New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (8 page)

Henley stepped a pace into the shop, faltered a moment as he surveyed the place. One wall was covered with the wing-feather fan of an eagle. A stuffed monkey hung by its genitals from the ceiling, which was crusted with black mussel shells. The odour of the room was sticky. In a polished clawfoot burner with talons spread, an orange lump of olibanum squatted, and as Henley slowly pivoted to view the coils of a white python on one of the rafters, the hognose head watching him with dusty eyes, the old man lit the incense coals. The yellow vapours wafted over the rickety shelf, seethed over husks of seahorses, the moult of a tarantula, red-speckled seabird eggs, and amber and green bottles stoppered with the thumbs of apes.

The room was glimmering with the trills of canaries. The lizards that would eventually devour them drowsed below in cages crafted from twigs. A yellow and papery light, filtered through tall lanterns stained with images of serpents and squids, gave everything an umber cast. In that light the old man, who had closed the door and was now motioning Henley to sit, looked ageless.

Henley sat in the corner and watched anxiously as the old man approached, his trouser legs hissing.

He held a thin bone whistle to his lips and blew a brittle note. 'I been waitin' a long time for you.'

With a wombsoft tread, he stepped closer. 'Cthulhu fhtagn!' he spit, and Henley felt a surge of strength. The old man was wrapped in a cloak of shadow. 'You knaw nuthin' 'bout what has you.

Well, I got to say, dat is best.' He leaned far forward out of the shadows, and Henley saw that he had only one eye. The other had been replaced by a shard of mirror, and seeing his reflection in it, he grew faint. Henley's eyes were so widely dilated, there were no whites showing, and around the corners of his mouth a scaly blackness was crusted. 'You knaw nuthin'

'bout de way dat has you. And dat be good. Dat be best good.' He pulled the bone whistle to his parched mouth and sucked a sea chant, a modal hymn, through it that seemed to come from all around, like a sound heard underwater.

Listening to it, Henley felt both as if his life were a small animal dying in a bottle and as if he would live for ever in the open spaces of lone birds.

Ralf's head was going bad. There had been too many lousy breaks, and he was getting to feel threatened.

When he learned that Henley had signed out of St Vincent's, he went to a gunshop and got several extra clips for the Walther automatic. It was too heavy to stay in the city, so he drove out to his sister's place in Stony Brook. By the time he got there, Henley's message had come through, and Ralf wheeled back into New York. At the Elton the cops had left, but there were several people in the lobby, grouped together, mumbling, Nobody had any idea what had happened.

Henley's door was unlocked, and Ralf entered without knocking. Except for a squelchy odour in the air and several drops of dark blood on the floor, the place was vacant as a sucked egg. The lights were on, and the window was open. When he went over to check the fire escape, he spotted a small dull rock with curious etchings on it. Ralf at first thought it was a paperweight, but when he examined it more closely, he recognized that it was like nothing he had ever seen before. He pocketed it, searched the bathroom scrupulously, and left.

He rarely got drunk, but when he did he became so tight that only violence could unspool him. He went down to the Red Witch and got skunked enough to call his old field captain. The last time he had seen Vince Pantucci was in Can Tho when they were spreading a little lead around some of the villages, hoping to enrage the Cong. Shortly afterward, Ralf was caught smuggling M16’s out of the country.

Pantucci was the ring's honcho, but Ralf did two years in the clam without fingering him. Since then, Pantucci had completed his tour and walked. Ralf knew he was in the city. He had been hearing tales about him for over a year. The man was mean. He was the only person that Ralf knew who could really move weight - other than Gusto. And he wasn't talking to Gusto.

Getting in touch with Pantucci was difficult. He was big time now, and he stayed low. Eventually Ralf had to drop a few lines about gun running to make contact. An hour later, Pantucci stalked into the Red Witch. He was big, wide as an oven, with arms like dock ropes and tight brass-red curls that boiled up around his neck from under his silk shirt. His dark cave-sitter eyes spotted Ralf instantly, and he muscled into the booth where he was sitting, said, 'What's the take, clothead?'

'I need a favour.'

Pantucci rolled his eyes. He had the face of an Etruscan - ethereal cheekbones, high fat forehead, and skin the colour of baked earth pulled tight over his skull. 'What's it gonna be, monk?

Cash?''Look, captain...'

'The captain is looking, Ralf, and he don't like what he sees. You're strung out, ain't you?'

'Nah, cap. I'm clean, but I got caught sidewise in a sour deal.' 'Dope?' 'Yeah.'

'What? Ganja?'

'Another class. Schmeck.'

'How much?'

'More than two kilos.'

Pantucci made a face like he smelled something disgusting. He slapped Ralf on the cheek and twisted his ear till it hurt. 'You jooch.' He pulled Ralf by his ear halfway across the table until their noses were practically touching. 'You move dub with strangers until you get boxed. Then you cry for me. Right?

Why didn't you come to me in the first place?'

Ralf pulled himself away and slumped in the corner, looking vaguely disgruntled. 'Didn't know you moved it.'

'You bullshit so much your molars are brown. Thought you'd get more play elsewhere, eh? Or was it that two years in the can made me look ugly? Who's the muscle?''Gusto.'

Pantucci coughed up a thick salty wafer of phlegm, let it lay hot on his tongue for a moment, then hawked it into the sawdust. 'What a weasel you are. What'd you expect from woolheads? You think you're a brother?' He stared for a moment into the thin cold eyes opposite him, engaging the emptiness he saw there. They were the most remote eyes he had ever known.

They reminded him of Ia Drang Valley and long swamp roads. He shook his head and looked away.

'Give me the plot.'

'Eastoh's brother Henley copped in Seattle and crossed to the city while ! lined up Gusto. Along the way something happened. He went into a coma. None of the meds could pin it. By the time I found him in St V's, Gusto was working on me. Now I know Henley's got the stuff, but he lit out. I guess he still thinks I was responsible for his brother getting blown away at Ngoc Linh. We patrolled together. I don't know. I was thinking you might find him.'

'So you can cop and deliver to Gusto? I don't work for nates, mongoose.'

'Yeah, well I do.' The wings of Ralf's nostrils whitened. His hands were under the table. 'My ass is on the line. You going off on me, captain?'

'How do you even know Henley has it?'

'I don't. But I got to ride something.'

Pantucci looked down at his hands, which were barked with callus. He liked Ralf. He looked intense, but he knew he could trust him. 'Give me the man's profile.'

'You think you can find him?'

'It's on the rails.'

Pantucci had a villa in the mountains where he set up Ralf. There was an indoor swimming pool there and a live-in maid and cook. There was also a metalworking shop for retooling stolen goods.

Ralf spent a few hours in the shop trying to bore a hole in the strange rock he had found in Henley's room. It was no good.

The rock was harder than any known substance. An automatic drill press with a diamond bit didn't even scratch it. Ralf was amazed but too preoccupied with evening the score with Henley to think much about it. He liked the rock. He liked its heft and its silky texture. It was the size of his palm with a few natural holes on its edge. Eventually he was able to thread some wire through one of the holes, and he wore the rock around his neck like a talisman.

A few days later, Pantucci found Ralf catnapping on the veranda beneath a vine-tangled trellis.

Trembling smells of cedar bark and pine riffled in the air. Sunlight buzzed off dusty rocks. 'I found him,' Pantucci whispered.

Ralf leapt out of the sunchair. 'Where?'

'He left an hour ago for Haiti.' He waved a packet of paper slips. 'Here's your ticket and passport.

There will be money at the airport - and a gun permit. Go in peace, jooch. And remember. We're even.'

Ralf arrived in Port-au-Prince wearing dark glasses, a USMC muscle shirt, and black flight pants tucked into steel-tipped boots. He carried an attache with a few changes of underwear, twenty-five hundred dollars in traveller's checks, five hundred dollars cash, and his Walther automatic. On the flight, he'd taken his butterfly out of the attache and slipped it into one of the many pockets on his trouser leg.

As he was deplaning, Ralf scanned the crowd, but there were so many black faces, it was impossible to eye any of Gusto's goofers. It wasn't until he was shouldering through the mob in the pavilion that he was sure they were laying for him. He felt hard metal pressing against his spine.

'Awright, pogue, you're comin' with me.'

He recognized the voice. It was the hit man he had tumbled in the parking lot. He was nudging Ralf out of the crowd with the barrel of his gun. Ralf groaned loudly and dropped to the ground. As he fell, he palmed the butterfly, sprung it open under his chest, and swivelled his attache to block the gun. The goofer turned and bent down to free his gun for a shot. As he did so, Ralf rolled and stood up quick, forcing the barbed end of the blade between the man's ribs. With a neat twist, he severed the aorta and yanked his knife free by pushing the man away.

The crowd was dispersing fast, and Ralf lost himself in the knots of scurrying people. A few minutes later, he was in a cab heading into town. He booked into a cheap hotel in the East End and began asking around for Henley. No one in the city had seen him, and on his second day he went out to the dirt-farmer markets near the shantytowns. He had bought a white jellaba, and, despite the heat, he wore it so that he could carry his Walther inconspicuously. It was only a matter of time before Gusto's men would hunt him down.

In the native-dominated marketplaces, the talisman drew a lot of attention. No one would touch it, but everyone wanted to see it. Three boys with the fetal air of bay pirates - brash gold teeth, oil-soaked T-shirts, reversed crucifixes - tried to tug it off his neck. They questioned Ralf about it first, mumbled something in a language he didn't recognize, and then, just when he realized that he had missed some sort of cue, one of them snatched at the rock. The wire cord it was on bit into Ralf's neck and held. His eyes tightened to a squint, and he elbowed the boy in the mouth. The other two drew long cruel knives from their thigh sheaths.

Ralf spun on his heels and spartied in and out between the stalls heading towards the alleys of the shantytown. The boys ran after him, whooping and throwing fruit and rocks. In the alley, Ralf stopped short and curled around, both hands holding his Walther automatic way out in front. The boys fell over each other trying to pull up. They backpedalled slowly, and at the mouth of the alley one of them made a gesture Ralf didn't understand and cried, 'Cthulhu fhtagn? The sound of his voice had a shrill, frightening quality that unsettled Ralf more than the sight of their knives had. He decided to call it a day.

Henley Easton had lost complete control of his body. It moved by another will, and he merely observed.

The last days that he spent in his body were riddled with madness. The body itself began to alter rapidly after he found his way to the old man in New York. The old one's name was Autway, and he was a sorcerer, that is, he was a Voudoun gangan. He carried a calabash filled with snake vertebrae, and whenever he rattled it, the men in his presence responded. He never had to speak directly to them. The sound of the calabash was sufficient instruction.

When Henley's body began to change, Autway provided loose-fitting white trousers and a wide-sleeved anorak with a hood that allowed him to move freely and didn't chafe his sensitive skin. A black squamous growth that had begun around his foot wound and his mouth spread quickly over his limbs and torso, itching terribly and emitting a thick putrefying odour.

Autway salved his flesh with the pulp of crushed roots, and that somewhat eased the discomfort.

For over a week, they kept him in a spacious cellar hung with draperies of dark nubbling. Autway came down frequently with younger men, all of them dark with wide faces that had the cast of full-blood Indians. For hours at a stretch, they rattled gourds and chanted, 'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.' The sounds they intoned had a peculiar effect on Henley. Hearing them, he felt starcalm, crazy-alive, glittering with energy. The rhythms were a vortex around him. It was a mutable, luculent sound, sometimes dark as the sea, sometimes stream-ingfire. Often, it would charge him so full of power that his body would rise and move about in lithe, sleek movements. The others would imitate him best as they could, but none could match the demonic fury with which his body wheeled and careened.

By the time they left for Haiti, Henley's face was darkened with scales. The ears, cheeks, forehead, and scalp were still clear, but he had the mouth of an iguana, and his eyes were ringed with black circles.

There were some febrile explanations at the airport about how sickly he was, but no one made a big fuss.

On the island, Autway brought him far out to North End to a trench hut on the mountainous outskirts of the slums. There the chants continued, only now there were many more people, kettle drums, torch parades, and the ceremony of zilet en bas de l'eau, the worship of an undersea island.

At the peak of the ceremony, elderly devotees gouged themselves to death with sharp stones.

Henley watched on in horror as his body danced its insane, impossible movements. His fingers were gradually becoming webbed, and his joints rearranged so that he could move his body as could no other human.

During the days, he walked about restlessly. With the anorak pulled up over his head, his body swayed through the shantytowns. He seemed to hover over the ground, shifting his weight like so much smoke.