Rook & Tooth and Claw

by Graham Masterton

  The door opened and the sergeant and another officer brought in Paul and Grey Cloud, handcuffed and shackled. The sergeant told them to sit down, well away from the table. Then he said to Jim, “Remember what the lieutenant said, sir – ten minutes and no longer. No smoking, no passing of any smoking materials, foodstuffs, books, gifts or documents. No physical contact whatsoever.”

  “All right if I breathe a little?” asked Jim.

  “That’s optional,” said the sergeant, and left the room, leaving the other officer standing by the door, his hands behind his back, his eyes fixed on nothing at all, slowly and irritatingly masticating a large wad of chewing-gum.

  Jim sat down. “I guess you probably know that your father came to see me. He said that you needed my help.”

  “We wouldn’t have called for you at all,” said Grey Cloud, proudly lifting his head. “But Catherine insisted – and, so long as we’re locked up here – there is no other way open to us. You will have to be our eyes and our ears, our legs and our voices.”

  “Your father mentioned some kind of animal.”

  “The spirit-beast, yes. The beast that nobody can see, even when it kills them.”

  “It’s going to be hard to explain that to a jury.”

  “That’s why we’ve come to you. We need you to tell people that the spirit-beast does exist. That’s our only hope of proving that we’re innocent.”

  “Maybe if you took a polygraph test,” Paul suggested.

  “Wait a minute,” said Jim. “What gives you the idea that I believe you?”

  “You’re prepared to admit the possibility that we might be telling the truth,” said Grey Cloud. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have come.”

  “OK – there’s an outside chance that some kind of spiritual force may have been responsible for Martin Amato’s death, instead of you two. I’m probably the only person on the planet who thinks so. But I believe that the West Grove college locker room and my apartment were both trashed by the whatever it was that killed Martin, and I don’t care for the way that the cops are trying to suggest that they weren’t. That smells of railroading to me. But I’m going to need a whole lot more proof before I start taking lie-detector tests and standing up and swearing on the Bible that an invisible creature from the spirit world ripped Martin’s lungs out, and not you. After all, you were down on the beach at the time when he was killed.”

  “I promise you we had nothing to do with it,” said Paul. “We didn’t even see it.”

  “You were covered in blood.”

  “It was hard not to be.”

  “You were right there – right after it happened?”

  Paul, soberly, said, “Yes. He was still pumping it out like a gusher.”

  Jim ran his hand through his hair. “You’ve got trouble here, guys. No question about it.”

  “All right,” put in Grey Cloud. “You saw the body. What do you think killed him?”

  Jim hesitated. “A bear, maybe, or a mountain lion.”

  “It certainly wasn’t done by humans, was it?”

  “Not unless they had some kind of fancy claw.”

  “Well, sure,” said Grey Cloud. “But can you imagine the strength you’d need to do something like that? And what happened to this fancy claw? Did we throw it away? Did we bury it? Is it hidden in our house?”

  “OK,” said Jim, “supposing you find a way of convincing me that this spirit-beast exists. What do you want me to do about it, apart from making a laughing-stock of myself in front of a court of law?”

  “We want you to arrange for the curse to be lifted, so that the beast returns to where it came from.”

  “Oh, yes? And how can I do that?”

  Grey Cloud said, “You will have to make a journey – a journey that will take you many miles in distance, and a long, long way inside your soul. You will have to learn what it is to be a Navajo. You will have to acquire the great understanding.”

  Seek the advice of two friends, thought Jim. Travel on a long journey. But then he said, “Don’t you think one of your own kind would be better at this? A Navajo? Somebody who believes in this stuff already?”

  Grey Cloud shook his head. “Too many Navajo have lost their faith. They should be looking for their spirits, but all they want is automobiles and housing developments and factories. When white men first came to our land, they defeated us not only by slaughtering us and giving us white men’s diseases, but by shaking our faith in our gods. One by one, all of our deities lost their power to defend us. Even Gitche Manitou the Great Spirit was rendered powerless and silent. How could he speak to people who no longer listened? We used to hear his words in the wind, but after the white men came all we heard was train-whistles and traffic and radio shows. In the same way, where can the spirit of water survive, when the rivers are poisoned by industrial pollution? There is no place for a spirit of fire when men have atomic bombs.

  “The spirits are still there, but the people are blind. Only you can see them.”

  “Well, this all sounds very mystical,” said Jim, “but I’m not at all sure that I can do it. I’m not at all sure that I want to do it.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Grey Cloud, “but you have to. You know that you do. Not just for our sake, but for yours, too. If you don’t go looking for this beast – this beast is going to come looking for you. It knows that you’ve been protecting our sister – and, what’s more, it knows that you can see it.”

  Jim wasn’t sure that he believed any of Grey Cloud’s warnings or not, but they gave him an uncomfortable feeling that he was being watched – or, worse than that, that something very dark and malevolent was sniffing him out. He glanced up at the window, but the shadow he had seen out of the corner of his eye was only the shadow of a nodding leaf.

  “So where am I supposed to journey to?” he asked. “And what am I supposed to do when I arrive?”

  “You have to journey to the Navajo capital of Window Rock, in Arizona. Take Catherine with you, and three other friends. My father will pay for the air fares. When you reach Window Rock, you will meet a man called John Three Names. He will take you to Fort Defiance, which we call the Meadow Between Rocks.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then he will take you to the man that Catherine is supposed to marry.”

  “So Catherine’s betrothal has something to do with all this?”

  Grey Cloud said, “Yes. The man that Catherine is supposed to marry has gone to a wonder-worker and conjured up the spirit-beast to prevent her from forming any attachments to anyone else.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t believe us? It’s true! He was so angry and jealous that he would have done anything to stop anybody else from touching her.”

  “Supposing I do believe you?” said Jim. “Why did your father promise this guy that Catherine was going to marry him in the first place? Is he rich, or what? I mean, that’s not a Navajo thing, is it? Arranged marriages?”

  Paul paused, and then he said, “Our father did it because our mother was dying of ovarian cancer. The man said that he knew a wonder-worker, and that the wonder-worker could intercede with the spirits to save our mother’s life. All he wanted in return was to marry Catherine and breed children with her.”

  “And your father agreed to that? Without asking Catherine what she wanted?”

  “He was losing his wife, Mr Rook. He was losing our mother. He was desperate.”

  “But your mother died anyway, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, she did. The spirits obviously thought that it was time for her to die. Afterward, my father went back to the man she was supposed to marry and asked if Catherine could be released from her betrothal. But the man said that a sacred promise was a sacred promise. Our father begged him, but he refused to change his mind. He said he wanted Catherine and he was going to have her, whatever it took.”

  Paul said, “We lit out of Window Rock overnight, leaving most of our possessions behind. Catherine didn’t know why and we weren’t
going to tell her. We came here to Los Angeles and my father was lucky enough to get that part in Blood Brothers. The studio needed a full-blood Navajo and he was a full-blood Navajo, and he could act.”

  “But then?”

  “Then we had messages that this man was going out of his mind with jealousy, and that he was going to ask the wonder-workers to put a curse on Catherine, so that no other man would ever be able to touch her. If they did – well, you saw what happened to Martin. The spirit-beast destroyed the locker-room, as a warning, and then, when he refused to be intimidated, it killed him.”

  Jim stood up and walked back to the window. A small puffy cloud had appeared in the rectangle of blue sky, and the squad car had gone. “This is a seriously weird story, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Believe me, Mr Rook, this is the truth. Would we tell you a lie, when our freedom is at stake? We might even go to the gas chamber if they find us guilty.”

  “Think of Catherine, too,” said Grey Cloud. “Think of all the other people who could get hurt.”

  “Yes,” said Jim. “Including me.”

  “Will you help us?” asked Paul. Behind him, the police officer sniffed and carried on chewing his gum.

  Jim said, “I don’t know. You haven’t told me what I’m supposed to do when I meet this spirit-man. How am I going to persuade him to give Catherine up?”

  “John Three Names will explain all of that. But the main thing you have to do is make him an offer. Money, mainly. But some other promises, too.”

  “I’m sorry, guys. I think I need to know much more before I say yes or no.”

  “Mr Rook – it’s far too complicated to explain right now. But I promise you – it isn’t anything difficult.”

  “All right, maybe it’s not difficult. But is it dangerous?”

  Grey Cloud gave an evasive shrug; but Paul said, “It won’t be dangerous if you remember everything that John Three Names tells you.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jim. “I’m still not sure about this.”

  Paul clenched his handcuffed fists and banged them on his knees. “You must!” he said. “You have to! There isn’t any more time and we don’t have anybody else.”

  “Excuse me. You may not have anybody else but I just get the feeling you’re not telling me everything you know.”

  “There’s nothing else to know. You go to Arizona, you talk to this guy, you make a deal with him, and that’s the end of it.”

  “So why do I have to take three friends?”

  “To take care of Catherine, that’s all.”

  “Can’t Catherine take care of herself?”

  “Mostly … but with all this going on, we think it’s a good idea for somebody to keep a close eye on her. That’s why we always picked her up after college. You know, just in case.”

  Jim said nothing for at least a minute. The guard sneezed twice. Paul and Grey Cloud watched him with tightly-contained unease. He didn’t understand this situation, not at all. But he took his grandfather’s warning very seriously, and he took Mrs Vaizey’s fortune-telling very seriously, and it seemed as if he were following the destiny that they both had predicted for him.

  “All right,” he said, at last. “Let me talk to your father again. Then I’ll see what I can do.”

  He found Henry Black Eagle at Universal Studios, on the set of Blood Brothers. A small scrubby area of backlot was supposed to be the Navajo reservation in Arizona, although Jim could easily see the Psycho house on the horizon, and coachloads of tourists being trundled around the Jaws pool and through the parting of the Red Sea.

  Henry was sitting in the front seat of a dusty blue-and-white police car drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup and smoking a cigarette. Jim leaned over the roof and said, “I talked to your sons. It looks like I’m going to Arizona.”

  Henry nodded, without looking up. “Thank you, Mr Rook. One day, you’ll get your reward for this.” He checked his watch, and said, “There’s a flight to Albuquerque at seven tomorrow morning. I can get you a charter from Albuquerque to Gallup. John Three Names will meet you there and drive you the rest of the way.”

  Jim said, “There’s only one thing I’m going to ask you. What kind of a character is this man who’s supposed to be marrying your daughter?”

  “Clever. Devious. He can twist your mind like a helter-skelter.”

  “How old is he? Do you know where he comes from?”

  “He’s as old as he looks. Where he comes from – well … where do any of us come from? The trees, the rocks, the dust on the ground.”

  “Does he have a name?” asked Jim. “It seems a little odd, flying all the way to Arizona to meet a guy and I don’t even know his name.”

  “Well, he has several names, as many Navajo do, but most of the time they call him He Who Speaks To Animals, or Dog Brother.”

  “And what does he look like? I mean, how old is he? Like, what can I expect?”

  “You can only expect the unexpected, Mr Rook. He’s a very devious man, very unpredictable. You should take care not to upset him.”

  At that moment, a podgy assistant director in a sweaty green Blood Brothers T-shirt came waddling up and said, “Come on, Henry. We’re ready to shoot the explosion scene.”

  “OK,” said Henry, and eased himself out of the car. “How about it, Mr Rook? Do you want to watch?”

  “Yes, sure. I’d love to,” said Jim. He followed Henry and the assistant director to a small corner of the lot where an elderly black Lincoln Continental was already tilted into a ditch. In the driver’s seat sat a dummy with a blue flowery dress and a blonde wig, slumped over the steering-wheel. Special effects technicians were still fiddling with wires and detonators, and the camera crew were standing around, switching on dazzling photo-floods and then switching them off again, smoking and drinking bottles of Evian water.

  On the other side of the set, on the porch of a ‘sheriff’s office’ that was nothing more than a front wall propped up with joists, Jim caught sight of Catherine, wearing a yellow checkered shirt and jeans, talking to a script assistant. “You brought her to work?” he asked Henry.

  “What else could I do? Her brothers are in jail. Somebody has to watch over her.”

  “She could have come to college. We keep a pretty good eye on our students there.”

  Henry said, “Yes, I know,” but that was all; and then the assistant director came over to put him in position.

  Just before the clapper-board snapped, however, Henry turned to Jim, and the expression on his face was unlike anything that Jim had seen before. Haunted, haggard, almost pleading. Jim looked over at Catherine. She was still talking with great animation to the script assistant, flicking back her hair and moving her hands. She was just as beautiful as ever – her hair gleaming, her eyes bright. But Jim was sure that he could see a shadow around her. A dark, dim shadow – much bigger than she was – and hunched up, as if it were trying to hide itself within her.

  The longer he looked at her, the clearer the shadow became. It followed every movement she made, but it was obviously another being altogether, a being that was imitating her, in order to stay concealed. Jim couldn’t take his eyes off it.

  He was standing right next to the best boy, who was wearing a Blood Brothers baseball cap backwards and trying to sort out a wildly frayed arrangement of multicolored electrical wires with a pair of pliers.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said. “That girl over there … the one in the yellow shirt. Can you see kind of a shadow all around her?”

  The best boy peered at Catherine, and then looked back at Jim as if he were two fajitas short of a Mexican picnic. “Shadow?” he said, as if he didn’t know what the word meant.

  “It’s nothing,” said Jim. “Forget it.” But after the best boy had gone back to his electrical spaghettini, he looked at Catherine again, and there was no doubt that there was a dingy shadow flickering over her. Even when she got up from her seat and walked across the set, the shadow followed her, like
smoke, like clouds, like a black-and-white movie projected over her face.

  She saw him, and waved, and he was still watching her when there was a deafening explosion, and the Lincoln blew up in a scorching ball of orange flame. The windows were shattered, the tires caught fire, and the hood was flung twenty feet up into the air. Jim turned around just in time to see Henry Black Eagle rolling away across the dust with a gun in his hand.

  When he looked back, Catherine had disappeared behind the dust and the smoke and the milling crowd of extras. But he glimpsed the shadow, sliding across the front of the ‘sheriff’s office’, and it was crouched, and angular, with a jagged, bristly outline.

  Chapter Five

  He met Susan in the corridor outside the geography room and asked her if she was interested in a trip to Arizona.

  “Arizona? Why on earth should I want to go to Arizona?”

  “I don’t know. You like cacti, don’t you? And the weather’s pretty good.”

  “The weather’s pretty good here. Besides, I’m right in the middle of the busiest semester I’ve ever had. And also, I thought that you and I were taking a raincheck.”

  “Well, it won’t be just us. One of my students is coming along. In fact, two or three of my students may be coming along. We’re visiting the Navajo reservation at Window Rock.”

  Susan shook her head. “I can’t believe you sometimes. You are the most – I don’t know. You are the most off-the-wall person I ever met. Sometimes I feel like you arrived here from another planet, and you haven’t quite learned how Earth people behave.”

  “All the same, how about coming to Arizona?”

  “No, Jim. I can’t.”

  “I need you, Susan. I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t need you. And I’m not talking about sexually. I’m talking about needing you, okay? Like needing your support.”

  “Why?” she demanded.

  “Well…I’m taking a couple of my girl students away with me, and I think it would be more appropriate if they had a female chaperone.”