Tengu by Graham Masterton

Author:Graham Masterton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Horror, Fiction
Published: 2011-01-08T10:30:01.455000+00:00

CHAPTER ONE

They had expected Admiral Knut S. Thorson to die within hours of his last and most paralyzing stroke. He was 78, after all, and his last ten years of life had been dogged by serious heart disease and delibitating collapses. But “Inch-Thick Thorsen,” as the Navy had always nicknamed him, was made of tough, durable stuff, and his hours of life had lengthened into days, then months.

He had lain for nearly a year now inside his oxygen tent at Rancho Encino Hospital, one of the most luxurious acute-care facilities in the whole of southern California, a stumpy little gray-haired man with ferocious eyebrows and a ruddiness in his weathered face which even twelve months of hospitalization had been unable to fade.

Every two days his wife visited and sat watching him breathe inside his plastic cocoon; a plain woman who always wore flowers in her hat. On holidays and anniversaries, his entire family came to Rancho Encino, and stared at him with respect, regret, and boredom. “Inch-Thick” remained with his eyes closed, his heartbeats monitored by the latest and most sensitive of cardiopulmonary equipment, his brainwaves monitored by electroencephalograph.

His wife was still with him at 9:06 the evening after Jerry Sennett had been asked by Sergeant Skrolnik to come down to police headquarters and look at Maurice Needs. She had said nothing to him for most of the afternoon; but toward nightfall she had recited to him, without any hope

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that he could hear or understand her, one of the love poems he had written to her during the war.

How can a love so gentle be so fierce? How can a soft caress grip with such strength? How can your tenderest glance so quickly pierce My heart its very depth, my life its length?

Admiral Thorson had never written any poetry before the war; and he never wrote any more afterward. But Mary Thorson kept in an old ribboned candy box in her dressing-table drawer a collection of nearly 40 poems that had expressed his feelings for her in those days when it was quite possible he would never see her again.

They were the only words of his that she now possessed.

At 9:08, Nurse Abramski, a brusque but charming woman with a striking resemblance to Mary Tyler Moore, looked in to check the admiral’s heartbeat and drip, and to ensure that his waste-disposal bags did not need emptying. She smiled the whole time, but said little; she knew that Mary Thorson preferred not to chatter. Mary Thorson had enough to cope with, paying this long drawn-out homage to her comatose husband and lover.

Nurse Abramski finished in Admiral Thorson’s suite at 9:11. At the very moment she closed the door behind her, a Chevrolet van drew up outside the hospital grounds on Balboa Boulevard and doused its headlights. Out of the driver’s seat climbed a young Japanese called Masahiro Yoshino, a kendo adept who had arrived in Los Angeles only four days ago from Kobe. Out of the passenger seat, puffing slightly, climbed

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