Firewalkers

by Chris Roberson

  Patrick could see from Hector’s glowering expression that he wasn’t getting through to him.

  “You would be better off taking literally anything else, kid,” Patrick went on. “Shooting heroin directly into your eyeball would do less damage than one injector’s worth of Ink.”

  Hector’s eyes widened slightly. Patrick knew that he wasn’t expecting a cop to recommend one illegal narcotic over another.

  “Where did you get the stuff?” Patrick looked around the room, and raised his voice to address the rest of the kids. “Who’s got the Ink connection?”

  The skinny guy who lived in the house stood in the corner, hands shoved deep into his pants pockets, and the kids on the couch were continuing to pretend that they couldn’t hear or see Patrick.

  “You could answer me,” Patrick continued, “or maybe I call up a couple of squad cars and we arrest the lot of you for underage drinking.”

  The skinny guy had a startled look on his face. “Hey, now . . .”

  “Those were there when we got here, man,” one of the kids on the couch said, trying hard not to slur his words.

  “We don’t have the stuff yet, okay?” Hector raised his hands in front of him, palms forward. “Vincent’s cousin is coming to drop it off.”

  “Hey!” One of the kids on the couch—Vincent, Patrick assumed—turned and glared at Hector. “Not cool, man.”

  Patrick motioned for the kids to settle down with a wave of his hand. “All right, all right. And when is Vincent’s cousin supposed to get here?”

  Hector glanced over at the kids on the couch, then back to Patrick.

  “I dunno,” he said with a shrug. “Supposed to be here already. I guess he’s running late.”

  Patrick pulled out his phone to check the time. It would be sunset soon.

  “Okay, kids, I’m going to head out,” he said as he slipped the phone back into his pocket. “You can go back to your video games and weed and what not, but seriously, stay off the Ink. I’ve seen what it can do to a person, and trust me, you do not want that to happen to you.”

  He pointed a finger at the skinny guy in the corner.

  “And if I find out that anyone here did dose themselves with Ink after I’m gone, I’m holding you personally responsible. And considering that I’m looking at a half-dozen cases of aiding-and-abetting underage drinking and drug use here, you’d be lucky to get away with just a few grand worth of fines and community service. You end up in the right court room, and you might even be looking at jail time.”

  The skinny guy blanched, swallowing hard.

  “Don’t worry,” Patrick went on, turning to go. “I can see myself out.”

  The front door was still partially ajar, and through the gap Patrick could see a plain white delivery truck parked out front. As he was walking outside, a guy wearing dark sunglasses and a ball cap was climbing out of the passenger side of the truck, carrying a paper bag in his hand.

  “Hey, you live here?” the guy said as Patrick turned onto the sidewalk.

  Patrick’s stomach roiled with nausea and an unpleasant taste stabbed his tongue. His hand moved closer to his holstered pistol as he turned in the guy’s direction.

  “Who’s asking?” Patrick said, eyes narrowing. “Are you Vincent’s cousin?”

  Were they really using a delivery truck to drop off illegal drugs? And hadn’t Izzie talked about almost being run down in the street the day before by the same kind of white delivery truck?

  “Hey, I know you.” The guy reached up with his free hand and took hold of his sunglasses.

  Patrick could hear the driver’s side door slam shut. He reached for his pistol.

  “Lieutenant Tevake.” The guy pulled the sunglasses off his face, and Patrick got the inescapable sense that someone else was looking out at him from behind those eyes. “Patrick. My man.”

  Dark blotches bloomed on the guy’s cheek and forehead, as his lips curled in a sinister smile.

  “I’ve had my people looking all over town for you and your friends.”

  Patrick drew his firearm with one hand, and pulled the makeshift amulet with its spiral mark out of his pocket with the other.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them,” Patrick said, aiming the barrel of his pistol at the guy’s chest while holding the amulet out at arm’s length.

  “There’s no need for that,” the guy said, taking a step closer, and the blots grew larger. The sun had just dipped below the skyscrapers of City Center to the west, bathing the street in deep shadows. “I just want to talk.”

  Patrick could hear the sound of the swing doors at the rear of the truck being opened, and the scuff of approaching footsteps.

  “Stay back.” Patrick gestured with the barrel of the pistol, and held the amulet up in the guy’s face. Then he chanced a glance behind him.

  The driver was walking quickly toward him, followed by three other men and a woman.

  “You can shoot this one if you want,” the guy said, reaching out and wrapping his hand around the barrel of Patrick’s gun. “But put away that damned squiggle. That’s just being rude.”

  The driver and the four others were closing in behind him, blots blooming on their exposed skin.

  “Your friends aren’t here, and you won’t have time to make a circle around yourself with that salt in your pocket this time, will you?” The guy stepped closer still, lifting Patrick’s pistol and pressing the barrel to his own forehead. “So if you need to shoot first, go for it, and then the rest of my people will bring you to me so we can talk.”

  Dark shadows swirled in the guy’s eyes, as the blots on his face grew larger.

  Strong arms wrapped themselves around him from behind, and as Patrick jerked reflexively the gun in his hand went off.

  The skin around the entry wound smoldered as the back of the guy’s skull exploded outwards, raining gore onto the sidewalk and lawn.

  “Got that out of your system, did you?” the dead man said, staring at Patrick through now lifeless eyes, his voice like an echo from the bottom of a deep, deep well. He put his sunglasses back on, as a viscous trail of blood oozed down from the hole in his forehead.

  “I’m glad,” the driver said, wrenching the pistol from Patrick’s hand. “Now we can talk.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Izzie sat in the passenger’s seat of the Volkswagen Beetle as Joyce drove through the concrete canyons of the Financial District. She held the journal that the old man had given her in her lap, her gaze resting idly on the battered and scorched cover.

  “Sorry I couldn’t talk Hasan into letting us stay past visiting hours,” Joyce said as they waited at an intersection for the light to change. “Maybe if we’d been there in an official capacity, but . . .”

  She trailed off, and glanced over in Izzie’s direction.

  “So what’s in there?” Joyce asked, indicating the journal with a curt nod. “Have you taken a look yet?”

  Izzie shook her head, and ran her fingertips along the cover’s edge. She was still thinking about what G. W. Jett had said about needing to see the shadows in order to face them.

  “Well, what are you waiting for? With this traffic, we won’t be back at Patrick’s place for another twenty or thirty minutes. Crack that thing open and read some of it.”

  Izzie looked up from the journal and glanced in Joyce’s direction. “Out loud?”

  “Sure, why not?” Joyce shrugged. “I’m pretty curious to know what’s in there, myself.”

  Izzie nodded absently, and flipped open the front cover of the journal. The interior pages were somewhat yellowed with age and filled with handwritten lines, the neatly formed block letters faded to an almost sepia-toned brown.

  “The first entry is dated October of 1942,” Izzie said. She scanned a few lines. “This Alistair Freeman was a pulp novelist, right?”

  “Yeah?” Joyce said as she shifted the car into gear. “So?”

  “Well, this is pretty flowery stuff. Here, listen to this. ‘I
dreamt of that day in the Yucatan again last night. . .”’

  Saturday, October 31, 1942.

  I dreamt of that day in the Yucatan again last night. Trees turned the color of bone by drought, skies black with the smoke and ash of swidden burning for cultivation, the forest heavy with the smell of death. Cager was with me, still living, but Jules Bonaventure and his father had already fled, though in waking reality they had still been there when the creatures had claimed Cager’s life.

  As the camazotz came out of the bone forest toward us, their bat-wings stirring vortices in the smoke, I turned to tell my friend not to worry, and that the daykeepers would come to save us with their silvered blades at any moment. But it was no longer Cager beside me, but my sister Mindel, and in the strange logic of dreams we weren’t in Mexico of ’25 anymore, but on a street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side more than a dozen years before. And I realized that the smoke and ash were no longer from forest cover being burned for planting, but from the flames of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that had ended her young life. “Don Javier will never get here from Mexico in time,” I told my sister, as though it made perfect sense, but she just smiled and said, “Don’t worry, Alter. This is the road to Xibalba.” Then the demons had arrived, but instead of claws, they attacked us with the twine-cutting hook-rings of a newsvendor, and we were powerless to stop them.

  Charlotte is still out of town visiting her mother, and won’t be back until tomorrow. When I awoke alone in the darkened room this morning, it took me a moment to recall when and where I was. In no mood to return to unsettling dreams, I rose early and began my day.

  I ate alone, coffee and toast, and skimmed the morning papers. News of the Sarah Pennington murder trial again crowded war-reports from the front page of The Recondito Clarion, and above the fold was a grainy photograph of the two young men, Joe Dominquez and Felix Uresti, who have been charged with the girl’s abduction and murder. Had it not been an attractive blonde who’d gone missing, I’m forced to wonder whether the papers would devote quite so many column inches to the story. But then again there were nearly as many articles this morning on the Sleepy Lagoon murder case just getting underway down in Los Angeles, where seventeen Mexican youths are being tried for the murder of Jose Diaz. Perhaps the attention is more due to the defendants’ zoot-suits and duck-tail-combs, and to Governor Olson’s call to stamp out juvenile delinquency. If the governor had the power simply to round up every pachuco in the state and put them in camps, like Roosevelt has done with the Japanese, I think Olson would exercise the right in a heartbeat.

  I didn’t fail to notice the item buried in the back pages about the third frozen body found in the city’s back alleys in as many nights, but I didn’t need any reminder of my failure to locate the latest demon.

  But this new interloper from the Otherworld has not come alone. Incursions and possessions have been on the rise in Recondito the last few weeks, and I’ve been running behind on the latest Wraith novel as a result. I spent the day typing, and by the time the last page of “The Return of the Goblin King” came off my Underwood’s roller it was late afternoon and time for me to get to work. My real work.

  As the sun sank over the Pacific, the streets of the Oceanview neighborhood were crowded with pint-sized ghosts and witches, pirates and cowboys. With little care for wars and murder trials, much less the otherworldly threats that lurk unseen in the shadows, the young took to their trick-or-treating with a will. But with sugar rationing limiting their potential haul of treats, I imagine it wasn’t long before they turned to tricks, and by tomorrow morning I’m sure the neighborhood will be garlanded with soaped windows and egged cars.

  I can only hope that dawn doesn’t find another frozen victim of the city’s latest invader, too. After my failure tonight, any new blood spilled would be on my hands—and perhaps on the hands of my clowned-up imitator, as well.

  The dive bars and diners along Almeria Street were in full swing, and on the street corners out front, pachucos in their zoot-suits and felt hats strutted like prize cockerels before the girls, as if their pocket chains glinting in the streetlights could lure the ladies to their sides.

  On Mission Avenue I passed the theaters and arenas that cater to the city’s poorer denizens, plastered with playbills for upcoming touring companies, boxing matches, and musical performances. One poster advertised an exhibition of Mexican wrestling, and featured a crude painting of shirtless behemoths with faces hidden behind leather masks. A few doors down, a cinema marquee announced the debut next week of Road to Morocco. I remembered my dead sister’s words in last night’s dream, and entertained the brief fantasy of Hope and Crosby in daykeepers’ black robes and silver-skull masks, blustering their way through the five houses of initiation.

  The last light of day was fading from the western sky when I reached the cemetery, wreathed in the shadows of Augustus Powell’s towering spires atop the Church of the Holy Saint Anthony. A few mourners lingered from the day’s funeral services, standing beside freshly filled graves, but otherwise the grounds were empty.

  I made my way to the Freeman family crypt and, passing the entrance, continued on to the back, where a copse of trees grows a few feet away from the structure’s unbroken rear wall.

  As Don Javier had taught me a lifetime ago in the Rattling House, I started toward the wall and, an instant before colliding with it, turned aside toward an unseen direction, and shadowed my way through to the other side.

  Don Mateo was waiting for me within. He’d already changed out of his hearse-driver’s uniform, and had dressed in his customary blue serge suit, Western shirt printed with bucking broncos and open at the neck, a red sash of homespun cotton wound around his waist like a cummerbund.

  “Little brother,” he said, a smile deepening the wrinkles around the corners of his eyes. He raised his shot glass filled to the rim with homemade cane liquor in a kind of salute. “You’re just in time.”

  When Mateo speaks in English it usually means that he’s uncertain about something, but when he gets excited—or angry—he lapses back into Yucatan. Tonight he’d spoken in Spanish, typically a sign his mood was light, and when I greeted him I was happy to do the same.

  “To your health,” I then added in English and, taking the shot glass from his hands, downed the contents in a single gulp, then spat on the floor a libation to the spirits. Don Javier always insisted that there were beneficent dwellers in the Otherworld, and libations in their honor might win their favor. But while I’d learned in the years I spent living with the two daykeepers, either in their cabin in the forest or in the hidden temples of Xibalba, to honor the customs handed down by their Mayan forebears, and knew that the villains and monsters of their beliefs were all-too-real, I still have trouble imagining that there are any intelligences existing beyond reality’s veil which have anything but ill intent for mankind.

  When I’d finished my shot, Don Mateo poured another for himself, and drank the contents and spat the libation, just as ritual demanded. Then, the necessary business of the greeting concluded, he set the glass and bottle aside, and began to shove open the lid of the coffin in which my tools are stored.

  “Four nights you’ve hunted this demon, little brother,” he said, lifting out the inky black greatcoat and handing it over. “Perhaps tonight will be the night.”

  I drew the greatcoat on over my suit. “Three victims already is three too many.” Settling the attached short cape over my shoulders, I fastened the buttons. “But what kind of demon freezes its victims to death?”

  The old daykeeper treated me to a grin, shrugging. “You are the one with the Sight, not I.” His grin began to falter as he handed over the shoulder-holster rig. “Though Don Javier might have known.”

  I checked the spring releases on both of the silver-plated Colt .45s and then arranged the short cape over my shoulders to conceal them. “Perhaps,” I said. But it had been years since the great owl of the old daykeeper had visited us in dreams.

  As
I slid a half-dozen loaded clips, pouches of salt, a Zippo lighter, and a small collection of crystals into the greatcoat’s pockets, Don Maeto held the mask out to me, the light of the bare bulb overhead glinting on the skull’s silvered surface.

  The metal of the mask cool against my cheeks and forehead always reminds me of the weeks and months I spent in the Rattling House, learning to shadow through solid objects, cold patches left behind as I rotated back into the world. I never did master the art of shifting to other branches of the World Tree, though, much to Don Javier’s regret.

  The slouch hat was last out of the coffin, and when I settled it on my head Don Mateo regarded me with something like paternal pride. “I should like to see those upstarts in San Francisco and Chicago cut so fine a figure.”

  The mask hid my scowl, for which I was grateful.

  Since beginning my nocturnal activities in Recondito in ’31 I’ve apparently inspired others to follow suit—the Black Hand in San Francisco, the Scarlet Scarab in New York, the Scorpion in Chicago. Perhaps the pulp magazine’s ruse works as intended, and like so many here in the city they assume the Wraith to be entirely fictional. There are times when I regret the decision to hide in plain sight, fictionalizing accounts of my activities in the pages of The Wraith Magazine so that any reports of a silver masked figure seen lurking through the streets of Recondito will be written off as an over-imaginative reader with more costuming skill than sense.

  Don Mateo recited a benediction, invoking the names Dark Jaguar and Macaw House, the first mother-father pair of daykeepers, and of White Sparkstriker, who had brought the knowledge to our branch of the World Tree. He called upon Ah Puch the Fleshless, the patron deity of Xibalba, to guide our hands and expand my sight. Had we still been in the Yucatan, the old daykeeper would have worn his half-mask of jaguar pelt, and burned incense as offering to his forebears’ gods. Since coming to California, though, he’s gradually relaxed his observances, and now the curling smoke of a smoldering Lucky Strike usually suffices.