Hymn (36 page)

Lloyd had never understood how a Salamander was formed, but now he saw it for himself, over and over again. It was silent, and it was quite uncanny. He had seen many supernatural occurrences over the past week, but nothing as strange as this.

A thick-set man lay slumped in his seat in the front row. The smoke rose from his burned body, and seemed to twist and thicken above his head. As it drifted higher and higher toward the ceiling, it gradually took on a human shape, and reached a point where it started to sink again, until it had reached the floor. The ritual chant had mixed smoke with the rising soul, so that the soul couldn't leave the earth's gravity, so that it was denied its place in heaven.

At the back of the smoky auditorium, more and more Salamanders fell soft as quilts from the air, and gathered together in silence, mute witnesses to their own burned bodies.

Otto turned back to his chorus in triumph, his yellow eyes wide.

‘It has begun!' he cried. ‘It has begun! Now for the greatest transformation of all!'

The chorus parted to allow him into the centre of their circle. Otto stood there for a moment, admiring them. ‘You, my immortals! My master race! Parents of the gods!'

Then he walked around the circle, touching each of them on the arm by turn. ‘You have an army now, an army of Salamanders . . . and those who do well for you can be Transformed like you at the next solstice. You need fear no resistance . . . you cannot be killed, you cannot die. You are the greatest of all living creatures.'

He continued walking around and around. ‘All of you have mortal partners with whom you can breed one child . . . those children will be the foundation of our future, the demi-gods.'

He stopped when he reached Celia and Mike Kerwin, and laid his hand on their shoulders. ‘You, unfortunately, have a partner who let suspicion overcome love . . . Mike, so did you. But for you, I have two special partners. Partners with whom it is more than an honour to breed.'

He looked around once more, and took a long, dry breath. ‘Now . . .' he said, ‘the talismen, please.'

The chorus held up their salamander charms, fourteen of them in all. Otto took Celia's and placed it on his tongue, and Celia stepped back out of the circle. The other thirteen held theirs up, and began to chant.

‘What's happening now?' asked Kathleen. She had her handkerchief pressed to her mouth to stop herself from choking. ‘What's he doing?'

As the chanting grew louder and more strident, Otto appeared, oddly, to grow taller. Lloyd wiped the smoke from his eyes and looked again. But it was true. Otto was growing taller and taller, until he was nearly eight feet tall, thin and attenuated and insect-like. He was grinning down at the stage, his yellow eyes bright, triumphant, fierce.

Suddenly, the top of his scalp parted, and his skin peeled away from his skull like a rubber glove. Underneath Lloyd saw black glistening bone, and yellow slanting eyes that were as dead and as calculating as any gargoyle's.

Now the skin split down Otto's back, and a forest of shining black spines rose up. ‘I have done what I was summoned to do,' he said, in a croaking rasp that was scarcely human. ‘I have recreated the master race. Now I can return.'

Kathleen gripped Lloyd's arm. ‘Lloyd . . . he's not even a . . . Lloyd! He's some sort of a . . .! Oh my God! What is it, Lloyd? What is it?'

Lloyd stepped back. ‘Whatever it is, we have to play that hymn . . . Once this is over, all of those people are going to go their different ways, and then we'll never stop them!'

They backed away from the stage, and around the back of the scenery again. On the far side of the stage was a short flight of steps and a door marked Grams: Silence. A small lighted window overlooked the stage itself.

‘That's it,' said Lloyd. ‘Follow me, but for God's sake keep a look out behind you.'

They climbed the steps as quietly as they could. The treads creaked, but the chanting of the chorus was so loud now that nobody could have heard them. In the centre of the circle, the reptilian monstrosity into which Otto was slowly being transformed was swaying and clicking and uttering harsh breathing noises. Lloyd glanced at it quickly and then decided not to look at it again. Black claws were tearing their way out of the skin of Otto's fingers.

He cautiously turned the knob of the sound room, and opened the door. Inside he could smell heated electrical equipment. He took the cassette out of his pocket, and stepped inside, nodding to Kathleen to follow him.

‘All I have to do is find the tape-player,' he said, inspecting the rows of switches and lights on the console. ‘Why the hell don't they have a Walkman, like everybody else?'

He found the tape-player, and was trying to slot in the tape when the door burst open again. In blundered Franklin, holding hands with Tony Express. Right behind them came Helmwige, looking darkly angry, with Tom. She was dressed in a skintight black leather leotard, cut impossibly high at the thigh, and black thigh-length boots. She was tugging Tom after her on a steel neckcollar. His neck was raw and his eyes were blotchy from crying.

‘Tom!' said Kathleen. ‘You bitch, let him go!'

‘Let him go? I'm going to flay him alive and eat him for my breakfast if you don't shut up! You! Denman! Take out that tape and give it to me!'

Lloyd looked around at Franklin and Tony Express. Franklin said, ‘We tried, Lloyd. We tried real hard. But she said she was going to kill him if we didn't give her the tape.'

‘Tony?' asked Lloyd carefully, meaning ‘what about your sundance doll?'

‘You can't use a revenge totem against somebody who's technically dead already,' Tony Express explained carefully, as if he were demonstrating a vacuum-cleaner. He swung the sundance doll from side to side, and nothing happened.

Helmwige said, ‘The tape, Denman, or else I burn the boy to a cinder, right in front of your eyes, like I burned his aunt.'

‘Lloyd . . .' said Kathleen, anxiously.

‘Guess I don't have any choice,' said Lloyd. He glanced out of the window of the grams room, and he could see something black and gleaming swaying in the centre of the stage. Otto, sloughing his human appearance, and returning to what he really was. The chant of the chorus was muffled in here, but Lloyd could hear that it was reaching a high pitch of hysteria.

He held out the cassette to Helmwige, just two or three inches out of her reach. ‘What is that thing?' he asked her. ‘That . . .' nodding toward Otto.

Helmwige smiled. ‘Otto? He used to be a student in Salzburg, before the war. But you see, he discovered a way to make himself not just a scholar but a genius. He made a trade with something dark, I don't know what. He allowed that thing to live inside his body until he had made his mark in history. Now, he has made his mark, and the thing is leaving, back to where it came from.'

Lloyd shuddered. Then, without warning, he swung his right arm and punched Helmwige straight in the face. Helmwige staggered back, lost her balance, and hit her side against the hi-fi console. But immediately she was back again, and she slapped Lloyd open-handed across the head so hard that he was thrown against the opposite wall.

‘Fool!' she spat at him. He tried to get up, but she kicked him in the ribs, and then in the stomach.

At that moment, however, Franklin grabbed hold of her, and gripped her in a bear-hug. At the same time, he yanked Tom's chain out of her hand, and threw it aside.

‘Lloyd!' he yelled. ‘Put on the Hymn! Kathleen! Tom! Tony! Go!'

‘You cretin!' spat Helmwige. ‘You know what I can do to you!'

‘Lloyd!' Franklin bellowed. ‘The tape!'

Dazed, coughing, bleeding, Lloyd climbed to his feet. He picked up the cassette and jabbed it into the tape-player.

Kathleen hesitated at the door, but Franklin shouted, ‘Go! Go! Go!'

‘Mengele's Dümmling!' Helmwige screeched. But Franklin kept her tight in his bear-hug, her arms by her sides, her face scarlet with fury and exertion.

Quickly, she began to increase her body heat. Franklin gasped, but he took a huge breath and continued to hold her. Lloyd pressed the Start button on the tape-player, and after a second or two, he heard the crackling rush of the lead-in.

Helmwige was now burning hotter and hotter. Her leather costume began to smoulder and stretch, but she kept on increasing her temperature. Sweat streamed down Franklin's face, and he gritted his teeth. But still he clung on to Helmwige, even when smoke began to rise from his scorched shirt, and the skin on his chest and his thighs began to blister.

‘Aaaaahhhh!!!' screamed Franklin, as Helmwige's body began to burn into his nerve-endings.

‘You fool! You pitiful fool!' Helmwige hissed at him. ‘You're nothing! You're nobody! You never were!'

The first notes of Wagner's Hymn of Atonement suddenly broke out of the theatre's public-address system. Down on the stage, the spindly black creature swayed and turned, and threw back its head. The chanting chorus obviously didn't hear the Hymn at first, but then one or two of them began to look around, and frown.

‘You're nothing!' Helmwige raged. ‘You're a nameless nothing!'

‘Oh, God!' Franklin cried out. ‘Oh God, help me! I'm Franklin! I'm Franklin Free! I'm Franklin Free!'

Steady and calm and strong, the piano-playing of the dead Sylvia Cuddy filled the auditorium of the Civic Theater. For one heart-stopping moment, Lloyd thought that the Hymn wasn't going to work, and that they were all going to die. But Helmwige suddenly incandesced, as bright as magnesium flaring, and both she and Franklin screamed at each other in mutual agony.

There was an ear-shattering explosion inside the grams room, and Helmwige collapsed into grey bones and silvery ash. Franklin dropped to the floor, trembling violently at first, then still.

Lloyd wrenched open the grams room door and stood on the top step. One by one, the chorus were incandescing, blazing bright as flares, and leaving nothing on the stage but drifts of ash. Lloyd glimpsed Celia for a moment, her hands pressed against her ears, but then he lost sight of her behind Mike Kerwin, who flared up as brightly as a fallen comet.

In the centre of the stage, the black glistening creature had dropped to the boards, and lay quivering malevolently. Its yellow eyes glared at Lloyd with such cold hatred that he had to turn away.

‘You have assured my return,' the creature croaked at him. ‘Until I can capture the soul of a mortal who can change the course of human history, I shall always return.'

Lloyd turned around and faced it and there were tears running down his cheeks. There was nothing he could say to evil like this.

With a hideous clattering sound, the creature slid between the cracks of two single floorboards, spines and claws and tail, and vanished from sight. Lloyd went to the side of the stage and retched, but all he could bring up was warm saliva.

He looked toward the auditorium. The burned bodies of a thousand of Southern California's most successful suburbanites sat charred beyond recognition. Of the Salamanders, there was no sign at all. They were always volatile, that's what Otto had said, when Otto was Otto, and not some black thing out of hell. He walked up the aisle and saw the deep scorch marks on the carpet where each of them had stood.

He had almost reached the exit when the first firefighter came hacking and splintering his way through the locked doors with his axe. The firefighter took one look at the autidorium, one look at Lloyd, and said, ‘Jesus.'

In a suite at the El Cajon Hotel, downtown, a fiftyish man in a tan-coloured shirt sat in front of his television set, round-shouldered, silent. Across the room sat a dark-haired woman, watching him anxiously.

‘So he failed,' said the man, at last.

‘We don't yet know why, or how,' the woman replied.

The man stood up and went to the window. He drew back the grimy net curtains and stared down into the street. ‘It doesn't matter why. It doesn't matter how. They always fail. They always betray me. “You can father a child,” he said. “I have just the woman for you. And just the man for Eva.”'

‘What are you going to do now?' the woman asked him.

‘Do?' he said. ‘I shall start again, natürlich. I have all the time in the world.'

Lloyd was playing cards with John Dull Knife in Zuni Tone's trailer when the telephone rang.

‘Heads you answer it, tails we let it ring,' he suggested.

Without even looking at it, John Dull Knife flicked a quarter with his thumbnail. He slapped it on to the back of his withered, liver-spotted hand, and it was tails.

‘I should have learned not to gamble with you,' Lloyd complained, and struggled up off the couchette to pick up the phone.

‘You shouldn't gamble with anybody,' replied John Dull Knife. ‘You gamble like a woman.'

‘Screw you, too,' Lloyd told him, just as a girl's voice said, ‘Hello?'

‘Oh, hi, yes, I'm, sorry'

‘Is that Mr Denman? I rang your fish restaurant but they told me you sold up and moved away.'

‘Well, that's right. I'm out in the desert at the moment, taking a sabbatical. It's what's called getting your head together. How can I help you?'

‘You probably don't remember me, but my name's Lawreign. Law like in LA Law? I work at the souvenir counter in the Star of India . . .'

‘Hey, I remember you. You're the pretty one.'

‘Thanks! But actually I called you because you asked me to watch out for a woman in a white raincoat and a yellow headscarf and dark glasses.'

‘Well, that's right, sure, but . . .'

‘She came in, day before yesterday.'

A soft feeling of dread crept down Lloyd's back, like a cold-furred cat. ‘Say again.'

‘She came in, day before yesterday and bought a piece of scrimshaw. Quite an expensive piece, too. She said she was going to send it to somebody as a gift, so we wrapped it and everything.'