* * * *

10:30 PM. 

Glenn Hong and Sammy Chow, the owner of the Golden Fortune, were smoking out back when they noticed the smell.

“What the hell is that?” Sammy sniffed. “Smells like something died back here.”

Hong shrugged. “I don’t smell anything,” he said. “Except for the crap your brother’s taking all over my kitchen.”

“Hey, screw you,” Chow snarled. “Ronnie’s got a right to work as much as you do.”

Hong blew a waft of smoke into Chow’s face.        

“Ronnie doesn’t even speak English, you moron.”

“Hey!”

“Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Mitsubishi, baby,” Hong said in his best ‘coolie’ accent. “You no speak a’ de Engleesh you no get respect in USA.”

Chow stormed off, swearing all the way back to the kitchen. Hong was a good chef (better, in fact, than Chow’s brother). Chow couldn’t afford to lose the kind of talent he wielded. On the other hand, Hong was an arrogant asshole. Everyone in the restaurant knew of his hatred for his less assimilated countrymen: Glen Hong looked down on men like Chen Mao Liu.

“Idiot,” Hong snarled.

Something in the alley snarled back.

Hong spun toward the sound.

“Hello?” he said. “Who’s there?”

Hong’s eyes strained to pierce the darkness but saw only shadows: No doped-up Mexican drag queen hungry for a fix; no angry black pimp looking to rob him.

He reached into the armpit of his chef’s jacket and yanked his Beretta 92F from its custom-made shoulder holster. It was the same gun Mel Gibson used in the Lethal Weapon movies that Hong adored.

At home, sometimes, Hong practiced his quick draw in front of a full-length mirror, mentally blasting away entire continents filled with ethnic rabble-rousers.

“You fuck wit’ the Hong-dog you gon’ get a face full o’ lead, biaaatch,” Hong drawled. He twirled the Beretta for effect and cursed the fates for making him Asian. He’d often complained to the staff that if he’d been born white or even black he would have been a star by now.

The thing that had been watching him stepped out of the shadows. Hong screamed. The creature growled again: A sound like boulders being ground to powder filled the alley.

Hong managed to get off five shots with the Beretta. Then the thing rushed toward him, one huge hand upraised, claws like black sabers gleaming in the glare from the street lamps.  

Hong pissed his pants.

The first swing severed his right arm at the elbow.

The second swing disemboweled him where he stood. The third one knocked him twelve feet through the air. Hong landed in a pile of his own intestines.

The growling thing fell upon Hong’s remains. The alley echoed with its screams of pleasure as it fed.   

Two busboys who witnessed the attack would report seeing something inexplicable in the alley that night; a man-like creature, nearly nine feet tall, covered with thick black fur; a monster that glared at them with burning yellow eyes before it disappeared into the shadows. Later, each of the eyewitnesses would suffer the worst nightmares of their lives.

No one in Seattle ever saw Chen Mao Liu alive again.

The creature was reported heading north.

3

Family Matters

1979 

My parents were fighters.

My mother, Lenore, was the first African-American model to grace the cover of a Western fashion magazine, British Vogue, back in 1966. Later, she taught school, until the government gutted the carcass of the New York public school system. Lenore fought the school board until she retired and moved to Bronxville, New York.

My father—well, that’s a little more complicated.

They’d been married for fifteen years the day it all came crashing down around us.  We were driving back from Martha’s Vineyard after visiting my aunt Selena. My mother’s older sister had married an attorney and moved to the Vineyard from Bronxville five years earlier, a fact that she’d never grown tired of reminding her “little sister.”

 I was sitting in the back seat with Doctor Necropolis  and Black Murray, the garter snake I’d liberated from my second-grade classroom. Black Murray lived in the glass geranium I kept on the windowsill in my bedroom. I’d taken him along on the trip to Oak Bluffs thinking (inexplicably) that he might enjoy the beach.

 My parents had waged a silent war since leaving New York: silent because my mother remained adamant that Aunt Selena never hear her and my father arguing, thereby adding fuel to a fire that was ignited the day my mother was born. As a result, I’d spent the summer of ‘79 ignoring hissed accusations and dodging thinly-veiled glares. I was only 9, but I wasn’t stupid.

 Doctor Necropolis giggled: Toil and trouble m’boy, he whispered. Toil and trouble.

 Doctor Necropolis was the mortal nemesis of The Time Rangers, a ragtag bunch of time-traveling marionette soldiers who haunted the UHF arm of Chicago’s TV galaxy for nearly a decade. He was the second-hottest seller in the FADCO line of action figures and games from 1967 until 1974, surpassed in popularity only by Captain Radion, the lantern-jawed Commander of the ‘Fighting 509^th.’

He’d made the trip from Chicago, where we’d lived until 1973, to New York, largely because my parents had only allowed me to take one toy with me during a hastily organized move conducted in the dead of night.

The black-clad Doctor Necropolis wielded a ‘Flying Death-ray Lazer Pocket Watch,’ ‘Perfect Karate-chop Action’ and a ‘Time-Grenade’ that could blast his enemies into the distant future or the forgotten past.

My Doctor Necropolis knew when people were going to die.   

He’d begun speaking to me sometime after my sixth birthday, an item he’d instructed me never to share with either of my parents.

Newsflash from Futureville, O-dog,” Necropolis chuckled.     

My father was fiddling with the radio as we drove along the Merritt Parkway toward New York while Lenore sat staring out of the passenger window, her jaw muscles clenching as she gnawed the bone of her discontent. Finally, the bone broke. Always consistent, Lenore went for the marrow.

“When we left Chicago you promised me that it was over, Marcus.”

Marcus took a deep breath and kept his eyes fixed upon the road.

“They’re breathing down my neck, Lenore,” he said.

Briefly, our eyes met in the rear-view mirror.

“Let’s talk about this later,” he said.

My father took pains never to argue with Lenore in front of me. Sometimes this made him appear weak before the juggernaut that was (and is) my mother: Lenore suffered from no such compunction.

“I don’t care,” she hissed. “I don’t care if he knows. You spend more time with Kowalski than you do with him anyway, so don’t pretend that you care.”

“Lenore, when Kowalski calls...”    

“You jump,” she said savagely. “You jump up and run to him like his little black lapdog every time.”    

When angered, Marcus could bellow like a general commanding troops under heavy fire. Marcus worked nights. A lot of nights.  Often, I’d heard them arguing when they thought I was at school. I’d sit on the front porch until the screaming stopped, too angry to open the door and scream at them to shut up shut up just shut...up.

But the finality I heard in my father’s voice that afternoon scared me more than the loudest shout.

Party’s over, O-dog, Doctor Necropolis whispered.

“You have no idea what’s happening out there, Lenore,” Marcus said, “and I’m tired of explaining it to you.”

My mother actually gasped. She was (and is) a woman unaccustomed to being thwarted.

“You arrogant son-of-a bitch,” she snarled. “Don’t you dare talk down to me.”

“Dad?” I interrupted.

Marcus looked up at me in the rear-view mirror again.

“Quiet, son,” he said.

I returned his smile. They were rare and I wanted to make this one last.

May 19th, O-dog, Doctor Necropolis whispered. Wanna know what year?

Shut up, you bastard, I thought.

Part of me hoped that I was crazy; that a twelve-dollar bundle of balsa wood and string couldn’t really predict when a man would die.

The problem was that four months earlier, Necropolis had predicted the death of Tubby the Wonder Cat, my Aunt Selena’s Siamese surrogate child. He’d correctly forecast the fatal heart attack of our next-door neighbor, Mr. Grant, as well as the abduction and murder of my kindergarten-teacher Mrs. Reagan.

The problem was that Doctor Necropolis was never wrong.

Marcus and Lenore loved each other, for the most part, but some unuttered resentment clouded the air between them. For my whole life we’d lived under that cloud the way prairie dogs live beneath the shadow of a circling hawk. We completed the drive back to New York shrouded in the kind of silence you find at the better funerals.

Marcus moved out the next day.

4

An Affair to Dismember

Criswell Nature Preserve, Northwestern Seattle. 

At 10:38 PM, two nights after Jeannie Montgomery was killed, a black Suburban sat parked on the edge of a clearing two miles south of the abandoned guard gates. The park rangers had received a call concerning an injured bear cub that had been sighted on the other side of the park.

Neville Kowalski, the man who made the call about the bear cub, opened the passenger door of the black SUV and stepped out into the clearing. In the circle of illumination thrown by the SUV’s headlights, another man knelt in a patch of red grass.

“That her?” Kowalski said.

His partner didn’t answer.

“Grudge?”

Marcus Grudge stood and nodded, “Some of her.”

As Kowalski ambled toward the clearing he stubbed his toe on a log half-hidden in the soil.

“Son of a... Fuck!” Kowalski hissed.

Grudge frowned. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Kowalski shrugged. “Every chance I get, brother.”

The two men stared down at the gutted corpse at their feet. Kowalski glanced up at Grudge. The big black man was glaring at the Montgomery girl as if he could reanimate her by the force of his will.

“Something’s not right,” he said.

“I know,” Kowalski said. “Two o’ those goddamn chimichangas at Taco Mundo and I got the worst gas leak since the Exxon Valdez.”

“I’m serious, Nev,” Grudge said. “Something’s hinky.”

Kowalski looked around the clearing.

“Whadda ya got?”

Grudge shook his head, “Not sure.”

Kowalski knelt to study Jeannie Montgomery’s remains.

“Nosferatu?” he said.

“No,” Grudge grunted. “Too messy. Whatever ate this poor gal was also a mutilator. ‘Suckers don’t waste blood.”

Kowalski scratched the three-day growth of graying beard stubble that clung to his cheeks. “Wolf?”

“Hasn’t been a skinwalker in the States in five years,” Grudge said. “But this thing, whatever it is… it feels a little like a Wolf.”

Grudge shook his head, his brow furled in concentration. “Something like it anyway.”

Kowalski belched and stood up. “We’d better get in the wind,” he said. “Park Ranger’ll be making the rounds any minute.”

“Jesus,” Grudge said. “Can’t you feel it?”

Kowalski stopped. After twenty years on the Road with Marcus Grudge he knew when to stop and pay attention.

“What is it?” he said.

Grudge was silent for nearly a minute. But finally, he opened his eyes. “Nothing,” he shrugged.

He dropped a big gnarled hand on Kowalski’s shoulder and offered a faint smile.

“You alright?” Kowalski said.

Grudge shrugged.

“I miss them, Neville,” he said. “I miss my life.”

Grudge rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and sighed deeply. “I’ve been thinking a lot about them lately. Know what I mean?”

Kowalski nodded. “Well, family ain’t everything it’s cracked up to be.”

The night wind kicked up sharply. A cold draft raised the hackles on the back of Kowalski’s neck.

“You think what we do matters?” Grudge said.

Kowalski shrugged.

“Dunno,” he said. “Freezin’ my ass off though.”

Grudge remained silent.

“Say,” Kowalski snapped. “What the Hell crawled up your skink-hole?”

“Choices,” Grudge said. “I’m just not sure they were the right ones.”

Kowalski scowled. “Somethin’ you ain’t tellin’ me?”

Grudge didn’t answer. He stared at the dead girl lying in the grass. Then he swore and punched Kowalski in the shoulder.

“I guess I’m just getting too old for this sh—”

The howl from beyond the treeline cut him off.

“What the hell was that?” Kowalski said.

Grudge pulled a silver-plated H&K .38 automatic. Kowalski’s Sig Sauer appeared in his right fist as if by sleight of hand. The two men stood back-to-back.

The howl repeated, closer this time.

“Christ,” Kowalski snarled. “What is that?”

“Goddamit, I don’t know.” 

“Bullshit,” Kowalski said. “You holdin’ silver?”

“It’s not a Wolf,” Grudge hissed. “Look, over there.”

Kowalski looked toward the edge of the clearing.

Something was watching them. A dark shape, partially hidden, high up in the trees. The thing glared at them, a sick amber light flickering in its eyes.  

“Holy Mary Mother of God,” Grudge hissed.

The hunters lifted their guns, too late, as the shadow thing screamed and leapt at them.

It was Marcus Grudge’s sixty-fourth birthday.

May 19^th. 

5

Skirmish

Television sucks.

And let’s face it, dear reader, before you get the idea that I’m one of those idiots who try to convince everyone that film is the last, great, modern art form, movies suck too: How many Nicholas Cage pictures can civilization take?

Television and movies, however, are the best things to happen to writers like me since the printing press.

“We’re back in one minute, Connie.”

Two months after the Montgomery murders, I was sitting in a television studio with Connie Sawyer, literary critic and host of The Eighth Hour, the hottest primetime arts and culture magazine in the public television universe.

The blonde, tall, icily attractive Sawyer ratcheted her black leather chair up just enough to allow her to look down on me. I didn’t mind: The sales from The River’s Edge would shore up my ego.

“You’re much better looking than that God-awful photo your publicist sent,” she said. “Too bad you write such crap.”

“You’re not so bad yourself,” I replied. “For a sour old hooker doomed to belittle those more talented than herself.”

Sawyer’s smile vanished. She’d likened my first book to “…a vile descent into a world too banal to be horrified by its own senseless violence,” and “…a relentless dry hump.” It was a testament to the persuasive powers of my publicist that I had agreed to appear on Sawyer’s show. The last thing I wanted to do was help her: I wanted to drop kick her down an abandoned well.

The assistant director stepped in and waved his fingers in my direction. “Five seconds,” he said. Sawyer glared at me, her perfect teeth clenched.

“Smile, asshole,” she snarled. “This sour old hooker’s about to make you a lot of money.”

“Four. Three. Two. One...”

Red lights ignited and Sawyer smiled for the cameras.

“We’re back with author Obadiah Grudge, whose new book, The River’s Edge, has graced the New York Times Best-Seller list for four weeks in a row.”

“Five, Connie,” I injected.

Sawyer’s smile cracked. Not a mortal rupture (She was far too frigid for that), merely a minor stress fracture, but it made my night.

“Obadiah, your books have been called “dark,” “menacing” and “ominous,” she continued smoothly. “What is it about the shadowy element of society that attracts your focus as an aspiring writer?”

Bitch

“I don’t think of my characters as menacing, Connie,” I said. “Some of them are as familiar to me as members of my own family.”

Sawyer laughed.

“Scary family,” she said.

I smiled and counted royalty checks in my head.

“Let’s talk about The River’s Edge, the story of a little girl who is abducted by her father and taken on a gruesome cross-country odyssey. Were you inspired by real events?”

“Connie, I think all ideas spring from experience. Stories are like doorways into the human psyche. Sometimes they lead to something productive and entertaining, like The River’s Edge, sometimes they lead to the unknown; unexplored rooms in the mansions of the mind.”

Sawyer smirked.

“You must spend a lot of time in dark rooms.”   

“I’d like to drag you into one sometime, Connie.”

We chuckled invisible daggers at each other. Off camera, the assistant-director cleared his throat.

“The best thing about those doors, Connie, seriously, is that you never know where they’ll take you. Some people find that scary. I take comfort in it.”

“Some might call that that cold comfort,” Sawyer said.

I made a mental note to call her for a date.

“Sometimes that’s the only comfort we get, Connie.”

* * * *

My assistant, Carla, was waiting in the limo.

“Yo, your publicist booked you on JUNO for next week,” Carla droned. “Oh, and your mother called. She said it was like, very important.”

Carla Quintana might have been the cloned lesbian love-child of Jennifer Lopez and Fran Drescher. A proud “New Yorican,” Carla was sexy in the way that all girls from the Bronx are sexy. She was compact, with the body of a hip-hop video dancer and the mouth of a Mexican longshoreman.  

“Call my mother,” I said. “Tell her I’m in the hospital: Minor stroke, some edema. Nothing serious, but no visitors.”

Carla wearily punched in the number.

“You are going straight to Hell,” she said.

The limo driver chose that moment to speak.

“Mr. Grudge, I just want to tell you that I loved Death and the Sorcerer.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s my favorite book.”

“Thank you so much.”

The driver brightened, encouraged. His attention shifted from the road to the rear view mirror, seeking mine, searching for the click. I reached into the mini-bar and grabbed a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels while he rattled on.

“I love the hardboiled private-eye stuff,” he said. “You do it better than a lot of these guys.”

“Cheers,” I said, lifting the bottle, steeling myself.

“You know, I write a little,” the driver said. “Mostly...”

“Mostly Fantasy stuff,” I cut in. “Maybe a little Horror thrown in for good measure, right?”

“That’s amazing,” the driver said. “See? I knew you and me was from the same tribe. How’d you know?”

I shrugged and drained the too-small bottle in one gulp. It was an ordeal I’d endured at least twice daily since the publication of my first novel, Death and the Sorceror: fervent slobberings from semi-sentient tassels of the literary lunatic fringe that is Horror/Fantasy fiction today, a fringe that I despised.

Let me explain: I hate Horror.

Any form of “literature” that smacks of the supernatural makes my ass bone throb with disgust. I write mysteries, “Hardboiled” suspense stories. Violent? Yes. Dark? Certainly, but my novels are grounded in real-world horrors: serial killers, mad gunmen, and drunken detectives at the end of the line.

But for reasons unfathomed by me at that time, my work had always appealed to the Horror geeks. This had proven to be a distinct handicap in an industry that sells thousands of Horror titles each year while ghettoizing even its most successful adherents, saddling them with the literary equivalent of a scarlet letter: the title of Horror Writer.

No horror writer whose name doesn’t begin and end with ‘Stephen King’ is ever considered a real writer. They are laughed at, ridiculed and discounted by the publishing industry, the literary establishment and the public.

“Call me a snob,” I said to the hopeful driver. “But I’d rather let a one-eyed baboon shave my balls with a rusty hacksaw than waste my time writing such inane bullshit.”

To my savage satisfaction, the driver’s hopeful expression died. He pushed a button on the steering wheel and raised the privacy screen between us without another word.

“It’s your mother,” Carla said. 

I shot her a look full of the promise of murder.

She handed me the phone and looked out the window.

“Yeah, mother. What’s up?”

Three minutes later, we were heading for my mother’s house in Bronxville.

My hands were shaking. As the car turned around and headed North, toward the suburbs of Westchester County, I willed them to be still. When I looked at my watch the trembling returned, worse than before: Death had come to call on an old family acquaintance.

She was right on schedule.

6

An Affair to Dismember:

Part Two

The only thing longer than a Catholic wedding is a Catholic funeral. As mourners flooded out of St. Theresa’s Cathedral I stood on the steps, doing deep knee bends in an effort to force the blood that had pooled in my lower legs back up to my brain.

St. Theresa’s overlooked the Hudson River and the West Side Highway. To the east, Harlem was waking up. Hip-hop music blared from a passing S.U.V., the bass beatdown an incongruous accompaniment to the occasion of my father’s final, fatal shuffle.

“Stop that,” a familiar voice hissed. “You look like you’re about to run a footrace.”

My mother Lenore is what the old Italians used to call a “ball-breaker.” The fact that she’d once graced the covers of such publications as Vogue, Redbook, and Essence belies the fact that she can decapitate a man at twenty paces with one slash of her tongue.

“I didn’t even know he was Catholic,” I said.

Lenore shrugged. “When we were married Marcus didn’t believe in organized religion. I suppose as he got older...”

“He got soft?” I smirked.

Lenore glared at me. For the briefest of moments an emotion that I didn’t recognize flickered in her eyes.

“Obadiah,” she said. “Your father was a good man.”

I afforded her the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for men who masturbate in public.

“Obadiah, listen to me...”

“Who are all these people?” I said, changing the subject.

We were standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the coffin and pallbearers to appear.

“There must be three-hundred people here I don’t recognize.”

“Your father had a lot of… friends,” Lenore said.

For some reason I got the feeling “friends” wasn’t the word she’d wanted to use. We’d only gotten the details of Marcus’s death a day before the funeral. He’d been traveling on business to Seattle with a client, a millionaire interested in developing a large tract of land using Marcus as the general contractor. According to my mother’s lawyer, Marcus Grudge owned and operated a successful construction firm somewhere in Northern California.

I’d never been invited to visit Marcus’s place of business. I knew next to nothing about it. After leaving us in the seventies, he’d conducted most interactions through a parsimonious attorney named Oliver Quip. Child support, alimony payments, Christmas cards and a terse letter addressed to me on every birthday were the only regular contact we’d had with him.

The prospective business partners had chartered a small plane in San Francisco intending to fly to Seattle to inspect the project. They never made it: Their plane went down somewhere in the Cascade Mountain range.

It had taken the authorities nearly nine weeks to locate Marcus’s plane. By the time we were notified of the accident he had been dead for nearly two months.

The mutilated couple standing on the far side of Riverside Drive snapped me out of my morbid musings. They were Asian, at least the man was. The woman looked bi-racial; an Asian-American mix.

The man appeared to have been gutted, the bloody crater where his liver and lights should have been gaping and apparent even from across the street. Someone had ripped his right arm off at the elbow.  The woman looked…stuck together somehow. Parts of her seemed to have been torn apart and knitted back together by a hyperactive, three–year-old speed freak. They were pale, those two…

“Obadiah…”

Their eyes hooded, slashes of darkness, twin abysses…

“Obadiah, close your mouth. People are staring…”

I was frozen, paralyzed by the sudden wash of cold terror that blossomed in the pit of my stomach.

What the hell…?

The gutted man raised his left hand and pointed at me.     

Pain exploded in my right arm.

“Owww!”

I looked down to see Lenore pinching the skin of my right triceps between her immaculate, diamond-hard nails. It was a trick she’d perfected back when I was a mouthy, unruly teenager. The slicing agony always served to bring my focus back to the here and now.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” I snapped.

“You were gaping,” Lenore said calmly. “You know I hate gaping.”

I looked back across Riverside Drive, my eyes scanning the sidewalk, and the entrance to the park beyond: There was no sign of the mutilated couple. They had vanished. The sense of eerie dislocation that attended their appearance was fading, like a stubborn migraine after a stiff whiskey transfusion.

I shook my head, hoping to clear the cloud of confusion that surrounded me. What had I just seen? Was I so upset by Marcus’s death that I was hallucinating? 

“Lenny, is that you?”

I turned toward the speaker.

Limping toward Lenore and me was an escapee from a Walter Brennan film. The man’s bedraggled appearance lent him the air of a mad prophet recently returned from the wilderness.

The newcomer was as thin as the Nixon Administration’s record on public disclosure, and he moved with great care, like a soldier with a live grenade up his ass.

“Neville,” Lenore whispered. “It’s been a long time.”

“You’re as beautiful as ever, Lenny,” the crusty prophet said.

“Lenny” smiled. Neither of them spoke for a moment, as mourners swirled around us. Then the crusty prophet turned to me.

“Is this the kid?” he said.

I was struck by the change in my mother. She seemed self-conscious in this man’s presence. Her eyes had lost their usual hawk-like focus. For the first time in recent memory she looked... uncertain.

Her uncharacteristic behavior put me on the defensive.     

Even though we spent most of our time either screaming at or ignoring each other, the dormant protective impulse common to the sons of single mothers rose up in me. I stepped forward and extended my right hand.

“Obadiah Grudge,” I said. “And you are?”

The crusty prophet stared at me for a moment. Then he extended his right hand.

“Forgive me,” Lenore said. “Neville Kowalski, this is... my son, Obadiah.”

“How d’you do,” Kowalski said as he shook my hand.

His grip was cool, surprisingly firm. An unexpected strength pulsed through his hand and up my arm.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” I said.

Kowalski winced as if I’d leveled a charge.

“I’m sure your mother’s...”

“I’ve never told him about you and Marcus, Neville,” Lenore said, hastily.

The crusty prophet’s eyebrows shot up like a pair of startled gray caterpillars.

“Well, I s’pose that’s fer the best,” Kowalski said, winking at me. “Not everyone is as understanding as Lenny here.” 

A few yards away, the hearse rolled up to the curb. Two black-suited funeral attendants got out and ran around back to open the loading door.

“What?” I said, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Understanding about what?”

  The doors to the cathedral opened and my father’s coffin was carried out by six men. Three were employees of the funeral home. One of the men was a cousin of my father’s whom I’d last seen at a family reunion in Arkansas when I was ten years old.

  I didn’t recognize the other two pallbearers. One of them, a burly redhead who’d wept openly at the funeral, glanced over to where we stood on the steps of the cathedral. Kowalski stepped in closer.

  “Listen, son,” he said. “I know you and your dad weren’t close. But he wanted me to ask a favor of you when his time came.”

  “What kind of favor?” I said.

  “Marcus requested that you be one of his pallbearers.”

  At a signal from the burly redhead the men carrying the coffin stopped. The redheaded man nodded at Kowalski.

“That I be what?” I said, unbelieving.

Kowalski nodded. “We talked about it a lot,” he said. “Marcus told me if he went first he wanted you on hand to help cart the old bastard out.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” I said.

Kowalski shrugged. “So how ‘bout it, son?”

I stood there with my mouth hanging open.

Around us, people were beginning to stare. Since I didn’t know what else to say, I said, “Sure.”

I walked up the steps and replaced one of the employees. Kowalski took up a position behind me. As we descended, Kowalski laid his hand on my left bicep, increasing his creepy factor by about two million percent.

“Your father and I were partners for thirty years, Obadiah,” Kowalski whispered. “We shared a life that few people would understand, or approve of. He was a great man.”

I nodded, more to keep my skin from crawling over my head like a tight wool sweater than in agreement.

“Thanks,” I said.                            

“He was a man of good and noble purpose,” Kowalski continued. “You’ve inherited a powerful legacy.”

As I gripped the handle of my father’s coffin I felt a nagging certainty that I’d missed something.

We carried the coffin to the hearse and slid it into the back. The driver slammed the door, climbed into the front seat, started the car and drove off toward the cemetery. I turned to see Kowalski and Lenore embracing on the steps like long-separated siblings.

What the Hell’s going on? I thought.

Kowalski lifted his head from my mother’s shoulder. Our eyes met.

The crusty prophet burst into tears.

7

Attack of the

Naked Vandal

May 14^th. Northwestern Seattle. Midnight.

Sukhdeep Singh believed in the American Dream.

He’d immigrated from New Delhi in the mid ‘nineties, worked his way up through a succession of low-paying jobs, saving, living like a pauper until he’d amassed enough to buy himself a piece of the largest convenience store franchise on Earth.

He’d brought his wife and three children across the ocean two years ago and moved them into a four-bedroom house in a middle-class suburb.

 Sukhdeep Singh knew the Dream was real, had felt its transforming power reshape his life and the lives of his children.

Tonight, however, the Dream was being a perfect pain in the cussi.

The anarchists, teenagers who’d pierced, dyed and shaved themselves to within an inch of their skeletons, wanted cigarettes and beer. Sukhdeep just wanted to go home.

“I don’t care what you got at Quickie-Mart,” Sukhdeep droned. “The good people at the All-Nite Mart chain of convenience stores are in full compliance with Washington State regulations regarding the sale of tobacco and alcohol products to people below the legal age of consent.”

“Corporate stooge!” one Goth who might have been female cried.

“You’re in chains, bra,” a second declared. “Just another latter-day slave.”

Sukhdeep rolled his eyes. “Tell me about it.”

The Goths left, grumbling about the W.T.O and the global servant class. Sukhdeep went back to his crossword puzzle.

Two minutes later, the video monitor over Sukhdeep’s  head flickered. Then the front doors hinged open and a naked man walked into the All-Nite Mart.

“We’re closed,” Sukhdeep groaned without looking up from his crossword puzzle.

Over behind the All-Nite 24 Hour Coffee House—which was really just a tall cardboard display festooned with life-sized photos of attractive Seattle stereotypes—something heavy crashed to the floor.

Sukhdeep jumped to his feet. “Hey!”

He threw down his crossword puzzle and looked up at the monitor that showed the area behind the Coffee House: It was empty.

“Piece of crap,” he muttered to the monitor.

This time, something exploded. Glass shards flew over the Coffee House. Sukhdeep ducked as glass tinkled to the floor around him.

“What are you doing back there?” he screamed.

Sukhdeep grabbed the crowbar he kept under the counter and stalked toward the display: Someone was tearing the Coffee House apart. Sukhdeep had been robbed seven times since buying the All-Nite Mart six months earlier and he’d had enough.

He rounded the corner and slid to a halt.

The nude Chinese man was crouching in the freezer compartment. Broken beer and soft drink bottles littered the area in front of the freezer. The floor was covered with bloody footprints.

“Hey!” Sukhdeep shouted. “Where are your clothes?”

The naked vandal grabbed a forty-ounce bag of ground coffee beans and ripped it open.

“Stop that!” Sukhdeep screamed.

The naked vandal upended the open bag and poured the ground coffee beans into his mouth.

“I’m calling the police,” Sukhdeep said.

The naked vandal opened another bag of coffee beans and upended it over his face. He swallowed the ground coffee in big, gasping gulps. When the bag was empty, he dropped it.  

Only then did he look at Sukhdeep.

The naked vandal stepped out of the refrigerator. As he moved, the bones in his face snapped and shifted. His body lengthened and his jaw elongated. A black snarl of hair burst from the skin of his face.

“I’m really calling the police,” Sukhdeep said.

Sukhdeep turned, slipped on one of the vandal’s bloody footprints and fell face-first onto the All-Nite Hot Sandwich Wheel. He screamed as the heating element in the Wheel set his turban on fire, beating at the flames until he extinguished his burning head wrap.

Then the thing from the refrigerator tackled him.

Sukhdeep struck the thing across the snout with the crowbar. In response, the monster from the refrigerator ripped his right arm off and flung it across the store.

The severed arm flew over the counter, and the crowbar, still clutched in Sukhdeep’s hand, smashed the television monitor.  

As he slipped into shock, Sukhdeep Singh’s life actually passed before his mind’s eye. And as the monster from the refrigerator tore out his throat, the last thing Sukhdeep remembered was his Uncle Iqbal’s terrible karaoke interpretation of She Blinded Me with Science. 

Then Sukhdeep Singh knew no more.

8

One Hell of a Stew

Lenore sat across from me in the car staring out at the green hills of New Jersey across the Hudson River. She’d asked the driver to take the long way home, up the Henry Hudson Parkway, before heading east along the Cross County Parkway toward Bronxville.

In a normal family we might have expected dozens of visitors bearing food and condolences. But Lenore had formed few lasting relationships in New York, preferring to pass her days with her books and her garden.

I’d neglected to tell anyone from my set about Marcus’s death. Few of them were even aware that I’d had a father, and I’d never seen fit to disabuse them of the notion. As a result of our voluntary exile, we were heading toward Lenore’s immaculate and utterly empty house. During the internment more people had offered their condolences to Kowalski than to either of us. Afterward, he’d invited us back to “the House.” Lenore, thankfully, had refused.

“Some friends are gathering there to pay last respects,” Kowalski had said. Pointing to one older woman who sat wailing ethnically at the graveside, Kowalski chuckled and added, “Old Sadie there made one hell of a stew for everybody. You sure you won’t change your mind?”  

It was as we were walking back to the car that the list of ingredients that were tossing themselves into my mental crockpot slammed together: The dish they presented was anything but tasty.

 Out of respect for Lenore’s unexpected display of human emotion I’d stifled myself at the cemetery. But as we passed beneath the George Washington Bridge, the stew of anger that had been bubbling in my gut since meeting Kowalski erupted over the lip of the cast-iron pot of forbearance.

 “When the Hell were you planning to tell me about them?” I said. 

 Lenore shrugged.

 “When I felt you’d reached a certain degree of maturity.”

 “Mother, I’m thirty-eight years old.”

“I’m still waiting.”

“I’m serious, Lenore.”

She hated when I called her Lenore.

“There are just a few things you don’t understand, Mister,” she snapped.

“Oh I understand alright,” I said. “I understand that the three of you were hiding a dark little secret.”

“Obadiah…”

“I understand that my dead father’s common-law ‘wife’ has more facial hair than I do and nobody ever saw fit to tell me.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Lenore snarled.

“Face it,” I said. “Marcus and Kowalski were lovers.”

“Christ, give me strength.”

“What?” I said. “I’m okay with it. I mean I have to be okay with it, don’t I? It’s the 21^st century, for God’s sake.”

“You’re not listening.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m furious. I’m furious with you. I’m furious with Marcus and I’m furious with Kowalski, the other woman.”

“Just shut up,” Lenore snapped.

“Oh no,” I said. “You shutting me down as if I were eight years old is not an option, mother-dear.”

“Right now, retroactive abortion is looking like an option for me,” Lenore grated. “You want to push your luck?”

The silence in the limo was instructive.

“You’re a vulgar person,” I said.

We drove on.

* * * *

I picked at the food Lenore set before me. My mouth was already too full of recriminations. I didn’t have room for pot roast.  

Lenore emerged from her bedroom and set a large black box down on the kitchen table. The box looked hand-carved from some dark wood, mahogany or painted oak. It had been secured with a heavy padlock.

“Your father had secrets, Obadiah,” Lenore said. “In many ways he was different than other men.”

“Really, mother, what’s the point?” I said.

“Don’t interrupt,” she snapped. “After today you may never speak to me again, so I mean to have my say while I can.”

Something in her tone shut me up. Whatever had been eating at her since the funeral was close to the surface. For no reason at all, a sense of foreboding draped itself about my shoulders like a uranium pashmina.

“I know that I’ve never been an affectionate woman, Obadiah. But I do love you. I hope you know that.”

Lenore smoothed the front of her dress and sat down. Even twenty years after her last modeling assignment she still moved like the Vice-Principal of a charm school. 

“Mother, what’s—”

Obadiah, your father was a monster hunter.”

Silence.

“Did you hear me?”  

I said, “He was a what?”

Lenore took a deep breath. “A monster hunter. He killed monsters.”

Silence.

“For a living.”

Outside, a cat knocked over Lenore’s garbage pail.

Inside: Silence.

“Actually, for Marcus it was more of a calling.”

Silence.

“Obadiah, you’re staring.”

“Mother, what the hell are you talking about?”

Lenore stood and walked to the breadbox.

“I need a drink,’ she said. “You want a drink?”

“Since when do you drink?”

Lenore reached into the breadbox and pulled out a pint-sized bottle of Crown Royal. Then she pulled out two glasses, cracked open the whiskey and sat down.

“This is going to be difficult for you to hear, and even more difficult for me to say,” she said. “I’m asking you to trust me and wait ‘til I’m finished before you start shooting. Agreed?”

“But—”

“Agreed?”

Stunned, frightened by the passion I saw in her eyes, I could only nod. I sat back and watched the woman I knew as a tee-totaller, a sober judge who held contempt for anyone who drank anything stronger than the occasional Mr. Pibb, toss back a finger of Crown Royal and pour another one three seconds later.

Then Lenore began to talk.

9

Lenny and Marcus

“I met Marcus Grudge back in 1963.

“I was fresh out of high school, taking college courses during the day. My nights belonged to Nat Wilson. He was an old blues singer who owned Nat’s Corner, a little café and nightclub on the South Side of Chicago. I worked there as a waitress.

 “One night, a man came in and sat at one of my stations. When I went over to take his order...when he spoke to me... I’d never seen him before, but it seemed as if I’d known him all my life. His name was Nestor Charles.

“We sat and talked. I don’t know why I wasn’t fired. It was Saturday night and the place was packed. But this man exuded something I’d never felt before. It was as if the rules didn’t apply to him somehow.

“He was wearing an old black suit that looked about two years out of date, tall and too skinny by a good twenty pounds. But he was the most compelling man I’d ever met.

“When my shift was over, I met Charles outside in the parking lot. It was after midnight and I really shouldn’t have gone. My parents raised me to know better, but I felt as if my wits had been dulled, submerged in a river of ice.

“He was driving this big, black car with the words Willingham Funeral Home written on the sides. At the time, I remember thinking how odd that was, this man driving around the South Shore in this big old hearse. At the same time I felt as if I’d met the love of my life.”

Lenore looked up from her whiskey.

“That’s a trick the undead can play,” she said, “to win your confidence before they make the kill. Your father once told me that the monsters can ‘shape the darkness,’ and use it for their own ends. Nestor Charles used the darkness. He played with me the way a cat plays with a mouse, made me see things, believe things that…that weren’t real. Then he bit me.”

Lenore paused, her eyes damp with memory. Then she cleared her throat and poured another drink.

“He sank his teeth into the flesh of my throat and he... he drank my blood. My God. What to say about that?”

I waited while she found the words. Lenore seemed to look through me, her eyes focused on some distant point far beyond the walls of her neat little kitchen.

“In one way, it was better than sex, better than chocolate, better than the best morphine you could ever buy. Oh, there’s pain, at first. It feels like God injecting fire into your veins, a fire that warms without burning. But it leaves a little of itself inside you, changes you.

“At the same time, I could feel myself, my real self, dwindling, screaming, somewhere in my mind while Charles stole from me, while he fed.

“Then, this big white light flooded the car.”

Lenore smiled again, her gaze focused squarely on mine.

“Someone yanked the driver’s door open. I could see this big black man standing in the light. He was carrying an axe handle in one hand. With the other he reached in and pulled Charles off of me. When his fangs slid out of my throat, it was... it felt...”

She shuddered and uttered a nervous chuckle.

“Charles was strong, stronger than me. But he was newly Risen. He’d only broken out of the colored funeral home the night before. When Marcus grabbed him he didn’t stand a chance. Marcus hit Charles. He beat him with that axe handle until he stayed down. Then he and another man picked Charles up and threw him into the trunk of their car.

“Life changed for me that night. I missed two weeks of school because I was too scared to leave my parents’ house. My mother didn’t know what to make of me. I walked around in a daze, lost in a kind of waking dream.

“Sometimes, in the dead of night, I would get up and sneak outside even though I was afraid: I had to get out and feel the night wind on my skin. My mother asked if I’d gone and gotten myself pregnant. She didn’t have a clue.

“But finally, I had to go back to school, which meant I had to go back to work. I crawled back to Nat and told him that I’d been sick. He took pity on me and let me come back. He also told me that a big, good-looking fellow had been asking around for me.

 “I didn’t see Marcus again until two weeks later. He came into Nat’s. He waited for my shift to end and we sat together. He told me that he’d driven a stake made from the heart of an ash tree through Nestor Charles’s heart the night we met. That way, when they buried him he would stay in his grave.

“I let him drive me home. In one night I’d met the man I would marry, and the man who would haunt my dreams.”

Lenore’s eyes flinched away from mine.

“I know how all of this must sound.”

“Not at all,” I said, finally. “It all sounds perfectly reasonable.”

I sat very still, taking great care to make no sudden movements. 

“Ah... let’s see,” I said. “In the last twenty-four hours I’ve learned that my estranged father may or may not have been gay; may or may not have left us to pursue a career as an independent contractor—a choice which cost him his life in a plane crash by the way—but that’s okay, because mom believes he was really the Unknown Ghostbuster. That about sum it up?”

Lenore spoke softly: “Obadiah, Marcus didn’t die in a plane crash.”

I stared at her, uncomprehending for a moment. Then I slapped my forehead.

“Oh! Of course!” I said. “Was it the Mummy? Giant Leeches? Or the Creature from the Black frigging Lagoon? Silly me, I actually believed the County Medical Examiner’s report.”     

The look of reproach on her face made me hate myself, but I couldn’t stop. I stood up.

“Maybe Count Chockula ate him for breakfast.” 

Lenore laid a key on top of the black box on the table and said, “Open it.”     

I stared at the black hatbox for a long beat before I answered. “No.”

I turned and picked up my jacket from the back of my chair. The skitter of foreboding in my gut had kicked itself into overdrive when I looked at that box.

Madness inside that box.

 “Why won’t you look inside, Obadiah?”

“Because I don’t want to,” I rasped, my throat suddenly gone dry. “I don’t want to do that right now.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Of course not,” I snapped, lying.

I didn’t care for the sly glint that crept into her eyes whenever she looked at the black box. I cared even less for the predatory smirk that curled across her upper lip.

“I don’t believe any of it,” I said. “You’re crazy with grief, or drunk... or ...just plain crazy.”

I walked to the door, opened it and let the cool night wind blow sanity back into my mother’s house.

“Either that or this is the worst practical joke since the two of you brought me home from the delivery room.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off that goddamned box.

“But whatever this was supposed to be about, I’m not buying. I’m going home, where I intend to open a bottle of the hardest liquor I can find, crawl inside, screw the cap on behind me and forget this conversation ever took place.”

“Obadiah,” Lenore said. “There’s more you need to understand.”

“No! Home. Booze. Forget.”

Feeling like the biggest dickhead on Earth, I left her there, sitting alone at her kitchen table.

Before I climbed into my car I spared a look over my shoulder. I could see her through the living room window, still sitting at the table, her spine straight, her chin held at a defiant jut. She looked older and more fragile than I’d ever seen her look.

She believes it, I thought. She believes every word.

But that wasn’t all.

As I drove away looking for the nearest bar, I recognized something else. Lenore had told me a story—one that was ridiculous on its face—with the sober demeanor of a judge delivering a death sentence. It was no joke.

My mother was terrified.

10

Athena

 June 21^st9:04 PM: Quickie-mart Asian Convenience Mart.

Detective Athena Talbot was thirty-five years old the night her twelve-year career in law enforcement came to a violent halt.

Talbot had been promoted to the rank of Detective just two months before the Montgomery murders. She was the youngest member of her family to make the cut, and the first female.

Talbot’s father was a cop, murdered by a white supremacist when she was nineteen years old. Her mother, a retired sheriff’s deputy, had moved to Miami three years ago to be closer to her younger sister Candace, a sophomore at Florida A&M.

Talbot pulled up behind an SPD cruiser that blocked the entrance to the Quickie-mart parking lot. There were ten cruisers stationed outside the front entrance. Cops crouched behind open doors, their guns aimed at the front window. Two Urban Assault Units, tank-like vehicles manned by Special Weapons and Tactics officers, were also present. 

“Jesus,” Talbot whispered.

Then someone yanked her door open.

Instinctively, she reached for her sidearm.      

“Whoa,” the shadowy figure said. “Easy, Annie Oakley.”

Talbot swore, holstered her weapon and got out of the car.

“Goddamit, Chesterfield,” she snarled. “I almost blew your balls off.”

Matt Chesterfield covered his crotch with both hands.

“That’s one way to get into my pants.”

Talbot shook her head. She liked Chesterfield. He was tall, black-haired and good-looking in a goofy white-boy way. But since he’d made the move to the FBI, Talbot had intentionally kept her distance.

“You slumming, Matthew?” Talbot said, indicating the Quickie-mart. Chesterfield chuckled again.

“Don’t worry, Athena. Seattle Office has no stated intention of moving SPD off the Wildman Murders.”

Athena smirked. “That’s reassuring.”

“Nicholson’s getting antsy though,” Chesterfield said. “Twelve murders in the last two months with possible racial overtones. That alone makes this one for us.”

Talbot’s brow furrowed. “Racial overtones?”

Chesterfield shrugged. “Many of the victims are of Asian descent. The first one, Glen Hong, was Chinese. Jeannie Montgomery, the girl from the nature preserve was half-Chinese. Sukhdeep Singh was Punjabi. With the situation in the Middle East going critical...”

“I get it,” Talbot grated. “Maybe the Wildman is really Osama Bin Laden.”

Chesterfield glanced around, but made no effort to hide his smile. “Same old mouth, trooper.”

“Cop’s best weapon,” Talbot said.

“In any event, times are tight,” Chesterfield said. “Funding is being diverted to the fuck-up in Iran and...”

“And the FBI’s hoping SPD can solve the case so you guys can rustle up some shoe bombers.” 

“Damn,” Chesterfield said. “Up for dinner tonight?”

Against her better judgment, Talbot smiled.

Three news vans screeched up to the scene. The doors of the vans slid open and several camera crews tumbled out.

“Wildman Murders,” Talbot said. “Why do they always have to name these guys?”

Chesterfield lit a cigarette and offered Talbot a drag.  

Talbot passed.

“Six dismembered victims, maybe more,” Chesterfield said. “Wounds which indicate acts of cannibalism; hair and saliva of an unknown type found on the remains; claw marks; evidence of superhuman strength.

Chesterfield shrugged. “Seems pretty wild to me.”

Talbot surveyed the crime scene. “Can’t argue with you there.”

The walkway in front of the Quickie-mart was crawling with cops. Several camera crews had set up in the parking lot; the glare of the bright lights threw the entire scene into a kind of reverse shadow play, milling figures outlined in harsh white radiance, hooded eyes and dark-uniformed figures drained of color, made monochromatic by the presence of so much illumination.

Two dead men hung half out of the ruptured front window of the Quickie-Mart. The victims had been impaled on long shards of shattered glass.

As Talbot watched, the front counter smashed through the second window. Police and SWAT Officers ducked as cigarettes, porno magazines and dead fish rained down onto the parking lot. After a moment, Chesterfield spoke.

“So, you think this is the guy?”

Someone screamed.

Talbot pointed. “I am not seeing that,” she said.

A monster stood in the window of the Quickie-mart.

The creature was enormous, nearly nine feet tall. It looked like a cross between a grizzly bear and a giant gorilla, heavily-muscled beneath a shiny coat of pitch-black hair.

The monster’s eyes flashed, a bright amber glare that slashed across Talbot’s vision like a flail of malice.

The S.W.A.T. Team commander lifted his bullhorn.

“Step out of the Quickie-mart with your hands over your head!”

In response, the inhuman roared. Then the creature vaulted high into the air and landed atop the Urban Tactical Unit. The Police and S.W.A.T teams opened fire, filling the air with the shriek of automatic weapons fire. The inhuman leapt into the crowd of law enforcement officers. In seconds it had slaughtered three of them.

“Oh my God,” Talbot whispered.

Before she knew what she was doing, she’d drawn her Glock 9mm and set out at a run toward the convenience store.

“Athena!” Chesterfield barked.

The inhuman shrugged off a hail of armor-piercing slugs, whirled and killed two men with one blow. Then it leaped high over the heads of the police, and landed atop one of the cruisers, crushing its front end to pulp.

The inhuman leapt again, slashing, crushing everything in its path. Claws that gouged steel and flesh with equal ferocity tore four more officers in half.

Talbot followed the inhuman’s movements, looking for the shot. But the howling thing moved too quickly, trailing death as it went.

Wait for it, woman, Talbot snarled.

The inhuman whirled. Paused. Met Talbot’s glare.

For Talbot, there was only the moment and the target. Her mind shut out the screams of pain, the thunder of gunfire. In her mind, she and the inhuman might have been the only living things on the planet.

Son of a bitch.

The thing launched itself toward her. Talbot drew a bead on the target as it approached, its tread shaking the earth beneath her feet.

Wait...wait...

The inhuman howled, rage streaming from carious yellow eyes.

Talbot fired.

One yellow orb exploded, spattered the inhuman’s black fur with shining amber gore. The inhuman staggered, its balance disrupted, momentum pulling it forward into a stumbling lurch. Talbot had one second to remember her father’s eyes—

Sorry, Pops

—Then the inhuman slammed into her, lifted her off her feet, and drove her backward into the side of one of the tactical units. Her breath smashed out of her with a grinding roar. Then she fell, enveloped by hair and muscle and the stench of rotten flesh.

Athena Talbot lay staring up at the stars over Seattle. A terrible weight pressed her spine against the concrete and she couldn’t catch her breath. Then the weight on her chest shifted and suddenly she could breathe. She turned her head and looked into the bloody face of a deceased Asian male with one yellow eye.

“Officer down! Get an ambulance over here!”

Chesterfield, Talbot thought.

She laughed, the movement bringing blood up from somewhere deep inside to bubble over her lips. She tasted copper, coughed and drew a shuddering breath.

Should’vetaken him up on that dinner invitation.

The Asian man snarled at her. Blood that was entirely red spouted from his ruptured eye socket. Then his face...did something, something so terrible that Talbot found the strength to scream. A moment later, the Asian was gone.

 “Freeze, asshole!”

More gunfire. Hands grabbing her. Chesterfield’s face appearing overhead, blocking the stars, fading, fading...

Then darkness.

11

“I Heard Somebody Say

 Burn, Baby, Burn”

In the dream, it’s my ninth birthday and I’m furious. Lenore has just given me the bad news.

“Daddy’s not going to make it to the party, Obadiah. He’s been… unavoidably delayed in Las Vegas.”

I don’t cry. I actually smile. Then I go for the gasoline.

Inside our house, Lenore is trying to salvage the party by baking my favorite cake: double chocolate with pecans. As we don’t have many friends, the only people in attendance at my “birthday party” are Mrs. Brooks, the hearing-impaired woman who lives across the street, and my cousin Walter. Walter has rickets and walks with a limp.

I’m standing in our old garage with a gasoline can in one hand and a box of matches in the other.

I upend the gas can into an empty steel trashcan that I’ve stolen from the abandoned lot across the alley. Squinting through eyes suddenly gone blurry from the fumes, I strike a match and stare at the tiny fire blossom that trembles between my thumb and forefinger.

At my feet, Doctor Necropolis lies, safely entombed within an old cardboard shoebox. The shoebox has been double-wrapped with masking tape to prevent the bastard from getting out.

“This doesn’t solve anything, O-dog.”

“Shut up,” I say through clenched teeth, and somewhere, as I lie dreaming back in what I am laughingly coming to think of as “The Real World,” the pain in my jaw feels real.

I drop the match into the trashcan and flames erupt, reaching nearly to the ceiling in a rush of red brilliance. I step back, my eyebrows crisping from the intense heat. I bend down and pick up the shoebox.

“No matter what you do to me, daddy is never coming home, O-dog.”

“Sit on it, douchebag.”

I toss the shoebox into the trashcan. Necropolis screams. For a moment, I consider dousing the flames, retrieving the shoebox: Doctor Necropolis was a Christmas gift from Marcus.

If I lose him…

I don’t let myself complete the thought.

Curious, I step forward—the flames have begun to recede enough for me to look over the edge of the trashcan—and something, a screaming shadow, leaps up from the flames, grabs me with burning hands and pulls me into the fire.

I scream.

And I burn.

12

An Affair to Dismember:

Part 3

     Three days after my father’s funeral, I was lying on the sofa in my apartment, surrounded by the emptied contents of my liquor cabinet and wishing I’d majored in brain surgery: There were several choice moments from the previous seventy-two hours that I would have happily cauterized.               

I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten solid food since the morning of the funeral. I sat up. The pain in my head immediately called me an idiot and punished me accordingly. At first I thought the blinking red light in the corner of my eye was a burst blood vessel. Then I realized that it was my answering machine.

I pushed the “play” button and my mother’s voice filled my living room.

“Obadiah, I haven’t heard from you. We need to talk. Call me.”  

Beep.

“Obadiah, hi, it’s Mark Bloom. Remember me? The publicist you’re underpaying to make you internationally fabulous? Listen, I booked you on Juno for the day after tomorrow...”

Beep.

“Obadiah. Neville Kowalski calling.”

I rubbed the crust out of my eyes.

“I don’t know exactly what your mother told you, but I can guess. I’d like to meet with you today, maybe over lunch at the White Fedora, say, one thirty?”

I reached over and turned up the volume.

“I know this seems odd,” Kowalski’s voice continued. “But there’s a few matters need clarifying before we can proceed.”

Before we can proceed?

“There’s a whole lot you don’t know about your old man. I’d like to tell you the real story. I’d like for you to understand what Marcus was all about. I hope you’ll come.”

The machine asked me if I wanted to erase my messages.

I looked at my watch: Twenty minutes to get to the White Fedora. I got up, got dressed, ran past my kitchenette and into the street to chase down a cab.

I could eat after lunch.

* * * *

Thirty-two minutes later, I stepped out of a taxi at the corner of Broadway and 47^th Street. A healthy lunch crowd swirled around me. As I stepped up onto the curb I was jostled by a group of fat Midwestern tourists. One of them, the obvious leader of the pack, grabbed me by the shoulders.

“Sorry, my brother,” he brayed. “Say, you and me aren’t gonna have a praablem here, are we, Roscoe?”

The rest of the pack yipped and chattered like overfed hyenas. The red-faced pack leader pounded my shoulder and roared with what I might have taken to be corn-fed good humor if I hadn’t been nearly asphyxiated by the vodka fumes eddying out of his enormous pores.

Without waiting for my reply, the fleshy adventurers moved on up the sidewalk, filling the air with harsh Midwestern r’s, smashing every vowel flatter than the flattest flapjack as they pursued the ephemeral pleasures of Times Square, Restaurant Row and the Great White Way.

The shrieking lunatic was almost a welcome relief.

I turned, expecting to see some perfectly ordinary crack-addled urban wildman, caught up, perhaps, in the throes of a brick-wielding frenzy. Instead, I was stunned to see a portly man wearing a smart cardigan and khakis and waving a butcher knife crossing 47th^th Street at a dead run.

“Diiiiieeeee!”

He was talking to me.

As people around me scattered like roaches I had one second to realize that I knew the wild-eyed lunatic.

That’s Copernicus Geller.

Geller dodged a speeding bike messenger and came on, his eyes wild as he screamed.

“Dieeeeeeee!”

Then the cross-town bus smashed into him. Geller flew West, thirty feet through the air, and landed on Broadway, dead center of the southbound lane.

It was 1:42 PM: The height of the midtown lunch rush.  

Geller sprang to his feet. He’d managed to hold onto the knife, but his left arm jutted at an angle that would have confounded the nation’s greatest contortionists. Undeterred, Geller turned, spotted me in the gawking crowd, lifted the knife—

“Diiieeeee!”

—and was struck by a taxi.

The taxi driver screamed in some Middle-Eastern dialect as Geller bounced off of the roof, slid down the back windshield, rolled off of the trunk and hit the concrete.

Again, Geller managed to stagger to his feet. Or rather his foot: Most of his right leg was rounding the corner of 48^th street, dragged beneath the wheels of the fleeing taxi.

Disoriented, Geller hopped backward into the northbound lane just as a speeding UPS truck thundered into the intersection and blasted him through the window of the nearest Starbucks.

As tourists and New Yorkers of every stripe ran toward the scene of the accident, I turned and made my way back up the street. Copernicus Geller was the book critic for the New York Sentinel. He hosted a weekly national cable show called Lit-Beat, during which he’d once burned a copy of Death and the Sorcerer while singing God Bless America.

One nutjob down, I thought with warm satisfaction. My step grew lighter as I made my way back up 47^th Street.

I even whistled.

* * * *

“Sorry I’m late. Traffic.”

Kowalski had already ordered lunch: chicken salad on a bed of fresh spinach. He waved away my excuse and grunted around a mouthful of croutons: “Traffic in this town sucks donkey balls.”

He waved the waiter over to our table.

“Get you something from the bar?” he said, indicating the chilled empty glass in front of me. “How ‘bout a nice cream soda?”

I sat down across from him.

“Just coffee,” I said. “You drinking anything?”       

“Everything,” he said. “Which is why I stick with cream soda.”

Kowalski leaned in, lowered his voice. “Obadiah, I’m seven years sober today. Christ, I’m tickled pink about that.”

“Congrats,” I said.

Again the wave: “Who gives a shit?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Obadiah, I shared that information with you because I believe that you and I are going to become friends.”

“That’s probably overstating things,” I said.

“Oh, not today,” Kowalski continued. “Hell, probably not even next year. But what I’m going to tell you about your father... Well let’s just say that he and I came from different worlds. Circumstances brought us together, changed both our lives. We were partners for nearly thirty years.”

By now I was profoundly uncomfortable. I turned, hoping to find a waiter—or a runaway bus to throw myself under.

“Your mom told you part of a story that began before you were born,” Kowalski said.

I nodded. “That you and my father were some sort of spook detectives.”

Kowalski winced. “Monster killers, son. Marcus Grudge and I were monster killers.”

“Listen, Mr. Kowalski,” I said. “I don’t know what kind of sick stunt you’re trying to pull over on my mother, but I came here today to tell you: It’s over.”

Kowalski looked up from his salad as if he hadn’t heard me. “How’s that?”

“I don’t know what kind of twisted though perfectly acceptable sexual relationship you and my father had and frankly, I don’t care,” I said. “I want you to stay away from my mother.”

“Sexual relationship?” Kowalski growled. “Sexual relationship?”

Kowalski laughed.

I clenched my jaw to control the flow of outrage that seeped around my teeth. Something about Kowalski set my nerves on edge. 

“You’ve filled her head with a lot of fairy tales and somehow, perhaps because of closet alcoholism or some undiagnosed mental disorder, she’s come to believe them. But whatever the reason: It’s officially done.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my checkbook.

“I’m going to write you a check for more money than you’ve ever seen back at whatever trailer park you came from. I’m going to give you this check, and then you are going to disappear, just like Count Dracula or the Invisible Man or whoever else you’d like to invite to your indictment, which I will personally guarantee if you come within fifty yards of me, my mother, or anyone in the tri-state area who bears a passing family resemblance. Capische?”

Kowalski stared at the check.

“I’ll take that as a “yes,”” I said.

I stood, feeling like a righteous defender of the mentally defective. I reached into my wallet and threw a five dollar bill onto the table.

“Thanks for the coffee.”

I spun on my heel and walked away from the table.

“Why do you think your books are so successful, Mr. Grudge?” Kowalski said.

I stopped. “Oh, I don’t know, Mister Kowalski,” I said. “What say you just chalk it up to dumb luck and fuck off.”

“You believe her.”

I turned back.

“What did you say?”

“You believe every word of what Lenore said and it scares the pistachios outta you,” Kowalski said, tapping the side of his blue-veined nose. “I can smell the fear comin’ off you in waves. Hell, you’re scared shitless; because you believe and you don’t even know why.”

He grinned. “Why didn’t you look in the black box?”

“How did you…?”

Kowalski smirked. “Look at you,” he said. “You’re one cocky son of a bitch. You dance across the bestseller lists and tell yourself that it’s because of raw talent and hard work when the truth is you’re a hack. “What’s worse? You know you’re a hack.”

“You arrogant bastard,” I said. “Who do you think...?”      

“Save the wounded artiste routine for someone who gives a rat’s ass,” Kowalski snarled. “The truth is you don’t have the slightest inkling why so many people buy your books.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“Oh?” he shot back. “Your ideas are good but your dialogue stinks. Your plotting is inconsistent at best. Your prose is decent enough: you paint pretty pictures. But your protagonists are cold, overly intellectual. Every one of em’s got a dictionary crammed so far up his ass they shit crossword puzzles. Your work lacks guts.”

I stumbled back to the table.

“Take a load off, Shakespeare.”

I sat.

“Like I said, your work lacks passion. But your imagery...”

Kowalski chuckled. “That’s where you tip the scales. You give people nightmares and they love you for it.”

It was all I could do to keep my jaw from bouncing off the table top. I picked up a piece of bread from the basket between us and began to knead it between my fingers.

“I bust my ass trying to bring them to life,” I said over a fistful of multigrain. I’d always suffered from a tendency toward nervous starch manipulation. Under a looming deadline it wasn’t unusual for me to massacre an entire loaf of white bread in one sitting. When my mother stayed with me after recuperating from her hysterectomy my apartment looked like the floor of a cocaine processing plant staffed by workers with the worst dandruff you could possibly imagine. Kowalski had rattled me and I couldn’t stop myself.

“I wrack my brain,” I went on. “Writing and rewriting, trying to breathe life into different versions of the same idea over and over until I’m blue in the fucking...”

I stopped, blinking like a politician caught fondling himself while reading to Mormon pre-schoolers. In two paragraphs Kowalski had defined everything I despised about my own writing.

I threw down the dismembered bread and stood up.

“Who the hell are you?”

Kowalski grinned.

“I’m the fella holds the keys to the kingdom, Junior,” he said.

“You want to cross the drawbridge or swim the moat?”

13

“Into the Cosmos, Time Rangers! Awaaayyy!” 

As the hired car pulled out of the long, circular driveway, I confronted the house Kowalski called “home.”    

“Welcome to Kalakuta,” he said.

The massive Victorian sprawled the length of an entire city block. It hunkered there, a dingy gray so dark it looked black against the bright summer sky, four stories tall, with widely-spaced windows that reflected the afternoon sun. They provided only minimal visual relief from Kalakuta’s squalid unloveliness.

“Black Summit.”

“What?” I said, my eyes flinching over the mansion’s oppressive stone turrets and soaring black parapets.

Her name,” Kowalski said. “Kalakuta. It’s the name for Death as personified in Hinduistic mythology. To drink of Kalakuta’s poisonous waters was to gain immortality. The Hindu gods fought tremendous battles to win that gift.”

Kowalski walked up to the front door and opened it.

“Come on in.”

Before stepping over the threshold, I marked the sun’s position in its westward crawl over Yonkers. 

I’ll give him ten minutes, I thought. I didn’t want to be inside Kalakuta when the sun went down.

* * * *

Kowalski stomped down the stairs that led into the kitchen carrying a battered black hatbox. He set the box on the table in front of me. It was nearly identical to the one Lenore had shown me after Marcus’s funeral, save that Kowalski’s box was as dusty and battered as a well-worn suitcase.

Kowalski reached down and flipped open the lid.

Despite myself, I jumped.

“In 1975, my father was murdered by his best friend, a man who called himself Satin Jack,” Kowalski said. He pulled out a tattered photograph.

“He betrayed my father on orders from this man.”

The man in the picture was dark-haired, with razor-sharp cheekbones and heavy-lidded black eyes. He might have been Native or African-American, Latino or Arabic. He glared into the lens, his face partially obscured by the bars of a prison cell.

Something about the man’s face nagged at my gut.

“I know him,” I said.

“If you knew him you’d be dead,” Kowalski said. “His name’s Carlos Vulpe. That picture was taken two hours before he was hanged for murdering ten children in the Spring of nineteen and ten.” 

“But you said your father died in 1975,” I said.

“I did,” Kowalski replied. “Vulpe hid his crimes by pretending to be a human serial killer. But he was a skinwalker, what you’d call a werewolf. For guys like him, Death is a minor inconvenience. ”

I studied the man in the picture, unable to shake the certainty that I’d seen him before. He was sitting with his back against the wall, his hands resting lightly upon his thighs, his spine erect, unbent.

At the same time, Vulpe’s smile communicated a sense of malignant ease, as if he were merely biding his time rather than awaiting his own execution. A man who looked like that would have moved with a serpentine economy of motion, the fluid grace of a dancer. But something in his expression also suggested a towering rage, and a limitless capacity for violence. A terrible hunger seemed to crackle in his eyes.

“My God,” I said. “His teeth...”

Kowalski nodded. “Near as anyone can tell, they were his original choppers, but somehow the sick fucker found a way to cover them with silver or aluminum or Christ-knows what. Then he sharpened them, filed them into points.”

It was true. Vulpe’s teeth gleamed, their argent coating plain even in the ancient photograph.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you said he was a werewolf...”

“A skinwalker.”

“If he was a... skinwalker, wouldn’t a mouthful of silver teeth... be... bad for him?”

“Vulpe wasn’t a member of the scumbag rank and file,” Kowalski said. “He sat near the top of the supernatural food chain. Some folks thought he used the silver to help him maintain control during his transformations: Vulpe and things like him draw power from suffering: Yours, theirs, and anybody else’s.”

“But why file them down?”

Kowalski shrugged. “Because he’d developed a taste for human meat even when he was on two legs. The teeth helped him kill more efficiently in his human form. He used them to eviscerate his victims. Sometimes he would rip out their throats, or just tear ‘em apart altogether.”

I laid the picture down slowly, deliberately, to keep my hand from shaking. The walls of Kalakuta seemed to lean in toward me. The ceiling crouched much closer to the top of my head than it had a moment before.

He used them to eviscerate...

“Listen, Mr. Kowalski,” I said. “I’m...I’m having a hard time with all this.”

“Your father and I first met back in ’75,” Kowalski said. “We were both hunting Vulpe by then, but for different reasons. For me, it was about my old man.”

Kowalski walked to the refrigerator and opened it. He produced a can of cream soda and brought it to the table.

“He was a monster hunter, one of the best. Together, he and Satin Jack struck terror into the heart of the Wraithing like no one ever had.”

“The Wraithing?” I said.

Kowalski nodded. “I’ll come to that in a minute. My father was an old school Catholic who ate slept and drank the job. He was also the most decent man I’ve ever known. I swore on his grave that I would kill the ones who killed him.”

Kowalski reached into the black hatbox and pulled a bundle of black cloth out of it. The bundle had been tied and secured with a length of red velvet ribbon. Kowalski untied the ribbon, unwrapped the bundle, and set it on the table between us. Without transition I was staring down the bore of a big mean-looking revolver.

Kowalski had changed without my noticing. He was wearing a black pinstriped suit and a slouchy fedora.        

“Alright, boys,” he snarled. “Here’s where the coon gets plugged.”

Twin runners of blood streamed from his eyes as he picked up the revolver and aimed it at my face.

“You alright, Obadiah?”

I blinked. Kowalski, the real Kowalski, was staring at me, his concern evident.

“Sorry,” I said.

“This was my old man’s gun,” Kowalski continued.

“Single action Colt .45; my father could blow the balls off a scared chickenhawk at high noon with this piece. That was his talent and the Service put it to good use.”

Kowalski sighed. Then he put the gun back into the box.

“But Marcus Grudge was born to the Road. It ran though him thicker than his own blood. He could spot Nosferatu even when they were illusion–casting. Your old man was damn near psychic himself.”

“Illusion-casting,” I said. I had to keep Kowalski talking. As long he was talking he wasn’t shooting: Talking=Good, Shooting=Very Bad.

Kowalski nodded.

“You said my father was ‘born to the Road?’ What road?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute.”

“But you said…”

“I said hold yer goddamn water.”

Despite my overactive imagination and the unease that was building a small condo in the pit of my stomach, I had to bite the insides of both cheeks: Kowalski was beginning to piss me off.

“My old man was only a second-generation monster hunter. Your line goes back farther. Marcus once told me that his father, his father’s father, his father and on back through slavery, back to a tribal shaman in Senegal maybe: They were all monster hunters.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Don’t you think hunting vampires might be a little difficult when you’re hiding from the KKK?”

“Monsters come different to different people, smart-guy,” Kowalski said. “Some of ‘em even manage to keep up with the times.”

“But you’re talking about my family,” I sputtered. “They were regular guys, working men. My grandpa Phil shuffled mail at the Post Office, for God’s sake.”

Kowalski shrugged. “What do you really know about your father’s people?”

I stood up. My heart was beginning to pound and I suddenly needed to move.

“Well,” I began. “There was grandpa Phil...Philip. His father’s name was Herbert. He moved to New Orleans after he left my great-grandmother in Atlanta. He...”

I paused, distracted by a flash of memory.

“He was only thirty-five when he... ”

“When he what?” Kowalski said.

“When he died.”

“How did he die?” 

“I don’t know, alright?” I snapped. “But who the hell knows how their great-grandparents died? That doesn’t mean he lived a double life.”

Kowalski drained his cream soda and tossed the empty can over his shoulder without looking. The can flipped end-over-end and landed in the blue New York Recycles bin by the back door.

“The life of a monster hunter is a hard one,” he said. “It’s lonely and filled with secrets. The things we hunt are also hunting us. Sometimes the bad guys turn one of us to their side. Satin Jack’s defection was a big feather in Vulpe’s cap.”

Kowlaski cracked his knuckles one by one, his eyes as hard as bits of gray flint.

“Jack Slocum betrayed a dozen hunters before I found him and put him down.”

“You mean you killed him,” I said. “That’s what we’re talking about here, isn’t it? Killing human beings?”

“I freed him,” Kowalski said. “If the Pale claims me for one of its own, the best thing you can do is bust a cap through my cabeza double-quick. Same goes for any other hunter. I did Slocum a favor.”

I lost the staring contest.

“That’s why you know dick about your father’s people,” Kowalski said. “Sometimes the Pale strikes at us through our loved ones. Family ties, relationships become liabilities. My marriage turned to shit the day I got my Walking papers.

“Marcus didn’t want that kind of life for you. He figured it was better for you to hate him than lose everyone you ever cared about to the Pale. He hoped you and Lenore would fall off their radar. But then you wrote Death and the Sorcerer.”

 “So?” I said.

“Earlier today I said that your books give people nightmares and they love you for it. But it’s more than that. When you wrote that book, you unknowingly revealed something that people subconsciously understand to be true: The same truth I’ve revealed to you.”

“That monsters exist?” I said. “But I’ve never written about vampires and werewolves. I despise that stuff.”

Kowalski rapped on his forehead with his knuckles.

“Freud’s got nothin’ on you, kid,” he said. “You write about dark worlds that lie in the shadow of this one. Your characters straddle the boundary between right and wrong, good and evil, life and death. Am I right?”

“Of course, but...”

“Your work is an allegory, a metaphor for a reality you’ve always suspected exists but which logic tells you can’t possibly be real.”

The hollow feeling in my gut deepened.

“But your readers know the real story,” Kowalski said.

“They visit the Wraithing when they drop off to sleep. They run screaming through its forests all night long and call it a nightmare when they wake up, scared senseless because it all felt so real.”

Kowalski leaned forward, his eyes incandescent, lit by the fires of madness or passion. Or prophesy.

“But the Wraithing is more than a dream, see? People recognize its shadow in the eyes of the businessman who chops up his family on a whim; they hear it in the giggle of the straight-A student who strangles her ailing grandmother for no earthly reason.” 

Kowalski chuckled.

“And they recognize it in the crappy stories you write.”

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“You are,” Kowalski tossed back. “You take all that terror and wrap it up in a neat little package that Mom and Pop and Little Jenny Who-gives-a-crap can pick up for six bucks at WalMart. You give ‘em a beginning a middle and, most importantly, an end to the nightmare. That way they can roll out of bed, kiss the boss’s arse for another day and pretend their lives make sense.

“But your blood knows the truth. It seeps out through your fingers and splatters your readers every time you write a new book.”

Kowalski laughed so hard that he was seized with a fit of coughing. “I think the whole thing is goddamn wonderfully ironic.”

I got up and walked toward the back door, needing fresh air, needing light. I turned the knob and tugged on the door to no avail: It had been nailed shut.

“Christ, that hurt,” Kowalski wheezed.

He got up and went to the refrigerator.

“Hey, how’d you like a nice cream soda?”

I stared out between the iron bars that blocked the window. Behind me, the crusty prophet clucked to himself.

Your blood knows the truth.

 “Damn shame,” Kowalski said. “No one seems to drink the stuff anymore. I can’t get enough. Hell, I’d take a cream soda spinal tap over a cold beer anytime.”

“Neville...” I said.

“Can’t stand beer...”

 “I don’t...” I stammered. “I mean I can’t...”

 “Believe?” Kowalski said. “I know.”

 He slammed the refrigerator door shut, reached into his pocket and produced a prodigious key ring. Dozens of keys of all sizes jingled as he fingered through the jumble of metal shapes.

 “We’ve come a fair piece though,” he said, “a fair piece indeed.”

 Chuckling to himself, he selected a long-necked, copper-colored key. He inserted the key into the lock of the door to the right of the refrigerator and turned it. The door swung open and Kowalski faced me, a mischievous grin dancing at the edges of his mouth.

“There’s just a little farther before the end.”

With that, he stepped through the door and disappeared.

Your blood knows the truth.

I tiptoed over to the door and peeked around the corner. In the gloom I could make out the first three steps leading down into the basement. Beyond the landing, darkness beckoned.

As I hovered on the edge of that void, my mother’s voice floated up from the dank cellar of my memory. 

Why won’t you look in the box, Obadiah?

I beat back Lenore’s voice with curses. 

Then I went down into the dark.

14

The Black Guts

of Kalakuta

We descended.

Above me, I sensed the ancient weight of Kalakuta increasing as we tramped deeper into her bowels. The tunnel seemed to squat closer and closer to the top of my head and the air grew heavy.

After what seemed like an eternity, a light flickered on over Kowalski’s head.

“Your old man and I moved in here soon after your folks split up,” he said. “Marcus had been monitoring a year-long manifestation outside San Francisco, but we were both fairly mobile. We went wherever the Referral Service sent us.”

“Referral Service?”

“I’m comin’ to that. Anyway, I took one half of the house. Your pop took the other.”

We reached a plateau: a wide stone platform like a stage blasted from the gutrock of Eastern Yonkers.

In front of us stood another door.

Kowalski reached into his pocket and I heard the lunatic jingle of his massive key ring.

“The Service had discovered something that required full time attention here in New York. Marcus and I were selected for an Indefinite Watch. It was only the second time we’d met. The first time, we were both hunting...”     

“Carlos Vulpe?” I interrupted.

Kowalski’s brow tightened. “I told you that part?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn.”

He opened the door. Beyond it, another staircase stretched away, though at a slightly shallower incline.

“Jesus,” I said. “How far down does this place go?”

Kowalski turned to me—for a moment I thought he was going to hit me—and said, “You don’t wanna ask questions like that around here, my friend.”

We descended.

“She was built in 1917 by a Russian immigrant called Grigor Molokov,” Kowlaski continued. “Molokov was a rich man, a banker. He was also one of the blackest necromancers in human history. No offense.”

“None taken,” I said. “What’s a necromancer?”

He paused at a third door.

“One who communicates with and controls the dead.”

“Sweet.”

Kowalski selected a large, brass key.

“A sense of humor,” he said. “That’s good. You’re gonna need one in about two and a half minutes.”

“How much farther?” I said.

Kowalski clicked on a naked yellow light bulb.

“We’re here,” he said. “Take a look.”

The final door towered over our heads.

It was nearly ten feet tall and eight feet wide and appeared to have been hand-crafted from a single massive slab of iron. The iron door gleamed dully as the light from the dim bulb reflected off its polished surface. Celtic runes, characters from various Asian and Western languages, African pictograms and hieroglyphs of every imaginable configuration formed an intricate design.

The writing covered the entire surface of the iron door in a pattern that seemed to rearrange itself as I watched. The moment my attention focused on one part of the design it was shunted away to a different part, pausing only long enough to discover some new segment that hadn’t been visible a moment before.

The effect was similar to that of a mobius strip: a never-ending visual journey, an optical illusion that drew the eye’s focus along behind it leaving the observer vaguely disoriented in its wake.  

The center of the design, however, appeared more stable than its outer edges. Two human figures etched in gold stood beneath the rearing form of a fire-breathing dragon.

The figure farthest from the dragon upheld a shield and a sword, but the second figure held my attention: It stood in front of and slightly above the sword-wielder, and carried a simple lantern in one upraised hand. Beneath the two figures, a single Latin phrase had been emblazoned, also in gold: Lux Defensor.

“To defend the light,” I whispered.

Kowalski nodded. “Smart guy.”

He put the brass key in the lock and turned it.

A series of deep thumps reverberated through the air beneath Kalakuta, the sound a boulder rolling down a flight of stone stairs might make shook the earth beneath my feet.

Kowalski placed his right hand in the center of the door.

I grabbed his arm, my heart pounding.

“Neville,” I said. “Will I discover the truth about my father behind this door?”

Kowalski smiled. “You might discover the truth about yourself behind this door,” he said.  “The question is, will you know the truth when it comes for you?”

I studied the iron door for a moment, knowing even then that once I walked through it there would be no turning back. I turned and looked back up the long staircase. In the distance, far above our heads, the glow from Kowalski’s kitchen looked as remote as the light from a distant star.

I turned back to the iron door.

“Open it.”

Kowalski nodded and pushed open the door.

Golden light filled the dark platform.

“Oh...my...God,” I said.

I walked into the room, following the light.

“Lux defensor, Junior,” Kowalski said.

Then he slammed the door behind me.

The room had been hollowed out of the native rock beneath Kalakuta. The walls, floor, and ceiling glimmered, their crystalline surfaces reflecting the light that emanated from a raised stone platform in the room’s center.

The source of the light stood in the center of the platform.

It was a woman.

A tall, magnificently built black woman. She was naked, her skull shaved bald, her arms resting lightly at her sides. The flickering, multicolored light shone from her face; power raged about her head like a swirling halo of purest starshine. One look at the woman was enough to confirm that she wasn’t remotely human. 

The starwoman was over six feet tall, straight of limb and square of shoulder with the body of an African Amazon. Her eyes were closed, her head thrown back as if she’d been frozen, immobilized in a moment of rapture, or agony.

My eyes traveled the length of the starwoman’s body, the curve of her hips, the flat stomach and full breasts, finally coming to rest on the hilt of a knife: The iron handle of a large blade protruded from the area just above the starwoman’s left breast.

I staggered forward, my right hand extended.

So beautiful, I thought.

I was burning, aflame with the desire to possess the starwoman, protect her from whoever had betrayed her and caused her such agony. The hilt of the blade assaulted my senses like an abomination.

My rage blinded me to the danger: I ignored the flashing motes of light as they began to swirl around me.  My quest for understanding fell to tatters. My life was unimportant. I had been born for only one reason: to pull the knife from the starwoman’s breast.

The swirling motes of light rose up, surrounded me, filling my vision, blocking my view of my beloved. My vision grew fuzzy and I became disoriented. There was a sensation of movement, of massive shapes moving through the walls of Kalakuta. Then the floor dropped away beneath me.

I rose, screaming as I was spun toward the ceiling of the cave. I threw up my arms and squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for the impact that would smash my brains out.

A moment later, I felt wind rushing past me. I opened my eyes and found myself cartwheeling into the open sky, tumbling literally head over heels, up and away from the cave and the starwoman. I shut my eyes again as I whirled, tossed about on the wind, rocketing upward...upward, then down, falling, really falling.  

I hit the ground hard enough to pound the air from my lungs. I lay on my face gasping for air. Scarlet airbursts detonated behind my eyes and I fluttered on the edge of consciousness. After an eternity, my chest loosened and I was able to snatch a raw breath. The flow of fresh oxygen reintroduced short-term memory to my brain and I rolled over onto my back.

Wherever I’d landed it was dark. I’d entered Kalakuta sometime after 2:00 PM, had spent less than an hour with Kowalski. But the sky overhead was black, shrouded in Night’s cold embrace. Then I saw the moons.

At first I thought I was seeing double, the result of my fall, a vicious hangover, or, hopefully, a malignant brain tumor.

Of course there’s always the distinct possibility that you’ve popped your friggin’ cork.

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. But when I opened my eyes nothing had changed. I was staring blearily at two full moons in a cloudless night sky. The largest of the moons (there were two of them) appeared similar to the moon I knew, its face pockmarked by a vast network of craters.

The smaller sphere hung slightly lower above the horizon. Its face was disturbingly smooth, as if it had been swept clean by some monstrous valet.

And it was green.

A horrid, emerald light emanated from that viridescent sphere, a squalid corpse glamour that made me slightly queasy. Its light infected the heavens like a creeping poison: Sickly emerald veins crept outward from the gangrenous orb, extending their reach across the dome of that alien sky like a loathsome emerald spider web. The moon was sick, evil or both. It was wrong.

I climbed to my feet and was immediately hammered by another surprise. I was standing on the edge of a precipice. The reason there were no clouds in the sky was that they were all below me. I’d landed atop a mountain surrounded by a field of green-tinged clouds.

I staggered backward, away from the precipice. But some instinct warned me and I stopped. Turning slowly, I saw that the “precipice” was more of a circular dais and that I stood at its opposite edge. Corpse clouds surrounded me on all sides. I’d apparently landed atop a titanic stone golf tee.

Vertigo double-pumped me in the stomach and I fell to my knees as a freezing wind sprang up around the golf tee, chilling me to the bone.

“Kowalski!” I screamed. “You bastard!”

An echo was my only response.

“Alright, you’ve read about things like this,” I said to myself. “Any minute now, you’ll wake up. Kowalski’ll be there and he’ll say, “It was all a hallucination, Junior. I slipped some acid in your cream soda as a little initiation. What do ya think about that?””

But a dark voice offered a more disturbing possibility.

Maybe not, the dark voice said. Maybe you’re supposed to climb down from here, bearing tidings of doom and destiny. You know...like Moses.

 “Don’t be ridiculous,” I fired back. “Do I look like Charlton Fucking Heston?”

The dark voice chuckled.

Maybe you’re going to die up here.

“Shut up!” I screamed.

Abruptly the sick green cloud cover parted.

The ground was closer than I’d imagined. Shadowed mountains surrounded my golf tee, forming a kind of bowl that extended as far as I could see. Far below me, lights flickered across a valley that formed the floor of the bowl. From the surrounding terrain I estimated that I was only five or six thousand feet above a field of moving lights.

A vast plain stretched out before me, a plain covered by the pulsing light field. The lights displayed every color imaginable and some I couldn’t begin to describe. Some of them flickered and danced like the gleam of distant campfires. Others shone steadily, like the glow from a million electric lamps.

As I watched, a new cluster of lights entered the great plain from somewhere beyond the horizon. The new cluster was the same sick color as the gangrenous moon.

As the emerald lights rushed toward the field, the other lights moved away from them, crowding together, blending their colors, seemingly in an effort to escape. But the corpse lights were too fast. They fanned out and surrounded a vast cluster of multi-colored orbs, trapping them inside a swiftly closing emerald circle.

When the noose was complete, the dimmer orbs on the edges of the circle turned the same pallid shade of green. As each green orb attacked the brightly-colored individuals, those orbs would erupt into dazzling doomed brilliance. Then the bright orbs would fade and vanish. The space formerly occupied by the bright orbs would then be replaced by a new green one.

When the last orb had turned green and joined its fellows, the circle moved on, larger, gaining speed as it undulated across the dark landscape, consuming and transforming any individual lights that drifted too close.

I heard a savage voice screaming into the wind. After a moment, I realized that it was mine. The dance of the lights, the conversion of the multicolored orbs was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen.   

“And so we meet again.”

I whirled, hoping to see Kowalski grinning behind me, knowing that Kowalski was a million miles away.

“No,” I said.

The thing that couldn’t be there, not in that place, not at that moment, raised its right hand and performed a perfect karate chop. Then it laughed, a high, rasping shriek that scraped at the inside of my head like a rusted trowel.

“Remember me, O-dog?”

I tried to scream, but my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth.

“Gonna set you at my right hand, O-dog,” the thing pronounced. “I’m comin’ for you.”

I couldn’t stop myself: I scrambled backward, forgetting where I was. The thing from my nightmares floated after me.

“July 25th^th, O-dog,” it shrieked. “Then it’s lights out for Kowalski!”

“Stop it!” I screamed.

Then my foot slipped over the ledge and I plunged backward over the precipice—

“Into the blackness of space rides the Fighting 509^th!”

—And looked up into the face of Neville Kowalski.

I was back in the cave beneath Kalakuta, lying flat on my ass with my head in Kowalski’s lap. Behind him, the starwoman stood still as unyielding stone.

Kowalski jerked his thumb toward the Amazon.    

“Ain’t that a kick in the nuts?”

He leaned in and sniffed.

“Oops,” he snorted. “I’d better go cop you a change o’ skivvies.”

“No,” I said.

I glared at Kowalski, then at the starwoman, then back at Kowalski, then back at the starwoman, my focus bouncing back and forth between the Alcoholic and the Amazon.

“No!” I moaned.

“Calm down,” Kowalski said.

“Fuck you!”

I was done. I threw off Kowalski’s arm, leaped to my feet and bolted for the door, ranting my denial as I scrambled up the stairs.

“No oh no oh nononono...”

“Obadiah, wait!” Kowalski thundered. “Goddamit!”

But I was already halfway up the stairs.

Forty seconds later, I tore open the front door, burst out of Kalakuta, and hit the driveway running.

“No no no oh no no no...”

Kowalski had called it the Wraithing, an alien dreamland connected to the waking world. Our world. But the thing that had spoken to me atop the cosmic golf tee was no dream. The thing atop that dark dais was real.

Because Carlos Vulpe was real.

I’d seen his picture earlier that afternoon but failed to make the connection: Carlos Vulpe was also the  star of my favorite classic TV show, Time Rangers, a hand-carved marionette with a Death-ray Lazer Blaster and perfect karate chop; a forgotten bogeyman that had once convinced a lonely little boy that it wielded the power of Life and Death.

Somehow, Carlos Vulpe and Doctor Necropolis were one and the same.

And he lived in a realm called the Wraithing.

15

Witness

 June 18th^th.Northern Seattle Forensic Care Facility.

The N.S.F.C.F was chronically understaffed and tragically under-funded. Originally, the facility had catered to non-forensic (non-violent) patients, mostly homeless alcoholics and chronic drug-abusers who’d run afoul of the legal system and been consigned to the permanent company of others like themselves.

A state budget crisis—along with an increase in violent criminal convictions in the late eighties—had left Washington State’s maximum security prisons so overcrowded that even the most violent felons had begun to receive ridiculously lenient prison sentences.

Seeking a solution to the overcrowding, the Governor had re-tasked the state’s oldest mental hospitals, earmarking them for the most violent criminal offenders. As a result, by the early nineties the N.S.F.C.F housed some of the most dangerous psychopaths in the country.

Ward 7F was where they kept the bad ones.

At 12:33 pm, Nurse Sandra Woo came on late for the graveyard shift. She’d spent fifteen minutes arguing with her boyfriend Donny about his Rottweiler, Sonny Chiba.

Sonny Chiba was named after Donny’s favorite’s ‘70’s kung fu action movie star. Donny was white, but he had a thing for Asian: girls, food, movies... everything. He’d quit his job at the bowling alley recently and seemed more interested in watching kung-fu movies on DVD and playing “Godzilla Smash” with Sonny Chiba.

Sandra Woo had ended their relationship earlier that evening after discovering two of Sonny Chiba’s turds snugged inside a brand new pair of Sam & Libbys she hadn’t even worn yet. After a heated argument she’d announced it was time to make a change and kicked Donny and Sonny Chiba out for good.  

Sandra Woo knew Donny was a loser. She didn’t know that he was about to become the least of her problems.

“Sorry,” she gasped as she approached the seventh-floor nurse’s station. Carla Fredericks, the on-duty nurse, yawned and waved Sandra’s apologies away.

“New admission in bed thirty-four,” Fredericks said. “Asian male, appears healthy but he’s unresponsive. Cops found him wandering naked through Rathbone Park this morning.”

“What’s his name?” Sandra said.

“No I.D.” Fredericks said. “But he’s got one hell of a wound on the right upper facial. Lost an eye, but Dr. Mackenzie couldn’t say how. They’re trying to dig up his family. ‘Til then we get to watch him, change his dressing and blah blah blah blah blah.”

“Great,” Sandra said.

“He’s on Halcyone,” Fredericks said. “Half a milligram. He should sleep through the night. Byeee.”

Sandra set her bag down and took off her jacket.

There should have been two other R.N.s and three security guards on duty that night, but the state had cut the nursing positions the previous month. Meanwhile, management was in the process of “cultivating a more cost effective relationship” with a cheaper security firm.

“Looks like you’re on your own, girlfriend,” Sandra said.

She reached into her bag, pulled out her copy of Wuthering Heights and settled down behind the nurse’s station.

“Heathcliff, take me away.”

She’d barely gotten past the moment when Heathcliff offered Mr. Lockwood a glass of wine, when a noise from the dormitory made her start. It sounded like something heavy had fallen to the floor.

Sandra groaned. Beltran, the old Puerto-Rican self-mutilator in bed thirty-one, had an uncanny knack for wriggling out of his state-mandated sleep harness when no one was watching.

Sandra put her book down, got up and walked down the hall. If she didn’t secure his harness, Señor Beltran would claw himself to bloody rags. She pushed through the door that led into the dormitory and paused.

“Here we go.”

Budgetary restrictions had also made electricity a luxury at most state mental health facilities. Harold Garnish, Sandra’s boss, had removed every light bulb not deemed “absolutely necessary for safe navigation” from every room in the building. Sandra stood in a tepid circle of light no wider than the reach of her outstretched arms. The opposite end of the dormitory was lost in the darkness.

Sandra moved quickly. Ward 7F normally held twenty-five beds, but ten more had been added to accommodate the overflow of homicidal maniacs who arrived on a monthly basis. Ward 7F gave Sandra the creeps with a capital C.

“Señor Beltran?” Sandra whispered.

The other residents were all snoring peacefully in their restraints.

Something shifted in the darkness behind Sandra and she turned toward the sound. A second later, the light bulb over her head went out.

“Goddamit.”

When nothing jumped out at her she chided herself silently. Her nerves always played up on her when she walked 7F.

Sandra turned and stomped toward the back of the dormitory. In the crisp moonlight that shone overhead she could make out the lumpen shape of Mr. Beltran where he lay on his bed.

“Señor Beltran, you’re being a real pain in the ass,” she muttered.

A moment later, Sandra froze, uncertain of what she was seeing in the half-light. It took her brain a moment to decipher the chaos in front of her.

Beltran was a self mutilator, a “cutter.” Before being committed he’d used razors, knives, even his own teeth, to open wounds in the prison of his flesh in order to release the demons that haunted his dreams.

But a demon of another sort had been at Beltran.  

The sodden red mess that lay strewn across his bed testified to an atrocity: Someone had torn Beltran apart: Parts of him, an arm, his legs and most of his right buttock, had been stripped of flesh.

Sandra stared at the mess on his bed for nearly thirty seconds. Then she turned and ran.

A part of her noticed that bed number thirty-four was empty, noticed the handfuls of matted black hair scattered across the bed and knew that she was in terrible trouble.

Then a dark shape detached itself from the shadows near the dormitory entrance, and Sandra Woo understood that her real troubles were just beginning.

16

Wings Over

Central Park

Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I feed the pigeons.

Believe it or not, giving bread to disease-ridden, winged vermin actually helps me gain perspective.

I was still struggling with the destruction of my reality when I found myself wandering through Central Park the next morning, burdened with a heavy heart and an extra large loaf of Wonder Bread.

The things I’d seen at Kalakuta had put me in one Hell of a lonely spot. Who could I turn to? Who the hell would believe me? Even if I was crazy enough to tell anyone in the first place. My mother? She was no help. Kowalski?

Kowalski’s dead already, O-dog. He just doesn’t know it yet.

I couldn’t tell my father’s partner without revealing what Vulpe had told me: That Death had put Kowalski’s name at the top of her “To Do” list.

The date was the 23^rd of July. If Vulpe was right, Kowalski was scheduled to die in less than forty-eight hours.

But telling Kowalski meant admitting that everything I’d experienced was real; that a superwoman stood frozen in a basement somewhere in Yonkers; that flesh-eating monsters stalked the night, and that my father had really been some kind of...

Stop it. 

I sat down on my favorite bench, in a shaded spot near the Sheep’s Meadow. With its sweeping views of the Upper East Side, the Sheep’s Meadow was where I went when I needed to think.

The day was dreary enough to require a raincoat but I’d left mine back at the apartment. As a result, the thin drizzle sought out all my dry spaces.

“What difference does it make, Frank?” I said.

Frank was my favorite of the Sheep’s Meadow pigeons. Charcoal gray with a distinctive white stripe down the center of his chest, Frank was elegant in an understated, avian way. Frank was always there for me.

“It’s all bullshit,” I continued.

Frank cooed and pecked at my right shoe.

I tore open the Wonder Bread, broke off a piece and dropped it on the ground. Frank pecked at it, and I shuddered, swallowing the surge of bile that rumbled up my throat. I hadn’t actually eaten bread since I was twelve years old. Even as a kid I’d loathed the idea of chewing the stuff; its doughy pliability repulsed me. The idea of it, wet and pasty, sliding half-chewed down my unwilling throat, was enough to ruin an otherwise serviceable meal.  

     Lenore, on the other hand, believed in Wonder Bread. She regularly force-fed me long and grueling lectures about its “Wholesome Goodness,” the number of vitamins and minerals with which it had been impregnated by its sadistic creators back in their mysterious laboratories in the Deep South.  As a result, I was forbidden to leave the table until I’d eaten at least one slice.

In retaliation, I’d gleefully imagined myself choking to death on the stuff; saw myself gasping for breath and turning gray while it swelled and clogged my throat. In my most cherished death scenario, Lenore would return to the kitchen only to discover me dead, my throat swollen to three times its normal size.     Later, at the morgue, forced to identify my cooling remains, she would throw back the sheet and discover that my dead flesh had actually turned into Wonder Bread: There before her would lie the results of her maniacal obsession with my vitamin-enrichment. How I would savor the sound of her screams, and the irony: my mother, that lover of White Death, betrayed by its image as an “All American” staple, now ruined, morally bankrupt, and bottom-heavy. 

     At the same time, I'd always been fascinated by its texture, especially White bread, which seemed like the bland, urban cousin to the more wholesome (but morally ambiguous) Wheat. When I was ten years old, my teacher caught me trying to ignite a ‘crude plastic explosive device’ I'd cobbled together, using white bread, Elmer's glue, three lumps of charcoal and a tin of lighter fluid. The teacher, a child-hating sadist named Miss Lily, had suggested, in front of the class, that the reason my father was absent was because  I was “...a snotty little know-it-all who didn't deserve a nice daddy.” In retaliation, Lenore made me eat two slices of white bread every night for a month. She also made me compose an essay: “The Evils of American Children Who Waste Perfectly Nutritious Food on Boneheaded Terrorist Activities.”
     It was only after years of therapy that I understood that my lifelong habit of mutilating bread was really a declaration of war: a line drawn in the shifting sands between me, my mother, and the emptiness I felt in Marcus's absence.

Frank pecked at it thoughtfully.

“I mean, what’s it all about, Frank?” I asked.

Frank finished off his slice of artery paste, shook out his feathers and eyed me for more.

“I’ll tell you what it’s all about,” I said. “The totality of existence, you, me: It’s all an illusion.”

Frank cooed and fluttered up onto my knee.

I jumped, startled. Normally, Frank barely acknowledged any human’s presence beyond strafing unwary joggers with pigeon crap.

I scratched at an itch that had sprung up on the back of my hand, so taken by Frank’s sudden display of affection that I ignored the burning sensation this action produced.

“Frank, I think this may be the beginning of a beautiful...”

That’s when I noticed the first worm.

It was red, about six inches long. And it was hanging out of Frank’s left eye.

“Jesus,” I hissed.

As gently as I could, I kicked Frank off my lap. He landed on the ground a few feet away, flapped his wings and took off. But I barely noticed.

My legs were covered with red worms.

“Uggghh,” I said, shooting to my feet and brushing at the worms. The nagging itch on the backs of my hands became a burning sensation. A warm flush was slowly creeping up the back of my neck and my tongue abruptly grew two sizes too big for my mouth.

I looked at the backs of my hands and gasped.

Seven worms dangled there, battened onto my flesh like red leeches. I yelped and snatched the worms out of my skin, stomped them into red mush. The smashed worms wriggled and began to creep across the sidewalk toward me.

There came a flutter of wings and a second later, Frank struck again. I heard the sound a large Italian woman sitting in a plate of warm risotto might make and looked down.

My shirt was covered with red worms.

There are times when blind panic is the only sensible choice: I panicked.

Flailing my arms wildly, I ran, tearing at my clothing, trying to scrape off the red worms. All the while I was horribly aware that Frank was fluttering around my head, depositing more of the bastards down the back of my shirt.

Through a blackening cloud of hysteria, I spotted one of the man-made ponds that dot that part of the Park. My skin literally crawling, I ran for it.

The cold water abraded my skin and shocked my senses. I dove down to the floor of the pond and rubbed myself against the muddy bottom, twisting and writhing until I’d scoured my skin raw. Only when my brain was screaming from oxygen deprivation did I allow myself to rise to the surface.

I swam, sputtering, landward, and flopped face-first onto the concrete walkway, half-in and half-out of the water.

A gentle cooing made me look up.

Frank landed on my head.

I snatched a hurried breath and prepared to dive again.   

Before I could submerge, a winged black shape swept over the tree line to the east. Frank’s talons dug into my scalp as the dark shape arrowed toward us.

It was a bird, a big black crow or raven.

The black bird circled the pond once. Then it screamed, folded its wings and plummeted earthward. Frank released my scalp. His wings beat furiously about my head and shoulders for a moment, and then he took off toward the shimmering steel canyons of Manhattan.

The raven pulled out of its kamikaze dive. With a sweep of its wings it shot past me and snatched Frank out of the air. A moment later, the raven and Frank struck the grass of the Sheep’s Meadow in a dull explosion of dapper gray feathers. Frank made a sound that was disturbingly similar to a human scream.

Then the raven pecked his eyes out.

I scuttled across the grass toward the avian massacre. 

By the time I’d arrived at the scene, Frank had been reduced to a quivering pile of blood-soaked pinfeathers. The raven was busily snapping up the squirming red spaghetti strands boiling out of Frank’s corpse.

My stomach gave up trying to hold down the pint of Jack Daniels I’d ingested the night before and I leaned over and christened the Sheep’s Meadow with everything I’d swallowed over the last forty-eight hours.

“Thinking things through?”

The voice belonged to a man I hadn’t seen in two decades, a man I’d helped bury a week earlier.

“Looks like we showed up just in time,” the familiar voice rumbled.

I looked up.

Marcus Grudge stood there with the rays of the rising sun pouring through him like water through a sieve. He reached down, extended a big gnarled hand and smiled.

 “Hello, son.”

17

Reunion

My dead father looked like a car crash victim.

Marcus’s body was a mess of torn muscle, ripped tendons and smashed bones. One eye dangled from its socket: As he pointed at me and laughed, it jumped and danced against his cheek like the “bouncing ball” from a karaoke video. The fronts of his shirt and khaki trousers looked like the mop from a Japanese slaughterhouse.

“You look disgusting,” I said.

Marcus looked down at himself. “Sorry,” he said. “Can’t seem to get this shape-molding thing down. Goddamn blood-suckers make it look easy. Watch this.”

A look of concentration tightened Marcus’s features.   

Then his head fell off and rolled across the grass.

“God!” I hollered.  

“Ain’t that a poke in the shitter?!?” the head chuckled.

“What the Hell are you doing?” I sputtered.

“Oh, get over yourself,” the head grumbled.

A moment later, Marcus reappeared. This time he looked almost normal, save for a massive gash across his throat and the blood spatter on his shirtfront.

“Sorry ‘bout the neck wound. That’s the one that took me out. Harder to manipulate.”

It had stopped raining by now, but the sun peeked warily from behind a skein of fast-moving clouds.

Marcus sat down next to me. He looked older, but that only made sense. The black had faded from his hair and he’d grown a slight paunch. Like me, Marcus was a big man, nearly six-feet-three inches tall. He’d played football in college. The exercise had rewarded him with an athlete’s broad shoulders and the easy gate of a man who was comfortable with physical exertion.

In one of my earliest stories I wrote about the adventures shared by a nine year old boy and the superhero who visited him when times were toughest. I’d named my superhero Captain Prometheus. I’d modeled him after Marcus.

We sat there, two strangers. My father was dead, or at least among the living dead. But I was alive.

And I was pissed.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You’ve come back because you want me take up the family tradition, expose what the government knows about UFO’s or whatever it is that people like you do.”

Marcus shook his head.

“I’m here to see how you’re doin,’ Obadiah.”

“What?” I said.

Marcus shrugged. Through the gash in his neck a flash of bone winked at me.

“I didn’t get the chance to make an appearance at my funeral; tell you how sorry I am about the way things turned out between you and me.”

“You were at your own funeral?” I said.

“Yep. But I hadn’t yet learned to entify.” 

“Entify?”

“To make manifest,” he said. “To convert mental energies into physical ones. Ironic, isn’t it? That’s what this whole mess is about, son.”

I cringed. The paternal tone he adopted so casually made the hackles on my neck stand at attention.

“What do you want?” I said.

Marcus sighed. He shook his head and lifted his hands in a “what do you want from me” gesture that was disturbingly familiar. After a moment I realized why: It was my gesture. I’d seen myself shrug in exactly the same way on television.

Pull it together, asshole, I snarled inwardly, furious at myself for allowing mere familial similarity to divert me from my target. I had a lifetime of solo science projects, missed Father-Son Weekends, and unanswered sex questions to get through. Marcus, the reality of his presence, was distracting me.

“Listen son,” Marcus said. “If it’s an apology you’re after…you’re right. I left. It was a shitty thing to do, abandoning you and your mother. If I had it to do all over again… I guess I might have gone another way.”

“You guess you might have gone another way?” my voice rising to a shriek. “Might have gone another… fucking… way?”

Marcus did my shrug again. Then he did something even worse: He smiled at me.

“Hey!” I snapped. “Don’t think just because you’re dead that you can ingratiate yourself with some lame-ass apology and a few cheap parlor tricks. I’m the one who spent my life wondering why the hell you left. I’m the one with flaming bitch bites permanently scorched across my ass from her temper tantrums. I’m the one who sat up nights listening to her cry.”

Marcus grunted. It was the same noise he’d made the time he came home, the day after my ninth birthday, the one in my dream, and learned that I’d burned our garage to the ground when I’d decided to end a dysfunctional relationship in the time-tested manner: with fire. The break-up had spiraled out of control, however, resulting in a harried call to the Bronxville Fire Department and a hysterical verbal assault from Lenore. 

“If you came back hoping for some half-assed reunion where you get to say— ‘Ooops! I was a bad father! Sorry, chum!’ —then I forgive you and we become best buddies, you wasted a lot of ectoplasm learning to entify because I’m not interested.”

Marcus nodded. “Fair enough.”

“Fair enough?” I said. “Fair enough? That’s all you have to say? You left us, man. You left and missed it all: My high school graduation; that stupid prom picture I took with Lois McCaffrey.”

My head was spinning, the words tumbling out of my face like turds out of an elephant’s backside. If Marcus had been alive at that moment I might have strangled him. As it was I needed some distance. He’d gotten too close too fast.

“You missed the first time I ever got drunk,” I continued. “I threw up all over the bathroom, passed out behind the toilet and got stuck. Lenore had to call the fire department to come and cut me out with the Jaws of Life. Where were you? I’ll tell you where: Gone.”

I glared at Marcus with what I hoped was the righteous nobility of a wounded saint. I’d rehearsed this scene in my mind a million times. At the climax of my fantasy monologue, Marcus always hung his head and begged my forgiveness. At that point I would either punch him in the stomach or tell him to go fuck himself.

In real life, Ghost Marcus shrugged and said: “Fair enough.”

“I swear to God if you say ‘Fair Enough’ one more time I’ll...”

“You’ll do what, son?” Ghost Marcus said. “Kill me?”

I stared at him until my head throbbed.

“Now, if you’re done venting, I’ve got business to discuss,” Marcus said. “I want you to take up the family crest.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you were here to check up on me.”

“You’ll be alright,” Marcus said. “Trust me, a little anger can be a good thing in our line of work.”

“Hey,” I snapped. “There’s no ‘our line of work.’ I’m a writer, in case you hadn’t heard.”

Ghost Marcus shrugged.

“You’re a writer because you have no other way to channel the energies of the Bent. It’s sitting there in your blood waiting for you to get jiggy with it.”

“Get ‘jiggy’ with it?” I said. “What is that? Did you take a ‘How to Speak in Stupid Anachronisms’ class in the Afterlife?”

“Don’t be a smartass,” Marcus said. “While we’re sitting here circling our wagons people are dying. I just hope we’re not too late.”

“What do you mean ‘too late?’” I said.

Marcus pointed at the remains of Frank the pigeon where the raven was snapping up the last of the red worms. It flapped across the grass and landed on Marcus’s right arm.

“Friend of yours?” I said.

“In a way,” Marcus said. “Othello led me here. He even managed to foil their little assassination attempt.”

“Assassination?” I said. “Why would anyone want to kill me?”

“Because you’re next,” Marcus said.

Kowalski’s words came back to me then.

Better to have you hate him than lose you to the Wraithing.

“It’s an old story, son,” Marcus said. “The things that live in the shadows hate us just as much as we hate them. I’m beyond their reach now. But you’re not. I’d hoped to keep the Wraithing Pale out of your life. Oh, your mother and I had our share of problems like any other couple, I suppose. But I loved her from the moment I first laid eyes on her. That’s why I left. I wanted to protect the two of you.”

Marcus sighed heavily. His image wavered, flickering as the wind picked up strength. Then it steadied.

“But now I see that I was wrong,” he said. “You were born to walk the Road.”

“The Road?” I said.

“The Revenant Road, son,” Marcus said. “The road every monster hunter must walk. I’m just a little farther along than you.”

Overhead, the sun tumbled down the gaping maw of a massive black storm cloud. Thunder rumbled in the west.

“The things Kowalski told you are true, Obadiah. The woman you saw back at the house?”

“The dead Amazon?” I said.

Marcus shook his head. “The Dreamer isn’t dead. She’s a gatekeeper of sorts. Her mind is... well it’s a kind of portal, one that opens onto the Wraithing dimension. There are others like Stella, hundreds of Dreamers, all over the world.”

“Stella?”

“That’s what Kowalski called her. We never learned her real name.”

“Who are they, these Dreamers?” I said.

Marcus shrugged. “No one knows where they came from, or how long they’ve been here. They generate the energies that separate the dimensions: the planes we access when we dream, from this one. They call themselves the Nolane.”

The raven uttered a dry chuckle and ruffled its wings.

“I don’t understand,” I said.  

“Neither do we, really,” Marcus grunted. “But the Nolane are incredibly powerful. I don’t know what would happen if the Dreamers ever woke up. Hell on Earth I suppose.”

“Then they’re the cause of all the problems,” I said.

Marcus shook his head.

“The Nolane are the reason we don’t live on the ninth circle of Hell, son. They act as buffers between the myriad realities. Think of them as, well, you might call them cosmic wardens.  Without the Dreamers, the realities would have merged ages ago. But occasionally something from the Wraithing makes it past their defenses.”

I shuddered as a cold dread skittered down my spine.

“But why?” I said. “What do they want?”

“To possess a human mind,” Marcus said. “Someone scarred by deep suffering: loss or grief or hate. Some of them can re-shape the human body. They walk our world, stealing form and substance from mankind’s primordial fears, to prey on us.”

“Vampires and werewolves,” I said.

“Suckers and Wolves are the tip of the iceberg,” Marcus said. “Believe me, there are worse things. If one of them stays over here too long it creates a breach in the space between realities. The longer the breach stays open, the stronger the squatter becomes, sucking energy from both dimensions, until the rupture becomes permanent.” 

“And you and Kowalski...?”

Marcus smiled. It was one of the few times I can remember seeing him do that. The fact that he was dead brought that fact home even harder.

“Kowlaski and I played ‘goalie.’ It was our job to collar the sports that get past the Nolane’s defenses and seal the breach. This little incursion was nothing compared to some of the cluster-fucks Kowalski and I set straight. Right, Othello?”

The raven spread its wings and chuckled again.

“He understands you?” I said.

Marcus nodded. “Some hunters are gifted with minor supernatural enhancements. We call them Bents. I happened to share a special connection with this old bird. Othello was my abettor. He pulled my fat out of a lot of fires. Except for that last one, right O?”

Turning to me, Marcus winked and jerked a thumb toward the raven. “He was off gettin’ laid.”

Othello croaked guiltily.

“That’s alright, brother,” Marcus said. “You remember Black Murray?”

“My garter snake?”

“Yep,” Marcus said. “He was your abettor. Had he lived he would have made an excellent companion on your Walk.”

Black Murray left us, tragically, a year after Marcus did. He had slithered out of his terrarium home and onto our blacktop driveway one balmy Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately our neighbor, Mr. Mayberry, had chosen that same afternoon to try out his brand new riding mower. As Black Murray lay sunning himself on the hot blacktop, Mr. Mayberry had rolled over him, flattening him instantly.

“I haven’t thought about Black Murray since...”

 “Since you and your mother flushed him down the toilet,” Marcus said. “I know. She wrote me what happened in her letter.”

 “Wait a minute, Lenore wrote you?”

 Marcus nodded. “Intermittently,” he said. “At first it wasn’t too bad. She wrote me every week to tell me what was happening with the two of you. But sometimes the work took me out of the country. Sometimes months went by before I was able to collect the goddamn mail. I think, in the end, your mama just got tired of waiting.”

 I made a mental note to call my mother as soon as my head stopped throbbing. I was angrier than at any other time I could recall.

 “Part of me hoped that John Mayberry’s killing that snake meant you might be spared.”

Othello croaked again. Then he hopped off of Marcus’s shoulder, and settled on mine.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Marcus said softly.  “Most Benders only get one abettor in a lifetime. Looks like you’re getting a second chance.”

I had to admit it: It felt right somehow, having that big black pigeon-killer preening itself on my shoulder. It felt like the most natural thing in the world.

I hated it.

“Look, Marcus,” I began. “I didn’t ask for this. I’m having a hard time accepting any of this.”

Marcus waved aside my protestations. Then he stood up.

“You hear that?” he said.

“What?”

Marcus turned to me, his face aglow, as if lit by the light from an alien sun.

“It’s time for me to go,” he said. “The Road is calling me on.”

“Now?” I squawked.

I’d suddenly remembered the ten million things I wanted to say to him. At the same time I hated the creeping emptiness that blossomed in the pit of my stomach at the thought of him leaving.

Marcus began to dissipate like wisps of smoke torn apart by high winds.

“Ask Kowalski about the Bent, son,” he said. “He’s a good friend and an excellent hunter. He’ll stick by you when the corners get tight.”

“Wait!” I said.

There was a flash of lightning, followed by the deep rumble of thunder. Then it began to rain in earnest.

I looked around, squinting to see a glimpse of my father through the downpour. 

But Marcus was gone.

18

Legends

Seattle Washington, 5:01 AM. July 21st.

Murder is never pretty. Ritual human sacrifice in church can be downright inappropriate.

The Southwest Chinese Lutheran Sanctuary sat at the corner of 196^th Street Southwest. In its heyday the sanctuary boasted one of the largest Chinese congregations in Seattle. It was built by a wealthy businessman named Bai Mu Shang.     

A lifelong Buddhist, Bai had immigrated to the U.S. in 1946 seeking his own piece of the post war American Dream. Desiring to bring Buddhism to the shores of his adopted land, Bai commissioned the construction of a temple that would attract followers of the Four Noble Truths from all over the West.

But during the laying of the foundation, Bai was discovered in a compromising position with his blonde secretary, a Presbyterian from Bakersfield named Trixie.

As a gesture of reconciliation, Bai dedicated the future temple to his wife, Margaret Zhang. A recent convert to the Lutheran faith, Margaret insisted the new temple become a Lutheran church, thereby reflecting the couple’s new Western sensibilities. In the traditional spirit of marital fence-mending, Bai agreed.                          

Two days before the inaugural service in the new sanctuary was to occur, however, Bai was caught screwing the blonde Presbyterian in the church’s main office, this time by Margaret herself. In the Western spirit of marital dissolution, Margaret shot them both to death before turning the gun on herself.

After a suitable period of mourning, Bai Mu Shang’s business partners reopened the sanctuary to the eager Christian faithful. It remained a popular church until the late 70’s when it was destroyed by fire.

Many among the sanctuary’s oldest worshippers whispered that the fire started in the same office where Bai Mu Shang and Trixie had passed so many pleasurable hours; that Bai’s angry spirit had exploded back into the living world to burn Margaret’s precious sanctuary from the earth.

In 1986, the sanctuary was condemned. Its blasted window frames, once the resting places of Christian icons, now gaped out across 196^th Street like the empty eyes of a cadaver. It remained a haunted place, a place of mystery and speculation, and within its crumbling walls, Nurse Sandra Woo was having an exceptionally bad night.

The thing from the old stories dropped the remains of its latest victim on the grisly altar at the front of the Church. The creature dipped its maw into the open trough of the dead black man’s torso and tore out his heart.   

Woo had been forced to watch the thing torture and devour seven human beings, forced to listen to their screams, their prayers and pleas for help, while it ripped them apart and consumed their flesh. Three days after her abduction, Sandra Woo teetered on the brink of insanity.

As the thing from the old stories swallowed the dead man’s heart, a blinding burst of emerald light exploded over the altar. The thing, whose name Sandra dared not allow herself to remember, threw back its head and howled. Of all the dark wonders Sandra had been made to witness in the last three days, this single horror was the worst.

Despite her fear, Sandra squirmed around on the filthy floor of the sanctuary, the skin of her wrists and ankles rubbed raw from the thick ropes that bound her, to stare at the being that hovered over the altar.

A tall, thin figure, man-shaped and crooked, floated, suspended in the seething green glare. Its long fingers dangled at the ends of sticklike arms. Its eyes were twin black holes; its face gnarled like the bole of an ancient tree.

The wooden man with the rotten eyes reached down with one brown hand, his face twisted with rage, animated by a palpable hunger. His fingers seemed to meet some form of resistance in the clear air above the “altar,” an invisible tension.

The wooden man clenched his fists and hammered them into the invisible barrier. But an explosion of power ignited the wooden man’s hands and he screamed.

The flames burned brightly for a moment, and then disappeared. Sandra sensed a deep groaning rumble through the earth beneath the sanctuary. There was a high-pitched, shrieking roar. The wooden man glared down at the thing from the old stories, smoke rising from his hands like censers.

“More, Chen,” it hissed. “I need more.”

The wooden man’s voice tore the air from the sanctuary, scoured the nerves in Sandra’s brain. She gasped, her lungs burning, red starbursts erupting into pain-bright blossoms behind her eyes. When she could snatch a breath she screamed.

The wooden man glared at her.

“The Witness,” he crooned. “Well done, Chen.”

The thing from the old stories chuckled, a deep-bellied rumble that drew a shudder of revulsion from the woman that lay surrounded by human remains.

Sandra recognized the creature that had abducted her from the N.S.F.C.S. Her parents were modern, second generation Americans. They’d even granted her an English name at her birth to ease her passage among suspicious Westerners. Her Chinese name, Woo na Wen, was for family.

But her father’s father, Grandpa Yun, had remained traditional Chinese until the day he died. It was from him that Sandra had learned the old stories.

It was Grandpa Yun who told her about the Yirin.

The giant ape man that many Chinese believed still haunted the forested regions and remote provinces of rural China had stepped out of the stories to feast on the flesh of the living, here in America.

Light from one of the broken windows crept through the sanctuary. The abandoned church brightened as Dawn spread its warmth through the chapel. At the approach of the light, the Yirin uttered a warbling shriek and leapt up into the burnt-out timbers high overhead.

The wooden man faded, like a shadow eaten apart by motes of sunlight, but its voice echoed through the chapel like the whispered promise of Death.

“Soon.”

Silence descended over the sanctuary.

Sandra Woo cried out for help. No one heard her. The chapel was too far from the street. The burnt out timbers and dense walls swallowed the sound of her terror as effectively as a soundproofed tomb.

Sandra lay her head down and wept into the blood and ash. Her parents’ God, the white Christian God of the West, had forsaken her. As Dawn illuminated the carnage in which she lay, she prayed to the old gods, the ones Grandpa Yun had taught her to remember.

She prayed for Death’s mercy before the Yirin returned.

19

Labyrinth

I may write fiction but I’m not crazy.

I’d seen evidence of a parallel reality, met the living incarnation of my personal bogeyman, and argued with my dead father in Central Park. Frankly, I’d had enough.

I needed to get some semblance of normalcy back into my life. The scowls of distaste on the faces of passing joggers reminded me that I also needed a change of clothes.

I chased down a taxi and waved a small fortune in the driver’s face to get him to take me back to Brooklyn. My assistant, Carla, was waiting for me in a limousine when my cab pulled up in front of my brownstone.

“You’re late,” she said. “Juno said if you blow this appearance she’ll start an ‘Authors We Hate Club’ in your honor.”

Carla sniffed and took two steps backward.

“You smell like my Uncle Paco when he forgets to change his diaper.”

“Shut up,” I snarled.

“Yo whatever,” she flipped back.

I made a mental note to fire her. Then I raced upstairs to change.

Othello was sitting on the fire escape outside my bedroom window.  Seeing Marcus’s pet raven perched in the same spot where I sometimes sat and searched the night skies for inspiration only agitated me more.

For the first time, I noticed how large the raven was, the tenacity with which its claws gripped the railing of the fire escape.

“Damn,” I said. “You are one big bastard of a bird.”

Othello spread his wings and chuckled dryly.

I shuddered. The sheer bulk of the pigeon killer suggested hidden armories interred beneath its feathers: lethal secrets waiting in the wings. Othello terrified me and fascinated me at the same time. 

Meanwhile, I’d completely forgotten my scheduled appearance to promote The River’s Edge on Juno Kemantari’s afternoon talk show.

“Stupid,” I snarled, as I ran for the shower.

As I passed my bathroom mirror, I stopped.

“Good God.”

The face that stared back at me looked like something the Lithuanian National Kickboxing Club might have used for a warm-up. My eyes were still puffy and red-tinged from where the red worms had injected their poison. My lips were swollen and purplish, my throat slightly swollen, lending me the appearance of a man recovering from severe anaphylactic shock.

Nevertheless, I dressed to impress: a black sport jacket, white shirt, open at the collar with black Prada slacks. An appearance on Juno meant millions of potential new readers. I could little afford to alienate such a powerful ally in my one man War on Obscurity.

I slammed down a quart of the strongest mouthwash I could find and ran for the door.

Othello uttered a loud squawk.

“What?” I snapped.

The raven flapped his wings, sailed across the room, and landed on my telephone.

“What is that supposed to mean?” I said. Then I realized I was talking to a bird. “I don’t have time for this,” I snarled, turning to leave.

I got halfway out the door before I turned back, hit the “Saved Messages” button on my answering machine and scribbled down Kowalski’s telephone number. I had about three million questions for my father’s partner.

As I ran down the stairs and hopped into the limo, thoughts of my upcoming television appearance faded to a distant hum.

Selling books was the last thing on my mind.

* * * *

Juno Kemantari was the richest, most powerful she-creature on Earth. She’d worked her way up from the back roads of rural Mississippi, collecting scholarships to Ivy League universities and alternately cajoling, seducing and browbeating her way to the top of the American Entertainment\Media anthill.

She was also a royal pain in the posterior, with an attitude that could sour an Olsen Twin at fifty paces.

 JUNO, however, reached twenty-two million viewers every afternoon. She’d won more Emmys than Alan Alda, produced seven successful mini-series and more TV movies, even co-starred in two wildly popular feature films. A plug on her “Books We Love Club” segment insured a lucky author the kind of instant national attention for which publishers joyfully cannibalize their children.

I was sitting in the makeup room, ignoring the stares generated by my appearance. The makeup artist, a petite blond named Chatsworth, was doing her best to cover my bruises and various swellings when the door opened and bad news blew into the room.

“Show’s been cancelled.”

This from Ryan Snodgrass, JUNO’s Executive Producer and semi-human shield. My publicist, Marc Bloom, levered himself between Snodgrass and me with the abandon of a marine throwing himself onto a live grenade.

“What happened?” Bloom cried.

Juno had a family emergency which required her to leave the studio unexpectedly,” Snodgrass said. “Her assistant is on his way up to... Ahhh. Here’s Trocious now.”

The man who stood in the doorway of my dressing room would have looked more at home thundering down the gridiron than schlepping coffee for TV personalities. He was nearly seven feet tall, coffee-brown, with a shaved skull that jutted up from a bull’s neck and shoulders.

“Obadiah, this is Trocious, Juno’s...personal assistant,” Snodgrass said.

Trocious nodded. Our eyes met, and for the briefest moment an image flashed before my mind’s eye.

Dark. Cold. Up ahead, light, warmth. But not for me...

It was only a flash, a burst of—

     Vision

—emotion, but I staggered backward as if I’d been pushed by a heavy wind. I would have fallen if Bloom and Snodgrass hadn’t caught me.

“Oh my God,” Bloom said. “Are you okay?”

As my equilibrium steadied, the vision faded, leaving me lightheaded and slightly woozy.

“Here, sit down,” Snodgrass said.

“I’m fine,” I replied.

“You look like shit,” Bloom snapped.

I sat.

Trocious loomed in the doorway, looking down at the three of us like a study in contempt chiseled in mahogany.

“Ms. Kementari extends an invitation to dine at her residence tomorrow night,” Trocious rumbled. His voice was lightly accented with some Southern dialect. Its timbre vibrated the walls.

“Ms. Kementari wishes to apologize for this inconvenience and to discuss future appearances.”

Snodgrass, the Executive Producer, shuddered. I felt his fingers grind the muscles in my forearm.

“Ahhh, thank you, Trocious,” he said.

Trocious stared at me as if Snodgrass hadn’t spoken.

“Is 8:00 acceptable, Mr. Grudge?”

“He’ll be there with bells on,” Bloom snapped.

Juno’s valet loomed, massive arms folded across his thickly-muscled chest. His gaze never wavered from mine.

Alone. Dark. Laughing in the light. Laughing at me.

I shuddered, trying to throw off thoughts of cold, dank places. I was exhausted, probably hallucinating. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to get out of there.

Suddenly I was afraid without knowing why. Something about Trocious, about the shadows gathered around him like a cloak of living darkness.

Kowalski would say something ridiculous right now.

But something about Trocious held my attention, like the sound of a bomb plummeting out of the sky, or the executioner’s tread as he approaches the guillotine.   

I stood to gain hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of new readers from any future appearances. Juno Kementari was a media connection any writer might have killed for.

“I’ll be there,” I said, “with bells on.”

20

Fire and Fury Over

 Yonkers Raceway

I spent the rest of that afternoon staring at my computer monitor and trying to form a coherent sentence. By dusk I’d gotten no further than an opening paragraph that read like the rulebook for the Taiwanese Amateur Train-spotting Club:

Torvino, a man with no problems, fled the decadent suburban sprawl of Atlantic City carrying only a six pack of Marlboro Reds, a serviceable gherkin, and a rusty hacksaw. At his side sat Simba. An ape.

I read that passage for the seventy-fifth time. Afterward, I considered slashing my throat. Meanwhile, Othello eyed me from the windowsill leading to my fire escape. He squawked once, loudly, and fluttered onto the top of my monitor. I’d closed the window, fearing that the raven might fly off and never come back. Despite my reservations, he was the only link to Marcus I had left.

But the pigeon-killer still gave me the creeps.

“Shoo,” I said. “Go over there.”

I’d cobbled together the closest thing to a perch that I could, taking an ancient tie rack that had been left in my apartment by the former owner and setting it in a litter box I’d dug out of my storage unit. The litter box was the legacy of a relationship that had lasted exactly as long as it took for my ex-girlfriend to understand that I really was violently allergic to her pet calico Sam-Sam.

So far, Othello hadn’t shown the slightest interest in my makeshift aerie, choosing instead to occupy the windowsill from whence to conduct his silent surveillance.

“What are you staring at?” I said. 

Othello offered up a casual chuckle.

“Fuck off, bird,” I said. “Go haunt someone else.”

Othello spread his wings and croaked. A moment later, a viscous stream of matter drizzled down the front of my computer’s monitor, obscuring with a white river of raven crap the hopeless drivel on the screen.

I quickly exhausted my voluminous repertoire of cuss words and threw open the window. Othello sailed past me and out into the night.

“Go dig up Edgar Alan Poe, asshole!”

I slammed the window shut and returned to my computer.

Othello’s offering looked like a spatter of lightning against the dark background of my screen saver, a luminous tree that flickered in the light thrown by the computer screen. I stared, transfixed by the lightning crap tree and was abruptly overtaken by the certainty that I was being watched.

I whirled, my eyes searching the dark corners of my apartment. As far as I could tell, I was alone. Nevertheless the feeling of being observed persisted, and for no good reason I suddenly found myself thinking about Lenore.

I hadn’t spoken to my mother since our conversation in her kitchen the day of Marcus’ funeral. I told myself I was just feeling guilty as I scrambled for the phone, but I was unconvincing, even to myself. A feeling of dread had sprung into being in the coils of my gut.

You’re being stupid, I chided. She’s probably getting drunk and painting crosses on all the windows.

The phone in my mother’s house rang twelve times before I hung up and hit ‘Redial,’ only to hear Lenore’s no-nonsense outgoing message.

“I’m obviously not here to receive your call. Either leave a message or call back later. Please be brief.”

Beep.

“Hello, mother. Hey. It’s me... Obadiah.”

Stupid. Of course she knows it’s you.

“I’m just... I’m just calling to check up on you. Well, not exactly checking up on you. Ahhh...”

You’re wasting time.

I hung up, feeling like a fool. To make matters worse, I knew that when Lenore got my rambling message she would undoubtedly make me feel even more ridiculous than I already did.

I went into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of glass cleaner and a handful of paper towels. I thoroughly cleaned my monitor, ignoring the wave of foreboding that seemed intent on clawing its way out of my guts. Then I went back to my story.

Ten minutes later, unable to concentrate and feeling anything but sleepy, I decided to take a casual drive up to Bronxville and pop in on Lenore, an unannounced social call (which she hated, even from me) but, I figured, what the Hell.

I grabbed my keys, ambled out of the apartment and strolled out to my BMW, which was waiting casually at the curb.

I was doing ninety by the time I hit the highway.

* * * *

At 9:39 I crossed into Westchester County via the Cross-County Expressway. I’d calmed myself enough to avoid killing anyone while navigating the complex network of entrances and exits that enfolded the Cross-County shopping center and was heading toward the Yonkers Raceway when a red S.U.V. rolled up behind me and tapped my rear fender.

“Son of a bitch!”

I gripped the steering wheel as my BMW accelerated, pushed forward by the S.U.V.’s greater bulk.

“What the hell are you doing?” I screamed.

The red S.U.V. surged forward and slammed into the back of my car with enough force to rattle my teeth.

“Jesus Christ!”

I pressed the accelerator, felt myself sink into black leather seats that had been hand-tooled by underfed German teenagers, and my BMW pulled smoothly away from the red S.U.V.  I swerved into the middle lane and waited for the idiot in the red truck to pass so I could read the license plate and call the police. 

The red S.U.V. swerved into the center lane and accelerated. This time it hit my rear fender so hard I momentarily lost control of the BMW and slalomed horizontally across the highway…directly into the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler.

The driver of the eighteen-wheeler blew his horn as I jerked the steering wheel hard to the left and mashed down on the brakes, correcting the BMW’s trajectory a moment before the eighteen wheeler blew past me with a furious roar, rocking my car on its wheels.

I had slowed to about seventy-miles an hour, my hands gripping the steering wheel for dear life, when the headlights of the red S.U.V. filled my every horizon (and my windshield) with imminent death. The S.U.V. was rocketing toward me, heading West against the flow of traffic.

The idiot’s going the wrong way, I thought wonderingly.

I floored the accelerator and swerved just as the S.U.V. thundered past on my right side.

He’s trying to kill me.

That realization brought with it a kind of clarity. I lifted my foot off the accelerator and coasted toward the nearest exit. Behind me, a swirl of headlights and blaring horns informed me that my assailant was causing difficulty for the late-evening commuters in my wake. I glanced up at the rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of several cars slewing across the highway. One of them blew a front tire, swerved and flipped over before coming to a halt on its roof.

“What the hell?” I breathed.

In my haste to leave my apartment I’d left my cell phone behind. I spotted an all-night gas station at the foot of the nearest off-ramp and made for the exit. The gas station would have a phone I could use to call for help.

The red S.U.V. roared up beside me.

Fear slammed my foot down on the accelerator. The red truck sped up, blocking my egress from the highway, forcing me away from the exit. A moment later, the driver’s window was lowered and the silver barrel of a semi-automatic handgun flashed in the darkness.

The first shot took out my right rear passenger window. Shrieking wind shattered the bubble of Teutonic silence around me as glass exploded across the back seat. The second shot smashed my rear view mirror: The metal frame bounced off the steering wheel and hit me in the forehead; I barely noticed: My heartbeat thundered in my ears.

The silver muzzle flashed. To my left, the driver’s side window exploded and covered me with broken glass. Up ahead on the right, the exit was approaching fast. I could see the bright neon glow of the all-night service station across from the highway.

Directly in front of me, the concrete barrier separating the highway from the exit ramp reared up like the curse from an angry concrete god. The driver’s strategy became wickedly obvious: By keeping me hemmed in he could either pick me off with the gun or force me into the concrete barrier, but playing “Graffiti Splash!” using my spinal column as the paintbrush was not on my list of fun ways to spend an evening.

I twisted the steering wheel hard to the right, forcing the S.U.V. to veer into the exit lane. The big vehicle wobbled, and the silver automatic blasted a volley of high-velocity slugs against the driver’s side of my car. As we pounded down the exit ramp I twisted the wheel again and slammed into the side of the S.U.V.

I skidded to a halt as the red truck swerved, hit the bottom of the exit ramp, and rocketed toward the service station. With a squeal of brakes the S.U.V. fishtailed as the driver struggled to regain control, then it flipped over, bounced onto its roof, rolled once, twice, three times...and slammed into the island of gas pumps in front of the convenience store.

The explosion was heard as far away as the Bronx.

* * * *

“Am I under arrest?”

Three hours later, I sat nursing the cup of bile-flavored coffee I’d been handed upon my arrival at the Yonkers police department. I was exhausted, still confused about the “accident,” and furious: No one had offered to top me up.

The detective who’d been blowing smoke up my ass since my arrival leaned back and smiled with the kind of avuncular authority that made me yearn for a concealed weapon.

“I told you, Obadiah,” the detective, whose name was McMurray, said. “You’re not under arrest. We’re simply waiting to confirm the ID’s on your dead friends. You’re free to go at any time.”

I stood up and grabbed my car keys.

“However… we’re hoping a man of your obvious accomplishments might shed a little light on why three grown men should be street racing in the middle of the night.”

I sat.  “I already told the state troopers; I wasn’t ‘street racing.’ Those lunatics were trying to kill me.”

McMurray frowned. “And why would they want to do something like that?”

“I don’t have a clue,” I sighed.

I stood up, needing to stretch my legs, but also needing to put some distance between me and McMurray. My statement wasn’t strictly true.

After the pigeon assault in Central Park, I was beginning to get a clue. But what explanation could I possibly have offered McMurray? That the forces of Evil were after me? That supernatural creatures with a thirst for human flesh were real, and that I was their next target?

Although I was uncertain to what extent that might or might not have been true I knew without a doubt where such an admission would land me: A luxury suite in one of New York’s overcrowded booby hatches, probably with a feces-flinging roommate thrown in for local color.

A diminutive female officer came into the interrogation room and laid a folder on top of the desk in front of McMurray. The lead detective picked it up and began to leaf through its contents. I waited a thousand years while he thumbed, whistling tunelessly through teeth the color of old sheetrock. Finally, he spoke.

“The S.U.V. was registered to a man named Neville Rhys Gilliam,” McMurray droned. “That name mean anything to you?”

I froze.

“What did you say?”

McMurray frowned. He leaned forward, all pretence at playing ‘casually disinterested’ abandoned.

“The guy we scraped outta that S.U.V.” he said. “We ran his plates, matched the tag with an old I.D. card we found in his glove compartment. Neville Rhys Gilliam.”

“It can’t be,” I said, recalling the Copernicus Geller incident of the day before. “It’s impossible.”

McMurray shook his head and chuckled. “Guys like these two snap all the time. Maybe too much meth down at ‘Club Manhole,’ or hidden service charges on their Barbra Streisand tickets. Trust me: It’s possible.”

“What do you mean, ‘these two?’” I said, ignoring McMurray’s feeble attempts at sentience. “There were two people in that truck?”

McMurray nodded. “Yup. The passenger was thrown from the vehicle when it flipped over: Asian male, late-forties. Sucker smacked headfirst into the back of a parked Hyundai. Pity too. Guy had a headful of beautiful white hair. Pretty unusual for your typical Asian. Know what I’m sayin’?”

McMurray snapped his fingers. “Killed like that.”

Snap.

“He ain’t pretty now, I can tell you,” McMurray chortled. “We pulled the Asian guy’s wallet. His name was…”

“Carter Yamato,” I said wearily.

McMurray smiled while managing to frown simultaneously, like a man who has just discovered gold in a bucket of battery acid.

“So you do know these guys,” he said. “Something you’d like to share with Uncle Ted?”                          

I sat down in the chair across from McMurray and stared into the swirling depths of the coffee cup. The cup was adorned with a picture of Batman, his cape outstretched like the black wings of his namesake. The caption beneath the picture read: “Criminals Are a Superstitious Cowardly Lot.”

“No,” I said. “I mean… I know who they are.”

“Couple of fruit-loops from the look of it.”

“They were life-partners, if that’s what you mean.”

McMurray’s eyebrows formed two grizzled question marks over eyes as opaque as Hudson River sediment. “Well bully for the boys,” he sneered. “The I.D. we found in Gilliams’ glove compartment had ‘Press’ on the front. Was he some kind of reporter?”

I shook my head.

 “Not exactly,” I said.  “He’s the book critic for the Village Voice.”

21

The 13^th Step

By the time I reached my mother’s house, it was nearly two o’clock in the morning. She hadn’t answered the phone calls I’d placed from the police department and by the time I was released I was nearly frantic with worry. Despite Detective McMurray’s wary-eyed warnings about not leaving town and obeying posted speed limits I broke several local ordinances on my way to Lenore’s house in Bronxville.

It was late July so the wind tunnel stampeding through the empty window frames in my car was, at least, balmy enough to soothe my troubled brow.

The fresh night air distracted me, prevented me from thinking too much about what I might find when I got to Lenore’s house. As I drove toward Bronxville, I reviewed the disturbing series of events that had overtaken my life.

In the span of two weeks I’d learned of my father’s death, the secret life he’d led. I’d learned that the Forces of Darkness were bound and determined to “whack me out”; that humanity was at the mercy of creatures from a realm I could scarcely comprehend. Now, another flock of malcontents was clamoring for my head.

Copernicus Geller, the one-legged knife wielder: Talk-show host and Book reviewer for the New York Sentinel.

Neville Rhys Gilliam, homicidal operator of the red S.U.V.: Book critic for the Village Voice.

Carter Yamato, Gilliam’s live-in lover: Syndicated columnist and book critic for the Daily Times.

All three of these men had trashed my work. All three of them had tried to kill me. Now, all three were dead.

Although I had every right to celebrate, I was too frightened to gloat. Dozens of critics had called for my public execution, but none of them had actually stepped forward to make it happen. Until now.

What the hell was going on? Were the three critics part of some larger plan? Had they each been visited by something from the Wraithing? Or had they simply read too many of my books? Was I really that bad? Was any of this really happening to me? Or was I simply losing my mind?

Once more, I toyed with the idea that I was sick, that the real me was lying in a mental ward somewhere, strapped to a table in some electroshock boutique, awaiting the liberating jolt that would restore me to my senses. Or maybe I really was suffering from a brain tumor, one just malignant enough to cause intense hallucinations.

God, if only that were true.

But what about the things I’d witnessed? What about my mother’s story? What about Neville Kowalski?

Frigging tumor would have to be the size of a Hanukkah basket.

No. The insanity that had re-colored my world in shades of crimson and black and ice-cold emerald was too visceral, its presence too worrisome at the back of my neck to be a mere hallucination. It was real alright.

And it sucked.

* * * *

The first thing I noticed when I clattered to a halt in front of the three story Tudor where I’d spent my adolescence was the orange light flickering through the living room windows. A surge of panic propelled me out of my car and up the stairs.

My God, she’s torched the place.

I reached for the spare key I’d carried since I was twelve years old, my heart knocking against my ribcage as I envisioned Lenore, unconscious inside a burning death trap.

My forward momentum was so great that when the front door opened I barreled through the doorway, past the shadowy figure crouching there, and sprawled face-first across the entry hall floor to a hail of laughter.

The laughter died instantly.

In the silence, I looked up from where I lay on the cold marble tiles. About fifteen people sat around the sunken living room, their bodies arrayed so that they were facing the center of the room. The fattest woman I’d ever seen was standing in the center of the partygoers.

The fat woman glared down at me as if I’d vomited in the punchbowl, her fingers hovering over a tray of hors ’d’oeuvres being proffered by a black woman wearing a pink apron, floral print dress and a string of pearls.

I got to my feet, wincing at the sharp twinge of pain in my right knee from where I’d banged it during my acrobatic entrance. “Where’s...owww. Where’s Lenore?” I snarled. “What’s going on? Who the Hell are you people and what have you done with my mother?”

The woman in the floral print dress stepped forward and lifted the tray of fingerfoods. “Obadiah...” But I wasn’t interested in whatever appetizer the woman was hawking.

It took me another twenty seconds before I realized the woman hovering in front of me was Lenore. “What the Hell are you wearing?”

“Obadiah, listen to me...”

“Have you lost your mind? You’re having some stupid midnight dinner party? I’ve been frantic. I’ve been calling you for the last three hours. Why didn’t you answer the goddamn telephone?”

“Obadiah, just listen for a moment.”

“What the Hell are you wearing?”

Lenore grabbed me by the crook of my elbow and hooked the skin covering my right tricep with her fingernails.

“Listen to me, you son of a...”

“Owww!”

Lenore scowled. She stopped a passing party-goer, a tall man wearing a black suit. The right side of the man’s face was horribly disfigured. Its twisted contours and odd angles gave the impression of having been scrambled and remolded by a crude, uncaring artist. The left side of the man’s face, however, was unmarred, almost beautiful in its patrician plainness.

“Garver, would you mind?” Lenore said, indicating the tray. “I’ll be back in just a moment.”

“Sure, Lenny.”

The disfigured man took the tray.

“Thank you.”

Gripping the meat of my arm in her pincers, Lenore pulled me into the kitchen.

“Let go of me! Owww!”

“Shut up.”

“The tone of her command brought me up short. Without transition I was suddenly furious. “What did you say?”

“I told you to shut... up,” Lenore hissed. “You come barging in here without returning my calls, uninvited, disturbing my guests, cursing, making demands without having a clue as to what might be happening in my life. As usual, you make everything about you and expect the whole world to jump on the bandwagon and I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it and right now I’m sick of you. So I’m telling you: Shut your big fat pompous mouth and listen for a change.”

Lenore pointed toward the living room.

“Those people out there happen to be my friends. More importantly, we all share a common problem. We’re all Survivors.”

“Survivors of what?” I snapped. “Bad parenting? Well let me pull up a chair. I’m sure I’ll fit in just…”

“Survivors of the madness that took your father,” Lenore said. “All those people were victims of the Wraithing Pale. Either through direct experience or through the experiences of a loved one.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re talking about a support group? Like a twelve step program?”

Lenore nodded. ”That’s right,” she said. “In fact we call ourselves The Thirteen Steps, because the things we’ve experienced are so far beyond the scope of ‘normal’ reality that twelve-steps-based support groups can’t even begin to cut the mustard.

“We come together twice a month to share stories and experiences, and to confirm that we aren’t crazy; that these things really happened to us; and that they’re happening to other people too. Excuse me. I have to check the dessert.”

Lenore went to the oven, opened it and removed a cookie sheet filled to the edges with the most delicious-looking chocolate chip cookies I’d ever seen. She set the cookies on the counter top and mopped her brow with the back of her forearm.

“This ‘dinner party,’ as you called it, is our second meeting of the month and it was my turn to host. No interruptions are allowed during a meeting, so I turned off the ringer on my phone. I’m sorry if I frightened you. Are you alright?”

The sudden shift in her tone invoked an upwelling from deep within the iron vault where I stored my emotions. Lenore’s image swam before my eyes as a lump rose up the back of my throat.

No, I whispered silently. No, mama. I’m far from alright.

“Why are you dressed like that?” I said, instead. “You look like you stepped out of one of your old glamour magazines.”

Lenore smiled and set the cookies on a glass serving tray. “I was wearing this dress the night Nestor Charles attacked me. Every so often I drag it out of mothballs. It reminds me that life isn’t always what we think it is. It keeps me honest.”

 She smiled. “The pearls were a wedding gift from your father. I wore them tonight to honor his memory.”

 That admission uncapped the reservoir of reaction I’d been holding back since leaving Kowalski and Kalakuta and the star woman. My legs went rubbery. I crumpled in the middle of Lenore’s kitchen floor and leaned my head back against the dishwasher.

 “I was attacked by a homicidal pigeon in Central Park yesterday,” I said. “I just spent the last three hours being interrogated by the police, and the critics are trying to kill me.”

Lenore waved my complaints away. “You’ve never been a critical favorite, dear.”

“Mother, they’re literally trying to kill me.”

Lenore looked up at me and her jaw dropped. “Oh my Lord.”

“I know. It’s insane.”

“It’s not that,” Lenore said. “You reminded me of your father just then.” She shook her head and sighed deeply.   “Something was always trying to kill him too.”

Lenore sat down on the floor beside me and took my hand. We sat without speaking for a moment. As much as I hated to admit it, it felt good sitting there, just the two if us. It had been that way for most of my life.

“I barely knew him,” I said. “Christ, he left before I knew who I was. Now I’m supposed to pick up where he left off and I don’t know how. Or why I should even care.”

Lenore shrugged. “You’re looking for reasons,” she said. “Why did this have to happen to me? How can any of this be, when we live in a world filled with tax-collectors, cheesy politicians and the Discovery Channel?”

She patted me on the thigh. “That way lies real madness, my darling.”

Lenore grabbed my chin and pulled my head around. Her eyes were shining and her voice was gentle.

“You just keep moving forward,” she said. “You’ll figure out the rest of it while you go.”

I nodded, uncertain how to respond to this beautiful stranger whom I was growing increasingly certain I’d never met.

“As to why you should care? That I can help you with.”

She stood up and walked to the kitchen door.

“Come on.”

I got to my feet and followed her into the living room.  

The fat woman was still speaking as Lenore led me to an empty chair. I sat down, feeling like an intruder, out of place among strangers. I’d only noticed the fat woman and the disfigured man before being hauled off to the kitchen. Now, I had the opportunity to study some of the other guests.

It was with some shock that I recognized several of the people who’d attended Marcus’ funeral. A pallor that had little to do with race, creed, or ethnicity seemed to cling to their bones. Even the darker-skinned guests looked pale. They were a motley crew, drawn from many different races and socio-economic backgrounds. But each of them carried a haunted air. Many of them flinched whenever someone looked their way. No one looked anyone else in the eye for more than a brief glance before looking away at something or someone else. Most of them were wearing black.

In contrast, Lenore seemed to flicker around the room like a giant humanoid butterfly: a bipedal monarch shimmering between moving clots of shadow.

The fat woman who had been speaking when I came in, sat down, and a thin, dark-haired woman took her place in the center of the circle.

“Hello, everyone,” she said. “My name is Tamar, and I’m a Survivor.”

The group responded: “Hi, Tamar.”    

Tamar smiled. Something about her expression pricked at my emotions. After my breakdown in Lenore’s kitchen, I felt raw, too vulnerable. I eyed the front door. It seemed tantalizingly close.

“This is only my second meeting. It’s been two years since the incubi took my son Benjamin. My husband Peter and I moved here from Israel last May with our three daughters. We were living with my parents on Long Island until last month. They don’t know what really happened to Benjamin. The doctors said it was ‘sudden infant death syndrome.’ But they weren’t there. They didn’t see the thing my Benjamin turned into before he died.”

Tamar visibly suppressed a shudder of revulsion.

“But my grandmother knew. My parents ignored her when she tried to tell them about the banim shovavin, the ‘mischievous sons.’ the demons who trick women, seduce them, use them as breeders to create... monsters.”

The Israeli woman swiped at the tears that sprang into her eyes.

“It’s alright, Tamar,” Lenore volunteered. “Everyone in this room understands what you’re going through.”

Tamar nodded gratefully. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I came tonight. My grandmother Elaine died last winter. My husband doesn’t want to talk about Benjamin. Since Benjy wasn’t really his in the first place, it’s hard to argue with him. But since she died... I have no one to talk to.”

Tamar smiled. “I thank God for you guys,” she said.  “No one else understands.”

22

Destiny’s Child

Finding my way back to Kalakuta the next morning was easier than you might imagine: How many haunted mansions can there be in Yonkers?

The house squatted at the top of its long driveway like a drunken troll groaning beneath an ancient curse. As I drove through the black iron gates, the noise from the street faded, blocked by the high stone wall that girded the property. I parked the car and walked up the driveway to the throbbing tones of Marilyn Manson. Heavy bass and pounding rhythm thundered out of the open downstairs windows as I rang the bell.

“Fuck off,” Kowalski bellowed. “I’m retired!”

The Beautiful People increased in volume.

I walked over to the window: Iron bars covered it, but I could see into what looked like a small office. Inside, Kowalski was nowhere to be seen. It was 11:12 AM. I was due at the she-creature’s mansion in Bedford at 8:00 PM sharp.

I’d spent the rest of the previous evening listening to the stories of the Steppers. The Israeli woman, Tamar, had given birth to a creature that only looked like a human infant: Little Benjamin had actually been fathered by an incubus, a creature from Jewish folklore.

The changeling had wrecked Tamar’s home and nearly destroyed her marriage before it was reclaimed by its father, a creature Tamar had encountered while traversing the dreaming forests of the Wraithing.

But the turmoil that had overtaken the Israeli woman’s life had been no dream. She and her family had become pariahs, shunned by their community, unable to convince the news media and therefore the public, that they had not murdered their son. They’d finally been forced to leave Israel simply to find work to support the family’s surviving children.

Tamar had met Lenore after being referred by a mutual acquaintance. Somehow, my mother and the other Steppers were helping Tamar cope with her fears and her loss.

I’d left somewhere around four in the morning, feeling humbled by Tamar’s simple courage in the face of so much devastation, and shamed by my mother’s unexpected ability to help. Now, after sleeping most of the morning locked in my apartment with the curtains drawn and the phone turned off, I needed guidance.  

I needed to find my own path through the forest.

“Neville, please,” I shouted. “It’s Obadiah.”

From somewhere close, Kowalski’s scratchy baritone thundered over the music: “Goddamit!”

The front door flew open and Kowalski appeared, hair askew, wearing a stained undershirt and boxers and clutching a rolled-up copy of Jugs.

I choked back the urge to laugh.

“What’s so goddamn funny?” Kowalski said.

I shrugged and said, “You up for Hobo of the Year Award?”

Kowalski scowled. “Funny guy,” he retorted. “Why don’t you save it for your crappy books?”

“Neville...”

“Didn’t you hear me?” Kowalski barked. “I’m worn out, man. I’m gonna take my old VW bus and hit the friggin’ highway. I got friends up in Woodstock. Figure I’ll head north and check out that cream soda enema I told you about.”

“Neville, I talked to Marcus.”

Kowalski dropped the magazine.

“What’s that you say?”

“And it was a cream soda spinal tap, by the way.”

“You mean it?” Kowalski said. “You really spoke to your old man?”

I shrugged, disgruntled by the ease with which the impossible had become irritatingly acceptable.

“He saved my life in Central Park two days ago.”

“You wouldn’t gaslight a beat-up old alky, would ya, Junior?” Kowlaski said.

“He told me to ask you about the Bent,” I said.

Kowalski clapped his hands and broke into the kind of jig you only see in movies about toothless old prospectors.

“Holy Christmas!” he crowed. “That wily old son-of-a bitch really did it!”

Kowalski reached out and grabbed me by the arm.

“Christ, don’t let’s stand out here like a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Get your ass inside!”

Kowalski yanked me into Kalakuta and slammed the door behind us.

“Marcus came to me, you know?” he said. “The day of the funeral. He told me what he had in mind.”

Kowalski peered around warily.

“I wasn’t sure if it was really him or... somethin’ else, y’know? Somethin’ from... over there? I told myself, ‘Kowalski, you’re just grievin’ over your best friend.’ Hell I thought I was re-trippin’ from all the acid I cranked back in the sixties. But then you came along and...Hot Damn!”

As he spoke, Kowalski danced back and forth in the big entry hall, his forefingers poking holes in the air around his head like fleshy exclamation points.

Despite my earlier paranoia, the iceberg in my chest began to melt, just at the edges. Then again I’ve always had a soft spot for toothless old prospectors.

“You asked me about the Bent,” he said. “In your old man’s case, it was the ability to sniff out the residents of the Wraithing whenever they reared their ugly heads in his general vicinity. That was his Bent, his talent.”

I nodded, only half-getting it.

“You’re saying my father was a medium?”

Kowalski shrugged. “Call it psychic, or sensitive. Different hunters have different Bents. Most of us, like me, don’t have anything other than gut instinct. Usually we get paired with a Sensitive, a Bender, each hunter augmenting the other. Like Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in those shitty Lethal Weapon flicks. That way, the burden is shared.”

“And Marcus, my father was a... He had a Bent?”

Kowlaski nodded. “That’s why you were able to see him. Hell, I’ve been chasing squatters for forty years. I’ve developed what I call my ‘Ass-clench Intuition.’ When a scenario doesn’t feel right my ass muscles get hard as a couple of silicone titties.”

Kowalski belched and leaned forward, like a dying man imparting the secrets of the universe. “But you got the knack,” he said. “Marcus must have passed his bent down to you, sure as I got the worst case of hee-morrhoids in the Hudson Valley! No offence.”

“None taken,” I said. “You said something about a burden?”

Kowalski’s expression hardened and his smile disappeared faster than grits at a Baptist brunch.

“Sit down, son,” he said.

I sat on the dusty armchair in the sitting room off the entryway. Kowalski dragged an old armchair over to the sofa and sat facing me.

“The Bent is many things: a gift; a weapon. It’s also the responsibility to put the squatters down when the need arises. Since most people wouldn’t accept the existence of the supernatural if it pooped in their Christmas pudding, the task falls to folks like us. But your father’s was a rare talent, even among the Benders.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, my heartbeat racing. “Are you telling me that Marcus... that I have... some kind of super powers?”

Kowalski scowled. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “We’re not talkin’ Buffy the Vampire Slayer or any o’ that daffy shite.”

“Oh,” I said, visions of Keanu Reaves/Matrix-style jujitsu fights disintegrating in my head.

“Call it a modest ‘gifting,’” Kowalski said. “To offset the gross supernatural advantages enjoyed by the squatters.”

“Squatters?”

“Yes,” Kowlaski said. “You see, we’re alerted to any breach of the Nolane’s defenses by the Referral Service. The Service helps us locate the squatter and clears the way for us to intercept it, thereby ‘sealing’ the breach.”

“You mean you have to just run out whenever someone from this Service calls?”

“Yep.”

This information evoked an upwelling of financial self-interest. How the hell could I be expected to pack up and leave at the behest of some shadowy organization I’d never heard of?

“Who are they?” I said.

Kowalski shrugged. “Haven’t the foggiest. But they’re never wrong. You may not hear from them for a month, sometimes two or three at a stretch. There’re always minor pinpricks in the Nolane’s defenses: a malignant sprite, maybe a goatsucker down in ol’ Mexico, but when a full breach occurs...”

A telephone beeped somewhere. Kowalski stopped and stared at me. “Well I’ll be…”

“What is it?” I said.

“Hold yer water.”

Kowalski walked out of the sitting room. From somewhere close by I heard him answer the phone.

“Yeah,” he grunted. “Go ahead. I see. Yep. Ahhh, well, he’s right here. But I don’t think... Where?”

Kowalski was quiet for a long time.

I glanced around the sitting room.

The walls were lined with bookshelves. As Kowalski grunted in the next room, I walked over to the shelves and perused the titles. Many of them were familiar: Moby Dick, A Christmas Carol, Fahrenheit ...

But one large leather bound volume caught my eye. Its spine was unadorned; no title graced its length. Curious, I reached up and slid the book out of its place between Lord of the Flies and The Lord of the Rings.

The book was old, heavier than it looked. The leather binding glistened as if it had been recently oiled.

I flipped through the first few pages.

Handwritten text lined the yellowing, wafer-thin sheets from top to bottom. Some of the pages featured illustrations, intricate renderings of battles between what looked like entire human armies against a slavering demonic horde.

Each of the illustrations, some in black and white, some rendered in colors so vivid they seemed to leap up from the page, displayed startling skill. These had been rendered with an attention to detail that seemed almost otherworldly. Each image had been painstakingly reproduced, each character captured in a moment of ecstasy or grief so visceral that I felt a lump rising at the back of my throat.

I turned to the last page.

The illustration featured a demon squatting atop a mountain of corpses. A screaming black man lay cradled across the demon’s lap. A loop of the black man’s entrails dangled from the demon’s open mouth, its end still anchored within the gaping red hole in the man’s abdomen.

Behind the demon, a dark figure stood on the edge of a black forest, its form partially hidden among the trees. The figure towered above that dark landscape. It was part man, part tree, with eyes that burned like branding irons.

It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing.

When I did, a surge of horror rose up in me and threatened to twist the floor out from under my feet.

“What are you doing?”

I spun, strode across the library and thrust the open book at Kowalski. “You did this?”

The look on Kowalski’s face diverted the stream of imprecations thronging at the backs of my teeth. Something in his demeanor seemed to buckle; some inner reservoir of resilience gave way and he sat down heavily on the sofa.

“That book belonged to Marcus,” Kowalski said. 

His voice lowered to almost a whisper and he looked down at the floor as if I’d uncovered something shameful. “I didn’t do it,” he said. “I’ve never seen it before today.”

“The man in this picture...” I said. “It’s him, isn’t it? It’s Marcus.”

Kowalski nodded, “Yes.”

“How?” I said. “He would have to have painted this before he...”

I stopped, realizing even before I said it, that such a thing would have been impossible. Marcus Grudge had been many things, but he was no artist.

“Every hunter receives a Book like that the day he sets his foot upon the Road,” Kowalski said. “The Book records his Walk, documents it.”

“For what?” I said.

Kowalski stared down at the floor. His reply was barely audible. “Posterity.” 

The word hung in the air between us like the final bite of a guillotine. Kowalski seemed to have lost the power of movement. He stared at the floor as if he were afraid to acknowledge the book’s presence.

“Normal folks never see them,” he said. “The Nolane have ways of marking their tools. Those pictures you’re looking at would be indecipherable to any regular Joe who just happened to stumble across the book. Only the hunters can read them.

“The Book records a hunter’s victories and his defeats. It records the beginning of a hunter’s Walk. Just as sure as it records the journey’s end.”

I stared at the last illustration in Marcus’s Book, repulsed and yet unable to look away.

“Have you seen your book?” I said.

Kowalski looked up from the floor, his eyes glittering.

“Don’t ever ask me that question again.”

Ashamed, frightened by the emotion I saw in his eyes, I threw the Book across the room.

“I don’t want this,” I said. “I didn’t ask for this.”

Kowalski stood and put a hand on my shoulder. I shrugged him away, whirled and faced him.

You’re trapped in this. With him. Trapped.

“Don’t touch me,” I snarled, more to my ghosts than to Kowalski. I grabbed him by the shoulders, pulled him in close and spoke directly into his face.

“I decide my destiny, understand?  Not you, not him, not that thing in the basement. And not some fucking book.”

I let him go and stalked past him.

“You can’t hide,” Kowalski said. “It is your destiny. It’ll find you wherever you go.”

I slammed the door on my way out, determined to lodge my complaint loudly enough for the whole careless universe to hear. But somehow, I sensed that it was a wasted effort.

The Universe didn’t give a shit.

I went off to get drunk.

23

Blithe Spirits

Drinking to escape your problems is wrong. The problems don’t go away just because you’ve chosen to drink yourself into a stupor. On the contrary, when you finally sober up, inevitably lying facedown in a puddle of various bodily fluids, the problems are still there, hovering like desperate relatives over the deathbed of a dying lotto winner.

Drinking for the simple expedient of getting blasted into unconsciousness, however, is perfectly acceptable.

I’d chosen McNair’s, a low-end, usually enjoyably empty “sports bar” just off the Westside Highway, to take my stand against rampant consciousness. It was two-o’clock in the afternoon, six hours before I was due upstate at Juno’s house. By two-thirty I was reasonably potted and feeling only a modicum of pain.

“Hey, pal,” a voice intruded. “You’ve got a lotta nerve, sitting on your ass while people are dying.”

I turned a bleary eye toward the seat on my right.

The mutilated couple was back, and this time they’d brought friends.  Seated on the barstool next to the mutilated Asians was a dark-skinned bearded man wearing a red turban. Like Marcus Grudge’s ghost and that of the one-armed Chinese man, the bearded man had been gutted. His throat had been ripped open. Blood and bits of bone sprinkled the front of his white short-sleeved shirt and his turban was smoking.

“This is him?” the Hindu said. “I can’t believe what my eyes are telling me.”

“Guy looks like a homo, you ask me.”

This from the thirty-something, balding white man wearing a Seattle P.D. field jacket. The nametag on the field jacket read, Ofc. Don Corcoran. Don Corcoran’s face had been smashed into red pudding. His head had been twisted around so far on his neck that he was forced to sit with his back to the bar simply to participate in the conversation. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

After meeting my dead father in Central Park it seemed strangely normal, meeting this coffee klatch of spooks in broad daylight. What I wasn’t prepared for was their criticism.

“Do you really think alcohol will solve your problems?” the Hindu said. “If you do then we are all damned.”

The Amerasian woman, whom I’d first seen during my father’s funeral, shook her head, the gristle and exposed tendons in her throat making wet little popping sounds.

“Leave him alone, Mr. Singh,” she said. “He’s working it out in the only way he knows how.”

“Working it out?” Corcoran snarled. “I had a wife and three kids to feed, honey! Half the Seattle PD gets smoked by a friggin’ monster and this guy sits here gettin’ tanked on mojitos.”

“It’s whiskey, pal,” I mumbled. I didn’t like the dead cop’s tone. “Jack Daniels’ finest blend.”

“Jeezus,” Corcoran groaned. “He is a homo.”

“I disagree,” said another voice, this one on my left.

I turned and saw something that looked like an anthropomorphic pile of hamburger sitting on the barstool to my left. “Forgive my appearance,” the talking hamburger said. Its accent was heavily flavored with Spanish, possibly Mexican or maybe El Salvadoran. “I have yet to master…”

“I know,” I interrupted. “‘Shape-molding.’ Look up my father when you get a chance. He can give you a few pointers.”

For some reason I found the thought of my father teaching this crew of spectral misfits the art of image management hilariously funny. I began to chuckle. Twenty seconds later, I was bent over the bar, howling with laughter.

“Jesus,” Corcoran grumbled. “The guy’s comin’ apart.”

“I concur,” the Hindu said. “She must choose another representative.”

“She won’t,” the Amerasian woman snapped. “And She won’t have to.”

“What do you people want?” I asked when I could catch my breath. I was suddenly less drunk than I’d hoped to be. The mutilated Dead were putting a crimp in my plan to obliterate myself before dark.

“We want what all the Dead want,” Corcoran snarled. “We want Justice.”

The Hindu nodded in agreement. “Revenge.”

“But he is too pampered,” the animated meat-puppet on my left gurgled. Looking closely, I could make out the remnants of a face, one brown eyeball stared up at me from the barstool’s seat. Tufts of black hair covered what I took to have been mustache-covered lips. “Look at his clothes, si? The way he weeps when he laughs. He is like a girl. A very ugly little girl.”

“Quiet please, Señor Beltran,” the Amerasian woman snapped. The other spooks quit clamoring. The Amerasian female ghost turned back to me. “You have to choose, Mister Grudge,” she continued. “In all the horrors yet to come, you must pick a side. You won’t be allowed to haunt the sidelines.”

Again I felt that geyser of inappropriate laughter welling up from deep inside me. The look of disapproval on the dead woman’s face stopped me.

“You are more than you know,” she said. “Your father was right about you.”

I leaned forward. “What do you know about my father?”

“Who the heck are you talking to?”

I turned to see who was speaking and found myself uncomfortably close to the ugly bartender. “Everything alright, buddy?”

I turned back, looking for the mutilated Dead, knowing even then what I would find: nothing. I was alone.

“Had a few too many, eh, pal?”

I looked around, nonplussed by the vanishing acts of the Dead; nonplussed by my inability to banish them from the geek show that was rapidly destroying my life.

“Hey, I read one of your books,” the ugly bartender shrugged. “Not bad, but not exactly my cuppa joe, you know what I mean? I’m more of a Crime slash Mystery slash ‘Detective at the End of the Line’ type guy.”

Laughing, I bellied up to the bar and slid my empty glass forward.

 “Just fill ‘er up, asshole.” 

24

Juno

I hate candles. Dim lighting makes me nauseous.

I write in the harshest electric lighting possible: One hundred and fifty-watt ‘Brite-white’ bulbs. They spotlight the corners of my office like a prison yard after a food riot. Anything less feels unclear to me, overly forgiving in the presence of encroaching darkness.

Juno Kementari’s house offered entire dissertations on the tepid forgiveness of candlelight. There were candles everywhere: on shelves, on tables. The lukewarm illumination they provided reminded me of an Indian leprosy ward I’d read about where the residents lived in the dark, stumbling over themselves rather than seeing the ravages of their illness in the faces of their neighbors.

Despite my best efforts earlier that afternoon, I’d been unable to attain the depth of drunken stupor to which I’d aspired. As I stood in Juno’s entry hall, I was disgustingly sober.

While I waited for my host to descend the winding stairway that led down to the entry hall, Trocious, her manservant, towered over my left shoulder, his massive frame half-visible in the medieval illumination.

“Dark,” I observed.

“Ms. Kementari is a staunch conservationist,” Trocious rumbled. “What light there is she finds sufficient.”

“Wonderful,” I grumbled.

“We see the truth in darkness, Mr. Grudge.”

There’s something surreal about the voices of the ultra famous. When you hear them standing in the same room, or ahead of you in the express line at Food World, there’s always a moment when real life blends with fantasy; when borders blur and boundaries realign. 

Juno Kementari had never been a great beauty.

Her diet dramas were the stuff of legend. Her complex history of binge eating and purging had provided material enough for entire mini-series. One particularly vicious tabloid had published nude photos of Juno sunbathing at her vacation home in Tuscany, inciting litanies of walrus jokes on the late-night talk-show circuit.

But the woman gliding down that winding staircase looked fit, even svelte in a black pinstriped suit and white silk shirt, which she wore open at the throat. Black high heels accentuated her height. On a tall day, Juno might have stood five-feet-seven-inches, maybe five-eight at the most. In the shadows of her domain, however, Juno seemed taller, more imposing than I remembered.

“Trocious, please take Mr. Grudge’s coat.”

I was grabbed a little too enthusiastically a second later. Trocious was as big as Shaquille O’Neal and twice as wide. His hands closed around my upper biceps and yanked my jacket off like a gorilla peeling a wily banana. Then he patted me down.

“Is this really necessary?” I snapped.

“When you’ve encountered as many stalkers as I have,” Juno said, smiling. “You can never be too careful.”

“He’s clean,” Trocious rumbled.

“He is?” Juno said.

The surprise in her voice was as confusing as it was offensive.

“Hey,” I shrugged. “I’m not in the habit of assassinating my hosts.”

The smile on Juno’s face seemed to brighten the air around her. At the same time, I thought I saw the flicker of something predatory ignite in her eyes. She looked me up and down with a hunger that appeared vaguely cannibalistic.

I wondered if I was about to get lucky. If so, I welcomed the challenge. An energetic bout of star-fucking seemed like just the thing to take my mind off my problems.

“Please join me in the dining room,” she purred.  

My entire upper body felt bruised from Trocious’ manual dry-hump. As Juno moved away down a long candle-darkened hallway, I limped after her into a sitting room. It was small only in relation to the dining room I could see through the double doors on the other side, a room the size of a small ballroom. 

“Trocious can be a little overzealous,” Juno said. “But I like that in men who safeguard my well-being.”

“I find that rather unsettling,” I said.

I shivered as a cold draft from the open windows in the dining room raised gooseflesh along my forearms. I jerked my head sharply to the right, trying to break up the knot of tension that had been growing between my shoulder blades since I’d first laid eyes on Juno’s valet.

Darkness. Stink. Sleeping in filth...

“Wine?” Juno said as she waved me toward a sofa. “I’ve worked up a dynamic little Merlot at my vineyards upstate.”

“Yes, please,” I said.

It was growing increasingly cold. As Juno disappeared behind the bar I clenched my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. At the same time, beads of sweat popped up across my forehead and my nose began to run.

“Do you have a cat?” I said.

“Can’t stand the things,” Juno said. “Why?”

“I’m allergic.”

Juno stepped out from behind the bar and handed me a crystal wine glass. The merlot swirled, thick and brackish in the candlelight. Tiny ripples of flame danced in liquid so red it looked black, flecks of moonlight trapped in a swirling cauldron of blood.

“Don’t worry,” she purred. “There’s only room for one pussy in this house.” 

Juno eased herself down next to me on the sofa.

Somewhere, far away, a bell began to toll in my head.

A drop of sweat rolled into my right eye and Juno’s image blurred. My throat tightened and my tongue seemed fiercely intent on slipping down the back of my throat.

Juno slid closer to me on the sofa, her eyes shining, her face shimmering like an image seen through clear ice. An itch tickled the roof of my mouth. Dimly, I recalled my reaction to the bite of the red worms the day before.

“I’ve followed your career with great interest, Obadiah,” Juno said. “I’ve read each of your books from cover to cover.”

I couldn’t breathe. My throat felt as if someone had shoved a ball of burning hemp halfway down my esophagus. My vision wavered and Juno’s face, the ubiquitous flames from a million candles, shimmered behind a curtain of tears.

“I’m... sorry,” I said. “I think I need...”     

“Your stories have attracted a great deal of attention, Obadiah,” Juno said. “People want to know more about you. We can’t have that.”

“I need...need a doctor,” I gasped.

“You’re sick?” Juno said. She shook her head and offered me a pained smile of sympathy. “That’s a pity. Still, maybe you can share some part of my wonderful darkness before the Feasting Time comes.”

I staggered to my feet and immediately fell to my knees. Even that meager increase in distance from Juno seemed to clear my head. The pressure in my throat eased somewhat and my vision cleared.

I began to crawl.

“Oh you can’t get away,” Juno said. “It’s much too late for that.”

I was five feet from the door of the sitting room. It hovered before me like an entrance to Nirvana encircled by golden flames. Every inch that separated me from Juno Kemantari seemed to return some measure of my faculties. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I had to get out.

I dragged myself toward the hall, reached out for the doorjamb to pull myself out of the room and my hands fell on a pair of immense black Cowboy boots. I looked up.

Several stories above my head, Trocious leered down at me, his eyes burning in the candle-gloom like dying twin suns.

“Please,” I gasped. “Help...me.”

Trocious grinned. His teeth were longer than I remembered, sharper. His incandescent eyes seemed to flash with an inner fire. That flame pierced the clouds that obscured my senses like the light from a gangrenous moon.  

Then he slammed the doors in my face.

“The Greeks always did have a flair for the drama,” Juno said. “Only appropriate, I suppose, since they invented it.”

I turned.

Juno stood in the center of the room, her head thrown back, hands on her hips. She was naked.

“It’s not too late, Obadiah,” she said. “I sensed it as I read Death and the Sorcerer. We’re kindred spirits, you and I. We could make this world our plaything.”

I lay there, unable to move, as Juno began to tremble, her flesh quivering until it rolled across her body in brown waves.

“I have something wonderful to show you,” she moaned. “Something I picked up during my travels abroad.”

She reached up behind her head, thrust her hands beneath her mop of black hair and tugged. I heard a sound like thick paper ripping and Juno’s eyes rolled back in her head. With a grunt, she pulled her scalp down over her forehead.

A flash of bone peeked between her fingers as she rolled her hair and scalp down over her face like a snake shedding its skin, pushed the skin down around her shoulders, her hips, her thighs... then past her knees and calves.

The glistening network of muscles and veins that stood before me in the Elizabethan illumination gloom stepped out of Juno’s empty skin, and moved toward me with its arms outstretched.

“Can you see me?” it said. “I’ve been… practicing.”

I couldn’t respond. I was only able to shake my head back and forth, dimly aware of the gobbling sounds that were drizzling from my mouth but unable to stop myself.

The thing with Juno Kementari’s voice took another step toward me. “It hurts to hold the fires inside,” she said. “No one tells you...how badly... the power... huuuurtsss.”

The fleshless thing limped forward, dragging a glistening red stain across the light oak hardwood floor. She opened her mouth. In the candlelight a double row of needle-sharp teeth glinted wetly.

“I dreamed about you,” she said. “Dreamed you were inside me.”

I flipped over and reached up for the doorknob. My hand met only cool wood where the doorknob should have been.

“No way out,” the Juno thing said.

The thing grabbed me by the legs and pain exploded in my calves and ankles. It felt as if I’d stuck them into a roaring furnace.

It flipped me over as if I were a child. I punched it in the head, grabbed at it, my hands slipping across wet muscles and exposed tendons.

Pain seared the palms of my hands and I jerked them away as my flesh blistered. Then the Juno thing gripped me with its terrible, burning strength, pulled my head back until the tendons in my neck creaked, and sank its fangs into my throat.

I screamed. I could taste my own blood on the back of my tongue as a stream of lava poured out of me, faster, faster. The Juno thing sucked harder; drew more of me into its mouth.

Like God injecting fire into your veins. The fire leaves a little of itself inside you, changes you.

You were right, Lenore, I thought. Right about everything.

From a million miles away, I heard shouting. It was coming from the hallway.

The Juno thing withdrew its fangs from my throat, lifted its head, and whirled toward the sound as the shouting grew louder. Its skin grew unbearably hot. A second later she began to smolder. Smoke rose up from her head and shoulders, and filled my nostrils with the smell of burning pork.

The door to the sitting room burst open.

“Juno Kementari, avaunt!”

Neville Kowalski stood in the doorway, a black crossbow at his shoulder.

The Juno thing released me and I fell to my knees, my vision wavering, on the edge of consciousness.

“Get your ass out of the way, Grudge,” Kowalski snapped.

Behind him, ten other people streamed into the sitting room. The newcomers wore black skullcaps that hid the tops of their heads, heavy black work pants and black coats.

They moved with an eerie economy of motion. None of them spoke, each man or woman moving into position smoothly, circling us, seemingly without command or signal, until we were completely surrounded.

The hunters.

They were armed with a variety of weapons: iron staves, axes, handguns, shotguns. Some carried long-bladed cutting implements, knives, scythes or hatchets.

The Juno thing snarled as the black-clad strangers blocked the exits. The smell of frying carrion grew overpowering.

“Watch her!” Kowalski snapped.

The Juno thing screamed.

Then it burst into flame.

25

A Weapon of Mass Distraction

Kowalski cursed and fired the crossbow.

The wooden bolt shot across the room and struck the flaming Juno thing in the center of the chest. The burning creature shrieked. The heat radiating from its body increased and I felt the hairs in my nose disintegrate.

Kowalski’s wooden bolt fell away, burned to ash.

“Staves!” he shouted.  

I scrambled for the nearest corner, the smell of my own burning facial hair creating sufficient concern for my safety. I was inches from the shelter of an open armoire when somebody grabbed me by the collar. A second later, my feet left the floor.

The Juno thing launched into the air like a comet, towing me along through a foul-smelling cloud of black smoke and bits of hot bone. We banked over the heads of the monster killers and streaked toward the northern end of the room.

“Ware the windows!” Kowalski shouted.

Three hunters placed themselves in front of the tall French doors at the far end of the dining room. The Juno thing uttered a coughing belch. There was a deafening blast of heat and fire, and one of the hunters, a woman, clutched her head and burst into flames.

The second hunter, a compact black man wielding a hatchet, ducked under the next firebolt. He reared back, preparing to fling the hatchet. The Juno thing regurgitated a gout of flame and roasted the hatchet-wielder where he stood. The hunter was propelled backward by the firebolt’s force, his body melting even as I watched. What struck the floor was something so repellent that I screamed.

The third hunter, a dark-haired Latina, thrust herself between the Juno thing and the nearest window. In one smooth motion she rolled into a kneeling firing position and aimed a Glock 9mm at my face.

“Hernandez, hold your fire!” Kowalski thundered. You’ll hit Grudge!”

The Juno thing veered away from the woman with the gun and Kowalski appeared at the opposite end of the dining room in front of a second set of open French doors leading out into the pool area.

“Door’s right this way, you ugly sack o’ shitworms,” he barked.

With a murderous shriek, the Juno thing hurtled across the dining room, inhaling flame to blast Kowalski into hot blood pudding.

Kowalski tossed something high into the air.

The object, a foot-long block of white stone, flipped over once, hit the floor and shattered into a thousand white pebbles.

The Juno thing dropped me.

I fell six feet to the floor as the fireball shot past me, changing shape as she flew. The fleshless crone, extinguished now, dropped to the floor, landing on her hands and knees.   

“Oh, you bastards,” she snarled.

The crone leaned forward, veined hands stroking the white crystalline chunks, and began to lick the floor.

“Oooohhh, you dirty...bastards,” she moaned.

With a shudder, the crone began to sift through the tiny crystals, tasting some, rejecting others. The hunters surrounded her, their weapons raised. The fleshless crone ignored them, her attention devoted to the white crystals.

“It’s salt,” Kowalski said.

My body felt like it had been run through an automated meat tenderizer and flash-fried to a golden brown. But I felt better than I’d done a few moments earlier.

“What the hell’s going on?” I cried. “What’s she doing?”

“Counting,” Kowlaski said. “She’s a soucouyant.”

“A what?”

“Hails from Trinidad and Tobago. In other parts of the Caribbean she’s known as the Old Higue.”

Kowalski turned toward me. “She’s a vampire.”

“But I saw you shoot her,” I said. “That crossbow...”

“Was as useless as my old John Thackery,” Kowalski shrugged. “Sometimes the traditional methods work, sometimes they don’t. But this much holds true: Vampires, whether they hail from Romania, Ireland or the Belgian Congo, share one weakness: They’re all obsessive-compulsives.”

I stared at the crone.

She’d already succeeded in stockpiling a neat molehill of salt between her thighs. She nosed about in the crystals, separating them grain-by-grain, muttering to herself and cursing.

“Some of the legends are true,” Kowalski continued. “No bloodsucker will cross open water, or enter a home, or a mind, without being invited first.”

“Obsessive/compulsive,” I said.

Kowalski nodded at the crone.

“She could do that ‘til Madonna becomes the Pope,” he said. “Fortunately, we won’t have to wait ‘til Hell freezes over.”

Kowalski lifted the empty skin the fleshless crone had left in the center of the room. It sagged in his arms like a ruptured Inflate-a-Date.

Keeping clear of the Juno thing, Kowalski stooped and grabbed a fistful of salt from the floor. The soucouyant snarled and slashed at him, her fingers elongating into vicious-looking claws as I watched. Then she went back to counting.

Kowalski tilted back the head of the empty flesh suit and poured the fistful of salt down the sagging throat.

The response was immediate. The Juno thing screamed and began to crawl across the floor toward us. One of the hunters raised a long black stave over the soucouyant’s head.

“Wait!” Kowalski shouted. “I wanna see this.”

He threw the empty skin on the floor, inches from the soucouyant’s outstretched hands. The soucouyant grabbed the flesh-suit and shrieked as if her hands were being scalded by the contact. Nevertheless, she began to crawl back into her skin.

I’d seen a lot of fucked-up things since meeting Neville Kowalski. I’d experienced enough strangeness to fill my head with a kind of howling numbness: a defense mechanism, I suppose, to protect my over-burdened psyche from a massive influx of the Weird.

But seeing Juno Kementari slither into a sizzling sack of her own vacated flesh was the bile-flavored icing on a seven-layer crap cake.

She’d barely gotten both legs back on before she began to dissolve. Her flesh split in a hundred places, bubbling as if she’d stepped into a tub filled with hydrochloric acid.

Juno screamed and gnashed her teeth, biting through the meat of her tongue until blood poured out of her mouth, but she wouldn’t stop.

“See?” Kowalski said. “Obsessive/compulsive. The soucoyant loves salt. Even though it has power over her, she’s gotta feel each grain against her raw nerves. It’s like catnip to a Calico: She can’t help herself.”

Even as Juno pulled the skin up to cover the top of her skull, the lower half of her body began to come apart. The air was filled with a sickly stench as plumes of black smoke burst from the top of her now human-looking head.

“You dirty bastards!” she howled.

By now, she’d covered herself in the skin suit, but it was too late. She rolled around on the floor, tearing at herself, gnashing at the flesh of her arms and legs as if she could scour them clean. Her body collapsed in upon itself, and I was unpleasantly reminded of what happens to a slug when covered with salt.

Juno uttered one high-pitched wail of despair, an ear-splitting screech that rattled the windows in the room. Then she lay still.

No one spoke for a long time.

Finally, Kowalski broke the silence.

“Well, ain’t that a bitch?”

I pinched my eyes shut, silently begging my gut to quit break dancing. It ignored me and performed a double-twisting ‘helicopter spin’ that would have made Justin Timberlake black with envy. A second later, I fell to my hands and knees and threw up all over Juno’s imported Turkish area rug.

The strained silence above me tickled the nerve-endings at the nape of my neck, a physical red alert that goes off whenever the walls of my dignity have been firebombed. I looked up to find that I was surrounded by the monster hunters.

Kowalski shook his head and gave up the kind of embarrassed shrug I’d come to expect from my mother.

“Heh,” he offered.

The tall brunette who had nearly blown my face off caught my attention. She was tall, about thirty-five, built like an Olympic swimmer: broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted. She wore a black leather biker jacket, black t-shirt, jeans and sturdy engineer’s boots. She might have been beautiful save for the grimace of distaste that curdled her features. And the black patch that covered her right eye.

“That’s Marcus Grudge’s son?” the one-eyed brunette growled.

“Damn right,” Kowalski growled. “So whatever’s stuck in yer craw, Hernandez, do the world a favor and keep it stuck.”

“He’s soft,” Hernandez snapped. “He smells like a cheap piece of ass. I don’t get it.”

“It’s not for you to ‘get,’” Kowalski shot back.

Hernandez shook her shoulder length black hair and slapped her Glock into a holster on her hip.

“He’s a pussy, Kowalski.”

The two of them glared at each other, something that looked like hate slicing the air between them.

“I’m bringing him along,” Kowalski said simply.

But something else lurked beneath the plainness of his statement, a softness that undercut his hard tone. The one-eyed brunette stooped in one graceful motion and picked up one of the black iron staves.

“You should have killed him,” she said. “He would have been better off.”

“You’re a cold-hearted ball-buster, Hernandez.” Kowlaski snapped.

The one-eyed hunter slid the iron stave into a long leather sheath. Her eyes never left Kowalski’s.

“And you’re a deluded old fool.”

A moment later, the doors leading to the hallway exploded off their hinges.

The other hunters spun, weapons at the ready as dust and debris settled to the floor.

Trocious stood in the doorway.

“Who the Hell are you?” Kowalski said.

“The fulfillment of a long, dark dream,” Trocious replied. “A dream from which there will be no waking.”

His eyes flared like sun storms, casting the rest of his face in ghoulish shadows. His voice rumbled through the air like the Trump of Doom.

 “I’m going to kill every single one of you.”

26

Throwdown at the Ambiguously-Lit Rodeo of Doom

Kowalski turned toward me and flipped a 9mm toward my head. I caught it, barely.

“What is he?” Hernandez snapped. She held the sharpened iron stave in front of her, its point facing the black giant in the doorway.

“I don’t know,” Kowalski growled. “Frankel’s the Diviner.”

“Frankel’s dead,” Hernandez said.

Trocious stood casually, his thickly-muscled arms at his sides seemingly relaxed. His eyes remained focused on mine as if the hunters’ discussion was beneath his notice.

“I’m offering you a chance,” he said. “You have uncommon attributes which our side might find useful.”

I glanced at Kowalski. The old man was holding his crossbow at the ready. I hadn’t seen him reload it, but a black bolt sat notched and aimed at Trocious’s heart.

“Don’t listen to him, Grudge,” Kowalski said. “He’s a goddamned liar, just like his dead-bitch mistress.”

Trocious laughed.

“Mistress?” he said. “But you misperceive my purpose. The woman was not the cause, merely the lure. Her fate is of no consequence.”

“You seduced her,” Kowalski said. “Sucked her in with promises and then turned her into that thing.”

“She sought power,” Trocious sneered. “Her dreams called out to me, brought me to her even across the Rift, so great was the force of her desire. They were the dreams of a powerful mind, but she craved more power. Such thoughts are as meat and drink to my kind.”

“In return you gave her Death,” Kowalski said.

“I gave her Night’s Embrace,” Trocious said. “And the power to use it however her wits might allow. It was she who chose the form of her destruction.”

Trocious turned his gaze back to me.

“These others have only moments of life left to them, but you may choose a different destiny.”

“Grudge...” Kowalski warned.

“A destiny you will serve, willing or no.”

“Shoot him,” Hernandez snapped. “Goddamit, Kowalski…”

“It won’t do any good,” Kowalski said. “Can’t you feel his power?”

Indeed, in that moment even, I saw it. He seemed to vibrate with force.  Energy, an aura, some kind of power swirled in the air around Juno’s “manservant.” I could see it, a black-light cloud of dark motes spinning around Trocious like a tornado of malice. That malice reached out and swirled around Kowalski and the hunters.

“I was born a slave,” Trocious said. “I’ve walked this world since before Abraham Lincoln was born. In my dreams, one of the Hallowed Ones came to me. He sang to me tales of a faraway land, a land of olive trees and white sands, of a distant shore lapped by a deep green sea: a land where all men were free.”

Kowalski and the other hunters stood as still as statues. Tears glimmered in Hernandez’s eyes, a rictus of pain twisting her face. The hunters stood, immobilized as effectively as if they had been turned to stone by Trocious’s malice.

The manservant took a step toward me.

“The Hallowed One offered me the power to destroy my captors if I served him willingly. He offered me the lives of the ones who sold my children. I accepted, and became as one of the Hallowed. I have served them ever since.”

Trocious extended his hand toward me. In the flickering candlelight, the nails of his right hand shone black as obsidian.

“Of what do you dream, Obadiah Grudge? Power? Limitless Wealth? The hearts of your enemies laid before you to grind beneath your heel? You have only to join us and all these dreams can be made real.”

Unbidden, the face of Tobi Bernardi, the literary critic for the New York Times, popped into my head. A vision of Bernardi crawling naked across the floor of my mansion in the Hamptons with an apple in her mouth sprang into being before my inner eye. The fact that I didn’t own a mansion in the Hamptons seemed a minor consideration.    

My mouth hinged open.

Then another voice rang out.

“Bullshit.”

Trocious turned toward the speaker.

Kowalski was chewing his lips to pieces.

His mouth and chin were covered with blood; a pink froth dripped out of his mouth and spattered his black coat.

“Bu...bu...bullshhh...”

As I watched, Kowalski raised his right fist as if it weighed a hundred pounds and punched himself in the nose.

“Bullshit!” he hollered.

His distress seemed to galvanize the other hunters.

One by one, they re-started, like sleepwalkers waking to find themselves naked in the middle of the Hollywood Freeway.

“You freaks killed my father and every other hunter that was ever worth a good goddamn,” Kowalski said.

He lifted his crossbow and fired. The bolt flew across the room and buried itself in Trocious’s heart.

“Let him have it!” Kowalski roared. A second later, a fusillade of gunfire filled the room with the thunder of War.

I dove to the floor.

Trocious stood there, his arms outstretched in the hail of bullets, with Kowlaski’s crossbow bolt sticking out of his chest. 

The manservant grew a foot taller, his shoulders bulging, shifting as his muscles twisted and expanded. The bones in his legs broke themselves and reformed. His feet turned black, became hooves. His face elongated, nostrils flaring—

Blood. Wet. Darkness. Laughing, laughing in the light…

—and his forehead broadened and extended. As the hunters’ fire tore into him, Trocious roared. His upper body hunched forward, grew heavier, even more thickly muscled. A dense black fur covered his torso, back and shoulders, and two long black horns burst through the bones of his skull.

What stood before me was something I remembered from Greek mythology, a monster, half-man and half bull, cursed by a god to live in seclusion and darkness for all eternity.

Kowalski fired another bolt.

Trocious snatched the shaft out of the air and flung it at one of the hunters, a short, stocky woman with a blue Mohawk. The shaft pierced the hunter’s throat and pinned her to the armoire.

Then he charged.

The hunters scattered, diving out of the monster’s path. One hunter, a muscular Asian man, was unable to get out of the way. Trocious impaled the hunter with those massive horns, lifted him off his feet and rammed him into the wall.

The impact shook the whole house, smashed plaster from the ceiling. Behind me, a huge chandelier crashed to the floor. Trocious left the hunter half-suspended in a man-sized depression in the wall, spun, and charged Hernandez.

The one-eyed hunter pulled an iron stave from the leather sheath strapped to her back. A moment before Trocious struck, she dove out of the way.

Trocious thundered past Hernandez. Before he could turn and run her down, Hernandez came up behind the bull-man and plunged the stave into the small of his back. The bull-man roared. He lashed out with his horns and struck Hernandez a glancing blow to the upper body. The one-eyed hunter flew ten feet through the air, landed on the long table and slid unconscious to the floor.

A lithe black woman darted in with a stave in each hand and rammed them into the top of the bull-man’s right buttock. Trocious roared and whirled, swinging its head with enough force to break the black hunter’s neck and fling her corpse the length of the dining hall. 

Another hunter swept in swinging a long-handled axe to behead the bull-man. Trocious whirled and countered with one long horn. The shock of the impact snapped the axe handle in half. The bull-man lashed out with one massive fist and pulped the hunter’s head. 

Two more hunters attacked in unison. One of them opened fire, peppering the bull-man with rounds from a semi-automatic shotgun. The creature staggered, reaching for the staves in its back. It seemed more affected by the iron spears: Bullets only seemed to annoy it.

The second hunter, a tall, redheaded man, threw his stave like a javelin and struck the bull-man in the shoulder. Trocious roared, spun on its heel and thundered toward me.

“Move!” the redheaded hunter cried.

At the last moment, he shoved me out of the way.

Then the bull-man ran him down.

“Shoot it!” Kowalski cried.

He was talking to me.

I glanced down at the silver automatic in my hand as the bull-man reached the far end of the dining room, spun on its heel and came for me.

I fired.

A gout of blood bloomed across the creature’s massive chest. Blood fountained out of the wound and splashed the floors of Juno Kemantari’s formal dining room.

The bull-man lunged toward me and I fired again. A red geyser spattered the shoes of the black-haired hunter crouching behind the monster. It was Hernandez.

This time, the bull-man shrieked.

The swirling black cloud began to flicker. The lambent particles slowed and began to fade. With a shout of triumph, Hernandez hurled her stave. It pierced the bull-man’s neck and punched through his Adam’s apple.

Trocious bellowed, and began to shrink.

The bull-man turned and stampeded toward the open French doors.

But Kowalski and his crossbow barred the way.

Trocious put on a burst of speed. But he was considerably slower now, bleeding heavily from his wounds.

Kowalski fired.

The bull-man veered to the right and Kowalski’s bolt shot past my left ear and buried itself in the wall inches from my head. Kowalski dove out of the way as the bull-man  smashed through the wall.

Trocious fled, bellowing, into the night.

I stood there with my gun aimed at a gaping hole in Juno’s dining room wall. Her candle-lit domain was a blood-splattered disaster. Around me, the hunters were scrambling to attend their wounded. I couldn’t move, couldn’t let go of the gun.

Hernandez got to her feet, her fists pressed against a deep gash in her side.

Kowalski moved to help the one-eyed brunette. But before he could take more than three steps Hernandez lifted one forbidding hand. Her contempt for him and for me was plain. It shone from her like a silent beacon of rage.

Kowalski nodded, but a flicker of pain contorted his features as he moved off to help the survivors.

A delayed adrenaline surge did a Soul Train Line through my nervous system and Kowalski’s gun tumbled from my hands. It struck the floor, bounced once and fired.

Next to Hernandez, a painted ceramic bust of Juno dressed as Jane Mansfield exploded in a shower of brightly-colored shrapnel. The one-eyed hunter dove onto her face.

Shattered porcelain rained down on her shoulders.

Hernandez got to her feet with as much dignity as her rage could stomach. The other hunters glared at me with a mixture of disgust, outrage, and the pity usually reserved for the mildly retarded.

But there was no pity in Hernandez’s eye.

27

The Price

Eleven hunters had come to my rescue and seven of them would never return to their homes and families.

Hernandez’s wounds were minor, the worst a deep gash from the bull-man’s horns. The tall redheaded man who’d saved my life had been seriously injured. He lay pale and unconscious on the dining room table, his ribcage crushed by the massive hooves of the Minotaur.

Eight more people, all wearing black, rushed into the room. Some of them helped to carry out the dead or tend the injured. Photos were taken. One woman recorded the operation with a high-resolution digital video camera.

Another group of hunters examined the body of Juno Kementari. They scooped Juno’s remains into a black body bag and carried it out under the watchful eye of a bald Hispanic man with a pockmarked face.

The bald man walked over to the dining table and checked the redheaded hunter’s pulse. The redhead’s skin shone pale from blood loss, slick with sweat. His breathing was labored, a wet rasp straggling in and out of his chest in shallow gulps as he struggled to breathe.

“What happened to him?” the bald man said.

Kowalski told him. The bald man nodded and put his hands on the redhead’s chest. He closed his eyes, and something, a distortion of some sort, shimmered in the space between them. There was a burst of light that faded instantly but left a silver afterimage in its wake.

A moment later, the bald man opened his eyes.

The man on the table relaxed, his muscles visibly losing their tension, as he settled onto the table. His breathing grew calmer and his skin regained some of its natural color.

The bald man looked exhausted by whatever he’d just done, but he offered me a jittery smile as the redhead was put on a gurney and rolled out of the room. The bald man spoke quietly to Kowalski. Before they parted, the bald man laid his right hand on Kowalski’s shoulder.

Kowalski slumped, as if suddenly overcome by a great weight. But a moment later, he straightened. His shoulders relaxed and he seemed to stand a little taller.

The bald man nodded and left. Through the French windows, I noticed the whirling red and blue lights of an ambulance receding into the distance.

“Doyle’s in bad shape,” Kowalski said. “His left lung’s collapsed and he’s got severe internal injuries.”

Kowalski rubbed his face as if he could reshape his features with the heels of his hands.

“If he does survive, he may never walk again. That thing broke his neck.”

“What about the others?” I said.

Kowalski grunted, “The survivors? Couple of broken bones. Nothing too serious. The man you saw tonight, the baldheaded guy? He’s a Bender. Name’s Eddie Moreno. Eddie’s something of a Healer. He can stabilize Doyle and the others until they get to a hospital. ”

“Why did Doyle do it?” I said. “He pushed me out of the way. That thing would have...”

I shuddered. The memory of the bull-man’s attack, the dark power it wielded, sent a thrill of horror up my spine.  

“He saved my life.”

Kowalski looked at me without speaking. For the first time I noticed the livid red scar on his nose, the three lines of scar tissue fading into his hairline. For the first time, I realized how vulnerable he looked.

“Doyle’s mother was a Locator. She could sense the spiritual energies of a sport and track ‘em down. She and Kevin were homeless, livin’ in a shelter when your father spotted them during a scenario. They were being stalked by a shape-changer, a predator that strangled its victims and assumed their forms.

“Theresa stumbled upon the squatter while working at the shelter. It murdered thirty other homeless people in the area before she led us to its lair. Marcus and I killed it.”

Kowlaski sighed. Behind him, a new group of hunters hustled in. The newcomers each wore silver ‘Hazmat’ protective ‘spacesuits.’ Each one carried a compact red tank strapped to his back. As Kowalski spoke, the silver-clad hunters began to spray the walls and ceilings with a strong-smelling liquid from the tanks.

“Marcus took the Doyles under his wing. Theresa helped put down more than two-dozen squatters before her ticket got punched.

“She’d been ridiculed her whole life for telling people about the monsters that whispered to her from her closet, monsters only she could hear. Marcus showed her that she wasn’t crazy, that the monsters were real.”

Kowalski smirked. The smell from the red tanks grew thick and harsh in the dining room, a bitter, chemical smell that stung tears from my eyes.

“Before she died, Theresa Doyle made Marcus promise to teach her thirteen year old son Kevin to Walk. He was one of Marcus’s first students. In some ways Kevin was the son Marcus never...”

Kowalski blanched.

“Jesus, Obadiah...” he began. “I didn’t mean...”

I waved his apology away. Two weeks earlier I would have been furious at the idea of my father adopting a surrogate son. Doyle was only a few years older than I was. Other than the fact that he was white we might have been brothers.

But none of that seemed to matter anymore.

“Kevin knew that you were Marcus’s son,” Kowalski said. “The two of them must have talked about you a great deal. He understood how important you were.”

I wanted him to stop. I didn’t want to hear what Kevin Doyle thought about me. I didn’t want to make the choice I sensed blazing above the horizon of my life like a comet heralding the End of Times.

What you want isn’t important anymore.

“I think he came here hoping to meet the son of his mentor.” Kowalski said. “But when he saw that you were in danger he found a better way to honor Marcus’s memory.”

I had to get out, away from the place where Kevin Doyle had done what I was too terrified or too selfish to do.

“I need some air.”

Kowalski followed me out of the dining room. He sat down heavily on a chair near the door and put his face in his hands.

He hadn’t enjoyed telling me Kevin Doyle’s story any more any more than I’d enjoyed hearing it.

* * * *

I sat on the front lawn and watched the last of the hunters evacuate Juno’s house. As the black S.U.V.s pulled out past the empty guard shack, Kowalski closed and locked the front door.

He walked over and sat next to me. 

“Cleaners,” he said, indicating the last of the black cars. “They’ll make sure no one ever knows what went on here tonight.”

I stared at the empty house; its windows darkened now, all lights extinguished. It was nearly midnight.

“Doyle didn’t make it,” he said, simply.

I nodded.

The first explosion shattered the windows in the upper storeys of the mansion. In moments, those floors were engulfed in flame. The men in the Hazmat spacesuits had done a thorough job. By the time the fire department arrived Juno’s home would be completely awash in flames.

Kowalski and I watched the flames rise higher. Soon it would be too hot to stay where we were. We sat, something heavier than speech thickening the air between us. Finally, I asked the question that had been building in my mind since that day in Central Park.

“What am I supposed to do?”

Kowalski turned and looked at me. Then, apparently satisfied by what he saw, he grinned. In the raging light of the fire, his smile was too bright, his eyes as extravagant as a demon’s leer.

 “Ever been to Seattle?”

28

The Name Game

We drove south, toward a private airfield near the Westchester Airport in the city of White Plains.  

“You said that my father was a Bender,” I said. “Does that make me one?”

Kowalski shrugged. “You seem to have the knack. You See. You have a native awareness of the supernatural.”

“Is it possible to have more than one Bent?”

Another shrug. “Possible. Rare, but possible. Your dad could pierce the veil of deception that the sports weave to fool the human mind. He was a Seer, one of the best. Marcus could spot a squatter even when it was illusion casting.”

In the distance I could see the lights of Westchester Airport brightening the night sky as Kowalski spoke.

“What interests me, though, is what happened when you shot at that...what did you call it?”

“The Minotaur,” I replied. “A character from Greek mythology. He was the son of a mortal queen and a magical white bull, condemned to live alone in a labyrinth for all eternity.”

Kowalski shrugged. “Why the hell would anybody want to be something like that?”

“You heard him,” I said. “He was born a slave. He dreamed of the one thing he didn’t have, could never have had: Power.”

I shifted in the passenger seat, uncomfortably reminded of how close I’d come to heeding the siren song of my own dreams: Tobi Bernardi would never know how close she’d come to being a sex slave on Southern Long Island.

“Anyway,” Kowlaski continued. “None of us were making a dent in the goddamned thing. I personally put two bolts in it. Hernandez shot the fucker at least twelve times and it still killed five hunters. We were merely irritating it. The son-of-a-bitch had us dead-to-rights.”

Kowalski paused. “Until you shot it.”

“So?”

Kowalski’s brow furled as if he were mentally flipping through the pages of some internal instruction manual.

“You know those old movies where a monster hunter shoots a Wolf with a silver bullet, or splashes a vampire with holy water?”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Bullshit. It’s not a cross that puts a squatter down. Well not exclusively. Holy water, crosses, these things are...well, think of ‘em as tools. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. It depends largely on the skill of the hunter who wields ‘em.”

“Well, how do you kill them?” I said.

“Two ways. One of ‘em is by using the one thing that the squatters can’t understand: faith.”

“But you said…”

“And I ain’t talkin’ about Church faith,” Kowalski interrupted. “I’ve seen squatters chew up priests and crap hubcaps. Church faith ain’t what this is about.”

I started to ask him what it was about. How can you kill a werewolf using silver bullets that don’t work? And what other kind of faith was there?

To confuse the issue even more, I was supremely uncomfortable with the idea of any kind of faith. I’d stopped believing in God around the same time my father left home for the last time.

The conversation I’d had with Lenore at Marcus’s funeral came back to me.

I didn’t know Marcus was Catholic.

I guess as he got older he got...

Soft?

I felt the ashes of my former outrage rekindle. If all this was leading up to some half-assed call to embrace religion, God was in for the rudest awakening since National Sodomize Your Clergyman Day.

“We’re in a goddamn losin’ battle,” Kowalski said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the things we hunt outgun us, outpower us, and outnumber us. I signed up for this tour haulin’ my father’s gun and my tired white ass to the table. Same goes for most of the others. We’re just ordinary people who rarely live to see sixty candles on a goddamn birthday cake.”

Kowalski slammed his fist against the dashboard.

“People like your father,” he said. “People like Eddie Moreno and Theresa Doyle even the odds a little. But they’re in the minority. As it is, we’re getting our asses handed to us on a goddamn daily-daily. I’m bettin’ that’s why Marcus thought you might be important.”

Kowalski reached into his pocket, produced a cigarette and lit it.

“I think you might be a Fatalist.”

“A fatalist?”

“A Deathgiver,” Kowalski said. “A very rare Bent.”

“What is it?”

“A Fatalist can use his own life energy, place it inside a weapon, any weapon. He can use that weapon as an extension of his will, a focus.”

He coughed, lowered his window and spat a thick stream of phlegm into the wind.

“Goddamn fags are killin’ me,” he said. “I haven’t heard of a Fatalist living more than a couple of years, though. The Hallowed put them high up their hit list. But somehow you slipped through the net.”

I stared out of the window, unsettled by this latest revelation. Behind us, the headlights of a dark sedan shone briefly in the side-view mirror.

Kowalski belched.

“But what the Hell do I know?” he grumbled. “I’m doin’ great if I make it through a day without shitting myself.”

“Why Seattle?” I asked, changing the subject.

Kowalski grunted, “’Cause it’s where you’ll learn the whole story. At least as it applies to your old man.”

“Why not tell me the whole story now?”

Kowalski shrugged. “Because it ain’t been written yet.”

I pressed him for more information but he would say no more on the subject. Then I remembered Doyle, the man who had died in my place, and my resolve steadied.

I would trust Kowalski to the end.

* * * *

We arrived at the airport. As Kowalski pulled into the darkness of a small three-story parking garage, the dark sedan slid in behind us and disappeared up the ramp leading to the second floor.

As we searched for a parking space I remembered the other thing that had been nagging at me since leaving Juno’s house.

“What’s the story with the one-eyed brunette?”

Kowalski threw the car into park.

“Maria Rose Hernandez,” he grunted.

“One of the best hunters in the world: Cold, merciless, totally devoid of simple human compassion. With no Bents, she’s offed more squatters than I’ve had hot dinners. She even goes after the little incursions: malignant sprites, chupacabras…”

Kowalski shrugged. “Behind her back, the other hunters call her the Blood Rose.”

“How’d she lose the eye?” I said.

Kowalski opened the driver’s door and got out of the car. As I shut the passenger door I realized that I hadn’t brought an overnight bag: Flying in the face of a lifetime of Lenore’s earsplitting admonitions, I’d meet whatever strange destiny Kowalski was leading me toward without benefit of clean underwear.

“We were working a case together. The Rose got into a dustup with a zombie down in Louisiana, a flesh sucker.”

I stopped.

“A flesh-sucker?”

“Yeah,” he chuckled. “Nasty piece of work. Some local white trash had dreamed up the power to raise an army of the undead. But two of the summoners had those goddamn George Romero flicks on the brain. Goddamn things ate the whole town and almost escaped into the bayou. Hernandez and I intercepted them, but it cost her. A walking corpse ambushed her; ripped her eye clean out of her head. Hernandez watched that zombie son-of-a bitch gulp down her baby brown, and then she blew its goddamned head off.”    

I nodded. The one-eyed brunette was just the kind of woman I’d always found irresistible: strong, severe, and bitter enough to make life interesting. The Blood Rose was a subject that rated deeper investigation.

“I guess that explains it,” I said.

Kowalski said, “Explains what?”

“Why she’s such a castrating bitch.” 

Kowalski smirked, his smile as cold as the space between the stars. “She’s my wife.”

As I speed-shuffled through my mental retinue of sharp verbal U-turns, a figure stepped out from behind a concrete pillar and hit Kowalski with a baseball bat.

Kowalski dropped like a marionette with its string cut.

“Hey!” I shouted, lunging toward where the bat-wielder stooped over Kowalski’s prone form.

The bat-wielder spun and aimed a gun at my face.

I froze, and the bat-wielder stepped out of the shadows.

My heart sank as I recognized my enemy.

Connie Sawyer, the host of The Eighth Hour: Best-selling author; dramaturge; nationally-recognized patron of the arts.

Critic.

“Leaving us without saying goodbye, Obadiah?” Sawyer purred. “How rude.”

“Connie, wait,” I said.

Sawyer smiled and dropped the bat.  “Not on your life.”

Then she shot me.

29

Critical Thinking

Lightning ripped through the top of my skull. I stumbled backward and fell on my ass. Sawyer was standing between me and the exit. There was nowhere else to go except deeper into the parking garage.

“Help me!” I shouted, my eyes scanning the area for anyone, an airline employee, even a semi-literate security guard with a gun.

“It’s nearly midnight, you arrogant bastard,” Sawyer said. “All the little people have gone home.”

“Connie,” I gasped. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because the others failed,” she said. “Consider it my contribution to a noble cause.”

“Connie, don’t…!” 

Sawyer’s second shot struck the concrete between my legs and ricocheted off into the night.

“Stop!” I shouted. “You don’t understand what’s happening! You and the other critics have been put under a spell! Well... not a spell... exactly, more like a possession.”

Sawyer laughed. “You’re pathetic.”

“No!” I shot back. “It’s true. You and Copernicus Geller and Graham Rhys Jones and Carter Yamato... You’ve all been... ensorcelled... or something!”

Sawyer shook her head.

“The only ‘sorcery’ I’ve encountered recently is the hex you put on me every time I open one of your lousy books!”

Her third shot whistled past my left ear and shattered the rear window of a nearby minivan.

“Can you imagine what my life is like?” Sawyer snarled. “Reading every shitty missive that comes across my desk simply because busloads of undereducated freaks decide that they’re worth anything more than the paper they’re printed on? Hundreds of adolescent maunderings from self-absorbed misfits who didn’t get enough attention from drunken parents; sloppy declarations of lost innocence; semi-literate dribblings from village idiots I wouldn’t pay to write my fucking grocery list? Just because they happened to strike a chord with the Great Unwashed? I pay the price in time and mental health, and I’m fed to the tits with it!”

Sawyer’s eyes narrowed into evil slits. Her face writhed with palpable insanity. “And then there’s you,” she hissed. “You fill the minds of the reading public with your violent, meaningless prattle, and millions of people pay you for it.”

Sawyer lifted the gun. “But no more. It came to me in a dream. I realized that I didn’t have to suffer anymore. If I kill you, the world will be that much better off.”

Sawyer pulled the trigger.

“No!”

The hammer slammed down, reverberating loudly in the empty parking garage. She pulled the trigger again with the same result.

Sawyer howled. “Son of a bitch!”

She shoved her hand into her jacket pocket and produced a handful of shells. One of them hit the floor and rolled beneath a parked Jaguar.

Adrenaline jacked a surge of energy into my muscles. I scrambled to my feet and vaulted up the ramp that led to the parking structure’s second floor. Sawyer came after me, firing on the run. A hail of bullets peppered the walls around me. As I rounded the corner, a bullet hit the bank of lights over my head and plunged the parking garage into near-total darkness.

“SHIT!” Sawyer screamed.

I reached the third level of the garage and nearly ran headfirst into the concrete wall of the structure. I spied an EXIT door on my right, tried it and found it locked.

“Shit!” I hissed.

Sawyer rounded the corner at the top of the ramp and slid to a halt. “Where are you, jackass?” she bellowed. From where I stood at the opposite end of the structure, I could see her silhouetted in the light from the lower level.

She can’t see me.

Taking advantage of the darkness, I dove under a nearby pick-up truck. There was no other exit from the private garage. If I were going to escape I’d have to get past Sawyer. And the gun.

I peeked under the body of the pick-up. From where I lay I could see Sawyer stalking me among the cars near the front of the garage and muttering to herself.

“Pompous bastard!”

About thirty cars separated us. At the rate she was moving she would find my hiding place in a matter of seconds. Kowalski’s words came back to me then: “A Fatalist can use his own life energy, place it inside any weapon, and use that weapon to focus his will.”

I looked around, searching the floor for something, a brick, an empty bottle, anything I could use as a weapon. If Kowalski was right the solution to my problem might be as close as the reach of my right hand.

“Stop hiding and face your public, Grudge!”

The floor beneath the pick-up truck was maddeningly clean.

What about her gun?

The idea thrilled me and terrified me at the same time. Back at Juno’s mansion I had apparently amplified the power of Kowalski’s gun, added some aspect of my life force to make the bullets lethal enough to badly injure Trocious.  

Maybe I could use that power to turn Sawyer’s advantage against her.

“Grudge!”

Sawyer was five car widths from my hiding place. I closed my eyes and opened my mind, searching for the red room which housed my father’s legacy.

Nothing happened.

I concentrated harder, formed an image of the gun in Sawyer’s hand; how it would feel gripped in my fist. Then I imagined the gun exploding, envisioned burning shrapnel hot enough to blind Sawyer, ripping through flesh and bone.

Yes.

I felt something give way inside me. Then my vision went red.

Yes.

I opened my eyes as the world around me... shifted. My bones hummed, and the fabric of reality shuddered for the briefest of instants.

“I’m coming for you, motherfucker!”

Nothing happened.

I was doing something wrong.

“Screw this.”

I was tired of being a victim, a passive reactionary tossed about on the ocean of circumstance. Rage propelled me out from under the pick-up truck. Maybe more direct action was required to make the red Power work.

I stood up and pointed my finger at Sawyer’s gun.

“Explode!” I commanded.  

Startled, Sawyer jumped back a step.

“Rip her eyes out!” I thundered with as much authority as I could muster. “Take her face off!”  

Sawyer’s brow furrowed: Her eyes widened with a kind of stunned wonder as she raised the gun.

“You really are an idiot.”

And a man in a red turban stepped out of the shadows and grabbed her by the hair.

Sawyer fired. But her aim was thrown off by the turbaned man’s assault. With a snarl she spun around to face her attacker, leveled the gun at his face.

Sawyer screamed. She dropped the gun, reached up and tore out two handfuls of her long blond hair. Still screaming, she turned, bolted toward the rear-facing wall of the garage and flung herself over the low railing. She plummeted three stories and struck the private roadway headfirst with the sickening crunch of bone on concrete.

In the awkward silence that followed, I turned and faced my red-turbaned savior.

He was dark-skinned, Indian or Pakistani. His white shirt was stained with blood, his neck, abdomen and chest a gutted ruin, which did little to distract from the fact that he had only one arm. It only took a moment to place him:

He was one of the mutilated dead I’d met at the bar, the one who’d been critical of my drinking.

The red-turbaned man stared at me without speaking.

“Thank you,” I whispered. “You saved my life.”

The dead man nodded solemnly. Then he turned his back on me and walked toward a patch of darkness.

“Wait,” I said.

The turbaned man stopped, but kept his back to me. Already I could see his form beginning to fray at the edges. Fearing that any sudden movement might cause him to dissolve and blow away, I approached him cautiously.

“What did she see? When she looked at you?”

“The end of all things,” he whispered. “The death of the future. Such visions lie within the power of the One who Commands me.” 

“But why?” I asked. “Why did you save me?”

The dead man seemed to consider for a moment. Then he shrugged and spoke in a voice like dead leaves skittering along October streets. ”Because She Commands,” he said simply. “And She has taken an interest. In you.”

As if that were enough, the dead man turned away again.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

The dead man stopped again. But this time, he turned and faced me. His eyes grew brighter and he smiled, as if unexpectedly relieved of some awesome burden.

“My name is Sukhdeep,” he said gratefully. “Sukhdeep Singh.”

The red-turbaned man faded, became one with the shadows in the deserted garage.

“Remember me,” he whispered.

Then, with a deep sigh, Sukhdeep Singh was gone.

30

A Fractured Fairytale

“The spook you saw in the garage was an Envoy,” Kowalski said, later. “A messenger from the higher-ups.”

We were sitting in a small office near the runway where our plane was being fueled. Kowalski’s injuries were minor, a bump on the back of the head the size of a robin’s egg and a bloody nose from where he’d struck the asphalt when Sawyer ambushed him. He was being tended to by Eddie Moreno, the bald Healer I’d seen earlier at Juno’s house.

“Two in one night, Nev,” Moreno chuckled, after making sure Kowalski was alright. “You guys are gonna kill me.”

Moreno had healed the deep scalp laceration I’d gotten from Connie Sawyer by simply laying his palms on my head and telling me to think about my favorite porno film.

 “It’s just moving energy around, Obadiah,” he’d said when he was done. “Tantric energy, sexual healing, whatever you wanna call it. That’s why I’m so damn healthy.”

 I offered a weak chuckle and wondered where else Eddie Moreno’s hands had been.

 After making my way back down to the first level of the parking garage, I’d found Kowalski sitting in his car screaming into his cell phone for backup. Moreno and two burly hunters had appeared twelve minutes later. After another phone call, this time to Pearl, an airport supervisor had taken us to his office and left us alone to “sort ourselves out.”

 “You sure you guys don’t need more firepower?” Moreno said. “Two ain’t a lot of juice for a squatter like...

 “No thanks,” Kowalski said, cutting Moreno off. He got up from his chair. “This one we’ve got to do alone, Ed,” he said. “Understand?”

 The bald man stared at Kowalski for a long moment. Then he nodded. The two men embraced, and Kowalski shook hands with the two burly hunters. Then Moreno and the others walked toward the door.

 The bald Healer turned back as if he’d remembered something he’d forgotten to say.

 “Give ‘em Hell, Kowalski,” he said simply. “You give ‘em Holy Hell.”

* * * *

An hour later, we boarded a jet, a small charter, with five other passengers: a businessman en route to Chicago where we’d have to land for refueling, an elderly black couple whose children had arranged for them to fly to the Windy City for their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and a drunk who bore a disturbing resemblance to Dr. Phil.

Before take-off, Kowalski pulled a thick leather volume from the shoulder bag he carried and handed it to me.

“Read this,” he grunted.

I reached for the book, and then recoiled like a housewife who’d just found a cobra in the breadbox.

“It’s not that book,” Kowalski said.

“What is it?” I said, not sure if I should believe him.

“History lesson,” he grunted.    

As the pilot announced preparations for take-off, Kowalski lay back and closed his eyes.

“Do you think that’s wise?” I asked. “You did sustain a pretty serious head injury tonight.”

Kowalski grunted. “I’m fine, dear,” he sneered. “Moreno fixed me right up. Besides, a few contusions ain’t gonna kill this old bird. Trust me, I know.”

My father’s partner lay back and closed his eyes, leaving me to face the thing that had been nagging at my awareness like a tic burrowing beneath my skin. I looked at my watch. Its luminescent display flashed the time and date like a harbinger of doom.

12:01 AM. July 25^th.

Lights out for Kowalski, O-Dog!

My teeth clenched tightly in an effort to bite back a surge of rage.

I decide my destiny.  Not you, not him, not that thing in the basement. And not some fucking book.

I’d uttered those words with the deepest conviction that they were true: Despite everything that had happened I still believed it. And if it was true for me, it had to be true for everyone. Including Neville Kowalski.

July 25^th, O’dog.

“Over my dead body, you twisted fuck.”

“Excuse me?”

I looked up at the flight attendant who hovered over me holding the glass of orange juice I’d requested. Her name tag read ‘I’m Chloe! And I’m from San-Diego!’

Suspicion shadowed Chloe’s faded showgirl-good looks.

“Sorry,” I said.

I accepted the orange juice. Sitting back in my seat, I turned my attention to Kowalski’s “other” book.

It was the length and width of an eight-by ten photograph. The cover was made from some animal’s hide, sheep or calf’s skin. It was soft, smooth to the touch. A scent of musk clung to its cover and to the pages.

I started to read as the jet taxied toward the runway.   

I didn’t look up for the next hour.

* * * *

“I bear witness to a tale begun long ago, a tale unfolding still. I bear witness to the yearning frailty of Man, to the dreadful power of Night’s Embrace, and pledge my soul to its utter defeat. Even unto my own destruction.”

                                      The Hunter’s Doom

“The hunters have always been among us, guarding our world against the deprivations of the Shadow Tribes, the denizens of that other Realm which they call Malek Ash, the Wraithing. 

“It is a realm where the vilest dreams of Man take shape and substance, striving in Darkness to return to the Light. It is in our world that they were created, and it is our world they hunger to rule. For the Wraithing is full to the bursting with their kind, and the Shadow Tribes vie among themselves for the right to become as Hallowed Ones, to return here, shrouded in terror and majesty, summoned by the anguish of their creators. This is the First Mystery.

“But the Hunters stand amid the gap between worlds, placed there by a Power greater than evil, greater even than good: for that Power is the undying Will of the Nolane, and it answers only to itself.    

“The human functionaries of the Nolane comprise the Second Mystery: The Hunters, a tattered echelon who possess, in greater or lesser degree, the talent of resisting the Shadow Tribes. These Talents aid the Hunters in discerning the movements and devices of the Enemy, for they dwell in Darkness, and men will not See.

“It is a simple thing, therefore, for the Hallowed Ones to cloak themselves in guises fair or foul, to obscure the senses of Man and gorge themselves upon His flesh. For the flesh contains the trappings of mortality upon which they feed. It is through consuming the flesh, or through the castigation of a mind in torment, that the Hallowed Ones feast upon human souls.”

“Nuts?”

“Jesus!” I gasped.

Startled, I jerked and my foot kicked the snack tray out of the flight attendant’s hands. Peanuts and pretzels rained down on the old couple sitting in front of me.

“Sorry!” I cried. “Oh my God!”

“It’s alright,” Chloe the flight attendant said.

“I was just...Oh my God!”

“It’s alright, Mr. Grudge.”

As the flight attendant cleaned up my mess, I swallowed, trying to force my heart back down my throat. I shut my eyes, but the words from The Hunter’s Doom reverberated in my self-imposed darkness.

“Good book?”

I opened my eyes. The old man and his wife were staring at me over their seatbacks.

“Um...” I said.

“We love scary books,” the old woman enthused. “My husband Ozzie reads Koontz. I think he’s a hack. I love King. I read The Tommyknockers in one sitting.”

I nodded mutely, my brain still too raw to provide much in the way of a polite response. Beside me, Kowalski snored softly to himself.

“I think there are two types of people,” the old woman was saying. “King People and Koontz People. What do you think?”

“We read your books too,” the old man said. “Don’t think we didn’t recognize you.”

The old woman hit him on the shoulder. “Ozzie, hush!”

“Damn it, woman! I’m talkin’ to the man!”

“You’re embarrassing him!”

The old man made a farting sound.

“Mildred and I met Koontz at a charity event in Boston,” he continued. “What a prick.”

“That wasn’t Koontz, Ozzie,” Mildred said. “I’ve told that you a million times.”

“I know Dean Koontz when I see him, woman,” Ozzie snapped. “I’ve read all the man’s books! I oughtta know what he looks like.”

“It was Samuel Delaney, man. Dean Koontz is white!”

The old couple went on that way for the next twenty minutes. I listened to them argue until we got to Chicago.

Anything was better than Kowalski’s history lesson.

But finally, my determination to make sense of my father’s life demanded that I continue. As we took off, refueled and bound for Seattle/Tacoma, I picked up where I’d left off:    

“But the Echelon bear a flame that drives back the Darkness. They are empowered by the Sleepers, called by men the Nolane, who are to the Hallowed Ones as a Huntsman to the Wolf. They are the Third and deepest Mystery.

“The members of the Echelon are the hounds of the Nolane. It is their unhappy task to dispatch the human vessels stolen by the Hallowed Ones, for a mortal, once stolen, is lost, condemned beyond redeeming to that Darkness from whence crawled its temptation. Once the mortal form has been shriven, the Power of the Nolane may enact upon the Hallowed spirit, dispatching it back to that Realm from which it came.

“As to the hunters. Theirs is a road fraught with grieving, solitude and untimely Death. The Nolane are harsh and unyielding in their exigency, offering little reward for so stern a duty. But their knowledge is vast, and by their Power they give aid and succor to their servants, even smoothing rough seas should they bar a hunter’s way.

“In this manner, the Nolane ease the worldly burdens of their weary agents ‘til that day when each must fall, trodden ‘neath the heel of the one Hallowed who proves his master. For as light is to shadow, so Hallowed is to Hound: Bound in Eternity. And when they meet, so must that hunter fall, yea, even he who reads these words. For the day of your end and even the bringer of your Doom are known, and marked in the Book of the Nolane.”

“Mr. Grudge?”

The flight attendant I’d kicked earlier stood at a wary distance from my feet. She winced as our eyes met and took a step backward.

“We’re landing, sir,” she said.

“Alright,” I replied.

“Would you wake up your friend?” the flight attendant said. “I didn’t have the heart to disturb him.”

Kowalski’s mouth hung open. I smelled the faint tinge of the minty airline mouthwash he’d gargled with during the refueling stop.

“Poor guy looks exhausted,” the flight attendant said.

For the day of your end and even the bringer of your Doom is known, and marked in the Book of the Nolane.

 July 25^th, O-dog. Then it’s lights out for Kowalski.

“He’s under a great deal of pressure,” I said, finally.

The flight attendant made sympathy noises.

“Tell me about it,” she clucked.

I stared out my window at the night sky. Dark clouds swept past me like barely glimpsed islands of shadow. The plane began to buck, and a red light came on over my head.

“We’re experiencing a little turbulence, folks,” the pilot announced. “Please fasten your seatbelts. The ride’s about to get a little bumpy.”

The plane bucked again, harder this time. Chloe the wary flight attendant took her seat and strapped herself in.

Behind me, the drunk who looked like Doctor Phil woke up and said, “What the Hell am I doin’ here?”

I waited as long as I could before waking Kowalski.

31

“Contestant 11.789.747

..... Come On Down!”

We took the Thrifty rent-a-car bus to the depot where a nondescript four-door sedan awaited us.

“I’ll drive,” Kowalski grunted.

As we drove away from the airport, I took in the interior of the rent-a-car—a chintzy mish-mash of fake chrome and coffee-stained fabrics—and grimaced. The forces Kowalski served purportedly provided for a hunter’s needs.

“How are we supposed to make a quick getaway in this bucket?” I said.

Kowalski grunted again. My father’s partner had been unusually quiet since waking up on the runway. He’d barely uttered two words since leaving the airport.

“It’ll do,” he grunted.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said.

Kowalski glared out at the night.

“Kowalski…”

“Open the glove compartment,” he snapped.

“If you won’t tell me why we’re here the least you can do is be...”

“Open the goddamn glove compartment!”

I opened it. Inside was a folded eight-by-ten-inch manila envelope.

“Open it,” Kowalski said.

Despite my newfound compassion I struggled with the urge to punch him in the neck.

Inside the envelope was a sheaf of papers, about twenty pages of small print. I squinted in the dark and turned on the dome light.

“Some of this is in Chinese,” I said.

“Chinese, huh?” Kowalski said.

I squinted at the English words at the top of the first page. “The Yeren?”

Kowalski slammed his fist against the steering wheel. The rented car swerved off the highway and slalomed across the shoulder for a hundred yards before Kowalski maneuvered us back onto the road.

“I must be gettin’ old in my old age,” he snarled.

“What’s a Yeren?” I said.

“Son-of-a bitch,” Kowalski said. “I saw the signs and missed every goddamn one of ‘em. Son-of-a bitch!”

“Hey!” I shouted.

“What?” Kowalski fired back.

“You can have your pity party later,” I said. “Tell me what this means.”

Kowalski reached into his pocket and produced a cigarette. Then he popped his Zippo.

“You’re not going to do that here?” I said.

Kowalski glared at me, and then he laughed.

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those goddamn ‘second-hand smoke’ shitheads.”

“Kowalski, in case you hadn’t heard, second-hand smoke kills. Jesus, where have you been since 1980?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Look,” I began. “You eat like a maniac and you smoke like a chimney. You don’t take care of yourself.”

“I kill monsters for a living, asshole,” Kowalski snarled. “I think my long-term health concerns are a tad more immediate: say not getting my head bitten off on a nightly goddamn basis!”

I folded my arms, fuming.

“Besides, I quit drinkin,” Kowalski said. “Don’t I get credit for that, Dr. Phil?”

“Why do you do that?” I said. “Why must you insult me?”

Kowalski lit his cigarette. He actually seemed to consider the question. When he spoke it was with the air of someone pondering a deep mystery.

“Actually I don’t know,” he said. “Your old man and I went at it that way for thirty years. I guess you remind me of him.”

“I’m not my father,” I said.  

“Trust me,” Kowalski said. “That much we’ve established. Chinese folklore.”

“What?”

“The Yeren. Sometimes we catch a break and the referral service gets an ID tag on the squatter before we intercept. Tonight’s specialty hails from the rural and mountainous regions of China. He’s the Oriental equivalent of our Sasquatch, or Wendigo.”      

“Wait a minute,” I said. “‘Sasquatch?’ You mean Bigfoot?  You’re telling me we’re going in search of a Chinese Bigfoot?”

I couldn’t feature it. After seeing Juno and Trocious in action, what Kowalski was suggesting seemed almost as ridiculous as his use of the term “Orientals.”

“The Orientals have their own legends of a wildman,” he continued. “Most cultures share similar monsters, hence the global popularity of creatures like vampires, werewolves and the squatter we’re gonna kill tonight.”

“Hold on a minute,” I said. “We’re going after this Yeren thing tonight? Now?”

“That’s right,” Kowlaski said. “This squatter’s  responsible for a string of unsolved murders in and around Seattle. Pearl’s tagged him and targeted him for removal.

That envelope contains details of its origins and current whereabouts. Saves us the ass-ache of trackin’ ‘em down.”

“How does the Service know where the killer is?” I said.

“It’s what they do,” Kowalski answered. “Smoothin’ over rough seas should they bar a hunter’s way, remember?”

Kowalksi swirled his finger around his temple and whistled the theme from The Twilight Zone. He laughed. Then he lit another cigarette.

“Read on, Macduff,” he said.

“That’s bad luck,” I said.

“What now?”    

“Quoting from the ‘Scottish Play.’”    

“You mean Macbeth?”    

I winced. Black shapes seemed to rise out of the darkness around us. I locked the passenger door.

“What’s wrong with you?” Kowalski said. “I only said ‘Macbeth.’”

“Stop saying that,” I hissed. “Never say that name.”    

“Why the Christ not?”

“Because I spent five years as a theater history minor, that’s why,” I snapped. “There’s an ancient theatrical tradition that says it’s bad luck to quote from or mention the name of that play.”

“Macbeth?”

“Jesus.”

“You gotta be shittin’ me.”

“You have to call it ‘the Scottish Play’.”

Kowalski shot a look filled with doubt toward my side of the car.

“I would appreciate it if you would respect my wishes,” I said. “I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need all the good luck we can get.”    

Kowalski considered this information for a long moment.

Then he puffed out a huge smoke ring.

“Superstitious horsebrownies,” he said.    

We drove on. 

32

Squire

We pulled up to the curb in a darkened residential area. The clock on the dashboard read two-thirty-eight in the morning. Overhead, the moon shone through the clouds like the baleful eye of a hungry God and I had to pee.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “It says here that this thing is ‘partially spiritual in nature and can only be returned to the spirit realm by a holy man, or a monk who humbly walks the earth having removed from himself all fear, anger, desire and attachment to fleshly concerns.’”

Kowalski threw the car into park.

“I look like a monk to you?”

“Well, now that you mention it...”

“Funny guy.”

We got out of the car. Kowalski went around to the back and opened the trunk.

“How the hell do you...?”

“Keep your voice down,” Kowalski growled. “This squatter can hear us a mile away. It can be all over us so fast we’d be torn apart before you can irrigate your shorts again.”

Around us, darkened homes nestled cozily on both sides of the street, their occupants unaware of the madness crouched in their midst. If what I’d read about the Yeren was true, the people of Seattle had a great deal to fear.

The quiet street seemed alive with shadows. Half-hidden shapes thronged in the spaces between the houses. Pale forms beckoned from every storm drain. A cold wind crept along the sidewalk, sweeping a solitary piece of newspaper along like an albino tumbleweed. 

“Shouldn’t we call the police?” I whispered.    

“And tell ‘em what?” Kowalski said. “That an ancient Chinese forest spirit that walks like a man and devours human beings only to vanish mysteriously, leaving behind a skunk-like stench and a haunting scream is stalking an abandoned Lutheran church in Northwest Seattle?”

Kowalski offered a black-hearted chuckle. “Tell you what, I’ll dial for you and you make the call.”

“I see your point.”

“Excellent.”

Kowalski removed his silver automatic from his overnight bag and slid it into a shoulder holster. Then he took a second automatic out of the bag, put it into a holster on his hip and tossed the bag in the trunk.

“But how are we going to...ahhh...?”    

“Kill it, Grudge,” he said. “We’re here to kill the fucker. Get it straight, ‘cause we’re only gonna get one chance.”

“Alright,” I said.

“If you fuck up we’re deader than Dick’s hatband.”       

“I get it,” I snapped.

Seemingly without transition the wind temperature dropped ten degrees. The hairs on my arms stood at attention as Kowalski continued.

“When dealing with a squatter it’s best to keep three things about you,” Kowalski said. “First and most obvious is your wits. The second is this.”     

He lifted a large silver golf bag out of the trunk.       

“You’re gonna ask it to play nine holes?”    

Kowalski hoisted a long wooden object out of the silver golf bag. He performed some arcane maneuver that I couldn’t quite follow and two long arms flipped up, forming a T.

It was a crossbow, similar to the one he’d used on Trocious but larger. This weapon was nearly five feet long and resembled a hunting rifle.

After a moment, I said: “Are you insane?”     

“Damn it, Pearl,” he growled. “I prefer a Colby. Better control in a running, crouching, ambush scenario. This one’s a Seward. She’s awkward, but powerful enough. Here.” He lifted the crossbow/rifle. “This one’s yours.”

Kowalski tossed the crossbow to me. I caught it... barely. Then I looked up at the crusty prophet.

“Holy God Almighty-”    

“-is not payin’ attention,” Kowalski snapped. “So you’d damn well better.”

The Seward was lighter than it looked, made from aluminum or something like it, from what I could tell. It looked decidedly lethal.

“Bolts are in the bag,” Kowalski said.

He lifted a second, more traditional-looking golf bag out of the trunk, and inspected its contents.

“Ahhh,” he said. “Pearl, I knew you wouldn’t bone me.”

He produced the Colby: It was a sleek, black compact crossbow, more like a pistol, with a “quiver” of glittering shafts secured to the stock.    

“Let me guess,” I said. “Silver arrows?”    

“Not fer this. Silver is good for most of yer undead; yer shape-shifters and some of the modern creature phenotypes. But there are older things, things outside your-Judeo-Christian philosophies, dig? Unless I miss my guess, the Yeren is a forest spirit, more akin to a malignant sprite or a goblin: That’s faerie breed, nasty and damn near immortal. Fer them, cold iron’s what’s needed.”

Kowalski struck the tips of two bolts together and sparks flew. He nodded and replaced the bolts in the quiver. Then he pulled a box of ammo out of his overnight bag and began to load the guns he carried, twin Sig Sauer Model automatics, each one capable of delivering fifteen rounds of rancorous double-action desecration. 

“Teflon-coated, high-velocity shells with iron shavings packed inside,” Kowalski said. “Bastards explode on contact. Nasty little fuckers.”

He finished loading the guns and slammed the trunk shut. “Let’s go.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Where’s my gun?”

Kowalski snorted. “The day I let you handle a firearm around me again’ll be the day Hell tap-dances out of my ass. Stick with the crossbow.”

We walked up the street and turned right, heading away from the glare of the streetlamps.

The abandoned church sat at the far end of a large empty lot that at one time must have served as the church parking lot. Behind the church, a closed freeway overpass formed the closed end of a kind of cul-de sac. 

As we walked toward the church, the silence became oppressive. The air grew thicker, difficult to drag into the lungs. A high, ringing tone trembled in my ears, and a light sweat prickled across the surface of my skin.

“Why is it that whenever I’m in the presence of something weird I feel like twenty pounds of shit in a five-pound sack?”

“Allergic reaction,” Kowalski grunted.

“What?”                           

     “Some talents manifest physically as symptoms. Sometimes the symptoms resemble an allergic reaction. It’s a survival mechanism.”

     “Survival mechanism,” I said.

     “Yep,” Kowalski said. “It’s your brain’s way of warning you: When you start to feel like crap, duck, cause some squatter’s fixin’ to jump out and carve you a new bunghole.”

“Thanks,” I snapped. “You said there were three things I’d need to get out of this alive. What’s the third?”

Kowalski sighed and readjusted the black golf bag on his shoulder.

“Passion,” he said. “It’s the foundation of all belief. Ferget those old horror flicks where the hero waves a crucifix at some hacked-off blood-drinker and burns it down to a bad fart and empty formalwear: It’s not the religious icon that wields the power. It’s the belief of the wielder.”

“But I’m an agnostic.”

“Not fer long.”

Kowalski scratched the silver whiskers adorning his cheeks: The sandpaper rasping this action produced did nothing to soothe my jangled nerves. 

“But you don’t have to believe in God to take down a squatter. More important is the belief that what you’re doing is right on a deeply philosophical, cosmic level.”

“What,” I said. “Like some sort of quest?”

“Yeah,” Kowalski said. “One usually backed by a fanatical conviction, or some deep, personal loss: a loss which binds a hunter to his path and sets his feet to the Road.”

Comprehension spread, slowly, like Dawn’s glow across the dark firmament of my consciousness. “You’re talking about my father.”    

Kowalski stopped. “Marcus and I were in Seattle three months ago. We were tracking a killer the police couldn’t even categorize. When I told you your old man was good, I wasn’t blowin’ smoke up your Hershey Highway. No offense.”

“None taken.”     

“Marcus tracked the thing. We found it close to the place where it had dumped its last victim’s remains. But Marcus was too good. The squatter was still in the area.”

In the darkness, Kowalski was barely visible. He spoke softly, his voice drifting toward me from out of the night. “Fucker got the jump on us.”

Kowalski lit a cigarette, his hands cupped around the Zippo to shield its flame from watchful eyes. “It came out of the trees. Bastard tore into us like a fat man on a bean burrito. I only caught a glimpse of it: big sucker, yellow eyes, hairy all over. It hit me, put my lights out. While I was unconscious...the squatter butchered Marcus.”    

Kowalski blew out a stream of smoke and pointed his crossbow at the sanctuary. “The same squatter that’s waiting for us in that church.”  He shrugged. “I feel shitty for not tellin’ you earlier. I wasn’t sure you were...Well, I wasn’t sure.”      

Kowalski reached into the silver golf bag and handed me a quiver filled with iron-headed bolts. His eyes held a deep wellspring of sympathy. But his voice was as rough as stone. “Welcome to the club.”    

With that, Kowalski turned and headed into the parking lot. As I watched him disappear into the shadows, I heard the bars of a prison cell slam shut behind me.

They say that Destiny has a way of closing around you like a spider’s web: The more you struggle, trying to escape, the more the web binds you, limits your choices.

As Kowalski strode off like a knight in some deeply fucked-up fairy tale, my destiny wrapped me in its web and pulled the strands tight.

I picked up my golf bag and started walking.

They say that God is in the details. I didn’t believe in God, but I would learn one thing that night: God may not be in the details but Death is, and she ain’t lookin’ for a roommate.

I went after Kowalski.

32

Special. Weapons. and. Terror.

We crouched behind a parked minivan long enough for Kowalski to give me a primer on crossbow etiquette. “Pearl” had thoughtfully provided me with a “self-cocker,” a weapon that only required the user to turn a small ratchet to retract the fiberglass bow, set the iron-tipped bolt to the nylon string, select a target, aim and fire.

By Zippo-light, Kowalski demonstrated the maneuver. The Seward had a “draw weight” of 175 lbs. It could propel a twenty-inch arrow through the air at 345 feet per second to deliver 107 pounds of force: Power enough to stop a horny bull moose in its tracks. The iron-infused broadhead bolts looked like miniature harpoons. They were designed to slice through tough hide on impact and shred the vulnerable organs beneath.          

After Kowalski had assured himself that I could load and fire the Seward, we continued.

The church was an architectural mongrel, part Asian pagoda, part Anglo-European cathedral. Its stained glass windows hung in jagged shards like parti-colored stalactites. Its doors had been bolted and chained shut.

The fire-gutted sanctuary stood slightly off center, like a wounded mastodon leaning toward the nearest tar pit. The ancient timbers groaned, overburdened by the effort of supporting the pagoda’s carcass.

Kowalski gestured and vanished up a dark walkway between the pagoda and the wall of the overpass.

“Wait,” I hissed.

I followed him around to the back. It was so dark in the passageway between the church and the concrete wall of the overpass that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.

I cleared my throat nervously. In the oppressive silence, the bubbling rustle of phlegm reverberated like an elephant’s death rattle. “Kowalski?”

Someone grabbed me. I snatched in enough breath to scream and my attacker clapped his hand over my mouth and hissed mint Altoid fury into my face-“Shut...the fuck...up.”

Kowalski.

I struggled in his grip (He was surprisingly strong for a toothless old coot) until he released me.

“Rear entrances are chained shut,” he whispered. “Find another way in. I’ll try to jimmy the locks.”

I nodded, turned away.

“And for the love of Christ, be quiet.”

I indicated my understanding. Then we separated.

My heart slammed itself against my ribcage as I crept along the back wall of the church searching for another entry point. The ground level windows had been boarded up. All of them were nailed shut, impossible to see through.

Except for one.

A window on the far side of the church had been blocked by three long wooden slats. The glass had been smashed. I could peek through the open space between two of the slats and into the basement, but in the dim light of the cloud-shrouded moon I couldn’t see more than a few inches beyond the window.

“Good work.”

Despite myself, I jumped.

“Will you stop doing that?”

“Shhhhh,” Kowalski hissed.

He laid his crossbow on the concrete and grabbed one of the boards. Following his lead, I grabbed the lower board and began to push. It was painstaking work, trying to pry the boards loose without making a racket. Kowalski was disturbingly adept, though. Working together, we were able to push the middle slat out of the window frame without waking up the whole neighborhood. I laid the board gingerly down on the concrete, taking great care not to drop it.

The upper and lower boards however, proved immovable. Even with both of us pressing as hard as we could, we were unable to budge them.

Kowalski waved me away from the window. Then he stuck his head in between the two boards. A moment later, his torso and legs disappeared between the two slats. With alarming dexterity for a man of his age, he dropped to the basement floor, landing quietly on the balls of his feet.  

Kowalski gestured for me to follow.

I handed the golf bags through the slats to Kowalski.  

Then it was my turn. I squeezed my arms, head and shoulders between the upper and lower slats. My upper torso slid through easily, followed by my ribcage and mid-section; I was almost through...

I stopped.

“What are you doing?” Kowalski hissed.

I tried to move forward; couldn’t.

“I’m stuck,” I hissed back.

I tried to squeeze out the way I’d come in; couldn’t.

“I’m stuck,” I said, louder.

“Don’t panic,” Kowalski grated.

Cold fury sharpened my reply: “I’m not panicking.”

Starting to panic.

I shot my hips forward, trying to force my way through the opening. Something ripped loudly in the gloom: Whatever it was, it only made my situation worse. The more I struggled the more hung up I became.

Then I realized what it was.

“My belt,” I said. “It’s caught on something.”

My goddamned Kenneth Cole black calf’s leather belt. The one with the silver buckle. I’d chosen it because the buckle stood out against a fantastic pair of black flat-fronts I’d picked up at the Barney’s Yearly Sales Event during my last trip to LA.

The big silver buckle was stuck on a nail.

“It’s my belt,” I groaned.

“Shhhh!” Kowalski said.

“Goddamn Kenneth Cole!”

“Quiet!”

Kowalski was furious, his face glowing, apoplectic in the moonlight. He eyed the shadows warily.

“Grab my arms,” I said, the prospect of being gutted because of a two-hundred-dollar fashion accessory looming large in my consciousness.

“Pull me out!”

Kowalski flapped his arms like a dope fiend waving down a speeding crack dealer—

“Shut...

—and my pants ripped.

I fell through the window and landed on top of a child’s desk. The desk broke apart under my weight and I fell off, knocking over a chest-high stack of similar desks on the way down. I crashed to the wooden floor with a noise like a race riot in a Burmese drum shop.  

Kowalski was there instantly. He grabbed me by the lapels, hauled me to my feet and whisper/screamed into my face, “SHUT UP!”

Behind us, the two slats fell out of the window with a clatter of splitting timber and broken glass.

Above us, something howled like a damned soul.

Kowalski glared at me, the promise of murder writ large across his face.

“Sorry.”

Kowalski snatched the crossbow out of the silver golf bag and began to load it.   

“Shut your mouth and listen!” he snapped, “I’ll take the point. Back me up. You see anything weird, sing out. You hear anything, yell. Most importantly if you see a monster lookin’ to chomp my guts start shootin,’ but you make damn sure I’m not in your line of fire, comprende?

I nodded. “Yeah...Yes...I...”

Whatever had howled a moment earlier, howled again.

“Oh my fucking God.”

Kowalski thrust the crossbow at me.    

“Alright,” he said. “Pull your head out of your ass and pay attention.”

Something big ghosted through the rafters overhead.

“What was that?” I said.

“School’s in session, Junior,” Kowalski said. “Let’s go.”

We ran toward a wide staircase and headed upstairs toward the chapel. I flipped the safety switch to the “Off” position as Kowalski had shown me earlier, stumbled, and nearly dropped the silver crossbow.

“Goddammit, Grudge,” Kowalski said. “Keep it together.”

“You keep it together,” I said. “I’m fucking terrified.”

Something moved in the corner near the top of the staircase. I whirled. A dark silhouette rose, head and shoulders shrouded in the silver moonlight shining through a shattered window.

“Look out!” I cried.

I lifted the crossbow and fired. Half a second later I heard the satisfying thunk as the iron-headed bolt struck its target.

“I got it,” I rasped. “I got the son-of-a bitch!”

Then my eyes adjusted to the moonlight and I saw the thing that I’d hit.

In the corner, one half of a silken curtain flapped in the cold draft that flowed in through the broken window. The other half was pinned to a wooden bust of a smiling Asian dignitary with thick glasses.

My aim was true: My bolt had struck the bust in the center of its breast.   

“Jesus,” Kowalski groaned. “You sure Marcus Drudge was your real father?”

An inhuman scream cut him off. I whirled as the scream was repeated. It was coming from the chapel. 

“Holy shit.”

Across a small ocean of charred furniture and crumbled plaster and wood, a makeshift altar stood at the front of the chapel.

The altar had been formed from human bodies.

A pile of corpses and pieces of corpses nearly nine feet high stood at the front of the chapel. Whoever had built the altar had constructed a gruesome stepladder, using the corpses to reach his most recent acquisition.

There was a woman dangling above the altar. 

She hung suspended from a rope that had been tied to her wrists. The other end of the rope had been hung over a jagged spar of blackened timber twenty feet above the chapel floor.

The woman was alive. When her eyes met mine she began to kick weakly, her bare feet brushing the top of the corpse altar below her.

“Fuck,” Kowalski growled. ”She’s a Witness.”

“A what?”

Kowalski cursed and scanned the rafters overhead.

“A witness,” he hissed. “She’s been placed at the top of the corpse heap in order to act as a repository, a vessel for all the torture and misery she’s seen. When her mind breaks (if it hasn’t already) whatever set this whole goddamn thing in motion will slip past the barriers and into our world, using her as a conduit.”

Jesus,” I rasped. “That’s the shittiest thing I’ve ever heard.”

I began to pick my way across the ruined floor.

Kowalski said, “Leave her.”

“What?!?” 

“We don’t have time.”

“We can’t leave her there like…”

Kowalski moved toward me, his eyes roving around the room, lingering on the rafters overhead. “We got a squatter somewhere on the premises,” he growled. “We can’t afford the distraction. Leave her.”

The outrage I’d nursed since meeting Kowalski began to churn in my gut. I bit back a shout, forced calmness into my voice.

“I’m not leaving her hanging there so that thing can butcher her.”

I was fed up with Kowalski, fed up with the suffering of innocents: I was hacked off enough to chew Death a new Asshole.

Kowalski spoke through gritted teeth.

“Listen, shit fer brains...”    

“No you listen,” I said. “I’ve had it with you. You’ve been nothing but demeaning and abusive since this whole thing started.”

“Grudge...”

“I’m taking her down,” I said. “If you don’t like it, go hunt Bigfoot yourself, Shit for brains.”    

I made my way to the altar.  But even a cursory glance was enough to inform me that I wasn’t going to make it: Arrayed across the makeshift shrine was a display of butchery that would have made Vlad the Impaler look like the official spokesperson for Amnesty International.

Whoever had murdered these people had torn them limb from limb. Severed arms, legs, heads, entrails and a variety of organ meats adorned the pile. Many of the bodies displayed obvious bite wounds.

The bound woman’s eyes drew my focus away from the atrocities before me. She’d been gagged with some filthy strip of cloth that reduced her cries to muffled grunts. Even beneath the blood and filth that covered her face I could see her exhaustion. And her terror.

What would Marcus do?

But she was still alive.

What would Kevin Doyle do?

I knew the answer. I bit back the geyser of vomit that pummeled up my esophagus and climbed onto the corpse pile. Above me, the bound woman’s struggles grew more frantic. My foot slipped in something wet: I looked down and discovered that I’d stepped on someone’s exposed spinal column.

Meanwhile, Kowalski was quietly suppressing a shit-fit. Finally, he broke. “Of all the stupid, unprofessional, sentimental horse hockey you’ve pulled,” he hissed. “This has to take the goddamn cake.”    

I reached the top of the corpse pile and climbed onto the broad back of a very fat, very dead white matron. I stood up, somewhat woozily, and came face to face with the bound woman.

“Mmmmmmphhh!” she said.

“Wait,” I replied. I removed the gag.

“He... He’s... It’s...”

“Calm down,” I said. “You’re safe.”    

“No no no...!”    

“We don’t have time for this,” Kowalski said.    

“Shut up,” I hissed.     

“He’s... he’s...”    

“Easy now,” I said. “What’s your name?”    

“Sandra,” she said breathlessly, “Sandra Woo. But...”    

“Grudge…”

“SHUT UP, KOWALSKI!”    

“You’re gonna blow the whole goddamn scenario!”

Suddenly Sandra Woo’s eyes went as wide as white saucers. She pointed at the chapel floor. I looked down.  Something, a dark shape, rose up behind Kowalski, its outline hunched and tremendous.

“It’s...it’s...!”    

“Oh quiet down, lady,” Kowalski snapped. “You know, I told him. I told Marcus you didn’t have the stones to do the job right.”    

“Neville...” I said, my lips numb with horror.    

“I quit drinkin,’ cold turkey,” Kowaslski raged. “I’ve killed blood-skates, were-tigers, three different varieties mind you...”    

“Kowalski...    

“Once, I staked a Walpurgi Death Lord to the roof of a moving fucking hearse while fighting off a defensive Familiar and a fucking Half-dead man-servant, single-handed!”

“Kowalski...”

“But in all that time I’ve never wanted to take a fucking drink like I do right... fucking... now!”

Behind him, the squatter grinned and raised its claws.

I let Sandra Woo go, raised my cross-bow and screamed—    

“Kowalski, behind you!”

—as Woo pinwheeled her arms and tumbled off the corpse shrine. Kowalski spun, too late, and saw what was standing behind him.

The Yeren was huge, black-furred. Its eyes shone fever-bright in the shadows. Its arms hung to its knees, massive hands tipped with black talons as long as daggers.

Kowalski froze. “Jesus Holy...”

The rest of his oath was drowned out as the Yeren screamed, a blast of sound that shattered the remaining windows inside the chapel. The force of the scream slammed Kowalski like a battering ram. He staggered backward, dropped his crossbow and fell to his knees.

“Kowalski get down!” I screamed.

Kowalski dove onto his face and I fired.

The iron-headed bolt flew across the chapel and slammed into the Yeren’s shoulder. The squatter screamed and wheeled on Kowalski who was scrambling to reach his cross-bow where it lay beneath a demolished pew.

The Yeren leapt. This time, however, Kowalski was prepared. He came up with the Colby and fired.

The Yeren was faster. It spun away, became a blur of motion. Kowalski’s bolt shot through the empty space it had filled a moment earlier. Kowalski notched another bolt and lifted the crossbow, too late: The Yeren slapped the weapon out of his hands. The crossbow flew across the chapel. 

I was still struggling to reload another bolt into the Seward. My frantic movements upset the corpse shrine and I tumbled off the fat lady’s back. I landed ass-first on the hardwood floor behind the shrine next to Sandra Woo. She crouched there with her hands over her ears.

“Stay here,” I said.

“Grudge!” Kowalski cried.

I grabbed my crossbow and dove out from behind the shrine as the sound of gunfire peppered the night with explosions. Kowalski had both automatics out, firing them simultaneously. He struck with deadly accuracy, each shot sending bright spatters of blood across the floor. The Yeren staggered, hurt by the iron bullets.

But it wasn’t enough.

I notched my second bolt, aimed and pulled the trigger.  

The bolt struck the Yeren high on the right side of its chest. The creature shrieked, grasped my arrow and snapped it in half. But the iron head was still buried in its flesh.

The Yeren turned, fixed me with a glare of amber-eyed malice, and my testicles retreated into the safety of my lower G.I. tract.

“Catch!” Kowalski screamed.

A second later, his silver automatic sailed toward me. I caught it while managing to hold onto the crossbow.

Kowalski swept in and rammed a long-bladed knife into the Yeren’s back. The Yeren whirled and launched a backhanded blow at Kowalski’s head. Kowalski raised his arms to absorb the brunt of the Yeren’s attack. Even so, the power of the squatter’s blow batted him away.

I dropped the crossbow, lifted the Sig Sauer and fired. A red rose sprouted in the black center of the Yeren’s chest. The monster screamed and leapt straight up, nearly twenty feet straight up, and vanished among the rafters.

“Don’t let it get above you, kid!” Kowalski screamed. “That’s how it attacks, from above!”

I aimed the automatic at the rafters over my head, but the exposed girders and charred timbers were empty.

Something moved in the shadows off to the right.

I fired.

Behind me, there was a flicker of motion above the corpse shrine: I spun and fired again.

The massive chandelier that dangled over my head groaned and began to sway back and forth.

“Where did it go?” I said. “Dammit where is it?”

The chandelier groaned again, louder this time. Its swaying motion increased. Behind me, the Yeren screamed. I spun toward the sound fired, once, twice, three times, and hit empty air. 

Above me, the chandelier swung back and forth, creaking like an ancient Viking battleship.

Then it broke free.

“Watch your ass, Grudge!” 

I dove out of the way a moment before the chandelier hit the floor with a thunderous clatter. Kowalski’s scream of warning barely registered over the tidal wave of breaking glass and clanging metal.

“Heads up!”         

I lifted the gun—knowing even as I did that it was too late—and the Yeren plummeted toward me.

Kowalski knocked me out of the way a second before the Yeren struck the floor hard enough to splinter oak. I slid across the chapel floor and slammed headfirst into the pastor’s lectern.

The Yeren grabbed Kowalski and hauled him off his feet.

For a moment, hunter and squatter faced each other, eye to eye, Kowalski wriggling like an unruly manikin, six feet above the floor.     

“You’re one hideous sack o’ shitworms, that’s fer sure,” Kowalski said.    

The Yeren bared its fangs.

For the day of your end and even the bringer of your Doom is known, and marked in the Book of the Nolane.

“Not today,” I snarled.

I reached for Kowalski’s empty automatic, grabbed it, and something... something akin to an electric shock ran up my arm. The place where my flesh met the warm solidity of Kowalski’s Sig Sauer grew warm, then hot.

For a split second I had the impression that the gun was melting into my hand: that my flesh and the gun had joined together, given up their individual structures to form... something new.        

The Yeren paused. It turned toward me with Kowalski dangling in its fists. They were both staring at me.

“I was right,” Kowalski said, wonderingly. “Jesus H. Barbarella. Look at you.”

I looked down at the gun in my hand and a blood-red burst of incandescence seared my sight. The light faded almost instantly, leaving a crimson lightning scar across my inner eye.

“Grudge!”

I threw the Sig Sauer with all my might.

The gun flipped end over end, arcing across the chapel like a scarlet comet, and struck the Yeren’s forehead.

The Yeren dropped Kowalski and wailed. A moment later, its forehead burst open. Blood spurted out of a deep gash in the squatter’s head and splashed the floor.

I grabbed two crossbow bolts out of the quiver on my hip and gasped as crimson force exploded in my clenched fists.

Borne forward like a blazing star over treacherous seas, I moved across the chapel. There was a sensation of rushing wind: a scarlet torrent, like a river of burning blood, seemed to expand my limbs, quicken my steps. A nano-second later, I smashed into the Yeren and drove the two cross-bow bolts into its heart.

The three of us went down, the Yeren shrieking, Kowalski swearing, and me riding the Yeren’s chest as I double-hammered the iron bolts in again and again.

In the melee the Yeren swung one massive arm and blindsided Kowalski with a solid blow to the face.

The scarlet lashings of a berserker’s fury had drowned my senses. I slammed the bolts in again, screaming even as the Yeren screamed, my teeth vibrating with the force of my rage.

The Yeren punched me in the stomach.

Sudden, blinding pain drove the air from my lungs. I looked down and discovered that I was mistaken: The Yeren hadn’t punched me; it had used the talons on its right hand like a spear and stabbed me.

I looked up just in time to catch a right cross to the jaw that propelled me across the room. I landed a few feet from where I’d dropped the silver golf bag.

My body had devolved, become a single raw nerve ending.

But I should have been dead. Some vestige of that shining red rage had protected me, prevented my neck from snapping like a fistful of dandelion stems.

Then my fingers touched smooth metal in the darkness. They closed around it, gripped it tight as a barren green illumination crept through the sanctuary. 

The Yeren turned away and loped over to the corpse shrine. The space above the shrine, the space where Sandra Woo would have been if I hadn’t rescued her, was the source of the emerald glow.

A shining green orb hung over the corpse shrine. It cast a leprous pall over the deserted sanctuary. 

The Yeren nodded in the wash of emerald light. Then it bent and grabbed Sandra Woo from behind the altar. Woo hung limply in its arms: In the sick glow from the spinning orb, she looked dead.

Holding Woo at arm’s length like a man who must clean a smelly puppy, the Yeren laid her atop the dead white matron’s back, bared its fangs and bent toward her throat.

I hurt everywhere. My jaw felt broken and I was certain that my guts were boiling out of the holes in my abdomen.

I said the first thing that popped into my head.

 “Hey, whore’s bastard.Your mother makes business with horny turtles and your father fornicates with river trout.”       

The Yeren cocked its head like a dog hearing an ultrasonic dinner bell: I’d insulted it in flawless Cantonese.

I’d learned a few Chinese curses while researching my third novel, Murder on the Great Wall. As emerald radiance filled the sanctuary, those phrases came back to me.

“You heard me, shit box,” I gasped. “When you were born you were so ugly your mama hung a “condemned” sign over her uterus.”     

The squatter dropped Woo. It slouched toward me, head cocked at a questing angle, a threatening growl rumbling in its chest.

“Your mama’s asshole is so big, every time she bends over to take a crap eight generations of Japanese whoremasters fall out!” 

The Yeren roared and leapt.

I thought about the father I would never know, the curse that had doomed my ancestors and hung a shroud over the face of my future. In that split second, as the Yeren fell toward me with its fangs aimed at my throat, I thought of all these things.

Then I fired the Seward.    

Like train wrecks, bad blowjobs and other disasters, my perception of the event slowed to a crawl: I saw the iron bolt streak like a brilliant crimson slash through the lambent green air; saw it punch through the Yeren’s upraised right hand; saw it pierce the squatter’s right eye like a cataract surgery performed by drunken sideshow freaks.

The Yeren flipped over in midair and crashed to the floor.

I gripped the last iron bolt: It was all that stood between me and the squatter’s claws, and it wasn’t enough: When my opponent came for me, I knew that I would die.

Somewhere, far from where I lay, a rooster welcomed the first tendrils of dawn. An airliner droned by overhead, its roar fading slowly into the distance.

“Come on, you fucker!” I screamed. 

Around me, soft edges sharpened as the shimmering emerald orb illuminated the sanctuary. Watching the light, my eyelids grew as heavy as iron doors. My muscles ached as if submerged beneath a river of ice.

Finally, too weary to hold the weight and too furious to let it go, I left Kowalski and Sandra Woo and everything else behind; filled my every horizon with bitter emerald.

I fell, lost in seething green and cold silence.

33

Heart of Darkness, Hear My Whine

For a timeless interval I wandered through a field of yellow flowers: golden peonies, amber jonquils, sunflowers as big as my head waved in a breeze that whispered with human voices.

My former nemesis, Tobi Bernardi, appeared and strolled along at my side. The blood that remained inside my body quickened. Even in my dying moments, my most strident detractor held the power to entice me.

“You did good work this time, Obadiah,” the phantom critic said. “Much better than your usual crap.”

For a moment, even Tobi glowed with a new luster. I pledged that if I was still alive when I woke up I would call her and make nice.

And my father was there.

Marcus stood with a large group of men and women, most of whom I didn’t know. I recognized a few of them from family photographs. My grandpa Phil stood at my father’s side. And next to him stood his mother, Bertha, holding a bloody meat cleaver. Bertha waved at me with one gore-clotted hand, and smiled.

A few others seemed familiar, though to my knowledge I’d never met any of them. But from them I sensed a kind of satisfaction, a feeling of welcome.

No one spoke. My father nodded his head, once, and moved aside to allow a shadowy figure to step into the amber light.

It was Kowalski.

My father’s partner glared at me without speaking. His eyes were filled with rage.  And fear.

A timeless instant later, Kowalski and the others faded, lost in that profusion of riotous yellow flora, until I was all alone in the silent field.

Slowly, the colors went out of the vision and I fell back into the darkness.

* * * *

Eventually, the world came back to me.

In the silence (except for the sound of Sandra Woo vomiting), I lay against the burned-out wall of the chapel wheezing like an angry asthmatic.

My right lung felt like someone had taken a sushi knife to it. And to add insult to critical injury, at some point in the midst of all the chaos, I’d soiled myself again.

As the last shreds of my dignity trickled through the rotten floorboards upon which I bled, I decided that I was definitely dying.

The revelation of my incipient mortality brought with it a host of morbid realizations: Tobi Bernardi would never know of the lust I’d discovered in extremis; I would die as I had lived, a semi-talented misanthrope, a spinner of violent, middle-of the road suspense yarns that millions bought and no one remembered.

I was alright with it.

I’d done something that mattered. I’d saved a life, maybe two if Kowalski still lived.

Kowalski

A dark note entered the autobiographical aria I was enjoying. Kowalski had been hit, hard. He’d taken a direct shot to the face when I’d tackled the Yeren.

Neville

We’d entered the sanctuary at around 4:30 AM. By my reckoning, Kowalski was nearly three hours past his “sell-by” date. Necropolis had said so. And Necropolis, or Carlos Vulpe, or whoever the Hell he really was, was never wrong.

“Mister?”

I opened my eyes.

Sandra Woo hovered above me, her eyes leaking black mascara lines down her cheeks and neck and staining the neckline of her ripped hospital tunic. Guided by instincts too ancient to ignore, I tried to look down her blouse.

“What is it?” I snapped, angry with myself for my momentary return to the carnal. Woo wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing her mascara even more.

“I think your friend is dying.”

Contrary to what I’d believed a moment earlier, I found that I was able to sit up. A stabbing pain gouged the right side of my lower back and tugged a groan up from my bowels.

“He’s over there, under the pews,” she said. ”I can’t reach him.”

I ignored the pain, got to my feet and staggered across the aisle.

Kowalski lay wedged between two overturned pews. He had slid beneath the long seats and come to rest with his head against the shattered remnants of the North-facing wall of the sanctuary.

I lay down on my stomach, gasping at the detonation of pain that ignited in my abdomen. I reached under the pew and tried to grab Kowalski’s ankle but my fingers barely brushed the bottom of his right shoe.

“My arm’s not... long enough,” I said. “Help me.”

Working together, we managed to shift one of the pews enough to drag Kowalski out.

His face had been smashed in. He’d sustained a hideous crushing injury to the right side of his face and head. The Yeren’s claws had torn away part of Kowalsi’s scalp, exposing the red/white cap of bone beneath. His skin was the livid color of a bruise, cool and clammy to the touch. He wasn’t breathing. Woo could find no pulse.

“Do something,” I said.

Woo shoved me aside and began to administer CPR. Her grunts of exertion filled the sanctuary as she labored to breathe life back into Kowalski’s body. Minutes passed. Nothing worked. Nothing changed.

Finally, she gave up. Exhausted, Sandra Woo sat on the floor, put her head in her hands and wept.

I sat there, bent almost double by the pain of my injuries, watching as the color drained out of Kowalski’s face.    

“Looks like you’re in a pickle, O-dog.”

The voice was known to me. As a child I’d heard it in my worst nightmares. I’d heard it more recently atop a wind-swept precipice in the Wraithing. Its presence here meant that I’d failed; that I’d seen only a small part of a grander scheme. And that Kowalski was lost to me forever.

Because he was there.

Sandra Woo lifted her head and screamed, a shrieking exhalation of triumph and utter damnation. Her face contorted itself and became Vulpe’s face. Shadows thickened around her, rewove themselves to form a midnight–black tunic which enfolded her in darkness.

The black cloud began to rise. It floated up to the height of the top of the corpse pile, nine feet above my head. Sandra Woo vanished in that seething black-emerald cloud as her scream cycled upward, lowered in tone, until it became Vulpe’s laughter.       

The black cloud dissolved. Carlos Vulpe hovered over the corpse shrine, a dark distortion of the silly character I’d once adored. I thought I had destroyed that part of my life: The day I set fire to our garage I’d consigned it to the flames, along with the rest of my childhood.

But I’d failed.

He had grown up too. His once smooth skin was pitted now, and gnarled like the bole of an ancient tree. Shining eyes burned with a nearly palpable contempt: twin pools-of lambent emerald malevolence that razed my courage to ash. He smiled, exposed needle-sharp fangs that glimmered like silver daggers in the withering light.

Doctor Necropolis. Carlos Vulpe. The Bogeyman.

I looked my monster squarely in the eye and spoke clearly.

 “What kept you?”

34

Hidden Agenda

Vulpe sat cross-legged in mid-air above my head. He was now nearly identical to the picture I’d seen in Kowalski’s kitchen; black hair slicked down and parted down the center, olive-skinned, with features sharp enough to slice bone.

He wore a close-fitting, high-collared black tunic, trousers, and boots, the outfit he’d worn in numerous episodes of The Time Rangers. But in the shimmering green illumination that filled the sanctuary, the black suit appeared to absorb light, exhaling darkness in return: Vulpe’s head seemed to float atop a man-shaped cluster of shadows.

“Let the woman go,” I said. “This is between you and me.”

“She isn’t aware of this conversation, O-dog” Vulpe crooned. “I’ve arranged for a little hiccup in her conscious awareness during our visit.”

“You can do that?” I said.

“When I’m done with her she’ll wake up with nothing more interesting than a bitch of a headache.”

Vulpe spread his arms like a Vegas stage magician and descended toward the floor of the church. Back in Kowalski’s kitchen I’d imagined that Vulpe would move with the febrile grace of a dancer. I was wrong.

As he drifted toward the floor of the church, he seemed to unfold himself, stretching his legs downward like a great black spider reaching for its prey. When he’d settled to the floor, he stood smoothly and folded his arms across his chest.

Vulpe was a head taller than me, inhumanly thin. If he had been made of flesh and bone he might have weighed ninety pounds. His arms were nearly as long as his legs, each joint thick and distended, like knots in the trunk of a young sapling. Nevertheless, Vulpe communicated an aura of hideous strength. He exuded power like nothing else I’d encountered, including the Yeren.

“Welcome, friends,” he said. “To the Moment Between.”

I grunted, forced myself to stand. I’d lost a lot of blood and my vision doubled at the effort. But I got to my feet, faced my foe and said, “I’m not impressed.”

Vulpe chuckled. “New Yorkers,” he said. “So jaded.” 

“What do you want?”

Vulpe laughed this time, “Come now, my brotha. What does any evil nether entity want? Power? Prestige? A lap dance with full release from Condoleeza Rice?”

I winced at the pain in my head. Something about Vulpe made my brain hurt. I squinted against the pain, and I saw it: a black aura, similar to the dark energy which had surrounded Trocious. In Vulpe’s case, however, the aura was much denser. He seemed to hover within a maelstrom of malice: Black-bellied thunderclouds roiled around him, heavy with harm.

Vulpe’s cloud contained swirling motes of greenish light that flared and flashed like carnivorous emerald fireflies. The flashes hurt the worst.

“Alas, ol’ chum,” he continued. “While I’d love to see Condy spread-eagled up a flagpole squirtin’ ping-pong balls as much as the next guy, my business is with you. I’m here to offer you a deal.”

“You’re a two-bit kid’s hobby item,” I snarled. “What could you possibly have to offer? If I hadn’t dreamed life into you you’d be the handle of somebody’s toilet brush.”

“Tut tut, m’man,” Vulpe chuckled. “The Power I represent was ancient millennia before you were anything more than a glint in yo pappy’s eye.

“That Power is prepared to make you an offer: An offer that also concerns one Neville Hephaestus Kowalski, AKA ‘Deader Than Three-day-old Camel Shit.’”

“I’m not interested,” I said.

“Oh, but I say you are interested,” Vulpe hissed. “See, I know you. You love nice neat endings: every loose end tied, every literary hole stitched up tighter than a ladybug’s crap flap. That’s just the kind of detail-oriented, anal-retentive he-bitch you are.”

Vulpe drifted closer. The heat from his eyes branded emerald circles across the skin of my irises.

“But you know as well as I do that even if I kill you, here and now, this isn’t over,” he crowed. “Far from it. Everything that’s happened up to this point has been an appetizer. The main course is gonna knock ‘em dead.”

Vulpe stopped. For a moment he seemed to tremble with suppressed vehemence, as if the very air of the sanctuary had grown rife with violence.

“And you? You’re already dead,” he spat. “You just don’t know it yet. However, I’m willing to throw you a bone before the end.”

“Why?” I said. “Why should I believe you?”

Vulpe shuddered again, his face contorting in a spasm of hate.  “Because I can’t lie,” he said. “And because you have friends in places you know nothing about.”

Despite Vulpe’s tone a dark glimmer of hope fluttered in my gut.

Was it possible?

“Tell me about the deal.”

“Alright,” Vulpe said. “Your friend isn’t gone... yet.”

“Liar,” I said. “Kowalski’s dead.”

“Oh, he’s dead alright,” Vulpe countered. “Dead as Dick’s hatband, as I believe he was fond of saying.”

My side was throbbing. My movements had widened the wounds in my abdomen. I shook my head to clear the red cobwebs gathering inside it, and a warm gout of fresh blood trickled down my thighs.

“Get to the point,” I grated.

“There’s dead and then there’s gone,” Vulpe continued. “Kowalski’s dead but he ain’t gone. Oh, he’ll be gone any second now, but I’ve held him up while we have our little chat.”

Vulpe gestured toward Kowalski.

Kowalski opened his eyes and sat up. He scowled, and glared around as if he’d awoken in a strange country where he couldn’t speak the language.

Then his eyes found mine.

“Grudge,” he said. “Don’t do it. Don’t listen to him.”

Then, as if the severity of his situation had only just occurred to him, Kowalski screamed.

“Goddamn! It hurts!”

As Kowalski’s shrieks filled the sanctuary, I whirled and faced Vulpe.

“Stop it!” I howled. “You’re torturing him!”

“Yeah,” Vulpe said. “It’s what I do.”

“Grudge!” Kowalski screamed. “Don’t do it!”

“What did you do to him?”

Vulpe shrugged. Kowalski’s screams grew louder.

“I ‘opened him up,’” he said. “He’s not dead, but he ain’t exactly alive either.”

Necropolis grinned. “He can feel himself rotting. Trust me, ol’ Nevvie’s psyche is a very ugly place right now.”

“It hurts!”

“You bastard,” I rasped.

Kowalski thrashed on the floor, his wounds gaping wetly in the emerald gloom: He was suffering the torments of the damned, barred from the surcease of Death.

“I’ve set up a sweet little bargain,” Vulpe said. “Pursuant to your agreement, of course. I’ve arranged to keep your friend on spiritual ice while you and me conversate.”

“‘Conversate’ about what?” I said.

“Goddamit, Grudge,” Kowalski gasped. “Listen to me.  I’ve had my run. This is my Day and I’m not afraid. Understand? It doesn’t matter what happens to me. Don’t let that shithead make you do something stupid.”

“That’s enough out of you, soggy-britches,” Vulpe said.

Kowalski stopped, frozen.

My vision doubled, then trebled. My focus began to waver. Vulpe split into two, then three carbon copies of himself.

Stay awake, asshole.

I drove my fist into my gut where the Yeren had stabbed me, and gasped. The world surged into clarity buoyed on a wave of nausea.

“That’s the spirit,” Vulpe said. “You and I both know that if Kowalski is allowed to die you gon’ be one sorry sumbitch. But it don’t gotta be ‘dat way, my brother.”

“You mentioned a deal,” I said.

“Yes,” Vulpe said. “I give you the power to make good: to do right by all those dead monster hunters swingin’ from your family tree. I’ll even throw in old ‘knobby-knuckles’ over there. In return you promise me one simple favor.”

In the red haze that clouded my senses, I imagined Kowalski shouting at the top of his lungs. Or maybe he really was shouting. I couldn’t tell anymore.

“What kind of favor?”

Vulpe chuckled again.

“Now that would be way too much expository dialogue, Mr. Chekhov; me standing here gloating as I reveal my devious plans while you figure out how to thwart them. How corny is that?”

Vulpe seemed to grow taller. The corpse-light in his eyes flared star-bright as he drew near.

“Let’s call it an act of good will; one to be redeemed at a later date. See, you’ve got potential that you haven’t even dreamed of, O-dog. I just want to see that potential realized before the Feasting Time.”

Juno had mentioned the Feasting Time as well. Something about those words stirred a pulsating terror in my gut. Black wings beat the shadows around me.

“What is that?” I said. “Feasting Time?”

Vulpe made a noise like a gameshow buzzer.

“Thanks for playing, but that subject is a ‘No Fly zone,’ comprende?”

Everyone I’d met along the strange journey to that moment rose up in my mind, shouting from the shadows of my confusion.

“Obadiah,” Marcus’s shade intoned. “You don’t know what you’re doing. Let him go.”

He’s dying, Marcus.

“Everybody dies, son,” Marcus said. “It’s Kowalski’s Day. Let him go. You’re playing with forces you don’t understand.”

But Kowalski lay dying at my feet.

And I had the chance to make things right.

“Well, what say you, O-dog?”

I shoved the shouts of horror and condemnation away, consigned them to whatever destiny lay over the emerald horizon. I would decide my course, and no one else.

“I accept.”

Vulpe’s eyes ignited. Curling streamers of emerald force rolled heavenward like the smoke from a conflagration.

“That’s my boy.”

There was a viridescent burst of light that faded swiftly, leaving me momentarily dazzled. The light was physical, possessing both weight and density. It clung to the insides of my eyelids. It hurt, like dozens of invisible millipedes crawling over my skin, creeping beneath my flesh.

When the pain faded, I opened my eyes.

Vulpe was gone.

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“What?”

We were back among the pews. Sandra Woo was staring at me. Kowalski lay unmoving where she’d left him on the floor.

“I asked if you have a cell phone.”

“Where is he?” I said.

“Mister, we’ve gotta call an ambulance.”

The word “ambulance” galvanized me.

“Wait.”

I crawled toward Kowalski, propelled forward by a rising wave of terror.

Something was moving inside me.

It seethed beneath my skin, something cold. It coiled around my heart and drew away its warmth. The coiled thing had settled itself inside my mind.

I had to get it out.

I lifted my left hand, heavy with blood and terror, and dropped it on Kowalski’s chest.

Power.

It flowed out of me, through me and into him, a red/green shriek of power that blasted the nerves in my hands and feet, fired the synapses in my brain and sent a thrill of horror down my spine.

I closed my eyes and heard someone shouting my name. I think it was my father.

I found Kowalski huddled in the dark, floating in a place that was no place, a place that was simply Outside.

I called to him. He turned to me and I froze: I didn’t see a savior reflected in Kowalski’s eyes. I saw a monster.

But it was too late.

I opened my eyes.

A moment later, Kowalski hitched in a breath.

Sandra Woo screamed.

The bruises on his face were gone. The injuries he’d suffered at the hands of the Yeren were fading as I watched.

Kowalski sat up. He held his hands in front of his face and stared at them as if they belonged on the end of someone else’s arms. Then he turned to me.

 “My God, Grudge,” he said. “What have you done?”

35

Summing Up

In the days following the so-called “Seattle Wildman Murders” a series of truly unsettling events occurred.

Nurse Sandra Woo, the only survivor of the Wildman’s killing spree, led the authorities back to the Southwest Chinese Lutheran Sanctuary, only to find that it had been burned to the ground by a fire so intense that nothing, not even a single wall, remained intact.

The Seattle Police Department and the FBI found no trace of the suspect Woo had identified as the Wildman. Only the remains of his victims, preserved from the flames in a crawlspace beneath the Sanctuary.

But Woo was adamant. Her story, she insisted, was true. The SPD officers shook their heads and made googly eyes at each other behind her back. Only one officer appeared interested, a recently injured veteran named Athena Talbot.          

Talbot took Woo to lunch a few days later.

She listened to everything Woo had to say with great interest.

* * * *

In the ashes of the burned sanctuary, the Seattle Police Department’s task force found copious amounts of DNA from a man wanted for questioning in the murder of Glen Arthur Hong: a thirty-five year old illegal Chinese national named Chen Mao Liu.

DNA analysis of Chen’s blood samples taken from the Sanctuary proved inconclusive. Forensic scientists quietly determined that Chen’s DNA had been cross-contaminated by that of an unknown animal.

The Mayor, County Medical Examiner, Chief of Police and every Federal agent involved in the case agreed that the blood samples should be held for further study. They were stamped “Classified” and sent to a Federal research facility in Washington. The mysteries of Chen Mao Liu’s blood, they agreed, were better left unrevealed to the general public.

An anonymous tip led Federal investigators to the cramped studio apartment Chen Mao Liu rented in Chinatown. There they found more of Chen’s blood, and hair samplings from several victims and from the so-called “Wild Man.”

Police also found the half-devoured remains of several of the missing victims whose bodies were not recovered from the Sanctuary: Their organs were found in Chen’s refrigerator in Chinese food containers stolen from the stockroom of the Golden Fortune, the restaurant where Chen worked until the night Glen Hong was butchered.

The Seattle P.D. and the FBI issued a joint statement saying that Chen Mao Liu had been held for questioning by Homeland Security, but because of his status as a citizen of the People’s Republic of China (and a hastily-drawn relationship to an obscure Chinese Ambassador), they averred, Chen was deported to Beijing to await punishment in the Chinese criminal justice system.

The outcome of the Wildman murders was protested by the victims’ families and an outraged public. Congress launched a twelve-week investigation that was abruptly halted without explanation at a cost of nearly thirty-five-million taxpayer dollars. Lawsuits were filed and settled, quietly, away from the glaring light of public scrutiny.

Soon enough, the story faded from the front pages, replaced by perfectly ordinary terrors.

But one fact remains.

The body of Chen Mao Liu was never found.

Other than blood and a few hair clippings, some of them displaying human, animal, and other characteristics that one forensic scientist described as “utterly impossible to identify,” no physical evidence was found to confirm he had ever existed.

Chen Mao Liu’s bloody footprints had been smoothed over like tracks in the sand. Hidden beneath an eternal sea.

* * * *

I didn’t know where the Story would lead me. Didn’t know what doors might open, or down what dark pathways those doors might lead.

I spent the next few weeks healing, pacing the floors of my apartment and jumping at shadows, unable to sleep, unable to write, needing to write just the same. Mostly I sat in Central Park, alone at night, smoking, searching my soul for answers and avoiding the pigeons.

One night, needing the sound of other human voices I went to a local coffee shop in the Village. It was a place normally haunted by literary types. I went there whenever I couldn’t get the words out of my head and onto the page.   

One of the waitresses, an aspiring actress I’d seen many times at the coffee shop, sat down across from me. I’d always experienced an intense distrust of this woman. In the past she’d tortured me with her adventures as a Black Artiste in the Big Apple.

On this particular night, however, the actress/waitress invited me to join her in an adventure of a different sort. She was dark brown, with dyed red dredlocks and eyes the color of a glacier. Having no good reason to reject her, I accompanied her back to Brooklyn.  

I was lonely.

Kowalski had refused to return my calls. He’d left me unconscious and alone at Seattle Memorial. When I awoke I was told that all my medical services (stab wounds, several strained tendons in my neck and back, several cracked ribs, a broken wrist and a greenstick fracture in the ulna of my right forearm) had been paid in full.

It had been four months since we’d last spoken.

On the subway ride back to Brooklyn, the actress/waitress and I could barely keep our hands off each other. By the time we reached my apartment I believed I would have committed murder to possess her. When I opened the door, Kowalski and Hernandez were waiting for us.

The actress/waitress shrieked and leaped across the room. Hernandez fired her crossbow even as the actress/waitress shape-shifted. The iron shaft shot past her and buried itself in the wall inches from my head. The actress/waitress lashed out, moving faster than human eyes could follow, and slapped Hernandez across the room.

Kowalski fired next. His bolt passed through empty air. The actress/waitress was standing on the ceiling directly over Kowalski’s head. She reached down, grabbed Kowalski by the throat and lifted him off the floor.

Red fury burned the shock from my mind. I grasped the iron crossbow and pulled it out of the wall. A shock of force reverberated up my arm, and fire exploded across the range of my perceptions.

The actress/waitress dropped Kowalski. Black-veined folds of skin like bat’s wings burst from the flesh beneath her outstretched arms. Her limbs elongated and thickened. Fangs emerged from her jaws and drooled viscous black slime onto the floor.

The vampire dropped to the floor and lunged toward me even as I lunged, thrusting out with the iron crossbow bolt. The force of our clash carried us across the living room and through the big picture window that overlooked Atlantic Avenue.

We plummeted two stories to the concrete. The vampire took the brunt of the fall. Even so, she tore at my face, black claws dragging red runnels down my cheeks.

My mind filled up with a crimson shout, and I rammed the iron bolt into the vampire’s heart. The creature screamed, and spat ichor into my face. I ground the bolt deeper into its chest until I felt the cords of her unlife snap. With a warbling moan, the vampire settled into the asphalt. In moments, she was gone. Not even a skeleton remained.  

Exhausted now, abandoned by that shining red rage, I staggered up the stairs of my brownstone, back to my apartment. When I got there, a bruised and battered Hernandez and Kowalski were waiting for me.

Kowalski shoved Hernandez toward me. The one eyed hunter stared at me, almost sheepishly.  

The Blood Rose cleared her throat.

“We have to talk.”

* * * *

After the cleaners were gone, Kowalski and I sat facing each other across my kitchen table.

“I drove up to Woodstock you know,” he said. “Thought I could retire, like I’d always planned to do.”

He shrugged. “I was bored out of my tits.”

The crusty prophet stood up and looked out the new glass the cleaners had installed in my living room.

“I couldn’t sleep out there,” he said. “Not sleeping much anywhere these days.” He turned and faced me. “What did you do to me, Grudge?”

I shrugged. “I healed you,” I said. “I don’t know how.”

Kowalski grimaced. He glared at me without speaking for nearly a minute. Then he shrugged.

“I don’t think I’m fully human any more,” he said. “Hell, I’m supposed to be dead. I don’t sleep. And I’m seein’ things…things that I shouldn’t be seeing. Things I don’t want to see.”

He slammed his fist on the table.

“Why’d you do it, Grudge?”

I considered my answer for a long time. But finally, I settled on the simple truth: “You’re my best friend.”

Kowalski stared at me without speaking. Then he cleared his throat and nodded. For a moment, I thought the merest hint of emerald fire shimmered around him; a fleeting glimpse of corpse light, but I couldn’t be sure.

A crazy gleam that had nothing to do with Carlos Vulpe flickered in his eyes.   Kowalski smiled.

“Then maybe things ain’t so black after all,” he said. “No offense.”

I returned his smile.

“None taken.”

* * * *

Three hours ago, a man attacked two female joggers in Central Park. There has been a month-long spate of unsolved mutilation/murders in Midtown. Othello led Kowalski and me to a secluded section of the park where we found the werewolf. It was in the process of eating one of its victims.

I shot the human host with a gun loaded with silver bullets. Kowalski was right about one thing: religious artifacts only focus the natural gifts of certain hunters.

It takes a “modest gifting,” to use Kowalski’s words.

And the passion of the bereaved.

I’ve written this account to try and document these events, to tell the story from the viewpoint of someone who lived it. My time is limited. I know.

My Book arrived in the mail the other day.

It came in a plain brown envelope with no return address and no sender. I’ve left it sealed inside a safe deposit box at a bank in upstate New York. I haven’t opened the Book. I know what’s inside. I’m afraid I won’t have the strength not to look at the last page.

I didn’t know what to expect, but my father did, damn him. The old bastard must have known all along.

Now, I know as well.

And now a word to you, dear Reader.

You may have occasion to look up from your reading one night, when the moon is full and the wind rattles your bedroom window.

You may hear a howl at midnight, and realize that the Wolf really is waiting at your door.      

You may even be lucky enough to meet a man or woman who offers you immortality: an eternity of sunless days and endless nights in exchange for a single kiss. If you do, don’t worry.

We’ll be right behind you.

Between book signings, public appearances and my monthly support group meetings, I still find time for my real job. My partner and I are available most nights and some weekends. I’m the arrogant prick with abandonment issues and he’s a toothless old coot who glows in the dark, but we’re passionate about our work. Hell, I come from a long line of men and women dedicated to saving your ass. My name? That’s easy.    

It’s Grudge.

I kill monsters.

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