Walkers (34 page)

‘I looked it up,’ Henry told him. ‘I
was interested in finding out something about those eels, that’s all.’

‘And you believe it?’ Salvador
repeated.

‘I didn’t say that I did, and I
didn’t say that I didn’t. So far, though, it’s the only independent explanation
that I’ve come across that fits all the circumstantial facts.’

‘But Devils . . .?’ Salvador smiled,
incredulously.

‘What else?’ asked Henry. ‘Only Mr
Belli and the people at Scripps can tell us any different.’

Salvador stood up, and brushed his
pants with his hand. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It seems that you have given me
something to think about, if nothing else. Do you have the reference to the
Devil here, so that I could look at it?’

‘I’m sorry, it was in a library book
at the university,’ Henry lied.

‘Perhaps you could give me the
title.’

Henry came over and patted Salvador
in a friendly, paternal manner on the shoulder.

‘It escapes me for the moment. But
I’ll check it today, and have somebody call you.’

‘Better still, perhaps the
university could photocopy the reference for me,’ Salvador suggested.

‘Dollar-fifty a copy,’ said Henry,
opening the front door for him.

‘I think the police department
budget can stretch to that.’

Salvador hesitated in the doorway.
Then he said, ‘We have managed to identify the girl, you know.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Her name was Sylvia Stoner. She was
twenty-two, and a photographic model. She came from Houston, Texas.’

‘Do you have any idea what she was
doing in Southern California?’

‘Oh, yes. She was on vacation,
visiting friends in San Diego.’ Salvador took out his spring-bound notebook,
and wetted the tip of his finger, so that he could flick quickly through the
pages. ‘She stayed with them for a couple of months, and then disappeared. They
didn’t alert the police because they thought she’d simply gone freewheeling
around for a day or two. According to them, she was something of a fun girl.’

‘It was no fun, the way she ended
up,’ said Henry. As Salvador lowered his notebook, he caught a glimpse of the
name Esbjerg, underlined twice, and part of an address that started with the
name Market. Salvador flipped his notebook shut so that Henry couldn’t read any
more.

‘Are you releasing all of this to
the media?’ Henry asked.

‘Not so far. Not until we know what
that creature actually is. If we go public on what we know so far, we’re going
to look like the loony tunes department. We had enough sardonic laughter over
that Ramirez business last month.’

‘Oh, I remember,’ smiled Henry. ‘The
bordello bust.’

‘Don’t remind me,’ said Salvador.
Then, with a brief wave of his hand, he walked off down the path. Henry closed
the door, and went immediately over to the bookcase, to take down his San Diego
telephone directory. He took it into the kitchen with him while he filtered
some fresh coffee. His finger ran up scores of Espinosas and Esmeraldas, until
at the top of the page it peaked in Esbjerg, K, 603 Market St.

There were two other Esbjergs, but
one was out on 44th St by the Holy Cross Cemetery, and the other was on Gamma
at 39th.

He picked up his telephone and
dialled Gil Miller’s number, at the Solana Mini-

Market.

Gil had arrived back in his body this
morning to find his mother worriedly shaking him, and saying, ‘Gil? Gil? Are
you all right?’

He opened his eyes, and blinked, and
yawned. ‘Sure, sure I’m all right. What’s the matter?’

‘I’ve been calling you for ages.
Your father wants you to help him unload the van. I thought you were sick or
something.’

Gil sat up. He had a tight headache,
unlike any other headache he had experienced before. It felt as if somebody was
gripping his head in their hands and squeezing it.

He frowned at his watch, and saw that
it had stopped.

‘What time is it?’ he asked his
mother, as she tugged back the curtains.

‘A quarter after six. I’ll make you
some breakfast while you help your father.’

Gil drew back his sheets and stood
up. He had a small but brightly lit bedroom, with a large window facing south
and a much smaller window facing east. The walls were painted pale yellow, and
there was a large cork-faced notice board running the length of the bed, with
school pennants and pictures of Lamborghinis and Maseratis and postcards from
friends, as well as a poster of Karen Velez,
Playboy’s
Playmate 1984.

Mrs. Miller went downstairs, while
Gil dressed in a clean pair of shorts, yesterday’s sawn-off denims, and a
brown-and-orange Padres tee-shirt. Walking out through the kitchen, he poured
himself a large glass of Minute Maid grapefruit juice, and drank it in three
long gulps.

Phil Miller was in the back yard,
stacking vegetables. ‘You sleep good?’ he asked Gil. ‘There’s ten boxes of
lettuce to come out next.’

Gil climbed up into the back of the
van, and began shifting boxes. He kept thinking about the nightmare from which
he had just returned, and about Susan, who was still trapped in that nightmare
somehow. In the light of the morning, in the back of his father’s van, it all
seemed so far away, and so bizarre, that he could have quite easily convinced
himself that it hadn’t happened at all.

‘You’re quiet,’ said his father,
after a while.

‘Something on my mind, that’s all,’
he replied, passing down a boxful of radishes.

Phil Miller looked at his son
narrowly. ‘Anything a father ought to know about?’

Gil shook his head. How could he
possibly explain to his father that only a couple of hours ago he had been
Tebulot, the machine-carrier, and that he had been killing creatures in a
torrential rainstorm, in a castle that didn’t exist? Howcould he tell him that
he was worried about a girl whose dreaming personality had been taken hostage
by an embryo Devil? His father’s imagination was capable of encompassing price
changes and new grocery products and baseball scores, and occasionally a random
episode of
V;
but that was about as
weird as it went.

‘You’re not sick?’ his father asked
him.

‘No, no. I’m fine. Listen – do you
need me in the store today?’

‘I was hoping you might help out
with the deli counter.’

‘If I got Lisa to do it?’

‘Then, sure. If you get Lisa to do
it.’

Lisa Dalwick was a school friend of
Gil’s, whose father was one of the most successful of the local realtors.
Lisa’s father didn’t particularly approve of her mixing with Gil; but Lisa
thought that the sun shone out of Gil’s every available aperture, and so there
wasn’t a lot that Dalwick
pere
could
do about it. Gil drove around to Lisa’s house after breakfast and promised her
a whole afternoon’s swimming together if she helped out at the market. Lisa was
okay. She was cute and petite and her figure turned heads, but right now her
mouth was crowded with more braces than the Coronado Bay Bridge.

Once the problem of the deli counter
had been settled, Gil drove up to Del Mar Heights, and parked outside Susan’s
house. He jogged up the steeply angled driveway, and rang the doorbell, still
jiggling from foot to foot.

After a long wait, Susan’s
grandfather came to the door.

‘Is Susan there?’ asked Gil.

The old man shook his head. He was
carrying a copy of the
National Enquirer
in
one hand, folded over. ‘She’s in hospital,’ he said. ‘They took her away about
an hour ago.’

Gil felt a sensation of dread slide
right through him, as if he had swallowed a mouthful of mercury. ‘Hospital?’ he
asked. ‘What, is she sick or something?’

‘They don’t know,’ the old man told
him. ‘They can’t work it out at all. She just wouldn’t wake up this morning,
that’s all. She’s breathing all right. Her blood pressure and all the-rest of
it, they’re okay. But it’s just like she went into some kind of a coma, when
she was asleep.’

‘God, that’s terrible,’ said Gil,
thinking to himself, if only this poor old man knew just
how
terrible.

‘They, er, took her to the Soledad
Park Clinic,’ said Susan’s grandfather. He took off his spectacles and stared
at Gil with bleary, widely cast eyes. ‘They said that any friends of hers would
be welcome to visit. You know – like a familiar voice might snap her out of her
coma.’

‘Sure,’ said Gil. He touched the old
man’s arm. ‘I’ll call up, you know, and see what time visiting hours are. I’m
real sorry this has happened. Can I keep in touch? You know, call you now and
again, to see how she is?’

Susan’s grandfather nodded. ‘You’re
welcome to. Do I know your name?’

‘Gil,’ said Gil. ‘Gil Miller.’ He
was almost tempted to say Tebulot.

It was nearly eleven o’clock by the
time he reached Henry’s cottage and buzzed at the door. Henry opened the door
with relief when he knew it was him. ‘I’ve been trying to call you. Your mother
said you were out.’ ‘I went up to Susan’s place.’ ‘And?’

Gil lifted both hands in
resignation. ‘She’s in hospital already. Her grandparents couldn’t wake her up
this morning so they called a doctor. She’s okay, as far as I can make out.
She’s still alive, and all her vital signs are normal. But she’s – what do you
call it? – comatose. Her personality hasn’t come back yet, which means that
Devil’s still keeping her hostage.’

Henry didn’t say anything for a while.
Then he slowly nodded, and sat down, and said to Gil in the bleakest of voices,
‘All we can do is hope that it keeps her hostage until nightfall.’

‘What I want to know is, where is it
keeping her?’ said Gil. ‘It took her out of that desert dream, but where did it
go from there?’ ‘Into another dream, maybe,’ Henry suggested. ‘There’s always
somebody asleep, somewhere, even during the day.

Shift-workers, nightclub staff,
prostitutes.’

‘Another question is, how to find
what dream she’s in, even when it does get dark?’

Gil asked him.

Henry said, ‘I don’t know. But there
must be a way. I mean, surely the original Night Warriors must have had some
system for detecting where the Devils were. After all, how many millions of
dreams do you think there are, just in a single night? It would take you a
lifetime to search through them all, even if you were sensitive, the way Susan
is.’

‘I’m glad you said is, and not was,’
Gil remarked.

‘We very much need to talk to
Springer, don’t we?’ said Henry. ‘I vote we go to the house to see if he’s
there. But there’s something else I want to follow up, too.

Lieutenant Ortega was here this
morning, poking and prying as usual; but this time I think that I got more out
of him than he got out of me. He’s found out who the girl was, the girl we
discovered on the beach. And I’ve found out where her friends live, down in San
Diego. When we’ve been to talk to Springer, maybe you could drive us down
there. I have a feeling we may be able to get a little more out of them than
the police obviously did. After all, you and I know what this business is
really all about, don’t we?’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Gil,
unhappily. ‘I think I’m about as “oh-fay” with what’s going down here as a
blindfolded gopher down a six-foot hole.’

Henry went across to his desk, took
his wallet out of the top drawer, and counted the money in it. Then he pushed
it into his back pants pocket. ‘I feel agonised about Susan,’ he said. ‘I feel
like I mismanaged the whole thing. We should never have gone into that building
to begin with.’

‘You didn’t mismanage anything,’
said Gil. ‘For starters, you’re not in charge. Just because you’re older, and
just because you’re a professor, you feel you’re responsible for everything we
do. But this is different. Whatever we decide, we decide together; and that
makes us all responsible for what happened, including Susan herself. ‘Well, I
guess you’re right,’ Henry told him. ‘But it doesn’t make me feel very much
better.’

They drove in Gil’s Mustang down to
Camino del Mar. They parked across the street from Springer’s house, and went
across to knock at the door. They waited and waited, and knocked again, but
there was no reply. The door, when they tried the handle, was firmly locked.
Traffic passed them noisily. Above their heads, two hot-air balloons sailed
silently north-eastwards.

Gil said, ‘Looks like Springer’s
left us out on our own.’

‘Maybe that was his whole plan,
right from the beginning,’ suggested Henry. ‘Not to train us at all, but to
throw us in at the deep end. Sink or swim.’

They left the house, and headed
across to 1-5 so that they could drive south to San Diego. As usual, the
interstate was teeming with traffic.

Gil said, as they passed by the
Mission Bay exits, ‘Aren’t you drinking any more?’

Henry shrugged. ‘I haven’t made any
conscious decisions about it. But, no, I haven’t had a drink.’

‘You should stick it out,’ Gil told
him. ‘I like you better when you’re sober.’