Walkers (21 page)

Springer smiled. ‘You have to
think
it, that’s all. It isn’t
difficult, and after a while it will come so easily to you that you will be
amazed to remember that you ever had any trouble.’

Susan aimed her finger again. Again
nothing happened.

But Henry suddenly pressed his hand
against her shoulder as forcefully as he could, and shouted
‘Fire!’

Instantly, with an ear-piercing
whistle like a Fourth of July rocket, the arrowhead flashed across the room,
followed by a three-foot shaft of golden light. It buried itself in the wall
only two or three inches away from the hole that Gil had made, at which point
the light immediately vanished, leaving the arrowhead deep inside the plaster.

‘Yeah!’ shouted Gil, and applauded.
Susan skipped and danced and jumped up and down. ‘I did it! I did it!’

Springer said, ‘You needn’t
necessarily use an arrowhead. The shaft of light alone – depending on how much
charge you put into it – will kill or stun or frighten people away. But, you
must train very hard. To take the part of Samena, you must be highly skilled,
highly sensitive, and so quick that nobody can catch you. Samena is the most
emotional of all the Night Warriors, the one whose nerves have to be stretched
to the tautest pitch. But she is also the most deadly.’

Henry closed his hands together, as
if in prayer, and what was left of the charge that Springer had given him began
to flow upwards towards the ceiling from between his fingers, crackling and
spitting and bright blue. Eventually it had all been discharged.

‘Springer,’ he said, ‘if I ever
doubted you, which I did, then please forgive me. This is all quite
astonishing. This is like a child’s fantasy come true.’

‘I regret that the ultimate purpose
is far from childish,’ said Springer. Her voice had become deeper again now,
and there were barely discernible changes in her face which made her appear
much more masculine. ‘Yaomauitl is by far the most malevolent of all the
Devils. He is the Devil of madness and greed and genocide. He came over to the
New World with Cortes in 1519. There are some stories which say that Cortes
himself was the Devil, walking the earth in the guise of a man. Certainly,
Cortes was responsible for the murder of countless thousands of Aztecs; and
even if he was not the Devil himself, then he took the Devil along with him
when he discovered Baja California in 1530.’

Henry said, ‘Why has he reappeared
now?’

‘There is no telling,’ said
Springer. ‘The ways of the Devil are masked from the eyes of Ashapola. That is
why only you, the Night Warriors, can discover how he has returned, and what
his evil intentions are; and that is why only you can destroy him.’

Henry laid his hands on Gil’s and
Susan’s shoulders. ‘You have given the three of us a terrible responsibility.
You know that, don’t you?’

‘I do not think that you will fail
me,’ said Springer.

Susan said, ‘How do we start? I
mean, what do we actually do? You’ve said that we’re Night Warriors now, and
that we can leave our bodies when we’re asleep. But how do we do that? And how
can we meet each other when we’re asleep?’

Springer said, ‘You will use this
house as your rendezvous. When you retire to bed each night, you will repeat to
yourself the time-honoured battle-hymn of the Night Warriors, and the influence
of that hymn will make sure that your dreaming presences meet at the nearest
point of sacred power, which is here. From then on, you will journey through
the dreams of others, to seek out Yaomauitl and any of his minions which may
have already been spawned.’

Gil said, ‘I think I’m dreaming
already.’

Springer smiled. ‘You will soon grow
used to the landscapes of the night. You will come here, every night for the
next two months, and I will train you in the mental and physical skills of the
Night Warriors. I will teach you their history, their traditions, and their
lore. I will tell you of their greatest victories, and their most terrible
defeats. By the time you have completed your training with me, you will feel
that your real self is the self which exists in dreams, and that your waking
personality is nothing but a flesh-bound parody of what you really are. Your
concept of
awake
and
asleep
will be completely reversed. At
the end of the night, when you have to return to your earthly body, you will be
doing so to rest; and many times you will feel that this resting is a chore.
There is so much more inside your mind than the intelligence necessary to carry
your body through the waking day. Your mind is a powerhouse, a limitless store
of talent and skill and inspiration. Asleep – as a Night Warrior – you will
begin to realise that power. No matter how much you have failed during the day,
no matter how meanly other people regard you, you will be heroes and heroines
in your dreams. Understand this, my friends: you are the people of legends – just
as every human being can be, once they have understood the strength and the
majesty inside their own heads.’

Gil asked, ‘This strength – this
skill – once we’ve achieved it, will it affect our everyday lives?’

‘Of course,’ said Springer. ‘Once
you have learned to have confidence and power in the dream world, your
abilities will not be forgotten during the day. Your life will change
immeasurably, whether you want it to or not. But you will find that the success
you achieve during the day will count little compared to the success you
achieve during the night. The greatest of adventures awaits you, my friend, as
soon as the sun begins to set.’

‘That first time you came to see
me,’ Gil said to Springer, ‘that time when you looked like a girl... you
mentioned that book
De
What’s-its-name...’

‘De Sortilegio,’
Springer nodded. ‘Yes, I did. That was to trigger inside your mind the
memories that you have inherited from your great-great-great-grandfather. I did
not mean to trigger them violently, but you went to your Mexican friend Santos,
didn’t you, and smoked a drug, and that of course heightened your inherited
memory to the point of immediacy and violence.’

Springer paused for a moment, and
then said,
‘De Sortilegio
was written
by Paul Grilland in 1533, after the return of some of Cortes’s men from Baja
California to Europe. His tract takes into account the frightening stories that
some of the Spaniards told him about devilish Sabbats that took place on the
West Coast of America in those early times. Although some refused to say
exactly what happened, it appears that Cortes initiated Black Sabbatical rites,
and that he summoned a manifestation of the Devil, or himself became such a
manifestation, and that during the course of those Sabbats native women were
forced to have sex with him.

‘Sixteenth-century theologians were
always arguing amongst themselves how it was possible for a Devil to have sex
with human women. But Paul Grilland said that there was irrefutable evidence of
it, from stories that he had been told, and William of Paris, the confessor of
Philip le Bel, supported him. So did the Salmanticenses, the lecturers of the
theological college of the Discalced Carmelites at Salamanca, in their
Theologia Moralis.
And Dom Dominic
Schram said that he had personally known several persons who had been compelled
against their will to endure the foul assaults of Satan.’ Springer smiled
sadly. ‘St Augustine himself said that anybody who did not believe that the
Devil could appear in the night and have carnal relations with a woman was
deluding themselves. The evidence of history is overwhelming.

When the Devil is free, and able to
travel abroad, no woman is safe from his desires.’

Susan said, ‘When do we start? Do we
start tonight?’

‘Do you
want
to start tonight?’

Susan said, ‘Yes.’ She had never
felt so motivated. She had never felt so inspired.

She had suddenly been shown that
there was something above and beyond her grandparents’ upbringing, that there
was something far more rewarding and exciting than school, and hanging out with
Daffy, and sitting on the beach hoping to be noticed by Tad Summers and Gene
Overmeyer. She felt that Springer had lifted her up and shown her a distant
vista that lay beyond the rooftops of Del Mar; a vista of mountains and clouds
and great achievements. It was intoxicating, dizzying; and Daffy had talked
about ‘really getting her life together’ with aerobic dance!

Gil nodded. ‘I’d start now, if I
could get to sleep.’

‘Henry?’ asked Springer, his eyes
watchful, guarded.

Henry said, ‘It seems that I’m in a
minority, whatever I think.’

‘Don’t you want to do it tonight?’
asked Susan.

Henry cleared his throat. ‘If you
want to know the God’s honest truth, I’m frightened.’

Gil said, ‘So am I, Henry. But it’s
something we’ve got to do. It’s a chance in a million-grillion. Henry –
supposing they said you could go to the moon?’

The moon?’ said Henry. He shook his
head. ‘I wouldn’t go to the moon. Believe me, Gil, the best view of the moon is
through the bottom of an upturned glass of vodka.’

Springer said, ‘You’ll start
tonight, though, won’t you?’

Henry thrust his hands into his
pockets. ‘Of course I will. It’s wonderful. It’s amazing.

But don’t forget that I’m
frightened, as well as impressed.’

Springer touched his hand in a
strange, furtive way, that for some reason put Henry in mind of an early
Christian, secretly passing him a Communion wafer. ‘You will have no fear
tonight, my friend. Kasyx the charge-keeper is fearless.’

Henry said, ‘That’s what I’m afraid
of.’

H
enry just managed to unlock the
front door of his cottage in time to catch the phone, which had been ringing
ever since he turned the corner by the promenade.

He left his keys hanging in the
front door, and scrabbled across the back of the sofa to hook the receiver up
into his hand.

‘Henry? Is that you, Henry? I almost
hung up.’

‘Andrea! I was out. I only just this
second dived in through the door.’

‘You
dived!
I wish I could have seen it.’

‘Let me close the front door,’ Henry
asked her. ‘There’s somebody outside using a power-saw. I can’t hear you too
good.’

He laid down the receiver, went to
the front door and closed it, and then crossed over to the liquor cabinet,
lifting out a bottle of vodka and a moderately clean glass.

Picking up the receiver again, he
opened the bottle and half filled the glass one-handed in mid-air, without
spilling a drop.

‘Got your drink?’ asked Andrea,
sharply.

Henry ignored her. ‘Did you find out
anything about the eel?’

‘That’s why I was calling. You don’t
think I would have called you to make small-talk, do you?’

Henry swallowed vodka, and shivered.
Don’t let her intimidate you, he thought.

Tonight, when she was asleep (black
lurex-decorated eyeshade over her eyes, which every morning had prompted him to
stare in mock bafflement at the bathroom mirror, and say to himself, ‘Who
was
that masked woman?’) he would take
on the form of Kasyx, the charge-keeper, the central core of the newly
resurrected Night Warriors; and everything that Andrea had done to hurt him
would be meaningless.

‘I promised to tell you about the
eel,’ said Andrea.

‘Yes,’ agreed Henry. ‘You did.’ He
drank more vodka, then put his glass down.

He could hear her shuffling papers.
‘First of all,’ she said, ‘it
wasn’t
an
eel. That is, it wasn’t a member of the teleost order
Anguilliformes,
like conger eels or moray eels or freshwater eels.
Neither was it a gulpen-eel, of the order
Saccopharyngiformes,
or a spiny-eel, of the order
Masta-cembaliformes,
or a cuchia, of the order
Symbranchi-formes.’

‘Was it a hagfish?’ Henry suggested.

‘No, it wasn’t a hagfish, either.’

‘Well, now you know what it
wasn’t,
do you have any idea what it
was?’

‘Nothing positive, no. It isn’t a
species that any of us have come across before.’

Henry waited for her to say
something else. When she remained silent, he said, ‘Is that it? You don’t know
what it is, and that’s it?’

‘Let me put it this way, Henry, it
has well-known physical and developmental characteristics. It has a skull, with
jaws, and it possesses an internal skeleton, and a digestive system. It is an
amphibian, rather than a pure fish, in the sense that it possesses lungs, and
rudimentary limbs that would enable it to balance itself on land, like a
eusthenopteron.’

‘A what?’

‘Oh, Henry, you’re still as ignorant
as ever. A eusthenopteron, an advanced fish of the late Devonian period, about
three hundred and sixty million years ago. They were capable of crossing
stretches of land from one lake to another during droughts.’

‘And that’s what this so-called eel
has turned out to be?’