Hymn (33 page)

‘Got you worried, man?' Gretchen asked him, in Tony Express's voice.

Otto snarled, his thin lips dragging themselves back across his teeth. He lifted both hands to his head, and stared at this mocking apparition of Gretchen in rising fury. ‘Nobody does this to me! Nobody! Ever!'

There was a deafening burst of incandescent flame, and the apparition exploded in front of Otto's eyes. But instantly he screamed, and slammed the heels of his hands against his temples, and dropped to the rug in agony. The sundance doll had drawn the ghost of Gretchen out of his own memory, and all that he had succeeded in burning was his own memory-cells. In fact, he had cauterized his recollection of her altogether, so that he would never be able to remember her again.

He lay on the floor, folded up like a storm-broken umbrella, shaking. Gott in Himmel, what had happened to him? He knew that it was something huge and dramatic, but he couldn't think for a moment what it was. Somebody had laughed at him. Somebody had mocked him.

‘Celia!' he called out. He climbed on to his knees. ‘Celia, wo bist du, Celia?'

He called again and again, but there was no reply. Eventually he managed to drag himself on to his feet and shuffle toward the kitchen, holding on to the furniture for support. He felt as if he had been hit in the head with the back end of an axe, and the light of dawn straining through the venetian blinds in the kitchen made his eyes water.

Celia was standing only a quarter-inch further from the spot where Tony Express had first suspended her metabolism. Otto walked up to her, and stared directly into her face, and said, ‘Celia, was ist los? What have they done to you? Why don't you move? Why don't you speak?'

But Celia remained practically motionless, her empty eye-sockets wide in surprise, one arm lifted, a cold grey statue of a woman in a shabby oceanside kitchen.

Die Zauberei, Otto repeated to himself, in disgust. Indian tricks, hocus-pocus, men who were there and then they weren't there, shamans who turned themselves into eagles, tricks, mirrors. Sand which poured upwards, clouds which refused to rain. He had heard about it but he had never taken it seriously. He didn't take it seriously now. The day of the Transformation was almost here, and then the magicians of every culture would see who ruled the realms of the dead, as well as the realms of the living.

He was still standing in the middle of the kitchen with angrily clenched fists when he heard the tyres of his Mercedes sedan squealing on the road outside. He ripped apart the slats of the venetian blind in time to see Lloyd wildly U-turning, and driving back toward the main Pacific highway. He also saw that they had let down the tyres of his 380SL.

Angrily, he scooped handfuls of dead blowflies and moths from the window-sill, and crammed them into his mouth, swallowing most of them without chewing. He coughed on one large mouthful, and as he did so, Celia suddenly phased out of her slowed-down metabolic state and turned to stare at him.

Tony Express and his sundance doll must have driven away too far to influence her any longer.

‘Otto?' she asked, bewildered. ‘Otto—what's wrong?'

Otto spat out flies so that they clung quivering with trails of saliva to his chin. Then he slapped Celia so hard across the face that he bruised his ring-finger, and shouted out,' Scheiss! Scheiss!'

‘Otto . . .' Celia quavered, picking up her fallen raincoat, and wrapping it around her.

‘The first thing we do after the Transformation is that we hunt down every Indian in every reservation and we finish with them! Versteh? We finish them!'

‘Here,' said Lloyd, with relief, lifting the envelope out of the door-pocket of his BMW. ‘Wagner's Hymn of Atonement, courtesy the Rosecrans Avenue Copie Shoppe.'

Kathleen took the pages and leafed through them carefully. ‘Do you really believe this can stop them?'

‘Celia seemed to think so. And remember what Franklin overheard Otto saying to Helmwige . . . “They can only be destroyed by Him . . .” I think Franklin probably misheard. Otto wasn't talking about Him, he meant the Hymn.'

‘Well, I suppose if they can be created by a ritual chant, they can be destroyed by one,' said Kathleen, although she sounded dubious.

‘Of course the problem is having this properly scored and played,' said Lloyd, as they walked back to the house. ‘Not only that, but having it played at exactly the right moment, after the Transformation.'

‘You must know some of the musicians at the opera,' Kathleen suggested.

‘For sure . . . but I don't know how many of them are members of Otto's jolly little study group . . . or which of them might give us away without realizing it.' He checked his watch, and looked around Kathleen's house. ‘We won't be able to stay here too long, either . . . not without Otto or the cops catching up with us. We're not exactly the least conspicuous quartet of people I've ever seen. I mean we don't have that ability of melting into a crowd, do we?'

Kathleen opened the front door to her house, and let them in. ‘Lucy!' she called. ‘Tom! We're back!'

There was no reply. Kathleen ran upstairs and checked the bedrooms, and then came down again. ‘They're not here. They must have gone over to my parents.' She picked up the phone and punched out the number. Lloyd asked her, ‘You want some coffee?'

‘I'd kill for some coffee.'

‘Franklin? Tony? How about some orange juice?'

‘I'd sell my grandpa for a root-beer,' said Tony Express. ‘You don't realize how much you miss it till you don't have it.'

Lloyd was scooping espresso into the coffee-machine when Kathleen came into the kitchen looking anxious. ‘I've called my parents' house and there's no reply.'

‘Hey, I shouldn't let it worry you,' Lloyd told her. ‘They probably went to the market, or out to the zoo.'

‘Weird day for the zoo.'

Lloyd touched her shoulder. ‘We're living in weird times.'

All the same, he started to feel a small sharp anxiety of his own when he called the Original Fish Depot and there was no reply from Waldo. It was a little too early, maybe, but when he called Waldo's home number, Waldo wasn't there, either. Oh, well: maybe he was on his way to La Jolla, stuck in the rush-hour traffic on I-5, or maybe he was down at the embarcadero, buying snapper.

They risked staying at Kathleen's house long enough to have a good breakfast of eggs and corned beef hash, although Tony Express wasn't too keen on corned beef hash because he said it reminded him of adobe.

Kathleen kept trying to call her parents, but still nobody answered.

‘You don't think that anything's happened to them?' she asked.

‘What could have happened? Your parents are old enough to go out without telling you, aren't they?'

But Kathleen remained worried and there was nothing he could do about it. And he remained worried because Waldo still didn't pick up the phone at the Original Fish Depot. He prayed that Celia and Otto hadn't taken their questioning too far.

‘We'll take the BMW,' Lloyd decided. ‘But I'll switch plates with your Camaro, Kathleen. FISHEE's a little too conspicuous. Franklin—do you want to do that for me?'

‘There's a whole set of wrenches in the garage,' said Kathleen. ‘Mike always kept his tools so tidy. Totally tidy guy, on the whole.'

Although it was only twenty to eleven, Lloyd poured himself a medicinal whisky. Then he went back to the phone and tried the restaurant again. This time, the phone was instantly picked up.

‘Waldo?' he asked.

‘Who is this?' a flat voice demanded.

‘I'm trying to get in touch with Waldo Slonimsky.'

‘You a friend of his?'

Lloyd frowned. ‘Well, kind of. What's going on?'

‘I'm sorry, sir. The only way that anybody can get in touch with Waldo Slonimsky is through a medium. He was killed last night, burned in a fire.'

Lloyd opened his mouth and then closed it again. So Celia had been lying when she had told him that she hadn't hurt Waldo. And she had probably been lying when she had sworn that she hadn't burned Sylvia Cuddy.

But Waldo, goddamnit. He couldn't bear the thought of losing Waldo. Waldo had been so much more than a friend, he had been the last surviving member of a family who had sent him desperately and optimistically to America in the hope that he would carry on their name, long after they had all been burned and forgotten.

His eyes filled with tears. He couldn't speak any more, and he put down the phone. He was going to kill Otto now. He was going to kill Helmwige. His feeling of revenge, already strong because of what Otto had done to Celia, now surged up inside him like a huge black tidal wave.

In the den, with his feet up on the magazine-table while he listened to The Real Ghostbusters on television, Tony Express suddenly lifted his head. He had heard something, the softest of rattles. It was the sundance doll, which he had left propped up in the hall. The sundance doll, which was especially sensitive to men's revenge—ask what revenge you want and it will give it to you.

Now why should the doll suddenly rattle? thought Tony Express. It only rattled if somebody came close to it who was so hungry for revenge that they could scarcely wait.

He stood up and groped his way to the den doorway. He heard footsteps.

‘Who's that?' he asked.

‘It's me, Lloyd,' a choked-up voice replied.

Without hesitation, Tony Express said, ‘Waldo's dead.'

‘How'd you know that?'

‘The doll can feel your revenge, man. And from the way you've been talking, there's only one person you care about enough to want to kill for.'

He paused, and then he added, ‘I'm really sorry, man. I know he meant a lot to you.'

‘Well, yeah,' said Lloyd, scarcely able to catch his breath.

But hardly had Lloyd told Kathleen what had happened, when Franklin came in from the garage, and Tony Express could tell from his quick, harsh breathing that he was seriously upset.

‘Lloyd,' he said, ‘can I talk to you?'

‘If it's about the registration plates, Franklin, don't bother. I've just this minute heard that Waldo died last night.'

Franklin was confused. ‘Oh, no, that's terrible. Was it Otto, do you think?'

‘Otto or Celia, one of the two. I don't know. Who cares. They're both as mad and as dangerous as each other.'

‘Lloyd—' Franklin began. He glanced with uncertainty at Kathleen.

‘What is it? Come on, can't it wait until later?'

Franklin dumbly shook his head. ‘You'd better come see for yourself.'

They went outside to the garage. Franklin had closed the automatic doors, but as they approached, he said, ‘You're sure you're ready for this?'

‘Just open up, for Christ's sake,' said Lloyd.

He didn't know what he had expected, but he certainly hadn't expected a corpse. A black charred figure was sitting upright in the middle of the concrete floor. The figure was so comprehensively burned that it was impossible to tell whether it was a man or a woman, or even if it was an adult or a child. It was sickening, but what made it slightly less shocking was that it had no identity. It could have been an artist's wooden figure, which somebody had perversely decided to char all over with a cigarette-lighter.

Lloyd approached the body slowly, and then stood quite still in front of it.

‘Who do you think it is?' Franklin asked him. ‘Look at this garage—there's black smoke all over everything.'

Lloyd circled around the burned body and ran his finger across the roof of Kathleen's Camaro. Its elk-grain padded vinyl was sticky with black powdery ashes and human grease.

At that moment, Kathleen appeared around the corner. Lloyd had asked Tony Express to keep her away, but there wasn't much that a twelve-year-old blind boy could do to control a determined middle-aged mother who was worried about her only son.

‘Kathleen . . .' Lloyd began, and tried to step in front of her.

‘Oh my God,' she said, her face as white as wax. ‘It isn't . . .?'

Lloyd took hold of her arms, but she quickly twisted herself free. ‘Who is it?' she said, in a breathless scream. ‘Lloyd, who is it?'

It was then that the draught through the garage toppled the figure's precarious sitting position, and it fell to the floor with a soft crunching sound. One charred arm broke free, revealing a thin discoloured gold ring, set with diamonds.

Soundlessly, Kathleen pressed her hand to her face. She stood shaking for a moment, and then she almost collapsed, and between them Lloyd and Franklin had to help her back to the house.

‘Lucy, oh my God, Lucy,' she said, over and over again in a high-pitched hysterical voice. ‘Oh my God, Lucy.'

In the hallway, the sundance doll rattled ominously as she passed it by.

Lloyd gave Kathleen a dose of the valium which her doctor had prescribed for her after Mike had died, and put her to bed. She came downstairs three or four times, trembling and quivering, but in the end Franklin went upstairs with her, and sat beside her, and talked to her and stroked her forehead until she relaxed.

Lloyd poured himself another drink, and another rootbeer for Tony Express. Then he stood and stared out of the window for a long time, while Tony Express sat beside him, humming to himself.

‘It must have been Helmwige,' said Lloyd, at last.

‘Sure,' Tony Express agreed. ‘Celia and Otto went thataway to look for us, Helmwige came thisaway.'

‘God, that poor woman,' said Lloyd. ‘None of this was anything to do with her. Nor was it anything to do with Waldo. God knows what's happened to Tom.'

‘As a matter of record, man, it wasn't actually nothing to do with me, either,' said Tony Express. ‘Not wishing to sound ungrateful or nothing.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Lloyd. ‘I seem to have got all of these innocent people caught up in my own crusade.'

‘Don't worry about it, man,' Tony Express told him. ‘My horoscope said that I was going to do something useful this month, for a change.'

‘John Dull Knife tells horoscopes?'

‘No, man, the San Diego Tribune.'

Lloyd thought for a while, and then he said, ‘I don't know what the hell we're going to do. You were pretty damn good at holding off Otto and Celia this morning, but could you do the same at the opera tomorrow night? I mean, what's the extent of your strength?'

‘Let's put it this way,' said Tony Express, ‘I can't fight any Little Bighorn for you. The sundance doll can help you take personal revenge on somebody you hate real bad . . . like the way it slowed Celia down because she was threatening Franklin, and the way it used a spirit out of Otto's own mind—a spirit that really hated Otto—just to hold him off for a while.

‘But I don't think I've got the power to kill anybody with a sundance doll. And I sure couldn't hold off a thousand people, maybe not even ten. The old Indian sorcery's gone, man. It came out of the ground and it came out of the sky and it came out of the water. Now the ground's all built on and the sky's all chopped up into pieces by airplanes and you sure wouldn't want to drink the water.'

Lloyd picked up the Wagner libretto. ‘So what you're saying is . . . this is our only hope?'

‘Wagner raised these Salamanders up, man. Only Wagner can send ‘em back again.'

‘So how am I going to get it played? The only person I know who could have done it is dead.'

‘Who was she, when she was at home?'

‘Sylvia Cuddy. She worked for the opera company with Celia. She was almost as much of an expert on Wagner as Celia was. In fact in some ways she was better.'

‘You were telling me about her. You reckon that it was Celia who burned her?'

Lloyd nodded. ‘I could sure use her now.

‘Well, man,' sniffed Tony Express. ‘Maybe you can.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘If Sylvia Cuddy is suffering in hell because Celia burned her, then she's going to be feeling pretty damned vengeful, right? And revenge is what we're tapping into here. Anybody who gets unjustly sent to hell can get themselves released by taking revenge on whoever it was who unjustly sent them there. Come on, man, everybody knows that. What do you think ghosts are? Why do you think they moan and they groan? They're spirits who think they shouldn't be suffering in hell, searching for the bastards who put them there.'

Lloyd said gently, ‘Am I beginning to understand you correctly? Because if I am . . . God help me!'

‘Pass me the doll, man,' said Tony Express, lifting himself off the sofa and sitting cross-legged on the rug. ‘I'm going to show you something now you won't forget.'

Lloyd reluctantly picked up the sundance doll and gave it to Tony Express. It felt almost alive in his hand, throbbing, swollen and pliable, like a man's erection felt through a woman's fox-fur coat.

‘Sylvia Cuddy you say?' asked Tony Express.

‘That's right,' Lloyd agreed.

‘Okay, then . . . what I want you to do is to think hard about Sylvia Cuddy. Try to remember what she looked like . . . where she lived. Her belongings. The sound of her voice. Imagine a real small Sylvia Cuddy standing inside of your head. Do you think you can do that?'

‘I can sure as hell try'

He closed his eyes. Tony Express said, ‘Come on, man, keep your eyes open. How'm I going to be able to see her, if you don't keep your eyes open?'