on his shoulder.

“Doctor,” he said. “Is that thing a threat to human life? To the lives of your staff?”

Jim licked his lips. “I don't have any evidence of that. So far I've seen nothing more than extreme physiological abnormality. It hasn't threatened us in any way at all.”

George Thousand Names butted in. “Coyote's very existence is a threat! Once he has his blood running through his veins again, he'll tear us to pieces!”

“You have some proof?” asked Lieutenant Stroud. “I'm not doubting your word, sir, but that thing in there is kind of human, and I'm not authorized to shoot human beings unless I have reasonable grounds to believe that they may be threatening life or property.”

George Thousand Names stood stiff as the spine on a porcupine, his eyes blazing. He pointed with a rigid arm toward the intensive-care unit. “That, Lieutenant, is Coyote, returned from the underworld! What more can I tell you?
That's Coyote!
”

Lieutenant Stroud looked across at his two officers, and one of them raised his eyebrows as if to suggest that George Thousand Names may not have all of his marbles.

“What do you think, Doctor?” the lieutenant asked Dr. Weston. “Is that a Red Indian demon or not? Or is it just a medical freak?”

Dr. Weston, although she was shaken by what she had seen in the intensive-care unit, replied, “It's a freak. It has to be. I've never seen anything like it, but we can't kill it.”

“Supposing—” Dr. Jarvis began.

“Supposing nothing!” interrupted Dr. Weston. “Jim, this thing is the strangest medical event we've ever seen. It's like Siamese twins being created in front of our eyes. We can't destroy it now. There's no way!”

“Dr. Weston,” I put in, “you didn't see Bryan Corder hurt. You didn't see Dan Machin when his eyes lit up like a devil's. You can't say that. Whatever it is in there, whether it's a demon or not, we've got to make sure it doesn't kill anyone else!”

Dr. Weston was about to answer, but she never had the chance. What happened next was like a freeway accident, it blurred past my eyes so fast that it was hard to comprehend. I do remember one or two vivid and horrifying things, though, and I guess they're going to stay in my mind forever.

Jim suddenly said,
“It's coming this way!”
and just as we turned to look at the intensive-care unit there was a blast of shattering glass and thousands of fragments of the observation panel sprayed across the room in a razor-sharp hail. One of the cops dropped to his knees at once, his face like chopped liver, and the other one turned away with his hands over his eyes and blood running down his fingers. My own cheeks were slashed in the glittering, tumbling burst of glass, but it wasn't the glass that frightened me.

It was the apparition of Coyote, rearing like a huge, pale praying mantis, his skull grinning fixedly on top of its shapeless trunk, his four arms smashing the remains of the window aside without hesitation.

And there was the heat. The appalling, scorching heat. It must have been two hundred degrees inside that intensive-care unit, and now a dry, roasting wind moaned and howled as it surged out of the broken window.

Lieutenant Stroud plucked his police special from his pants and fired twice at the monstrous Coyote. But the demon waved one arm toward him, and he was hurtled away across the room, cracking his back against the wall, his gun skidding off into the slush of broken glass.

Dr. Jarvis shrieked,
“John! Hold him!”
But I knew that there was no way we were going to hold this thing back, and I wrenched open the door, shouting, “Forget it! For Christ's sake, get out of here!”

George Thousand Names, his hands lifted to protect his head, scrambled out of the room as quickly as he could. Dr. Weston followed him, and then me, and then Jim. The cop with the bleeding eyes was trying to help Lieutenant Stroud, but the demon waved his arm again, and the cop shrieked, and staggered helplessly toward the door.

“I'm burning!”
he yelled. “Put me out! For God's sake!
I'm burning!
”

Jim ran toward him, but then the cop opened his mouth, and a fierce gout of flame gushed out from between his lips.
He was blazing inside
, his stomach and his lungs were on fire, and every time he tried to cry for help, a monstrous funnel of superheated flames bellowed out. “John! A blanket! Get me a blanket!” Dr. Jarvis hollered, but it was too late. The cop rolled against the side of the corridor and slid to his knees, leaving a trail of fiercely burning blood on the wall. Then he collapsed and lay still, and in front of our eyes, to our overwhelming horror, the flames that were burning inside him gradually broke out, singeing and then setting fire to his uniform from inside, and then engulfing his whole body until he lay on the carpet blazing like a ritual suicide.

There was another moan of hot air from inside the room and we heard something like a grumble and a roar, the sound of a devilish beast that was determined to destroy us. Then, miraculously, Lieutenant Stroud came diving out of the doorway, rolling sideways toward us, and gasping for air like an athlete who's testing his threshold of pain.

George Thousand Names and Dr. Jarvis knelt down beside him. “I'm okay, I'm okay,” he told them, trying to stand up. “My back's bruised but I think I'm okay. For God's sake, let's get out of here. That thing's gone crazy.”

“Not crazy. That's his natural behavior,” George Thousand Names said. “He's going to destroy and devour us and there's nothing we can do.”

Lieutenant Stroud painfully climbed to his feet, his eyes fixed on the dark doorway where Coyote was hiding.

“Well, maybe there's nothing that
you
can do, medicine man, but I know what
I'm
going to do. That—that
thing
in there has declared war, and if it's war he wants, he's damned well going to get it!”

George Thousand Names reached out and held the lieutenant's arm. “Please, Lieutenant. You're not dealing with the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Bombs and tear gas could never hurt Coyote. All you can do is to—”

His words were drowned in a roar that shook the whole building. Pieces of broken door, ribbons of shredded carpet, fragments of plaster, and a dry fierce heat that stank of animals and death came blasting over us. It was Coyote, coming out in search of his blood, coming out in search of his face, and coming out to slaughter us. It was Coyote, the demon of wrath and fear!

FIVE

I was hardly conscious. A chunk of door jamb had struck me on the left side of the head, and my legs had given way beneath me. I was lying against the side of the corridor, shrouded in tattered carpet, and it seemed that the whole world was coming down around me. The hot hurricane howled and shrieked, and pieces of debris tumbled and flew down the corridor. Over it all, as Coyote approached us, I heard a noise like someone screaming down an endless echoing pipe; a hopeless dreary screaming that frightened me more than almost anything else.

Screwing up my eyes against the scorching wind, I tried to look up. I could see George Thousand Names sprawled against the opposite wall, and Lieutenant Stroud huddled beside him. Jim was further away, his hands clutched over his gingery hair, but I couldn't see Dr. Weston at all.

Then the very air itself seemed to darken, and out of the darkness came something that wasn't much to do with Bryan Corder and Dan Machin anymore. It was a spectral manifestation, a ghost made of eerie density and contorted flesh. It had a kind of negative glow to it, the glow of deep shadows or gloomy rooms, and it glided darkly down the corridor, the skull with its hideous grin, and behind it a rippling and loathsome cloak of half-substantial flesh. The screaming grew drearier and louder as Coyote went by, but there was yet another sound that accompanied his passing.
It was the flap of dead skin
, like flacid tarpaulin on a deserted warehouse roof. It was almost more than I could bear.

The noise and the wind seemed to drone on forever, but suddenly I raised my head again and I became aware that Coyote had passed us by without harming us. I looked up a little more and turned around to check behind me, and the demon had vanished.

George Thousand Names whispered dryly, “I think it's all right now, at least for a while. He's gone to search for his blood.”

“How do you know that?” asked Lieutenant Stroud.

“Because he would have killed us otherwise, and taken great pleasure in raping Dr. Weston. He needs his blood to stay alive, and if he doesn't get it in one moon's rising and descending, he'll be banished back to the underworld.”

Lieutenant Stroud, clutching his back, stood up against the wall. “Well, that's the first piece of good news I've heard all day. All we have to do is keep Coyote away from innocent bystanders for twenty-four hours, and that's the end of that.”

George Thousand Names brushed off his windbreaker. “I'm afraid not, Lieutenant. Whatever you do, Coyote will make sure that he finds his blood.”

“What about his face?” I said. “His face was on the doorknocker.”

“He'll go searching for that too.”

“But I just sent Jane off to get that.”

George Thousand Names stared at me, and his face was totally grave. “You sent Jane to go get the doorknocker? You mean that?”

I felt panicky. “Well, sure, I just thought that if he didn't have his face—”

George Thousand Names said, “Great Spirit, preserve us. If Coyote catches her with that thing, she won't stand a chance.”

Lieutenant Stroud came forward and he looked impatient. “I'm sorry to interrupt the ominous warnings, but what did you mean about the blood? That blood should be locked up at Redwood City by now, isn't that right, Doctor? How's Coyote going to find it, let alone get hold of it?”

“Oh, come on, Lieutenant,” I said, equally testy. “Coyote just burst his way through three inches of toughened glass.”

“I didn't ask you,” retorted Lieutenant Stroud sharply. “I was asking our resident expert.”

“Well, the answer to your question is that Coyote is a dog monster of sorts,” said George Thousand Names. “He has a supernatural ear and a supernatural sense of smell. The old legends said that when Bear Maiden was hiding in a cave, Coyote was able to smell her through ten spear-lengths of solid rock, and he destroyed the cave and half the mountain to find her. That was supposed to have happened on Nacimiento Peak, more years ago than even the Navahos can remember.”

Lieutenant Stroud looked grim. “Thanks for the optimistic forecast.”

“What are you going to do now?” I asked him.

“The first damned thing I'm going to do is call in the SWAT squad. We're going to find that thing, whatever it is, and give it a dose of what it just handed out to us.”

“Lieutenant,” put in George Thousand Names. “I thought you were a sophisticated man. At least, more sophisticated than most policemen.”

“What's that supposed to imply?”

The old Indian looked at the detective cold and level. “Your massive firepower is useless. Would you hunt a fox with a tank, or try to kill a mosquito with a machine-gun? Coyote is too cunning for you, Lieutenant, too powerful, too elusive. What you must do is track him down in the way that the ancient gods used to, by appealing to his lust and his vanity and by coaxing him into engineering his own destruction.”

“Are you kidding?” said Lieutenant Stroud. “When I have to make my report about this, I'm going to have to say what immediate and decisive action I took. I can just think what the commissioner's going to say when he reads that I appealed to the fugitive's lust and vanity and coaxed him into engineering his own destruction. Now, if you'll excuse me.”

The lieutenant went across to an office close by and picked up the telephone. He rattled the receiver a few times, and eventually got through. As he called up reinforcements, George Thousand Names looked at Jim and me and shrugged. “You can never explain to a white man,” he said.

“What about Jane? Can we do something to help her?” I asked.

“Of course,” replied the Indian. “In fact, the best plan for you and I right now is to go to this house on Pilarcitos Street and seal it off from Coyote with the strongest spells we can. If he hasn't got there already, he'll try to steal the doorknocker and he'll also try to get to those pictures of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak.”

“Why's that?” Jim asked.

“Simple, he wants the hair that he cut from Big Monster. Once he finds it, his immortality will be assured. We will never be able to destroy or dismiss him then.”

“All right,” I said. “What are we waiting for?”

As we left the front door of the hospital, the first of the SWAT trucks and cars were arriving and the night was howling and warbling with sirens. We walked quickly across the parking lot to Dr. Jarvis's Monte Carlo, and Jim held the front seat forward so that I could climb awkwardly into the back. As he stood there, he glanced up at the roof of the hospital. “The birds, they're gone.”

George Thousand Names seemed to take it all very calmly. As he eased himself into the front passenger seat, he said, “Of course. They have followed Coyote. They hang over his head like a cloud of sorrow. Sometimes they seem to fill the air like heavy smoke; other times they are almost invisible. Birds are very magical and strange creatures, Dr. Jarvis. They have spirits of supernatural kind that men can rarely understand.”