Rook & Tooth and Claw

by Graham Masterton

  Jim scribbled George Babouris’ number on a paper coaster. “You can call me here before twelve. After that, you can catch me at college. There’s a football game tomorrow afternoon.”

  Henry Black Eagle stood up and held out his hand. “I don’t know what to say to you, Mr Rook. I don’t expect you to forgive me. All I ask is that you try to understand.”

  “Well, there is one thing,” said Jim. He lifted the silver whistle out from under his shirt. “What exactly does this thing do?”

  “It attracts Coyote’s attention. All the old wonder-workers used one, when they wanted to summon him up from the underworld. It’s set at the same pitch as a bat’s squeak, and in the days before he became half-human, Coyote used to have a taste for bats.”

  “Let me tell you – we were flying from Albuquerque to Gallup when the airplane lost all of its power. No engines, no electrics at all. Catherine was staring at the controls and I could see the beast’s shadow around her. It was a miracle that we didn’t nosedive into the forest. But I blew the whistle and it seemed like she woke up, and we got all of our power back. If we’d have hit those trees we would have been dead for sure.”

  They left the cafe and walked out onto the sidewalk. The sun was melting into the ocean, and a chilly wind was beginning to blow. Waste paper tumbled between the gliding wheels of the day’s last rollerbladers, and the sun caught the spokes of a passing bicycle. Henry Black Eagle looked thoughtful.

  “What you’ve said … that’s very strange. Coyote would have done everything he could to make sure that Catherine reached him safely. He wouldn’t have wanted her to crash the plane like that. He didn’t want any of you dead until you had reached Window Rock, and he didn’t want you dead at all.

  They walked a little further and then Henry Black Eagle said, “You know, it seems to me that someplace inside of her, Catherine knew what was going to happen to you. After all, she had Coyote’s own blood in her veins. She knew what was going to happen to you and she knew that it would be far more terrible than dying quickly in a plane crash. So she used Coyote’s own powers to shut down the plane’s electrics. He can do that, you know. In the old days, when the white men first set up their telegraph lines, he could silence them just by staring at them, the same way that some men can silence a dog with just a look.”

  “So when I blew the whistle—”

  “That’s right. You alerted Coyote, and when he realised what was happening, he stopped her.”

  “But that means that Catherine has some kind of will of her own, even when she’s turning into the Changing Bear Maiden.”

  “Perhaps. But even if she has, I doubt if Coyote will let her exercise it ever again. Remember what I said. The more times she changes, the more of a beast she becomes.”

  Jim reached his car. “Call me tomorrow,” he said, and Henry Black Eagle nodded. Jim glanced at him in his rear-view mirror as he drove away. He decided that he didn’t feel any sympathy for him, not after what he had done, but he did think that he looked like the loneliest man on God’s earth.

  Jim slept badly that night. He kept dreaming about the thin man with the yellow glasses, and his dream was filled with a stomach-dissolving sense of dread. He thought that he woke up, and looked across the room, and saw a figure in a charred, smoking blanket sitting on the armchair opposite. He thought, God, it’s Susan, she isn’t dead after all, and he climbed off the couch and approached her. But the blanket-figure didn’t move, and he was too frightened to open it to see what was inside it. He reached out his hand but then he woke up and realised that this was a dream, too. He was soaking with sweat and he was shaking.

  Over breakfast, George looked at him through the haze of frying bacon and said, “You’re looking rough, Jim. After everything’s that happened, you ought to take a break, you know that.”

  “I’m probably going back to Arizona tonight.”

  “Really? What the hell for?”

  “Well, let’s just say that I’ve got some unfinished business.”

  George sat down opposite and began to fork up mouthfuls of bacon and runny fried eggs. “Don’t do anything stupid, Jim. I know you. You’ve got kamikaze written all over you.”

  “Oh, and you don’t think that a 4,000-calorie breakfast is suicidal?”

  “Jim – I have to keep my strength up. That Valerie, I’ll tell you. She’s a very demanding woman.”

  “You haven’t—?”

  “She kept me dancing till ten after two. Polka, foxtrot, waltz, shimmy, shake, Charleston, twist, frug, locomotion, turkey trot, you name it.”

  “You enjoyed it, didn’t you?”

  “Sure I enjoyed it. And let me tell you something else. I think I’m in love.”

  Jim left him to his bacon and eggs and drove to the college. After last night’s dreams he wanted to take another look through the book that John Ng had been reading – Navajo Legends. He needed to know as much as he could about Coyote’s possible weaknesses – his vanities, his petty jealousies, the way he played tricks. He was convinced that the only way to beat a deceiver was to out-deceive him.

  The college campus was almost deserted this morning, apart from three or four students who were hanging up the bunting for this afternoon’s game. West Grove had a long-standing grudge against Azusa Commmunity College, mostly because Azusa had never beaten them by less than 38 to 7. Jim looked up as he crossed toward the college building. The sky was strange, with heavily-building clouds. He had a feeling that something threatening was in the air.

  He walked along the wax-polished corridor toward Special Class II. Mr Wallechinsky, the security guard, was just coming out of Sue Randall’s room, and locking the door behind him.

  “Ah – Mr Rook! Any idea when Ms Randall’s coming back? She borrowed a projector from the science department and I know they’re pretty keen to have it returned.”

  “I think she’s going to be a few more days yet, Mr Wallechinsky. Why don’t you just give it back to them?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Jim unlocked his classroom and opened the door. Immediately, he stopped dead. The room had been totally wrecked. All of the desks had been toppled over, and some of them had been completely dismembered. Personal computers lay everywhere, their screens smashed, their keyboards ripped apart, their printers crushed. The portraits of Shakespeare and Mark Twain and Walt Whitman had been pulled from the walls and torn apart. The fluorescent lights dangled down from the ceiling. Jim’s own desk had been tipped on one side and its contents strewn all over the floor.

  Worst of all, though, were the marks on the walls. There were criss-cross gouges everywhere, like the gouges of giant claws. Whole furrows of plaster had been dragged out, in deep parallel stripes, and one clawmark went right through the frame of the blackboard, and across its surface – not just scratching it but cutting it almost through to the wall behind.

  Jim took two or three steps into the room, and sniffed, the way that Mrs Vaizey would have sniffed. He could pick it up now. Animal – or maybe two different animals. The heavy funky smell of bear, and the sharper, rancid odour of wild dog. He picked up a first edition, his own, of John Peale Bishop’s Green Fruit. His father had given it to him when he had graduated. Now its spine was broken and half of its pages fell out onto the floor.

  She’s here, he thought to himself. It had never occurred to him that she might follow him back to Los Angeles, but she obviously had. She’s here, and she’s making sure that I suffer.

  He heaved his desk back onto its feet. For some reason, it had never occurred to him that the Changing Bear Maiden might come after him. No wonder his grandfather had been warned him to go away – as quick as he could and as far as he could. Coyote was obviously not willing to forgive and forget, even though he had now had his bride-to-be, and he had no reason to suspect that Jim would try to set her free. Although maybe he did. Maybe he had sniffed out in Jim that burning sense of consideration that had made him want to teach a remedial class in the first place. Maybe he kn
ew that Jim would never let Catherine go.

  Jim started picking up chairs and desks, one by one. The floor was strewn with ripped-up poems and essays and broken glass. God knows it was hard enough for most of these students to write one coherent sentence. Now most of their semester’s laborious work had been thrown all over the floor. Jim picked up Mark Foley’s essay on Rip van Winkle: ‘Rip van Winkle let his childrin run wile they never wore no shos and his suns pants was alus fallin down.’ When he thought of the essays that Mark was capable of writing now, only a few months later, it really hurt him that somebody could have treated his first efforts with such disrespect. He picked up another sheet and it was Mark’s latest piece of work on Walt Whitman: “Walt Whitman was gay. He kissd dyin soldiers durin the Cival War which was part human but it exited him too. Still he loved his mother and was never rude about women. He rote about ‘a merry housefull of young ladies’ and ‘I never saw so many fine-looking grey hair’d women … such as no time or land but ours could show.’”

  Mark’s spelling was still erratic, but his ability to read and to comment on what he had read had increased enormously. Henry Black Eagle had been right: Coyote knew how to attack his enemies where it hurt. He knew what they valued the most, and he had no compunction about destroying it.

  He was still picking up papers and books and pieces of broken glass when Mr Wallechinsky came in. “What the hell happened here?” he demanded.

  “Our vandal came back,” said Jim.

  “Look at the state of this place. I don’t believe it. I only looked in here about an hour ago.”

  “And you didn’t hear anything, and you didn’t see anybody?”

  “Only that big fat student of yours – what’s his name, Gloach?”

  “Russell Gloach, that’s right. And I’d prefer it if you didn’t call him big and fat. Think of some other way to describe him. Like, think of his hair.”

  “OK, I saw that big fat crewcut student of yours. He was in here maybe fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “I don’t know. Let me see … there were two or three of them wandering in and out. That Indian girl, she was one of them.”

  “Catherine White Bird? Catherine White Bird was here?”

  “I saw her with my own eyes, walking down the corridor. She was brushing her hair.”

  “Do you have any idea where she went afterward?”

  “How should I know? Wherever it was, though, she wasn’t in any kind of a hurry.”

  She’s back, thought Jim. And now she’s come to get me.

  “OK, Mr Wallechinsky,” he said. “Take it easy. Let’s lock this room up for now.”

  “You don’t want me to clean it up?”

  “No, I want you to leave it just the way it is. After the game this afternoon I’m going to call the cops, and I don’t want any of this evidence swept up or tampered with.”

  “In that case, maybe you should stop tidying it up yourself, Mr Rook. I bet by now you’ve left so many fingerprints they’re going to be able to prove that you did it.”

  Jim dropped Mark’s essay on Whitman onto the floor. “You’re right,” he said. “But there’s something I am going to tidy up.”

  He went back outside and walked around the buildings, but there was no sign of Catherine anywhere. He went down to the football field. Greg Lake was there, sitting on the bleachers talking to Sherri Hakamoto.

  “Hi, Mr Rook. Looking forward to the game this afternoon?”

  Jim shaded his eyes with his hand and peered all the way around the field.

  “You seen Catherine today?”

  Greg’s face went through a complicated series of contortions before finally deciding to look mildly puzzled. “Catherine? No. I thought she was still in Arizona.”

  “Well, so did I, Greg, but apparently not. By the way, I’m going to have to ask you to stay out of the home room today. There’s been some more vandalism.”

  “Hey, none of my stuff’s been damaged, has it? I left all my project in there.”

  “I don’t know. You’ll have the chance to look later. But meanwhile, keep an eye out for Catherine, will you?”

  “Okay, Mr Rook.”

  Jim borrowed Mr Wallechinsky’s spare set of keys and spent the next twenty minutes combing the college grounds. Because it was Saturday, many of the buildings were locked, but he checked the art studio, the design block and the gym complex. He even searched the girls’ locker-rooms (making sure he shouted “halloo!” loudly before he went in). He opened Catherine White Bird’s locker but there was nothing inside it to suggest that she was back. Books, magazines, T-shirts, cosmetics – as well as cut-out pictures of fashion models and moody-looking young rock stars. Kurt Cobain grinned from beside her mirror, and Jim thought, if you think that what happened to you was bad … wait till you see what the Changing Bear Maiden can do.

  In the end, he had to give it up. He gave Mr Wallechinsky’s keys back and went to the faculty lounge and picked up the phone. He waited and waited and at last Henry Black Eagle answered.

  “Mr Black Eagle? Jim Rook. No, it doesn’t matter that you haven’t booked the tickets yet. No, I’m glad that you didn’t. We don’t need to go to Arizona. Catherine’s here.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Henry Black Eagle, in a chilled voice.

  “Catherine’s here. My classroom’s wrecked, the same way the locker room and my apartment were. Our security man told me that he saw her in the corridor.”

  “But don’t you see – now that’s he got her – Coyote wouldn’t let Catherine out of his sight.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s simple, Mr Rook. If Catherine’s here, then Coyote must be here, too.”

  “I hope you’re kidding me.”

  “No, Mr Rook. I’ve told you how possessive he is.”

  “So what do you think he wants?”

  “I think, Mr Rook, that you must have left him feeling very angry. Coyote likes to think of himself as the trickster, not the tricked. He might be wary of you, as I said, but it looks as if he’s come to show you who’s boss.”

  “I don’t understand it. Why should he bother? I’m only one white man.”

  “He’s seen how much you care for your students, Mr Rook. Maybe he knows that you’re not going to rest until you get Catherine away from him.”

  Jim thought: that can’t be the whole story. Even if I came after Catherine, Coyote could set the Changing Bear Maiden on me, or use all kinds of magic to kill me before I could get anywhere near him. He doesn’t have anything to fear from me, not really. So why has he come all this way to hunt me down?

  And then it occurred to him. Maybe he does have something to fear – something that he knows about but I don’t. Maybe I can kill him, after all.

  It must be something to do with the fact that I can see spirits. Not only white man’s spirits, but Native American spirits, too.

  “Are you still there?” Henry Black Eagle asked him, impatiently.

  “Yes, yes, I’m still here. Listen, I’ll tell you what I want you to do for me. Go see Paul and Grey Cloud and ask them which Native American spirit is Coyote’s deadliest enemy. Ask them which spirit could be most easily persuaded to kill him.”

  “There are many. I don’t know them all.”

  “Well, go ask your sons. Then come up to the college, and make it as quick as you can.”

  “But Mr Rook—”

  “No buts, Mr Black Eagle. You owe me. And more than that, you owe your daughter, too. This could be the only way of saving her.”

  The Azusa team and their supporters arrived in a procession of coaches and people carriers just after twelve. Dr Ehrlichman had arranged a cookout under the trees on the north side of the college, and the air was already pungent with the smell of mesquite. Jim circled the school grounds, his coat slung over his shoulder, looking from right to left for any sign of Catherine or Coyote. If they were still around, they were keeping themselves well out of the way,
but Jim was sure that he could sense their presence. He kept seeing furtive movements behind the trees, and flickering shadows where no shadows ought to be cast. He felt a prickling sensation in his skin, too, and thought of Macbeth: ‘By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.’

  He walked between the wooden picnic tables where the West Grove team were eating their lunch. Mitch Magro, the new captain, was trying to work the Fumblers up into a serious fighting mood. “We owe this to Martin, OK? He didn’t die so that we could lose to Azusa. He trained us, didn’t he? He really inspired us. So we’re going to go out there this afternoon and we’re going to beat the living crap out of those guys.

  “If we catch it, we run with it. If it hurts, we think how bad Martin got hurt. If we feel like giving up, we don’t. I’m going to tell you this: I would rather die than lose this game, and I want you all to feel the same way.”

  Russell Gloach was sitting a little way apart from the others, cutting up a bunless hamburger into very small pieces.

  “How’s the struggle going, Russell?” Jim asked him.

  “Oh, great. I love these diet burgers. It’s just that I could eat about four hundred of them.”

  “Come on, Russell. You’re doing good.”

  “I’m weak, Mr Rook, I promise you. I’m so goddamned weak I can hardly stand up, let alone play football. I haven’t had a Twinkie since two weeks Tuesday. I can’t remember what peanut butter tastes like.”

  “Listen, Russell,” said Jim. “Something pretty weird is happening here today. Catherine’s back.”

  “What’s weird about that?”

  “Well, she’s not exactly herself. She’s having some kind of a breakdown. The point is, if you see her, I want you to make sure that you grab hold of her and send somebody off to find me.”

  “Grab hold of her? Supposing she doesn’t want to be grabbed hold of? Especially by me. Why don’t you get Brad Kaiser instead?”