Rook & Tooth and Claw

by Graham Masterton

  “Tell her to brace herself!” Randy shouted. “For Christ’s sake, we’re going in!”

  “Catherine!” Jim yelled. “Catherine! You have to listen to me! Catherine!”

  He reached across and tried to turn her face around, but as soon as he touched her cheek he shouted, “Ah!” and whipped his hand away. Catherine’s cheek had been rough and whiskery, and he had distinctly felt teeth.

  “Catherine, if you’re in there, Catherine, try to fight it!” Jim screamed at her.

  “Jim? What on earth are you doing?” said Susan. “Jim! Get your head down, you’ll break your back!”

  Every cockpit window seemed to be filled with nothing but rising trees. Mark was still gibbering “shit, shit, shit,” under his breath, and Sharon was praying to Allah.

  Catherine can’t hear me, thought Jim, desperately. She may be there but she simply can’t hear me. She’s an animal now, not a human being. And how can you make an animal hear you?

  He suddenly patted the front of his shirt and felt the whistle that Henry Black Eagle had given him, dangling around his neck. He lifted it up and blew it. He didn’t hear anything at all, and Catherine didn’t respond, so he blew it again, even harder this time.

  Catherine’s head turned toward him with a terrifying jerk. Her black eyes glared at him with such ferocity that he flinched away. He could see the shadow around her quite distinctly now, and it was less like a shadow than a mask – a snarling animal mask, with its lips curled back in hatred.

  Jim said, “Catherine!”

  A startling look of recognition crossed her face. She said, “What? What’s happening?” and even as she spoke the blackness in her eyes began to shrink. The shadow faded and suddenly flowed away, like ink washed away down a sink. She looked around her and saw the trees rearing up on every side of them, and Sharon and Susan with their heads down between their knees.

  “What’s happening?” she shrieked. “I don’t understand what’s going on! What’s happening?”

  “Get your head down!” Randy shouted at her.

  But Jim said, “Catherine – you’re Catherine! Catherine White Bird, that’s who you are!”

  Catherine stared at him for one long moment, and then she raised both hands and touched her forehead, as if she couldn’t believe that this head, this hair, this face were really hers.

  “You’re Catherine White Bird,” said Jim, and even if they all died now, at least Catherine would die with the full knowledge of who she was, and what had happened to her.

  She turned to the instrument panel, and rigidly held out her hand. “Live!” she demanded. “Live!”

  Jim saw the lights snap back on again, and the indicator needles suddenly bob back up into position. But the trees were looming so close that they blocked the sunlight out of the cabin, and the Golden Eagle seemed to be dropping even faster, as if it had given up the effort to stay airborne.

  “Randy!” Jim yelled at him. “Randy – try the engines again!”

  Randy flicked the starter switches. Nothing.

  “Keep trying, for Christ’s sake!” Jim insisted.

  Randy flicked them again, and then again. And then the starboard engine coughed, and the port engine coughed in sympathy, and suddenly they felt the deep, ripsaw vibration of both engines at full throttle. Randy pulled back on the controls so hard that it looked as if he were physically lifting the Golden Eagle back up into the air. Sharon screamed as branches lashed against the wings. Mark let out a long, eerie-sounding moan of sheer terror.

  Jim thought, “Please, God”, and held Catherine’s hand, and now it was smooth and small, the way it should have been, and she interlaced her fingers with his, and whispered, “Gitehe Manitou, save us.”

  The Golden Eagle burst through the top of the treeline, its propellors spraying leaves and branches in all directions. It continued to climb over the lower slopes of the Cibola Forest, higher and higher, rising to such an altitude that they could see the sun shining across twenty miles of forest and desert, with the Zuni Mountains rising behind them now in a faint purplish heat-haze.

  “Well, I don’t know what in hell happened back there,” said Randy. “But today I can truly tell you that I believe in God. Or Allah,” he added, turning to Sharon. “Or Gitche Manitou, whatever.”

  Mark said, “Whew.”

  “Is that all?” Randy ribbed him. “Just ‘whew’?”

  “Yeah, ‘whew.’ I thought I’d crapped myself but I haven’t.”

  “I guess that’s one small mercy,” said Randy, and tilted the Golden Eagle toward Gallup.

  John Three Names was waiting for them on the hot, sun-glaring airfield. He was a small, dapper Navajo in a brown coat, beige slacks, and a brown wide-brimmed hat with feathers in it. He had one of those crinkled, soft-skinned Native American faces that always reminded Jim of a parcel wrapped in secondhand brown paper. But his eyes were bright and hard, and he spoke in quick, clipped sentences, and there was nothing soft or secondhand about his ideas.

  “Hi, I’m John Three Names,” he said, grasping Jim’s hand. “I gather you had some trouble getting here. They had two firetrucks and an ambulance standing by.”

  “Well, let’s say we’ve had something of a scare,” Jim told him. He turned around and looked at Catherine, who was helping Sharon with her bags. “I’d like to think that it’s over, but somehow I don’t think that it is.”

  “I have a car outside,” said John Three Names. “Or maybe you’d like to rest up here for a while.”

  “I think we can go on,” said Jim. “How’s everybody feeling?”

  “Let’s go on,” said Catherine. “The sooner we get there, the better.”

  Jim said, “You’re sure?” but she reached out and touched his hand, very lightly, and he knew that she wanted nothing more than to get this journey over with. She hadn’t thanked him for what he had done in the airplane, but then she didn’t need to. Only she and Jim had shared that moment when she had realised who she really was, and that shared understanding was better than thanks. Jim felt very close to her, just then, and as she followed John Three Names, with her long hair shining in the afternoon sun, he could almost have loved her.

  “Don’t let Dr Ehrlichman see you looking at your students like that,” said Susan.

  “Like what? I’ve been worried about her, that’s all.”

  “As you said yourself, she doesn’t look like the back of a totem-pole.”

  “Susan—”

  She linked arms with him. “We’re alive, that’s all that matters. I really thought that we were going to die back there. I suddenly realised how unprepared I was.”

  She stopped, and lifted her head, and kissed him. Mark and Sharon were walking close behind them and Mark wolf-whistled.

  Jim said, “Do you mind? Even faculty members are allowed to make discreet demonstrations of mutual affection.”

  John Three Names had a blue Ford Galaxy parked outside the airfield, with seats enough for all of them. “I borrowed this from the Navajo Community College. You must drop in and see it, Mr Rook. I think you’ll be impressed.”

  “How come they call you John Three Names?” asked Mark, as they drove away.

  “Because I have three names, of course.”

  “Really? What are they?”

  “‘John’, ‘Three’ and ‘Names.’”

  Mark frowned at him for a long time. “You’re putting me on, aren’t you?”

  John Three Names looked at him and laughed. He said, “Nobody laughs louder than a Navajo, when he’s tricked a white man.” Jim smiled and sat back and tried to enjoy the drive to Window Rock. Once or twice he took out the whistle that Henry Black Eagle had given him and turned it around in his fingers. It had saved him, he understood that. It had saved all six of them. But he still didn’t really know why, or how. Catherine didn’t seem to have the shadow around her any more, but what were the chances that it might come back? And what might it try to do to them next time? He lifted the whistle to his lips
and he was about to blow it when he saw Catherine looking at him with her fingertip raised to her lips.

  He said, “What?”

  “Better not to disturb him again,” she warned.

  “Him? Who’s him?”

  Catherine lifted her hands so that they were covering her face, but opened her fingers so that her eyes could look out. Jim couldn’t understand what she meant, but it had a very sinister effect, like a mask, or somebody who was spying on the world from somewhere else.

  He lowered the whistle and dropped it back into his shirt. Obviously there were times when it was going to help them, and other times when it was going to bring them trouble.

  Susan reached across and held Jim’s hand. It could have been a gesture of revived affection, or it simply could have been a way of confirming that they were all still alive. There was one thing that Jim knew for sure – he wasn’t going to fly back to Albuquerque, not with Catherine, anyway.

  John Three Names said, “Any of you ever visited the Navajo Nation before? I think you’re going to find it quite an eye-opener. I’ve lived here for the past twenty-five years and I’ve seen some changes here, I can tell you. We still have far too many people on welfare, but we’ve kept up to date with the modern world in most ways. To me, the most important thing is that we’ve kept our native language and our national identity. It’s just a pity that so much magic has gone out of the land.”

  They arrived in Window Rock at mid-afternoon, under a flawless blue sky. It was a small Arizona town much like any other, with stores and gas stations and office-buildings. John Three Names had booked them into the Navajo Nation Inn, $73 the night. A calm, handsome woman in a blue dress showed them to their rooms – plain, but sunny, and decorated with yei rugs with stylized figures on them. A boy of about five followed them a few paces behind, frowning with shyness and curiosity. John Three Names stopped, and went back to the boy. He held up both hands, which were empty, but then he rubbed them together, and produced a quarter out of thin air. He gave it to the boy and said, “Don’t spend it all on candy.”

  Sharon and Catherine were sharing a bright, big room with a view of the pool. Jim touched Sharon’s shoulder as she carried her bag through the door, and said, “Don’t forget, will you? Keep your eye on her … and if you see anything that worries you—”

  “I’ll look after her, Mr Rook,” Sharon reassured him. “She comes from an ethnic minority that’s even more minorer than mine.”

  Jim and Susan had adjacent rooms with a connecting door. Susan rattled the handle to make sure it was locked. “You know, just in case you start sleepwalking.”

  “What if I’m awake?”

  “If you’re awake, you die.” She didn’t realize how prophetic that was.

  John Three Names followed Jim into his room. Jim slid open the patio door and stepped out onto a small terracotta-tiled balcony with a table and chairs. In the distance, the vermilion mountains were washed out with heat. A lizard baked in the dust beyond the balcony, but didn’t stir.

  “Like the room?” asked John Three Names.

  “It’s fine, thanks.”

  “Tell me what really happened on the airplane.”

  Jim looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “It wasn’t just instrument failure, was it?”

  “Oh, no? What makes you think that?”

  “When we were driving here, I could see you in my rear-view mirror. I saw you take out the whistle. I saw Catherine White Bird caution you not to blow it. Then I saw her cover her face.”

  “So what did that tell you?”

  “It told me that you had probably blown the whistle before, for some reason, and that you were puzzled about the effect it had produced. So maybe you wanted to try it again, to see what would happen this time. But Catherine White Bird said no, you would disturb him – and when you asked who him was, she covered her face.

  “You know why she did that? She didn’t want to speak his name, in case it was carried to him on the wind, and he knew that she was coming closer. But that whistle has only one purpose, to call the spirit called Coyote. And to do this –” and here he covered his face in the same way that Catherine had done “– is to warn people that Coyote isn’t far away, and that he’s listening out for you.”

  Jim said, “I think you’d better explain this from the bottom up.”

  John Three Names came and stood next to him. “In days gone by, before the white men came, when you could see spirits by broad daylight, Coyote was the greatest mischief-maker of all the Navajo demons. A killer, a trickster, a raper of women, and a thief. When it came to the grand assembly of all the supernatural beings, the gods would sit facing the south and the demons and other malevolent spirits would sit facing the north. But Coyote was so deceitful that none of the other spirits would allow him to sit close, and he stood by the door, ready to run away before the others ganged up on him.

  “Coyote did everything perversely. He profaned against the sacred rites. He tipped his arrows with grey feathers, which is a recognized sign of bad luck. The month of October, which is the month of mishaps and mistakes, was dedicated to him. When the night sky was created, he was given a handful of stars to put in their places, but he was too irresponsible to do it properly, and so he flung them up all in one mass, and created the Milky Way.

  “Whenever games were played, Coyote would set one side against the other, and then run off with the prize.”

  Jim said, “This is all myth, surely. I mean, it’s a story – the same kind of story that the Greeks and the Romans used to tell. Zeus hurling his thunderbolts, Neptune with his trident – and Apollo riding his fiery chariot through the sky.”

  “Not quite,” said John Three Names. “There are no records of anybody ever having seen Zeus, in the flesh. But Coyote was spotted by Navajo hunters as late as 1861. They turned back from the hunting-ground, of course, because if you ever saw Coyote it meant unhappiness and death. It’s all recorded on blankets, if you want to see them.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Jim. “I was always a slow reader when it came to blankets.”

  “The days of the gods and the demons began to die in 1864, after the Navajos had persisted in raiding their neighboring tribes, the Hopi and the Zuni. Colonel Kit Carson went on what you might call a search-and-destroy mission to rout out the last of the Navajo. Carson laid waste their crops and killed their livestock. Then he made eight thousand of them walk three hundred miles from Fort Defiance to Fort Sumner on the Pecos River. Many died. The rest he kept prisoner for four years until the Navajo finally agreed to sign a treaty.

  “It was during this time that the Navajos’ faith in their spirits was so badly shaken, and their spirits – well, what can spirits do when nobody believes in them any longer? They don’t die, they’re immortal, but they melt away. The earth gods sank into the ground, and if you go out into the desert you can still see the hills where they did it. The wind gods blew away across the mountains, and caused tornadoes. The river gods ran away to the ocean, although once in a while they come back to flood the Mississipi to remind us of the powers they used to have.

  “But mostly the gods were not believed in, so they went their way. There was only one exception – Coyote. When the white men came, and the days of myth and legend were all over, he was wily enough to find a way to live in the open, so that humans would believe in him, and spirits, too. He mated with a human woman, who gave birth to a child that was human and Coyote, both. And this boy gave birth to another child, and so on, from one generation to the next. What this means is that Coyote is still with us today, Mr Rook, and he’s very much alive.”

  “This isn’t easy to believe,” said Jim.

  “Why shouldn’t it be? You’ve seen Coyote’s mischief with your own eyes. Henry Black Eagle told me what happened at your college; and he also told me that your apartment had been torn apart, and your cat killed.”

  “So explain it to me. Why is he doing it, and how?”

&nbs
p; “The why is simple. The man that Catherine was supposed to marry went to a wonder-worker and asked him to summon up Coyote’s powers, so that Coyote would bring Catherine back to him – and if she fell in love with any other man, to kill him.”

  “Like a hex, you mean?”

  “You could call it that. Except that this hex has taken the shape of a beast, which watches Catherine day and night.”

  “I think I’ve already seen it a couple of times,” said Jim. “It’s like kind of a shadow that seems to follow Catherine around.”

  John Three Names said, “You’re the only man who ever has – and that’s why Henry Black Eagle and his family asked you to come here. If you can persuade this man to release Catherine from her promise, the beast will have to leave her – and only you can be sure that it really does.”

  “Do you know this man that Catherine’s supposed to have married?” Jim asked him.

  “I’ve seen him once or twice, but I’ve spoken to him only once. He lives in a trailer up at Meadow Between Rocks. Most of the time he keeps himself to himself, and everybody respects his privacy and leaves him alone. He’s supposed to have quite a ferocious temper on him, although I’ve never seen any of that.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Several. But most people call him Dog Brother.”

  Jim sat down on the end of the bed. “The question is, John, what am I going to offer this – Dog Brother to give up Catherine? She’s a beautiful girl. If I had the choice, I wouldn’t give her up.”

  “Henry Black Eagle has some property up by Shiprock, as well as stocks and bonds. You’re authorized to offer these to Dog Brother in exchange for releasing Catherine from her promise, plus a quarter of a million dollars in cash.”

  “What if he’s not interested?”

  “Then we will have to try another way. We will have to find the wonder-worker who conjured up Coyote’s curse and see if we can make a bargain with him.”

  “And supposing he doesn’t want to play ball, either?”

  “I think we should cross that canyon when we come to it.”

  “What about this Coyote character? If he’s half-human, then he must be findable.”