Rook & Tooth and Claw (13 page)

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, there is going to be trouble.”

“You mean yes sir, Mr Chill sir, there is going to be trouble, sir. So what kind of trouble are we talking about here?”

Jim reached into his pocket and took out the small piece of black cloth. Now his heart was beating so slowly that it had almost stopped and he felt as if he could easily turn into a zombie himself. He laid the piece of cloth on the table and Chill pushed aside a heaped ashtray full of pistachio shells so that he could look at it. He picked it up. He turned it this way and that. He leaned back under a spotlight so that he could see what was written on it.

He looked at Jim with a wary expression on his face. “Where did you get this?” he asked.

“Umber Jones gave it to me, to give to you. I don’t even know what it is.”

“You don’t know what it is? You bring me a voodoo curse and you don’t know what it is?”

“Listen – I’m only the messenger here. I’m not a Catholic and I’m not black. I’m a college teacher. All I know about voodoo is what I’ve read in books and magazines.”

Chill banged the table with his fist so that pistachio shells went dancing in all directions. “You brought me a voodoo curse!” he roared. He held the piece of cloth up in front of Jim’s face and his eyes were bulging with rage. “You know what this is? This has been cut from the cloth of a murdered Roman Catholic priest and the warning has been written in his own blood! You know what this says? Here, look –
jama ebya ozias
– and here, the mark of Baron Samedi, the lord of the cemeteries! You dare to bring me this? You
dare
to bring me this?”

“I was – I was asked to, that’s all. I didn’t have any choice in the matter. I owe Umber Jones a kind of a favour, that’s all. Don’t ask me about voodoo. Don’t ask me about narcotics. I’m just trying to stay alive and I’m just trying to protect some people who are very precious to me, okay?”

Chill looked down at him for a very long time. It seemed like hours. Then he reached into his coat and took out a pack of cigarettes. He tucked one into his mouth and instantly four lighters clicked into action. He ignored them all and lit his cigarette himself. “Who is he, this Umber Jones? He tired of living or something?”

“I wouldn’t underestimate him if I were you.”

Chill rolled the piece of cassock between finger and
thumb. “He knows his voodoo, I’ll give him that. Sometimes somebody might take a splinter from the altar; or the communion host; and they’ll dip it in chicken’s blood, and that’s enough of a warning. But this – this is like a death threat. Ain’t nobody gives no death threat to Chill, believe me.”

“I didn’t know,” said Jim. “He told me to bring it to you and I brought it.”

Chill grinned, and smoke leaked out from between his teeth. “I don’t know what somebody like you is doing mixed up in a business like this. But if I were you, I’d forget about this Umber Jones, whoever he is, and put as much distance between you and LA as you possibly can. Like I hear that Nome, Alaska, is pretty nice at this time of year.”

“So what do you want me to tell him?”

“Tell him I’ll see him in hell.”

He said it as coolly as he could; as befitted a man with a name like Chill; but Jim detected an inflection in his voice that betrayed a deep underlying uncertainty. He had heard the same slightly-strangulated talk from countless college bullies. Chill had been seriously disturbed by Uncle Umber’s patch of cloth. It was like Billy Bones in
Treasure Island,
being tipped with the black spot.

Jim waited for a moment, but Chill crushed out his cigarette and his minders began to shrug their shoulders and look threatening and the audience was obviously over. Jim got up and left the bar, just as the singer was launching into
You’re Simply The Best,
wildly off-key. Quite honestly, thought Jim, if Chill was going to shoot anybody, he ought to shoot her.

Chapter Nine

To Jim’s surprise, Tee Jay was back in class the next morning, wearing a Snoop Doggy Dogg sweatshirt and a strange, evasive look on his face. Jim came into the room with a bulging folder under his arm, dropped it on to his desk and stood for a while, taking in everybody’s faces – Sue-Robin Caufield, flirting and chatting; David Littwin, frowning at his desk as if he couldn’t understand why it was there; Muffy Brown, her head thrown back in laughter; Ray Vito, his eyes half-closed in a smooth Latin flirt with Amanda Zaparelli – he had taken a sudden interest in her now that her teeth were fixed.

Jim rubbed the back of his hand against his chin. He had been plagued by nightmares all night and he hadn’t shaved very well this morning. His hair had refused to do what he wanted it to do and there had been no clean shirts in his drawer. He had discovered a blue checkered shirt that he usually used for working on the car. Two buttons were missing but at least it was pressed.

“Okay, class … this morning I’m pleased to welcome Tee Jay back to college and I’m sure that the rest of you are, too. What happened to Elvin was a terrible tragedy but in a way it makes it a little easier to bear knowing that the perpetrator wasn’t one of us.”

As he said “one of us” he turned and fixed his eyes on Tee Jay. He and Tee Jay were the only ones who
knew that Tee Jay
had
been involved – and that even if he hadn’t killed Elvin himself, he had stood by while Umber Jones had stabbed his best friend more than a hundred times. But Jim still wanted him to feel that he was part of the class – that he had a family to turn to. It was the only possible way of setting him free from his uncle’s influence.

“Today we’re going to read
Why He Stroked the Cats
by Merrill Moore.
Page 128
in your
Modern American Verse.
I want you to read it silently to yourselves first of all, to see what you make of it. It’s a difficult poem, strange. But I’d like to hear what each of you think it means.”

He was still reading the poem to himself when he saw what looked like black smoke pouring over the windowsill. It rose, and softly whirled, and eddied around, and gradually the shape of Umber Jones materialised, shadowy and distorted at first, but then quite clearly.

Jim tried not to look at him, but it was impossible, because Umber Jones came right up to his desk and stood in front of him. His face looked as if it had been
powdered with ash and his eyes were glittering red. He looked like a zombie himself, but he spoke with his usual thick, threatening aplomb. “You did what I asked, and talked to the man called Chill?”

Jim nodded. He could see that Sharon had looked up from her poem and was frowning at him, as if she suspected that something strange was happening. He didn’t want Umber Jones to think that any of his class were aware of his presence. But then he glanced at Tee Jay and it was quite obvious that Tee Jay could see his uncle as clearly as he could. He was giving Jim a small, mocking smile, as if daring him to speak.

“Okay, Mr Rook … and what did Chill have to say for himself?”

Jim said nothing. Umber Jones stepped closer to his desk and held up his right hand. “I didn’t quite hear that, Mr Rook. Maybe you better speak a little louder.”

Jim continued to stare at him and say nothing.

Umber Jones stared back at him for a while, and then he started to rotate his right hand, around and around, and take it off, exposing the blade that was concealed inside it. “You see this knife, Mr Rook? This knife has the power of Ghede, who is Baron Samedi’s closest assistant. When Baron Samedi wants bodies, it is Ghede who provides them. Now, you wouldn’t want to be one of those bodies, would you?” He held the knife right in front of Jim’s face until the point almost touched his chin. “How about you telling me what Chill said to you last night?”

“He said he’d see you in hell.”

“Well of course he did,” said Umber Jones. “You didn’t seriously think that he was going to give up ninety per cent of his income, did you, just because some college teacher told him to?”

“No, quite frankly, I didn’t.” Two or three more members of the class looked up.

“But you gave him the message, didn’t you? And you warned him what would happen if he didn’t do what he was told?”

“Yes, I did.”

“So next time, when you go to see him, he’ll be more amenable, won’t he?”

“What do you mean? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to
persuade
him, Mr Rook, in the time-honoured fashion.”

“If anybody else gets hurt—” Jim began. But at that moment John Ng stood up, with an expression of panic on his face.

“Mr Rook!” he said, and held up his necklet. “Mr Rook, he’s here now, isn’t he? That’s who you’re talking to! Look at my stone! Look at it! It’s turned completely black!”

Sharon stood up, too. “I can
feel
him, Mr Rook! You can’t pretend he’s not here!”

The other members of the class turned this way and that in confusion. “Who’s here?… What are they talking about?”

“It’s the man in black!” John shouted. “It’s the man who killed Elvin! Nobody can see him, only Mr Rook, but he’s here! He’s here right now, in the classroom!”

Tee Jay twisted around in his seat. “Shut up, you Viet Namese loony! What the hell you say, man in black?”

Sharon said, “He
is
here! I know he’s here!”

“You shut up too, bitch,” Tee Jay snapped at her. “What are you crazy or something?”

“Tee Jay!” said Jim. And it was then that he felt a cold flick across his face, and the poetry book in front of him was abruptly spattered with a fine spray of blood.

He clapped his hand against his cheek, shocked. Umber Jones was glaring at him with his amber-coloured teeth clenched in a grotesque snarl. “I told you not to tell them but you told them, didn’t you? You disobeyed me!”

The classroom was suddenly silent. All of the students stared at Jim wide-eyed. Blood ran down between his fingers and dripped off his elbow. “I didn’t tell them anything,” he said. “They were sensitive enough and intelligent enough to work it out for themselves.”

Umber Jones seemed to rise and swell, so that he was nearly seven feet tall. His suit was black, with a black buttoned-up vest which Jim could clearly see, yet there was a shadowy transparency about it. He could faintly distinguish the faces of some of his students through it, Ricky and Beattie and Sherma Feldstein.

Umber Jones said, “Now they know about me, maybe they need a little lesson on what will happen if they talk about me to anybody else.”

“Don’t you touch them, not one of them!” Jim retorted.

“And who’s going to stop me?”

“Listen, I’ll do anything you want! You want me to go back and talk to Chill? Fine, I’ll do it. But just don’t touch my students!”

“You’ll do anything I want, whether I touch them or not. You’re my friend, Mr Rook, remember?”

Jim jumped up, knocking his chair over, and made a grab for Umber Jones’ arm. His hand passed through it as if it were smoke. Umber Jones swished his hand down and cut Jim’s left sleeve open. Then he swished it sideways, nicking the tip of Jim’s nose. If he hadn’t dodged his head back in time, Umber Jones would have sliced his entire nostril open.

All that his class could see was Jim dancing and
whirling on his own, his sleeve ripped open and blood flying in all directions. Muffy began to scream, and then Jim staggered against Jane Firman’s desk and she began to scream too. The boys shouted in alarm. “Hold him! Somebody hold him! Go get Mr Wallechinsky! Don’t let him fall!”

But Tee Jay suddenly stood up and shouted, “No! You hear me? Don’t call nobody! Shut the hell up and stay where you are!”

There was a sudden hush, all except for Muffy, who kept up a monotonous self-pitying sniff. Umber Jones stepped away from Jim, holding his blade up high, his eyes almost crimson with cruelty. Jim pulled a bunch of Kleenex out of the box on his desk and pressed them against his cheek. He felt shocked and hurt but worst of all, he felt that he was weak. He was supposed to protect his students, but he couldn’t.

Tee Jay said, “You listen to me good. You’re all going to walk out of here today and you’re not going to say one word about what you saw. Because the man in black that Mr Rook here was talking about, he’s
real,
even if you can’t see him for yourselves. I seen him. I seen him that day when Elvin died and I can see him now, as plain as day.”

He stood in the centre of the class, looking at every one of them. “Maybe you didn’t believe in him before, but take a look at those cuts on Mr Rook’s cheek and tell me where they come from. If you don’t want that to happen to you, keep your mouth shut and you don’t say nothing to nobody. And if you need any further persuading, go to the funeral home and ask to take a look at Elvin.”

“So who is this man in black?” Russell Gloach challenged him.

“He’s like a ghost, that’s all.”

“A ghost?” said Ray. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“Well, he’s more like a spirit. He isn’t dead … he’s just walking around outside of his body.”

“How come you know so much about him?” asked Sue-Robin.

“He’s the spirit of somebody I know. That’s why he’s here.”

“Can’t you tell him to leave us alone?” said Jane, miserably. Her eyes were filled with tears and she was deeply distressed.

Tee Jay emphatically shook his head. “This spirit isn’t the kind of spirit you can give any kind of orders to. You want to live a long, peaceful life? You give this spirit respect, and you give him plenty of space. You understand that?”

Jim came forward. He didn’t look at Tee Jay, but he said, “Tee Jay’s right, everybody. It’s in your own interest if you don’t tell anybody what happened here today. Even your family, or your closest friend.”

“But what can we
do
about it, this spirit?” asked Beattie, looking nervously around the classroom. “Can’t we do what they did in that movie when the girl’s head went round and round?”

Jim looked at Umber Jones but Umber Jones kept his head lowered so that his face was obscured by the brim of his Elmer Gantry hat. “We can’t do anything,” said Jim. The class could sense the defeat in his voice and they quietened down.

Jim dabbed at his face. It had stopped bleeding, but it still needed cleaning up. He would have gone straight to the infirmary, but he wasn’t going to leave his class alone with Umber Jones.

“Let’s get back to the poem,” he said. “Tee Jay – you want to return to your seat?”

Tee Jay gave him a shrug and sprawled back into his chair. Jim returned to his desk, picked up his chair, and sat down in front of his blood-stained poetry book. He glanced up at Umber Jones, but Umber Jones remained where he was, silently smoldering, his face still concealed.

The class whispered and shuffled their feet, half-bewildered and half-fearful. “Come on,” said Jim. “Let’s get back to the poem. He won’t do you any harm if you do what he says, will he, Tee Jay?”

“If you say so, Mr Rook.”

Jim said, “I want you all to think what the poet was trying to explain. I mean – is this real, the floor splitting and the walls melting, or is it an allegory? If so, what kind of an allegory? And what does he mean by ‘certain magic laws’?”

The class remained silent. They knew that Umber Jones was still there, whether they could see him or not. But after a few moments, Umber Jones took off his hat, and ran his hand through his ash-powdered hair, and looked up at Jim with a sloping smile. “Chill frightened you, didn’t he?” he said, in that sack-dragging voice of his.

Jim ignored him, but pointed to Greg, over in the corner, and said, “Greg – what did you think he meant by ‘certain magic laws’?”

Greg squeezed his face into ten different expressions before he managed to say, “Superstitions … you know what I mean? Like spilling salt or walking under a ladder.”

“That’s very good, Greg. Taboos, that’s what he was talking about. That comes from the Polynesian word ‘tabu’, meaning a sacred or significant object.”

Umber Jones said, “You should have someone look at your cheek. Nasty cut, that.”

“Don’t interrupt,” Jim told him, even though he was still shaking. “No matter what you do, these children still deserve their education.”

They locked eyes for a moment. Then Umber Jones said, “Okay. I’ll send you a messenger.”

“Not Elvin, please. Let Elvin rest in peace.”

“Elvin? Elvin doesn’t want to rest in peace. Elvin’s glad to be out and about.”

Jim couldn’t think what to say. But Umber Jones began to shudder and fade, and in a few moments his smoke had disassembled itself, and blown away, as if he had never been there at all.

“He’s gone,” said John Ng. “Look at my crystal. It’s clear.”

“Is he really gone?” asked Rita.

Jim said, “Yes. I think we can all breathe a little more easy.”

“But what does he
want
?” Sherma insisted.

“Nothing that has to worry you,” Jim told her. “I’m just sorry that you’ve all gotten involved.”

“Come on, Tee Jay, tell us what he wants,” demanded Russell. “I mean you seem to be such buddies with him.”

Tee Jay said, “You heard Mr Rook. He doesn’t want nothing that has to bother you. All he wants is space and respect.” He put his fingertip to his lips, in the same way that Umber Jones had done when he looked through the classroom window. “And silence.”

He turned to Jim and said, “You need to get that cut fixed, Mr Rook. How about I take you down to the nurse?”

There was something in his tone of voice that made
Jim immediately put down his bloodstained poetry book and say, “All right, Tee Jay. The rest of you … I won’t be too long. Why don’t you write me a poem of your own about your own superstitions … anything that frightens you. Breaking a mirror, treading on the cracks in the sidewalk, the number thirteen …”