Rook & Tooth and Claw (25 page)

“That’s right. Of course I do. She could tell people’s fortunes … with tea-leaves, or the Tarot, or by reading palms. She was also a damned good knitter.”

Jim thought: she was right, but that wasn’t really much of a test. If Mrs Vaizey’s son had left her lobster hat behind, he had probably left her Tarot cards and her knitting patterns, too.

“You know what her maiden name was?”

“For sure. Duncan, Alice Duncan – born January 17, 1919, in Pasadena, the second of seven children.”

“And you know how she died?”

Miss Neagle nodded. “She suffered. She never told you how much she suffered, because she knew that she’d upset you. But she suffered, believe me.”

“You know how, and why?”

“One night, her spirit left her body, looking for a voodoo
houngan
who was trying to take possession of one of your students. Unfortunately, the
houngan
was waiting for her.”

Jim stopped pacing, and looked Miss Neagle right in the eyes. “You’re in there, aren’t you?” he said. “You’re really in there.”

“Yes,” said Miss Neagle. “I’m really in here.” And she lifted her hand to his cheek and touched it, very gently, not in the way that a woman like Miss Neagle normally would, but in the way that a grandmother would, or an elderly friend. Jim took hold of her hand and squeezed it. “Welcome back,” he told her.

“I’m not sure you’re going to say you’re so happy to see me when I tell you why I’m here.”

“What’s the matter? Don’t tell me
you’ve
seen something frightening coming to get me, too.”

“Who else has told you?” asked Miss Neagle, in the querulous tones that Mrs Vaizey would have adopted.

Jim said, “My grandfather was here yesterday morning.
My
dead
grandfather. He told me to watch for something dark and old and
bristling
.”

“Then that’s much more serious than I thought.”

“What? What’s more serious?”

“People’s relatives hardly ever make visitations from the other side unless those people are in desperate danger. I mean, why should they come back? They’ve had a whole lifetime of struggle and conflict, they don’t want any more. But for me – no, it was your aura that worried me.”

“My aura? What’s wrong with my aura?”

“When you came walking around the pool just now, you had the most threatening aura I’ve ever seen, alive or dead. You were completely surrounded by a swirl of dark, dull colors – like – like
tentacles,
thrashing around in a muddy river – and there was a dreadful feeling of
cold,
too. That’s why I came up to see you.”

“So what does that mean?”

“It’s very serious, Mr Rook. It means that something awful is going to happen to you – and whatever it is, it’s already begun. That’s why your aura has started to grow darker, the same way the sky grows darker just before a storm. It can feel the threat that’s coming toward you. It can
sense
that you’re soon going to die.”

“I’m going to
die
? And
soon
?”

“Unless you can find a way of saving yourself, yes.”

“Come on, now, what the hell is all this about? What does ‘soon’ mean? Sometime in the next half hour? Tomorrow? Next year? And
how
am I going to die?”

Miss Neagle shook her head. “I can’t tell, not exactly, unless I read the cards.”

“Listen,” Jim protested, “I don’t have any intention of dying. Not sooner. Not even later.”

“Nobody does, Jim.
I
didn’t, any more than you do now. We’re all frightened of pain. We’re all frightened
of darkness. Why do you think I’m clinging onto this life, by staying with Valerie?”

“Valerie? Who’s Valerie? Oh – I see who you mean. Miss Neagle. Yes, for sure.”

Miss Neagle said, “You don’t have to find out how you’re going to die unless you really want to. Most people don’t.”

“But how can I save myself if I don’t know what it is?”

“You want me to read the cards?”

“Of course I want you to read the cards. You think I want to go out, turn the corner and find myself torn to pieces by something old and cold and bristling?”

“Just because your grandfather said it was bristling, that didn’t necessarily mean it was something that could tear you to pieces. It may be nothing more than a detail… just part of the omen, not all of it. It may be nothing more than a hairbrush, lying next to your bed when you’re dying.”

“Somehow I don’t think so. He said ‘
bristling
’ like he really meant it.”

“All right, then,” said Miss Neagle. She took a pack of cards out of her bathrobe pocket. She had obviously come prepared. “How about here, on the table?” she said, and Jim pulled out two dining-room chairs so that she could spread the cards out in front of her. Jim had never seen anything like them before. They were colored picture-cards, like the Tarot, except that the drawings they bore were even stranger, and more obscure. There were demons on stilts and dwarves with copper pans on their heads and pale, naked women with their eyes blindfolded, surrounded by huge black-beetles. There were minstrels in extraordinary heaped-up hats and sad-eyed knights carrying hideous witches on their backs. Some of the cards showed nothing but deserted landscapes, with only a shadow falling across
them to indicate that somebody was just about to enter the picture.

“Pretty weird deck,” Jim remarked, as he sat down beside her.

“Weird, yes, but very sensitive. You don’t see many like this. They were secretly devised in the fourteenth century on the orders of Pope Urban VI – supposedly to help his cardinals to flush out an infestation of demons in hundreds of Italy’s churches. Because of that it’s called the Demon Tarot. The demons hid themselves in the cellars and the belfries, and only the cards could tell you where they were. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But I’ve known these cards to sense that a wife was going to attack her husband with a breadknife, six hours before she actually did it. And once they warned that a little girl of six was going to die in a house-fire.”

“And did she?”

Miss Neagle nodded, sadly. “Her mother wouldn’t believe me. I tried to find out where she lived and take the little girl away, but by then it was too late.” She paused, and then she said, “That was the last time I used this pack, until today.”

“You’re scaring me,” said Jim, trying unsuccessfully to smile.

“I’m scaring myself,” Miss Neagle told him. She shuffled the cards, tapped them three times, and then started to lay them out in an H-shaped pattern, 21 cards in all. The feline formerly known as Tibbles had been watching her closely, but now her fur rose up on end, and she let out a soft hiss of disapproval.

“One of these cards has to represent you, the significator. This one looks good – the teacher. It’s the card I used to choose for young, well-educated men – especially
single,
young, well-educated men.”

The card showed a man with a strange, serene look on
his face. He was wearing a long cloak that was decorated with all kinds of objects, like kettles and hourglasses and loaves of bread. A young woman was sitting in front of him, cross-legged, with a golden ear-trumpet in one ear, into which the man was pouring green oil from a green-glass bottle.

Miss Neagle placed the card face-upward in the centre of the H-pattern. Then, slowly, she turned the rest of the cards face-up, too.

“This is tomorrow,” she explained, lifting up a card showing a man in a complicated black-velvet bonnet, looking out over a stormy estuary. On the man’s back a shadow had fallen – a shadow like a large hand. “And this next card is the number four.” Three noblemen in masks were standing in a cemetery; but almost invisible amongst the gravestones and the monuments was a grotesque grey figure with horns and a strange trumpet-like protrusion instead of a nose.

“So far this means that the next significant event in your life will not take place until four tomorrows have passed.”

“So I won’t be killed until Thursday? Is that it?”

“I don’t know, Jim. Let’s carry on.”

She picked up the next card and showed it to him. A pale man was walking across a desert with the rising sun behind him. On closer inspection, Jim saw that the desert floor was composed entirely of intertwined human bones. Miss Neagle said, “Whatever is going to harm you, it’s coming from the east.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“It may be not significant. But all evil spirits come from the east. You should never build a house with its front door facing east.”

“What’s that?
Feng-shui
?”

“Not at all. It’s simple survival. You don’t want demons flying into your house every time you open the front
door, now do you?” She leaned forward over the cards, frowning. “Now here’s an odd one.”

She showed Jim a very dark card, almost black. Jim held it up and his cat abruptly jumped off her chair and ran into the bedroom. Jim got the feeling she would have closed the door behind her if she could have done. He peered at the card intently, and he could just distinguish a rough, shaggy shape with two reddened eyes. More significantly, though, he could see a claw lifted into the air – a claw like a bear’s claw, only bigger, with viciously hooked nails.

“Well?” he asked Miss Neagle.

“Well… this is what is coming after you, I presume. A beast of some kind. I don’t know why it’s coming after
you
in particular, but it is. Feel the card again – no, feel it. It’s warm, isn’t it? It’s actually warm. It’s charged with psychic energy. It
knows
you.”.

She was right. The card
was
warm. In fact it was so warm now that he could hardly hold it. He was about to hand it back to her when it suddenly curled up and burst into flame. He dropped it into the ashtray and both of them watched as it was reduced to a curled-up wafer of black ash.

“How the hell did
that
happen?” asked Jim, flapping away the smoke.

“I told you. Psychic energy. The card acted as a cable between whatever this thing is that’s coming to get you, and you yourself. And like all cables when they get overloaded with energy, it burned out.”

“Well, I’m real sorry about your deck.” He reached into his back jeans pocket for his wallet. “Is it worth very much?”

“They’re irreplaceable. If my son had known how rare they were, he wouldn’t have left them behind. But he never did like me telling fortunes.”

“Oh, shit,” said Jim. “I’m sorry.”

Miss Neagle was gathering up the rest of the cards. “You don’t have to be. I haven’t lost any. That card didn’t belong to this pack at all.”

“I don’t understand.”

She laid her hand on top of his. “I’ve never seen it before now. It just appeared by itself. Now, is that a warning, or is that a warning?”

Jim gave her a long, grave look. Then he stared at the ashes in the ashtray. “You mean …? You’d better tell me more.”

Chapter Three

The cards could tell him only three ways of avoiding the ‘old, cold bristling’ thing that was following him. The first was to seek the advice of two friends. The second was to travel on a long journey, although they didn’t say where. The third was completely cryptic. If he were going to survive, a game would have to be played, and both sides would have to admit defeat.

“A game? Do the cards say what kind of game?”

Miss Neagle shook her head. “I’m as mystified as you are. But I get the feeling that these three instructions are
progressive,
if you get my meaning. Once you’ve sought the advice of your friends, you’ll know where you have to travel, and once you’ve travelled there, you’ll know what kind of game has to be played, and why both sides have to lose.”

Jim sat back. “You say these cards are supposed to be the best?”

“You want to try a second opinion from the regular Tarot? Or the tea-leaves, maybe? Or Sydney Omarr?” She was being sarcastic. Sydney Omarr was a professional astrologist with a 1–900 phone line.

“Unh-hunh. I think I’ll stick with the Demon Tarot. At least it’s offering me
some
way out. I just wish I knew which two friends it’s talking about. That would be a start, at least.”

“Maybe it’s talking about two lecturers from college.”

“Sure. And maybe it’s talking about Bill and Gordon from Joe’s Bar & Grill. It could be talking about anybody.”

Miss Neagle put her cards away. She closed her eyes for a moment, and then she suddenly leaned forward, propping her head in her hands. “Miss Neagle – Valerie – are you okay?”

For a moment, she didn’t say anything. “You want a glass of water?” he asked her. “Another shot of whiskey? How about some iced tea?”

“I’m all right,” she said, at last. “It was a hell of a strain, that’s all, trying to do what Alice used to be able to do.”

“How’s Mrs Vaizey?”

“She’s okay … but she’s exhausted, too. She found it tiring enough reading the cards when she was alive. Now she has to guide my hands and make my brain work, and I’m not a psychic sensitive, the way she was.”

Jim laid a hand on her shoulder and smiled at her. “You did very well, Valerie, thank you. You don’t mind if I call you Valerie?”

“Sweetheart, you can call me anything you like.” She knocked back her whiskey in one gulp and prepared to go. As she went to the door, however, she said, “This thing that’s supposed to be after you – this
beast
,” she said. “Do you believe in that?”

“I wouldn’t have done, not until this morning.”

“You really think it’s real?”

“Yes, I do. I don’t have any idea what it is, or why it’s after me – but, yes, I think that it’s really real.”

She kissed him, and this was definitely Miss Neagle kissing him, not Mrs Vaizey. This was the kind of half-serious kiss you got from a boozy, fortyish woman in a bar. “You’re an interesting man, Jim. You don’t mind if I call you Jim? One of these days you and I ought to
sit down together with a bottle of wine and a plateful of spaghetti and ask each other the meaning of life.”

Jim said, “Tell me one thing, before you go.”

“What’s that, Jim?”

“Do you argue at all? You and Mrs Vaizey, inside of your head?”

Valerie knew back her head and gave three short, barking laughs. “You
are
an interesting man, aren’t you? Yes, we argue all the time. But it’s a whole lot more entertaining than arguing with yourself.”

Jim gave her a wave as she tottered back along the balcony in her little pink high-heeled slingbacks. Then he went back into the kitchen and opened up another beer.
Two friends
? he thought.
Which two friends
?
And where do I have to travel
?

There was one thing he knew for certain. He had to act fast, because he was now totally convinced that there was a beast looking for his blood; and that it was the same beast that had slaughtered Martin Amato on Venice Beach.

He picked up the frail fragments of ash from the ashtray, the remains of the playing-card, and sifted them through his fingers. They silkily fell back again, and formed the shape of a black, horned creature, with tiny, demonic eyes.

* * *

He arrived early for his first English tutorial on Monday morning and when his class came in he was standing at the window with his back to them, staring out at nothing at all. He hadn’t slept well. He was wearing a crumpled pair of tan-coloured chinos and a green checkered shirt which looked as if he had salvaged it from the bottom of the laundry basket. His hair stuck up at the back and no amount of smoothing it down would keep it down, even with spit.

Special Class II were unusually quiet as they took their places, although he could hear the murmur of the names ‘Martin’ and ‘Catherine’ and he knew what they were all talking about. Before he turned around he waited until all the murmuring and whispering had stopped, and there was nothing but an occasional cough or the squeak of a sneaker on the composition floor.

At last he stepped up to the front of the class and looked at all of them, one after the other. Greg Lake, pulling his usual faces over in the corner. Greg suffered from a lack of co-ordination, and it was a constant effort for him to show his feelings with his facial expressions. At the moment he looked as if he were sucking on a particularly sour lemon candy.

Amanda Zaparelli, olive-skinned and sultry, with a husky smoker’s voice, a liking for very strong perfume and lots of it, and a chronic inability to tell the difference between an adjective and an adverb. “You should of seen me walk into the room. I was so strutly.” “Give me that quickly cigarette, will you?”

Jane Firman, pale and dyslexic and given to sudden bursts of frustrated tears. Titus Greenspan III, serious and bulgy-eyed. Titus tried harder than almost anybody else, but he always took everything too literally. If he read that ‘the noon sun drilled a hole in my head’ he would put up his hand and ask why the narrator hadn’t dropped dead on the spot, spilling his brains all over the desert.

Sharon X, in a voluminous black djellaba-like dress which he could only presume was a Black Muslim mourning outfit. John Ng, moon-faced and serious, with a white carnation in a jelly-jar in front of him. White was the Vietnamese colour for death.

Jim looked at them all, one by one, and studied them all. They didn’t have any idea how much their predicament could hurt him. Sometimes he wished for their sake that
they didn’t have to grow up and leave college – and, in particular, that they didn’t have to leave his class. They were so characterful, so individual, so full of inflated hopes and wild ambitions. They wanted to be celebrities. They wanted to appear on TV and live in big, pink-washed houses. But he had so little time to teach them – so little time to help them overcome their turtle-slow reading speeds and their painfully limited vocabularies, not to mention their stuttering and their word-blindness and their horrifying ignorance of history or geography or world affairs.

“What’s the capital of Chile?” he had asked Ricky Herman.

Mark Foley had shot up his hand and said, “I know! Con Carne!”

Jim loved them, all of them. But he hated the culture which had led them to believe that reading was unimportant, that correct spelling didn’t matter, that any dumb poem which
they
wrote was just as good as any dumb poem that Marianne Moore or Robert Lowell had written. He hated it most of all because it didn’t allow them the gift of expressing themselves, especially at times like these.

Very quietly, he said, “Yesterday, we all suffered a terrible shock and a loss so painful that it’s difficult to put it into words. Martin Amato was found murdered on Venice Beach in the early hours of Sunday morning. He was a son, a brother and a friend. He was a civil engineering student and captain of the football team. He was twenty-one years and two months old.”

Jim paced to the back of the class, where Sue-Robin Caufield was sitting. She wore a black scarf around her arm and she was biting back the tears. She and Martin had dated for a while, before Catherine came along.

“What do you say about somebody like Martin? He was reliable. He was considerate. He took himself too
seriously. He wasn’t a genius, but that never affected his unquestioning loyalty to his college, to his team, and to all of his friends. He was the kind of regular guy who had the potential for happiness, and self-fulfilment, and to make a lasting contribution to society.

“Now all of that has been taken away from him – and from us, too. And because of that our lives are going to be poorer, and more doubtful, and less trusting of the world we live in.”

He walked up to Catherine’s desk. Today she was wearing her hair tightly braided with a black ribbon, and a black dress. Her eyes looked puffy from crying.

“Are you all right?” he asked her. “You can be excused this class if you want to.”

“I’m okay,” she whispered, without looking up. “Please … I’d rather stay here.”

Jim stayed beside her for a moment, watching her, and then he turned to the class at large. “Today I want you all to write me a short poem about Martin. I want you to use that poem to express in words everything you feel about him, or any other friend that you’ve lost.”

Muffy Brown put up her hand and said, “Excuse me, Mr Rook, sir, but isn’t that kind of like
cynical
? I mean Martin’s been dead for no more than a day and you’re turning his death into
classwork
?”

Muffy was small and pretty with a personality like a roomful of bouncing balls. Earlier this semester she had worn the most elaborate braids that Jim had ever seen, but now she had shaved her head almost bald except for a flat crewcut on top, and acquired a silver ring through her eyebrow.

Jim said, “Listen to me. If you can express your feelings about Martin’s death in writing, you’ll be paying him the greatest compliment you ever could. If you can put down the shock, and the anger, and the sense of unfairness… if
you can learn to convey your grief to other people… not only will you be improving your communicating skills, you’ll be helping yourself to come to terms with what’s happened. You’ll be making it clear that Martin’s death touched you and affected you … and you’ll have found a way of telling the world just how much.”

He picked up one of his books and said, “After Allen Ginsberg’s mother died, he wrote a long poem called
Kaddish,
which was filled with anger and bewilderment and relief, too, because his mother had been mentally sick. He used it as a way of honouring her, of remembering her – and of coming to terms with the way in which she had changed from being a pretty young girl ‘sitting crossleg on the grass – her long hair wound with flowers –’ to an elderly woman ‘too thin, shrunk on her bones – new broken into white hair – loose dress on her skeleton – face sunk, old! withered – cheek of crone –’

“But finally, he says to her, ‘There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you’ve gone, it’s good.’ ”

He lowered the book, lowered his head. “For Martin’s sake, and for your sake, too, write something that comes right out of your heart.”

There was silence in the classroom. Then, almost as one, everybody brought out their pads, uncapped their pens, and began to write. Jim had never seen them so subdued. He went back to his desk, sat down, and started to write something himself. But he wasn’t writing a poem about Martin’s death. He was writing “2 Friends? Who? Journey? Where? Game in which both sides surrender? What?”

He sat with his head in his hands for a long time, trying to make sense of what he had written. After a while, however, he looked up. Most of the class were bent diligently over their work, although he could see that most of them had written no more than two or three
lines. Still, for Special Class II, two or three lines was something of an achievement. Russell seemed to be the most inspired – or the most deeply affected – because he had already filled one sheet of paper and was on to his next, his tongue clenched between his teeth like a small boy trying to hook a maggot onto a fishing-hook.

When he looked toward Catherine, however, he saw that she wasn’t writing at all. She was sitting up quite straight, her head tilted back, looking toward the ceiling. There was an extraordinary smile on her face, almost a radiance, as if she were supremely happy.

Jim watched her with gradually-increasing curiosity. She kept on looking at the ceiling, and she started to sway her head from side to side in a strange, repetitive movement that reminded him of something but he couldn’t think what.
Shock,
he thought.
She’s going into shock.

Immediately, he stood up, tilting back his chair so that it fell onto the floor with a sharp, echoing clatter. The class all looked up at him, but he raised his hand and said, “Don’t worry. It’s okay. Just get back to your work.”

He went back to Catherine’s desk and stood over her. “Catherine? How are you feeling? How about going outside for a couple of minutes? Maybe you could use some air.”

She didn’t answer, so he cautiously reached out and touched her shoulder. “Catherine – come on, how about seeing the nurse?”

Slowly Catherine turned her head. As she did so, she closed her eyes. But when she had turned completely toward him, she abruptly opened them again. He felt a shrill sense of fright and he couldn’t stop himself from taking one step away from her. Her eyes were totally expressionless, as if she didn’t know who he was – or even
what
he was. He had never known anybody look at him like that before, and he couldn’t even think what to say
to her. What do you say to a painted portrait, when it stares at you; or a snake that stares back at you, in the reptile-house?

“It’s all right, Mr Rook,” she told him, in the softest of voices. “I don’t need to see a nurse. I’m fine.”

“All the same, maybe you’d better go home. This only happened yesterday morning. Shock can last for days or weeks or even years.”

“I want to stay here,” she insisted. “Please, Mr Rook, I’d prefer to stay here.”

“OK, OK. But if you start to feel dizzy, or anything like that—”