Walkers (38 page)

It looked like nothing more than a
blob of black, cracked sealing-wax, stuck on to an old piece of twisted fabric.
The priest said, ‘They were found in Jerusalem, in the year nine hundred. They
were said to be fragments of the robes of nine of the twelve disciples, one
from each, taken from their hems on the night of the Last Supper.

Three are missing: that of Judas,
that of Peter, and that of John.’

Henry touched the seal with his
fingertip, and turned it over. ‘What happened to the other three?’

The priest said, ‘Nobody knows. But
the saying is that if anybody could get all twelve together, he would be able
to exile the Devil for ever.’

‘Perhaps God has the other three,’
said Henry. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t want us to exile the Devil for ever. Perhaps,
from time to time, we need to be reminded of the ultimate evil, so that we can
appreciate the ultimate good.’

‘You should have taken the cloth,’
smiled the priest.

Henry wrapped up the seal, and
dropped it back into the satchel. ‘I think, in a peculiar sort of a way, that I
just did.’

They drove back down through the San
Juarez mountains, their sun-visors lowered against the burning sun. They
reached Mexican Highway 1 at Ensenada, and drove north to Tijuana. It was dark
when they reached the border, and they had to wait an hour before they could
get through, but at last they were back on 1-5 and heading for Del Mar and
Solana Beach.

‘Those seals,’ said Gil, ‘what do
you think of them?’

‘Phoney, probably,’ Henry replied.
‘Have you ever come across a religious relic that isn’t? If they joined
together all the pieces of the so-called True Cross, they’d have themselves a
crucifix as tall as the Sears Building. And as for fragments of cloth from
Jesus’s robe, you’d have thought that Jesus owned a seamless-robe warehouse.’

‘You believe in Yaomauitl, though,
don’t you?’

‘Do I? I don’t know what to think. I
know that something terrible’s been prowling around, and that something killed
Sylvia and Sylvia’s boyfriend. But don’t let’s be too naive about it. Don’t
let’s jump to hasty conclusions. Springer set us up once, and he could be doing
it again.’

‘You really don’t trust anybody, do
you?’ Gil asked him.

‘Yes, I do. I trust you, and I trust
Susan, and I also happen to trust myself. But that’s about as far as it goes.
Don’t think I’m getting all cynical on you. I’m not. The more I see, the
stronger my belief becomes. I believe in the Night Warriors, and the task that
the Night Warriors have to perform. I believe in them, implicitly. But if I can
have so much supernatural stuff proved to me so unequivocally, why should I
accept any other supernatural stuff that isn’t proved so well? It would
certainly make life easier for us if everything that priest said was one
hundred per cent – but supposing it isn’t?

Supposing he’s left out one or two
absolutely crucial facts? Supposing he’s lying, to protect a real murderer?
Supposing none of it ever happened, and you and me were being suckered from
beginning to end?’

Gil said, ‘Henry – somewhere along
the line we have to take one or two things for granted, otherwise we’re not
going to get anywhere.’

‘Well, you’re right,’ Henry agreed.
‘But let’s not automatically take everything at its face value, okay?
Especially not priests, and men who seem to be messengers from God.’

They reached Henry’s cottage, and
Gil parked outside. Henry said, ‘I have an idea.

Why don’t you call your folks and
tell them you’re staying over tonight with friends? I hardly ever get disturbed
here, so there isn’t so much chance of somebody bursting in on us and thinking
we’ve gone into a coma.’

‘That sounds like good thinking,’
said Gil.

Henry unlocked the front door, and
reached around to switch on the lights. ‘The phone’s at the back of the sofa.
When you’ve finished, maybe we could go out and get ourselves an egg foo-yung
to go.’

The lights blinked on – and there he
was, or rather
she,
because this
evening she was wearing a plain white costume that was more like a dress than a
suit, and her face was more finely featured than usual. She was sitting in
Henry’s favourite chair, her legs crossed, watching and waiting as if she had
been watching and waiting for hours.

‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘The return
of the Night Warriors.’ Henry was taken off guard.

‘Springer,’ he said. ‘I thought we’d
seen the last of you.’

‘The last? What on earth made you
think that?’ ‘What on earth do you
think
made
me think that?’ Henry retorted. ‘You abandoned us last night, left us tangled
up in some goddamned nightmare with no power and no way out – and, thanks to
you, Samena’s been captured and held hostage by that Devil they dug up on the
beach. You
knew,
didn’t you? You
knew, right from the very beginning, that we were going to come face-to-face
with that Devil. I mean, you lied about it, you went out and tracked down one
of the pathologists who was working on that Devil, and of course he was bound
to have a dream about it – and now look what the hell’s happened!’

Springer listened to all of this
patiently, her hands pressed together in simulation of prayer.

‘Is that all you have to say?’ she
asked Henry, at last. ‘There could be more,’ snapped Henry. ‘It depends on the
quality of your explanation.’

‘My explanation is very simple,’
said Springer. She rose from her chair and walked towards Henry and Gil with an
effortless glide. ‘Please, Gil,’ she said, ‘do call your parents. They would
like to know that you are safe; and it would be a good idea if you were to
spend the night here.’ ‘Well?’ Henry demanded.

Springer smiled. In her utterly
asexual way, she was really very attractive. She had a beauty that no human
being can ever achieve. Faultless, pale, and perfect.

‘I confess that I deceived you, and
that I took you into Mr Shapiro’s dream in the full knowledge that you would
encounter the creature from the beach. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want
you to over-react. I believed, you see, that you would be able to cope quite
easily with a Devil who is still only an embryo – or, what do they call the
off-spring of kangaroos? – a joey.’

‘Maybe we could have coped with it,
with some forewarning, and a little more power,’

Henry protested.

Gil said, fiercely, ‘We were
completely fucked. There was nothing we could do. We had to make up our minds
whether we wanted to kill ourselves for no reason, or come back here to safety
and leave Susan behind. That was some kind of choice, huh?’

‘Well, that part of it I regret,’
said Springer. ‘But even I cannot be in two places at one time, no matter how
many different faces I wear. I had to leave you because I had located the
descendant of yet another Night Warrior, and it was essential that I recruited
him as quickly as possible. He will join you tonight. His name is Xaxxa, the
slide-boxer.’

‘What is the point of recruiting
another Warrior when it costs you one that you’ve already got?’ Henry asked,
bitterly.

Springer said, with a touch of
sharpness, ‘I am your trainer, Kasyx, not your nurse-maid. I fully expected the
three of you to be able to deal with that nightmare, and to be able to overcome
the creature, too.’

‘Whatever you expected, Springer,
the simple fact of the matter is that I don’t trust you any more,’ Henry told
him.

‘Me neither,’ said Gil.

Springer thought about that for a
moment, and then said, ‘Do you consider it essential for your task that you
trust me?’

Henry said, ‘Not essential, no. I’ve
only been a Night Warrior for one night, but I get the feeling that it’s a very
much bigger thing than both of us.’

Springer nodded. ‘In that case, you
will give me the opportunity to prove to you that I
am
trustworthy. You will go out tonight, with Xaxxa, and you will
rescue Samena from the spawn of the Devil. I will guide you to the right dream,
and this time I will advise you in advance of the true identity of the
dreamer.’ ‘It’s not our leather-and-lashes friend Lemuel Shapiro again, is it?’
asked Henry.

Springer said, ‘No. The creature was
moved today from the coroner’s laboratories to the Scripps laboratories. Your
dreamer will be one of the people who is studying it there. Most probably,
Doctor Steinway.’

Henry stared at Springer in
disbelief. ‘Doctor Andrea Steinway?’ . ‘You know her?’ asked Springer, mildly
surprised at Henry’s reaction.

‘I should think so. She was my wife
for four years. And now you want me to go into one of her nightmares?’

Gil slapped Henry on the back.
‘Jeez, who knows, Henry, you might even come face-to-face with the monster she
thinks you are!’

T
hey went to bed at ten-thirty, after
a quick Chinese supper that Gil had brought back from Chung King Loh. Henry
took the bed and Gil bunked down on the sofa. Gil was happy to stay over at
Henry’s cottage: it made him feel more relaxed, even though he suspected that
part of the reason Henry had invited him was to act as watchdog, in case Henry
felt tempted to take a drink. Henry was fighting his alcoholism hard: he even
regretted having accepted the priest’s offer of red wine. As he told Gil, ‘Once
you’ve taken that first drink, it’s ten times more difficult to say no to the
next.’

Springer had left them with nothing
more than a promise to meet them at the house on Camino del Mar at eleven. She
would say nothing further about that night’s assignment, nor about their new
Night Warrior, Xaxxa. She wouldn’t even explain what a ‘slide-boxer’ was. ‘When
you come tonight, you will see for yourself.’

In the darkness of their separate
rooms, Henry and Gil said the words that would transport their dreaming
personalities out of their earthbound bodies.

‘Now when the face of the world is hidden in darkness, let us be
conveyed to the
place of our meeting, armed and armoured;
and let us be nourished by the power
that
is dedicated to the cleaving of darkness, the settling of all black matters,
and the
dissipation of evil. So be
it.’

They closed their eyes, and felt the
tides of sleep steadily overwhelming them, just as the Pacific steadily
overwhelmed the shore. They rose, silent and transparent as ghosts, leaving
their bodies lying in the cottage, and sailed high above Del Mar, darker
tonight because of cloud cover, following the bright needlework of traffic
towards the house where Springer would be waiting for them.

They were absorbed through the roof
of the house, and sank into the second-floor room.

Springer, as promised, was already
there, looking even more feminine than she had this afternoon. She had combed
out her hair into impossible waves, and she wore an extraordinary white
knee-length jacket with wide shoulders and a loosely tied belt, and nothing
underneath but a white garter-belt and white stockings.

‘You’re early,’ she said, with
pleasure. ‘That will give you time to meet your new warrior, Xaxxa.’

She turned, and ushered forward a
tall, well-muscled black boy, dressed at the moment in nothing but pale blue
shorts. His hair was cropped short, which emphasised the thickness of his neck.
His face was flat, short nosed, one of those highly photogenic faces, like Muhammad
Ali’s. But although he was obviously athletic, and intensely fit, there was a
cautious expression of humour somewhere around his mouth; an expression that
contradicted the idea that anyone with this kind of physique had to be serious
and dull.

‘Xaxxa,’ said Springer, nodding her
head. ‘Xaxxa – this is Kasyx, the charge-keeper, and Tebulot, the
machine-carrier.’

‘You didn’t tell me they was white,’
said Xaxxa, suspiciously.

‘I didn’t tell you they were black,
either.’

‘Well, Night Warriors, I guess I
kind of assumed they was all black.’

‘The Night Riders were white,’ said
Henry, and then wished that he hadn’t.

Gil said, ‘Does it matter – us being
white?’

‘That depend,’ said Xaxxa. ‘I mean,
like that depend entirely on your attitude. I mean, for instance if you think
that because you white you can start giving me orders, then you can forget it.
You can forget this whole Night Warrior thing completely. My father was in
Vietnam, and believe me, man, he took nothing but three years of shit from
white men, and he always said to me never go joining nothing where there’s a
white man in charge because you going to be sweeping the floor even if you some
kind of genius.’

‘Are
you a
genius?’ asked Henry, pertinently.

Xaxxa said, ‘No, but that’s if I
was.’

‘Do you have a name, apart from your
Night Warrior name?’

‘Sure. My name’s Lloyd Curran.’

‘I’m Henry,’ said Henry, ‘and this
is Gil. I’m a teacher and Gil’s a student and neither of us are geniuses
either. The only other thing I can say is that the Night Warriors aren’t like
the army. We don’t have officers and we don’t have rank. We work together
whatever our age and experience, and – now that you’ve joined us – whatever our
colour. What do you do, Lloyd?’