Tengu

  Tengu

  By

  Graham Masterton

  TENGU – Winner of the Silver Medal of the West Coast of Books

  Nancy spoke: “The most evil of all the seven Black Kami is called the Tengu. Even the most experienced adepts at the Shinto shrine are warned opening themselves up to the Tengu. It is said that the leader of the shrine had once done so, and had almost been driven mad.”

  “Nancy, please...” Gerard interrupted.

  “No. You must listen to me. The characteristics the Tengu gave to those he possessed included invincible physical strength, the mad strength of the berserk, the ability to stand up to ferocious attack from any kind of weapon. Also, if the person he was possessing was chopped into the tiniest pieces, the pieces would regenerate and grow again into demons even more hideous than the original...”

  “Nancy!” Gerard shouted.

  “No!” she hissed. “You have to listen because it’s true! They’ve done it! They’ve brought it here, the Tengu, the real Tengu demon! The devil of remorseless destruction!”

  STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

  TEG/232/Ref:18a

  FROM: THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY

  TO: SENATOR D. R. NUSSBAUM

  REFERENCE: USS Value

  October 17, Naval records show indisputably that the radio monitoring vessel USS Value was at Pearl Harbor on July 2, 1945, undergoing routine equipment repairs. There can be no basis whatever for your suggestion that the vessel was anchored at that time off the coast of Japan. Nor can there be any substance in your claim that the USS Value was connected with what you call the “Appomattox Situation.” The Navy has no record of any file of that title or description.

  EXCERPT FROM THE RECORD OF THE CONGRESSIONAL INQUIRY INTO INTELLIGENCE PROCEDURES, MARCH, 1961.

  SEN. NEILSEN (N.J.): Did you at any time prior to this sortie appreciate that you might have to sacrifice the lives of all but one of your fellow operatives in order to achieve a comparatively minor intelligence coup?

  LT. COL. KASTNER: Yes, sir. I was conscious of the risks. I might add that my fellow operatives were, too. We were trained.

  SEN. NEILSEN: Do you now believe that what you achieved was worth the loss of all those lives, and worth the political risks which Senator Goldfarb has already outlined?

  LT. COL. KASTNER: There was a possibility that it might have been, sir. I admit the net result was a disappointment.

  SEN. NEILSEN: A disappointment?

  LT. col. KASTNER: Not all such sorties are disappointments, sir. Appomattox was a good example.

  SEN. NEILSEN: Appomattox? What was Appomattox?

  LT. COL. KASTNER: I have just been given instructions that I am not to respond to that question, sir. It is outside the area of my competence.

  SEN. NEILSEN: I think this inquiry deserves some kind of explanation of your remarks, Colonel.

  LT. COL. KASTNER: I’m sorry, sir. I have been advised that any kind of response would be a violation of national security.

  SEN. NEILSEN: Very well, Colonel. But I intend to take this matter further.

  LT. COL. KASTNER: That is your privilege, sir.

  MESSAGE RECEIVED FROM APPOMATTOX ONE, JULY 11, 1945

  “We’ve located it, sir. No question about it. We’ve taken sixteen radio bearings and we have it right on the button.”

  “In that case (inaudible) immediately. I repeat, immediately. You will be picked up at 2125 hours on the 15th on the beach at (inaudible)”

  BOOK ONE BURNED DOVES

  CHAPTER ONE

  When Sherry Cantor’s alarm clock woke her at 7:27 on the morning of August 9 she had twenty-three minutes to live.

  That was the most overwhelming fact of her morning. Yet it was the only fact she didn’t know.

  She knew that her twenty-second birthday was only three days away. She knew that in two weeks she was supposed to drive down to San Diego and spend a week with her brother Manny and his wife Ruth. She knew that she had a date to meet her good-looking new lawyer, Bert Dentz, in thirteen hours and thirty-three minutes for dinner at the Palm Restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard.

  She knew that her savings account at Security Pacific contained $127,053.62, and she knew that last Wednesday’s Variety had dubbed her “most promising young video star of 1983.”

  But knowing all that was not enough. Knowing all that could not possibly save her from what was going to happen in twenty-three minutes’ time.

  After the alarm had woken her up, she lay on her emerald-green satin sheets in her small white California-rococo bedroom, under the framed black-and-white print of yuccas at Santa Barbara.

  She thought about the dream she had just been dreaming. It had been vivid, almost realer than real, as only early-morning dreams can be. She had imagined herself jumping rope in the front yard of the old white house in Bloomington, Indiana. She had 14 imagined the leaves falling from the trees like flakes of rust. She had imagined her mother coming to the door, and waving her to come in for cookies and milk....

  Sherry thought about her dream, and then let it warmly melt away. Bloomington, Indiana, was five years ago, and a lifetime away. She stretched on the twisted sheets.

  She was a tall, striking girl with rich chestnut hair and a face that was uncompromisingly European. Her eyes were wide, and almost amber. She was wide-shouldered, big-breasted, and narrow-hipped. She slept naked, except for a small pair of blue satin panties, and her skin was soft and brown against the shiny sheets.

  There was a faded photograph on the sideboard in Bloomington of Sherry’s mother in a transit camp in Munchen Gladbach, Germany, in 1945. Except for the puff-sleeved dress and the headscarf, it could have been Sherry.

  At 7:31, with only nineteen minutes left, Sherry sat up in bed and ran her hands through her tousled hair. On the bleached calico window blind, the first nodding patterns of sunlight shone through the fan palms in her garden, and made a shadow-play.

  Somewhere outside, a radio was giving the morning traffic report. It was bad everywhere.

  Sherry climbed out of bed, stood up, stretched, and stifled a yawn. Then she padded out of the bedroom and into her kitchenette. She opened the mock Oregon-oak cupboard and took down a can of Folger’s coffee. As she reached for her percolator, a triangle of sunlight lit her hair, and then her shoulder, and then her right breast. The nipple was pale and soft.

  While the coffee perked. Sherry poured herself an orange-juice and stood in the kitchenette drinking it. She felt hungry. Last night, she’d shared a bottle of tequila with Dan Mayhew, the curly-haired actor who played her unhappily married cousin in Our Family Jones, and hangovers always made her feel hungry.

  She opened the fridge again. There were two Thomas’s muffins left. She wondered how guilty she would feel if she toasted one.

  It was 7:37. She decided against the muffin. Dan May-hew hadn’t even been worth getting a hangover over, and so he certainly wasn’t worth putting on weight over. Last week she’d seen him sitting in the studio commissary with a boy whose pale lemon ballet shoes and surfer’s knobs hadn’t exactly reassured her about Dan’s essential virility.

  It was 7:39- There were eleven minutes of life left. Sherry left the kitchenette as the coffee began to perk, and walked into her small bathroom. There were T-shirts and panties hanging to dry on a line over the tub. She looked at herself in the mirror, pouted at herself, and pulled down her eyelids to make sure her eyes weren’t too bloodshot. Lionel–Lionel Schultz, the director of Our Family Jones–always went crazy if anyone arrived on the floor with reddened eyes.

  ‘‘What do you think we’re shooting here?” he invariably screamed. “A fucking Dracula picture?”

  Lionel Schultz wasn’t a gentle man. He wasn’t much of a gentleman, either. But he had a perverse genius for soap op
era, and for provoking believable performances out of inexperienced actors.

  It was Lionel Schultz who had shown Sherry how to develop the dumb, busty part of Lindsay Jones into a character of sweet and quirky sympathy. And he hadn’t touched her once.

  Sherry finished her orange juice and set her glass down on the basin, next to her cake of herbal soap. She stepped out of her panties, and sat on the toilet. She could hear the birds chittering in the garden, and the distant murmur of the freeways. She closed her eyes, and tried to think what she felt like wearing today.

  It was 7:42. She flushed the toilet, washed her face, and walked back into the kitchenette naked.

  The coffee was popping and jumping. She picked up the folded-back script that lay on the counter, next to the Popeye cookie jar, and flicked through two or three pages. Tengu LINDSAY (sobbing): Is that really what you think of me? After all those days and nights together? After all those things you said?

  MARK: Honey, you don’t understand. I had to tell Carla we were finished. I didn’t have any other choice.

  Riboyne Skel O’/em, thought Sherry. If anyope had shown me this script before I signed up for Our Family Jones, I wouldn’t have thought it was worth turning up at the studio. I would have stayed as a waitress at Butterfield’s, fetching and carrying white wine and cottage cheese salads for pretentious British tax exiles in tinted glasses, and been glad of the work. Who would have guessed that some treacly saga about some even more treacly family would have gotten off the ground for a pilot and two episodes, let alone for two series?

  Even more amazing, who would have thought that a Jewish girl from Bloomington, Indiana, would have been picked out of hundreds of would-be starlets for one of the most noticeable roles in the whole drama?

  There wasn’t any question that Our Family Jones had cost Sherry the love of her live-in boyfriend, Mack Holt. Mack was lean and moody, with curly blond hair and a broken nose, and he could swim and ride and fence and dance like Fred Astaire. They had met one evening on the plaza outside of the Security Pacific Bank at Century City, when she had just opened her savings account with $10 her mother had sent her. The shadows of the dying day had been very Bauhaus, and he had crossed the plaza at that trotting pace athletes use when they’re just on the point of breaking into a run. She had been putting away her bankbook; dropped her purse; and he had picked it up for her in one fell swoop. After such a meeting, he should have known she would make it in soap opera.

  Sherry and Mack had lived for seven months on the second floor of a brown crumbling hacienda off Franklin Avenue, in Hollywood. They had shared their three-room apartment with a lumpy divan, two fraying basketwork chairs, three peeling posters for the Grateful Dead, and a dyspeptic gas stove. They had talked, played records, made love, smoked Mexican grass, argued, gone off to work, brushed their teeth, and finally arrived at the moment when Lionel had called to say Sherry was fabulous, and just had to come down to the studio right away, and Mack, far more talented, but still parking cars for a living, had refused to kiss her and wish her luck.

  From then on, it had been nothing but sulks, arguments, and eventually, packed suitcases. Sherry had lived for a while with a plain but friendly girl she knew from Butterfield’s, and then taken out a mortgage on this small secluded bungalow at the top of a steeply graded dead end called Orchid Place. She enjoyed the luxury of living alone, with her own small garden, her own wrought-iron fence, her own living room, her own perfect peace. She began to think about who she was, and what she wanted out of her life, and all of her friends said she was much nicer since she’d left Mack, and much more relaxed.

  To ease one of the more pressing demands of being single, Sherry had bought, through the mail, a pink vibrator. Most of the time it stayed in her bedside cupboard, next to her Oil of Olay and her Piz Buin sun oil, but occasionally there were nights when fantasies crowded her mind, and the Los Angeles heat almost stifled her, and she used it just to keep herself sane.

  It was harder than anyone knew, being the most promising young video star of 1983.

  With four minutes left, she poured herself a cup of coffee. She sipped it and repeated her lines under her breath: “Is that really what you think of me? After all those days and nights together? After all those things you said?”

  There were three minutes left. One hundred eighty seconds of life. She crossed the living room with her coffee mug in one hand and her script in the other. The sun was shining through the loose-woven yellow drapes drawn across the French doors, and the whole room was suffused in daffodil-coldred light. Her bare toes curled into the Tengu white shag rug.

  “Is that really what you think of me?” she repeated.

  Two minutes. She switched on the Sony television which stood in the corner. On top of the television was a sprig of poinsettia in a glass carafe of water. She had picked it yesterday evening, before she went out with Dan. On the wall behind the television was an original studio sketch for the Jones family parlor, signed by the artist. In a concentrated whisper, Sherry said:

  “After all those days and nights together? After all those things you said?”

  A commercial for Santa Anita Dodge appeared on the television screen–a fast-talking man in a powder-blue suit and a Buddy Holly hairstyle. “When you bring the family down to Santa Anita Dodge, we’ll give each of your children a free balloon, and your wife will be able to pick up a free voucher for hairstyling and a beauty treatment. , That’s guaranteed, whether you buy a new Dodge or not.”

  “Is that really what you think of me?”

  One minute left. Thirty seconds. Fifteen. Ten. Five.

  Sherry turned away from the television to set her mug down on the glass-and-bamboo coffee table in the middle of the living room.

  Her telephone rang, although nobody | ever found out who it was, calling her at 7:49:55 in the morning.

  The noise was so shattering that she thought a bomb had gone off. Then she thought it must be an earthquake. But as she turned back toward the French windows, she saw both huge panes of glass bursting inward, so that the whole living room was filled with a blizzard of glittering, tumbling fragments. Next, the metal screens were ripped away, and the aluminum upright between the broken windows was smashed aside as if it were cardboard.

  She didn’t scream. She didn’t even understand what was happening until it was too late. She raised her hands to protect her face from the flying glass, but the glass was nothing.

  Through the wrecked windowframe stepped a short, powerfully built man dressed in a strangely tied-up yellow robe. His skull was cropped down to a bristly black brush. His face was covered by a grotesque white mask, expressionless and evil.

  Sherry tried to back away, tried to cover her nakedness, but a sharp triangle of glass sliced into the side of her foot, and her hesitation was fatal.

  The man seized her left wrist in a grip so hard that it broke both her radius and her ulna. He twisted her fiercely around, and gripped her throat from behind. She gagged and choked, and tried to thrash against him with her legs, but he was impossibly strong.

  Without a word, without even a grunt, he went down on one knee and pulled Sherry backward across his thigh. She felt a splitting pain in her spine that was so intense that she passed out. But she instantly regained consciousness and was drowned in scarlet waves of agony. The man was hurting her so much she couldn’t even believe it was happening to her.

  Her back broke. She felt it snap. She could see the combed-plaster ceiling of her bungalow, and the paper lantern with the flower patterns on it. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t cry out, couldn’t move. It couldn’t be real. Things like this didn’t happen. She wasn’t here at all. She must be someplace else. Asleep. Dreaming.

  She could still hear the radio somewhere outside. It was playing “Samba Pa Ti.”

  Silently, the powerful man gripped the inside of her thighs. Her head was lying back on the rug now, and her hands were clenched in paralysis over her breasts. Her entire nervous system was disloc
ated, and she was already dying. The man let out a deep, suppressed hmphas he pulled her thighs further and further apart, stretching every muscle and sinew. Through a haze of pain and disbelief, Sherry heard something crack in her groin, although she could no longer feel anything below her waist.

  The man let her tumble from his upraised knee onto the rug. He stood up, keeping a hold on the ankle and the thigh of her right leg. With deliberate care, he planted his black silk slipper on Sherry’s pubic bone, to give him balance and leverage, and then he twisted her leg around as if he were trying to tear the leg off a chicken.

  She was lucky she couldn’t feel it. The ball of her thighbone was wrenched out of its socket. Then the skin and flesh were screwed around so tightly that they tore apart, in a grisly welter of burst arteries. The man gave Sherry’s leg one more turn, and ripped it right away from her body.

  He stepped back, and looked down at her. Her breathing was shallow with shock, and her face was already blue. Her eyes were clouded over. The man wiped his hands, first on his robes, then on the drapes. He didn’t seem to know what to do next.

  Sherry realized she was dying. She didn’t know why. She could see the man looking down at her, and she tried to think how she could ask him. It didn’t really matter, of course. Nothing mattered when you were dead.

  Her last thought was that she wished she could see her home in Indiana just one more time.

  The man in the yellow robe watched her die, his mask impassive. Then he walked back out the broken French window, and stood in the morning sunlight, still and thoughtful, as if he had just returned from a long and unexpected journey.

  CHAPTER TWO

  As Sherry was dying, Mrs. Eva Crowley was parking her slate-colored Seville Elegante on a red line close to the twin towers of Century Park East. She switched off the motor and sat in the driver’s seat for a while, watching her pale blue eyes in the rearview mirror. Well, she thought, this is ‘it. This is where my life is pasted back together again, or lost for good.