Rook & Tooth and Claw (18 page)

Again he laid his hand on the
loa
stick, and this time he concentrated on its rising out of Umber Jones’s grasp and coming with him. He stared at it harder and harder, willing it to do what he wanted. Gradually he could feel it taking on substance, smooth and hard and shiny. It still
didn’t feel like a real stick, at least it didn’t to him: he felt that his fingers could pass right through it at any moment. But he kept on concentrating –
rise – rise – you damned stubborn piece of wood
– and inch by inch he was able to draw it out of Umber Jones’s fingers.

If anybody else had been watching, they would have seen the
loa
stick sliding out of Umber Jones’s hand as if by magic. They would have seen it rise into the air and float unsteadily toward the window. Jim didn’t realise it, but he was using the same psychic energy that so-called poltergeists use, to fling plates and furniture around the room.

It took all of his concentration to keep a grip on the
loa
stick – or, rather, to will the
loa
stick to stay in his insubstantial hand. But once he had ‘carried’ it to the window, he would be able to drop it into the street below, and then all he would have to do would be to hide it close by. He could come back later in his physical form to retrieve it. He still wasn’t certain what he was supposed to do with it – break it, or bury it or throw it in the ocean – and none of Sharon’s books made any mention of how to deal with a stolen
loa
stick. He guessed that the best way of getting rid of it would be to burn it and scatter its ashes, the same way that he had disposed of Mrs Vaizey, God rest her.

He reached the window and manoeuvred the tip of the
loa
stick into the gap. He looked down at the sidewalk below to make sure that there was nobody around. He didn’t want some passing stranger to pick up the stick and walk off with it, not knowing what it was.

As he was just about to drop it, however, he saw a dark flicker on the other side of the street. At first he thought it was nothing but the shadow from the awning of Amato’s Deli. Then – to his alarm – he saw a tall black
figure come striding out of the darkness, making its way directly toward the apartment’s front door. Umber Jones, with his ashy face and his glistening red eyes.

He lost his concentration and the
loa
stick dropped on to the rush-mat carpeting. Panicking, he knelt down and tried to pick it up, but he was too worried about Umber Jones’s smoke-spirit flowing up the stairs. He grabbed and grabbed, but his fingers went through the
loa
stick every time. From the next room, he heard voices – Tee Jay’s and Umber Jones’s – and he guessed that Tee Jay was trying to stall his uncle’s smoke-spirit for as long as he could. But it was still no use. He couldn’t even
feel
the
loa
stick now, let alone pick it up. He would just have to save himself now, before Umber Jones discovered that he was here and used the power of Ghede to make him eat himself – or punish him in some other horrible and painful way.

He was about to flow through the gap in the window when he felt a strong, calloused hand snatch at his shoulder. He was wrenched around and slapped three times across the face. The slaps were silent, but they were so hard that Jim felt as if his neck had been dislocated. He was gripped by the wrists and pulled up straight, so that he was face to face with the smoke-spirit of Umber Jones.

Umber Jones, to his surprise, was grinning.

“So … you found out how to leave your body and walk the way that spirits walk?” said Umber Jones. Jim tried to struggle free but Umber Jones was gripping him far too tightly. “What brought you here, to my house?” Umber Jones asked him. “Thought that you’d pay me a visit, did you? Thought that you’d be sociable?”

Jim twisted himself sideways but still Umber Jones kept an unrelenting hold on his wrists. He looked around
the room – inspecting the cabinet crowded with voodoo bric-a-brac, at the tables with their charms and amulets and silver boxes. “You wouldn’t have come here to
steal
something, would you, Mr Rook? I wouldn’t believe that of you. I thought it was a teacher’s duty to uphold our moral standards – set an example.”

He gave a dry, thumping sniff. Then he said, “No … I don’t think you came to steal anything, did you? I can’t see anything missing.” He was playing with Jim, taunting him. The moment he flowed into the room he must have seen that the
loa
stick was lying on the floor.

“Or … wait a minute, what’s this?” he said, looking down by Jim’s feet. “Isn’t that my cane there, down on the floor? What do you think
that’s
doing down there? I hope you weren’t trying to make off with
that,
Jim, because that’s a sacred cane. You can knock on any door with that cane and you’ve got the spirits with you, as many as you want. You’ve got Ghede and Ougon Ferraire. You’ve even got Vodun, if you dare.”

Jim said, “You know damn well what I’m doing here. The killing has to stop.”

Umber Jones tilted his head forward so that he and Jim were almost nose to nose. “The killing can never stop, Mr Rook. Not until everybody in this city pays their respects to Umber Jones. Not just their respects, neither. Their money, too, and anything else that might catch my eye.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Maybe I am, Mr Rook. But you’re something much, much worse. You’re out of your body.”

“You really think you can force every pimp and drug-dealer in Los Angeles to hand over ninety per cent of everything they make?”

“Think it? I
know
it. What did Chill say to you today? Don’t tell me he’s still holding out.”

Jim said nothing. Umber Jones gave him a long, blood-coloured stare and then released his wrists. He leaned down and picked up his
loa
stick, sliding his hand down the length of it as if to reassure himself that it hadn’t been bent or damaged. It was the
loa
stick that gave his smoke-spirit the ability to be able to intervene in the physical world – to pick up objects, to cut people, to stab them to death. He walked over to his body on the bed, opened up his own fingers, and returned the
loa
stick to its original position.

“I thought I could trust you,” he said. “You don’t know how much you’ve disappointed me. You’ve let your students down, too.”

“Don’t even think about touching my students.”

Umber Jones came right up to him and towered over him. “You won’t be able to stop me.”

“Oh, I’ll stop you. I’ll find a way, believe me.”

“And supposing I make you eat yourself, the way that I made your lady friend eat herself?”

Jim said, “You need me too badly. How are you going to talk to all of those drug dealers if you don’t have me?”

“I can always find another friend.”

“Maybe you can. But it isn’t easy, finding friends, is it? Especially friends who are easy to blackmail, like me.”

Umber Jones grinned at him. “You’re right. But I think you need to be taught a lesson. I think you need to be given a little instruction in obedience and humility.”

Jim didn’t know what to say. He had never felt quite so frightened in his life. In his spirit form, outside his body, he felt naked and vulnerable, and as helpless in front of this smoke-black figure of spells and witchery as a newly-born child. He hadn’t even known before Umber Jones had slapped him that spirits could even
feel
other
spirits, let alone hurt them. Apart from what Mrs Vaizey had told him, and what he had read in Sharon’s books and
National Geographic,
his knowledge of spirits had been limited to Jacob Marley and
Casper the Ghost.

“What are you going to do?” he asked Umber Jones, tightly.

“You’ll find out.”

“You’re just going to let me go?”

“As you said yourself, it isn’t easy, finding friends.”

“So what about this little instruction in obedience and humility?”

“You’ll find out.”

With that, he turned his back on Jim and went back over to the bed. He stood beside his physical body and laid his hand on its chest. He crossed himself and muttered a few incomprehensible words. His physical body began to breathe more and more deeply, its nostrils flaring, its ashy black coat-lapels rising and falling. Soon its breath was coming in huge agonised groans, like a man trapped in a submarine.

The black image of Umber Jones’s smoke-spirit began to tremble. With every inward breath that his physical body took, it seemed to be pulled toward it. Then it started to fold in on itself, and become smokier and even less substantial. Right in front of Jim’s eyes, Umber Jones’s physical body
breathed in
his smoke-spirit, little by little, until there was nothing left beside the bed except a few dark wisps that floated and curled until they were breathed in, too.

Jim heard Umber Jones murmur something, and his fingers stirred like spiders disturbed by rain.

Now was the time to leave. Jim turned away, and flowed through the gap in the window, into the night, floating down toward the street with the lights of Venice
sparkling all around him. He reached the sidewalk and looked back toward Umber Jones’s bedroom window. Umber Jones was standing there, silhouetted by the dim, flickering candelight, watching him.

Jim started to make his way home, gliding from one street to the next. All he wanted now was to be back in his physical body before Umber Jones decided to teach him his lesson. It didn’t look as if he was going to be forced to consume himself, thank God. But not knowing what punishment Umber Jones had in store for him was almost as chilling.

He reached his apartment block and flowed in through the window. He crossed the living-room, where the feline formerly known as Tibbles was sleeping on the floor beside the couch.

The couch itself, however, was empty. Jim’s physical body had gone.

Chapter Twelve

He glided through to the bedroom. His body wasn’t there, either. With rising panic, he glided through to the bathroom. The tub was empty. The shower-head dripped with its usual plangent
plink, plank, plink, plank.

He went back to the living-room. He laid his hand on the couch but he couldn’t feel any warmth. He could see, however, that the ash had been scuffed, as if somebody had stepped on it. His cat must have felt his presence, because she lifted her head and opened one eye.

What the hell was he going to do now? Was this Umber Jones’s punishment, to take his physical body away and leave his spirit without anywhere to go? From what Mrs Vaizey had told him, a body and a spirit could only survive for a very limited time without each other. What if Umber Jones had taken his body away and hidden it, so that he would have to beg to have it returned?

But then again, what if his disappearance wasn’t anything to do with Umber Jones? What if Myrlin had seen him lying in a coma and had him taken away by ambulance? How could he find his body then?

He circled the living-room again and again. Nobody could have seen him, but as he circled he disturbed the air. Ghosts and spirits are not completely undetectable. They raise and lower temperatures, they slow down clocks.
Their breath can always be faintly felt, or sometimes even seen, especially on a fogged-up windowpane.

He was still frantically circling when he heard a familiar tap at the living-room window. He couldn’t open the door, so he flowed out through the fanlight and reassembled himself on the balcony outside. Elvin was standing by the railings, smiling at nothing at all. He was even more decomposed than he had been before. The wounds in his face were gaping open and they had started to suppurate – a thick, glistening pus that had dried around each stab-wound like the crusts around a jar of mayonnaise. Blowflies crawled in his eye-sockets, giving Jim the impression that his eyes were sparkling, and that he could see.

“I suppose you’ve come with another message?” said Jim.

Elvin opened and closed his mouth. His tongue was so swelled up that it was almost impossible for him to speak.

“You don’t happen to know the whereabouts of my body, do you?” Jim demanded. “If this is Umber Jones’s idea of a punishment, then you can tell him that I’m sorry; that I’ll never touch his
loa
stick again and that I’ll do whatever he wants me to do, in perpetuity, no argument. But he has to give me my body back.”

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” whispered Elvin.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

A blowfly flew out of Elvin’s eye-socket with a sharp, echoing buzz. “I’ve taken your body to the place where it belongs … the place where everybody’s body belongs.”

“What do you mean? The cemetery?”

Elvin nodded. “All bodies belong in the ground; yours as well as mine.”

“My body’s been
buried
? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“Boxed and buried, Mr Rook. But don’t you worry. I said some comforting words over your grave.”

Jim felt even more naked and transparent than ever. It had been wonderfully liberating, to leave his body, but now he was beginning to feel as if he had been sitting in a cold bath for far too long. If a spirit could shiver, he was shivering. He began to long for his body. He missed its warmth and its security, for all of its heaviness.

Elvin said, “Nobody will ever find you, Mr Rook. You’ll have to wait for Umber Jones to dig you up again.”

“And how long is that going to be?”

“A day. Two days. A month-and-a-half. Three months. Maybe never.”

“But my body’s not going to survive without my spirit.”

“Don’t worry, Mr Rook. I’m going to show you where you’re buried, so that you can slip back into your skin.”

“But even if I do that – how can I survive if I’m six feet under?”

“Goofer dust,” said Elvin, with a smile. “I blew some goofer dust on you, while you were lying on the couch. You don’t need to eat. You don’t need to drink. You scarcely need to breathe. You’re a zombie, Mr Rook. You’ll survive for months.”

Jim couldn’t think of anything to say.

Elvin shuffled closer and he smelled so sickly that Jim would have retched if he had had a stomach to retch with. “Follow me,” said Elvin. “It isn’t far.” He turned and made his way back along the balcony.

Jim hesitated for a moment, but Elvin turned around
and beckoned him. “Come on,” he said. “We don’t have much time. You want your body back, don’t you?”

Reluctantly, Jim followed him down the steps. Instead of going out into the street, however, Elvin turned right down the narrow path to the back of the apartment block where the dumpsters were kept. The path was dark and wet from a dripping garden tap, and Elvin’s feet dragged along the concrete in the same shambling gait that had characterised the zombies in
Dawn of the Dead.
God, thought Jim, talk about life imitating art, if
Dawn of the Dead
could be classified as art.

Elvin crossed the yard and then made his way through a tangle of weeds and bushes until he reached a triangular patch of waste ground between the rear of the garages and the cinderblock wall of the property next door. It was dark and shadowy here, but Jim could see that the dry, clumpy soil had been recently disturbed.

“My body’s
here
?” he asked, with a feeling of dread.

“Can’t you feel it, Mr Rook? Can’t you sense your own flesh?”

“So what do I do now?”

“Do what spirits always do when they come back from walking about. Slide into your body, and rest.”

Jim said, “Did Umber Jones
know
that I was going to leave my body tonight?”

“Umber Jones knows a lot of things, Mr Rook.”

“But only my students knew what I was going to do. Nobody else. And
they
wouldn’t have tipped him off.”

“Well,” said Elvin, “you’ll have plenty of time to think about it.” He wasn’t being sarcastic. In some way, his thick, obstructed voice sounded almost sad, as if he desperately wished that
he
was lying in a coffin under the ground, able to rest his decaying limbs.

Jim wasn’t sure what to do. He stood on the broken lumps of dug-up dirt and tried to feel where his body might be. Several minutes went by, with Elvin patiently watching him, and the night all around them busy with the sound of traffic. Then Jim became conscious of a warmth beneath his feet; a sense of wellbeing. His body was below him, he could feel it. He could almost see it in his mind’s eye. He allowed himself to sink. He closed his eyes and tried to think of himself as nothing more substantial than warm water, soaking into the soil. As he sank lower and lower, he felt his spirit trickling between each individual grain, deeper and deeper. In only a few moments, he was embraced by complete darkness.

He reached the lid of his coffin. It was only a plain pine box, and he soaked through that, too, like wood stain. He flowed back into his body, into his brain. He drew on his hands like pulling on a pair of gloves. He filled out his lungs and his stomach and he stretched out his legs until he reached his toes. For a few seconds, the sense of relief was huge.

Only for a few seconds. The next thing he knew he was trapped in a dark, stifling box, his arms pinned beside him, unable to move. A wave of claustrophobia rolled over him, but he couldn’t even scream. He was still paralysed by the goofer dust, his eyes wide open, his mouth wide open, but his facial muscles completely locked. Once, when he was playing football, he had dislocated his jaw, but this was a thousand times worse. He was gripped by such muscular rigidity that he couldn’t even express his hysteria by panting or kicking or beating his fists. He thought he was going to die.

After a few minutes, however, he tried to persuade himself to calm down. It wasn’t easy. The coffin was
so tight that his nose was touching the underside of the lid. His brain was telling his heart to beat faster but his heart refused. He felt as if the frustration of being paralysed was going to explode inside him like a bomb. But then he kept trying to tell himself,
you’re buried, you’re paralysed, but you’re not dead yet.
Stop panicking and start thinking, otherwise you’ll never get out of here – not until Umber Jones deigns to dig you up, anyhow.

You know for a fact that people in Haiti have been known to survive in their coffins for several days after their ‘funerals’. You can survive, too, if you try to keep your head straight. Your lungs refuse to breathe, but that’s all for the best. You need to keep your metabolism down to an absolute minimum. No mental struggling, no hysteria. You practically have to flat-line.

It took him almost twenty minutes before he was able to calm himself completely. He kept having little spasms of claustrophobia which made him shudder spastically from head to foot. In the end, however, he managed to suppress his terror and to quieten his mind like a glassy pool of water. He would survive, he was sure of it. Umber Jones needed him too much to let him die. He was being punished, that was all, for trying to steal the
loa
stick. If he could accept his punishment calmly, then he would survive.

He tried to think of what he could do next. He could either lie here and wait for Umber Jones to exhume him, or else he could try to escape. The trouble was, his body was paralysed and his spirit was incapable of any greater physical activity than picking up a stick. He lay in total darkness, underneath the earth, unable to cry out, unable even to weep. He now knew what it was like to be a zombie; and why so many of them
were so subservient when they were finally brought out of the ground. Either they were totally traumatised, or else they were so grateful for being rescued that they were prepared to do anything that their rescuer wanted them to do. There was nothing more terrifying, nothing more lonely, than lying alive in your own grave, waiting and hoping for the sound of a shovel.

Jim could have believed that God had forsaken him.

By ten-fifteen, Special Class II were beginning to become restless. Not in their usual way: shouting and throwing paper pellets and drumming on their desks. This time they were quiet and worried, talking to each other in low murmurs and occasionally going across to the window to see if Jim’s car had appeared in the parking-lot.

Russell Gloach was eating out of a family-sized pack of nacho-flavoured tortillas. “You don’t think something went wrong?” he asked. “Tee Jay’s uncle sounds like one real mean dude.”

Muffy looked at her watch. “Where is Tee Jay anyhow? He’s just about the only person who can tell us what went down, and he’s not even here.”

“Something went wrong,” said Russell, with tortilla crumbs dropping from his mouth. “You mark my words. ‘Something went wrong.”

“Will you stop being such a pessimist?” snapped Seymour. “Mr Rook could have been held up by anything. Traffic, who knows?”

“Did you ever know him to be late? He’s never late.”

“Maybe he found the stick and now he’s trying to get rid of it.”

“M-m-maybe w-we should c-call him at home.”

“David, that’s the best idea yet,” said Sharon. “Does anybody know his number?”

“It’s in his desk,” said Ray.

“How do you know it’s in his desk?”

“Because I
always
look through teachers’ desks, just to see what they’ve confiscated. Believe me, if you want chewing gum, penknives or porno mags, there is
no
more reliable source than a teacher’s desk.”

They found Jim’s number in the small leatherbound diary he always kept in his left-hand drawer. Sue-Robin took her mobile phone out of her Moschino bag and punched it out, noisily chewing gum as she did so. She blew a large pink bubble while she waited. The phone rang and rang but Jim didn’t pick up. Eventually Sue-Robin said, “He’s not answering. Something must have happened to him.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Well, let’s check with the office, just to make sure that he didn’t come in today. Then – I don’t know – maybe a couple of us ought to go round to Tee Jay’s place. Maybe Tee Jay knows where he is.”

Muffy went to see Sylvia, Dr Ehrlichman’s secretary, but Sylvia hadn’t seen Jim either. “Don’t you worry, it’s probably that old car of his. I’ll have Dr Ehrlichman set you some work to be getting along with.”

“Oh, no, no. Tell him not to bother. We’ve all got plenty to do.”

She returned to the classroom. The rest of the students were waiting expectantly, but all she could do was to shake her head.

“That’s it, then,” said Sue-Robin, decisively. “Ray and Beattie, why don’t you go to Tee Jay’s house. Ask his mom where his uncle’s place is, and then go see if you can find him.”

“Do I have go with Ray?” asked Beattie, with distaste.

Ray blew her a smoochy Italianate kiss and said, “Sure you do. I’m the one with the fastest wheels.”

“Fast cars are a pathetic penis-substitute,” Beattie sniffed.

“Fast cars get you laid faster,” Ray retaliated.

“Exactly.”

They were still discussing what the rest of them should do when they heard a scratching, squeaking sound. They all fell silent and stared at each other. Then, as if they had been choreographed, they all turned their heads toward the chalkboard. A stick of chalk was hovering in the air in front of it, tapping at it again and again, like a deathly-white dragonfly.

“Oh my
God
,” breathed Rita Munoz. “It must be Tee Jay’s uncle again.”

“Oh shit I hope not,” said Seymour. “What the hell are we going to do if it is?”

The stick of chalk hesitated and then suddenly dropped to the floor, making them all jump. Then, very hesitantly, it rose up again, back up to the board. It looked as if it were being held by somebody invisible, somebody whose fingers couldn’t grip properly.

“Hey, look,” said John Ng. “It’s making some marks. It’s writing something.”

With excruciating slowness, the chalk made a single vertical line. Then it moved sideways a little, and drew what looked like an Indian tepee. Then two Indian tepees.

I A AA.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” frowned Titus. But then the chalk moved sideways again and wrote what looked like an 8.