They Thirst (30 page)

"Anybody here?" Rico shouted at the stairway. His voice rolled on through the building and was unanswered. He stared at the priest, his face paled by fear.

"We go up," Silvera said and started climbing the stairs again. The fourth floor hallway was as quiet as all the others. Rico could see doors standing open, and in the dim light he could make out the same deep scratches that they had seen downstairs.

Just above the fourth floor landing, Silvera stopped, his eyes wide, staring at the walls. New graffiti covered the old—HOTSHOT WAS HERE. VIPERS ARE KINGS. ZEKE SUX (HA HA). ALL FOR THE MASTER. BURN BABY BURN. Silvera reached out and touched the brown letters. "My God," he heard himself say, his voice hollow, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a well. "That's blood!" He continued upward, his senses coiled like a
culebra de cascabel.
For now his nerves were vibrating with the presence of something he'd felt a thousand times before—in a jail cell where two heroin addicts cut each other to pieces with razor blades; in a suffocatingly hot room where a drunken father had just beaten his three-year-old son to death with a baseball bat; in the smoldering, corpse-strewn ruins of a tenement razed by the arsonist's match; in the greedy eyes of Cicero, the dealer of demonic dreams. That presence was Evil, and now Silvera felt it as he never had before, so strong it was a tangible thing that clung to the walls, holding the odor of blood and brimstone. His heart was pumping hard, and before he reached the fifth floor he could feel the twitching—fibrillations, the doctors called them—begin deep in his hands.

The fifth floor corridor stretched out before them. Rico looked in through one of the open doors. The place was a wreck, and bits of a shattered mirror glittered on the floor like dusty diamonds. Silvera moved on ahead of him toward the Santos apartment and was about to push open the door—
scratches,
he thought,
there are scratches in this wood
—
when something crashed violently behind a closed door on the opposite side of the hallway.

"What the shit was that?" Rico said, twisting around.

Silvera crossed the hall and put his hand on the doorknob. He paused for a moment, listening. From the apartment he could hear a muffled
thump, thump, thump
that was unlike anything he could identify. Then there was silence. "Who's there?" Silvera called out. But there was no answer. He started to push the door open.

"Father!" Rico said. "Don't. . . !"

But then Silvera started across the threshold, and something dark came flying into his face from the ceiling. He cried out, feeling a claw graze his cheek, and threw his hands up before his face. The thing tangled in his hair, then whirled off over his head like a swooping, gray leaf. Silvera spun around to watch it hit the corridor ceiling with that muffled thumping noise; it flew over Rico's head and disappeared into shadows at the far end of the hallway.

Silvera was shaken, but he felt like exploding with nervous laughter.
A pigeon,
he thought.
I was frightened by a single pigeon.
He looked back into the apartment and immediately saw the broken window where the thing must've flown in, on the floor a broken bottle and knickknacks spilled from a shelf that the pigeon had probably collided with. He went into the apartment, his hands shaking badly now—he wondered how he was going to keep Rico from seeing—and checked the bathroom. A mirror had been smashed, and Silvera stared at himself through a series of concentric cracks. Again he noted that the shower curtain was gone. The rod itself had been ripped out of the wall.

Across the hallway Rico was slowly pushing open the door to Mrs. Santos's apartment. He stood at the threshold and called out her name, but of course there was no answer, and neither had he been expecting one. It was just that he wanted to hear a voice in this place, something human in this silent vault. He stepped into the apartment, his heartbeat racing. A sheen of sweat clung to his face. He walked across the room and looked into the small, darkened bedroom. It was sweltering, the air hanging in heavy layers. Rico saw that the sheets had been torn off the bed. He felt the hair rise on the back of his neck suddenly and didn't know why. Quickly he left the bedroom and went back out to the hall.

Father Silvera had stepped into another room further along the corridor. In this apartment he found an empty cradle with several spots of blood on the infant's pillow. When he stepped into the bedroom, he immediately froze. On the wall over the bare bed, written in blood, was ALL FOR THE MASTER. Newspapers were jammed over the single window, reducing the light to a pale, smoky haze. Silvera ripped them away. The light immediately strengthened, and he opened the window for some fresh air.

And then something moved in the room—a bare whisper of a movement that made Silvera twist around from the window. But no one was there. The bedroom was empty. He listened, ignoring the increased muscle fibrillations that ran through his hands, making his fingers twitch like claws. Again that noise, somewhere close. A sliding, cloth-on-cloth sound. He stared at the mattress. No sheets.
Where are they?
he wondered.
Did these people leave their homes and belongings, taking with them only sheets and cheap plastic shower curtains?

But when the noise came again—very softly—he knew where it was coming from, and something within him recoiled.

Under the bed.

"Rico!" Silvera called out, his voice sounding hoarse and hollow in the small room. When Rico came, the young man's eyes were haunted, gleaming bright with fear. "Help me," Silvera said and moved to push the bed aside.

Beneath it was an oddly shaped cocoon, the bed sheets wrapped tightly around what might have been the body of a two-headed man.

"What's that?" Rico said, his voice cracking. "What's that thing?"

Silvera bent and gingerly touched it. The form seemed to radiate a chill. He slowly began to work the sheets loose, and now Rico could see the disease in his hands, but he didn't care. The sheet caught, and Silvera ripped at it.

"Hey, Father," Rico said. "I don't like this, you know? I say we get out of here and call the cops. Okay? I mean, I'm not chickenshit or . . . WHAT'S THAT?"

A hand and arm, as bone white as marble and veined with blue, slithered out in front of Silvera. The priest checked his impulse to leap away and continued tearing at the sheet. In another moment he could see grayish hair and a pale, heavily lined forehead; then a second scalp, this one black-haired. He pulled the sheet free from the faces. It was Joe Vega and his thirteen-year-old son Nicky, entwined together. Their faces were as white as carved stone, but what made Silvera almost cry out with terror was the fact that he could see their eyes through the thin, almost clear membranes of their closed eyelids. The eyes semed to be staring right at him; they filled him with cold dread. He forced himself to reach down and feel the chests for heartbeats.

"They're dead," Rico said. "Somebody's killed them!"

Their hearts weren't beating. He felt for a pulse, found nothing.

"What killed them?" Rico was babbling. "Why do they look like that?"

"How do I know?" Silvera snapped. When he stood up, a shard of white sunlight fell across Vega's face like a stripe of hot neon. "I can't imagine what's happened here! We've got to check all the apartments. Maybe there are more corpses jammed under the beds. We'd better look in all the closets, too. God, what's done this thing?"

Behind him something rustled. Rico made a strangled sound, and Silvera turned.

Vega's corpse was moving. Silvera felt the hair rise at the base of his neck, but he couldn't look away from that unholy sight. Vega's legs were moving within the sheet, feet pushing against the floor, his arms tightly locked around his son. The gray-lipped mouth was twitching, as if a scream were about to burst free. The dead eyes blankly accused Father Silvera.

"He's not dead!" Rico said. "He can't be, not if . . ."

"They have no heartbeat!" He raised his hand and made the Sign of the Cross in the air. Instantly Vega's corpse-that-was-not-a-corpse opened its mouth and made a hideous, anguished moan that sounded like a low wind blowing through dead trees. The legs pushed frantically, and in another moment the two figures had squirmed back underneath the bed. They gave
a couple of convulsive twitches and lay still.

Rico's face had gone almost as white as Joe Vega's. He turned and stumbled over his own feet trying to get out to the corridor. Silvera came out, walking unsteadily. "Let's get out of here, Father! Let's call the cops!" Rico pleaded.

"Did you look for Mrs. Santos?"

"Yeah. There's nothing in there. . ."

"Were the sheets on the bed?"

Rico went cold. "Sheets? No. But Christ, Father, don't go back in there!"

Silvera stepped into the apartment. He forced himself to look under the bed, but there was nothing there. He crossed the room to a closet, gripped the knob, and opened it. At the bottom there was a pile of old newspapers and clothes. Silvera stared at it for a few seconds, then probed it with his foot.

Something moved, shifting uneasily.

He slammed the door shut and hurried out to where Rico, his face a shade between white and green, waited. "All right," Silvera said. "Now we go for the police."

Palatazin and Reece came out of an apartment building on Malabar Street in Boyle Heights trailed by an elderly black man with a gnarled walking stick. The man's name was Herbert Vaughan, he was a retired L.A. police officer, and he owned a light gray '72 Volkswagen Beetle with license plate 205 AVT.

"You know Captain Dexter?" he asked Palatazin when they'd reached the dark blue car with the municipal tag parked in front of the building.

"Will Dexter? Yes sir, I did know him, but he retired about six years ago."

"Oh, Captain Dexter retired? He was a fine man, a real fine man. He could find this Roach fella for you if you got him out of retirement" The man's eyes snapped from Reece to Palatazin.

"I'm sure he could, Mr. Vaughan. He did a good job on the Chinatown killings back in '71."

"Uh-huh. Sure did. And I'll tell you what, Will Dexter could catch the Gravedigger, too. Could find that fella fast as you could say 'Jack Robinson.' "

"The Gravedigger?" Reece said. "Who's that, Mr. Vaughan?"

"Don't you boys keep up with anything anymore?" He cracked his stick impatiently down on the sidewalk. "It was in the
Tattler
this morning! The Gravedigger! That fella who's been goin' through cemeteries and makin' off with the caskets! Ha! That kind of shit didn't go on when I was on the force, I'm here to tell you!"

"The
Tattler?"
Palatazin said softly. "This morning?"

"Son, have you got wax in your ears? That's what I said. What kind of accent have you got? Italian?"

"Hungarian. Thank you for talking with us, Mr. Vaughan." Palatazin went around the car and slid in under the steering wheel. Reece climbed in, but Mr. Vaughan shuffled forward and gripped the door handle before Reece could close it. "You get Cap Dexter out of retirement, you hear? He'll find the Roach for you, and he'll put that Gravedigger in the nut house where he belongs!"

"Thank you, Mr. Vaughan," Reece said and gently closed the door. As they drove away Palatazin glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the old man leaning on his cane, watching them drive out of sight.

"Who's next?" Reece asked.

Palatazin checked his list. "A. Mehta, 4517-D, Arizona Avenue in East L.A. That's a white Volks with the plate 253 BTA. I hope the other men are having better luck than we are." He waited for a light to change and then turned right on Whittier Boulevard. He'd gone almost a block when an ambulance screamed up from behind. Immediately he swerved to the curb; the ambulance, white and orange lights flashing, careened through traffic and on out of sight.

"Gravedigger," Reece said quietly and smiled. "Christ! This city's full of nuts, isn't it? If it's not Roach, it's the Gravedigger, and if not him, it'll always be someone else tomorrow."

"Remind me to find a
Tattler
on the way in. I'd like to read that story."

"I didn't think you were a fan of that rag."

"I'm not. But Mr. Vaughan's right—we have to keep up with things, don't we?" In the distance he heard the shriek of another siren. He could look down the side streets off Whittier Boulevard and see a smoky haze hanging in the afternoon sunlight between buildings that looked like bombed-out hulks. He didn't often come into the poor black and Spanish sections of Boyle Heights, East L.A., and Belvedere Gardens. There were detectives, though, who been trained especially in dealing with the barrio population, and in many instances riot situations had been defused by a detective or a beat officer who'd been accepted into the barrio's fold. All others were
extranos,
strangers not to be trusted.

Reece glanced over at Palatazin, then back to the street.
"Any
particular reason you wanted to hit the street yourself on this one, captain? You could just as easily have handled it from the office."

"No, I wanted to get out of there for a while. I'm getting fat and lazy sitting around telling other people what to do. That's the trouble with promotions, Sully. You're rewarded for what you do best by being shoved upstairs to let younger men do the legwork. Of course, if what you do best is the legwork, then . . . well . . ." He shrugged. What he did not say was that he was becoming fearful of his own office, of the shadows and shapes he was beginning to think he saw within those four walls.