“Well, for one thing, we don’t know where he is, do we? And for another thing, I may be wrong about the sacrifice, and he may not have tipped off Umber Jones that I was leaving my body. He’s still our classmate, until we can prove him otherwise. Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”
They staked out Umber Jones’s apartment from eight o’clock onwards. In Ray’s car sat Ray and Sharon and David Littwin. In Jim’s car, a few spaces behind them, sat John Ng and Beattie McCordic and Muffy Brown. Across the street, facing in the opposite direction, was Russell’s Mustang Mk II, with Sue-Robin Caufield and Seymour Williams. Russell had the coffee-mug filled with ghost-dust, on strict instructions that he wasn’t to eat it.
In Ray’s car they all ate Big Macs with their mouths open and noisily drank strawberry milkshakes. Sharon had brought her book of voodoo ritual so that she could say the words that would prevent Umber Jones’s smoke-spirit from returning to his body. They were written in a very old African language and she could barely pronounce them. She kept repeating them over and over again, until Ray said, “For Christ’s sake, Sharon. You sound like you’re bubbling in your bathwater.”
Babai babatai m’balatai … hathaba m’fatha babatai …
Jim felt exhausted but he was determined to see this through. He sat slouched down in his seat, wearing Ray-Bans and a green West Grove baseball cap in case Umber Jones recognised him from across the street. He probably wouldn’t – especially since he must still believe that Jim was six feet under, in a tight pine box, suffering a well-deserved punishment for trying to steal his loa stick. All the same, Jim didn’t underestimate Umber Jones’s cunning; nor Tee Jay’s either, if Tee Jay really had betrayed him.
Over an hour went by and Jim was beginning to think that he ought to call it a night. He got all of his students to call their parents to tell them that they were working late on an English project, and to hold supper for them. Beattie McCordic wouldn’t eat pizza or hamburgers, and much to her embarrassment her stomach began to gurgle, although John kept saying, “It’s quite all right. Even your stomach has the right to express itself.”
“Spare me,” said Beattie.
At that moment, without any warning, the front door of Umber Jones’s apartments was flung open and out strode a tall, dark man wearing a wide-brimmed Elmer Gantry hat. It certainly looked like Umber Jones, but was it? “You see him?” he asked Beattie. “Just across the street there … passing the telephone booth … passing the trash bin.”
Beattie frowned across the street. “I don’t see anybody. There’s nobody there.”
“Good – that’s definitely him, then,” said Jim. “If you could have seen him, he might have been a decoy. Let’s go.” Beattie gunned the engine and swerved away from the curb. Jim said, “Not too fast. He’s just passing that grocery store. That’s it. We don’t want to get too close, just in case he gets the idea that we’re following him. He won’t be too alert, though. He doesn’t realise that anybody can see him.”
Umber Jones reached the end of the block and crossed over without even looking at the passing traffic. A truck passed less than three inches away from him, and his smoke whirled up, but he didn’t even flinch.
“Keep going, keep going, left a bit,” said Jim. “He’s still headed in the same direction, but I think he may take a right at Colonial.”
Beattie was driving so that Jim could concentrate on their pursuit. He was an edgy passenger, but he knew that he might have to jump out at any moment and follow Umber Jones’s smoke-spirit into a house or a store or a restaurant. He wanted to have a ‘getaway’ car ready, too, in case anything went seriously wrong. He didn’t have a gun – not that a gun would have had any effect against a smoke-spirit – and he had already seen from his dealings with Umber Jones that running away was the better part of valour.
“Right,” said Jim. “He’s definitely turning right.” He dialled Sue-Robin’s number. “We’re following him north-westward on Colonial. Why don’t you meet up with us at Colonial and Warren?”
“Where do you think he’s going?” asked John.
“I don’t know … but wherever it is, he’ll be causing mischief.”
The Smoke turned left and then right again, along a street of shuttered stores and cheap hotels. Outside the Glencoe Hotel two men were talking to a girl with fluffed-up hair and a short sequin mini-dress. One of the men was dressed in a white suit and built like an oak front door. The other was thinner, with greased-back hair and sunglasses. The thin one was remonstrating with the girl about something, because he kept jabbing his finger at her and every now and then he would make a slapping gesture in the air as if he was angry enough to hit her.
“Oh God,” said Jim. “Here we go again.”
The Smoke-figure came sweeping down the street and as it came nearer and nearer to the hotel entrance it appeared to swell in size, until it was even larger than Mr Oak Front Door. Jim didn’t see its hand twisting, but the streetlight caught the flash of its knife.
This time, he couldn’t let it happen without saying a word – whether the men deserved what The Smoke intended to do to them or not. He put down the car window and shouted out, “Hey! Look out behind you!”
Immediately, the thin man in sunglasses dodged behind the girl. Chivalrous, thought Jim. Mr Oak Front Door swung around with his fist half-raised just as The Smoke glided into him and stabbed him in the side of the belly.
“What’s happening?” shrieked Beattie. “Look at that man!”
Blood spattered all over Mr Oak Front Door’s suit as Umber Jones stabbed him again and again. Nobody except Jim could see The Smoke. All they could see was a heavily-built man performing a jerky dance on the sidewalk, while his coat was covered in one bright red splash after another. He made one more stumbling step and then he fell face-first on to the concrete.
Umber Jones turned toward Jim’s car with a hideously frightening expression on his face. His eyes burned and his cheeks were powdered with ash. For a moment Jim thought that he was going to come rushing over to attack them. His bloody knife was lifted and he even took two or three steps across the sidewalk. Then, suddenly, he stopped. Jim could almost hear him thinking aloud. If Jim had escaped from his coffin and was following him with some of his students – what were the other students doing?
He bared his teeth and screamed, “Curse you, Mr Rook! I’ll kill you for this!” and he turned and went rushing back the way he had come.
“Follow him!” Jim shouted, forgetting that Beattie couldn’t see him.
“Which way? Which way?”
“Back that way! Quick! He’s headed back to his own apartment!”
Police sirens began to wail in the distance as Beattie performed a jerky, bouncing seven-point turn in the middle of the street. Jim picked up his mobile phone again and punched out Sue-Robin’s number. There was a long burst of crackling static, but then he heard her saying, “Yes? Yes? I can’t hear you, Mr Rook!”
“Can you hear me now? Good! Then head right back to Umber Jones’s apartment, and step on it!”
Next he tried Ray’s number, but he couldn’t make any contact at all.
“Can you still see him?” Beattie asked desperately.
“It doesn’t matter – he’s seen us now. Just get back to his apartment as fast as you can. I’m trying to raise Ray but I can’t get through.”
Ray, Sharon and David were round at the back of the Dollars&Sense store, gingerly picking their way between orange-boxes and vegetable crates and stacks of sacks of potatoes. The store was still open. Through a wired-glass window they could see the back of a young man’s head as he was talking on the telephone. Sharon accidentally kicked a fruit-box, and the young man turned and peered outside. There were no lights in the back yard, however, and he soon turned away again, still talking. The three of them dodged across to the black-painted fire-escape without being seen.
They climbed the fire-escape as quietly as they could. They knew that they wouldn’t disturb Umber
Jones’s body, but Jim had warned them about Mr Pachowski, and it was quite possible that Tee Jay was there, too. When they reached the second-storey landing, Ray pointed toward Umber Jones’s bedroom and whispered, “That’s it. All we have to do now is break in and grab the stick.”
He reached the window, and tried to lift it up.
“Is it l-l-locked?” asked David.
“Not only locked, it’s been screwed down, too.”
“What do we do now?”
“We use subtle Italian skills handed down from father to son for generations.” With that, he took off his pointy-toed shoe, swung his arm back and smashed the whole window with it.
David said, “For C-c-c. Christ’s sake, Ray!” pressing his hands to his ears. Glass pealed and tinkled into the yard below, but Ray unhurriedly put his shoe back on and gave them a shrug. “This isn’t the kind of neighbourhood where anybody’s going to come running at the first sound of broken glass. In fact they’ll probably go running in the opposite direction.”
He cleared away a few remaining splinters. On the other side of the window hung a heavy black curtain, and he had to pull that aside, too, in order to climb over the sill. He gave it three sharp tugs. And there he was, lying on his bed, with his black nightlights floating beside him – the body of Umber Jones.
“There’s the stick – I can see it,” hissed Sharon. “Come on, Ray, all you have to do is grab it, then I can say the words and we can get the hell out of here!”
Ray eased himself in through the window and walked across the bedroom. He looked down at Umber Jones in fascination. “Look at him, his eyes are open but he can’t see me. Creepy, isn’t it?”
“Just grab the stick!” Sharon urged him.
Ray put out his hand and grasped the silver skull on top of the loa stick. As he did so, however, the bedroom door burst open so violently that it juddered against the wall, and Tee Jay came hurtling in. He seized hold of Ray’s shirt and flung him aside.
“You dare to touch the sacred property of Baron Samedi!” he roared. He didn’t sound like Tee Jay at all. He sounded as if his voice had been composed from a hundred slowed-down screams – harsh and agonised, but totally commanding. He didn’t look much like Tee Jay, either. His face was plastered white all over, except for black circles painted around his eyes and a black slit of a line painted across his lips. He was bare-chested, and his skin was decorated with scores of tiny barbed hooks, each of them tufted with red-dyed fur or clumps of chicken-feathers. He stood amidst the clouds of incense-smoke and he looked like a visitor from hell.
Ray climbed to his feet. “Listen, man,” he said, “I don’t want any trouble here. But we have to have that stick, man. Your uncle can’t go on killing people. You know that.”
Tee Jay stared at him with eyes like glistening black beetles. Then, without warning, he swung his fist and knocked Ray back against the door-jamb. Ray toppled sideways and hit his head on the edge of the table.
As Tee Jay went over to hit him again, Sharon managed to scramble in through the window. She reached out for the loa stick, but Tee Jay must have been able to sense her. He pivoted around and slapped her open-handed across the side of the head. She fell to the floor with her ears ringing. “Touching the loa stick is blasphemy!” he roared at her.
“Tee Jay!” she begged. “It’s Sharon!”
He ignored her. He picked Ray up from the floor but Ray was out cold, with a swelling bruise on the side of his head. Tee Jay let him drop.
“You stay where you are,” he told Sharon. “My uncle will be back here soon, and then you’ll find out what we do to blasphemers.”
Sharon tried to crawl back toward the window but he stepped forward and slapped her again. “Stay where you are, bitch! I’ve been waiting for this!”
Outside the window, David kept himself pressed against the wall, hardly daring to breathe. He couldn’t even call for help, because Ray was carrying the mobile phone. He listened and waited and prayed that Tee Jay wouldn’t look outside.
“It wasn’t your fault,” said Jim. “I shouldn’t have told you to drive so fast.”
They were only two blocks from Umber Jones’s apartment, but the police had flagged them down for speeding, and now they were waiting with almost intolerable tenseness while a pot-bellied officer pedantically wrote out a ticket. “You just remember, little lady, ten miles on your speed puts another hundred feet on your stopping distance. There are kids around here, at this time of night; and people with too much alcohol inside them. You don’t want to go killing nobody, do you, just because you’re one minute late for some appointment?”
Jim was grimacing and squeezing his hands into fists. For God’s sake, cut the road safety lecture and let’s get out of here.
But before he tore off the ticket, the officer stepped back and walked very slowly all the way around the car, peering at the tyre-treads, checking the lights, tapping at the bodywork. Anybody would have thought that he was thinking of buying it. “All righty,” he said, at last, and handed Beattie her ticket. “Just remember the golden rule.”
“The golden rule?” asked Beattie, anxiously.
Come on, thought Jim. Come on, come on, come on.
“Better to be late in this world than early in the next.”
Oh, please.
They drove slowly away, leaving the police officer standing in the street watching them go. They turned the corner, and then Beattie slammed her foot down. The rear tyres howled like slaughtered pigs, leaving twenty-foot slashes of burned rubber on the concrete.
Russell and Sue-Robin and Seymour had already arrived outside the street door that led up to Umber Jones’s apartment.
“No sign of Ray and Sharon yet,” said Seymour. “I just hope they’ve managed to grab that stick.”
Russell tried the door but it was firmly locked. “Best thing we can do is stand here and wait. He may be smoke, but even smoke needs an eentsy-weentsy gap to get through.”
“I’m scared,” said Sue-Robin.
Russell peeled the clingfilm off the top of the coffee-mug. “There – you don’t have to be scared. If he comes anywhere near, we’ll be able to see him.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. Run, I guess.”
Sue-Robin peered into the mug and wrinkled up her nose. “Do you think that really works? I mean, that’s just some old woman’s ashes, isn’t it?”
“Mr Rook seems to think that it’s going to work.”
He took a pinch between finger and thumb and sniffed it. “Doesn’t smell like anything much.”
“Oh, gross, Russell. You’re breathing somebody in.”
Russell threw the ghost dust away. As he did so, however, he was sure that he momentarily saw something in the air in front of him – something that looked like disembodied fingers. He flattened himself back against the door, and he was heavy enough to make it shudder.
“What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” asked Sue-Robin, in fright.
“He’s here,” said Russell, in a tiny, squeezed-up voice. “He’s here! He’s standing right in front of us!”
Sue-Robin snatched the coffee-mug and flung the ghost dust into the air. For a few terrifying seconds they saw the outline of Umber Jones, ten feet tall, with his knife raised up in the air. His teeth were clenched and his face was rigid with fury.
He vanished; but Russell rolled himself away from the door just as the shoulder of his shirt was sliced open. “Get back!” Russell yelled at Sue-Robin and Seymour. “Get the hell out of here! Run!”
The door rattled ominously; and then there was a long sucking sound, as if a current of air were streaming underneath it. Russell couldn’t see it, but Umber Jones had just poured under the bottom of the door, and now he was making his way back upstairs.
Russell said, “What’s Ray’s number? Tell him that Umber Jones has come back!”
Sue-Robin scrabbled with her mobile phone, but even when she managed to get Ray’s number right, she heard nothing at a
ll.
“Oh, Jesus, this is all getting out of control,” said Russell.
They heard a car speeding toward them, and then a squeal of brakes. They turned around and saw that Jim had arrived, with Beattie and John.
Jim looked at Russell’s shoulder. It was bleeding slightly, but the wound wasn’t too deep. “What happened?” he said. “Where is he now?”
Russell nodded up toward Umber Jones’s apartment. “I think we blew this one, Mr Rook. All we’ve managed to do is to make him pissed off. And I mean seriously pissed off.”
An upstairs window opened and Mr Pachowski peered out. “What’s going on down there? Get away from that door or I’ll call for the cops!”
Jim ignored him. He gave the front door a hefty kick with his left foot, then another. The frame cracked a little but still the door wouldn’t move.
“Hey! What are you doing down there?” Mr Pachowski demanded. “That’s vandalism! That’s criminal damage!”
“Oh shut up you old idiot!” Sue-Robin retorted.
Jim kicked the door again but still it wouldn’t budge. Russell said, “Here – get out of the way. You got to leave this kind of thing to experts.” He stepped back six or seven paces, and then came running at the door shoulder-first, all 300 pounds of him, and knocked it clear off its hinges and into the hallway.
“Come on,” said Jim. “Let’s hope to God we’re not too late.”
They reached the door of Umber Jones’s apartment. It was an inch or two open. Maybe Tee Jay had left it like that so that his uncle’s smoke-spirit could return more easily. From inside, they could see only the dimmest flicker of candlelight, and they could hear voices, too.
Jim eased the door wider. He turned around to Russell and Sue-Robin and Seymour and put his finger to his lips. “Ssh, follow me.”
They crept across the darkened living-room to the bedroom. For all of his bulk, Russell was remarkably graceful. The bedroom door was wide open, and Jim could see Umber Jones’s feet in their dusty black patent shoes, lying on the bed. The candles circled and dipped in their saucers, making the light swivel across the walls. He stepped closer. Through the crack at the side of the door he could see Tee Jay, standing with his back to him, tufted with feathers and fur. He could see part of Sharon’s skirt, too. Ray lay sprawled in full view, his face pale, unconscious.
Rook & Tooth and Claw Page 21