The Revenant Road (16 page)

It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing.

When I did, a surge of horror rose up in me and threatened to twist the floor out from under my feet.

“What are you doing?”

I spun, strode across the library and thrust the open book at Kowalski. “You did this?”

The look on Kowalski’s face diverted the stream of imprecations thronging at the backs of my teeth. Something in his demeanor seemed to buckle; some inner reservoir of resilience gave way and he sat down heavily on the sofa.

“That book belonged to Marcus,” Kowalski said. 

His voice lowered to almost a whisper and he looked down at the floor as if I’d uncovered something shameful. “I didn’t do it,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before today.”

“The man in this picture...” I said. “It’s him, isn’t it? It’s Marcus.”

Kowalski nodded, “Yes.”

“How?” I said. “He would have to have painted this before he...”

I stopped, realizing even before I said it, that such a thing would have been impossible. Marcus Grudge had been many things, but he was no artist.

“Every hunter receives a Book like that the day he sets his foot upon the Road,” Kowalski said. “The Book records his Walk, documents it.”

“For what?” I said.

Kowalski stared down at the floor. His reply was barely audible. “Posterity.” 

The word hung in the air between us like the final bite of a guillotine. Kowalski seemed to have lost the power of movement. He stared at the floor as if he were afraid to acknowledge the book’s presence.

“Normal folks never see them,” he said. “The Nolane have ways of marking their tools. Those pictures you’re looking at would be indecipherable to any regular Joe who just happened to stumble across the book. Only the hunters can read them.

“The Book records a hunter’s victories and his defeats. It records the beginning of a hunter’s Walk. Just as sure as it records the journey’s end.”

I stared at the last illustration in Marcus’s Book, repulsed and yet unable to look away.

“Have you seen
your
book?” I said.

Kowalski looked up from the floor, his eyes glittering.

“Don’t ever ask me that question again.”

Ashamed, frightened by the emotion I saw in his eyes, I threw the Book across the room.

“I don’t want this,” I said. “I didn’t ask for
this
.”

Kowalski stood and put a hand on my shoulder. I shrugged him away, whirled and faced him.

You’re trapped in this. With him. Trapped.

“
Don’t touch me,
” I snarled, more to my ghosts than to Kowalski. I grabbed him by the shoulders, pulled him in close and spoke directly into his face.

“
I
decide my destiny, understand?  Not you, not
him
, not that
thing
in the basement. And not some fucking
book
.”

I let him go and stalked past him.

“You can’t hide,” Kowalski said. “It
is
your destiny. It’ll find you wherever you go.”

I slammed the door on my way out, determined to lodge my complaint loudly enough for the whole careless universe to hear. But somehow, I sensed that it was a wasted effort.

The Universe didn’t give a shit.

I went off to get drunk.

23

Blithe Spirits

Drinking to escape your problems is wrong. The problems don’t go away just because you’ve chosen to drink yourself into a stupor. On the contrary, when you finally sober up, inevitably lying facedown in a puddle of various bodily fluids, the problems are still there, hovering like desperate relatives over the deathbed of a dying lotto winner.

Drinking for the simple expedient of getting blasted into unconsciousness, however, is perfectly acceptable.

I’d chosen McNair’s, a low-end, usually enjoyably empty “sports bar” just off the
Westside Highway
, to take my stand against rampant consciousness. It was
two-o’clock
in the afternoon, six hours before I was due upstate at Juno’s house. By two-thirty I was reasonably potted and feeling only a modicum of pain.

“Hey, pal,” a voice intruded. “You’ve got a lotta nerve, sitting on your ass while people are dying.”

I turned a bleary eye toward the seat on my right.

The mutilated couple was back, and this time they’d brought friends.  Seated on the barstool next to the mutilated Asians was a dark-skinned bearded man wearing a red turban. Like Marcus Grudge’s ghost and that of the one-armed Chinese man, the bearded man had been gutted. His throat had been ripped open. Blood and bits of bone sprinkled the front of his white short-sleeved shirt and his turban was smoking.

“This is him?” the Hindu said. “I can’t believe what my eyes are telling me.”

“Guy looks like a homo, you ask me.”

This from the thirty-something, balding white man wearing a Seattle P.D. field jacket. The nametag on the field jacket read, Ofc. Don Corcoran. Don Corcoran’s face had been smashed into red pudding. His head had been twisted around so far on his neck that he was forced to sit with his back to the bar simply to participate in the conversation. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

After meeting my dead father in
Central Park
it seemed strangely normal, meeting this coffee klatch of spooks in broad daylight. What I wasn’t prepared for was their criticism.

“Do you really think alcohol will solve your problems?” the Hindu said. “If you do then we are all damned.”

The Amerasian woman, whom I’d first seen during my father’s funeral, shook her head, the gristle and exposed tendons in her throat making wet little popping sounds.

“Leave him alone, Mr. Singh,” she said. “He’s working it out in the only way he knows how.”

“Working it out?” Corcoran snarled. “I had a wife and three kids to feed, honey! Half the Seattle PD gets smoked by a
friggin’ monster
and
this
guy sits here gettin’ tanked on mojitos.”

“It’s whiskey, pal,” I mumbled. I didn’t like the dead cop’s tone. “Jack Daniels’ finest blend.”

“Jeezus,” Corcoran groaned. “He
is
a homo.”

“I disagree,” said another voice, this one on my left.

I turned and saw something that looked like an anthropomorphic pile of hamburger sitting on the barstool to my left. “Forgive my appearance,” the talking hamburger said. Its accent was heavily flavored with Spanish, possibly Mexican or maybe El Salvadoran. “I have yet to master…”

“I know,” I interrupted. “‘Shape-molding.’ Look up my father when you get a chance. He can give you a few pointers.”

For some reason I found the thought of my father teaching this crew of spectral misfits the art of image management hilariously funny. I began to chuckle. Twenty seconds later, I was bent over the bar, howling with laughter.

“Jesus,” Corcoran grumbled. “The guy’s comin’ apart.”

“I concur,” the Hindu said. “She must choose another representative.”

“She won’t,” the Amerasian woman snapped. “And She won’t have to.”

“What do you people want?” I asked when I could catch my breath. I was suddenly less drunk than I’d hoped to be. The mutilated Dead were putting a crimp in my plan to obliterate myself before dark.

“We want what
all
the Dead want,” Corcoran snarled. “We want Justice.”

The Hindu nodded in agreement. “Revenge.”

“But he is too pampered,” the animated meat-puppet on my left gurgled. Looking closely, I could make out the remnants of a face, one brown eyeball stared up at me from the barstool’s seat. Tufts of black hair covered what I took to have been mustache-covered lips. “Look at his clothes,
si
? The way he weeps when he laughs. He is like a girl. A very ugly little girl.”

“Quiet please, Señor Beltran,” the Amerasian woman snapped. The other spooks quit clamoring. The Amerasian female ghost turned back to me. “You have to choose, Mister Grudge,” she continued. “In all the horrors yet to come, you must pick a side. You won’t be allowed to haunt the sidelines.”

Again I felt that geyser of inappropriate laughter welling up from deep inside me. The look of disapproval on the dead woman’s face stopped me.

“You are more than you know,” she said. “Your father was right about you.”

I leaned forward. “What do you know about my father?”

“Who the heck are you talking to?”

I turned to see who was speaking and found myself uncomfortably close to the ugly bartender. “Everything alright, buddy?”

I turned back, looking for the mutilated Dead, knowing even then what I would find: nothing. I was alone.

“Had a few too many, eh, pal?”

I looked around, nonplussed by the vanishing acts of the Dead; nonplussed by my inability to banish them from the geek show that was rapidly destroying my life.

“Hey, I read one of your books,” the ugly bartender shrugged. “Not bad, but not exactly my cuppa joe, you know what I mean? I’m more of a Crime slash Mystery slash ‘Detective at the End of the Line’ type guy.”

Laughing, I bellied up to the bar and slid my empty glass forward.

 “Just fill ‘er up, asshole.”