Tengu (50 page)

Kathryn and
Kelly screamed. For as Mr. Esmeralda ran past them, the Tengu appeared in the
lights which flooded the Mercury Air apron, both arms raised in a ritual
greeting to the devils which swarmed in the night air. He was even more
grotesque than the previous Tengu: his body was not only gaping with the wounds
from Doctor Gempaku’s silver claws, but smashed and misshapen from his 27-story
fall from Gerard Crowley’s office window.

His eyeballs
were totally white: he did not need to see, not in the ordinary sense of the
word. He was already dead, although not yet dead, and he strode toward Mr.
Esmeralda with all the purpose of a creature that is possessed by a hideously
powerful devil.

Mr. Esmeralda
was halfway up the steps to the jet’s cabin, leaving Eva and the girls on the
tarmac, when the Tengu .reached the foot of the steps, grasped them in his hands,
and shook them violently, until they rattled and thundered.

“Take them
shrieked Mr. Esmeralda, pointing to Eva and her twins. “Take them instead! They
are yours, as a substitute!”

The Tengu
raised his face blindly toward Mr. Esmeralda, then hesitated, turned, and
groped the air. Eva and the girls stood where they were, mesmerized by fright.

“Take them!”
screamed Mr. Esmeralda. “Take them!”

Still the Tengu
hesitated, but then he took one or two uncertain steps toward Eva, his hands
raised, his wounds glistening blue in the airport lights. Although Mr.
Esmeralda couldn’t hear her above the whistling of the Gulfstream’s engines,
she stepped forward to meet the Tengu and whispered, “You can have me.
But not my daughters.”

With one
sweeping blow, the Tengu knocked Eva’s head sideways and snapped her neck. She
stood where she was for a second or two, her head at a sickening angle, and
while she did so, the Tengu wrapped his arms around her, dug his hands into her
lower back until he had seized her ribcage, and then, with one grisly and
explosive wrench, opened her chest out like the ribs of an opening umbrella.
Stomach and guts splashed onto the concrete apron, and even Mr. Esmeralda stood
on the steps of the jet and stared in horror. Without even looking at Kathryn
or Kelly, the Tengu stalked back toward the black van. Two of the three Onis
were waiting, arms folded, to receive him and help him back into the van. The
third Oni was hidden in the shadows, although what he was doing, Mr. Esmeralda
couldn’t tell.

“I want to get
out of here,” he said to the stewardess who was standing behind him,
white-faced, in the cabin doorway.

The stewardess
couldn’t speak. “We have to leave now snapped Mr. Esmeralda. “We have to!”

The stewardess
shook her head, speechless, too shocked by the murder she had witnessed to
move.

“Where is the
captain?” Mr. Esmeralda demanded. “We have to go!”

There was a
sharp swishing sound, and a flash, and Mr. Esmeralda halfturned to look back
down toward the van. That was the last conscious movement he made. The third
Oni, resting against the hood of the van, had fired a single antitank round
from an 84-mm.?
Carl Gustaf rocket-launcher, a 5.7-pound
high-explosive projectile which penetrated the fuselage of the Gulfstream close
to the wing and instantly exploded.

Fully loaded
with fuel, the plane blew up in a huge, rumbling burst of orange fire. Pieces
of incandescent aluminum were hurtled into the air like a fireworks display.

The black van
was already speeding away, without lights. But as it reached the perimeter of
the airport and turned south again on the Pacific Coast Highway, it was picked
up for the second time that evening by a beige Cutlass, driven by Detective
Pullet. Beside him sat Sergeant Skrolnik, and in the back seat were Detective Arthur
and a police marksman named Woschinski, who had blotchy red Jtcne and a habit
of sucking peppermints, but who could hit a moth at yards and clip only its
legs off.

Skrolnik rapped
into his radio, as Pullet followed the “Something’s happened at Torrance
Airport. A van, damned great explosion. As soon as you get any word on it, let
me know. Meanwhile, what about that call to Sennett? Did you get through? Did
you tell him to get down here? I want him down here! He knows what the hell’s
going on, all this Japanese crap, which is more than I do. Tell him to take the
Long Beach Freeway as far as the Pacific Coast Highway, and then head south.
Tell him to get his ass in gear. Does he have CB? Well, that’s one goddamned
relief. Tell him to get down here fast. This is it. The balloon’s going up.”

F
our miles out of Marina
del
Rey, a U.S.
Coast Guard cutter intercepted the yacht Paloma and hailed her to heave to. The
yacht immediately cut her engines and wallowed for almost ten minutes in the
water, without navigation lights, without putting down her anchor. After
hailing the yacht four more times and raking her from stem to stern with
floodlights, the Coast Guard captain finally decided to send aboard three armed
enlisted men.

They
discovered, on the foredeck, still alive–but only just–
a tall
Japanese who was later identified as Doctor Gempaku. He had knelt by the rail,
and in the ritual manner of seppuku, and sliced open his own stomach with a
razor-sharp samurai sword. Down below, in the galley, they found a Chinese girl
who had been killed by being garrotted with a redhot wire. There were signs of
her breasts and buttocks of severe sexual assault.

In an inner
cabin, dead, were three young Japanese men wearing black silk masks. They had
all committed suicide by thrusting sharp knives, one in each hand, into their
own eyes and deep into their brains.

It was in the
very last cabin, though, that they found the greatest horror of all. Sitting in
a cushioned basket, surrounded by hundreds of burning candles, a small deformed
figure, naked, like a glistening fledgling that had fallen featherless from its
nest before it could learn to fly. The heat and the stench inside the cabin
were overpowering, but the tiny figure smiled at them as they stepped in, their
eyes wide with caution and fright, their carbines held high.

‘‘Holy shit,’’
said one. “Holy shit, this isn’t even real.

The tiny figure
continued to smile at them. The most unnerving thing about it was that, on top
of that deformed and twisted
body,
it had a perfectly
normal head, the head of a handsome 37-year-old man.

“Good evening,
gentlemen,” it whispered. “It seems that you have caught me at a disadvantage.”

One of the
Coast Guardsmen nodded; and, ritually, in return, the tiny figure nodded too.
It’s
heavy head dropped forward onto its chest, and for a
moment it whined, and whined again, and then fell silent.

“What’s the
matter with it?” asked one of the Coast Guardsmen. “Do you think
it’s
okay?”

“Would you
think you were okay, if you looked like that?”

“Jesus, I don’t
know. Why don’t you go take a
look.
”

“I’m not taking
no
fucking look.”

The other man
glanced behind him, to make sure that no other Coast Guardsmen had boarded the
yacht. Then, with the barrel of his carbine, he knocked five or six lighted
candles onto the blankets and cushions that lay on the floor. He watched them
for a second or two, to make sure they were well alight. Then he closed the
cabin door and struck at the lock with the butt of his gun to jam it. “We
didn’t even go in there, right?” he asked his companions.

“We didn’t even
go in where?”

The man checked
his watch. “Let’s give it ten seconds,” he said. “Then we’ll shout fire.”

The Paloma
burned for less than twenty minutes before listing over to port and quickly
sinking.

Kappa, the
water devil, had returned at last to the water. There was a smell of steam and
oil and charred varnish on the wind.

T
hey reached the power station at Three Arch Bay only five minutes
after Sergeant Skrolnik.

Jerry parked
the Dodge beside Skrolnik “s Cutlass, and turned immediately around to look at
El Krusho. Wrapped in a blanket on the back seat, alternately nursed and
tortored by Nancy Shir-anuka, Maurice was in a state of feverish trance,
twitching and mumbling and murmuring.

Mack and
Gerard, both in the front seat with Jerry, glanced at him uncertainly, as if
they weren’t at all sure they should continue.

“This isn’t
going to kill him or anything?” asked Mack. “I’ve known that poor sucker for
years.”

“He is
completely possessed now,” said Nancy. “Nothing will hurt him, not even
bullets.”

“Nothing?”
asked Gerard. “Not even another Tengu?”

Skrolnik came
over to their car and slapped on the roof. “Esmeralda’s dead,” he told them.
Jerry lowered the window to hear what he was saying. “He was trying to escape
in an executive jet at Torrance Airport, and it seems like these Japanese
bastards fired some kind of rocket at him. The whole plane went up. Six, maybe
seven people killed altogether. Most of the corpses haven’t even been
identified yet.”

“My wife–my
daughters,” said Gerard.
“Any news of them?”

“You’re Gerard
Crowley?” asked Skrolnik.

“Yes, sir.”

Skrolnik raised
his head, so that his face couldn’t be seen from the interior of the car. Then
he said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Crowley.”

Gerard said,
“Jesus. Did they suffer?”

“Not as far as
I know.”

Gerard was
silent after that. Jerry said to Skrolnik, “If they’re attacking this power
station, then presumably they’re going to try to set off some kind of nuclear
explosion.”

“That’s what I
thought,” agreed Skrolnik. “They’ve parked their van around the side there, not
far from the beach. We’re keeping them under close observation, and I’ve
already called for reinforcements. They won’t even get close, I promise you.”

“Don’t count on
it,” said Jerry.

Skrolnik peered
in through the open window. “Is that
Needs
you’ve got
in the back?”

“Yes, sergeant.”

“What’s the
matter with him? He looks sick.”

“He’s okay. He
needs some air, is all.”

Detective
Arthur came over and said hastily, “Sergeant
,,
they
want you around at the fence.”

“Okay,” said
Skrolnik, and then to Jerry, “Don’t wander away too far. I may need you.”

“Okay,” said
Jerry.

Once Skrolnik
had gone, Jerry and Mack and Gerard climbed out of the car, opened the rear
door, and helped El Krusho onto the grass. He coughed and swayed, 325 pounds of
entranced muscle, a human machine possessed by a violent spirit. Jerry could
have sworn that he saw tiny blue fires twinkling around El Krusho’s head, but
he guessed it was fatigue or reflections from the power station.

The power
station was floodlit now: a compact collection of white concrete buildings with
a tall red-and-white striped chimney, a battery of shiny aluminum ventilator
shafts, and a cylindrical roof over the fusion reactor itself like a huge
sailor’s cap. Plumes of steam rose from the slender chimneys that exhausted the
power station’s cooling plant, and the deep reverberating thrum of generators
was carried toward them by the evening wind.

“Tell Maurice
to go in there and kill the Tengu,” Jerry instructed Nancy.

Nancy said,
“You are sure this is what you want?”

“It’s what
Maurice wants.”

“Very well,
then,” said Nancy, and spoke rapidly to Maurice in Japanese.

“He’s going to
understand that?” asked Mack. “He doesn’t even understand English.”

“I am speaking
to the Tengu, not to Maurice,” said Nancy.

She had to
pause for a moment while a police helicopter flackered overhead, its
searchlights running across the ground like a frightened ghost. Then she
finished her incantation and bowed to Maurice with the respect of one who
recognizes extreme power when she confronts it.

There was
shouting from the far side of the fence around the power station, and a sharp
crackling of gunfire. Nancy said to Maurice, “It’s started. You must go. Kill
the Tengu. Kill it swiftly.”

Without
hesitation, Maurice seized the wire of the perimeter fence and ripped it apart
like unraveled knitting. He stepped straight through it, followed closely and
anxiously by Jerry and Mack. Gerard stayed behind with Nancy.

As they came
around the corner of the cooling plant, they saw a double cordon of police and
security guards, all armed, facing the Tengu across the parking lot. Every
floodlight was lit, giving the scene the brilliant unreality of a movie set.

But there was
no question that the Tengu was real. He came slowly forward, toward the main
doors of the power station, his head bound tightly with a scared sweatband
painted with magical characters, his eyeballs white as boiled eggs, his body damaged
and scarred and torn so viciously that the naked sinews showed through his
wounds. God, thought Jerry, you can see the blood pulsing through his arteries.

Nobody
challenged the Tengu. The police had bullhorns, but they didn’t use them.
Instead, an officer simply said, “Fire,” and there was an ear-spitting
fusillade of carbine and pistol shots.

The Tengu was
hit again and again. Bullets blew lumps of raw flesh from his shoulders and his
chest. One bullet turfed the skin and muscle away from the left side of his
face, so that his jawbone and teeth were bared. But he didn’t waver. He kept
advancing on the ranks of police and security guards, his arms raised above his
head, even when a sharpshooter hit his forearm and elbow, smashing the bone and
digging up the muscle.

The police
cordon began to waver and break, unnerved. “Fire demanded the officer, but none
of them did. They watched in horrified fascination as the Tengu, bloody and
maimed, walked right through their ranks, up the concrete steps of the power-station
entrance, and then burst open the doors with a single blow of his fists. Before
anybody could react, he had disappeared inside.