The Revenant Road Page 5

  If I lose him…

  I don’t let myself complete the thought.

  Curious, I step forward—the flames have begun to recede enough for me to look over the edge of the trashcan—and something, a screaming shadow, leaps up from the flames, grabs me with burning hands and pulls me into the fire.

  I scream.

  And I burn.

  12

  An Affair to Dismember:

  Part 3

  Three days after my father’s funeral, I was lying on the sofa in my apartment, surrounded by the emptied contents of my liquor cabinet and wishing I’d majored in brain surgery: There were several choice moments from the previous seventy-two hours that I would have happily cauterized.

  I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten solid food since the morning of the funeral. I sat up. The pain in my head immediately called me an idiot and punished me accordingly. At first I thought the blinking red light in the corner of my eye was a burst blood vessel. Then I realized that it was my answering machine.

  I pushed the “play” button and my mother’s voice filled my living room.

  “Obadiah, I haven’t heard from you. We need to talk. Call me.”

  Beep.

  “Obadiah, hi, it’s Mark Bloom. Remember me? The publicist you’re underpaying to make you internationally fabulous? Listen, I booked you on Juno for the day after tomorrow...”

  Beep.

  “Obadiah. Neville Kowalski calling.”

  I rubbed the crust out of my eyes.

  “I don’t know exactly what your mother told you, but I can guess. I’d like to meet with you today, maybe over lunch at the White Fedora, say, one thirty?”

  I reached over and turned up the volume.

  “I know this seems odd,” Kowalski’s voice continued. “But there’s a few matters need clarifying before we can proceed.”

  Before we can proceed?

  “There’s a whole lot you don’t know about your old man. I’d like to tell you the real story. I’d like for you to understand what Marcus was all about. I hope you’ll come.”

  The machine asked me if I wanted to erase my messages.

  I looked at my watch: Twenty minutes to get to the White Fedora. I got up, got dressed, ran past my kitchenette and into the street to chase down a cab.

  I could eat after lunch.

  * * * *

  Thirty-two minutes later, I stepped out of a taxi at the corner of Broadway and 47th Street. A healthy lunch crowd swirled around me. As I stepped up onto the curb I was jostled by a group of fat Midwestern tourists. One of them, the obvious leader of the pack, grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “Sorry, my brother,” he brayed. “Say, you and me aren’t gonna have a praablem here, are we, Roscoe?”

  The rest of the pack yipped and chattered like overfed hyenas. The red-faced pack leader pounded my shoulder and roared with what I might have taken to be corn-fed good humor if I hadn’t been nearly asphyxiated by the vodka fumes eddying out of his enormous pores.

  Without waiting for my reply, the fleshy adventurers moved on up the sidewalk, filling the air with harsh Midwestern r’s, smashing every vowel flatter than the flattest flapjack as they pursued the ephemeral pleasures of Times Square, Restaurant Row and the Great White Way.

  The shrieking lunatic was almost a welcome relief.

  I turned, expecting to see some perfectly ordinary crack-addled urban wildman, caught up, perhaps, in the throes of a brick-wielding frenzy. Instead, I was stunned to see a portly man wearing a smart cardigan and khakis and waving a butcher knife crossing 47thth Street at a dead run.

  “Diiiiieeeee!”

  He was talking to me.

  As people around me scattered like roaches I had one second to realize that I knew the wild-eyed lunatic.

  That’s Copernicus Geller.

  Geller dodged a speeding bike messenger and came on, his eyes wild as he screamed.

  “Dieeeeeeee!”

  Then the cross-town bus smashed into him. Geller flew West, thirty feet through the air, and landed on Broadway, dead center of the southbound lane.

  It was 1:42 PM: The height of the midtown lunch rush.

  Geller sprang to his feet. He’d managed to hold onto the knife, but his left arm jutted at an angle that would have confounded the nation’s greatest contortionists. Undeterred, Geller turned, spotted me in the gawking crowd, lifted the knife—

  “Diiieeeee!”

  —and was struck by a taxi.

  The taxi driver screamed in some Middle-Eastern dialect as Geller bounced off of the roof, slid down the back windshield, rolled off of the trunk and hit the concrete.

  Again, Geller managed to stagger to his feet. Or rather his foot: Most of his right leg was rounding the corner of 48th street, dragged beneath the wheels of the fleeing taxi.

  Disoriented, Geller hopped backward into the northbound lane just as a speeding UPS truck thundered into the intersection and blasted him through the window of the nearest Starbucks.

  As tourists and New Yorkers of every stripe ran toward the scene of the accident, I turned and made my way back up the street. Copernicus Geller was the book critic for the New York Sentinel. He hosted a weekly national cable show called Lit-Beat, during which he’d once burned a copy of Death and the Sorcerer while singing God Bless America.

  One nutjob down, I thought with warm satisfaction. My step grew lighter as I made my way back up 47th Street.

  I even whistled.

  * * * *

  “Sorry I’m late. Traffic.”

  Kowalski had already ordered lunch: chicken salad on a bed of fresh spinach. He waved away my excuse and grunted around a mouthful of croutons: “Traffic in this town sucks donkey balls.”

  He waved the waiter over to our table.

  “Get you something from the bar?” he said, indicating the chilled empty glass in front of me. “How ‘bout a nice cream soda?”

  I sat down across from him.

  “Just coffee,” I said. “You drinking anything?”

  “Everything,” he said. “Which is why I stick with cream soda.”

  Kowalski leaned in, lowered his voice. “Obadiah, I’m seven years sober today. Christ, I’m tickled pink about that.”

  “Congrats,” I said.

  Again the wave: “Who gives a shit?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Obadiah, I shared that information with you because I believe that you and I are going to become friends.”

  “That’s probably overstating things,” I said.

  “Oh, not today,” Kowalski continued. “Hell, probably not even next year. But what I’m going to tell you about your father... Well let’s just say that he and I came from different worlds. Circumstances brought us together, changed both our lives. We were partners for nearly thirty years.”

  By now I was profoundly uncomfortable. I turned, hoping to find a waiter—or a runaway bus to throw myself under.

  “Your mom told you part of a story that began before you were born,” Kowalski said.

  I nodded. “That you and my father were some sort of spook detectives.”

  Kowalski winced. “Monster killers, son. Marcus Grudge and I were monster killers.”

  “Listen, Mr. Kowalski,” I said. “I don’t know what kind of sick stunt you’re trying to pull over on my mother, but I came here today to tell you: It’s over.”

  Kowalski looked up from his salad as if he hadn’t heard me. “How’s that?”

  “I don’t know what kind of twisted though perfectly acceptable sexual relationship you and my father had and frankly, I don’t care,” I said. “I want you to stay away from my mother.”

  “Sexual relationship?” Kowalski growled. “Sexual relationship?”

  Kowalski laughed.

  I clenched my jaw to control the flow of outrage that seeped around my teeth. Something about Kowalski set my nerves on edge.

  “You’ve filled her head with a lot of fairy tales and somehow, perhaps because of closet alcoholism or som
e undiagnosed mental disorder, she’s come to believe them. But whatever the reason: It’s officially done.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out my checkbook.

  “I’m going to write you a check for more money than you’ve ever seen back at whatever trailer park you came from. I’m going to give you this check, and then you are going to disappear, just like Count Dracula or the Invisible Man or whoever else you’d like to invite to your indictment, which I will personally guarantee if you come within fifty yards of me, my mother, or anyone in the tri-state area who bears a passing family resemblance. Capische?”

  Kowalski stared at the check.

  “I’ll take that as a “yes,”” I said.

  I stood, feeling like a righteous defender of the mentally defective. I reached into my wallet and threw a five dollar bill onto the table.

  “Thanks for the coffee.”

  I spun on my heel and walked away from the table.

  “Why do you think your books are so successful, Mr. Grudge?” Kowalski said.

  I stopped. “Oh, I don’t know, Mister Kowalski,” I said. “What say you just chalk it up to dumb luck and fuck off.”

  “You believe her.”

  I turned back.

  “What did you say?”

  “You believe every word of what Lenore said and it scares the pistachios outta you,” Kowalski said, tapping the side of his blue-veined nose. “I can smell the fear comin’ off you in waves. Hell, you’re scared shitless; because you believe and you don’t even know why.”

  He grinned. “Why didn’t you look in the black box?”

  “How did you…?”

  Kowalski smirked. “Look at you,” he said. “You’re one cocky son of a bitch. You dance across the bestseller lists and tell yourself that it’s because of raw talent and hard work when the truth is you’re a hack. “What’s worse? You know you’re a hack.”

  “You arrogant bastard,” I said. “Who do you think...?”

  “Save the wounded artiste routine for someone who gives a rat’s ass,” Kowalski snarled. “The truth is you don’t have the slightest inkling why so many people buy your books.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “Oh?” he shot back. “Your ideas are good but your dialogue stinks. Your plotting is inconsistent at best. Your prose is decent enough: you paint pretty pictures. But your protagonists are cold, overly intellectual. Every one of em’s got a dictionary crammed so far up his ass they shit crossword puzzles. Your work lacks guts.”

  I stumbled back to the table.

  “Take a load off, Shakespeare.”

  I sat.

  “Like I said, your work lacks passion. But your imagery...”

  Kowalski chuckled. “That’s where you tip the scales. You give people nightmares and they love you for it.”

  It was all I could do to keep my jaw from bouncing off the table top. I picked up a piece of bread from the basket between us and began to knead it between my fingers.

  “I bust my ass trying to bring them to life,” I said over a fistful of multigrain. I’d always suffered from a tendency toward nervous starch manipulation. Under a looming deadline it wasn’t unusual for me to massacre an entire loaf of white bread in one sitting. When my mother stayed with me after recuperating from her hysterectomy my apartment looked like the floor of a cocaine processing plant staffed by workers with the worst dandruff you could possibly imagine. Kowalski had rattled me and I couldn’t stop myself.

  “I wrack my brain,” I went on. “Writing and rewriting, trying to breathe life into different versions of the same idea over and over until I’m blue in the fucking...”

  I stopped, blinking like a politician caught fondling himself while reading to Mormon pre-schoolers. In two paragraphs Kowalski had defined everything I despised about my own writing.

  I threw down the dismembered bread and stood up.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  Kowalski grinned.

  “I’m the fella holds the keys to the kingdom, Junior,” he said.

  “You want to cross the drawbridge or swim the moat?”

  13

  “Into the Cosmos, Time Rangers! Awaaayyy!”

  As the hired car pulled out of the long, circular driveway, I confronted the house Kowalski called “home.”

  “Welcome to Kalakuta,” he said.

  The massive Victorian sprawled the length of an entire city block. It hunkered there, a dingy gray so dark it looked black against the bright summer sky, four stories tall, with widely-spaced windows that reflected the afternoon sun. They provided only minimal visual relief from Kalakuta’s squalid unloveliness.

  “Black Summit.”

  “What?” I said, my eyes flinching over the mansion’s oppressive stone turrets and soaring black parapets.

  Her name,” Kowalski said. “Kalakuta. It’s the name for Death as personified in Hinduistic mythology. To drink of Kalakuta’s poisonous waters was to gain immortality. The Hindu gods fought tremendous battles to win that gift.”

  Kowalski walked up to the front door and opened it.

  “Come on in.”

  Before stepping over the threshold, I marked the sun’s position in its westward crawl over Yonkers.

  I’ll give him ten minutes, I thought. I didn’t want to be inside Kalakuta when the sun went down.

  * * * *

  Kowalski stomped down the stairs that led into the kitchen carrying a battered black hatbox. He set the box on the table in front of me. It was nearly identical to the one Lenore had shown me after Marcus’s funeral, save that Kowalski’s box was as dusty and battered as a well-worn suitcase.

  Kowalski reached down and flipped open the lid.

  Despite myself, I jumped.

  “In 1975, my father was murdered by his best friend, a man who called himself Satin Jack,” Kowalski said. He pulled out a tattered photograph.

  “He betrayed my father on orders from this man.”

  The man in the picture was dark-haired, with razor-sharp cheekbones and heavy-lidded black eyes. He might have been Native or African-American, Latino or Arabic. He glared into the lens, his face partially obscured by the bars of a prison cell.

  Something about the man’s face nagged at my gut.

  “I know him,” I said.

  “If you knew him you’d be dead,” Kowalski said. “His name’s Carlos Vulpe. That picture was taken two hours before he was hanged for murdering ten children in the Spring of nineteen and ten.”

  “But you said your father died in 1975,” I said.

  “I did,” Kowalski replied. “Vulpe hid his crimes by pretending to be a human serial killer. But he was a skinwalker, what you’d call a werewolf. For guys like him, Death is a minor inconvenience. ”

  I studied the man in the picture, unable to shake the certainty that I’d seen him before. He was sitting with his back against the wall, his hands resting lightly upon his thighs, his spine erect, unbent.

  At the same time, Vulpe’s smile communicated a sense of malignant ease, as if he were merely biding his time rather than awaiting his own execution. A man who looked like that would have moved with a serpentine economy of motion, the fluid grace of a dancer. But something in his expression also suggested a towering rage, and a limitless capacity for violence. A terrible hunger seemed to crackle in his eyes.

  “My God,” I said. “His teeth...”

  Kowalski nodded. “Near as anyone can tell, they were his original choppers, but somehow the sick fucker found a way to cover them with silver or aluminum or Christ-knows what. Then he sharpened them, filed them into points.”

  It was true. Vulpe’s teeth gleamed, their argent coating plain even in the ancient photograph.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you said he was a werewolf...”

  “A skinwalker.”

  “If he was a... skinwalker, wouldn’t a mouthful of silver teeth... be... bad for him?”

  “Vulpe wasn’t a member of the scumbag rank and
file,” Kowalski said. “He sat near the top of the supernatural food chain. Some folks thought he used the silver to help him maintain control during his transformations: Vulpe and things like him draw power from suffering: Yours, theirs, and anybody else’s.”

  “But why file them down?”

  Kowalski shrugged. “Because he’d developed a taste for human meat even when he was on two legs. The teeth helped him kill more efficiently in his human form. He used them to eviscerate his victims. Sometimes he would rip out their throats, or just tear ‘em apart altogether.”

  I laid the picture down slowly, deliberately, to keep my hand from shaking. The walls of Kalakuta seemed to lean in toward me. The ceiling crouched much closer to the top of my head than it had a moment before.

  He used them to eviscerate...

  “Listen, Mr. Kowalski,” I said. “I’m...I’m having a hard time with all this.”

  “Your father and I first met back in ’75,” Kowalski said. “We were both hunting Vulpe by then, but for different reasons. For me, it was about my old man.”

  Kowalski walked to the refrigerator and opened it. He produced a can of cream soda and brought it to the table.

  “He was a monster hunter, one of the best. Together, he and Satin Jack struck terror into the heart of the Wraithing like no one ever had.”

  “The Wraithing?” I said.

  Kowalski nodded. “I’ll come to that in a minute. My father was an old school Catholic who ate slept and drank the job. He was also the most decent man I’ve ever known. I swore on his grave that I would kill the ones who killed him.”

  Kowalski reached into the black hatbox and pulled a bundle of black cloth out of it. The bundle had been tied and secured with a length of red velvet ribbon. Kowalski untied the ribbon, unwrapped the bundle, and set it on the table between us. Without transition I was staring down the bore of a big mean-looking revolver.

  Kowalski had changed without my noticing. He was wearing a black pinstriped suit and a slouchy fedora.