I nodded. I was so terrified that I could scarcely speak. I opened the back of the truck, and helped Quamus to unload one of the cylinders of nitrogen, and mount it on a trolley.
Quamus then dressed himself in the silvery insulated suit, while Enid strapped the firelighter’s hose on to his back.
It took us five minutes at least to get ready; but fortunately there were none of the walking dead around, and it didn’t seem as if any of Mictantecutli’s minions had seen us.
We quickly crossed the street, and went into the warehouse yard by a side entrance.
As we approached, the feeling of dread increased; and the stench of that evil demonic presence grew so strong that I felt like retching. I forced open a small back door in the warehouse, and we pushed our way inside, Quamus first, then me with the trolley of liquid gas, then Enid. We hurried silently through the corridors of the Lynnfield offices, left, then right, then left again, until we reached the swing doors which led directly into the warehouse itself.
Quamus, his insulated helmet held under his arm, beckoned me wordlessly towards the doors. Through the small windows in them, we could see right across to the far side of the warehouse; and what we saw there made me go eight times colder. It was like a scene from some barbaric representation of all that was sickening, and all that was foul.
The skeleton Mictantecutli was sitting cross-legged on a makeshift throne of crates and packing-cases, his huge skull bent forward. All around him, in their charnel-house robes, swarmed the dead of our local cemeteries, from Granitehead and Salem and Maple Hill. Each of the corpses was bearing in his hands a torn-out human heart, sometimes two or three, and waiting his turn to lay his gruesome offering at Mictantecutli’s bony feet.
The whole grisly scene was lit by that flickering electrical light which turned the colour of blood to black; and the eye-sockets of the prince of the region of the dead to dark, knowing, infinitely malevolent pits.
Quamus said, ‘This is it. Are you ready?’
‘No, but let’s do it.’
Quamus fitted his helmet over his head, undipped the nozzle of his fire-hose, and then said, ‘When I shout “go,” turn on the gas. Not before. When I shout “off,” turn it off.’
‘I think I can understand that.’
‘Okay, this is it,’ said Quamus, and before I knew what was happening we had pushed open the swing doors and started jogging as fast as we could across the concrete warehouse floor, thrusting aside corpse after shambling corpse, dodging away from flailing arms, both of us intent on one thing only: freezing the Fleshless One before it realized what we were doing, and blew us both apart.
We slid over blood and hearts and human tissue, and then we were there, right in front of Mictantecutli, right beneath his immense luminous skull ; the skull which was made up of scores of other skulls. The demon had been gorging itself on hearts, and its bare teeth were bloody and tangled with sinew and arteries. It nodded and turned towards us, its head overhanging us like the moon, and then Quamus screamed a muffled, ‘Go!’ and I yanked the spanner that turned on the liquid nitrogen.
Freezing gas spewed out of the nozzle, and Quamus directed it straight upwards, straight into the creature’s skeletal face.
I heard a deep, vibrant, floor-shaking roar. It was more like two subway trains colliding head-first in a tunnel than a sound that could have been made by an earthly creature. I was thrown right over on to my side, jarring my left shoulder on the floor; and pieces of Mictantecutli’s corpses flew all around me in a grisly blizzard.
Quamus somehow managed to stay on his feet, spraying the demon’s skull in slow, steamy, systematic sweeps. I felt the intense cold of the liquid nitrogen even from ten feet away, and I could see the whiteness of frozen gas forming around Mictantecutli’s mouth and eye-sockets.
But the creature was far from defeated. It reached out with one skeletal arm, and before Quamus could duck away, it had seized him around the waist. I heard Quamus yell, and I saw him directing the hissing stream of gas on to the fingers which clutched him; but Mictantecutli squeezed tighter and tighter, and then I heard a terrible crunching noise inside of Quamus’ insulated suit. Quamus jerked, sagged, jerked again; and then collapsed to the floor. The gas nozzle fell with him, spraying all around us like a fulminating python.
I scrambled to my feet, and snatched the fire-hose myself. The nozzle was so cold that the skin of my hands stuck to it, and I couldn’t peel them free. But I directed the gas at Mictantecutli, streaming it up and down its ribs, from side to side across its face, and shouting at the top of my voice, words that were utter gibberish, words of fear and hatred and hysterical revenge.
Mictantecutli reached out for me, slowly but with terrifying inevitability. I sprayed its fingers, and saw them draw back a little, but then it began to reach out for me with its other arm.
I stepped away; but lost my footing on the rotting body of an old man. Mictantecutli’s huge hand seized my hip, and then my waist, and I felt as if I had been snatched by a Great White shark.
‘Aaaaaaahhhhhhh!’ I screamed at Mictantecutli; and I knew I was dead. I felt one of my ribs break, and the crushing pain on my pelvis was unbearable. I sprayed the demon’s face again and again, but then I began to lose consciousness. Everything went black-and-white, like a photographic negative, and I felt a creaking sound inside of my body that must have been my hip-bone being strained to the utmost.
But quite suddenly, the pressure was relieved, and then released altogether. I dropped to my knees, my eyes tight-closed, trying to keep the stream of liquid gas directed towards Mictantecutli, although I hardly knew where the demon was. It was only after I had recovered enough to lift my head and look around me that I realized what had happened.
Standing amidst all of the walking corpses, giving out an unearthly and radiating light of her own, white-faced, white, but somehow strong and celestial and beautiful, stood Jane. Her hair flowed up around her head as it had before, when I had seen her at Quaker Lane Cottage; but now it gave off steady star-like streams of silver radiance.
She was quite naked, but somehow her nakedness was sexless and spiritual. Beside her walked a young boy of four or five years old, as beautiful as she was, also naked, giving off the same calm light.
Mictantecutli unsteadily lifted its ghastly head. Its cheekbones were thickly rimed with frost, and icicles hung from its collar-bone. It regarded Jane in apparent disbelief, and shook itself like a wounded animal.
I didn’t know what was happening or why; but I took my chance. Holding up my liquid nitrogen spray, I climbed on to Mictantecutli’s shin, and then on to his massive pelvis.
Gritting my teeth against the grating pain of my own broken rib, I scaled the side of his ribcage, and stood there, pouring out freezing gas until the demon’s vertebrae were thick with sparkling white frost.
Jane gradually faded; and the boy with her. But at that moment there was a snapping noise, and one of Mictantecutli’s frozen fingers dropped from its hand and clattered on to the floor. Then one of its ribs gave way; then another; and I found myself standing on what felt like a collapsing staircase, as the Fleshless One’s entire skeleton began to fall to pieces under me.
Its skull bent forward, and its spine cracked, and then that huge and hideous head rolled to the concrete floor and shattered into dozens and dozens of smaller skulls.
All around me, as I climbed down from the demon’s skeleton, the dead of Salem and Granitehead were rustling to the floor in ragged heaps; the false life taken out of them; the false breath drawn from their lungs.
Enid came slowly forward, and helped me to turn off the liquid nitrogen. All the skin was frozen from the palms of my hands, and I was severely bruised and lacerated. But I was alive, at least, and that was one blessing that I couldn’t question.
‘Did you see Jane?’ I asked Enid, in a shaky voice. ‘Did you see her then?’
Enid nodded. ‘I saw her. I called her myself.’
‘You called her yourself?
How?’
Enid rested her hand on my shoulder, and smiled. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we still have work to do. All of these bones must be taken away from here, and buried according to the rituals.’
‘But how did you call Jane? And why did she help us? I thought she was one of Mictantecutli’s servants.’
‘She was,’ said Enid. ‘That is, until you killed her a second time, and freed her from Mictantecutli’s power. She is at rest now, because of you; and so is your unborn son.’
‘I still don’t understand how she came.’
Enid looked around at the carnage in the warehouse, and sadly down at Quamus. ‘Your wife was a member of the sisterhood, Mr Trenton. She would never have told you because she was forbidden to tell you; and in any case you would never have believed her.’
The sisterhood?’
Enid nodded. ‘Your wife was a Salem witch. Not from her mother’s side of the family, but from her father’s, so her power was not particularly strong. But she was enough of a witch to have been in touch with others of the sisterhood; and enough of a witch, of course, to have been very susceptible to the powers of Mictantecutli.’
‘What now?’ I said, nodding towards the broken skeleton. ‘Now this monster’s dead, are your powers all gone?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Enid. ‘The power of kindness will always endure. When Mictantecutli saw your dear dead wife, Mr Trenton, it was a reminder to it that its power is limited; and that there is a greater power which reigns over it, even today.’
I looked up. I felt extremely tired. Through the upper windows of the warehouse, falling in cathedral-like rays, came the pale light of the afternoon, and I realized then that the darkness of Mictantecutli had at last been destroyed. I tried very hard not to cry.
THIRTY-SIX
I left Granitehead in early May, and went to live for a while with my parents in St Louis.
My mother overfed me, and my father took me for long walks in the Missouri Botanical Gardens and talked about life the way he saw it, cut and dried, because he thought it would be good for my head. He made me a beautiful pair of Oxford shoes, hand-stitched, and gave them to me for no particular reason at all, except to show that he did love me, after all.
I went back to Massachusetts in June to sell Quaker Lane Cottage. I drove up to Tewksbury to see old man Evelith, and to share a sherry with him in his library, and he told me that he believed he had come close to finding the magical bonds which would hold Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, and that he would be able to use one of the bones from Mictantecutli’s dismembered skeleton in a ritual which would put his ancestor to rest for good. I left after an hour: I didn’t want to hear any more of that demon talk.
I didn’t go to see Edward Wardwell. I had heard from Gilly that Edward had never forgiven me for blowing up the David Dark, and I guess he had every right to feel sore about it. As for Gilly, well … she and I were never particularly suited. I could have loved her once, I suppose, but somehow our personalities never quite meshed.
With Walter, I went to Waterside Cemetery and together we laid flowers on the graves of the ones we had once loved; and then we shook hands and said goodbye. I don’t know whether Walter forgave me, or not, or even if there was anything to forgive.
Mictantecutli had hit Salem like a hurricane, and he was still busy sorting out legal claims for damages, and helping to identify and re-bury the dead.
I said goodbye to Laura; I said goodbye to Keith Reed, and to George Markham’s wife.
George had never been found, and was listed as ‘missing, feared dead’.
Then, at last, I drove back up to Quaker Lane Cottage, and stood in the overgrown orchard looking out over Granitehead Neck, my hands in my pockets; watching the distant white sails of the boats, and the glitter of summer sunshine on the waters of Salem Harbour.
I pushed the garden-swing, until it began to utter that distinctive creakkk-squik, creakkk-squik. Then I left it, and it gradually lost momentum and swung to a standstill.
The wind was warm. I felt as if the world had recently been reborn. I left the cottage, and closed the garden-gate behind me.
Table of Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
The Pariah Page 39
