The Revenant Road (8 page)

I stumbled back to the table.

“Take a load off, Shakespeare.”

I sat.

“Like I said, your work lacks passion. But your imagery...”

Kowalski chuckled. “
That’s
where you tip the scales. You give people nightmares and they love you for it.”

It was all I could do to keep my jaw from bouncing off the table top. I picked up a piece of bread from the basket between us and began to knead it between my fingers.

“I bust my ass trying to bring them to life,” I said over a fistful of multigrain. I’d always suffered from a tendency toward nervous starch manipulation. Under a looming deadline it wasn’t unusual for me to massacre an entire loaf of white bread in one sitting. When my mother stayed with me after recuperating from her hysterectomy my apartment looked like the floor of a cocaine processing plant staffed by workers with the worst dandruff you could possibly imagine. Kowalski had rattled me and I couldn’t stop myself.

“I wrack my brain,” I went on. “Writing and rewriting, trying to breathe life into different versions of the same idea over and over until I’m blue in the fucking...”

I stopped, blinking like a politician caught fondling himself while reading to Mormon pre-schoolers. In two paragraphs Kowalski had defined everything I despised about my own writing.

I threw down the dismembered bread and stood up.

“Who the hell are you?”

Kowalski grinned.

“I’m the fella holds the keys to the kingdom, Junior,” he said.

“You want to cross the drawbridge or swim the moat?”

13

“Into the Cosmos, Time Rangers! Awaaayyy!” 

As the hired car pulled out of the long, circular driveway, I confronted the house Kowalski called “home.”    

“Welcome to
Kalakuta
,” he said.

The massive Victorian sprawled the length of an entire city block. It hunkered there, a dingy gray so dark it looked black against the bright summer sky, four stories tall, with widely-spaced windows that reflected the afternoon sun. They provided only minimal visual relief from Kalakuta’s squalid unloveliness.

“Black
Summit
.”

“What?” I said, my eyes flinching over the mansion’s oppressive stone turrets and soaring black parapets.

Her name,” Kowalski said. “Kalakuta. It’s the name for Death as personified in Hinduistic mythology. To drink of Kalakuta’s poisonous waters was to gain immortality. The Hindu gods fought tremendous battles to win that gift.”

Kowalski walked up to the front door and opened it.

“Come on in.”

Before stepping over the threshold, I marked the sun’s position in its westward crawl over
Yonkers
. 

I’ll give him ten minutes,
I thought. I didn’t want to be inside Kalakuta when the sun went down.

* * * *

Kowalski stomped down the stairs that led into the kitchen carrying a battered black hatbox. He set the box on the table in front of me. It was nearly identical to the one Lenore had shown me after Marcus’s funeral, save that Kowalski’s box was as dusty and battered as a well-worn suitcase.

Kowalski reached down and flipped open the lid.

Despite myself, I jumped.

“In 1975, my father was murdered by his best friend, a man who called himself Satin Jack,” Kowalski said. He pulled out a tattered photograph.

“He betrayed my father on orders from this man.”

The man in the picture was dark-haired, with razor-sharp cheekbones and heavy-lidded black eyes. He might have been Native or African-American, Latino or Arabic. He glared into the lens, his face partially obscured by the bars of a prison cell.

Something about the man’s face nagged at my gut.

“I
know
him,” I said.

“If you knew him you’d be dead,” Kowalski said. “His name’s Carlos Vulpe. That picture was taken two hours before he was hanged for murdering ten children in the Spring of nineteen and ten.” 

“But you said your father died in 1975,” I said.

“I did,” Kowalski replied. “Vulpe hid his crimes by pretending to be a human serial killer. But he was a
skinwalker
, what you’d call a werewolf. For guys like him, Death is a minor inconvenience. ”

I studied the man in the picture, unable to shake the certainty that I’d seen him before. He was sitting with his back against the wall, his hands resting lightly upon his thighs, his spine erect, unbent.

At the same time, Vulpe’s smile communicated a sense of malignant ease, as if he were merely biding his time rather than awaiting his own execution. A man who looked like that would have moved with a serpentine economy of motion, the fluid grace of a dancer. But something in his expression also suggested a towering rage, and a limitless capacity for violence. A terrible hunger seemed to crackle in his eyes.

“My God,” I said. “His teeth...”

Kowalski nodded. “Near as anyone can tell, they were his original choppers, but somehow the sick fucker found a way to cover them with silver or aluminum or Christ-knows what. Then he sharpened them, filed them into points.”

It was true. Vulpe’s teeth gleamed, their argent coating plain even in the ancient photograph.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you said he was a werewolf...”

“A
skinwalker
.”

“If he was a... skinwalker, wouldn’t a mouthful of silver teeth... be... bad for him?”

“Vulpe wasn’t a member of the scumbag rank and file,” Kowalski said. “He sat near the top of the supernatural food chain. Some folks thought he used the silver to help him maintain control during his transformations: Vulpe and things like him draw power from suffering: Yours, theirs, and anybody else’s.”

“But why file them down?”

Kowalski shrugged. “Because he’d developed a taste for human meat even when he was on two legs. The teeth helped him kill more efficiently in his human form. He used them to eviscerate his victims. Sometimes he would rip out their throats, or just tear ‘em apart altogether.”

I laid the picture down slowly, deliberately, to keep my hand from shaking. The walls of Kalakuta seemed to lean in toward me. The ceiling crouched much closer to the top of my head than it had a moment before.

He used them to eviscerate...

“Listen, Mr. Kowalski,” I said. “I’m...I’m having a hard time with all this.”

“Your father and I first met back in ’75,” Kowalski said. “We were both hunting Vulpe by then, but for different reasons. For me, it was about my old man.”

Kowalski walked to the refrigerator and opened it. He produced a can of cream soda and brought it to the table.

“He was a monster hunter, one of the best. Together, he and Satin Jack struck terror into the heart of the Wraithing like no one ever had.”

“The Wraithing?” I said.

Kowalski nodded. “I’ll come to that in a minute. My father was an old school Catholic who ate slept and drank the job. He was also the most decent man I’ve ever known. I swore on his grave that I would kill the ones who killed him.”

Kowalski reached into the black hatbox and pulled a bundle of black cloth out of it. The bundle had been tied and secured with a length of red velvet ribbon. Kowalski untied the ribbon, unwrapped the bundle, and set it on the table between us. Without transition I was staring down the bore of a big mean-looking revolver.

Kowalski had changed without my noticing. He was wearing a black pinstriped suit and a slouchy fedora.        

“Alright, boys,”
he snarled.
“Here’s where the coon gets plugged.”

Twin runners of blood streamed from his eyes as he picked up the revolver and aimed it at my face.

“You alright, Obadiah?”

I blinked. Kowalski, the
real
Kowalski, was staring at me, his concern evident.

“Sorry,” I said.

“This was my old man’s gun,” Kowalski continued.

“Single action Colt .45; my father could blow the balls off a scared chickenhawk at high noon with this piece. That was his talent and the Service put it to good use.”

Kowalski sighed. Then he put the gun back into the box.

“But Marcus Grudge was born to the Road. It ran though him thicker than his own blood. He could spot
Nosferatu
even when they were illusion–casting. Your old man was damn near psychic himself.”

“Illusion-casting,” I said. I had to keep Kowalski talking. As long he was talking he wasn’t shooting: Talking=Good, Shooting=
Very
Bad.

Kowalski nodded.

“You said my father was ‘born to the Road?’ What road?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute.”

“But you said…”

“I said hold yer goddamn water.”

Despite my overactive imagination and the unease that was building a small condo in the pit of my stomach, I had to bite the insides of both cheeks: Kowalski was beginning to piss me off.

“My old man was only a second-generation monster hunter. Your line goes back farther. Marcus once told me that his father, his father’s father,
his
father and on back through slavery, back to a tribal shaman in
Senegal
maybe: They were all monster hunters.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Don’t you think hunting vampires might be a little difficult when you’re hiding from the KKK?”

“Monsters come different to different people, smart-guy,” Kowalski said. “Some of ‘em even manage to keep up with the times.”

“But you’re talking about my
family
,” I sputtered. “They were regular guys, working men. My grandpa Phil shuffled mail at the Post Office, for God’s sake.”

Kowalski shrugged. “What do you
really
know about your father’s people?”

I stood up. My heart was beginning to pound and I suddenly needed to move.

“Well,” I began. “There was grandpa Phil...Philip.
His
father’s name was Herbert. He moved to
New Orleans
after he left my great-grandmother in
Atlanta
. He...”

I paused, distracted by a flash of memory.

“He was only thirty-five when he... ”

“When he what?” Kowalski said.

“When he died
.
”

“How did he die?” 

“
I don’t know, alright
?” I snapped. “But who the hell knows how their great-grandparents died? That doesn’t mean he lived a double life.”

Kowalski drained his cream soda and tossed the empty can over his shoulder without looking. The can flipped end-over-end and landed in the blue
New York Recycles
bin by the back door.

“The life of a monster hunter is a hard one,” he said. “It’s lonely and filled with secrets. The things we hunt are also hunting us. Sometimes the bad guys turn one of us to their side. Satin Jack’s defection was a big feather in Vulpe’s cap.”

Kowlaski cracked his knuckles one by one, his eyes as hard as bits of gray flint.

“Jack Slocum betrayed a dozen hunters before I found him and put him down.”

“You mean you
killed
him,” I said. “That’s what we’re talking about here, isn’t it? Killing human beings?”

“I
freed
him,” Kowalski said. “If the Pale claims me for one of its own, the best thing you can do is bust a cap through my
cabeza
double-quick. Same goes for any other hunter. I did Slocum a favor.”

I lost the staring contest.

“That’s why you know dick about your father’s people,” Kowalski said. “Sometimes the Pale strikes at us through our loved ones. Family ties,
relationships
become liabilities. My marriage turned to shit the day I got my Walking papers.

“Marcus didn’t want that kind of life for you. He figured it was better for you to hate him than lose everyone you ever cared about to the Pale. He hoped you and Lenore would fall off their radar. But then you wrote
Death and the Sorcerer.”

 
“So?” I said.

“Earlier today I said that your books give people nightmares and they love you for it. But it’s more than that. When you wrote
that
book, you unknowingly revealed something that people subconsciously understand to be true: The same truth I’ve revealed to you.”