Walkers (48 page)

Henry awkwardly pushed Andrea toward
the door. But as she reached it, she turned and screamed at him, ‘It’s locked!
I can’t get out! Henry, it’s locked!’

Henry looked desperately around him
for something to beat the door open. He picked up a mahogany-seated lab stool,
grasped hold of its legs, and bashed it at the wooden panelling once, twice,
three times. At the third blow, the stool’s seat flew off and he was left with
nothing but a handful of sticks.

Salvador, his coat still lifted up
in front of him, made a last effort to smother the creature’s flames. The
uniformed officer had managed to bring the fire extinguisher forward, but the
mechanism seemed to be jammed, and he was hitting it again and again with the
butt of his police revolver. The scene in the darkened laboratory was like some
grotesque marionette show. A small screaming figure standing on a stage,
gushing with flames, while nobody could do anything at all but stand around and
helplessly watch. The room was filling up with thick black smoke now that
choked their noses and filled up their throats with the sickening odour of
burning bone.

Salvador turned in horror to Henry
and shouted out, ‘Can’t you get that door open?’

‘It’s locked!’ Henry shouted back.
‘I’ve tried breaking it down but it’s too solid!’

‘We’ll have to climb up on to the
balcony!’ said Salvador. But as he lowered his sports jacket, and took a step
back towards them, there was a sudden roaring rush of flame, and the burning
Devil leaped off the dissection table and clung on to him, like a child
clinging on to its father.
‘Madre mia!’
Salvador
shouted, and frantically clawed at the burning Devil. But it had wrapped its
arms tightly around his chest, and was digging its claws into him. His cotton
shirt scorched and suddenly flared, and he staggered back three or four
hysterical paces, with the Devil still hugging him tightly.

‘Help me!’
Salvador
screamed.
‘Help me, for God’s sake, help
me!’

The uniformed officer circled warily
around Salvador. Henry glimpsed his terrified face in the light of Salvador’s
burning shirt. But then the creature lashed out with one of its claws, so
quickly that Henry saw nothing but a semicircular rush of fire. Its claws caught
the flesh of the officer’s face, and ripped off everything below his eyeballs,
right down to the bones of his skull, with a sound like a tearing sack. The
officer’s hands jerked up to his face in a reflex of agony and utter horror,
and then he collapsed into the darkness.

Salvador wrestled with the Devil,
suddenly silent now in the depths of his unbearable pain. But the more he
twisted, the more he struggled, the tighter the burning Devil clung on to him.
Salvador’s hair burst into flame, and Henry watched in morbid fascination as it
curled and shrivelled, and his scalp turned patchy and red. Salvador didn’t
scream, even though the Devil’s thigh-bones must have burned right through to
his pelvic girdle, and its claws must have deeply penetrated his back.

It was then that the laboratory
doors swung open, and Gil and Lloyd appeared, Gil holding his father’s gun. Gil
said, ‘Christ Almighty.’

Henry turned to him, and shouted,
‘Give me that!’ His voice was almost hysterical.

Gil handed him the gun without any
argument, and Henry took it, cocked it, and walked up as close to Salvador and
the Devil as he dared.

Over the Devil’s hunched and
blackened shoulder-blade, Salvador caught sight of Henry lifting the revolver.
He nodded his mutilated head up and down, in silent supplication. Kill me,
por favor.
Henry held the heavy pistol
in both hands, his aim wavering for a moment, and then fired. The recoil was
terrific; the laboratory bellowed with echoes. The top of Salvador’s head burst
open like a pot of red chili that had suddenly boiled over, and he dropped
backwards against one of the varnished benches, and then on to the floor, the
Devil still clinging to his chest.

The blazing Devil turned, thwarted
of Salvador’s living soul, looked up at Henry and screamed again, a terrible
carrion-crow scream that chilled Henry from the roots of his hair to the joints
of his toes. Its claws released their hold on Salvador’s body, and Henry heard
them scratching on the tiles.

He fired once. His ears sang. The
Devil’s chest flew open, like an exploding birdcage, and blazing fragments
tumbled in all directions. He fired again, and the Devil’s skull was smashed.
He fired twice more, and at last the creature was nothing more than pieces of
burning bone.

A wind began to blow. Softly at first,
stirring the ashes of what had once been Yaomauitl’s bastard child. Then much
more strongly, and much more loudly, a low doleful shriek like the mistral
which blows down the Rhone-Saone valley in France, and eventually drives men
mad with depression; or the sirocco which blows across the Sahara, its flying
grit turning glass windows into blinded stones.

Henry lifted his head, his grey hair
blown sideways by the wind, his eyes watering with heat and emotion.

‘Yaomauitl!’ he shouted.
‘Yaomauitl!’

But then the wind died away,
whispering into the corners of the laboratory, and Henry knew that Yaomauitl
had gone. He turned around and looked at Gil and Lloyd and Andrea, and outside
he could hear footsteps approaching along the corridor, and the sound of police
sirens.

He laid his hand on Gil’s shoulder.
Gil stared at him in shock.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Henry said,
hoarsely. ‘Nobody could have known what that creature was going to do.’

Gil pressed the back of his hand
against his forehead. ‘It was burning,’ he said. ‘It was burning and it
wouldn’t die.’

The uniformed officer whose face had
been ripped off by the creature’s claws started to moan and bubble, somewhere
in the shadows.

Lloyd said, ‘Oh my God. It’s a real
Devil, isn’t it? I mean a real actual Devil.’

‘Yes,’ Henry replied. He was
conscious that Andrea was looking at him fixedly, her glasses held close to her
chest.

‘Henry,’ she said, in a trembling
voice. ‘Henry, what happened here?’

‘You were examining that creature,’
said Henry. ‘You must have known what it was.’

‘I had no idea, Henry. The tests
that we managed to complete showed that it was nothing more than a kind of
amphibian... a kind of urodela, like a salamander or a siren. Very highly
developed, of course, but...’

‘A Devil,’ Henry interrupted her.

‘What?’ asked Andrea, perplexed.

‘What are the seven tests of
Abrahel?’ Henry asked her, his voice choking.

‘The what? Henry, you asked me that
before. I don’t know. What on earth are you talking about?’

Henry said, ‘You’re saved, Andrea.
You don’t know it, but you’re saved.’

At that moment, an arc-light
suddenly flooded the laboratory, and Henry realised that the place was crowded
with police and medics and firemen. A police officer came up to Henry and
prized the gun out of his hand, and said, ‘Okay, sir. I’ll take that.’

S
pringer was a woman that night. She
wore a complicated gown of white taffeta and white silk, with a high ruffled
collar and a triangular bodice of pleated lace embroidered with white
seed-pearls. It looked as if it had been created by the court dressmaker of
Queen Elizabeth I in conjunction with the Emanuels.

She said, when they were all
assembled, and all transformed into the arms and armour of the Night Warriors,
‘You have been rash.’

‘We have killed all of Yaomauitl’s
offspring,’ said Kasyx, defiantly.

‘You have killed all of those
offspring which came from the body of Sylvia Stoner. But there will be others,
just so long as Yaomauitl is free.’

‘We know that,’ said Gil. ‘That’s
part of the reason we did it.’

Xaxxa put in, ‘We could have spent
years, hunting for Yaomauitl, without ever finding him. You know that. Dream
after dream, with no luck at all. The only reason you found that Devil son of
his last night was because you knew where to look.’

‘Same as the night before,’ said
Samena. ‘The night you sent us into Mr Lemuel Shapiro’s nightmare, with no hint
of a warning.’

‘So, what we’ve done now is, we’ve
made Yaomauitl mad,’ said Xaxxa. ‘We’ve made him
so
mad that he’s going to come looking for us, instead of the other
way around.’

Kasyx added, ‘We plan to bushwhack
Yaomauitl, if that’s the right word.’ Springer paced slowly around the
assembled company of Night Warriors, her dark impenetrable eyes taking in the
crimson electric armour of Kasyx, the white breastplate of Tebulot, the plumed
tricorn hat of Samena, and the tight harness of Xaxxa. When she had walked
around them in a complete circle, she said, in the sharpest of tones, ‘Well, .
. we speak differently tonight. We speak with independence. We speak with accord.’

‘Perhaps we’re learning who we are,
and what we can do,’ Xaxxa replied.

‘You killed one man and seriously
disfigured another, in your new flourish of independence and accord,’ said
Springer.

‘No,’ said Kasyx, ‘that’s where
you’re absolutely wrong.
We
didn’t
hurt those men, Yaomauitl did. This is a war, Springer, not just a frolic for
four people who want to do something more exciting at night. This is an
invasion. Believe me, I regret the death of that detective more than anybody.
He was the first detective with whom I was ever on first-name terms. But in
wars, in invasions, people get hurt. You can never win unless you take that
risk.’

Springer remained expressionless for
a moment, and then smiled. ‘You have spoken well, Kasyx,’ she said. ‘You have
understood the gravity of what Yaomauitl is attempting to do. You have begun to
act on your own initiative, too; and even though your attack on those buried
Devils was hasty and ill prepared, you were lucky, and it worked, and you
destroyed them. Whether it is owed to luck or not, there can be no serious
criticism of success.’

Samena said, ‘Were you planning on
putting us into any particular dream tonight?’

Springer shook her head. ‘You must
go out on your own now, and choose whichever dream you will. You are not yet
fully experienced Night Warriors, but you are ready to select a dream of your
own. My task is almost finished.’

‘You’re leaving us?’ asked Samena.
Suddenly she found the prospect of being without Springer quite unsettling,
like driving for the very first time without an instructor. Samena had spent a
whole day in limbo, as a hostage to Yaomauitl’s offspring, and she was still
nervous about going back into dreams. She had not yet been able to explain to
any of the others the total fear that she had felt; the deathly despair of
sitting alone for hour after hour in a room whose walls were as intangible as
fog, and yet as impenetrable as tempered steel. There had been no sound in that
room, no feeling, no vibration. Nobody had visited her. And there had been
nothing at all to suggest that she was not going to stay there for all
eternity.

Springer produced a white peacock
fan out of her sleeve and began to flutter her face to keep it cool. ‘I am not
exactly what you think I am, any more than Ashapola is exactly what you think
He
is. We are greater and at the same
time lesser; yet greater because of our lessness.’

Kasyx, trained as he was in
philosophy, was equal to that riddle. ‘I see,’ he said.

‘Ashapola is the God of Human
Possibilities, and you are his messenger.’

Springer said, ‘You make a wise
charge-keeper, Kasyx. One day, in years to come, they may remember your name
with great admiration.’

Kasyx turned to Tebulot, Samena, and
Xaxxa. ‘I’ve learned something else,’ he told Springer. ‘I’ve learned that no
charge-keeper can be greater than the Warriors he is appointed to serve. We are
one. We are Night Warriors.’

Springer took hold of Kasyx’s hand,
and bowed her head. ‘I wish you good fortune in your fight against Yaomauitl. I
shall be watching you.’

Now, clasping hands, the four Night
Warriors rose through the roof of the house and into the night. There was no
moon. They rose high, scanning the sparkling landscape for any intimation that
Yaomauitl was coming after them; listening and looking, and using their
heightened psychic senses, too. They drifted northwards, following the luminous
line of the coast, four dark shadows in a dark sky. They could feel beneath
them the dreams and nightmares of the thousands of people who were already
asleep. Collectively their dreams were like palaces and apartment blocks with
invisible walls, in which the strangest events were acted out, in darkness and
in daylight, in fear and in happiness, in passion and in agony. Clocks spun,
clouds rushed across unimaginable skies, fields of corn waved like fire. There
were voices and sobs and so much music that it sounded as if a great unseen
orchestra were tuning up, cellos and piccolos and anguished violins. Shouts.
Laughter. Muttering and weeping.

In dreams and nightmares, everything
was possible. The dead could walk and talk as if they had never been away. The
unborn could open their eyes and stare at their mothers who never were. Love
could be consummated between passing strangers.