Charnel House (18 page)

I put my hand over the telephone receiver and said to Dr. Jarvis, “I'm sorry, Jim. Dr. Crane is dead. Coyote got to the ambulance just past the airport.”

George Thousand Names looked deadly serious. “The blood,” he insisted. “Did he get the blood?”

“Mr. Thousand Names wants to know if Coyote got the blood,” I asked the officer.

Lieutenant Stroud coughed. “Tell him that Seymour Wallis was found a half hour later in the Bay. He was so sucked out that the guy who hauled him out thought at first he'd found a dead shark.”

All I could say was, “That's it, then. What else can we do? Do you have any, idea where Coyote is?”

“We have an APB out and the SWAT squad are checking every possible hideout. But if you ask me it's going to be hopeless,” he said.

“Okay, Lieutenant,” I told him, and laid down the phone.

In the first smeary light of early morning that seeped into my room, George Thousand Names looked tired and hunched. He ran his gnarled fingers through his white hair. “Let's hope we don't lose this one, friends. If Coyote gets loose, then I can't tell you what carnage there's going to be.”

Jane suddenly looked up and smiled, and I can remember thinking how strange that smile was. What the hell could there be to smile about?

I made up a makeshift bed for Jane on the couch. I was too exhausted and shaken to think of seduction, and in any case Jane was acting so withdrawn and remote that I could have yelled, “Let's ball!” at the top of my voice and all she would have said was, “Pardon?”

She wrapped herself in a blanket and fell asleep almost straight away. I went around the apartment turning off the lights and drawing the drapes, but somehow I didn't feel much like lying down and closing my eyes. I went out into the hallway and looked at some of the drawings of Mount Taylor. The glass in the frames was pretty dusty and stained, and most of the prints were badly foxed, but if you looked close you could see that someone had penciled under each one,
“Mount Taylor from Lookout Mountain,”
or
“Mount Taylor from San Mateo.”
There were similar notations under the pictures of Cabezon Peak, like
“Cabezon Peak from San Luis.”

I tippy-toed across my sitting room and quietly took down my
Rand McNally Road Atlas
. Then I crept back into the kitchen, closed the door, and spread it out on the table, along with as many pictures of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak as I could crowd around. I laid a sheet of waxed paper over the map, took out my pen, and began to mark on the overlay the locations from which each of the views of the two mountains had been drawn.

To keep myself going, I smoked half a pack of cigarettes and made myself a big mug of black coffee, as the sunlight outside the kitchen window grew stronger and eight o'clock chimed from the pine clock on the sitting room wall.

By nine, I had almost every viewpoint plotted, and I lifted the sheet of waxed paper up and admired the pattern of tiny Xs that I had marked all over it. I couldn't imagine what the hell they all meant, and there didn't seem to be any pattern to them that I could make out, but I guessed that George Thousand Names would probably be able to enlighten me.

I tucked the paper in my pants pocket, then crossed the kitchen to put the percolator on for another mug of coffee. I switched on the small black-and-white television that my mother had given me last Christmas, and after a couple of messages for Sugar Frosties and some kind of dumb plastic catapult for shooting Action Man over your neighbor's hedge, I caught a news bulletin about the ambulance that Seymour Wallis had been abducted from.

The announcer said, “San Francisco's SWAT squad are still hunting for a ghoulish hijacker who ambushed an ambulance on its way to Redwood City Clinic from Elmwood Foundation Hospital and stole the cadaver of former city engineer Seymour Wallis. The hijacker, described by investigating detectives as ‘armed and extremely violent,' inflicted fatal injuries on Dr. Kenneth Crane, who was accompanying the body on its trip along Bayshore Freeway, and on Miguel Corralitos, a twenty-seven-year-old hospital orderly. The body of Mr. Wallis was later found by an early-bird fisherman in the Bay off Millbrae. So far police have no clues to the hijacker's motives for purloining the corpse, but they promise fresh bulletins shortly.”

After that, they went into some report about orange blight in a fruit farm downstate, and I switched the television off. So Coyote was still free, although I couldn't imagine what kind of form he had taken on now, or where he might be. What does a hideous demon do in the daytime? He can't very well roam the streets of San Francisco, especially with Lieutenant Stroud and the SWAT squad tracking him down. That's if he left any tracks.

My percolator started gurgling and popping and gave me quite a start. I lit another cigarette and looked out over the backs of the apartment buildings around me. It was Sunday, and a pregnant girl in a smock was sitting on a fire escape brushing her hair dry in the morning sunshine. I coughed and wished I could stop smoking. Right now, though, there didn't seem much point. If cancer didn't get me, Coyote probably would.

The telephone rang. I lifted it up. “John Hyatt.”

It was George Thousand Names calling from the Mark Hopkins. “Did you sleep okay?” he asked.

“I didn't sleep at all,” I told him. “I spent the rest of the night charting those viewpoints of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak.”

“Does it look like anything interesting?”

“Well, it could be. But I think it needs an interpreter. I came second to bottom in trigonometry, and that was only because I kept my pencils sharper than the guy who came bottom.”

“Do you want to come over? As long as you leave that necklace on the door, your place will stay safe.”

“You're sure?”

“Sure I'm sure. In any case, Coyote will probably be resting up right now, absorbing his blood into his system.”

“I was wondering where demons go to in daytime.”

“Demons are things of the dark,” George Thousand Names told me. “In sunlight, their powers are weakened. So you can bet that Coyote is holed up in some abandoned house someplace, or down in some culvert, or maybe he's even made it to 1551.”

“Isn't it worth trying to flush him out now that it's daylight?”

“John,” he said, “when I say his powers are weakened I don't mean that he doesn't
have
any powers. If we go near that creature, we're dead meat. I mean that.”

“Thanks for the cheerful message. I'll come over in about one hour. I want to take a shower first. I smell like a pig.”

“Okay,” he said. “Don't forget to bring the chart you made.”

I was just about to say “you bet,” when the words died on my lips. The kitchen door had opened a small way and there was something standing outside watching me. I could see the glitter of dark eyes and an even darker shape. I felt as if the world had disappeared from under me and every nerve in my body tingled and crept with fright.

“Did you hear what I said?” said the tinny, distant voice of George Thousand Names.

“Wait. There's something outside my door. I don't know what it is. Wait.”

“Which door?” he demanded.

“The kitchen door. The kitchen door, it's—”

The door slammed open so hard that splinters of wood and broken hinges flew across the room. I gave a high-pitched yelp, and pitched off my chair, scrabbling across the floor toward the sink. I kept my knives there in a drawer, and what I needed right now was instant protection.

The beast came through that door like a tidal wave of black fur. It was a bear, a massive full-grown grizzly, nearly four hundred pounds of hair and muscle and vicious curved claws. It collided heavily with the kitchen units, and the television and percolator and spice racks clattered and crashed on to the floor. As the bear turned, it snarled viciously, and I wrenched open the kitchen drawer too quick and too hard letting out a shower of knives and forks and bean slicers and apple corers all over the floor.

I ducked down, caught hold of my biggest kitchen cleaver, and rolled as fast as I could toward the broken door. The bear paused, and snarled again, and it was only then that I really looked at it.

It was more than a huge beast of shaggy fur and dark animal smell. It had a pale white face, pale as a woman's, but with yellowish teeth that were bared with every snarl and growl. I stared at it, trying to understand what it was, what it could possibly be. I was so shocked and horrified that I couldn't grasp it at first, just couldn't get my mind around the fact of this terrifying beast's existence.

It was Jane. Hard and ferocious though they were, those eyes were hers. That face was hers. The strange statuette on Seymour Wallis's banister post had come to life, and it was her
.

I whispered, “Jane …”

She didn't answer, just snarled again and moved implacably toward me, her hard claws scratching on the kitchen floor. Saliva dripped from the points of her teeth, and there was nothing in her expression but blind animal hatred.

“Jane, listen,” I said, in a croaky voice. All the time I was trying to back toward the door. I saw the muscles rippling under that coarse glossy fur, and I knew that she was going to run for me again, and this time she probably wouldn't miss.

On the floor, the telephone receiver kept saying:
“John? John? What's the matter, what's going on?”

There was a brisk tattoo of sharp claws, and the Bear Maiden leaped toward me with the force of a huge black automobile. I know that I yelled out, but it was with aggressive desperation this time, the kind of banzai scream they teach you in the Army to pump your adrenalin up.

As the giant bear hurtled toward me, I swung back my arm and whammed it straight in the face with the meat cleaver. That didn't do very much to help me. The force of the Bear Maiden's leap banged me back against the wall, and we collided together on the floor in a ghastly embrace of blood and fur and claws. I think I was concussed for a moment, almost crushed, but then I managed to push some of the furry weight off my legs and hips, and roll her over.

I thought she was dead at first. The cleaver had struck her in the left side of the face, chopping a deep bloody V into her forehead, and damaging her left eye. The velocity of her own leap had done the most damage, because there was no way that
I
could have hit anybody that hard. I knelt beside her, shaking and quaking, and almost heaving up my last few mugs of coffee.

She opened her right eye and looked at me. I twitched nervously and stood up, well away from those claws and those teeth. She smiled. A sort of sour, self-satisfied grin.

“My master will want you now,”
she whispered.
“He has waited so long for his beautiful Bear Maiden, and look what you have done. My master will track you down, and he will make sure that you die the worst death that anyone could ever imagine.”

I said thickly, “Jane?”

But even if the face looked like Jane, there was nothing in the creature's mind that remembered Jane or the way she used to feel about me. She lay there, panting and bleeding, but I knew that I hadn't killed her, and it was only a matter of time before she came after me again.

The telephone said, “Hello? Hello? John!”

I picked it up from the floor. “I'm here, George. I'm okay for now. The Bear Maiden's here. It's Jane. The Bear Maiden is Jane.”

“Get out of there, quick. While you still have the chance.”

“She's hurt. I hit her with the meat cleaver.”

“That's not going to please Coyote. Listen, just get your maps and git.”

“
Git?
I haven't heard anyone say that since Hopalong Cassidy.”

“John, you're hysterical. Just get the hell out of there.”

Still stumbling and staggering, I gathered up my
Rand McNally
and my wallet, and stepped over the Bear Maiden's twitching legs to the door. She rolled her eyeball up to watch me as I passed and whispered, “Coyote will get thee. Have no fear.”

I went out of the front door, made sure the necklace was tightly fastened around the handle, and headed for the elevator with wobbly knees. It was only after I'd hailed a taxi in the street and we'd pulled away into the traffic that I felt the first surge of real nausea.

I tapped the driver on the shoulder.

“Yup?” she asked me.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I think I'm going to puke.”

She turned around and stared at me, a cigarette hanging from her lower lip.

“Mister,” she said. “This ain't no goddamned airline. Sick bags ain't provided.”

“What do you suggest I do?” I asked her, sweating.

She drove at forty miles an hour over a cross street, bouncing and jolting on the taxi's suspension. “Swallow it,” she said, and that was the end of that discussion.

Maybe Red Indians are self-disciplined and ascetic, but George Thousand Names wasn't so self-disciplined that morning that he didn't take my hand in both of his when I walked through the door of his room at the Mark Hopkins, and he wasn't so ascetic that he didn't pour us both a large Jack Daniels.

“It's a nightmare. The whole damned thing is a nightmare,” I said.

He was wearing a red satin bathrobe and slippers with beads sewn all over them. He looked as if he was starring in a cowboy movie financed by Liberace. “That's the worst mistake you can make, to think it's a nightmare. If you think that, you will close your eyes to whatever happens, and hope to wake up. But you
are
awake, John, and this is really happening.”

“But how the hell can a girl I know, a girl I used to love damnit, a girl I
still
love, turn into a creature like that?”

The old Indian set his glass down on top of the television set. With the sound turned down, some golf star was mouthing the virtues of tooth polish.