The Revenant Road Page 6

  “Alright, boys,” he snarled. “Here’s where the coon gets plugged.”

  Twin runners of blood streamed from his eyes as he picked up the revolver and aimed it at my face.

  “You alright, Obadiah?”

  I blinked. Kowalski, the real Kowalski, was staring at me, his concern evident.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “This was my old man’s gun,” Kowalski continued.

  “Single action Colt .45; my father could blow the balls off a scared chickenhawk at high noon with this piece. That was his talent and the Service put it to good use.”

  Kowalski sighed. Then he put the gun back into the box.

  “But Marcus Grudge was born to the Road. It ran though him thicker than his own blood. He could spot Nosferatu even when they were illusion–casting. Your old man was damn near psychic himself.”

  “Illusion-casting,” I said. I had to keep Kowalski talking. As long he was talking he wasn’t shooting: Talking=Good, Shooting=Very Bad.

  Kowalski nodded.

  “You said my father was ‘born to the Road?’ What road?”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute.”

  “But you said…”

  “I said hold yer goddamn water.”

  Despite my overactive imagination and the unease that was building a small condo in the pit of my stomach, I had to bite the insides of both cheeks: Kowalski was beginning to piss me off.

  “My old man was only a second-generation monster hunter. Your line goes back farther. Marcus once told me that his father, his father’s father, his father and on back through slavery, back to a tribal shaman in Senegal maybe: They were all monster hunters.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Don’t you think hunting vampires might be a little difficult when you’re hiding from the KKK?”

  “Monsters come different to different people, smart-guy,” Kowalski said. “Some of ‘em even manage to keep up with the times.”

  “But you’re talking about my family,” I sputtered. “They were regular guys, working men. My grandpa Phil shuffled mail at the Post Office, for God’s sake.”

  Kowalski shrugged. “What do you really know about your father’s people?”

  I stood up. My heart was beginning to pound and I suddenly needed to move.

  “Well,” I began. “There was grandpa Phil...Philip. His father’s name was Herbert. He moved to New Orleans after he left my great-grandmother in Atlanta. He...”

  I paused, distracted by a flash of memory.

  “He was only thirty-five when he... ”

  “When he what?” Kowalski said.

  “When he died.”

  “How did he die?”

  “I don’t know, alright?” I snapped. “But who the hell knows how their great-grandparents died? That doesn’t mean he lived a double life.”

  Kowalski drained his cream soda and tossed the empty can over his shoulder without looking. The can flipped end-over-end and landed in the blue New York Recycles bin by the back door.

  “The life of a monster hunter is a hard one,” he said. “It’s lonely and filled with secrets. The things we hunt are also hunting us. Sometimes the bad guys turn one of us to their side. Satin Jack’s defection was a big feather in Vulpe’s cap.”

  Kowlaski cracked his knuckles one by one, his eyes as hard as bits of gray flint.

  “Jack Slocum betrayed a dozen hunters before I found him and put him down.”

  “You mean you killed him,” I said. “That’s what we’re talking about here, isn’t it? Killing human beings?”

  “I freed him,” Kowalski said. “If the Pale claims me for one of its own, the best thing you can do is bust a cap through my cabeza double-quick. Same goes for any other hunter. I did Slocum a favor.”

  I lost the staring contest.

  “That’s why you know dick about your father’s people,” Kowalski said. “Sometimes the Pale strikes at us through our loved ones. Family ties, relationships become liabilities. My marriage turned to shit the day I got my Walking papers.

  “Marcus didn’t want that kind of life for you. He figured it was better for you to hate him than lose everyone you ever cared about to the Pale. He hoped you and Lenore would fall off their radar. But then you wrote Death and the Sorcerer.”

  “So?” I said.

  “Earlier today I said that your books give people nightmares and they love you for it. But it’s more than that. When you wrote that book, you unknowingly revealed something that people subconsciously understand to be true: The same truth I’ve revealed to you.”

  “That monsters exist?” I said. “But I’ve never written about vampires and werewolves. I despise that stuff.”

  Kowalski rapped on his forehead with his knuckles.

  “Freud’s got nothin’ on you, kid,” he said. “You write about dark worlds that lie in the shadow of this one. Your characters straddle the boundary between right and wrong, good and evil, life and death. Am I right?”

  “Of course, but...”

  “Your work is an allegory, a metaphor for a reality you’ve always suspected exists but which logic tells you can’t possibly be real.”

  The hollow feeling in my gut deepened.

  “But your readers know the real story,” Kowalski said.

  “They visit the Wraithing when they drop off to sleep. They run screaming through its forests all night long and call it a nightmare when they wake up, scared senseless because it all felt so real.”

  Kowalski leaned forward, his eyes incandescent, lit by the fires of madness or passion. Or prophesy.

  “But the Wraithing is more than a dream, see? People recognize its shadow in the eyes of the businessman who chops up his family on a whim; they hear it in the giggle of the straight-A student who strangles her ailing grandmother for no earthly reason.”

  Kowalski chuckled.

  “And they recognize it in the crappy stories you write.”

  “What’s so funny?” I said.

  “You are,” Kowalski tossed back. “You take all that terror and wrap it up in a neat little package that Mom and Pop and Little Jenny Who-gives-a-crap can pick up for six bucks at WalMart. You give ‘em a beginning a middle and, most importantly, an end to the nightmare. That way they can roll out of bed, kiss the boss’s arse for another day and pretend their lives make sense.

  “But your blood knows the truth. It seeps out through your fingers and splatters your readers every time you write a new book.”

  Kowalski laughed so hard that he was seized with a fit of coughing. “I think the whole thing is goddamn wonderfully ironic.”

  I got up and walked toward the back door, needing fresh air, needing light. I turned the knob and tugged on the door to no avail: It had been nailed shut.

  “Christ, that hurt,” Kowalski wheezed.

  He got up and went to the refrigerator.

  “Hey, how’d you like a nice cream soda?”

  I stared out between the iron bars that blocked the window. Behind me, the crusty prophet clucked to himself.

  Your blood knows the truth.

  “Damn shame,” Kowalski said. “No one seems to drink the stuff anymore. I can’t get enough. Hell, I’d take a cream soda spinal tap over a cold beer anytime.”

  “Neville...” I said.

  “Can’t stand beer...”

  “I don’t...” I stammered. “I mean I can’t...”

  “Believe?” Kowalski said. “I know.”

  He slammed the refrigerator door shut, reached into his pocket and produced a prodigious key ring. Dozens of keys of all sizes jingled as he fingered through the jumble of metal shapes.

  “We’ve come a fair piece though,” he said, “a fair piece indeed.”

  Chuckling to himself, he selected a long-necked, copper-colored key. He inserted the key into the lock of the door to the right of the refrigerator and turned it. The door swung open and Kowalski faced me, a mischievous grin dancing at the edges of his mouth.

  “There’s jus
t a little farther before the end.”

  With that, he stepped through the door and disappeared.

  Your blood knows the truth.

  I tiptoed over to the door and peeked around the corner. In the gloom I could make out the first three steps leading down into the basement. Beyond the landing, darkness beckoned.

  As I hovered on the edge of that void, my mother’s voice floated up from the dank cellar of my memory.

  Why won’t you look in the box, Obadiah?

  I beat back Lenore’s voice with curses.

  Then I went down into the dark.

  14

  The Black Guts

  of Kalakuta

  We descended.

  Above me, I sensed the ancient weight of Kalakuta increasing as we tramped deeper into her bowels. The tunnel seemed to squat closer and closer to the top of my head and the air grew heavy.

  After what seemed like an eternity, a light flickered on over Kowalski’s head.

  “Your old man and I moved in here soon after your folks split up,” he said. “Marcus had been monitoring a year-long manifestation outside San Francisco, but we were both fairly mobile. We went wherever the Referral Service sent us.”

  “Referral Service?”

  “I’m comin’ to that. Anyway, I took one half of the house. Your pop took the other.”

  We reached a plateau: a wide stone platform like a stage blasted from the gutrock of Eastern Yonkers.

  In front of us stood another door.

  Kowalski reached into his pocket and I heard the lunatic jingle of his massive key ring.

  “The Service had discovered something that required full time attention here in New York. Marcus and I were selected for an Indefinite Watch. It was only the second time we’d met. The first time, we were both hunting...”

  “Carlos Vulpe?” I interrupted.

  Kowalski’s brow tightened. “I told you that part?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Damn.”

  He opened the door. Beyond it, another staircase stretched away, though at a slightly shallower incline.

  “Jesus,” I said. “How far down does this place go?”

  Kowalski turned to me—for a moment I thought he was going to hit me—and said, “You don’t wanna ask questions like that around here, my friend.”

  We descended.

  “She was built in 1917 by a Russian immigrant called Grigor Molokov,” Kowlaski continued. “Molokov was a rich man, a banker. He was also one of the blackest necromancers in human history. No offense.”

  “None taken,” I said. “What’s a necromancer?”

  He paused at a third door.

  “One who communicates with and controls the dead.”

  “Sweet.”

  Kowalski selected a large, brass key.

  “A sense of humor,” he said. “That’s good. You’re gonna need one in about two and a half minutes.”

  “How much farther?” I said.

  Kowalski clicked on a naked yellow light bulb.

  “We’re here,” he said. “Take a look.”

  The final door towered over our heads.

  It was nearly ten feet tall and eight feet wide and appeared to have been hand-crafted from a single massive slab of iron. The iron door gleamed dully as the light from the dim bulb reflected off its polished surface. Celtic runes, characters from various Asian and Western languages, African pictograms and hieroglyphs of every imaginable configuration formed an intricate design.

  The writing covered the entire surface of the iron door in a pattern that seemed to rearrange itself as I watched. The moment my attention focused on one part of the design it was shunted away to a different part, pausing only long enough to discover some new segment that hadn’t been visible a moment before.

  The effect was similar to that of a mobius strip: a never-ending visual journey, an optical illusion that drew the eye’s focus along behind it leaving the observer vaguely disoriented in its wake.

  The center of the design, however, appeared more stable than its outer edges. Two human figures etched in gold stood beneath the rearing form of a fire-breathing dragon.

  The figure farthest from the dragon upheld a shield and a sword, but the second figure held my attention: It stood in front of and slightly above the sword-wielder, and carried a simple lantern in one upraised hand. Beneath the two figures, a single Latin phrase had been emblazoned, also in gold: Lux Defensor.

  “To defend the light,” I whispered.

  Kowalski nodded. “Smart guy.”

  He put the brass key in the lock and turned it.

  A series of deep thumps reverberated through the air beneath Kalakuta, the sound a boulder rolling down a flight of stone stairs might make shook the earth beneath my feet.

  Kowalski placed his right hand in the center of the door.

  I grabbed his arm, my heart pounding.

  “Neville,” I said. “Will I discover the truth about my father behind this door?”

  Kowalski smiled. “You might discover the truth about yourself behind this door,” he said. “The question is, will you know the truth when it comes for you?”

  I studied the iron door for a moment, knowing even then that once I walked through it there would be no turning back. I turned and looked back up the long staircase. In the distance, far above our heads, the glow from Kowalski’s kitchen looked as remote as the light from a distant star.

  I turned back to the iron door.

  “Open it.”

  Kowalski nodded and pushed open the door.

  Golden light filled the dark platform.

  “Oh...my...God,” I said.

  I walked into the room, following the light.

  “Lux defensor, Junior,” Kowalski said.

  Then he slammed the door behind me.

  The room had been hollowed out of the native rock beneath Kalakuta. The walls, floor, and ceiling glimmered, their crystalline surfaces reflecting the light that emanated from a raised stone platform in the room’s center.

  The source of the light stood in the center of the platform.

  It was a woman.

  A tall, magnificently built black woman. She was naked, her skull shaved bald, her arms resting lightly at her sides. The flickering, multicolored light shone from her face; power raged about her head like a swirling halo of purest starshine. One look at the woman was enough to confirm that she wasn’t remotely human.

  The starwoman was over six feet tall, straight of limb and square of shoulder with the body of an African Amazon. Her eyes were closed, her head thrown back as if she’d been frozen, immobilized in a moment of rapture, or agony.

  My eyes traveled the length of the starwoman’s body, the curve of her hips, the flat stomach and full breasts, finally coming to rest on the hilt of a knife: The iron handle of a large blade protruded from the area just above the starwoman’s left breast.

  I staggered forward, my right hand extended.

  So beautiful, I thought.

  I was burning, aflame with the desire to possess the starwoman, protect her from whoever had betrayed her and caused her such agony. The hilt of the blade assaulted my senses like an abomination.

  My rage blinded me to the danger: I ignored the flashing motes of light as they began to swirl around me. My quest for understanding fell to tatters. My life was unimportant. I had been born for only one reason: to pull the knife from the starwoman’s breast.

  The swirling motes of light rose up, surrounded me, filling my vision, blocking my view of my beloved. My vision grew fuzzy and I became disoriented. There was a sensation of movement, of massive shapes moving through the walls of Kalakuta. Then the floor dropped away beneath me.

  I rose, screaming as I was spun toward the ceiling of the cave. I threw up my arms and squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for the impact that would smash my brains out.

  A moment later, I felt wind rushing past me. I opened my eyes and found myself cartwheeling into the open sky, tumbling literally head over heels,
up and away from the cave and the starwoman. I shut my eyes again as I whirled, tossed about on the wind, rocketing upward...upward, then down, falling, really falling.

  I hit the ground hard enough to pound the air from my lungs. I lay on my face gasping for air. Scarlet airbursts detonated behind my eyes and I fluttered on the edge of consciousness. After an eternity, my chest loosened and I was able to snatch a raw breath. The flow of fresh oxygen reintroduced short-term memory to my brain and I rolled over onto my back.

  Wherever I’d landed it was dark. I’d entered Kalakuta sometime after 2:00 PM, had spent less than an hour with Kowalski. But the sky overhead was black, shrouded in Night’s cold embrace. Then I saw the moons.

  At first I thought I was seeing double, the result of my fall, a vicious hangover, or, hopefully, a malignant brain tumor.

  Of course there’s always the distinct possibility that you’ve popped your friggin’ cork.

  I closed my eyes and counted to ten. But when I opened my eyes nothing had changed. I was staring blearily at two full moons in a cloudless night sky. The largest of the moons (there were two of them) appeared similar to the moon I knew, its face pockmarked by a vast network of craters.

  The smaller sphere hung slightly lower above the horizon. Its face was disturbingly smooth, as if it had been swept clean by some monstrous valet.

  And it was green.

  A horrid, emerald light emanated from that viridescent sphere, a squalid corpse glamour that made me slightly queasy. Its light infected the heavens like a creeping poison: Sickly emerald veins crept outward from the gangrenous orb, extending their reach across the dome of that alien sky like a loathsome emerald spider web. The moon was sick, evil or both. It was wrong.

  I climbed to my feet and was immediately hammered by another surprise. I was standing on the edge of a precipice. The reason there were no clouds in the sky was that they were all below me. I’d landed atop a mountain surrounded by a field of green-tinged clouds.

  I staggered backward, away from the precipice. But some instinct warned me and I stopped. Turning slowly, I saw that the “precipice” was more of a circular dais and that I stood at its opposite edge. Corpse clouds surrounded me on all sides. I’d apparently landed atop a titanic stone golf tee.

  Vertigo double-pumped me in the stomach and I fell to my knees as a freezing wind sprang up around the golf tee, chilling me to the bone.