'You stink,' he said, sharply. 'You stink of the grave.'
They were going to tear my heart out,' I told him. They were clawing at my chest, you know that? Clawing at me, like vultures.'
There was a long silence between us. Quamus pulled the truck in to the side of the road, and then slowly maneuvered it around, so that we were driving back towards Salem.
'You let Mictantecutli go,' he said.
I looked at him. There was no point in denying it. He knew as well as I did that when the graves of Granitehead opened, that meant that the Fleshless One was free.
'Yes,' I said.
Quamus kept his eyes on the road ahead, and his foot pressed hard against the floor. In a minute or two we would be passing through that crowd of walking dead for a second time, and he wanted to make sure that we hit them at a good 80 miles an hour, unstoppable, and invincible.
Quamus said, 'Mr Evelith said that you would probably let the Fleshless One go free. He suspected it. So did Enid. Enid said that she had read your fortune in the tea which you drank when you first came to visit us, and she could see uncertainty there, and extravagant promises from a supernatural force. The Fleshless One promised you your wife back, I suppose?'
'Do you blame me for saying yes?'
Quamus shrugged. 'We are dealing with a greater force here; a force of magic and terrible malevolence. We cannot talk in terms of blame or recrimination. You did what you felt was right. We know that you are not a bad man.'
At that moment, we collided with a whole congregation of walking corpses, at almost 90 miles an hour. Decayed flesh flew in all directions, and there was a hideous pattering sound on the windshield, as disembodied hands were flung against it by our slipstream. Quamus impassively checked his side-mirrors, to make sure that none of the corpses were still clinging to the sides of the truck, and then slowed down, and drove into Salem more sedately.
There was no need to observe the speed limit: the police were already too preoccupied. Salem lay under the midnight-black sky like a vision of Hell. Fires burned all over the city, the Roger Conant Co-operative Bank, Parker Brothers Games factory, One Salem Green, they were all alight, and burning like Satan's ovens. The city was a city of historic cemeteries, and all of them had spewed out their dead: Harmony Grove, Greenlawn, Derby Street, Chestnut Street, Bridge Street, and Swampscott. The dead crowded through the streets savaging the living, and the malls and pavements were splattered with blood and strewn with freshly-killed bodies.
Several times, as we headed out of the city towards Tewksbury, walking corpses clutched at our truck and tried to cling on; but Quamus kept barreling on until they dropped off, and once he swung the side of the truck against a street-sign to dislodge three of them who were holding on to the nearside fender. I glimpsed them in my rear-view mirror, rolling over and over, limbs and skulls tumbling in all directions.
We reached Tewksbury in 15 minutes, and Quamus blew the airhorns in front of old man Evelith's wrought-iron gates. Enid shooed the dog away, and opened up the gates for us, and Quamus drove speedily inside, jumped down from the cab, and helped Enid to lock up behind us.
Old man Evelith himself was standing on the top of the front steps, leaning on his walking-cane. When he saw me climbing down from the truck's cab, he raised one hand in salute, and said, 'You've done it, then? You've brought Mictantecutli back?'
I hesitated, but I could see that Quamus was holding back, so that it would have to be me who explained what had happened. I walked slowly forward across the shingle, and then stopped, and cleared my throat.
'I have a confession to make,' I said, hoarsely.
Old man Evelith stared at me for a very long time; fiercely at first, but then more understandingly; and then he turned away to look up at the darkening sky, and the rooks which circled in it like the vultures of hell itself.
'Well,' he said, 'I guessed this would happen. But you must come in. You look tired, and cold; and you have the smell of death upon you.'
Thirty-Five
'I believed it,' I said, as we sat in the library over glasses of strong brandy. 'It promised to give me my wife back, and I believed it. That's my only excuse.'
Duglass Evelith watched me carefully through the half-moon lenses of his spectacles. Then he leaned forward with his elbows on the library table, and said, 'Nobody's accusing you, Mr Trenton. Or perhaps I should call you John. I have been trying for years to rescue my dead ancestor; you have far more justification for trying to rescue your dead wife. Unfortunately, Mictantecutli is not a demon whose word can ever be trusted. It is a demon of death and deception; and you have been deceived, and almost killed.'
'What are we going to do?' I asked him. 'It's already destroyed half of Salem. How can we stop it?'
Old man Evelith thoughtfully rubbed the back of his wrinkled neck. 'I have been giving this matter some considerable thought, while you have been bathing. Quamus believes that Mictantecutli will probably have been fed by now, and will have revived enough to have left the boat-ramp where you landed it. But he doubts if the demon will have gone far. It has awoken after 290 years, and it will no doubt wish to acclimatize itself before it attempts to exercise its full power over the local population, and further afield.'
'How will it do that?' I asked.
'Well,' said old man Evelith, 'it is our guess that it will seek out somewhere to conceal itself; somewhere that it remembers from days gone by. Enid has suggested David Dark’s old cottage by the Mill Pond. That was where it spent most of its days in Salem; and that is where it will probably retreat now.'
'But that cottage isn't there anymore.'
'No,' said Duglass Evelith. 'According to my maps of the 1690s, David Dark’s cottage used to stand in a clump of trees just west of what is now Canal Street.'
'And what stands there now? Or is it open ground?'
'Oh, no, there's a building there now,' said old man Evelith. 'The Lynnfield & District Book Warehouse. That, in our opinion, is where Mictantecutli will go to hide for a while; and that, in our opinion, is where we are going to have to go to destroy it.'
I took another sip of brandy, and felt it burn down the back of my throat. Then I looked at Quamus, and old man Evelith, and said, 'What do you propose to do? How do you go about destroying a living skeleton — especially one as powerful as Mictantecutli?'
Quamus said, 'There is only one hope. The Fleshless One must be frozen. Once frozen, it must be attacked with sledgehammers, and dismantled. Each bone must then be buried separately over a wide area, and each grave must be blessed in the name of the great spirit Gitche Manitou and in the name of the Christian Trinity. Then, there will be no escape for Mictantecutli, not even into the world of Indian phantoms, which were the aboriginal ghosts of the American continent, before the white man's religion came.'
'How do you propose to freeze it?' I wanted to know. 'Do you think it's going to let you? This morning, it blew a police officer's guts out right in front of my eyes.'
'We must take the risk of approaching it,' said old man Evelith. 'It may kill us outright, but we must take the risk. There is no other way. Once we are close enough, we will spray it with liquid nitrogen. We already have the equipment prepared. We were going to use it to dismantle Mictantecutli once my ancestor Joseph Evelith had been released from his bondage to Tezcatlipoca. But even if that release is not to be, we must still destroy the Fleshless One, and we have the means to do it.'