The eternal foe

01Nov

I removed the pendant from my neck in the elevator and put it around hers. I think she recognized it. She looked up at me without fear for the first time. There was no warmth or engagement. She was still detached from every one and every thing. I couldn’t tell if that was her natural state or a defense mechanism to cope with the trauma. At the very least, she was clearly no longer in immediate terror. But still, when I reached toward her back to comfort her, she stepped away.

The elevator opened and we walked past the pair of security guards and across the columned hall to the street. I felt eyes on me. I didn’t know if that meant electronic surveillance or other means entirely, but I knew I was being watched as surely as I knew I was walking and breathing and fleeing without a plan. I hadn’t expected to survive. I certainly hadn’t expected to become responsible for an innocent life.

I didn’t believe for a second that this was the end of it, that they were just going to let us go. They’d gone to great lengths to see me cut loose, and to set me against the chef. One of dozens, apparently. But I was the one who struck true. I was the weapon. And now that I’d succeeded, I was a loose end. I’d lost my job after months of inconclusive therapy. If I was found dead with a suicide note expressing guilt over the Cormack affair, it wouldn’t raise too many alarms—except maybe with Hammond.

He’d do something stupid, I knew, like risk his family, his wife and girls, trying to find justice for me. I couldn’t let that happen.

But right then, Alexa was my first priority. I needed to get her somewhere safe, which meant out of town. She was near-catatonic in the car. She just sat in the back, immobile, like her mind was gone. I wondered what had happened to her. Seven years she’d been missing. It took some coaxing to get her out of the car again, that was sure. I think being inside a solid, enclosed space was somewhat comforting for her then, like a den. I reached in to reassure her it was safe, and she scrambled back on the seat and swatted at me in the air. Eventually, I think the prospect of being alone scared her more than anything. I went to my trunk and found my heavy metal roadside flashlight, first aid kit, and emergency blanket. I was out of her sight for several moments, and when I shut the trunk and came back around, she was sitting on the edge of the seat, feet on the curb. She still wouldn’t let me touch her, but it seemed like she didn’t want me too far away either.

I started walking and she followed some distance behind—although she left the rear door of the car wide open. In that neighborhood, there was no guarantee the vehicle would still be there five minutes later. But since I had little choice, I led her across the weedy lot and around to the back of the brick church assembly. I lifted the slanted doors, which shed flecks of paint, and left them open for her.

“Hello?” I called as I walked down the steps.

The lights were off and it was dark, but then, it was still a couple hours before sunrise, so what did I expect? I clicked the flashlight and pointed it at the floor as I walked around the boiler room.

“Hello?” I called again. “Anyone here?”

I didn’t smell shit anymore. But I smelled something else.

The beam from the flashlight hit the grate of the metal cage, which cast large shadows on the back wall. Only small squares of light made it through, and they moved about as I stepped. The dancing of the shadow made it difficult to see, more even than if I’d had no light at all, and it wasn’t until I was at the gate that my eyes made sense of the scene. I dropped the blanket and first aid kit, which broke open on the floor.

I heard footsteps on crackling paint.

“Don’t come in!” I called back. “Alexa, wait there! Do you hear? Just wait there.”

The gate was unlocked—it had been forced—and I pushed into the storage room. The witch doctor was strung from the back wall, arms out, head slumped, like some live reenactment of the Crucifixion. With the beam from my flashlight squarely on him, I could see the wet blood on his dark skin and red smears on his clothes.

“Alexa, stay back!” I called.

I set the flashlight on the table, beam up. It reflected dimly off the brown pipes and wood joists in the ceiling. I stepped closer to feel for a pulse and tripped over a box on the ground and landed hard on my palms. I stood and reached for my friend, but both his wrists and neck were too high. His chest wasn’t moving.

I was standing there, looking at the cords that dangled him from the pipes in the ceiling, when the beam of light started moving behind me. I turned. Alexa held it. She swung two-handed and whacked me hard across the temple. The second blow, the one to the back of my head, came when I was on my hands and knees.

 

 

 

There was a Lord of Shadows. He existed. He existed the way money existed, or tyranny. He existed because people believed he existed, just as paper money has value because people believe it does. He existed in the minds of his devout. He existed in the acts they carried out in his name. They’d even built him a throne—a throne of martyrs from which to rule the world, a throne for all to see. And in that way, his power was indestructible. For he was the ultimate adversary: one who could never be found, never confronted, never defeated.

The eternal foe.

 

 

 

I was sideways on old concrete. My hands and feet were bound together behind me and attached to each other via nylon rope that stretched over my butt to my feet. The knots were strong, but the line was slack. I was inside a circle splattered on the concrete—a circle of blood. There were marks spaced around the outside, like the numbers of a clock. There was an identical circle next to me which overlapped the first, like a Venn diagram, leaving a foot-wide arc of space inside both. The witch doctor’s corpse was now headless and slumped in the corner. The wound was jagged, and curls of skin hung off what was left of his neck.

Help was out of the question. That much was certain. No one knew about that place, not even Hammond. That was the whole reason I’d picked it. It was a long-forgotten hole.

My flashlight was on the workbench, pointed toward the hall, but it was no longer the only source of illumination. A couple dozen irregular candles—some small, some quite large—lit the room in flickering yellow. They rested on the floor in no discernible pattern, except that none disturbed the circles in the center, for which space had been cleared. The card table was overturned in the hall. The cot and mattress leaned against the wall, covering one of the windows. My talisman hung from one of the cot’s legs.

She saw that I was awake. She saw me looking at it.

“You thought it would keep you safe.” She shook her head. “But it doesn’t have any more effect on me than it does you.”

It wasn’t Alexa’s voice. It couldn’t have been. It was older, and there was a slight Caribbean twang.

“You’re human,” I said.

“I was. Once.”

She was crouched on the floor in the adjacent circle with her back to me. She was naked except for her cotton panties. She was working on something, cleaning it perhaps. Her arms were covered in blood up to her elbows, and there was quite a bit of splatter over the rest of her. Candlelit shadows danced across her back.

She turned then, and over Alexa’s face and shoulders I could see a swirl of vapor—another face and torso, vaguely African in appearance, with bare breasts and long hair in braided in beads. There was a blood-covered skull in hers hands, bits of sticky red flesh still clinging to it. She set it on the ground between us, directly in the center of the overlap. As Alexa moved, her smoky inhabitant moved with her.

I took a deep breath. I fought the urge to tug at my bonds. It’s natural. Your body wants to rebel, to straighten, to stand. I forced myself to stay in that terrible backward U shape and focus on what I knew.

An exorcism is like a hostage negotiation.

“You have a name?” I asked.

She smiled at me. She stood and moved to the workbench. As she stepped out of the circle, I could no longer see the smoke. Alexa removed a long bloody knife from the bench and set it on the floor between two candles. The blade was pointed at my back.

“Josephine,” she said.

“You killed them, didn’t you?” I accused. “The best people on the planet. You killed them all.”

“Some of them, yes.” She nodded. The accent was gone. It had disappeared with the smoke. “And some of the worst, too. Others did the rest.”

“The worst? What’s that supposed to mean?”

She stood at the bench with her back to me, making more preparations that I couldn’t see from the floor.

“That woman you found,” she said in Alexa’s young voice.

“You killed Dr. Massey?”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. With that mark on her tongue, Amber wouldn’t have been able to reveal anything to the chef even if she’d wanted. He would’ve known that the moment he discovered it. I suspect he let her go on the hope that she’d lead him to the Lord of Shadows. Once freed, she knew they’d come for her. Or suspected. That’s why she was hiding in that derelict house, and why she’d spray-painted sigils of protection on the sides, disguising it with bits of graffiti between so anyone passing would assume it was gang signs.

The warlocks, the Shadowlords, sent their assassin, the last person anyone would suspect: an innocent-looking young woman with a mental handicap. The perfect killer. Even I hadn’t contemplated it.

“That’s how you got close to them,” I said. “That’s why you took her. Because she’s special.”

“Retarded, you mean? Yes. And a powerful medium as well. Mediums are easy to take. They’re sensitive. Their spirits are already wide open. To receive. And a retarded child has no defense.”

She leaned down to me. Her fingers were soaked and dribbling blood, like she’d just dunked her left hand in a tub of it. As she passed through the blood circle, the smoky apparition appeared again. She put her wet hand to my forehead. She was close to me and I could see the wisps of a face.

“What happened to you?” I breathed.

She drew something on my face, marks of some kind.

“I made a fair bargain.” She drew a mark to the left of the first, then made lines on my cheeks. “With a man who no longer wanted his heart. He asked for nothing in return. He just wanted it gone. He could no longer bear the weight it carried. So I took it.”

She finished her work and stood. She lit a short bundle of dried herbs in one of the candles. It didn’t so much burn as smoke like incense.

“But the shaman . . .” She spat the word. “He said it was wrong.”

Étranger.

“But it was fair!” She walked, bundle in hand, to the adjacent circle and crouched down. “He came for the heart. But I had already made a bargain. He didn’t like that. He got angry. And I had no choice but to escape into the flames, to become this . . . thing.”

She began to shake the bundle back and forth over the blood-wet skull and over me. She was mumbling to herself with her eyes closed.

I watched the smoking bundle rise and fall. “What are you doing?”

“They promised me a body. They bartered fair.”

A body. They promised her a body. So that was it.

Me.

She wasn’t going to possess me, like she had with Alexa. A possession could be driven out. She was going to become me. That’s what the circles were for, and the candles and the rest.

No more loose end.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said.

“It’s too late,” she retorted. “I already did the work. Fair and square. Now I collect my fee.”

And just like, that Alexa’s mostly naked body slumped to the floor and the smoky apparition floated about with the incense. It wound through the air to the witch doctor’s skull, resting in the overlap between the circles, and I understood. As long as she was inside the conjuring circle, her spirit would remain patent. It wouldn’t dissipate. But neither could she escape. She couldn’t cross the boundary. Not without a host.

The smoke gathered completely inside the skull. I could see it swirling behind the eye sockets and floating in and out of the nasal cavity. There, it was wholly inside both circles. It could pass either way.

Wisps emerged and moved toward me.

“No . . .”

I pulled hard against my bonds, over and over. The slack line went taut and I realized: Josephine had left that rope long for a reason. I suspect she needed that. I suspect she needed some way to free herself after the transfer, a way to inch my body like a caterpillar to the knife she’d left by the candles and cut herself free.

My nose caught a whiff of the vapor. It wasn’t smoke. It smelled of breath and memories. I pulled and pulled and pulled.

The rope that connected my hands to my feet behind me served as an anchor and was just long enough to allow me a few hard tugs. The nylon dug into my skin. It burned. I could feel the thinner skin on the back of my hand stretch like elastic and tear. I screamed as the smoke entered my eyes and nose and ears and mouth. But I’d already felt the pain of skin torn free, some weeks before. I knew it hurt. It hurt like a motherfucker. But I also knew I’d survive. I yanked hard with one more primal yell. I didn’t so much move my limp arm as launch it, bloody and burning, into the air, right as my mind was snuffed like a candle.

 

 

 

He said he gave me everything I needed.

In a box of risotto.

What I got was a message from the other side. A warning.

Beware the wolf with three eyes.

Well, they already have two, right? And the third eye is what sees beyond. It’s the eye of the spirit self, like on Hindu statuary and all that New Age spiritual crap. In the forehead. Right where the old woman in the vision touched me with the midnight blue dye.

And the wolf is the hunter who takes down the lamb. The lamb is innocence. Peace. The symbol of renewal and salvation.

In all of this, there was only ever one hunter.

Me.

And that was the message. The wolf with three eyes was that part of me. The night stalker. The dark part of my soul that I pretended wasn’t there. I kept it away from Freddie and Craig and Kinney, that’s for sure, the way a lover hides an infidelity. I kept it away from them by pretending it was false. And in pretending to be ignorant of it, I let it be used.

That’s how evil grows. When we’re convinced of our own righteousness. When we believe our extremes are justified. When we believe we’re the good guy—even when we’re not. Because we’re stopping the really bad things. So a little sin is okay.

“Beware the wolf with three eyes” was a warning from the other side, from the ghost walkers, the spirits-shamans of old, not to trade salvation for vengeance. Not to become the dire hunter. Because courage alone is tyranny.

I remembered a line from one of the books I’d read:

And I had become as a blade without a wise hand to guide it.

But here’s the thing. “Beware” doesn’t mean run from. It means “Be aware of.” “Watch out for.” Maybe even “Use with caution.”

So that’s what I did.

The conjuring circles were beyond my skill. But not Josephine’s. She’d done a good job, too—far better than the old witch doctor had done with the ghoul. I couldn’t have made those circles or traced those runes. But I could use them, same as her.

I threw my limp arm like a Hail Mary pass. My mind went dark just as my torn hand landed on the skull and knocked it away.

With my hand and blood at the center, I summoned an apparition of my own.

I think it had been following me. On the other side. I think it had been following me since I was 13. It must have been pacing back and forth like a caged animal, waiting for the door to open, because I felt it burst from the circle like it had been running at full speed down a long hall.

A spectral wolf.

Its head was the size of a washing machine. Its coat, mottled gray. An ethereal beast, just like the voodoo priestess trying to become me. I couldn’t touch her. Even if my hands had been freed, they would’ve been useless. They would’ve passed through the vapor. But not the wolf’s teeth, for it was made of the same stuff. My totem hit Josephine’s spirit so hard it broke her from my body in a burst of smoke. It locked her in those powerful jaws. It impaled her on its teeth. Then it shook. Back and forth. Growling. As it twisted around the room, passing through metal and brick alike as if none of it were real. I heard screaming. Terrible, awful screaming.

And then, just like that, they were gone.

My eyes opened.

The room was quiet. I heard breathing. Mine. And someone else’s.

Alexa.

My free hand was shaking so badly and was so numb with pain that it was nearly useless, but one free elbow gave me enough leverage to reach the knife and cut myself loose. I struggled to my feet, almost falling twice, and ran to the prone girl resting sideways on the floor. I shook her and called her name. I called over and over. I called her back from wherever her mind went. But I couldn’t hear my voice. I was screaming, but inside that conjuring circle, it went not into the room but into the other place. I called her name over and over.

She coughed.

She opened her eyes.

“Alexa . . .”

I didn’t wait for daylight. I just drove.

 

 

 

Undated

It’s been months.

Shit.

Months . . .

I don’t want to go into everything that’s happened. There’s no point. There were some bad decisions on my part. Some drinking. Some other stuff. Guess I’m not as strong as I thought.

I took Alexa to Craig’s house. I had to tell her that her brother was dead. That was fun. And that her sister-in-law was missing, almost certainly dead as well. I didn’t tell her what year it was. I figured that was a shock that could be saved for later. And I didn’t tell her what her body had been doing without her. That’s not anything she ever needed to know. I didn’t tell Hammond either. I didn’t tell him where I’d found her and he didn’t ask. I think things were dawning on him then—that maybe there was more going on in the world than he’d been led to believe. I understood what he was feeling, the uncertainty and confusion. When something like that hits you, your first response isn’t to run out and learn everything you can. Not at first. It’s to shrink back to what you know. Only later do we poke our heads, like an animal from its burrow.

I’m not sure what the authorities will do with her, if they’ll let her stay with the Hammonds or not. She has a mental handicap, but she’s not a minor anymore. I expect her case will become a bureaucrat’s wet dream before it’s all resolved. But at least she’s in a good place—as good a place as there is in this world. In a home, with a family.

After that, I disappeared, if only to protect my own family. I was homeless for a while. Out West. That was an adventure. Everyone thinks the street people are crazy. And they are. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. There’s plenty in the big city that feeds off the homeless, lemme tell you. And I don’t mean preys on them. I don’t mean gobbles them up. I mean feeds. Like a parasite. And I got to see it.

Vampires aren’t like in the movies. They don’t give soliloquies in dark dungeons. They don’t sulk like teenagers. They don’t reduce a body to its corpse. Usually. That only raises questions.

They’re psychopaths. Sophisticated. Charming. Manipulative. They don’t want to kill you. They want to feed on you, week after week, for as long as they can. It’s so scary to see up close. And I don’t mean the groping and fevered slurping. I don’t mean when two or three are feeding on the same person at one time.

Fucking leeches.

No. It’s how they prey. The easy lies. The feigned innocence. Like a pedophile. They feed on hopes and dreams as much as blood. They love their victims. Even as they’re killing them, they adore them for what they give and promise them everything. They stroke them and look longingly into their eyes. And some poor soul feels needed. And their life just fades away. And the cause of death is “renal failure” or “drug overdose” or “unspecified anemia associated with malnutrition.”

Never vampirism.

You know someone who was a victim. I guarantee it. Your teenager who cuts herself, maybe. Maybe she cuts herself because the secret boyfriend she met on the internet asks her to.

I made sure they’d remember I wasn’t ever on the fucking menu.

Ever.

I even helped some folks get free.

Turns out, the chef was right. I’m good at that.

But it’s a lonely world to live in. More even than before. I mean, you can’t exactly chat about this stuff at a dinner party. Not seriously. Not without seeming completely insane.

“Sorry to hear about your intestinal ailments, Joe. Did you know that some kinds of lesser devils can possess specific organs in your body? That might not be Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Just sayin’. Try drinking a tincture of red wine and deadly nightshade, to get it drunk—they love that shit—then spin a silver dollar on a string in front of your eyes, back and forth, to disorient it and it’ll probably stumble away.”

Ha.

So you sit there at the party and don’t say anything. Because that’s what you’re thinking. Because you just don’t live in the same world as your friends anymore. And the people you share this new world with, well, they’re a buncha fucking A-holes.

I kept my head shaved. And I got a tattoo. High up, on the crown of my forehead. A simple lens shape—sideways, with an empty circle in the center. Because now my eyes are open. All three of them. I finally learned what the chef was trying to tell me that day I broke the seal on his sanctum. Probably the most valuable lesson of my life. Courage alone isn’t enough. It has to be tempered by the other attributes of the saint: wisdom and compassion and the rest.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no saint. I never will be. Odds are, neither will you. But I don’t think the Divine expect that—or whoever it is that’s out there on our side. The patient ones. The wise. The bearers of light. I don’t think they expect perfection. They don’t expect any of us to save the world. But they expect each of us to do our part. It’s not always clear what that is, but I guarantee you it’s something more nothing. It’s something more than good intentions. You can’t just be against things, even evil ones. You can’t just go around smiting the wicked. That doesn’t do anything but make them more wicked. You have to nurture them. You have to nurture the good

And that’s hard. Damned hard.

But you can do it. We all can, every day, in ways big and small. You don’t need spells or magic weapons. You don’t even have to be a saint. You just have to do something more than nothing. You just have to start. You have to. We all do. Because now it really is up to all of us. To be better. We can’t look to someone else to save us. Because there isn’t anyone. All the saints are dead.

And the darkness is rising.

 

I’m posting the chapters of my forthcoming urban paranormal mystery, FEAST OF SHADOWS, in order until the book is released. A blend of hard-boiled whodunit and contemporary urban fantasy, it’s been described as “Tolkien meets Dashiell Hammett for dinner in the present day.”

You can sign up here to be notified when the book is released.

You can start reading in order here: The old ones are patient.

The next chapter is: (not yet posted)

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