West Shore Drive runs into Lafayette Street, which itself runs directly into the centre of Salem. But not far from the intersection of West Shore Drive and Lafayette, there is the Star of the Sea Cemetery. And when I came panting and limping along Lafayette, my chest bursting and my throat feeling as if it had been scoured with glasspaper, I saw that the graves at the Star of the Sea had opened, too. Scores of the walking dead were there: in yellowed shrouds and rotting robes, flickering with that cold electrical light which had first announced the presence of Jane.
I slowed down. The dead were shambling all across the -highway, and at first I thought they were simply dazed and disoriented. But then I saw that in their midst there was a stationary car. I ducked down, and weaved my way between the roadside trees, trying to get as close as I could without being seen. But I was still 25 yards away when I realized what had happened. The dead had stopped the car by crowding across the road. They had seized the driver, and now he was lying spreadeagled over the hood, his shirt ripped open to reveal his chest and stomach. The walking dead had torn him open, so that his bloody ribs gaped like gates, and one of them was holding up his red-glistening heart in a skeletal hand, so that the blood ran down the bare bones of his wrist. Two or three more of them, in varying stages of decay, were feeding on his liver and his intestines.
I retched, and brought up swallowed sea water. One of the dead raised her head from the car-driver’s ripped-open abdomen, a string of whitish intestine still dangling from between her teeth. She stared at me with naked eyeballs, and then screeched, and pointed, and the rest of the grisly assembly turned and stared at me, too.
I upped and ran, regardless of the stitch in my side, sprinting along the middle of the highway as fast as I possibly could. I could hear my own breath whining in and out of my lungs, and the flapping of my feet on the pavement. And behind me, far too close behind me, The rushing sound of the dead, rushing and whispering and whooping.
I had almost run back to the intersection with West Shore Drive when the first of the corpses from Waterside Cemetery appeared, and then more of them, spreading themselves out across the road and cutting off my escape. I turned back, and saw that the crowd of corpses which had been pursuing me along Lafayette Street were only a few yards away, their arms triumphantly raised to catch at me.
Desperate, I tried to dodge to the side; but one of the corpses clawed at me and caught my sleeve. I punched him hard in the face, and to my horror my fist went right through his half-rotten flesh, breaking his partly-decayed skull, and my hand was plunged deep into the chilly slime of his liquefied brain. Another corpse, a woman, caught me from behind, and jumped on to my back, tearing with her bony fingernails at my face and neck. Then another, his legs rotted up to the thighs, came grabbing at my ankles and my knees. More and more of them clamoured around me, scratching and tearing, and for the first time in my life I actually screamed out loud.
They dragged me down to my knees by sheer weight of decomposing flesh. They whooped and whistled and screeched, their breath whining in and out of lungs that were ragged with decay, through nostrils that were caverns of wormy meat. I felt hands ripping at my clothes, scratching at my chest, as the corpses obeyed the blind command from Mictantecutli to bring him hearts. Hearts, he wanted, freshly torn from living humans; hearts to gorge on, so that he could rise again, and stalk the earth.
Suddenly, there was a roaring sound, and the corpses started to shriek and clamour and stumble away. I was down on the pavement with my hands held over my head, rolled up into as much of a human ball as I could manage; but I risked a glance to my left, up under my arm, and what I saw was salvation on wheels. It was Quamus, in our refrigerated truck, driving into the corpses with his horn blaring, his engine revving, and his headlights full on. I saw a woman caught beneath one of his front wheels, her body pinned by ten tons of solid truck; I saw her thrash and writhe and then a splash of blackish fluid leap across the road. I saw another corpse frantically trying to scale the side of the cab, and then falling away as the flesh sloughed off his arm. Quamus drove relentlessly through the clamouring tides of resurrected bodies, crushing and smashing them without mercy. Once, they had all been humans, but now they were nothing more than the puppets of Mictantecutli, the pariah.
Wiping blood away from my mouth, I climbed up on to the truck and knocked on the side door. Quamus saw me, and unlocked it, and I climbed gratefully in. He locked the door again, and immediately pulled away, blinding and killing three or four more living corpses who stood in our path.
‘You stink,’ he said, sharply. ‘You stink of the grave.’
They were going to tear my heart out,’ I told him. They were clawing at my chest, you know that? Clawing at me, like vultures.’
There was a long silence between us. Quamus pulled the truck in to the side of the road, and then slowly manoeuvred it around, so that we were driving back towards Salem.
‘You let Mictantecutli go,’ he said.
I looked at him. There was no point in denying it. He knew as well as I did that when the graves of Granitehead opened, that meant that the Fleshless One was free.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Quamus kept his eyes on the road ahead, and his foot pressed hard against the floor. In a minute or two we would be passing through that crowd of walking dead for a second time, and he wanted to make sure that we hit them at a good 80 miles an hour, unstoppable, and invincible.
Quamus said, ‘Mr Evelith said that you would probably let the Fleshless One go free. He suspected it. So did Enid. Enid said that she had read your fortune in the tea which you drank when you first came to visit us, and she could see uncertainty there, and extravagant promises from a supernatural force. The Fleshless One promised you your wife back, I suppose?’
‘Do you blame me for saying yes?’
Quamus shrugged. ‘We are dealing with a greater force here; a force of magic and terrible malevolence. We cannot talk in terms of blame or recrimination. You did what you felt was right. We know that you are not a bad man.’
At that moment, we collided with a whole congregation of walking corpses, at almost 90 miles an hour. Decayed flesh flew in all directions, and there was a hideous pattering sound on the windshield, as disembodied hands were flung against it by our slipstream.
Quamus impassively checked his side-mirrors, to make sure that none of the corpses were still clinging to the sides of the truck, and then slowed down, and drove into Salem more sedately.
There was no need to observe the speed limit: the police were already too preoccupied.
Salem lay under the midnight-black sky like a vision of Hell. Fires burned all over the city, the Roger Conant Co-operative Bank, Parker Brothers Games factory, One Salem Green, they were all alight, and burning like Satan’s ovens. The city was a city of historic cemeteries, and all of them had spewed out their dead: Harmony Grove, Greenlawn, Derby Street, Chestnut Street, Bridge Street, and Swampscott. The dead crowded through the streets savaging the living, and the malls and pavements were splattered with blood and strewn with freshly-killed bodies.
Several times, as we headed out of the city towards Tewksbury, walking corpses clutched at our truck and tried to cling on; but Quamus kept barrelling on until they dropped off, and once he swung the side of the truck against a street-sign to dislodge three of them who were holding on to the nearside fender. I glimpsed them in my rear-view mirror, rolling over and over, limbs and skulls tumbling in all directions.
We reached Tewksbury in 15 minutes, and Quamus blew the airhorns in front of old man Evelith’s wrought-iron gates. Enid shooed the dog away, and opened up the gates for us, and Quamus drove speedily inside, jumped down from the cab, and helped Enid to lock up behind us.
Old man Evelith himself was standing on the top of the front steps, leaning on his walking-cane. When he saw me climbing down from the truck’s cab, he raised one hand in salute, and said, ‘You’ve done it, then? You’ve brought Mictantecutli back?’
I hesi
tated, but I could see that Quamus was holding back, so that it would have to be me who explained what had happened. I walked slowly forward across the shingle, and then stopped, and cleared my throat.
‘I have a confession to make,’ I said, hoarsely.
Old man Evelith stared at me for a very long time; fiercely at first, but then more understandingly; and then he turned away to look up at the darkening sky, and the rooks which circled in it like the vultures of hell itself.
‘Well ,’ he said, ‘I guessed this would happen. But you must come in. You look tired, and cold; and you have the smell of death upon you.’
THIRTY-FIVE
‘I believed it,’ I said, as we sat in the library over glasses of strong brandy. ‘It promised to give me my wife back, and I believed it. That’s my only excuse.’
Duglass Evelith watched me carefully through the half-moon lenses of his spectacles.
Then he leaned forward with his elbows on the library table, and said, ‘Nobody’s accusing you, Mr Trenton. Or perhaps I should call you John. I have been trying for years to rescue my dead ancestor; you have far more justification for trying to rescue your dead wife. Unfortunately, Mictantecutli is not a demon whose word can ever be trusted. It is a demon of death and deception; and you have been deceived, and almost killed.’
‘What are we going to do?’ I asked him. ‘It’s already destroyed half of Salem. How can we stop it?’
Old man Evelith thoughtfully rubbed the back of his wrinkled neck. ‘I have been giving this matter some considerable thought, while you have been bathing. Quamus believes that Mictantecutli will probably have been fed by now, and will have revived enough to have left the boat-ramp where you landed it. But he doubts if the demon will have gone far. It has awoken after 290 years, and it will no doubt wish to acclimatize itself before it attempts to exercise its full power over the local population, and further afield.’
‘How will it do that?’ I asked.
‘Well ,’ said old man Evelith, ‘it is our guess that it will seek out somewhere to conceal itself; somewhere that it remembers from days gone by. Enid has suggested David Dark’s old cottage by the Mill Pond. That was where it spent most of its days in Salem; and that is where it will probably retreat now.’
‘But that cottage isn’t there anymore.’
‘No,’ said Duglass Evelith. ‘According to my maps of the 1690s, David Dark’s cottage used to stand in a clump of trees just west of what is now Canal Street.’
‘And what stands there now? Or is it open ground?’
‘Oh, no, there’s a building there now,’ said old man Evelith. ‘The Lynnfield & District Book Warehouse. That, in our opinion, is where Mictantecutli will go to hide for a while; and that, in our opinion, is where we are going to have to go to destroy it.’
I took another sip of brandy, and felt it burn down the back of my throat. Then I looked at Quamus, and old man Evelith, and said, ‘What do you propose to do? How do you go about destroying a living skeleton - especially one as powerful as Mictantecutli?’
Quamus said, ‘There is only one hope. The Fleshless One must be frozen. Once frozen, it must be attacked with sledgehammers, and dismantled. Each bone must then be buried separately over a wide area, and each grave must be blessed in the name of the great spirit Gitche Manitou and in the name of the Christian Trinity. Then, there will be no escape for Mictantecutli, not even into the world of Indian phantoms, which were the aboriginal ghosts of the American continent, before the white man’s religion came.’
‘How do you propose to freeze it?’ I wanted to know. ‘Do you think it’s going to let you? This morning, it blew a police officer’s guts out right in front of my eyes.’
‘We must take the risk of approaching it,’ said old man Evelith. ‘It may kill us outright, but we must take the risk. There is no other way. Once we are close enough, we will spray it with liquid nitrogen. We already have the equipment prepared. We were going to use it to dismantle Mictantecutli once my ancestor Joseph Evelith had been released from his bondage to Tezcatlipoca. But even if that release is not to be, we must still destroy the Fleshless One, and we have the means to do it.’
I looked seriously at Duglass Evelith, and then at Qua-mus. ‘You’re going to have to let me do it, you know that.’
Old man Evelith shook his head. ‘The risk is too great. And, besides, you do not understand these things.’
‘I released Mictantecutli. I must take the chance of trying to destroy it.’
‘No,’ said old man Evelith, adamantly. ‘Quamus is already prepared.’
‘But - ‘
‘No,’ old man Evelith repeated, and this time I knew there was going to be no arguing with him. But he added, more sympathetically, ‘You can accompany him, if you wish.
You can be his assistant. He will need somebody to help him to carry the cylinders of liquid nitrogen; and he will need somebody to help him collect the frozen bones of Mictantecutli when it has finally been defeated.’
Old man Evelith sounded as if the job had already been done: but I could tell from the stern look on Quamus’ face that the danger we were up against was extreme, and that there was every chance that by later this afternoon both of us would be feeding the bony maw of the Man of Bones, the Fleshless One.
‘I want you to rest now,’ said Duglass Evelith. ‘You will leave for Mill Pond in an hour. I want you to think of nothing else but victory over the influences of darkness, and that you are strong enough to defeat even the most terrible of demons. Consider yourself a warrior, John, who is about to embark on a great adventure. Dragon-slaying, monster-butchering, something mythical and courageous. For after all, destroying Mictantecutli will be exactly that.’
In spite of Duglass Evelith’s advice, I spent most of the next hour pacing around my sitting-room, drinking whisky. Outside, the sky grew darker and darker, until I had to switch on my lights. I tried to read, but I didn’t feel in the mood for geology, and I couldn’t get past the word ‘Preface.’ I tried to telephone Gilly, but the lines were down, and al I could get was a distant crackling noise. At last I lay on my bed with hands over my eyes, and thought of nothing at all. Five minutes later, however, when I was just beginning to relax, Quamus came into my room and said sombrely, ‘We are ready to leave now. Please be quick.’
I followed him downstairs without saying a word, half-skipping as I went to push my sneaker on to my left foot. The refrigerated truck had been loaded with twenty cylinders of liquid nitrogen, and a device like a fire-fighter’s spray, as well as an insulated suit and gloves to protect Quamus from the sub-zero gas. Enid was to come with us, but Duglass Evelith was going to stay behind. He explained that he was too old to fight demons any more, but all of us knew that if Mictantecutli were to wipe out Quamus, Enid, and me, then somebody who knew how to defeat it would have to remain safe.
Duglass Evelith took my hand between both of his, and squeezed it. Take care,’ he said, ‘and remember that what you are fighting has no moral scruples, no conscience, nothing that even remotely approximates a human conscience. It will kill you if it can. It will expect you to do the same in return.’
We drove away into the darkness, the three of us sitting side by side in the cab. We said very little to each other as we headed east towards Salem. We were al afraid, we all knew it, and there wasn’t much point in discussing it. The cylinders of nitrogen clanked around in the back, but I wondered whether there was really any future in trying to use them on a creature like Mictantecutli.
All around us, the Massachusetts countryside was like hell by Hieronymous Bosch.
Fires leaped up from shopping malls and residential estates; overturned vehicles burned in the roads in grotesque funeral pyres, their tires flaring and dripping like incendiary wreaths.
Enid said, This is what Salem must have been like in the days when David Dark first brought Mictantecutli back from Mexico. No wonder they tore all references to it out of the history books, and never spoke about it. It must have
seemed like a nightmare until they finally got rid of it.’
At last we reached the outskirts of Salem, and made a careful detour down Jefferson Avenue to cross the MBTA Commuter tracks quite a way south of the Lynnfield Book Warehouse. As we drove slowly up towards the warehouse, our tires crunched on broken glass, and the highway was splattered with red in places, as if it had been raining blood. I saw a family who had been dragged out of their car and pitifully torn to pieces as if they had been attacked by wild animals. And the dreadful truth of it was that it was my fault, my responsibility. If it hadn’t been for my selfishness and my blindness, Mictantecutli would never have gotten free; and this gory rampage of Salem’s dead would never have happened.
All I could possibly do to atone for my stupidity was to destroy the demon I had set free.
The warehouse stood on the intersection of Canal and Roslyn, overlooking the railroad tracks. It was here, 290 years ago, that David Dark had lived, and it was here that David Dark had died. His cottage had stood among a clump of trees that had long since vanished; but for Mictantecutli this was still familiar ground. Demons permeate the ground on which they live with a rank odour, like diseased dogs, or so Duglass Evelith had told me. That was how they knew where to return after hundreds of years; and that was why devil-possessed places like Amityville and Rohrerstown always had a sickening odour.
The warehouse was a gray, rectangular building, with a small brick administration block on one side, and rows of windows high up by the roof. As Quamus drew the truck in to the curb, we knew at once that Duglass Evelith had guessed right: from inside the building, we could see those blue-and-white electric flickers which betrayed the presence of that malevolent energy with which Mictantecutli had been haunting Granitehead. Quamus pulled the truck to a stop across the street, and we al climbed out.
‘There can be no delay,’ said Quamus. ‘We must go straight in, and spray the creature with liquid nitrogen straight away. Any hesitation and it will destroy us; and you have seen what it is capable of doing to a human body, without even touching it.’
The Pariah Page 38
