Walkers (37 page)

‘Did you catch his name?’

The priest shook his head. ‘All the
time she called him “baby”. They came to take pictures of the church, and of
the village, but they took no care with their pictures, and they spoke too
loudly of what they were going to do on their vacation.’

‘What are you trying to imply?’
Henry asked him.

‘Simply that they were not genuinely
here on vacation. They came, like a few other Americanos have come before them,
because they had heard that some of the villagers have another crop, apart from
grapevines.’

‘You mean -?’

‘Yes, my friends. Marijuana. The
fragrant strain known amongst connoisseurs as San Juarez Paradise Number One.
Very difficult to find, very expensive. And not many Americans know that it is
grown in the hills around San Hipolito.’

Neither Henry nor Gil said a word
about the priest’s apparent approval of the marijuana crop, but the priest himself
sipped his wine and smiled at them over the rim of his glass.

‘I can see that you are surprised
that I condone the sale of narcotics. Well – I do not condone it, but I do turn
a blind eye to it. There is no money in San Hipolito, my friends. Most of the
soil is stony and barren, so conventional farming produces little reward.
Without the sale of San Juarez Paradise Number One, this village would die.

The people who live here would be
dispossessed, and the church would fall into ruin.

I have to make a practical choice
between a trade which transgresses the laws of men and a state of poverty and
suffering which would transgress the laws of God.’

‘So Sylvia and her companion were
here for grass?’ asked Henry.

‘Of course. There is nothing else
here that would entice an American tourist, no matter how eccentric, to stay in
San Hipolito for even a few minutes.’

‘Then what happened?’ asked Gil.

The priest spread his hands. ‘They
stayed for two days, maybe three, and I heard from one of the little birds who
tell me such things that they were negotiating with the Perez family to buy two
thousand dollars’ worth of marijuana, first quality. Perez of course was
holding out for more money, and Sylvia and her companion were constantly
telephoning to America to see if they could drum up more promises of sales.’

He paused for a moment, and then he
said, much more gravely, ‘There came then the day of the earth tremor. The
ground split, and everybody in the village rushed into the surrounding fields
in case their houses fell on them. When they returned, they found that the
church wall had fallen, and that Yaomauitl had escaped from his elm-wood box.
They sent out dogs, and men with shotguns, but there was no trace of the Devil,
or even of his passing.’

‘Sylvia and her companion were still
in the village?’

The priest nodded. ‘They stayed for
one more night and one more day. But certain things about them were strange.
The night after Yaomauitl had escaped, Seftora Rosario heard them upstairs in
their bedroom. They seemed to be arguing, or at least the girl Sylvia seemed to
be arguing. Senora Rosario did not recognise the other voice. It was a man’s
voice, but very harsh and loud, and it sounded as if it was coming from
everywhere at once. She said that it frightened her to hear it. However, it did
not last for very long, because the argument finished with great abruptness,
and then Senora Rosario – well, she usually does not listen to such things –
but she heard Sylvia and her companion on the bed. She said that it sounded very
violent, like rape. She could hear Sylvia crying out, in a muffled voice, as if
she had a hand or a pillow over her mouth. She could hear the man cursing her,
in the same harsh voice. And of course she could hear the frame of the bed
shaking, as if they were trying to break it to pieces. The next morning she
went upstairs and told them that they must go.’

‘Sylvia’s boyfriend was still with
her?’ asked Henry. ‘In spite of the way that he had sounded the night before?’

‘Ah, you are quick, Mr Watkins,’
said the priest. ‘Yes, her companion was still with her – but when they left
Senora Rosario’s to drive back to America, they made one mistake. One serious
mistake.’ ‘What was that, Father?’

‘Come,’ said the priest. ‘Now is the
time for us to talk to Ludovico.’

They finished up their wine, and
then the priest led them out of his house and across the highway. He pointed
out Senora Rosario’s house, a large secluded adobe at the very end of one of
the two rows which made up the village, trailing with creeper and surrounded by
a high wall. Although it was well past siesta time now, there didn’t seem to be
anyone around, only a small bare-bottomed boy playing in the dust, and a thin
mangy-looking dog which kept prowling and barking around one of the houses.

The priest waved a fly away from his
face, and then pointed down the street, close to where Gil had parked his
Mustang.

An old man was sitting in a shadowy
doorway. His face was withered, and his eyeballs were as white and vacant as
hard-boiled eggs. He wore a freshly pressed suit of pale beige linen, and his
shoes had been highly polished, even though they now bore a thin film of dust.
His hands rested on the gleaming brass knob of a walking-cane.

‘This is Ludovico,’ said the priest.
‘Ludovico, these two gentlemen are special friends of mine from El Norte. I
would like to introduce them to you. ‘Ludovico blindly shook hands with Henry
and Gil, and then said, ‘What are they looking for, these special friends of
yours, Father?’

‘They have been asking about the
girl who came here, the American. The girl who was here when the earthquake
damaged the church.’

Ludovico licked his deeply lined
lips, and said, ‘You said that somebody would come one day to ask about her,
didn’t you, Father?’

‘Yes, Ludovico, I did.’

‘Can you trust this pair, Father? I
sense something unusual about them. I sense something to do with electricity.’

Henry smiled. ‘You’re right, sir. Is
there anything else you can sense?’

The old man touched his own face, as
if to reassure himself that it was still there. ‘I sense many strange things.
Strange duties, strange ambitions. I sense danger, too.’

‘Did you sense something the day
that the earthquake damaged the church?’ asked Henry.

‘Not then, not then,’ said Ludovico.
‘But, the day after, when they left, that was when I sensed something. You see,
they had passed by me several times during their stay in the village, and I had
come to know them quite well. Their voices, their footsteps, the sound of their
clothes.’

‘And?’ asked Gil, when the old man
seemed to hesitate.

‘And, they made the mistake of
passing close by me when they left the village for the last time. Because I
heard them, both of them, quite distinctly; and I sensed something which I
never wish to sense again. It was the same girl, of that there was no question.
Perhaps not in soul, but certainly in body. The man, however, was completely
different. Other people say that he looked just the same. But when he passed me
by, I heard hard skin rubbing on hard skin; I heard the sharp clicking of claws
on the road. I heard hissing breathing, and a terrible rustling sound which
filled me with fear. Worst of all I felt a dead coldness, as if somebody had
opened an icebox door right in front of my face, and then closed it again.
There was no doubt about it. That afternoon, whatever anybody else perceived
with their eyes – I knew that a Devil had passed by.’

Henry turned to Gil. There was no
need for either of them to speak. The pieces of the fateful puzzle were coming
together now; and they had learned something new about their Deadly Enemy –
something which Springer had either failed to tell them, or which Springer
didn’t know. He had admitted, after all, that even Ashapola was not always able
to anticipate the ways of Devils.

That ‘something’ was that Yaomauitl
could take on the form of a human being, so effectively, it seemed, that
everybody who saw him was deceived. Only those who were unable to see him were
not taken in. Only the blind could detect the distinctive sound of a demon from
hell.

‘So, Yaomauitl escaped from San
Hipolito in the guise of Sylvia’s boyfriend,’ said Henry. ‘And Sylvia’s only
crime was that she came here looking for high-quality grass.’

‘At the wrong time, I regret,’ said
the priest. ‘But if it had not been her it would have been somebody else.
Yaomauitl is quite indiscriminate in his choice of familiars.’

‘Did you find out what happened to
the boyfriend?’ asked Gil.

The priest said, ‘That was the only
time we did not involve the police. We ask you, too, not to pass this
information on to any law enforcement agency, because it will only cause
suspicion, and distress, and may even lead to a wrongful arrest. Victor Perez,
you see, had many arguments with Sylvia’s male companion about the price of his
marijuana, and that could easily be misconstrued as a motive for his murder.’

‘You found him dead, then?’

The priest said, ‘Yes, we found him
dead.’

‘And you’re certain that Yaomauitl
did it?’

‘No human being could have killed a
man in this fashion, my friends.’

Henry said nothing, but it was
obvious that he wanted to know how the Devil had destroyed Sylvia’s travelling
companion. The priest thanked Ludovico for his evidence, and they all shook
hands with him. Then the priest led Henry and Gil further down the village
street until they reached a stony side-turning that led down beside a vineyard.
They walked alongside the vines under a baking sun, their feet crunching on the
bone-dry soil, and occasional insects droning past them as they went.

‘We haven’t moved him yet,’ said the
priest, over his shoulder. ‘Nobody will touch his remains, because they believe
that they contain such evil; and in any case I didn’t think it wise. If anybody
did come asking questions about him, I wanted to be able to show them that it
would have been impossible for Victor Perez or indeed for anyone else to have
murdered him.’

They reached the end of the
vineyard. Along the lower edge of it, for about a half-mile, the boundary had
been marked out with staves, six or seven feet high and about fifteen feet
apart. Halfway up the end stave, there was a large dry lump; a papery-looking
excrescence that resembled a wasp’s nest. They approached it with a mixture of
mystification and alarm. But even on close inspection they couldn’t make out
exactly what it was. It was some sort of dessicated tissue, twisted and snarled
with tendons, and there were some dark maroon lumps on the side of it, but it
bore no resemblance to anything that Henry or Gil had ever seen before.

Henry stared at the priest in
bafflement. But the priest beckoned him around to the other side of the pole,
and pointed.

Squashed and distorted though it
was, Henry could just make out the face of a man in the middle of all that
dried-up flesh. His eyes were squeezed tight, like a newborn baby’s, his nose
was pressed into an indeterminate lump, and his mouth was dragged down sideways
by the intrusion of five curled nodules that must have been his fingers.

The priest crossed himself, and
said, ‘He was found here three days after Sylvia and her companion had left San
Hipolito. Yaomauitl could have hidden his remains, of course, but I believe
that he left them here as a warning.’ He looked away, out across the mountains.
‘Now you know what a man looks like when every single ounce of moisture is
taken out of him. We don’t amount to much, do we, for all of our pride?’

They walked back up the hill again.
Only Gil turned back to look. Tonight, they were going to have to face the
offspring of the creature that was capable of doing that to a man, and he just
wanted to keep the image sharp in his mind. It would ensure that he didn’t
hesitate, when it came to pulling the trigger of his machine.

The priest invited them back for
more wine, but it was growing late now, and they wanted to return to San Diego
as soon as possible.

‘I will pray for you,’ the priest
told them. Gil started up the Mustang. Henry said,

‘Thank you, Father. We appreciate
your prayers.’

‘There is one thing,’ the priest
added. ‘Wait here for just a moment, and I will bring it for you.’

He hurried off towards his house.
Gil and Henry sat in silence while they waited for him to return. Both of them
were thinking about the dried-up remains of Sylvia’s friend. And both of them
were thinking of the Deadly Enemy Yaomauitl, and how he had stared at them out
of that woodcut picture from so many years and years ago.

That woodcut alone was proof of the
longevity of utter evil. Evil could be contained; evil could be banished; but
evil could never be destroyed.

The priest returned, perspiring and
out of breath. He handed Henry a brown felt satchel, fastened at the front with
a fraying cord.

‘Take these,’ he said. ‘These are
the nine seals which the Night Warriors placed on the elm-wood box, to keep
Yaomauitl from breaking out of it. They were brought over to Mexico by Jesuits
who had heard how the Devil was causing havoc in the New World. They are beyond
price, my friends, so please guard them well.’ Henry untied the cord, and
looked into the satchel. Inside, there was a collection of small tissue-paper
packages. He took one out, and carefully opened it. The priest watched him
anxiously as he laid the seal across the palm of his hand.