Walkers (45 page)

He popped the top and drank half the
can in one long swallow.

‘Want to roust out some more?’ Gil
asked him, after he had finished the can, pressed the flat of his hand against
his belly, and loudly eructated.

‘You’re paying the money,’ said
Laurence.

Gil stood by and watched with his
hands in his pockets as Laurence slapped away at the sand in gradually
progressing semi-circles. Maybe Gil was just tired, but it occurred to him that
the dream world of the night and the waking world of the day were beginning to
overlap. It was almost as weird, pursuing the Devils out here on the beach, in
the sunshine and the wind, as it was pursuing them through the labyrinths of
people’s nightmares. It was more frightening, too, in a way, because to go
after them in the daytime meant that they were real flesh and blood, not just
the fractured pieces of somebody else’s imagination.

What’s more, he was unarmed and
unarmoured, and if any of those Devils decided that it objected to being
disturbed by Laurence’s drumming, there would be nothing he could do to protect
himself except run like hell.

Laurence suddenly said, ‘Here’s
another – and another.’

Gil stepped forward. There were two
shivering disturbances in the sand, quite close to each other. They were
unmistakably similar to the first one they had located. Gil made a pattern of
stones over each one. A crucifix, as if he were hunting vampires.

‘I wish you’d tell me what these
darn things are,’ Laurence grumbled. ‘It’s unnatural, to go clamming and not
know what kind of a critcher you’ re after.’

Gil said nothing, but forced a
smile. He was still smiling when Bradley appeared, weaving along the beach on
his bicycle. He was wearing a tee-shirt with
Let My
Fingers Do The Walking
printed on it. He whistled when he saw Gil, and whooped.

‘Hey, Gil, haven’t seen you for
days,
compadre. Where you been?’

‘Hi, Bradley. How are things?’

‘Well, they’re okay, I guess. You
didn’t come to Donna’s
party
last night.
Everybody was asking where you were. And guess who was there? Shirleen! You
remember Shirleen, she used to go to school with the Kaiser brothers. Really
enormous cakes.

She went off with Jay McDonald, of
all people, what a smooth-ass. I swear to God he puts rolled-up socks in the
front of his pants, just to give him profile.’

Bradley stopped for a moment, and
then looked around at Laurence, and frowned. ‘Is that guy with you?’

‘Kind of,’ said Gil.

Bradley leaned closer. His breath
smelled of orange-flavoured Bubble-Yum. ‘What’s he doing, or is it impolite to
ask?’

‘He’s drumming up clams. He slaps
the sand, see, and the clams come up to the surface.’

‘This isn’t the season for clams, is
it?’ asked Bradley.

‘Not really, but we’re practising.’

‘I see,’ said Bradley, although
clearly he didn’t. He watched Laurence for a little while longer, and then he
said, ‘Where were you, anyway? Your dad said you were staying the night
someplace. Not with some lady of ill repute, I trust?’

‘I was just doing some studying,’
said Gil, uncomfortably. He realised how far he had grown away from Bradley
after his experiences as Night Warrior. He suddenly thought of firing his
weapon up at those Monks of Shame, and the way they had come fluttering down
through the rain. He thought of those Arab horsemen, flaring like magnesium.

‘Hey,’ said Bradley, ‘did you hear
the one about the guy who phones home from the office?’

‘No, Bradley, I did not hear the one
about the guy who phones home from the office.’

Unstoppable, Bradley said, ‘This guy
phones home from the office, and this unfamiliar woman answers and so he says,
who’s this? And she says, it’s the maid, but he says what maid, we don’t have a
maid, but the woman says your wife hired me this morning. So the guy says where
is my wife, and the maid says she’s upstairs with her boyfriend, in bed. So the
guy goes crazy, and he says to the maid, go to the closet in the den, and take
out my shotgun, and blast the shit out of my whore of a wife and her boyfriend.
So the maid puts down the phone and a couple of minutes later he hears two
bangs, and then the maid comes back and says it’s okay, they’re dead, what
shall I do with the bodies? And the guy says throw them in the swimming-pool.
And the maid says,
what
swimming-pool?
And the guy says, this
is
689-2281?’

Gil stared at Bradley and Bradley
stared back at Gil, bursting to laugh.

‘You don’t change, Bradley, do you?’
said Gil.

‘You didn’t think that was funny?’

‘It was okay.’

‘Hey, you coming to Ken and Lilian’s
barbecue tonight?’ Bradley wanted to know.

But Gil didn’t answer. His yellow
Mustang had reappeared, and Henry was making his way down the beach towards
them, carrying a large glass carboy and a length of shiny glass tubing.

Bradley saw that Gil wasn’t looking
at him at all, but watching Henry, and suddenly he frowned. ‘Gil? What the hell
is going on here, Gil?’

Gil slapped Bradley on the back, and
tried to look cheerful. ‘Just a little experiment, that’s all.’

Bradley looked back at Laurence, who
was still slapping the sand. ‘Experiment?

What kind of experiment?’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you. It’s
kind of secret.’

‘Can I watch?’

Henry came struggling up to them,
and set down the carboy on the sand. ‘
Whewf!’
he said. ‘That’s darn heavy. There are two more of them in the trunk.’

‘Henry,’ said Gil, ‘this is my
friend Bradley.’

‘Pleased to know you, sir,’ said
Bradley, holding out his hand.

‘Well, absolutely likewise,’ Henry
replied, tautly. ‘But do you think you could make yourself scarce? What we’re
doing here is rather – well, you know, unorthodox.’

‘You want me to leave?’ asked
Bradley, somewhat hurt.

Gil said, ‘I’ll tell you what,
Bradley, go back to the store, help yourself to any magazine you like. Tell Dad
that I said it was okay, and that I’ll pay for it out of my allowance.’

‘You mean
any
magazine?
Hustler
or
something?’

‘You got it.’

Bradley mounted his bicycle, waved,
whooped, and went wavering off again. Henry said urgently to Gil, ‘I want to be
quick, before any lifeguard patrols come past and ask what the devil we’re up
to. How many embryos have you located?’

‘Six so far. Laurence is still
drumming away.’

‘Okay, then, I want you to help me,’
said Henry. ‘This carboy contains concentrated sulphuric acid. I borrowed iton
permanent unofficial loan from the chemistry department at the University, as
payment for a favour I once did for one of the lecturers. A horrible man called
Kinsky.’

‘What are you going to do with it?’
asked Gil.

‘Very simple. Wherever Laurence has
located an embryo, I’m going to push this glass tube down until it touches the
Devil underneath. Then, with the aid of this funnel, I’m going to pour down a
hefty beakerful of acid. Look – we might as well start here, where we dug up
the first one.’

‘Do you think it’s actually going to
work?’ asked Gil, fearfully.

‘My dear fellow, this stuff will
burn its way through the trunk of a giant sequoia, from one side to the other.
There isn’t a creature alive that can withstand it.’

Henry handed the glass tube to Gil,
and Gil hesitantly positioned it over the spot where they had found the first
of the Devil’s offspring. Slowly, he pushed it down into the soft sand, inch by
inch, until he suddenly felt the resistance of something that felt like a body.
The sand shifted, and cracked, and he knew that he had located the Devil.

‘Is that it?’ asked Henry, and Gil
swallowed, and nodded.

‘Very well,’ said Henry, and he
carefully filled up a half-litre chemical beaker with the fuming,
straw-coloured acid. Gil watched him as he fitted a glass funnel into the top
of the glass tube, and prepared to pour the acid down it.

‘You’re really sure this is a good
idea?’ he asked Henry.

‘It’s the quickest and the most
effective way I could think of,’ Henry replied. His face was very grim.

‘Okay, then,’ said Gil. ‘You’d better
do it.’

Keeping tight control over his
trembling hands, Henry slowly emptied the beaker into the funnel. The funnel
filled up for a moment, and then gradually emptied, as the acid drained down
the tube and into the cavity where the Devil’s embryo was concealed.

The last of the acid disappeared,
and Henry said, ‘All right, now. Take the tube out.’

He was white with stress, and he
accidentally dropped the beaker on to the sand.

‘Found another one!’ Laurence called
them, from across the beach.

‘Thank you, Laurence,’ Henry
replied. ‘We’ll be right there.’

Gil watched the patch of freshly dug
sand. ‘Is it working?’ he asked Henry. ‘What are we going to do if it doesn’t
work?’

But his answer came from the sand
itself. Suddenly and frighteningly, it started to heave and boil, and to kick
up in sprays. Henry and Gil stepped back, and watched the commotion with
increasing dread; but the creature did not emerge from its hiding-place.
Instead, it twisted and thrashed deep below the surface, invisibly, and there was
no sign of its death agony but the sand furrowing and humping and rippling.

At the very last, though, as the
disturbance began to die away, Henry and Gil heard a scream that was quite
unlike anything that either of them had ever heard before. It was a purely
mental scream, inside their heads, but it set Gil’s teeth on edge, as if he had
been biting limes, and it cut through Henry’s thinking-processes like a sharp
cleaver through calves’ liver. Both of them squeezed their eyes tight shut as
the scream went on and on; and in those moments of blindness both of them saw
hell itself, the real hell of degradation and disappointment and pain and
despair, the hell of cancer and fire and love gone cold. In the instant before
the creature died, there was something else, though, something that chilled
them even more, something that wrapped their foreheads in wind-chilled sweat.
It was a sensation of mockery; of bloodthirsty taunting – that by killing the
Devil’s child they had achieved nothing whatsoever, only the bringing down on
to their own heads of the fearful revenge of Satan and his nine hundred and
ninety-eight evil associates. The Devil’s children were also the children of
death, and so they returned gladly to the charnel-house of hell. They could be
tortured, they could be imprisoned, they could be burned into raw fats by
concentrated sulphuric acid, but they could never be truly destroyed.

When the scream had at last died
away, shrinking into the back of their occipital lobes, Gil wiped his face with
both hands, and looked at Henry with undisguised fear and deep respect.

‘Oh, boy. Yaomauitl is really going
to go for us now, isn’t he?’ he asked.

Henry said, ‘It would seem so, if
you experienced the same kind of feeling as I did.

But I had a pretty good idea that
this would happen. These embryos are not real embryos – not in the sense that
each one of them is a separate individual. At least, I don’t think they are.
They’re more like replicas, endless copies of Yaomauitl, which are closely
connected through their unconscious minds with the master himself, their
father. If one of them dies, if one of them gets hurt, then Yaomauitl knows
about it, just as surely as if it had happened to him.’

Gil looked around at Laurence, who
was patiently standing beside another disturbance in the sand.

‘That makes eight,’ he called.

‘Are we going to kill them all?’
asked Gil.

‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘Help me.’

T
hey left the beach when the tide
came in. They had emptied two-and-a-half carboys of concentrated sulphuric
acid, and burned eleven embryos beneath the sand. It was four-thirty in the
afternoon as they climbed back into Gil’s Mustang, and turned around for La
Jolla, to take Laurence back to his shell store. The sky had clouded over, and
a cooler wind was blowing off the sea.

They had twice been obliged to halt
their acid-pouring when lifeguard patrols came past, and once during the lunch
break, when a gang of school kids decided to make camp close by, and to horse around
on top of the very places where the Devil’s embryos lay concealed. But Henry
had been patient. By four o’clock they had succeeded in destroying every one of
the embryos they had located, and Laurence had drummed all-over the beach for a
second time, just to make sure that they hadn’t missed any.

Henry turned around in his seat and
counted out Laurence’s money. ‘I’ll bring you the Chivas Regal tomorrow,’ he
promised.

‘That’s okay by me,’ said Laurence,
licking his thumb and counting through the bills, tidying them up and turning
them around whenever they were upside-down. ‘Just glad to be of service.’