Graham Masterton - Death Trance

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.