Graham Masterton - Death Trance

'You must go faster,' insisted Quamus, but Walcott shook his head.

Now the police boat was within earshot, and they killed their siren and began to curve around in front of our bows, neat and fast and unavoidable. One of the officers was already balancing his way along the deck with a loud-hailer, and another stood behind him with a carbine.

'Okay, slow down,' I told Walcott. 'There's no point in getting shot at.'

Walcott eased off his engines, and the lugger began to dip and drift towards a slow rendezvous with the waiting police-boat. The copper vessel caught up with us, still propelled by its own inertia, and bumped noisily against our stern.

'Come out on deck with your hands on your heads,' ordered the police officer. 'I want all of you right where I can see you.'

He started to walk back along the deck, but he had scarcely gone three paces when he suddenly gripped his stomach, and collapsed out of sight.

'What's happened?' asked Walcott, standing up on the foredeck to get a better view. 'Did you see that? He just kind of fell over.'

The second officer, the one who had been carrying the carbine, suddenly ran to the police-boat's cabin. Then their pilot appeared, carrying a towel and a first-aid kit.

'What's happened?' I shouted. 'Is everything all right?'

The second officer glanced up at us, and then waved us away. I turned to Walcott and said, 'Pull up alongside. Come on, quick!'

'Are you kidding?' said Walcott. 'This is our chance to get away.'

'Pull up alongside!' I ordered him. He shrugged, spat, and turned over the engines so that we nudged up against the trim hull of the police-boat.

It was only when we actually touched their boat that I saw the blood. It was sprayed all over the deck as if someone had been painting the boat crimson with a firehose. The second officer appeared again, his shirt splashed with gore, his hands so bloody that he looked as if he were wearing gloves.

'What happened?' I asked him, in horrified awe.

'I don't know,' the policeman said, in a shocked voice. 'It was Kelly. His stomach just blew open. I mean it just blew open, and everything came out, all through his shirt.'

He stared at me. 'You didn't do it, did you? You didn't shoot him or anything?'

'You know damn well we didn't.'

'Well… go back to Salem… you got me? Go back to Salem and report to police headquarters. I have to get Kelly to hospital.'

The pilot came past, his shirt flecked with blood. He was very pale and he didn't say anything; but went straight to the wheelhouse and started up the police-boat's engine. Within a minute, the police-boat had angled away towards the harbour, its siren wailing, leaving the lugger and its attendant casket alone on the incoming tide. I looked at Quamus, and Quamus looked back at me.

'We will continue to make for Granitehead,' he decided. 'Once they have recovered from their shock, those officers will alert the police at Salem that we are coming, and we will be arrested if we go back there. Let us tow this burden of ours on to the wharf, and I will rent or borrow a car and go back to Salem Harbour to bring the refrigerated truck.'

'Do you think Mictantecutli will be safe for all that time, without refrigeration?' I asked him.

Quamus looked astern, at the floating casket. 'I do not know,' he said solemnly. Tor all I am aware, that officer on the police-boat… Mictantecutli could well have been responsible for that.'

Laurie glanced at her father. 'Dad,' she said, 'let's get this thing to shore, hunh?'

Walcott nodded. 'It doesn't carry anything catching, does it?' he wanted to know. 'It isn't diseased?'

'Not in the way you mean it,' I told him. 'But let's get a move on, shall we? The longer we stay out here, the more dangerous it's going to be.'

We passed the Waterside Cemetery and then turned in towards the boat ramp at Brown's Jetty. It had once been a fashionable place to launch your pleasure-boats, back in the 1930s. There had been a restaurant there, and a cocktail verandah, and lights strung out along the pier. But these days the buildings were sagging and deserted, and all that remained of the cocktail verandah was a rotting deck on which dozens of skeletal beach-chairs lay heaped as if they had been consigned to a mass grave.

Walcott brought the lugger in as close as he could, and then we untied the casket and let it drift up to the weed-slimy boat-ramp on the persistent flow of the tide. With a little prodding from our billhooks, it lodged itself listlessly against the lower reaches of the ramp, and then Quamus and I jumped off the lugger into the sea, and swam and waded ourselves ashore.

I climbed dripping wet to the top of the ramp, and tried out the winch. Fortunately someone had kept it greased and in good working order, and it didn't take long to unwind enough cable to reach down to the casket's rings. As soon as he was sure that we had the casket secure, Walcott gave us a toot on his whistle and began to steer his lugger out into the harbour again. I can't say I blamed him, even though he probably faced immediate arrest. Even a couple of months in jail is preferable to having your intestines blown out.

Quamus and I said nothing as we worked the handles of the winch, gradually edging the huge copper vessel up the concrete ramp. It made a shifting, grating sound as we inched it upwards, and there was a terrible hollowness about it, a slight rumbling, like very distant thunder. I sweated and gasped at the winch-handle, and tried not to think what the creature inside this ponderous vessel was actually like, and what it might conceivably do to me.

It took us almost half an hour, but at last the casket had been dragged right up to the top of the ramp, where we covered it with two tarpaulin sheets which were usually used for protecting boats during the winter. Quamus looked out across the harbour, but there was no sign of the police or the coastguard, or even of Edward and Forrest and the rest of the David Dark fellowship.

'Now,' said Quamus, 'I will go back to Salem and collect the refrigerated truck. You must stay here and guard Mictantecutli .'

'Wouldn't it be better if I collected the truck? You can't say that you're exactly unnoticeable. A six-foot Narragansett in a wet quilted jacket.'

'They will not notice me,' said Quamus, with quiet confidence. 'I have a technique which the Narragansett developed centuries ago to hunt wild animals. We call it "No Hunter." '

'"No Hunter"?'

'It is a way of making oneself invisible to other people, even though one is there. A strange technique, but it can be taught.'

'All right, then,' I said. I didn't really like the idea of waiting beside this monstrous burial-casket too much, but I guess I really didn't have any choice. 'Just don't be too long, that's all; and if you do get arrested, tell the police where I am. I don't intend spending all night out here, with nobody but Mictantecutli for company, not while you're eating steak-and-eggs in the Salem City jail.'

'Now you are afraid,' smiled Quamus.

He walked off between the derelict restaurant buildings towards West Shore Drive. I sat down on the jetty and looked cautiously at the corroded copper vessel in which David Dark’s Aztec demon had been incarcerated for over 290 years. I turned around to tell Quamus to bring me a half-bottle of whisky while he was away, but he was already gone. The 'No Hunter' had disappeared. I tried to make myself comfortable, and propped one leg up on the tarpaulins which covered the casket, as if it were simply a rather odd-looking boat that I happened to own.

It was only noon, but the sky was strangely gloomy, as if I were looking at it through dark glasses. A wind was getting up, too: a wind that hadn't been forecast. It ruffled the gray waves of Salem Harbour, and whipped the dead leaves and collected rubbish on the sagging cocktail verandah. A salt-faded sign above the restaurant still said Harbourside Restaurant, Lobster, Clams, Steaks, Cocktails. I could imagine summer nights out there, with Dixieland bands and men in straw hats and girls in shimmering shimmy dresses.