Charnel House (19 page)

“She was a
bear
, George,” I said. “She had hair all over, and there was only her face. And she didn't even recognize me. I couldn't say anything. She came right across that kitchen at me like a locomotive, and she would have killed me if I'd given her half a chance.”

George Thousand Names sat down on the edge of his bed. It didn't look slept in, but then I had heard that some well-trained Indians could sleep standing up. Maybe that was just an apocryphal story, but somehow I could just imagine George Thousand Names standing in the corner, arms crossed, snoring the night gently away.

“Between the time that you sent her to get the doorknocker, and the time that we found her on Seventeenth Street, Coyote must have assaulted her.”

I took a fiery swallow of bourbon. “Assaulted? I don't understand.”

George Thousand Names looked across at me with elderly concern. I was beginning to feel that if I could ever have had a choice of fathers, this man would have been it. He was compassionate, and understanding, but he was also cynical and wise, and you knew that whatever he said was God's honest truth. Or Gitche Manitou's honest truth.

“Coyote is the most lustful of demons. He probably raped her. There is an old Navaho song about how Coyote meets a maiden on a mountain pass. ‘One day walking through a mountain pass, Coyote met a young woman. What have you in your pack? she asked. Fish eggs, answered Coyote. Can I have some? the maiden asked. Only if you close your eyes and hold up your dress. She did as she was told. Higher, said Coyote, and walked up to the woman. Stand still so I can reach the place. I can't, she said, there is something crawling between my legs. Don't worry, said Coyote, it's a scorpion, I'll catch it. The woman dropped her dress. You weren't fast enough, it stung me.'”

He had recited this song in a flat, monotonous voice. When he'd finished, he looked up at me. “You see? He is cunning as well as brutal. When I say assaulted, I mean seduced.”

I couldn't believe it. “That thing, that thing we saw last night,
that
had sex with Jane?”

George Thousand Names nodded. “Very probably. According to the legends, it was only after Coyote had filled her mind with the most evil ideas of antiquity that Bear Maiden grew hair and claws. I'm sorry, John, but if we're going to lick this thing we've got to face the facts.”

“Oh, sure.” I felt bitter and upset. Of all people, why Jane? If I hadn't been dumb enough to send her on that fool's errand, she might have been safe.

George Thousand Names went to the window and looked out over downtown San Francisco through the hotel drapes. “John,” he said, “I know you take this personally, but you must understand that we're struggling with a life-and-death situation.”

I tried to smile. “It depends on whose life it is, doesn't it?”

He shook his head. “Not
whose
life, but how many lives. There are people out there, John, thousands of them, and Coyote can turn this city into a dismal carnage. If he stays loose, these streets will look like a slaughter house before you know it. Coyote is a mad, random killer, John. A maniac beyond all maniacs. The only way to destroy him now is to outwit him and make absolutely sure that he can't find Big Monster's shorn-off hair.”

“But all the pictures are at my apartment.”

“You sealed the door with the necklace?”

“Of course.”

“Then Bear Maiden can't get out and Coyote can't get in. At least, I hope not.”

I took out a cigarette and lit it. It tasted like a Hungarian steelworker's instep, but I needed something to steady my nerves. “What do we do now?”

He rubbed his chin. “I think we ought to discover where Big Monster's hair might be,” he suggested. “Then, we can go tackle Bear Maiden. She's ferocious enough, but I think I have spells that could hold her. After we've done that, we'll go looking for the big one. Coyote himself.”

“Well, I just hope we live this day out.”

George Thousand Names smiled. “The Costanoan Indians used to live here in San Francisco before the Spanish arrived. They had a prayer that began: ‘When evening falls, give me the small darkness and not the great.'”

I laid my road atlas on the table and produced the crumpled grease-proof overlay that I had painstakingly marked out that morning. We arranged the overlay on the map, and George Thousand Names scrutinized it like a skeptical art expert. He sniffed a couple of times, and his lips moved in a silent whisper as he located places and villages and mountains. After a while, he sat back on the arm of the couch and frowned in deep concentration.

“Well?” I asked him. “What does it mean?”

He glanced back at it. “I'm not sure. It's a very unusual arrangement of viewpoints, quite unlike the usual pictographs that Indians used to draw to locate waterholes. If you look here, you'll see that it's made of several symmetrical curves. Now, that just didn't happen when Navahos were making their charts of the desert areas. Time was too precious and the countryside was too inhospitable. You made your pictures where you could and you didn't worry about symmetry.”

“So what does that prove? That it isn't genuine?”

George Thousand Names shook his head. “No. We're certainly pointed in the right direction. The very fact that there's a pattern here is meaningful. What we have to work out is what the pattern means.”

“How can we do that?”

He held the piece of grease-proof paper up to the window. “Well, I have the feeling that what we're seeing here isn't a regular map. Those pictures of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak had a magical significance because they were the home of Big Monster, but I'm beginning to wonder if Big Monster's hair is hidden around that area or someplace else.”

He crossed the room and opened his brown pigskin suitcase. Then he came back to the table with a small glass vial of something that looked like black dust.

“I hope the supernatural doesn't embarrass you,” he said.

“Why should it?”

“Well … you're a white man. And it's a long time since white men understood the supernatural for what it really is.”

Having taken a chance on Jane's one-off theory about Coyote and Big Monster, and having traveled through the night to bring George Thousand Names down to San Francisco, I felt slightly irked at the suggestion that I was just another white bigot. But all I said was, “One day, the Indians are going to find out that not all palefaces are mindless barbarians.”

George Thousand Names raised an eyebrow. “Those Indians who are still left.”

We left that particular argument where it was. With Coyote loose, this was no time to do a big Wounded Knee number. But I knew that one day, if we escaped this thing alive, George Thousand Names and I were going to have to sit down and do some pretty serious talking. What Coyote's gruesome reincarnation had made me realize for the first time in my life was that America wasn't
our
land, not white land, at all. The Spanish hadn't arrived in San Francisco until 1775, and before that, all those centuries before that, Indian lore and Indian magic had made this land what it was. There were demons and ghosts in them thar hills, but they weren't white, and they didn't take any heed of white man's effete magical powers.

While I watched, he opened his glass vial and sprinkled blue-gray dust on my grease-proof paper map. He blew on it gently and whispered a few words. Then, right in front of my eyes, the dust shifted across the paper just like iron filings drawn into patterns by a magnet. In a few seconds, it had marked out a pattern of curves that connected up the penciled crosses I had made from each of the original pictures.

He studied the pattern and then smiled. “Well, wonders will never cease.”

“What does it mean?” I asked him.

He pointed to the pattern with a stubby finger. “That is a very ancient symbol. When I say ‘ancient,' I mean that it bears about as much relation to present-day Indian tongues as Middle English does to modern American speech. It is very difficult to express precisely, but what it means roughly is ‘the place you will one day see from the north lodgepole of the tepee of the beast.'”

I blinked. “I don't think I'm any the wiser.”

George Thousand Names looked at me carefully. “It's really very clear. The tepee of the beast is Fifteen-fifty-one Pilarcitos Street, you remember how it worked out as six-sixty-six. The north lodgepole simply means the view from the top of the house facing northward. Whatever you see from that vantage point, that is where Big Monster's hair is hidden.”

“Well, for Christ's sake,” I said. “What are we waiting for? Let's get up there!”

“Give me three minutes to bathe and dress,” George Thousand Names insisted. “Meanwhile, you might give Dr. Jarvis a call and tell him where we're going. If he has the time, he'll probably want to come along.”

The old Indian went into the bathroom and ran the tub, while I sat down on the side of the bed and picked up the phone. I dialed Elmwood Foundation Hospital and asked to speak to Dr. Jarvis.

“I'm sorry, sir,” the receptionist said. “Dr. Jarvis isn't here right now.”

“Is there any way I can reach him?”

“I don't think so. He left here about twenty minutes ago with a young lady.”

I sighed. “Okay. Can you leave him a message? Tell him John Hyatt called.”

“Oh, it's you, Mr. Hyatt. In that case you may know where he's gone. He left with a lady friend of yours.”

“What did you say?”

“A pretty looking girl with long hair. Ms. Torresino.”

For a moment, I couldn't think what to say or do. My mouth was very dry, and I felt distinctly bilious, again, as if I'd been eating too many Japanese seaweed cocktail crackers. I put my hand over the phone and shouted,
“George!”

The medicine man appeared in the bathroom doorway, wrapped in a towel.

“I just called the hospital. They told me that Jim left about twenty minutes ago with Jane.”

“What?”

“That's what they told me.”

He began to rub himself quickly dry. “In that case, we have to move really fast. If Jane's gotten herself out of your apartment, then Coyote must know where to look for Big Monster's hair. All the pictures were there, right?”

I said, “Thanks a million,” into the phone, and laid it down. Then I asked him, “What happened? I thought the necklace was supposed to keep her locked up.”

George Thousand Names stepped into a large pair of floral boxer shorts, and then sat down on the bed to put on freshly creased linen slacks.

“The necklace was no guarantee. She may have found a way to shake it loose, or maybe a cleaner removed it. Even Coyote could have come by, and persuaded someone to take it off.”

“But even so, George, she's a
bear
. How the hell can she walk the streets like a bear?”

He laced up his shoes and reached for a smart blue blazer. “She's a bear, and she isn't a bear. The hair and the teeth and the claws are the physical manifestations of the evil that Coyote has put into her mind. But they don't have to show themselves all the time. The Bear Maiden is a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde creature. She changes according to her needs.”

“You mean she probably looks normal now, but she could change back into a bear at any time?”

He nodded.

I let out a long, frustrated breath. Then I put my arm around George Thousand Names's shoulder, and said quietly, “Why don't we think about this, George? Think where they might have gone? Maybe Lieutenant Stroud knows.”

“You heard the news,” said George Thousand Names. “The police are looking for a medical freak, not an Indian demon. Right now, Coyote is holed up someplace, waiting for nightfall, and laughing down his sleeve at all of us. Especially Lieutenant Stroud.”

“Do you think Coyote's gone up to Fifteen-fifty-one?”

“It's possible. In fact, if he's really managed to work out where Big Monster's hair is, I'd say it's a certainty.”

For quite a few moments, we sat and looked at each other, and both of us felt the fright and the burden of what we had elected to do. We didn't
have
to get involved. We could leave it all to Lieutenant Stroud and the SWAT squad, and take the next plane to Honolulu. But somehow we both felt that now Coyote had brought his evil into our lives, there was only, one way to go. And that wasn't off to Hawaii.

“George,” I said quietly. “Is there any way at all that we can wipe Coyote out? Is there any weakness anywhere that we can attack?”

George Thousand Names stared at the carpet. “I thought the necklace would work, but it obviously hasn't. Maybe Coyote's gained some new powers since he's been in hibernation. His only real soft spot, or so the legend says, was for Bear Maiden; and that isn't exactly a weakness because Bear Maiden was always so devoted to him.”

“What about Big Monster's hair?”

“That's the greatest threat of all,” he said. “Once he finds it, that will give him all the strength he needs, and immortality, too. If that happens, we might as well pack up our bags.”

“Supposing
we
found it first?”

The Indian shrugged. “Even if we did, we couldn't do much with it.”

“Couldn't we wear it ourselves? Would it give
us
strength?”

George Thousand Names looked at me as if I was totally bananas. “If a mortal man attempts to wear the scalp of a giant or a demon, he will be destroyed by what he sees. In other words, for as long as he could survive it, which wouldn't be long, he would become a demon himself, and his mind just couldn't take it. So the Hualapai Indians say, or at least they used to.”

I reached for another cigarette. “Okay. We'd better get ourselves up to Pilarcitos. Doing anything is better than doing nothing.”