The girl stood up and leaned over him and to his bewilderment it was the Creole girl from K-C records. She was dusky-skinned, with high cheekbones and feline eyes, and her mass of black dreadlocks made her look like Medusa, who could turn men to solid stone. She was wearing a clinging dress in purple jersey with a large amethyst pendant dangling between her breasts and at least a dozen silver bracelets on each wrist.
Lincoln could smell her and she smelled like jasmine flowers on a warm summer evening, in some enclosed courtyard in the French Quarter.
‘Can’t remember your name,’ Lincoln whispered. He gave a dry, abrasive cough, and then he said, ‘What was it? I know… always reminded me of “ukulele”.’
‘Eulalie,’ the girl smiled. ‘Eulalie Passebon.’
‘That’s it, Eulalie. What the hell are you doing here, Eulalie? And come to that, where the hell is here?’
‘You’re in the emergency room at the Case Medical Center, in Cleveland.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve had a very serious accident, Lincoln.’
Again, Lincoln tried to sit up. He could move his arms, and press down against the mattress with his hands, but he could only raise his head a few inches.
‘I can’t move! What happened to me? I don’t remember.’
‘They found you lying on the patio outside of your room at the Griffin House Hotel. You fell, and broke your spine. You’re paralysed — temporarily, at least.’
Lincoln stared at her. ‘Paralysed?’
Eulalie took hold of his right hand and lifted it to her lips and kissed it. ‘I’m so sorry, Lincoln. This was the very last thing I wanted to happen.’
‘Where’s a doctor? I need to see a doctor! What are you doing here? Has anybody called my wife?’
‘Shh,’ said Eulalie. ‘I’ll call for the doctor in just a minute, I promise you. The hospital staff have contacted Grace to tell her what happened to you. She’s flying in from Detroit and she should be here in less than an hour. But first of all it’s very important that you understand what’s happened to you. You need to understand who you are.’
Lincoln began to panic. ‘I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about! I need to see a doctor!’
‘Lincoln—’
‘I’m paralysed, for Christ’s sake! I don’t know how it happened and I’m lying here in this goddamned hospital bed and you’re a goddamned receptionist for a record company in New Orleans. What’s going on? Have I gone crazy, or what?’
‘Lincoln, listen to me. We don’t have much time. Do you remember the man with the gray face and the green lipstick and the long gray hair?’
Lincoln blinked at her. ‘What? I still don’t know what you’re talking about!’
‘It was back at the Griffin House Hotel, room one-oh-four. A woman was lying on your bed. She was badly hurt, wasn’t she? Then the bed caught fire and you tried to hide in the bathroom but the man with the gray face and the green lipstick was there, hiding in the shower stall.’
Lincoln said nothing, but continued to stare at her wide eyed. As he did so, a flickering image began to move inside his mind, as if he were remembering a grainy old movie that he had seen a long time ago, in some unfamiliar movie theater.
The gray-faced man stepped out of the shower stall, all spindly and dressed in black, and his lips were painted with green make-up into a mad, pointed grin, even though his real lips were tightly puckered with anger. His voice when he spoke sounded as if he had a mouthful of dry sand.
‘I warned you not to come, now didn’t I? You would not listen to me, though, would you? You out-and-out refused to listen.’
Eulalie said, ‘He came after you with his handsaw, didn’t he? And the room was burning and the door was locked and there was only one way out.’
‘The fire escape,’ Lincoln whispered. Now he remembered.
‘That’s right. And it collapsed, and you fell three stories to the ground. And that’s how you broke your back.’
Eulalie kissed his hand again, and then she said, ‘The hotel staff who found you on the patio, they did the right thing and didn’t try to move you. So the chances of your recovering look pretty good.’
‘That man who came after me, who was he?’
‘We don’t know for sure. But we think he could have been a murderer called Gordon Veitch.’
‘Who?’
‘Gordon Veitch. He raped and killed at least a dozen women in the nineteen-thirties. Maybe it wasn’t the real Gordon Veitch, because Gordon Veitch is probably dead by now, but a nightmare of Gordon Veitch.’
‘A nightmare? That doesn’t make any sense at all. You’re tryin’ to tell me that he was only a dream?’
‘Maybe he was, maybe wasn’t. Another possibility is that he was somebody who was made up to look like Gordon Veitch. A copycat.’
Lincoln said, ‘What happened in that hotel room, believe me, that felt real. I don’t know how it could have been, but I’m lyin’ here right now with my back broke, and nothin’ comes much realer than that, does it?’
‘Whoever that man was, Lincoln, and whether he was real or not, we need your help to track him down and put a stop to what he’s doing.’
‘You’re kiddin’ me, right? Look at me, I can’t even get out of bed.’
Eulalie leaned forward so that her face was very close to his, almost as if she were going to kiss him on the lips. He could even see his own face reflected in her eyes. ‘I’m not Eulalie, Lincoln, even though I look like her. The reason I took on Eulalie’s appearance was because you know her and like her, and I needed to gain your trust as quickly as possible.’
‘You’re not Eulalie? Then who the hell are you?’
‘My name is Springer. I’m kind of a messenger, an envoy.’
‘Who for? DHL?’
Springer shook her dreadlocks. ‘I come from Ashapola, who is the spirit of faultless light and absolute purity.’
There was a very long pause. Lincoln didn’t know if he ought to snort or laugh or burst into tears. ‘You’re talkin’ about, like, God?’
‘Ashapola is known to many different people by many different names. But Ashapola is our guardian and our protector. Ashapola is all that stands between the human race and ultimate chaos.’
‘You’re not some hospital visitor, are you? Where you from, the Baptists or somethin’? You tryin’ to convert me?’
Springer smiled. ‘I don’t need to convert you, Lincoln. You are what you are. You’re descended from a long line of people who have the capability of entering the world of dreams and nightmares and fighting on the side of good. We call them Night Warriors. If you like, you’re one of Ashapola’s army.’
‘Say what? I wasn’t descended from no Night Warriors. My father was a jazz musician and my grandfather was a cook at The Whitney and my great-grandfather before him worked as a sweeper-upper in the Polish match factory.’
‘I know. But apart from being a cook, your grandfather Joseph was Zebenjo the Arrow-Storm. He was a Night Warrior who was capable of firing over two hundred arrows so fast that you couldn’t see them coming.’
‘Oh, right.’
Springer squeezed his left knee through the blankets.
‘Feel anything? Anything at all?’
Lincoln shook his head.
‘That’s because of your spinal injury. But that won’t affect your ability to become Zebenjo’Yyx, the grandson of the great Zebenjo, and fire arrows at the same devastating rate as Zebenjo did.’