Walkers (49 page)

Fortunes could be won by the
poorest, and to the rich could come ruin and humility.

Over these dreams and nightmares,
the Night Warriors passed, trailing their shadows behind them. Every dreamer
who sensed them go by would frown in their sleep, and feel in the morning that
something unusual had happened to them during the night.

It was Samena who first sensed the
presence of Yaomauitl. They had almost reached Beverly Hills, and they were
about to turn eastward and head out towards Glendale and Pasandena. But Samena
suddenly lifted her head, and raised her hands, and said, ‘He’s here. I can
feel it. He’s very close.’

The Night Warriors slowed their
shadowy journey through the night. Samena closed her eyes, and slowly sank to
the west, following her emotions rather than her eyes.

The other three Night Warriors
stayed close, keeping up with her, looking around them as they descended into
the darkness for any signs of an ambush. They had seen how ferocious
Yaomauitl’s offspring could be. Yaomauitl himself, the Deadly Enemy, was fully
grown, and centuries old. They had every reason to be frightened of him.

‘Left, left,’ murmured Samena, and
they spiralled down towards a large pale green stucco house on Lago Vista
Drive, in Coldwater Canyon. There was a free-form swimming-pool at the back of
the house, an orchid garden, and a Bentley Eight parked in the driveway. There
were lights on all over the house, and the Night Warriors could hear the sounds
of music and laughter.

‘Are you sure this ts the place?’
Kasyx asked Samena. ‘I can’t imagine that anyone could be sleeping with this
noise going on.’

‘Follow me,’ said Samena, gently,
and led the way down through the green tiled roof, through the large attic
studio, through the ceiling, and into a child’s bedroom.

It was a pretty bedroom, decorated
with floral print curtains and an ice-blue wall-to-wall carpet. In the middle
of a large brass bed, on top of covers that matched the curtains, a boy of
about eight was sleeping. He was blond headed, suntanned but delicate featured,
with skinny wrists and skinny ankles. He wore pale blue pyjamas, with
wrinkled-up trouser legs. On the pillow next to him a small blue teddy-bear
stared up at the ceiling, as if it had been pole-axed. At the head of the bed
there was a sentimental religious picture of the four Apostles standing around
the cot of a sleeping child, with the words
‘Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John, bless the bed that
I
lie on.’

The four Night Warriors stood at the
foot of the boy’s bed and looked down at him.

‘The Devil’s here?’ asked Xaxxa. ‘In
this kid’s dream?’

Samena said, ‘Can’t you sense it?’

They were silent for a moment.
Downstairs, they could hear the adults of the house laughing and talking. From
the fragments of conversation that they could pick up, it sounded as if the
house belonged to a motion-picture executive celebrating the success of a
recent production. A woman with a penetrating high-pitched voice kept saying,
‘Charlton was
wonderful
... I was
never a fan of his, but he was absolutely
wonderful.’

Kasyx said, ‘Very well. The longer
we delay, the more chance the Devil will have to prepare himself.’ He lifted
his arms, and drew the fluorescent blue octagon in the air, while the other
three Night Warriors came closer to him.

Kasyx parted the night inside the
octagon; the Warriors glimpsed darkness and sinister shadows. Tebulot eased his
weapon off his back, and held it ready in case they were attacked as soon as
they penetrated the dream. Kasyx raised the octagon over their heads, and then
commanded it to descend all around them.

As soon as the octagon touched the
floor, the Night Warriors found themselves in a whirling, cavernous nightmare.
They were standing in what appeared to be a cathedral, or a church, with a high
domed roof and a wide floor of black and white tiles. The cathedral was filled
with an endless howling noise, echoing and breathy, like the sound of a subway
train rushing along a tunnel; shadows and objects hurtled through the air in a
mad defiance of the normal laws of gravity.

As they looked around, a massive
rocking-horse appeared, the size of a small building, with snarling lips and
bared teeth and wild blind eyes. It rocked thunderously over their heads, and
when they looked up into its belly they could see huge oily springs and
groaning gears, and scores of small children clinging desperately to its
stirrups.

‘Some nightmare,’ said Tebulot. ‘I
bet the poor kid’s parents have been forcing him to have riding lessons.’

Kasyx asked Samena, ‘Any idea which
way?’

Samena touched her forehead with her
fingertips and closed her eyes. ‘He’s outside somewhere. I don’t quite know
where. But he’s keeping very still and very quiet. He probably knows we’re
here, and he’s hiding.’

‘Okay, then,’ said Kasyx. ‘Let’s
head for the door, shall we? But keep a look out for absolutely anything.’

A screaming jack-in-the-box flew
past them, its mouth stretched wide in mechanical agony, followed by the
running shadows of fierce dogs. Then a table came by, turning end over end, and
four chairs, and a shower of cutlery, and a grown-up’s voice was barking and
shouting all around them just as fiercely as the dogs.
‘Now
look what you’ve done!
Now look what you’ve done! Now look what you’ve done!’

They reached the doorway and looked
back inside the cathedral. There were objects flying everywhere, even as high
as the domed ceiling: keys, candlesticks, chairs, scissors, toys, shoes; the
walls echoed and re-echoed with the sound of hundreds of conflicting voices –
adult voices, shouting and screeching and bullying and nagging.

‘Now look what you’ve done!’ ‘Can’t you be more -?’ ‘How many times do
I
have to-?’

‘Look at the mess you’ve -!’ ‘If you don’t tidy up your -!’ ‘Don’t you
be so -!’ ‘If you talk
back to me once more, I’ll -!’

They glanced at each other, and each
of them recognised the pit-of-the-stomach smallness of being a child. None of
them said a word. This was the first time they had been reminded of the real
feelings of childhood since they passed adolescence.

For Kasyx, that was nearly forty
years ago; for Tebulot and Samena and Xaxxa, it was only five or six. But until
now they had completely suppressed the fear and the anxiety and the sense of
utter dependence on adults whose tempers could unpredictably change from friendly
to sarcastic to nightmarishly violent, for no reason that a child could even
begin to work out. It was all here, however, inside this nightmare; the chaos
and the turmoil of childish uncertainty.

The Night Warriors left the
cathedral, closing its doors behind them. All around the cathedral spread an
unkempt cemetery. It was daytime, but the sky was slate grey with impending
thunder, and a wind furrowed the dry grass between the headstones, like a bony
hand. The tombs here were enormous, huge stone engines of exalted death, with
angels and masks and scythes carved on them; and open stone books in which
words were written in strange indecipherable languages. Somewhere, a branch or
a gate intermittently tapped in the wind,
tak-tak,
tak-tak,
and they all felt that Yaomauitl the Deadly Enemy was somewhere
close.

As they passed through the cemetery,
towards the crumbling lych-gate, they heard the hollow grating of stone on
stone. Xaxxa was taking up the rear, and he suddenly looked around, and quietly
said, ‘Oh Jesus Christ, man.’

Kasyx halted, and turned. Tebulot
lifted his weapon. But Xaxxa remained where he was, staring at the tombstone
right beside him. The lid had slid off to one side, leaving a narrow triangular
gap, and inside the triangular gap they could see a yellowish corpse in a
winding-sheet, an old woman who glared at them with eyes that were bloodshot
and bulbous.

Kasyx said, ‘It’s just part of the
nightmare. Forget it.’

Xaxxa slowly stepped away, without
taking his eyes off the open tomb. As he passed the next tomb, however, there
was another grating noise, and that opened up, too, revealing a half-decayed
man in a morning suit. Then another tomb opened, and another, and another, until
the sliding of stone lids on top of stone catafalques sounded like the grinding
of teeth. Over two hundred bodies lay open to the thunderous sky, unmoving but
unquestionably alive in the tattered finery in which they had been entombed;
wedding gowns and dinner-suits, evening dresses and frock-coats, a celebrating
company with staring eyes and rotten flesh.

The branch went
tak-tak, tak-tak,
and the Night Warriors walked cautiously through
the cemetery, glancing apprehensively from one side to the other, ready for
anything.

Suddenly, lightning cracked from the
clouds, a thick-trunked tree of solid electricity, and earthed itself on a
distant hillside. The wind whipped up, and leaves rattled through the air all
around them. There was a smell of ozone, ozone and death. The freshness of
allotrope of oxygen, mingled with the sweetness of human disintegration.

The dead sat up in their tombs.
Whether they had been galvanised into life by that devastating discharge of
lightning, like Frankenstein’s monster; or by nothing more than a random
fantasy that had entered the mind of the sleeping boy, the Night Warriors
couldn’t tell. Anything was possible in a nightmare. But the dead sat up,
stiffly, their dry skin audibly cracking, their flesh flaking from their faces
like pieces of desiccated fish, and they turned towards the Night Warriors and
screamed at them.

It was no ordinary scream. It was a
hellish discordant clamour that lifted up the hair at the backs of their necks,
and chilled their bladders with a sudden primitive urge to urinate and then to
run. Kasyx had never heard anything like it; not even this afternoon, from the
blazing Devil. This was a cry of utter despair, from those whose lives had
already been lived out, and finished. This was the most elemental human terror
of all, expressed in one hideous noise. The fear of dying; the horror of being
dead.

‘Come on, let’s get out of here,’
shouted Kasyx; and the Night Warriors quickly retreated from the cemetery with
the dead still screaming at them. Beyond the cemetery was a grassy field –
although the grass was deep crimson, and the trees around it were pungent
yellow, like a photograph that had been printed with the wrong dyes. Together,
they jogged through the grass, looking back from time to time to make sure that
the dead from the cemetery weren’t following them.

After a few minutes, the screaming
died away into the distance. The crimson field began to rise, until at last
they found themselves standing on a ridge overlooking a strange city. All of
the city’s buildings were towering and black, sparkling with lights, and
walkways connected the upper levels, one to another. There were black flags
flying in the wind, and small aircraft swarming around the city like hornets.
The city ticked, with a regular tensile tick; Tebulot turned to his companions
and said,

‘Clockwork. Can you hear that? The
whole place is clockwork.’

It was then, however, that Samena
turned around, and touched Xaxxa’s arm. Xaxxa turned around, too, and alerted
Kasyx.

‘They’ve followed us,’ he said.

Kasyx looked back at the wind-blown
field of crimson grass. Advancing across it in a single line that was strung
out from one horizon to the other, came the dead. They were silent now, and
they walked with their heads lifted in decaying defiance, their tattered robes
and dresses dragging through the knee-deep grass.

‘Tebulot,’ said Kasyx. ‘This isn’t
any figment of the boy’s imagination; this is Yaomauitl’s doing. Are you fully
charged up?’

Tebulot checked his charge-scale,
and then nodded. Samena unclpped a multiple arrowhead from her belt, and
slipped it over her index finger. Xaxxa stepped to one side, and crouched,
ready to attack.

Now, the distant thunder began to
grumble, and lightning walked across the far horizon like the long-legged
scissorman. As the dead came nearer, the rain began to fall, big fat widely
spaced droplets that rustled in the grass. Kasyx heard a high-pitched clicking
behind and above him, and almost immediately four small clockwork airplanes
from the clockwork city came curving overhead, their propellers shining in the
rain, their stubby black wings buffeted up and down by the wind.

There was another sound, too. The
tearing of grass. They looked down, and saw that handfuls of crimson turf were
being ripped away from underneath by skeletal fingers that were demanding
access to the world above. Only fifteen feet away, a hand broke loose from
under the grass, and then another, and then the rotting head of a corpse
emerged from under the ground, grinning the grin of the long-dead, its teeth
and its ears and its eye sockets clogged with soil. At last, it tore aside the
turf as if it were opening the zipper of a sleeping-bag, and rose to its feet,
blindly and unsteadily, its head lifted to seek out the scent of living flesh.
Another hand tore through the earth, right by Samena’s foot, and then another.
Soon the whole grassy ridge was wriggling with decayed hands, as the dead
struggled out of their burial-barrow.