Walkers Read Free

look the other way. Somehow, however, he found that
he couldn’t, that he had to watch. Otherwise the girl on the beach would remain
faceless forever, and when he dreamed about her at night, which he inevitably
would, he would see nothing but that mermaid hair, tangled with weed, and
nothing but that long pale back.
    ‘Be careful,’ the medical examiner
instructed the medics. ‘I don’t want any extra bruising.’
    He came over and stood next to Henry
and Gil and Susan. ‘You didn’t touch her at all, or try to move her?’
    Henry shook his head. ‘I don’t think
I would have had the nerve.’
    Susan ventured, ‘Do you suppose that
somebody might have killed her? I mean, on purpose?’
    The medical examiner pulled a face.
‘Girls of this age are always susceptible to being killed, either on purpose or
accidentally, or else through carelessness. Pretty girls especially. They have
more power than they know. Their youth and their looks give them power. The
trouble is, they never know how to use it. Not safely, anyway.’
    With exaggerated care, the two
medics eased the girl’s body out of the sand, and then rolled her on to her
back.
    Her arm fell against the wet beach
with a slapping sound and then one of the medics said, in a peculiar voice,
‘Jesus Christ.’
    Henry stared, but at first he
couldn’t understand what he was staring at. The medical examiner moved forward
at once, and stood over the body, his face disassembled into no recognisable expression
at all. Fear? Horror? Fascination? The two medics took a step back, one of them
holding his hand over his mouth, and looking watery eyed. Lieutenant Ortega had
been standing with his back to the body, talking to Morris and Warburg; but
then Warburg nudged him and he turned around and saw what the girl really
looked like.
    Her face was almost beautiful, in
spite of the fact that it had been swollen by the sea.
    A classic blonde, with classic
American bone-structure, the sort of girl who could easily have found herself
an acting part in Matt Houston or Magnum, P.I. or even Dynasty. Wide shouldered, large
breasted; but beneath her ribcage the horror began. Henry suddenly understood
what he was looking at, and whispered, ‘Oh, God,’ and Susan buried her face in
her hands.
    The girl’s abdomen had been
completely ripped out, from her ribs to her pelvis, and inside her abdominal
cavity scores of silvery-black eels were writhing; a tumultuous nest of
slithering creatures, twining and untwining themselves, blindly feeding on what
was left of the dead girl’s softer organs.
    Gil turned away, buckled at the
knees, crouched on the sand, and retched. The uniformed policemen stared in
alarm and helplessness; even the photographer crossed himself. For minutes on
end, there was nothing that any of them could do but watch the knotted tangle
of eels as they heaved and twisted and wriggled, and the pale emotionless face
of the girl whose body they were slowly devouring.
    The medical examiner turned to
Lieutenant Ortega with widened eyes. ‘Ever see anything like that, ever!’
    Lieutenant Ortega abruptly shook his
head.
    ‘Me neither,’ said the medical
examiner. Then he turned to the medics and said, ‘Get rid of those things.’
    The medics looked unhappily down at
the body. ‘You mean . . .?’
    ‘Whatever they are, those eels.
Those snakes. Get them out of there.’
    One of the medics picked up a stick
from the beach, and approached the body gingerly. He leaned forward, and
prodded the eels with the tip of it, just once.
    Immediately, the eels wriggled and
twisted even more furiously, and the medic jumped back with a high-pitched ‘aah!’ of irrepressible disgust.
    The medical examiner impatiently
took the stick away from him and circled around the body himself. While
everybody else watched him with flesh-crawling apprehension, he prodded the
eels two or three times, and each time they boiled in the dead girl’s stomach
with the same slippery fury. Suddenly,