Charnel House (23 page)

Mission Street seemed so completely normal that day that I couldn't believe that a thing worse then the devil himself was behind me. People were shopping, walking, eating, laughing, and I was driving desperately northwards toward the Golden Gate, not even sure if I was going to come out of the next few minutes alive.

The Golden Gate was even foggier now, and the outline of the bridge's stately structure was limned in spidery shadows. Cars were moving across it with their headlights on, and when I rolled down the Pinto's window I could smell the chilly flat smell of fog, and hear the ships mournfully calling as they steamed slowly out of the bay toward the ocean. As I came down Lombard Street to the bridge approaches, the fog grew denser still, and despite my panic I had to slow down and crawl along behind a line of other cars.

I glanced at Jane. She was still slumped in her seat, her head back, and for all I knew she could have been dead. I said another prayer for George Thousand Names right then, partly because I didn't want him to die, and partly because the Bear Maiden would wake up if he did. The last thing I wanted to do was fight a supernatural grizzly in the confines of a Ford Pinto.

The car ahead of me suddenly stopped. I blew my horn a couple of times, but he stayed put. I opened my door and climbed anxiously out, and then I saw what the trouble was. Two policemen had halted the traffic, and they were standing around in the road, pointing upward. I ran toward them, leaving Jane in the car.

“What's the hold-up?” I asked, trying to sound normal. All the same, I guess my voice came out pretty high-pitched.

“Some kind of disturbance up there. Some kind of structural disturbance. You see that?”

I peered up into the fog. The policemen were right. The suspension cables of the bridge were swaying alarmingly from side to side, and there was some kind of strange encrustation on them. When I peered harder, I saw what the encrustation was. The birds. The Gray Sorrow. Coyote had gotten here before me and was extracting the hair of Big Monster from the cables.

“That's real strange,” said one of the cops. “You see that? Up there? Now, does that look like a kind of a darkness or doesn't it?”

He was more observant than he realized. The darkness, which clung around the bridge's uprights like a stain in the sky, was the substance of the demon Coyote. He was in his shadowy, amorphous form, the form that he took when he traveled with the sandstorms of the desert and the hot winds from the south. Now, up there, he was taking the prize which he had won for himself centuries and centuries ago, when Mount Taylor was the home of a giant and Cabezon Peak hadn't even been created.
The demonic scalp of Big Monster, the trophy that guaranteed him invulnerability and immortality
.

One of the suspension cables sagged and then swung downward, frayed and broken. It must have weighed tons, but it fell over the side of the bridge and did nothing but lash backward and forward in the air, a frustrated steel snake.

Right then, I didn't care about the police or anyone. I knew that Coyote had the hair, and there was no way that I could explain that to anyone. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted out,
“Coyote! Coyote! Coyote!”

The policemen looked at me pop-eyed.

“Coyote!”
I bellowed.
“Come out and face me, Coyote!”

One of the cops stepped forward and took my arm. “Hey, mister, just keep it down a little, will you.”

“Coyote!”
I screamed. “I
challenge you! Coward! Lecher! Treacherous murderer!”

The cop said, “What the hell—”

But then the sky darkened even more, and the bridge shook with a rumbling vibration, and when the policemen looked up they saw what I was doing. There was a sigh of surprise and fear from all the people around who'd gotten out of their cars, a moaning sigh that could have been the sound of mourners at a foggy funeral.

Around the upper reaches of the bridge's spires hovered Coyote's ugliest and most feral form. It squirmed and changed with every dull breath of wind, but the malicious eyes burned down at us, and the racks of demonic teeth glistened through the fog.

Motorists and policemen scattered. One of the cops tried to pull me away with him, but I shook him off. Behind me, I heard feet running down the roadway, and the sound of more car doors opening and more people dragging their wives and their children away.

“Coyote!”
I shouted. I was bathed in sweat, and trembling. “
I have your Bear Maiden, Coyote!
”

The gruesome demon's form rolled and twisted, and grew clearer in the fog. Now I could see that around its horned head, the iron-gray hair of Big Monster was wound, a ghastly garland of primitive magic. The bridge vibrated under me, and there was a deep, shuddering sound like thunder over nearby hills.

“Coyote! Give me the hair and you can have Bear Maiden back! Can you hear me, Coyote? Can you hear me?”

There was another rumble. Fragments of steel and concrete dropped from the top of the bridge on to the roadway, bouncing off abandoned cars.

I turned and started to hurry back to the Pinto, glancing over my shoulder at the hovering demon as I did so. I kept imagining its devilish claws sinking into my back, or its teeth ripping my flesh off, and my body was so hyped up that I walked like a tennis player on the crucial edge of a major tournament. I had to wipe the sweat from my face with my shirtsleeve.

I reached the car. The demon's wind was beginning to blow, a scorching hurricane that blasted my ears and made my face feel as if it was raw. I wrenched open the Pinto's passenger door, and tried to lift Jane out of her seat and onto the road. I was sweating and cursing, and all the time the bridge was heaving under my feet so that I could hardly stay upright.

At that moment, three uniformed SWAT squad men came running past me with carbines. One of them slapped me on the shoulder and shouted, “Okay, feller, just get out of here as fast as you can!”

“I can't! I have to destroy it!” I shouted back, but the man didn't understand, and went running off along the bridge toward the horrendous dark form of Coyote.

It was only when the three SWAT officers ran into Coyote that I really understood what I was up against. One moment they were pelting along the roadway with their guns raised, and the next second the wolfish shape of the demon descended on them with a crackling of electrified air, and a thundering sound that made the Golden Gate Bridge tremble.

The man in front was spun around; and as he spun round I saw that his front was cleaved open like meat in a supermarket freezer. Then all three of them were hacked to pieces in front of my eyes by some fearful invisible force that chopped away their hands and their heads and their legs and their arms, and knocked the pieces in all directions. I think I probably screamed.

Now the demon was rippling toward me, only a few yards off, and the full power of his hatred and malevolence was directed my way. I desperately dragged Jane toward the rail of the bridge, then turned to face Coyote with as much defiance as I could manage, which wasn't very much.

“Keep away!”
I yelled.
“Keep away or I'll push her over!”

The demon kept coming, and now the terrible hot wind was searing my face and drying my eyeballs so that I couldn't even blink. Everything around me was darkness and fear, and those evil red eyes were fixed on me with cruel intensity.

I heaved Jane up on to the rail. Below us, through the fog, the gray waters of the bay heaved and foamed.

“
I mean it, damn you! I mean it!
” I shouted. And in that moment of total panic, I
did
mean it. I willed myself to mean it. If Coyote moved any nearer, his beloved Bear Maiden, his passionate werewolf mistress, was going to go over the rail and die.

I saw a disembodied snarl in the turbulent darkness in front of me, a snarl of terrible phantom teeth. I saw, too, Coyote's head, with its crown of magical hair. But he paused for one second. He paused. And it was then that I gambled everything, and let Jane fall to the sidewalk.

It happened in strange slow motion, like a nightmare of running in which you can never escape. As Jane slid down to the road, I dodged sideways and made a run for Coyote himself. With one hand, I reached out for Big Monster's hair, and I forced as much strength and energy through my body as I possibly could, and more. All the same, it seemed to take forever, and I could actually see Coyote beginning to turn toward me, and his teeth baring in animal hatred.

It was like throwing yourself into boiling water. The heat and the turmoil of Coyote's presence was unbearable. I snatched, missed, and snatched again, and suddenly I was tumbling and rolling back across the road with a handful of long gray hair that fizzed and buzzed like live electric wires. I was thrown right back against the wheel of an abandoned Plymouth, and I grazed my face and my arm, but I knew that I'd done it. I'd actually stolen the Big Monster's scalp away from the demon Coyote.

There was a shattering roar of supernatural fury. I thought the bridge was cracking, the sound was so loud. I pushed myself sideways between two cars, and then I had to jump even farther back as those cars were lifted and smashed against each other in an ear-splitting collision. I dragged the hair around behind a Cadillac, and raised it above my head.

In that moment, I remembered what George Thousand Names had told me.
If a mortal man attempts to wear the scalp of a giant or a demon, he will be destroyed by what he sees. In other words, for as long as he could survive it, which wouldn't be long, he would become a demon himself, and his mind just couldn't take it
.

I said only one thing. It was a whisper against the scorching wind, but it was all I could think of. “George, help me. Wherever you are, help me.”

Then, closing my eyes in dreadful anticipation, I wound the strange slippery hair of Big Monster around my head.

I didn't think anything was going to happen at first. I raised my head, terrified and disappointed. But then a feeling like a dark depth charge went through my whole body, and I was suddenly aware of a strength both physical and mental, that I had never imagined possible. It was a frightening, evil strength. It was the strength of all my most violent and carnal desires amplified a hundred times. But it gave me such a wild jolt of exhilaration that I shrieked out loud, not a shriek of fear, but a shriek of sheer joyous overwhelming malevolence. I felt lustful, and vengeful, and I felt swamped with urges to rape and wreck and destroy everything and anyone I came across. I stood up from behind the cars, and I seemed to rise to amazing heights, taller and stronger than any human being could ever be.

I saw Coyote then clearly. Not a murky shadow, or a turmoil of cloud, but the demonic beast himself, crouching over Jane's body with his robe of worms and coyote skins on his back. I knew, too, what he was going to do. He had a gray bird perched on one of his bristly shoulders, and an armful of guts and blood from the dead SWAT men. He was preparing to reward Jane for her failure with his most loathsome specialty; sewing a bird into her stomach and then forcing her into the dead intestines of the SWAT men. The Ordeal of Three.

I felt anger so far beyond human anger that I roared out loud. I saw Coyote for what he was; and I also saw that the air was curdled with other demons and spirits, the ghosts of the wind and the fog, the manitous of earth and fire.

“Coyote!”
I bellowed.
“Coyote!”

The demon turned, his jaws dripping with blood. I raged across the roadway toward him, and all the time I felt with black delight that I was fearless, that I was not afraid of him any longer. I seized him, and felt the coarse and revolting bristles of his body, the maggoty softness of his insides. He struggled and screamed, but it was Big Monster's hair that was giving me strength, strength far greater than Coyote could cope with.

I tore him open like a sack, and out of his insides came living things that crawled and twitched, smothered in blowflies. I seized his jaws and stretched them so far apart that they snapped, and then I put out those blazing eyes. There was no blood. But there was a stench of evil that was centuries old, the sour and sickening smell of the dog-beast, Coyote, the First One to Use Words for Force.

I stood away from his ruined body, and his breath fled with the wind. His heartbeat palpitated for a few moments, and then went still. His eyes dulled over. The breeze of San Francisco Bay tossed away the bristles, the crumbling bones, the leathery skin. Soon there was nothing but a fragment of hairy scalp and a scorch on the sidewalk. A scorch that, if you walk across the Golden Gate today, you can still see.

Right then, with Coyote dead, I felt as if something as black and as vast as a locomotive was rushing into my brain. I knew that I wasn't going to survive these minutes in my demonic form, but I didn't care. I was almost elated, as if the ultimate high was rushing my way to hit me.

In the back of my mind, though, I still heard the voice of George Thousand Names. Maybe he knew what my plight was, and he was making one last supreme psychic effort. Maybe the strength was my own. But I heard him say,
If a mortal man attempts to wear the scalp of a giant or a demon, he will be destroyed by what he sees. For as long as he could survive it, which wouldn't be long, he would become a demon himself, and his mind just couldn't take it
.

With an agonized cry, I pulled Big Monster's hair from my head and hurled it as far as I could into the dull waters of San Francisco Bay. It curled and unwound with the wind, and blew away. I felt a desperate sensation of loss and exhaustion go through me, and I sank on to my knees on the roadway.

It was then, through clouding vision, that I saw Jane. She was lying on the sidewalk, and for one fleeting moment, I saw claws and teeth and black hair down her spine. But as the last of Coyote's dust was whipped away, she opened her eyes and she was Jane Torresino again, my once and perhaps even my future love.