Rook & Tooth and Claw

by Graham Masterton

  “Hi, Miss Neagle.”

  “Hi yourself.”

  “That hat sure brings back some memories.”

  “I like it. I found it in my apartment when I moved in.”

  “Suits you. Well, it would suit anybody who wanted to walk around with a lobster on their head.”

  “Of course … that wasn’t all I found.”

  Jim said, “Oh, no?” Then, “How about a beer?”

  “A beer? I hope you know me better than that.”

  Jim blinked at her in surprise. Apart from exchanging a few words around the pool every day, he hardly knew her at all. “Okay, then,” he said. “Whatever.”

  “Bourbon, straight up. No rocks.”

  Jim unscrewed the Wild Turkey and poured a generous measure into a highball glass with Miami Parrot Jungle printed on the side. Miss Neagle came over and took it and said, “Why don’t we drink to very long life. With the emphasis on very.”

  “All right. Very long life.”

  Miss Neagle leaned forward and stared into Jim’s eyes. “You don’t recognise me, do you?”

  “Sure I recognise you. You’re Miss Neagle from Apartment 105.”

  “Yes, I am. But I’ll tell you what else I found in my apartment when I first moved in, apart from this hat. I found Mrs Vaizey.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She was still there, Mr Rook, at least in spirit. Very faint, almost faded away. But when I was lying in bed that very first night, almost asleep, she spoke to me.”

  “She spoke to you? What did she say?”

  “She was kind and she was sympathetic, and she gave me all kinds of encouragement. You see, I was very depressed when I first moved here. I was almost flat broke, and a man who I loved very, very dearly had just died of cancer. Sometimes I thought about ending it all. But Mrs Vaizey gave me comfort and friendship like I’ve never know before. She made me feel that I wasn’t alone any more.”

  The feline formerly known as Tibbles was rubbing herself frantically against Jim’s leg, desperate for food, but all Jim could do was stare at Miss Neagle with his beer half-raised to his mouth.

  Miss Neagle sipped her whiskey and smiled at him. “Mrs Vaizey was about to fade away completely, the way that all spirits do, after a while. But I didn’t want her to go. I loved her. I needed her. So I let her in. I don’t quite know how it happened. I just sort of … let her in. Miss Vaizey is here inside of me, Jim.” She tapped her forehead. “She’s still here … she’s still with us.”

  “I don’t believe this,” said Jim. “You’re trying to tell me that you’re Miss Neagle and Mrs Vaizey, both?”

  “Got it in one. And it happens more often than you’d think. A spirit who isn’t yet ready to fade away finds somebody who’s still alive who desperately needs her. Somebody who’s sick, maybe – or suicidal, like I was. Both of them benefit. The spirit gets to stay here for a whole lot longer, and her host gains all of her memories and all of her lifetime’s experience.”

  Jim walked back into the living-room and circled Miss Neagle in deep suspicion. This was beginning to sound like some kind of very eccentric shakedown. “If this is true, that you’re yourself and Mrs Vaizey both, then of course you’ll know what special talent Mrs Vaizey had.”

  “That’s right. Of course I do. She could tell people’s fortunes … with tea-leaves, or the Tarot, or by reading palms. She was also a damned good knitter.”

  Jim thought: she was right, but that wasn’t really much of a test. If Mrs Vaizey’s son had left her lobster hat behind, he had probably left her Tarot cards and her knitting patterns, too.

  “You know what her maiden name was?”

  “For sure. Duncan, Alice Duncan – born January 17, 1919, in Pasadena, the second of seven children.”

  “And you know how she died?”

  Miss Neagle nodded. “She suffered. She never told you how much she suffered, because she knew that she’d upset you. But she suffered, believe me.”

  “You know how, and why?”

  “One night, her spirit left her body, looking for a voodoo houngan who was trying to take possession of one of your students. Unfortunately, the houngan was waiting for her.”

  Jim stopped pacing, and looked Miss Neagle right in the eyes. “You’re in there, aren’t you?” he said. “You’re really in there.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Neagle. “I’m really in here.” And she lifted her hand to his cheek and touched it, very gently, not in the way that a woman like Miss Neagle normally would, but in the way that a grandmother would, or an elderly friend. Jim took hold of her hand and squeezed it. “Welcome back,” he told her.

  “I’m not sure you’re going to say you’re so happy to see me when I tell you why I’m here.”

  “What’s the matter? Don’t tell me you’ve seen something frightening coming to get me, too.”

  “Who else has told you?” asked Miss Neagle, in the querulous tones that Mrs Vaizey would have adopted.

  Jim said, “My grandfather was here yesterday morning. My dead grandfather. He told me to watch for something dark and old and bristling.”

  “Then that’s much more serious than I thought.”

  “What? What’s more serious?”

  “People’s relatives hardly ever make visitations from the other side unless those people are in desperate danger. I mean, why should they come back? They’ve had a whole lifetime of struggle and conflict, they don’t want any more. But for me – no, it was your aura that worried me.”

  “My aura? What’s wrong with my aura?”

  “When you came walking around the pool just now, you had the most threatening aura I’ve ever seen, alive or dead. You were completely surrounded by a swirl of dark, dull colors – like – like tentacles, thrashing around in a muddy river – and there was a dreadful feeling of cold, too. That’s why I came up to see you.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “It’s very serious, Mr Rook. It means that something awful is going to happen to you – and whatever it is, it’s already begun. That’s why your aura has started to grow darker, the same way the sky grows darker just before a storm. It can feel the threat that’s coming toward you. It can sense that you’re soon going to die.”

  “I’m going to die? And soon?”

  “Unless you can find a way of saving yourself, yes.”

  “Come on, now, what the hell is all this about? What does ‘soon’ mean? Sometime in the next half hour? Tomorrow? Next year? And how am I going to die?”

  Miss Neagle shook her head. “I can’t tell, not exactly, unless I read the cards.”

  “Listen,” Jim protested, “I don’t have any intention of dying. Not sooner. Not even later.”

  “Nobody does, Jim. I didn’t, any more than you do now. We’re all frightened of pain. We’re all frightened of darkness. Why do you think I’m clinging onto this life, by staying with Valerie?”

  “Valerie? Who’s Valerie? Oh – I see who you mean. Miss Neagle. Yes, for sure.”

  Miss Neagle said, “You don’t have to find out how you’re going to die unless you really want to. Most people don’t.”

  “But how can I save myself if I don’t know what it is?”

  “You want me to read the cards?”

  “Of course I want you to read the cards. You think I want to go out, turn the corner and find myself torn to pieces by something old and cold and bristling?”

  “Just because your grandfather said it was bristling, that didn’t necessarily mean it was something that could tear you to pieces. It may be nothing more than a detail… just part of the omen, not all of it. It may be nothing more than a hairbrush, lying next to your bed when you’re dying.”

  “Somehow I don’t think so. He said ‘bristling’ like he really meant it.”

  “All right, then,” said Miss Neagle. She took a pack of cards out of her bathrobe pocket. She had obviously come prepared. “How about here, on the table?” she said, and Jim pulled out two dining-room chairs so t
hat she could spread the cards out in front of her. Jim had never seen anything like them before. They were colored picture-cards, like the Tarot, except that the drawings they bore were even stranger, and more obscure. There were demons on stilts and dwarves with copper pans on their heads and pale, naked women with their eyes blindfolded, surrounded by huge black-beetles. There were minstrels in extraordinary heaped-up hats and sad-eyed knights carrying hideous witches on their backs. Some of the cards showed nothing but deserted landscapes, with only a shadow falling across them to indicate that somebody was just about to enter the picture.

  “Pretty weird deck,” Jim remarked, as he sat down beside her.

  “Weird, yes, but very sensitive. You don’t see many like this. They were secretly devised in the fourteenth century on the orders of Pope Urban VI – supposedly to help his cardinals to flush out an infestation of demons in hundreds of Italy’s churches. Because of that it’s called the Demon Tarot. The demons hid themselves in the cellars and the belfries, and only the cards could tell you where they were. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But I’ve known these cards to sense that a wife was going to attack her husband with a breadknife, six hours before she actually did it. And once they warned that a little girl of six was going to die in a house-fire.”

  “And did she?”

  Miss Neagle nodded, sadly. “Her mother wouldn’t believe me. I tried to find out where she lived and take the little girl away, but by then it was too late.” She paused, and then she said, “That was the last time I used this pack, until today.”

  “You’re scaring me,” said Jim, trying unsuccessfully to smile.

  “I’m scaring myself,” Miss Neagle told him. She shuffled the cards, tapped them three times, and then started to lay them out in an H-shaped pattern, 21 cards in all. The feline formerly known as Tibbles had been watching her closely, but now her fur rose up on end, and she let out a soft hiss of disapproval.

  “One of these cards has to represent you, the significator. This one looks good – the teacher. It’s the card I used to choose for young, well-educated men – especially single, young, well-educated men.”

  The card showed a man with a strange, serene look on his face. He was wearing a long cloak that was decorated with all kinds of objects, like kettles and hourglasses and loaves of bread. A young woman was sitting in front of him, cross-legged, with a golden ear-trumpet in one ear, into which the man was pouring green oil from a green-glass bottle.

  Miss Neagle placed the card face-upward in the centre of the H-pattern. Then, slowly, she turned the rest of the cards face-up, too.

  “This is tomorrow,” she explained, lifting up a card showing a man in a complicated black-velvet bonnet, looking out over a stormy estuary. On the man’s back a shadow had fallen – a shadow like a large hand. “And this next card is the number four.” Three noblemen in masks were standing in a cemetery; but almost invisible amongst the gravestones and the monuments was a grotesque grey figure with horns and a strange trumpet-like protrusion instead of a nose.

  “So far this means that the next significant event in your life will not take place until four tomorrows have passed.”

  “So I won’t be killed until Thursday? Is that it?”

  “I don’t know, Jim. Let’s carry on.”

  She picked up the next card and showed it to him. A pale man was walking across a desert with the rising sun behind him. On closer inspection, Jim saw that the desert floor was composed entirely of intertwined human bones. Miss Neagle said, “Whatever is going to harm you, it’s coming from the east.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “It may be not significant. But all evil spirits come from the east. You should never build a house with its front door facing east.”

  “What’s that? Feng-shui?”

  “Not at all. It’s simple survival. You don’t want demons flying into your house every time you open the front door, now do you?” She leaned forward over the cards, frowning. “Now here’s an odd one.”

  She showed Jim a very dark card, almost black. Jim held it up and his cat abruptly jumped off her chair and ran into the bedroom. Jim got the feeling she would have closed the door behind her if she could have done. He peered at the card intently, and he could just distinguish a rough, shaggy shape with two reddened eyes. More significantly, though, he could see a claw lifted into the air – a claw like a bear’s claw, only bigger, with viciously hooked nails.

  “Well?” he asked Miss Neagle.

  “Well… this is what is coming after you, I presume. A beast of some kind. I don’t know why it’s coming after you in particular, but it is. Feel the card again – no, feel it. It’s warm, isn’t it? It’s actually warm. It’s charged with psychic energy. It knows you.”.

  She was right. The card was warm. In fact it was so warm now that he could hardly hold it. He was about to hand it back to her when it suddenly curled up and burst into flame. He dropped it into the ashtray and both of them watched as it was reduced to a curled-up wafer of black ash.

  “How the hell did that happen?” asked Jim, flapping away the smoke.

  “I told you. Psychic energy. The card acted as a cable between whatever this thing is that’s coming to get you, and you yourself. And like all cables when they get overloaded with energy, it burned out.”

  “Well, I’m real sorry about your deck.” He reached into his back jeans pocket for his wallet. “Is it worth very much?”

  “They’re irreplaceable. If my son had known how rare they were, he wouldn’t have left them behind. But he never did like me telling fortunes.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Jim. “I’m sorry.”

  Miss Neagle was gathering up the rest of the cards. “You don’t have to be. I haven’t lost any. That card didn’t belong to this pack at all.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She laid her hand on top of his. “I’ve never seen it before now. It just appeared by itself. Now, is that a warning, or is that a warning?”

  Jim gave her a long, grave look. Then he stared at the ashes in the ashtray. “You mean …? You’d better tell me more.”

  Chapter Three

  The cards could tell him only three ways of avoiding the ‘old, cold bristling’ thing that was following him. The first was to seek the advice of two friends. The second was to travel on a long journey, although they didn’t say where. The third was completely cryptic. If he were going to survive, a game would have to be played, and both sides would have to admit defeat.

  “A game? Do the cards say what kind of game?”

  Miss Neagle shook her head. “I’m as mystified as you are. But I get the feeling that these three instructions are progressive, if you get my meaning. Once you’ve sought the advice of your friends, you’ll know where you have to travel, and once you’ve travelled there, you’ll know what kind of game has to be played, and why both sides have to lose.”

  Jim sat back. “You say these cards are supposed to be the best?”

  “You want to try a second opinion from the regular Tarot? Or the tea-leaves, maybe? Or Sydney Omarr?” She was being sarcastic. Sydney Omarr was a professional astrologist with a 1–900 phone line.

  “Unh-hunh. I think I’ll stick with the Demon Tarot. At least it’s offering me some way out. I just wish I knew which two friends it’s talking about. That would be a start, at least.”

  “Maybe it’s talking about two lecturers from college.”

  “Sure. And maybe it’s talking about Bill and Gordon from Joe’s Bar & Grill. It could be talking about anybody.”

  Miss Neagle put her cards away. She closed her eyes for a moment, and then she suddenly leaned forward, propping her head in her hands. “Miss Neagle – Valerie – are you okay?”

  For a moment, she didn’t say anything. “You want a glass of water?” he asked her. “Another shot of whiskey? How about some iced tea?”

  “I’m all right,” she said, at last. “It was a hell of a strain, that’s all, trying to do w
hat Alice used to be able to do.”

  “How’s Mrs Vaizey?”

  “She’s okay … but she’s exhausted, too. She found it tiring enough reading the cards when she was alive. Now she has to guide my hands and make my brain work, and I’m not a psychic sensitive, the way she was.”

  Jim laid a hand on her shoulder and smiled at her. “You did very well, Valerie, thank you. You don’t mind if I call you Valerie?”

  “Sweetheart, you can call me anything you like.” She knocked back her whiskey in one gulp and prepared to go. As she went to the door, however, she said, “This thing that’s supposed to be after you – this beast,” she said. “Do you believe in that?”

  “I wouldn’t have done, not until this morning.”

  “You really think it’s real?”

  “Yes, I do. I don’t have any idea what it is, or why it’s after me – but, yes, I think that it’s really real.”

  She kissed him, and this was definitely Miss Neagle kissing him, not Mrs Vaizey. This was the kind of half-serious kiss you got from a boozy, fortyish woman in a bar. “You’re an interesting man, Jim. You don’t mind if I call you Jim? One of these days you and I ought to sit down together with a bottle of wine and a plateful of spaghetti and ask each other the meaning of life.”

  Jim said, “Tell me one thing, before you go.”

  “What’s that, Jim?”

  “Do you argue at all? You and Mrs Vaizey, inside of your head?”

  Valerie knew back her head and gave three short, barking laughs. “You are an interesting man, aren’t you? Yes, we argue all the time. But it’s a whole lot more entertaining than arguing with yourself.”

  Jim gave her a wave as she tottered back along the balcony in her little pink high-heeled slingbacks. Then he went back into the kitchen and opened up another beer. Two friends? he thought. Which two friends? And where do I have to travel?

  There was one thing he knew for certain. He had to act fast, because he was now totally convinced that there was a beast looking for his blood; and that it was the same beast that had slaughtered Martin Amato on Venice Beach.