Death Trance

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.'

I looked seriously at Duglass Evelith, and then at Qua-mus. 'You're going to have to let me do it, you know that.'

Old man Evelith shook his head. 'The risk is too great. And, besides, you do not understand these things.'

'I released Mictantecutli. I must take the chance of trying to destroy it.'

'No,' said old man Evelith, adamantly. 'Quamus is already prepared.'

'But — '

'No,' old man Evelith repeated, and this time I knew there was going to be no arguing with him. But he added, more sympathetically, 'You can accompany him, if you wish. You can be his assistant. He will need somebody to help him to carry the cylinders of liquid nitrogen; and he will need somebody to help him collect the frozen bones of Mictantecutli when it has finally been defeated.'

Old man Evelith sounded as if the job had already been done: but I could tell from the stern look on Quamus' face that the danger we were up against was extreme, and that there was every chance that by later this afternoon both of us would be feeding the bony maw of the Man of Bones, the Fleshless One.

'I want you to rest now,' said Duglass Evelith. 'You will leave for Mill Pond in an hour. I want you to think of nothing else but victory over the influences of darkness, and that you are strong enough to defeat even the most terrible of demons. Consider yourself a warrior, John, who is about to embark on a great adventure. Dragon-slaying, monster-butchering, something mythical and courageous. For after all, destroying Mictantecutli will be exactly that.'

In spite of Duglass Evelith's advice, I spent most of the next hour pacing around my sitting-room, drinking whisky. Outside, the sky grew darker and darker, until I had to switch on my lights. I tried to read, but I didn't feel in the mood for geology, and I couldn't get past the word 'Preface.' I tried to telephone Gilly, but the lines were down, and all I could get was a distant crackling noise. At last I lay on my bed with hands over my eyes, and thought of nothing at all. Five minutes later, however, when I was just beginning to relax, Quamus came into my room and said somberly, 'We are ready to leave now. Please be quick.'

I followed him downstairs without saying a word, half-skipping as I went to push my sneaker on to my left foot. The refrigerated truck had been loaded with twenty cylinders of liquid nitrogen, and a device like a fire-fighter's spray, as well as an insulated suit and gloves to protect Quamus from the sub-zero gas. Enid was to come with us, but Duglass Evelith was going to stay behind. He explained that he was too old to fight demons any more, but all of us knew that if Mictantecutli were to wipe out Quamus, Enid, and me, then somebody who knew how to defeat it would have to remain safe.

Duglass Evelith took my hand between both of his, and squeezed it. Take care,' he said, 'and remember that what you are fighting has no moral scruples, no conscience, nothing that even remotely approximates a human conscience. It will kill you if it can. It will expect you to do the same in return.'

We drove away into the darkness, the three of us sitting side by side in the cab. We said very little to each other as we headed east towards Salem. We were all afraid, we all knew it, and there wasn't much point in discussing it. The cylinders of nitrogen clanked around in the back, but I wondered whether there was really any future in trying to use them on a creature like Mictantecutli.

All around us, the Massachusetts countryside was like hell by Hieronymous Bosch. Fires leaped up from shopping malls and residential estates; overturned vehicles burned in the roads in grotesque funeral pyres, their tires flaring and dripping like incendiary wreaths.

Enid said, ‘This is what Salem must have been like in the days when David Dark first brought Mictantecutli back from Mexico. No wonder they tore all references to it out of the history books, and never spoke about it. It must have seemed like a nightmare until they finally got rid of it.'

At last we reached the outskirts of Salem, and made a careful detour down Jefferson Avenue to cross the MBTA Commuter tracks quite a way south of the Lynnfield Book Warehouse. As we drove slowly up towards the warehouse, our tires crunched on broken glass, and the highway was splattered with red in places, as if it had been raining blood. I saw a family who had been dragged out of their car and pitifully torn to pieces as if they had been attacked by wild animals. And the dreadful truth of it was that it was my fault, my responsibility. If it hadn't been for my selfishness and my blindness, Mictantecutli would never have gotten free; and this gory rampage of Salem's dead would never have happened.

All I could possibly do to atone for my stupidity was to destroy the demon I had set free.

The warehouse stood on the intersection of Canal and Roslyn, overlooking the railroad tracks. It was here, 290 years ago, that David Dark had lived, and it was here that David Dark had died. His cottage had stood among a clump of trees that had long since vanished; but for Mictantecutli this was still familiar ground. Demons permeate the ground on which they live with a rank odour, like diseased dogs, or so Duglass Evelith had told me. That was how they knew where to return after hundreds of years; and that was why devil-possessed places like Amityville and Rohrerstown always had a sickening odour.

The warehouse was a gray, rectangular building, with a small brick administration block on one side, and rows of windows high up by the roof. As Quamus drew the truck in to the curb, we knew at once that Duglass Evelith had guessed right: from inside the building, we could see those blue-and-white electric flickers which betrayed the presence of that malevolent energy with which Mictantecutli had been haunting Granitehead. Quamus pulled the truck to a stop across the street, and we all climbed out.

'There can be no delay,' said Quamus. 'We must go straight in, and spray the creature with liquid nitrogen straight away. Any hesitation and it will destroy us; and you have seen what it is capable of doing to a human body, without even touching it.'

I nodded. I was so terrified that I could scarcely speak. I opened the back of the truck, and helped Quamus to unload one of the cylinders of nitrogen, and mount it on a trolley. Quamus then dressed himself in the silvery insulated suit, while Enid strapped the firelighter's hose on to his back.

It took us five minutes at least to get ready; but fortunately there were none of the walking dead around, and it didn't seem as if any of Mictantecutli's minions had seen us. We quickly crossed the street, and went into the warehouse yard by a side entrance.

As we approached, the feeling of dread increased; and the stench of that evil demonic presence grew so strong that I felt like retching. I forced open a small back door in the warehouse, and we pushed our way inside, Quamus first, then me with the trolley of liquid gas, then Enid. We hurried silently through the corridors of the Lynnfield offices, left, then right, then left again, until we reached the swing doors which led directly into the warehouse itself.

Quamus, his insulated helmet held under his arm, beckoned me wordlessly towards the doors. Through the small windows in them, we could see right across to the far side of the warehouse; and what we saw there made me go eight times colder. It was like a scene from some barbaric representation of all that was sickening, and all that was foul.

The skeleton Mictantecutli was sitting cross-legged on a makeshift throne of crates and packing-cases, his huge skull bent forward. All around him, in their charnel-house robes, swarmed the dead of our local cemeteries, from Granitehead and Salem and Maple Hill. Each of the corpses was bearing in his hands a torn-out human heart, sometimes two or three, and waiting his turn to lay his gruesome offering at Mictantecutli's bony feet.

The whole grisly scene was lit by that flickering electrical light which turned the colour of blood to black; and the eye-sockets of the prince of the region of the dead to dark, knowing, infinitely malevolent pits.

Quamus said, 'This is it. Are you ready?'

'No, but let's do it.'

Quamus fitted his helmet over his head, undipped the nozzle of his fire-hose, and then said, 'When I shout "go," turn on the gas. Not before. When I shout "off," turn it off.'

'I think I can understand that.'

'Okay, this is it,' said Quamus, and before I knew what was happening we had pushed open the swing doors and started jogging as fast as we could across the concrete warehouse floor, thrusting aside corpse after shambling corpse, dodging away from flailing arms, both of us intent on one thing only: freezing the Fleshless One before it realized what we were doing, and blew us both apart.

We slid over blood and hearts and human tissue, and then we were there, right in front of Mictantecutli, right beneath his immense luminous skull; the skull which was made up of scores of other skulls. The demon had been gorging itself on hearts, and its bare teeth were bloody and tangled with sinew and arteries. It nodded and turned towards us, its head overhanging us like the moon, and then Quamus screamed a muffled, 'Go!' and I yanked the spanner that turned on the liquid nitrogen.

Freezing gas spewed out of the nozzle, and Quamus directed it straight upwards, straight into the creature's skeletal face.

I heard a deep, vibrant, floor-shaking roar. It was more like two subway trains colliding head-first in a tunnel than a sound that could have been made by an earthly creature. I was thrown right over on to my side, jarring my left shoulder on the floor; and pieces of Mictantecutli's corpses flew all around me in a grisly blizzard.

Quamus somehow managed to stay on his feet, spraying the demon's skull in slow, steamy, systematic sweeps. I felt the intense cold of the liquid nitrogen even from ten feet away, and I could see the whiteness of frozen gas forming around Mictantecutli's mouth and eye-sockets.

But the creature was far from defeated. It reached out with one skeletal arm, and before Quamus could duck away, it had seized him around the waist. I heard Quamus yell, and I saw him directing the hissing stream of gas on to the fingers which clutched him; but Mictantecutli squeezed tighter and tighter, and then I heard a terrible crunching noise inside of Quamus' insulated suit. Quamus jerked, sagged, jerked again; and then collapsed to the floor. The gas nozzle fell with him, spraying all around us like a fulminating python.

I scrambled to my feet, and snatched the fire-hose myself. The nozzle was so cold that the skin of my hands stuck to it, and I couldn't peel them free. But I directed the gas at Mictantecutli, streaming it up and down its ribs, from side to side across its face, and shouting at the top of my voice, words that were utter gibberish, words of fear and hatred and hysterical revenge.

Mictantecutli reached out for me, slowly but with terrifying inevitability. I sprayed its fingers, and saw them draw back a little, but then it began to reach out for me with its other arm.

I stepped away; but lost my footing on the rotting body of an old man. Mictantecutli's huge hand seized my hip, and then my waist, and I felt as if I had been snatched by a Great White shark.

'Aaaaaaahhhhhhh!' I screamed at Mictantecutli; and I knew I was dead. I felt one of my ribs break, and the crushing pain on my pelvis was unbearable. I sprayed the demon's face again and again, but then I began to lose consciousness. Everything went black-and-white, like a photographic negative, and I felt a creaking sound inside of my body that must have been my hip-bone being strained to the utmost.

But quite suddenly, the pressure was relieved, and then released altogether. I dropped to my knees, my eyes tight-closed, trying to keep the stream of liquid gas directed towards Mictantecutli, although I hardly knew where the demon was. It was only after I had recovered enough to lift my head and look around me that I realized what had happened.

Standing amidst all of the walking corpses, giving out an unearthly and radiating light of her own, white-faced, white, but somehow strong and celestial and beautiful, stood Jane. Her hair flowed up around her head as it had before, when I had seen her at Quaker Lane Cottage; but now it gave off steady star-like streams of silver radiance.

She was quite naked, but somehow her nakedness was sexless and spiritual. Beside her walked a young boy of four or five years old, as beautiful as she was, also naked, giving off the same calm light.

Mictantecutli unsteadily lifted its ghastly head. Its cheekbones were thickly rimed with frost, and icicles hung from its collar-bone. It regarded Jane in apparent disbelief, and shook itself like a wounded animal.

I didn't know what was happening or why; but I took my chance. Holding up my liquid nitrogen spray, I climbed on to Mictantecutli's shin, and then on to his massive pelvis. Gritting my teeth against the grating pain of my own broken rib, I scaled the side of his ribcage, and stood there, pouring out freezing gas until the demon's vertebrae were thick with sparkling white frost.

Jane gradually faded; and the boy with her. But at that moment there was a snapping noise, and one of Mictantecutli's frozen fingers dropped from its hand and clattered on to the floor. Then one of its ribs gave way; then another; and I found myself standing on what felt like a collapsing staircase, as the Fleshless One's entire skeleton began to fall to pieces under me.

Its skull bent forward, and its spine cracked, and then that huge and hideous head rolled to the concrete floor and shattered into dozens and dozens of smaller skulls.

All around me, as I climbed down from the demon's skeleton, the dead of Salem and Granitehead were rustling to the floor in ragged heaps; the false life taken out of them; the false breath drawn from their lungs.

Enid came slowly forward, and helped me to turn off the liquid nitrogen. All the skin was frozen from the palms of my hands, and I was severely bruised and lacerated. But I was alive, at least, and that was one blessing that I couldn't question.

'Did you see Jane?' I asked Enid, in a shaky voice. 'Did you see her then?'

Enid nodded. 'I saw her. I called her myself.'

'You called her yourself? How?'

Enid rested her hand on my shoulder, and smiled. 'Come on,' she said, 'we still have work to do. All of these bones must be taken away from here, and buried according to the rituals.'

'But how did you call Jane? And why did she help us? I thought she was one of Mictantecutli's servants.'

'She was,' said Enid. 'That is, until you killed her a second time, and freed her from Mictantecutli's power. She is at rest now, because of you; and so is your unborn son.'

'I still don't understand how she came.'

Enid looked around at the carnage in the warehouse, and sadly down at Quamus. 'Your wife was a member of the sisterhood, Mr Trenton. She would never have told you because she was forbidden to tell you; and in any case you would never have believed her.'

The sisterhood?'

Enid nodded. 'Your wife was a Salem witch. Not from her mother's side of the family, but from her father's, so her power was not particularly strong. But she was enough of a witch to have been in touch with others of the sisterhood; and enough of a witch, of course, to have been very susceptible to the powers of Mictantecutli.'

'What now?' I said, nodding towards the broken skeleton. 'Now this monster's dead, are your powers all gone?'

'I don't think so,' said Enid. 'The power of kindness will always endure. When Mictantecutli saw your dear dead wife, Mr Trenton, it was a reminder to it that its power is limited; and that there is a greater power which reigns over it, even today.'

I looked up. I felt extremely tired. Through the upper windows of the warehouse, falling in cathedral-like rays, came the pale light of the afternoon, and I realized then that the darkness of Mictantecutli had at last been destroyed. I tried very hard not to cry.