Walkers (22 page)

‘No,’ said Andrea. ‘It simply
happens to have rudimentary limbs like a eusthenopteron. The rest of it is
quite different.’

Henry was silent for a moment. He,
of course, knew what the eel actually was. Or at least he knew what Springer
had said that it was. One of the seeds of the Devil, already part grown. And
what had Springer told them?
If they can
find a hiding-place,
they grow, and
after six months or so, they emerge as fully grown as their parent.

‘You had some people digging on the
beach,’ said Henry.

‘That’s right,’ Andrea replied. ‘So
far, though, they haven’t found any more of the eels. They’re going to dig a
little further, but they don’t hold out much hope. It seems as if the eels have
managed to escape very deep into the sand.’

‘I thought you said they weren’t
eels at all.’

‘They’re not, but that’s what
everybody calls them. Here in the laboratory we’ve christened them
plourdeostus, because they have skull similarities with some of the first fish
that evolved with jaws, in the Silurian period.’

‘Well, that all sounds very much
like your usual scientific mumbo-jumbo to me,’ said Henry, amiably. ‘But then,
you always were way ahead of me, weren’t you, in the department of applied
tomfoolery?’

‘Now you’re being rude again,’ said
Andrea. ‘You’re drunk, aren’t you?’

‘Not at all,’ Henry replied. ‘Not
enough,
anyway. It just struck me that
you people at Scripps can never bear to admit that you don’t know what
something is. So to make up for that shortcoming, you always call it by some
mystifying name. Plourdeostus!

Why don’t you just call them biters?
Or vicious bastards, which is what anybody with any sense would call them?’

‘You’re being rude again,’ Andrea
repeated.

‘Well, you always drive me to it,’
said Henry. ‘I’m a paragon of courtesy until I start talking to you. Then, I
don’t know. I don’t know what it is that you do to me. Perhaps I should
christen you dentireversioptus, because you always set my teeth on edge.’

‘Goodbye, Henry,’ Andrea warned him.

Henry took a deep breath. ‘I’m
sorry,’ he told her. ‘Thanks for keeping your promise.

Just forget you ever knew me.’

‘I did that a long time ago,’ Andrea
retorted, and put down the phone.

Henry sighed. He put down the phone,
and sat on the sofa and stared at the framed poster for Lucky Strike cigarettes
on the opposite wall. He wished he hadn’t drunk so much today. On the other
hand, there wasn’t much point in stopping now. He had reached that
middle-to-advanced state of inebriation when to stop suddenly would be to
guarantee a pounding headache by six o’clock this evening. Better to go on
drinking and to ward off the hangover until tomorrow morning. It would be far
worse tomorrow, there was no question about that, but at least it wouldn’t
interfere with tonight’s bit of business.

Gil, meanwhile, was walking with
Susan along The Boardwalk at Solana Beach. He had taken her along to the Taco
Auctioneer for lunch, and now he wanted her to meet his family. Susan was
chattier and happier than she had been for months, and Gil hardly had to say
anything. She talked enough for the two of them.

‘I just can’t wait for tonight,’ she
kept telling him. ‘Did you see my costume?’

Gil lifted an eyebrow. ‘Pretty sexy,
I thought.’

She pushed him into the road. ‘Well,
what if it is?’

‘Terrific,’ Gil joked. ‘I’m not
complaining. The sexier the better.’

‘What do you think you look like in
those tights of yours?’ Susan retaliated. ‘The Rudolf Nureyev of Solana Beach!’

‘Hey listen, lady, that’s the last
time you get a taco out of me!’

They kidded along for a while, until
Susan suddenly went serious. ‘Do you think Henry’s going to be all right?’

‘In what way?’ Gil asked her. There
was chili-sauce on his tee-shirt, and he was trying to rub it off with spit.

‘Well, it seems like he’s drunk all
the time.’

‘He had a bad divorce or something,
that’s all.’

Susan brushed her hair out of her
eyes. ‘I’m not saying I don’t like him, because I do.

I’m not saying I don’t trust him,
either. But you heard what Springer said, about all this being so dangerous. Do
you think he’s going to be able to handle it if he’s drunk?’

‘I don’t know. I get the feeling
that Springer’s going to get him off the sauce during training. I mean, the
reason he drinks is because he’s bored, right, and because he doesn’t feel he’s
worth anything to anybody, and because he doesn’t have any companionship. What
else is there to do except sit at home and get drunk? But now Springer’s
offered him a challenge – I mean, like he’s offered the challenge to all of us,
hasn’t he? We’ve agreed to go hunt this Devil or whatever because we want
something more out of our lives than what we already have. We want some
answers.

We want some questions, too,
questions we never even thought about. Have you ever sat down and thought to
yourself, is this it? Is this what my life adds up to? Isn’t there any more?
That’s the question that Springer’s given us, right? And that’s the question we
want to answer.’

Susan reached out and
unselfconsciously took hold of Gil’s hand. ‘You know something,’ she said,
‘ever since my parents died in that car-crash, I’ve never really thought about
anything but how to be normal. When you don’t have any parents, people are
either much too sympathetic, or else they treat you like you’re slightly weird,
mentally backward or something. Either way, you constantly get treated like
you’re some kind of abnormal person. I’ve been to senior citizens’ meetings
with my grandmother, and one of these strawberry-rinsed old ladies used to
introduce me to another strawberry-rinsed old lady, and say, right in front of
me, ‘This is Susan, both her parents were killed in a car-crash, poor lamb, but
she’s taken it so well you wouldn’t credit it.’ Right in front of me! As if I
constantly needed reminding that they had died. As if I needed to feel anything
but
normal.
I’ve been reading normal
books, wearing normal clothes, watching normal TV programmes, and hanging out
with normal friends. I’m so normal I’m practically a Federal statistic on
normality. But now that all of
this
has
happened – Springer and everything – now that I know about the Night Warriors,
I don’t want to be normal any more. I want to find out what I can do if I
really stretch myself.’

Gil said, ‘You may have been trying
to be normal, but you sure didn’t succeed. I don’t think you’re normal at all.’

She squeezed his hand. ‘Is that a
compliment?’

He grinned. ‘Maybe. Not your
normal
kind of compliment.’

They reached the Mini-Market. Phil
Miller was behind the cash-desk, checking a week’s groceries for Mrs. Lim, who
ran the Tian Dan Chinese restaurant along the strip. Mrs. Lim was watching Phil
narrowly, counting up the groceries in her head.

She didn’t believe in electric
adding-machines.

‘Hi, Gil,’ his father greeted him,
looking at once at Susan.

‘Hi, Dad. This is Susan Sczaniecka.’

‘How’re you doing, Susan?’

Tine, thank you, sir. Gil just took
me out for a taco.’

Phil said, ‘A taco? Is he getting
serious already?’

‘Don’t take any notice,’ said Gil.
‘That’s just my old man being my old man. He thinks he’s the natural successor
to Don Rickles.’

‘Little Middles is one dollar
sixty-nine cents,’ Mrs. Lim corrected Phil.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Phil apologised.
‘That’ll teach me to concentrate. Help yourself to an ice, if you want to,
Gil.’

‘Thanks, Dad.’

Susan looked around. ‘It must be
really fantastic, owning a store.’

Gil shook his head. ‘You’d better
believe it. You should come down here one Sunday afternoon, when we’re checking
the stock.’

They took an orange ice-lolly each,
and then went out through the back yard, which was crowded with wooden crates
and empty cardboard boxes, and through the gate which led out to the back
alley. This alley took them down to the beach.143

It was bright and hot down on the
shoreline. Scores of kids were out surfing in wet-suits, and scores more lay on
beach-towels under the sandy-coloured rocks, listening to ghetto-blasters or
throwing peanuts to the squirrels or simply lying on their backs and baking
their bodies. Every few minutes, Gil saw somebody he knew.

Being brought up by the ocean, the son
of a store-owner, he knew a whole lot of people, and Susan was amused by his
constant waving and nodding and calling hallo.

‘Seems like you’re the local
celebrity,’ she said. The sea-breeze whipped fine blonde hair across her face.

‘We’re all local celebrities around
here,’ Gil told her, sucking his ice-lolly until one side of it was colourless
ice. ‘We used to have a gang when we were younger. The Solana Sharks, if you
can believe it. I think the worst thing we ever did was have a pitched battle
with a whole lot of kids from San Elijo, using seaweed instead of car antennae.
Mind you, I don’t know if you’ve ever been hit in the face with a seaweed
bullwhip. It
hurts!’

They walked for over a mile along
the beach. The surf seethed and roared, and every now and then the water
tumbled up as far as their feet, and then slid away again. They held hands as
they walked, and the feeling was friendly and good, not only because they liked
each other, but because they shared a secret, too; a huge and exciting and
dangerous secret.

It wasn’t long before they reached
the police trestles which barred off the beach at Del Mar. Two officers in
sunglasses were passing the time with two high-school girls in very small
bikinis, but they kept their eyes on Gil and Susan as they approached.

‘Sorry folks, the beach is still off
limits.’

‘Jellyfish, huh?’ asked Gil, leaning
on the trestle. He knew one of the girls in the very small bikinis, and said,
‘Hi, Candice.’ Susan, without really wanting to, stood a little bit closer to
him. She didn’t know why, but she felt possessive.

Not far off, three researchers from
the Scripps Institute, white coated, were probing the sand, accompanied by John
Belli the medical examiner, Salvador Ortega, and two bored-looking detectives
with their coats slung over their shoulders.

Salvador Ortega noticed Gil and
Susan standing by the barrier, and shaded his eyes with his hand. Then he
excused himself from the rest of his party, and came over,

‘Mr Miller,’ he said, nodding to
Gil, ‘and Miss Sczaniecka.’

‘You pronounced my name right,’ said
Susan. ‘You’re about the first person who ever has.’

‘My sister married a Pole,’ said
Salvador. ‘Now, her name is Carmen Krzysztofowicz.

If I don’t pronounce Polish names
right, she gives me a hard time.’

‘How are the jellyfish?’ asked Gil,
nodding towards the party of researchers.

‘We’ve turned this beach into Swiss
cheese. We still haven’t located a single one.’

‘Do you think you will?’

Salvador shook his head. ‘Those
sons-of-bitches are born survivors, if you ask my opinion. They’ve probably dug
their way to Mexico by now.’

Gil looked up. ‘I don’t know,’ he
said, with disquiet. ‘I’ve got a funny feeling. Like, we didn’t walk down this
way by accident. Do you feel that, Susan?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. She
touched her fingertips to her temples, and concentrated.

‘There’s something... I don’t know
what it is. I can’t describe it.’

Salvador watched them with interest.
‘You sense something?’ he asked them, looking from one to the other. ‘What do
you think it is?’

‘I’m not certain,’ said Susan. ‘It’s
like the beach is moving under my feet. You know that feeling you get during an
earth tremor?’

‘Well, we’ve had enough of those
over the past six months,’ said Salvador. ‘Maybe you just felt one that I
didn’t.’

It was then that they felt another
sensation – an extraordinary sensation, as if an invisible door had suddenly
been opened in mid-air, and someone had stepped through. They both turned their
heads and looked up the beach towards the promenade, and there in the distance
was Henry, in an open-necked turquoise shirt and large flapping white Bermuda
shorts. He looked like a senior citizen on his annual vacation.

‘Did you
arrange to
meet Professor Watkins here?’ asked Salvador, nodding
toward Henry inquiringly.

Gil said, ‘No, sir.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Salvador beckoned to the two
uniformed officers. ‘Would you let these people through the line for me? Yes
-and this gentleman walking down the beach. Professor Watkins! Henry! Would you
come this way, please?’

The cops shifted the trestle aside,
and Gil and Susan walked through, closely followed by Henry. ‘Well, well,’
Henry said, ‘what a surprise. What are you two doing here?’