I’d been half convinced that the afternoon I’d spent in Pen’s kitchen, teasing out that tune and getting it down on the Walkman, would be so much wasted time. But I knew I could never take Scrub one-on-one, no matter how many low blows I threw. So if I ever did come up against him, I’d need to have an even more unfair advantage.
The big man lurched to his feet again, but it took him a Herculean effort. His head snapped around, and he looked at me across ten meters of planking with a glare of insane, incendiary hatred.
“Castor,” he growled. “I’ll kill you for this. That’s a promise. When I—”
He stiffened, and a tremor ran through his body like a wave through water. He stared at his arms and groaned. They were writhing, not like limbs but like snakes, like puppy dogs in a sack. He tried to take a step toward me, managed, started work on another. That was as far as he got.
“When I come—back—” Scrub was having to force the words out, his voice bubbling and fluting. He began to melt from the legs up, and he shrank in on himself spectacularly. But he wasn’t melting; that was just the way it looked from where I was sitting on the walkway. What was actually happening was a whole lot more disgusting.
He turned into rats. The whole of that big, solid frame dissolved and separated, tore itself asunder, and a wave of brown, furry bodies struggled out of the folds of his greasy suit to sweep off along the walkway in a filthy tide, heading away from the water. If Scrub’s consciousness had still been animating them and welding them together, they could have eaten me alive, but Scrub—the mind and personality that used that name—was a ghost. When the music punched him out of the flesh that he’d wrapped around himself, the individual little rat minds all kicked back in and took up their own agendas again.
I thought back to the time when I’d unlocked the door of my room and found Scrub sitting on the bed. Now I knew how he’d managed to get in through that barely open window. I gave a reflexive shudder at the thought. When he’d threatened to kill me, it wasn’t just farting in the wind. I hadn’t exorcised him, just broken his concentration and stolen his body out from under him. He could find another body, given time—could and probably would. Loup-garous are like weeds in that way; you think you’ve got rid of them, but they pop up again when you least expect it, kill off your prize geraniums, eat your dog, and crush your skull like an eggshell.
But that was a thought to linger on during some warm summer evening yet to come. Right now I had other things to think about. Picking myself up off the planking, I retraced my steps along the walkway and retrieved the rest of my stuff: the lock picks, the bolt cutters, the cone-bore flute, the whole dodgy tool kit. Then I put my shoes back on, boarded the Mercedes again, and made a beeline for the cabin door.
I gave it the once-over as I hauled out my lock picks. Bog-standard Yale, slightly sexy Chubb. Not the piece of cake that I was hoping for, but far from impossible. I got to work, occasionally looking over my shoulder back toward the harbor entrance to see if anyone was coming down the walkway in my direction. Nothing. I worked undisturbed, got the Yale inside of ten minutes, but then lost time on the Chubb. It was a real fucking boojum, with an impossibly narrow barrel and a double detainer. Bouncing the pick didn’t help at all, so I was reduced to working out the set pins laboriously, one by one, the skin on the back of my neck prickling the whole time. Then it was one pass for each pin, with the minutes ticking by.
When the lock finally clicked and the door gave inward a fraction of an inch, I was taken by surprise and almost fell in with it. Recovering my balance, I stood up and stepped into the dark space inside the cabin.
I stood still for a few moments, listening. Nothing. I didn’t really want to turn a light on, because if Damjohn came home suddenly, I wanted to be the surpriser rather than the surprisee. I ought to be able to hear footsteps and maybe voices as he came along the walkway toward the boat, but if he saw a light, he’d send the heavy mob in first, on tiptoe, and before I knew where I was, I’d be replaying Custer’s last stand with only a couple of vowels out of place.
The faint movement of air on my face told me that the cabin or galley that I was in was fairly large, but it was impossible to see a thing. My nerves more or less screaming now, I forced myself to wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The room built itself up around me, piecemeal, as the darkness separated out into discrete volumes.
There was a table right in front of me—long, low, and really convenient to trip over. There were two couches built into the sides of the room and something in the middle distance that looked like a tall cabinet of some kind against the farther bulkhead wall, with a squat, blocky object standing off to one side of it. In between me and the cabinet there was a chair, and the more I squinted at the chair, the more convinced I was that someone was sitting in it.
I stepped soundlessly to one side so that I wouldn’t be silhouetted against the open door behind me. It made no difference, of course—if anyone was sitting there, they’d already seen me and had plenty of chance to respond to my entrance. But the stillness and the silence persisted, and I reminded myself that taking things slowly wasn’t a luxury I could afford right then.
So I skirted the table and advanced into the room. That brought me broadside on to the chair and confirmed my first impressions; it was definitely occupied by someone who was sitting stock-still in the dark, rigidly upright, facing front even though I’d moved a quarter-circle around to the left.
I thought again about turning on the light, came to the same conclusions. My flesh creeping a little, I closed in on the chair and its motionless occupant. I put out a hand and brought it down gently on the silent figure’s shoulder.
Instantly it convulsed, its head snapping round in my direction, its back arching. It tried to twist away from me, but didn’t manage to get very far. The combination of squirming effort and more or less total failure to go anywhere left me mystified for about half a second. I realized that the figure was tied to the chair around about the same time that something hard and cold slammed into the back of my neck, dropping me to my knees. I didn’t stay there for long, though. The foot planted in my stomach sent me rolling and gasping, full length, on the floor.
The lights clicked on, blinding my dark-adjusted eyes. It wasn’t as much of a handicap as you’d think; winded, dazed, and curled up in a fetal ball, I wouldn’t have been able to see a whole hell of a lot in any case.
Damjohn’s unctuous tones intruded on my pain. “I have caller display, Mr. Castor,” he said with dripping scorn. “When Richard called me on Arnold’s phone—a phone that he’d previously lost to you in a brawl in a public house—what was I supposed to think?” He said a few other things as well—or at least he was still talking when I faded out.
Twenty-two
I WAS PROBABLY ONLY UNCONSCIOUS FOR A MINUTE OR so. As I bobbed my way painfully back up from the black well that Chandler used to get so lyrical about, I could still hear Damjohn’s voice. He was speaking in a clipped, commanding voice—giving orders, from the sound of it. Heavy footsteps moved across the cabin in response. Good. If he was talking to someone else, I could go back to sleep.
But the someone else hauled me roughly upright and gave me a hard shake to dislodge the cobwebs—almost taking my head along with them. I blinked my eyes open, took in a scene that was skewed at a nauseating angle and had a very depressing effect on my spirits.
Damjohn was sitting on one of the couches, at his ease, lighting a black cigarette. Behind him stood Gabe McClennan and Weasel-Face Arnold. Arnold’s battered face gave me a moment’s low satisfaction, but under the circumstances, it didn’t do a whole hell of a lot to warm the cockles. Two more bravoes to whom I hadn’t been introduced stood on either side of me, holding me up in the absence of any meaningful efforts from my rubbery legs.