The Revenant Road

by Michael Boatman

  “Don’t let it get above you, kid!” Kowalski screamed. “That’s how it attacks, from above!”

  I aimed the automatic at the rafters over my head, but the exposed girders and charred timbers were empty.

  Something moved in the shadows off to the right.

  I fired.

  Behind me, there was a flicker of motion above the corpse shrine: I spun and fired again.

  The massive chandelier that dangled over my head groaned and began to sway back and forth.

  “Where did it go?” I said. “Dammit where is it?”

  The chandelier groaned again, louder this time. Its swaying motion increased. Behind me, the Yeren screamed. I spun toward the sound fired, once, twice, three times, and hit empty air.

  Above me, the chandelier swung back and forth, creaking like an ancient Viking battleship.

  Then it broke free.

  “Watch your ass, Grudge!”

  I dove out of the way a moment before the chandelier hit the floor with a thunderous clatter. Kowalski’s scream of warning barely registered over the tidal wave of breaking glass and clanging metal.

  “Heads up!”

  I lifted the gun—knowing even as I did that it was too late—and the Yeren plummeted toward me.

  Kowalski knocked me out of the way a second before the Yeren struck the floor hard enough to splinter oak. I slid across the chapel floor and slammed headfirst into the pastor’s lectern.

  The Yeren grabbed Kowalski and hauled him off his feet.

  For a moment, hunter and squatter faced each other, eye to eye, Kowalski wriggling like an unruly manikin, six feet above the floor.

  “You’re one hideous sack o’ shitworms, that’s fer sure,” Kowalski said.

  The Yeren bared its fangs.

  For the day of your end and even the bringer of your Doom is known, and marked in the Book of the Nolane.

  “Not today,” I snarled.

  I reached for Kowalski’s empty automatic, grabbed it, and something... something akin to an electric shock ran up my arm. The place where my flesh met the warm solidity of Kowalski’s Sig Sauer grew warm, then hot.

  For a split second I had the impression that the gun was melting into my hand: that my flesh and the gun had joined together, given up their individual structures to form... something new.

  The Yeren paused. It turned toward me with Kowalski dangling in its fists. They were both staring at me.

  “I was right,” Kowalski said, wonderingly. “Jesus H. Barbarella. Look at you.”

  I looked down at the gun in my hand and a blood-red burst of incandescence seared my sight. The light faded almost instantly, leaving a crimson lightning scar across my inner eye.

  “Grudge!”

  I threw the Sig Sauer with all my might.

  The gun flipped end over end, arcing across the chapel like a scarlet comet, and struck the Yeren’s forehead.

  The Yeren dropped Kowalski and wailed. A moment later, its forehead burst open. Blood spurted out of a deep gash in the squatter’s head and splashed the floor.

  I grabbed two crossbow bolts out of the quiver on my hip and gasped as crimson force exploded in my clenched fists.

  Borne forward like a blazing star over treacherous seas, I moved across the chapel. There was a sensation of rushing wind: a scarlet torrent, like a river of burning blood, seemed to expand my limbs, quicken my steps. A nano-second later, I smashed into the Yeren and drove the two cross-bow bolts into its heart.

  The three of us went down, the Yeren shrieking, Kowalski swearing, and me riding the Yeren’s chest as I double-hammered the iron bolts in again and again.

  In the melee the Yeren swung one massive arm and blindsided Kowalski with a solid blow to the face.

  The scarlet lashings of a berserker’s fury had drowned my senses. I slammed the bolts in again, screaming even as the Yeren screamed, my teeth vibrating with the force of my rage.

  The Yeren punched me in the stomach.

  Sudden, blinding pain drove the air from my lungs. I looked down and discovered that I was mistaken: The Yeren hadn’t punched me; it had used the talons on its right hand like a spear and stabbed me.

  I looked up just in time to catch a right cross to the jaw that propelled me across the room. I landed a few feet from where I’d dropped the silver golf bag.

  My body had devolved, become a single raw nerve ending.

  But I should have been dead. Some vestige of that shining red rage had protected me, prevented my neck from snapping like a fistful of dandelion stems.

  Then my fingers touched smooth metal in the darkness. They closed around it, gripped it tight as a barren green illumination crept through the sanctuary.

  The Yeren turned away and loped over to the corpse shrine. The space above the shrine, the space where Sandra Woo would have been if I hadn’t rescued her, was the source of the emerald glow.

  A shining green orb hung over the corpse shrine. It cast a leprous pall over the deserted sanctuary.

  The Yeren nodded in the wash of emerald light. Then it bent and grabbed Sandra Woo from behind the altar. Woo hung limply in its arms: In the sick glow from the spinning orb, she looked dead.

  Holding Woo at arm’s length like a man who must clean a smelly puppy, the Yeren laid her atop the dead white matron’s back, bared its fangs and bent toward her throat.

  I hurt everywhere. My jaw felt broken and I was certain that my guts were boiling out of the holes in my abdomen.

  I said the first thing that popped into my head.

  “Hey, whore’s bastard.Your mother makes business with horny turtles and your father fornicates with river trout.”

  The Yeren cocked its head like a dog hearing an ultrasonic dinner bell: I’d insulted it in flawless Cantonese.

  I’d learned a few Chinese curses while researching my third novel, Murder on the Great Wall. As emerald radiance filled the sanctuary, those phrases came back to me.

  “You heard me, shit box,” I gasped. “When you were born you were so ugly your mama hung a “condemned” sign over her uterus.”

  The squatter dropped Woo. It slouched toward me, head cocked at a questing angle, a threatening growl rumbling in its chest.

  “Your mama’s asshole is so big, every time she bends over to take a crap eight generations of Japanese whoremasters fall out!”

  The Yeren roared and leapt.

  I thought about the father I would never know, the curse that had doomed my ancestors and hung a shroud over the face of my future. In that split second, as the Yeren fell toward me with its fangs aimed at my throat, I thought of all these things.

  Then I fired the Seward.

  Like train wrecks, bad blowjobs and other disasters, my perception of the event slowed to a crawl: I saw the iron bolt streak like a brilliant crimson slash through the lambent green air; saw it punch through the Yeren’s upraised right hand; saw it pierce the squatter’s right eye like a cataract surgery performed by drunken sideshow freaks.

  The Yeren flipped over in midair and crashed to the floor.

  I gripped the last iron bolt: It was all that stood between me and the squatter’s claws, and it wasn’t enough: When my opponent came for me, I knew that I would die.

  Somewhere, far from where I lay, a rooster welcomed the first tendrils of dawn. An airliner droned by overhead, its roar fading slowly into the distance.

  “Come on, you fucker!” I screamed.

  Around me, soft edges sharpened as the shimmering emerald orb illuminated the sanctuary. Watching the light, my eyelids grew as heavy as iron doors. My muscles ached as if submerged beneath a river of ice.

  Finally, too weary to hold the weight and too furious to let it go, I left Kowalski and Sandra Woo and everything else behind; filled my every horizon with bitter emerald.

  I fell, lost in seething green and cold silence.

  33

  Heart of Darkness, Hear My Whine

  For a timeless interval I wandered through a field of yellow flowers:
golden peonies, amber jonquils, sunflowers as big as my head waved in a breeze that whispered with human voices.

  My former nemesis, Tobi Bernardi, appeared and strolled along at my side. The blood that remained inside my body quickened. Even in my dying moments, my most strident detractor held the power to entice me.

  “You did good work this time, Obadiah,” the phantom critic said. “Much better than your usual crap.”

  For a moment, even Tobi glowed with a new luster. I pledged that if I was still alive when I woke up I would call her and make nice.

  And my father was there.

  Marcus stood with a large group of men and women, most of whom I didn’t know. I recognized a few of them from family photographs. My grandpa Phil stood at my father’s side. And next to him stood his mother, Bertha, holding a bloody meat cleaver. Bertha waved at me with one gore-clotted hand, and smiled.

  A few others seemed familiar, though to my knowledge I’d never met any of them. But from them I sensed a kind of satisfaction, a feeling of welcome.

  No one spoke. My father nodded his head, once, and moved aside to allow a shadowy figure to step into the amber light.

  It was Kowalski.

  My father’s partner glared at me without speaking. His eyes were filled with rage. And fear.

  A timeless instant later, Kowalski and the others faded, lost in that profusion of riotous yellow flora, until I was all alone in the silent field.

  Slowly, the colors went out of the vision and I fell back into the darkness.

  * * * *

  Eventually, the world came back to me.

  In the silence (except for the sound of Sandra Woo vomiting), I lay against the burned-out wall of the chapel wheezing like an angry asthmatic.

  My right lung felt like someone had taken a sushi knife to it. And to add insult to critical injury, at some point in the midst of all the chaos, I’d soiled myself again.

  As the last shreds of my dignity trickled through the rotten floorboards upon which I bled, I decided that I was definitely dying.

  The revelation of my incipient mortality brought with it a host of morbid realizations: Tobi Bernardi would never know of the lust I’d discovered in extremis; I would die as I had lived, a semi-talented misanthrope, a spinner of violent, middle-of the road suspense yarns that millions bought and no one remembered.

  I was alright with it.

  I’d done something that mattered. I’d saved a life, maybe two if Kowalski still lived.

  Kowalski

  A dark note entered the autobiographical aria I was enjoying. Kowalski had been hit, hard. He’d taken a direct shot to the face when I’d tackled the Yeren.

  Neville

  We’d entered the sanctuary at around 4:30 AM. By my reckoning, Kowalski was nearly three hours past his “sell-by” date. Necropolis had said so. And Necropolis, or Carlos Vulpe, or whoever the Hell he really was, was never wrong.

  “Mister?”

  I opened my eyes.

  Sandra Woo hovered above me, her eyes leaking black mascara lines down her cheeks and neck and staining the neckline of her ripped hospital tunic. Guided by instincts too ancient to ignore, I tried to look down her blouse.

  “What is it?” I snapped, angry with myself for my momentary return to the carnal. Woo wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing her mascara even more.

  “I think your friend is dying.”

  Contrary to what I’d believed a moment earlier, I found that I was able to sit up. A stabbing pain gouged the right side of my lower back and tugged a groan up from my bowels.

  “He’s over there, under the pews,” she said. ”I can’t reach him.”

  I ignored the pain, got to my feet and staggered across the aisle.

  Kowalski lay wedged between two overturned pews. He had slid beneath the long seats and come to rest with his head against the shattered remnants of the North-facing wall of the sanctuary.

  I lay down on my stomach, gasping at the detonation of pain that ignited in my abdomen. I reached under the pew and tried to grab Kowalski’s ankle but my fingers barely brushed the bottom of his right shoe.

  “My arm’s not... long enough,” I said. “Help me.”

  Working together, we managed to shift one of the pews enough to drag Kowalski out.

  His face had been smashed in. He’d sustained a hideous crushing injury to the right side of his face and head. The Yeren’s claws had torn away part of Kowalsi’s scalp, exposing the red/white cap of bone beneath. His skin was the livid color of a bruise, cool and clammy to the touch. He wasn’t breathing. Woo could find no pulse.

  “Do something,” I said.

  Woo shoved me aside and began to administer CPR. Her grunts of exertion filled the sanctuary as she labored to breathe life back into Kowalski’s body. Minutes passed. Nothing worked. Nothing changed.

  Finally, she gave up. Exhausted, Sandra Woo sat on the floor, put her head in her hands and wept.

  I sat there, bent almost double by the pain of my injuries, watching as the color drained out of Kowalski’s face.

  “Looks like you’re in a pickle, O-dog.”

  The voice was known to me. As a child I’d heard it in my worst nightmares. I’d heard it more recently atop a wind-swept precipice in the Wraithing. Its presence here meant that I’d failed; that I’d seen only a small part of a grander scheme. And that Kowalski was lost to me forever.

  Because he was there.

  Sandra Woo lifted her head and screamed, a shrieking exhalation of triumph and utter damnation. Her face contorted itself and became Vulpe’s face. Shadows thickened around her, rewove themselves to form a midnight–black tunic which enfolded her in darkness.

  The black cloud began to rise. It floated up to the height of the top of the corpse pile, nine feet above my head. Sandra Woo vanished in that seething black-emerald cloud as her scream cycled upward, lowered in tone, until it became Vulpe’s laughter.

  The black cloud dissolved. Carlos Vulpe hovered over the corpse shrine, a dark distortion of the silly character I’d once adored. I thought I had destroyed that part of my life: The day I set fire to our garage I’d consigned it to the flames, along with the rest of my childhood.

  But I’d failed.

  He had grown up too. His once smooth skin was pitted now, and gnarled like the bole of an ancient tree. Shining eyes burned with a nearly palpable contempt: twin pools-of lambent emerald malevolence that razed my courage to ash. He smiled, exposed needle-sharp fangs that glimmered like silver daggers in the withering light.

  Doctor Necropolis. Carlos Vulpe. The Bogeyman.

  I looked my monster squarely in the eye and spoke clearly.

  “What kept you?”

  34

  Hidden Agenda

  Vulpe sat cross-legged in mid-air above my head. He was now nearly identical to the picture I’d seen in Kowalski’s kitchen; black hair slicked down and parted down the center, olive-skinned, with features sharp enough to slice bone.

  He wore a close-fitting, high-collared black tunic, trousers, and boots, the outfit he’d worn in numerous episodes of The Time Rangers. But in the shimmering green illumination that filled the sanctuary, the black suit appeared to absorb light, exhaling darkness in return: Vulpe’s head seemed to float atop a man-shaped cluster of shadows.

  “Let the woman go,” I said. “This is between you and me.”

  “She isn’t aware of this conversation, O-dog” Vulpe crooned. “I’ve arranged for a little hiccup in her conscious awareness during our visit.”

  “You can do that?” I said.

  “When I’m done with her she’ll wake up with nothing more interesting than a bitch of a headache.”

  Vulpe spread his arms like a Vegas stage magician and descended toward the floor of the church. Back in Kowalski’s kitchen I’d imagined that Vulpe would move with the febrile grace of a dancer. I was wrong.

  As he drifted toward the floor of the church, he seemed to unfold himself, stretching his legs downw
ard like a great black spider reaching for its prey. When he’d settled to the floor, he stood smoothly and folded his arms across his chest.

  Vulpe was a head taller than me, inhumanly thin. If he had been made of flesh and bone he might have weighed ninety pounds. His arms were nearly as long as his legs, each joint thick and distended, like knots in the trunk of a young sapling. Nevertheless, Vulpe communicated an aura of hideous strength. He exuded power like nothing else I’d encountered, including the Yeren.

  “Welcome, friends,” he said. “To the Moment Between.”

  I grunted, forced myself to stand. I’d lost a lot of blood and my vision doubled at the effort. But I got to my feet, faced my foe and said, “I’m not impressed.”

  Vulpe chuckled. “New Yorkers,” he said. “So jaded.”

  “What do you want?”

  Vulpe laughed this time, “Come now, my brotha. What does any evil nether entity want? Power? Prestige? A lap dance with full release from Condoleeza Rice?”

  I winced at the pain in my head. Something about Vulpe made my brain hurt. I squinted against the pain, and I saw it: a black aura, similar to the dark energy which had surrounded Trocious. In Vulpe’s case, however, the aura was much denser. He seemed to hover within a maelstrom of malice: Black-bellied thunderclouds roiled around him, heavy with harm.

  Vulpe’s cloud contained swirling motes of greenish light that flared and flashed like carnivorous emerald fireflies. The flashes hurt the worst.

  “Alas, ol’ chum,” he continued. “While I’d love to see Condy spread-eagled up a flagpole squirtin’ ping-pong balls as much as the next guy, my business is with you. I’m here to offer you a deal.”

  “You’re a two-bit kid’s hobby item,” I snarled. “What could you possibly have to offer? If I hadn’t dreamed life into you you’d be the handle of somebody’s toilet brush.”

  “Tut tut, m’man,” Vulpe chuckled. “The Power I represent was ancient millennia before you were anything more than a glint in yo pappy’s eye.