“Well, I’ve been thinking about that; and I don’t think I’m being fair on you. Almost just isn’t enough, is it?”
“Almost is better than nothing.”
“Jim … I don’t want to hurt you, that’s all.”
“You’re right. Better to face up to it. We don’t want to live out a lie, do we?”
“No,” she said, lowering her eyes.
“Come on, we can still pass in the corridor and say ‘hi’ to each other. We can still watch college football games together. We can still chit-chat over cups of poisonous coffee at faculty get-togethers.”
“Jim—” she said, and took hold of his hand.
He took a deep breath. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll live.”
Although it suddenly occurred to him that if he didn’t find the 2 Friends within the next twenty-four hours, he would almost certainly die.
He knew that something was wrong as soon as he reached the top of the steps and started to walk along the balcony that led to his apartment. His front door was ajar, and there were hundreds of soft, crumbly fragments tumbling out of it, like snowflakes, except that they couldn’t be snowflakes, with the late-evening temperature still well over 60 degrees.
He approached his front door cautiously, tightly rolling up the copy of Esquire that he was carrying so that he could use like a club. He listened, but he couldn’t hear anything except for the occasional surge of studio laughter coming from Myrlin’s television in the next door apartment, and the swooshing of traffic. Somebody was playing a guitar somewhere, and somebody else was whooping with laughter.
He reached the door and the snowflakes blew around his shoes. It was only then that he realized that they were tiny fragments of multicoloured plastic foam. He bent down and picked one up and squashed it between his fingers. It looked as if a pillow had been ripped open and emptied all over his floor.
“Pusscat?” he called, in a low, hoarse voice. He waited, but there was no response. He tried whistling, but there was still no reply. It was a damned nuisance, having a cat that refused to answer to her own name. She had suddenly stopped, about eighteen months ago, and Jim had even taken her to the vet to find out if she were deaf. The vet said, “Just cussedness, that’s all.”
Jim stretched out his hand and eased the front door open wide. It must have been kicked open, because the lock housing had been splintered right out the doorframe. Inside, it was almost totally dark, and he stood for a long time wondering if he dared to go in. There had been a spate of drug-connected robberies along this stretch of Electric Avenue in the past few weeks, and two innocent householders had been shot, one of them fatally.
“If you’re in there, you’d better come out!” he called. “The cops are coming and I’m armed!”
Still there was no response. Jim reached around the door and felt for the light-switch. He took a deep breath, and switched it on.
At first he couldn’t understand what he was looking at. Then – as he took one step into his apartment, and then another – he realised that the whole place had been torn apart, as if by a gang of enraged baboons. The snowflakes had come from his couch, which had been comprehensively gutted, right down to the springs. Polyurethane foam was scattered everywhere, ankle-deep in places. Pictures had been pulled from the walls and smashed. His television lay on one side, the screen cracked and two of the legs wrenched off. His CD collection had been pillaged, his books thrown everywhere, his venetian blinds reduced to collapsed concertinas.
It was the same in the kitchen. The refrigerator door had been pulled right off, and food strewn everywhere. A large jar of tomato-juice had been emptied across the floor like blood.
Most chilling of all, though, were the scratch-marks across the kitchen cabinets. The light oak doors had been viciously gouged by something which must have resembled a huge claw. Even the formica work-surface had been scratched – over an inch deep in places.
Jim picked up a broken picture-frame containing a photograph of his cousin Laura, with whom, when he was younger, he had fallen hopelessly in love. The glass was smashed and a claw had torn away half of Laura’s face. He looked at it for a moment, and then let it drop back onto the floor. It was as if his entire life had been ripped to shreds – as if everything he had ever thought or felt or worked for had never counted for anything, and this was fate’s way of showing him so.
There was worse to come. He went into the bedroom and his bed-covers had been sliced into shreds, his pillows burst apart. In the bathroom, the mirrors had all been smashed into kaleidoscopes and the washbasin pulled free from the wall – although, thankfully, the pipes hadn’t been fractured.
He was just about to close the bathroom door when he noticed a reflection in the shattered mirror of his medicine cabinet. A dark reflection, on the other side of the door. At first he thought that it was just his robe, which he usually hung up there. Then he realised it was something more. His robe seemed to have a thick fur collar.
With a terrible feeling of dread, he looked around at the back of the door. His robe was there, yes. But it didn’t have a fur collar. The feline formerly known as Tibbles had been hung on the same hook, right through her wide-open mouth, up through her palate and into her brain. Her eyes were wide open and glassy, and her teeth were bared in an agonized snarl.
Jim bent over the bathtub and up came half-chewed steak and string potatoes and broccoli, as well as an acid gush of bile and chardonnay.
After a few minutes of choking and gasping, he wiped his mouth on a towel and made his way back to the living-room, treading on broken glass and CDs and books. He found the telephone behind the sofa, and by some miracle it was still working. He took Lieutenant Harris’s card out of his coat pocket and dialed his personal number.
He was still waiting to be put through when a figure appeared in the doorway. It was Miss Neagle, in a gauzy pink nightdress, with a ruffled collar.
“My God, Jim, what happened here? You look like you’ve just had your own personal earthquake.”
Jim said, “Not far from it, Valerie. You know what you said about this dark thing coming to get me – this old, dark bristling thing? Well, it’s almost caught up with me, believe me. If I hadn’t have gone out tonight—”
Miss Neagle stepped her way carefully through the wreckage. She stood close to Jim and laid a hand on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry … you must be devastated.”
“Devastated isn’t the word for it. I’m terrified, too. And my cat – whatever it was, the damn thing killed my cat.”
Miss Neagle sniffed – a long, inquiring sniff – and it sounded more like Mrs Vaizey sniffing. “I can still smell it,” she said, after a while.
Jim sniffed, too, but all he could smell was Folger’s coffee, spilled all over the kitchen floor. “It’s left a smell?” he asked her.
“Not a real smell … it’s more like a spiritual aroma. Sometimes, when I stand close to somebody who’s done something really evil, I can pick up a terrible sour kind of odour, like rotting meat. Other times, I can smell when somebody’s happy. It’s very warm, and floral.”
Jim sniffed again. “So what does this smell like?”
“It’s an animal, although it isn’t an animal. It has a very strong musky odour, like a bear. I can smell its aura, too. It’s very fierce, almost berserk. I don’t think anybody could stop it, even if they tried. It has incredible determination. It would go through brick walls to get at you, if it had to.”
She paused, and frowned, and then she said, “And yet, you know – and yet –”
“And yet what?”
“I don’t know. I can smell something else. A sense of confusion, maybe.”
“It wasn’t confused enough to tear up everything I own. Even my goddamn pajamas.”
Miss Neagle looked at him and raised an eyebrow and now she looked just like Miss Neagle, and not at all like Mrs Vaizey. “Oh … I didn’t know you wore pajamas.”
Jim said grimly, “I don’t, do I? Not now.”
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Just then, his call was connected. Lieutenant Harris sounded as if he had a headcold coming, and kept clearing his throat every few seconds. “Harris? What’s the problem, Mr Rook?”
“Somebody just tore up my apartment, the same way they tore up the locker room at West Grove.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry. Is there very much damage?”
“They killed my cat and they ripped up everything I own. Furniture, books, paintings … there isn’t anything left intact.”
“Did anybody see anything?”
“It’s probably just as well that they didn’t. Whoever did this could rip your lungs out with one blow.”
“What makes you think it was the same person that tore up the locker room?”
“I’ve got very similar scratches here, and clawmarks. And who the hell has the strength to pull the door off an icebox?”
“Listen,” said Lieutenant Harris, “I don’t want you to touch anything. I’ll send a patrol car around as soon as I can, and I can get down there myself in twenty minutes. OK? But don’t touch anything.”
He put down the phone. Miss Neagle was prowling around the apartment, sniffing and sniffing, her arms held out almost like a ballerina. “What else can you smell?” Jim asked her.
“I smell two animals, not just one. I can’t understand it. I can smell dog, as well as bear. Two distinctly different spiritual aromas.”
“So what does that mean? That two animals came here and trashed my apartment, instead of one? What difference does that make?”
“It makes a whole lot of difference, Jim … because one animal is very strong and determined but the other feels as if it’s fighting an inner battle with itself. That’s all part of the confusion I was talking about.”
“I don’t follow this at all,” said Jim. “I’m just going outside to wait for the cops.”
But as he tried to pass, Miss Neagle clutched his arm and said, “The dog aroma comes from very far away – hundreds of miles. It must be tremendously powerful to make itself felt at such a distance. The bear is very dangerous, Mr Rook, but it’s the dog you have to be wary of. The dog is going to do something really, really bad.”
Jim looked around at his apartment, at his disemboweled furniture, at his shattered pictures, at his ripped-apart books. “You’re telling me that this isn’t really, really bad? Quite apart from the fact that I’m supposed to have less than three-and-a-half days to live.”
“Something worse is going to happen, believe me.”
Miss Neagle stared into his eyes and they weren’t her eyes. They were pale and lucid as Mrs Vaizey’s. “You don’t even know what this thing can do to you, Jim. These animals can take your spirit, as well as your body. When you die, you expect to be back with your parents, don’t you, and the people you always loved? You expect to be back in those old familiar places where you used to play when you were a boy? But if you give your spirit to these beasts, Mr Rook, you won’t know anything but pain and darkness, for ever and ever. There is an afterlife, believe me, but if you let these beasts get hold of you, you’ll wish to God that there wasn’t.”
Chapter Four
Jim spent the night on the couch round at George Babouris’ house in the less desirable part of Westwood. George was big-bellied and black-bearded and catastrophically untidy. His living-room was strewn with cast-off sneakers and discarded sweatshirts and empty pizza boxes, as well as heaps of books and students’ coursework. It looked only marginally less devastated than Jim’s place.
George got up early and came padding through to the kitchen in a Homer Simpson T-shirt and a pair of baggy shorts, scratching his behind and puffing on the first cigarette of the day. Jim looked up frowzily from the couch and said, “What time is it, George, for Christ’s sake?”
“Five-thirty. I always get up at five-thirty. It gives me time to have a little bit of life outside of college.”
“Five-thirty is so damned early it’s practically still yesterday.”
“Yes, but think what you can get done. I’m writing a book at the moment. I can write two or three pages every morning before I have to start thinking about banging Newton’s Law into those sloping foreheads in Applied Physics. Here, look—” he said, and passed Jim a handful of crumpled, coffee-stained paper.
Jim rubbed his eyes and peered at the title. The Lute of Apollo: The Complete History of Bouzouki Music. He handed it back without comment.
“You see?” said George. “I went to the library and found that nobody has ever published a definitive book on Greek café music – not even in Greece. So I thought, here’s a gap in the market, I’ll write one myself! I’ll be famous! Maybe they’ll make me President of Greece! How about some coffee?”
Jim dressed and went to college almost an hour earlier than usual because George fried himself a huge breakfast of corned beef hash which filled the whole apartment with greasy smoke, and then insisted on playing bouzouki music so that Jim could learn to appreciate how much it spoke of the sun, and the wine-dark sea, and a land where men were men and had seriously hairy chests and women did all the work.
Alone in his classroom, he sat in the dust-speckled morning sunshine marking essays. He had given up smoking seven years ago, but he had never felt more like a cigarette. He had asked Special Class II to write him a critical assessment of Treasure Island. Mark Foley had written, “Long John Silver was this cool dud with 1 leg, leder of the pirates. He wants to rip off all of the treasure but Jim Hawkins stops him. He should of kill Jim Hawkins but they had a bond, lik a father and son should of been.”
Jim always found it extraordinary how his least able students were able to get right to the nub of a story. They ignored the plot and felt the pulse of it. Beattie McCordic, who always interpreted everything she read from a radical-feminist point of view, had written that ‘there are no women pirates in Treasure Island which is ridiculous because in real life there were plenty of them and some of them were real ballbreakers.’ But she went on to say ‘that doesn’t mean that the story is anti-feminist. The way Jim Hawkins behaves is influenced all the way through the story by his mother, who is quiet but strong and very moral. There are two main characters in this book: Long John Silver and Jim Hawkin’s mother, even though she only appears right in the beginning and right at the very end.’
After two or three essays, he stopped marking, and stared out of the window. He thought of the feline formerly known as Tibbles and he felt so angry and sad that he could have cried. But while he was looking out of the window he saw a dark-blue Chevrolet Caprice turn into the parking-lot, and Lieutenant Harris climb out. Lieutenant Harris put on his dark glasses, combed his hair, straightened his coat, and walked toward the college buildings like a man who was very pleased with himself.
Two or three minutes later, there was a knock at the classroom door. “Mr Rook?” said Lieutenant Harris.
“Sure, come on in,” Jim told him. “You look like the cat who got the caviar.”
“Well, I thought you’d like to know that we’ve made a breakthrough in the Martin Amato homicide.”
“That’s good news. That’s really good news. Did you make an arrest yet?”
Lieutenant Harris triumphantly lifted one finger. “Let me tell you something, it was classic procedural police-work. We did a house-to-house down at Venice Beach, and then we staked out the boardwalk and stopped every single cyclist and jogger and skater. We interviewed every bodybuilder on Muscle Beach and every rollerblader in the Graffiti Pit.”
Jim put down his pen and waited for Lieutenant Harris to finish complimenting himself on the trouble that he had taken.
“In the end, we found two young guys from Idaho, of all places. They had hitch-hiked all the way from Boise in the hope of becoming movie extras. Saturday night they didn’t have anyplace to stay so they tried to sleep on the beach. They were lying in their bedrolls when two men ran right into them.”
Lieutenant Harris picked up the small plaster bust of Shakespeare on Jim’s desk and peered
at it closely. “Who’s this? Don’t tell me. That guy from Star Trek.”
“Lieutenant,” Jim said, impatiently.
“Oh, sure. Well, there was a scuffle between these two young kids from Idaho and these two guys who had run right into them. It wasn’t much, and the kids wouldn’t have thought anything about it, except that when the two guys had gone running off, one of them found that his hands were covered in blood. The first thing he thought was that one of the guys had stabbed him. So he went to a local bar and washed it all off, and found that he hadn’t been stabbed at all. The blood must have come from the other guy.”
“Suggesting what?”
“Suggesting that the other guy had either cut himself badly – or else he’d very recently cut somebody else, and gotten himself splattered in their blood.”
“And?”
“And he couldn’t have cut himself. The blood must have come from somebody else.”
“How do you know that?”
Lieutenant Harris gave him a triumphant smile. “Because the two kids on the beach positively identified him as Catherine White Bird’s brother Grey Cloud – and it didn’t take much to establish that Grey Cloud didn’t cut himself that night. His partner they identified as Paul – Catherine’s other brother.”
“You’re kidding me. Those two pretend they’re tough, but I don’t believe they’d go that far.”
“They did it, Mr Rook. That’s obvious. They didn’t like their sister going out with a white man, so when she refused to give him up – that was it. Tribal honour was at stake, or whatever.”
“You’ve arrested them?”
Lieutenant Harris nodded. “Suspicion of first-degree homicide. I’ll admit that I still don’t know how they inflicted those wounds on Martin Amato, but they were down on the beach at the time he was killed, and Grey Cloud was covered in blood. We’re running a DNA and haemotology test right now, and if that blood turns out to be Martin’s … well, that’s all folks.”
“What about the locker room? What about my apartment? What about my cat?”
Rook & Tooth and Claw Page 28