I broke the silence. “Gyro has to get his nails clipped today. I’ll take him.”
I volunteered to chauffeur the beast often because I always took him for ice cream, which then gave me an excellent excuse to have ice cream. Ours was a mutually beneficial relationship in this respect.
Wally piped up, “We got a message board contact from Hayseed last night.”
Message boards were our link to others like us who were careful about not revealing too much of their identity. I had always surmised that anyone who sensed they were being hunted could use the very same tools we did to discover who or what was threatening them. It seemed that discretion could only enhance our ability to harry the ranks of the immortal. Over the years, we had obliquely built a network of contacts who shared our rare occupation. Hayseed was one such compatriot, operating in the American heartland. We knew he was a male, a bit older, and that he had spent the better part of a decade chasing one particularly vile creature whom he would only describe as a Feeder.
When he got drunk one night after discovering the remains of a pair of teen girls, he sent us a picture of the crime scene. It was a charnel house on the edge of a wheat field. Blood and tissue hung from cut stalks, and there was so little of the girls left that the next rain would wash them into the thirsty soil, lost forever to their grieving families. Light indentations of shoeless female feet dotted the site, where a splash of rusty blood indicated the killer had planted her feet to lunge and tear. Hayseed had written of the stench, old and sour, a scent that stitched death and gore with the violating tone of ammonia. A ghoul, I thought instantly, looking at the hideous images. Only a ghoul would rend a human in such a gleeful and desperate manner, skipping birdlike around the victim as it bit and slashed, mumbling and tittering around a prize of warm flesh. Ghouls were the last stop on the train of immortality, often even being killed by their own brethren, who reviled their less cultured cousins. Their descent was often marked by hysterical violence and a complete loss of control. It was easy to see why their indiscretions could lead to other parties taking an interest in eliminating them from the world. Crudely put, they were bad for business and brought the one thing to immortals that they would not brook: visibility. They were not always alone, often paired with a human we branded helper or friend, both terms used as a slur to describe a truly puerile, complicit being devoid of morality. Often, a helper would act as a traitorous assistant in hopes of gaining inroads to her own immortality. Helpers became indentured servants, slaved to an amoral beast that used them for as long as they could. Rewards were never free, as even the sexual pleasure showered on them inexorably turned them into shadows. Their lives with their masters ended as they began: with deception and lust. And then death. Always with death.
We thought of Hayseed as the Captain Ahab of the plains, but he was far from myopic in his practices. He had, over the years, passed us information about the panoply of beings that traveled and stalked the highways and cities of Kansas, Nebraska, and points east. The sea of grain that stretched under the stars was a dangerous place. Commerce demanded that trucks and trains traverse the yawning spaces of the plains, and, with these, came lonely men who were exactly the type of souls that immortals found irresistible. Hayseed stayed busy. Abandoned trucks and cars and luggage led him through a skein of hints that would end in the same scene, with Hayseed moving on and the ashes of an immortal committed to the relentless wind of the prairie. He was, in his own way, as lethal as we were, but far lonelier.
“What did he say?” Risa, brow raised, was curious.
So was I. Hayseed did not contact us often, but his messages usually had some punch to them. His economy of words was offset by his discerning eye for information that was germane to us in an immediate way. The newest message was no different.
Wally got serious. “A local auctioneer was settling an estate that should have meant nothing to anyone. It was a clapboard house on a lot that belonged to a dowager who had died three years earlier. The market was so weak that there was no reason to press for a sale, but, eventually, not one, but three, relatives came forward demanding the entire estate,” she said. She paused and glanced at her laptop again. “The house was empty except for out-of-date furniture that didn’t even have kitsch value. The land is piss-poor and too far from town to matter, and she had a monthly check of less than nine hundred dollars, most of which went to bills, a kid who cut her lawn, and the local animal shelter.”
Risa was deep in thought, and I was nowhere near a guess as to what the hook could be. We waited for Wally to continue.
“Two of the relatives seem like ghosts. No ties to the area, no discernible relation to the woman. The third has the ring of truth, and his statements are so guileless that I think he might be real. He said he was the son of her sister’s first husband and that he had spent the Christmas season there for three straight years while his father served in the Marines.”
I interrupted, “Why only Christmas?”
Risa followed with several questions, all focused on the reason for the dustup over the estate. “Where was the mother? Was she missing? Did they have money or . . . were they special? Who was the boy, other than a holiday guest?”
She tapped her nail against her teeth and became quiet. I knew a pensive Risa meant that I was missing some of the obvious questions, let alone the hidden ones.
Wally spoke, her tone soft and thoughtful, “Hayseed wrote almost nothing about the family. I think he only wrote about the place at all because of one detail. The attorney who handled the estate asked Ethan, the now-grown boy, if he had enjoyed Christmas on the plains. He said no, he wouldn’t have even known which day Christmas fell on since they didn’t have a television or a tree or presents.”
Risa laughed, “You’re telling me there was a single old Jewish Luddite in the middle of five states of wheat?”
I smiled, too, until Wally finished with a flourish.
“No. She wasn’t anything like that at all. Ethan says she was spooky as hell, rarely spoke to him, and wore an old necklace that she would take off and shake at thunderstorms as they rolled towards the house. He was a kid, so he didn’t really grasp what she was doing; he just thought she was insane. If you ask me, the old lady was a witch.”
We all recognized the necklace as the only bright point in an otherwise unremarkable story, although an old woman confronting a wall of lightning on the prairie made for good imagery. Witches came in all types. A solitary woman bereft of a large family wasn’t newsworthy to us. I couldn’t imagine what Hayseed had thought we would find compelling about this tale, until I remembered that our information flowed both ways.
“When was our last message to him? Before or after I met Senya at the bar?”
Wally was certain. “After. And I was thorough, many details.”
We all thought that, no matter how small, the details always gave insight into finding what or who was just out of our reach and how to make our grasp that much longer.
Risa finally spoke. “Since we know about Ethan, and a lone weather witch who seems to have had no impact on anyone or anything that we know of, we need to know two things. What necklace was she wearing, and who else wanted it?”
Wally nodded and said, “Yes, and one more thing, too. Who else came to claim the estate? What was the excuse they gave to travel to a place where a solitary woman presided over an unwanted scrap of ground? Was there anything interesting about them, other than the simple fact that they were even aware of her death? I’ll message him again and ask him what we’re missing.”
Breakfast was over with that, and I had a giant dog to get into my car. Ice cream--and Gyro--could not wait.
11
On Route 441 in Hollywood is a group of saints operating as veterinarians. The Castle Animal Clinic is a modest building between a paint store and an auto shop that specializes in electrical issues and horrendous outbursts of screaming in Greek. I had made the terrifying mistake of taking my car there years earlier, where a pair of cousi
ns had an argument in front of me that escalated to an impromptu wrestling match on the floor. I had arrived to pick up my vehicle, and, after separating from each other with ominous threats, the shorter cousin demanded sixty dollars from me for “fixing short in goddamn no good cheap cheap wiring harness.” I paid without a word and have not visited the Screaming Greek Electrical Wizards since.
The staff at Castle was another story entirely. Gyro loped in through the glass door ahead of me to an enthusiastic greeting from Sandra and Lena, who ran the front of the house. Both women were in their late forties, motherly, and had a deft hand with the patrons, regardless of whether they had hands, paws, or claws. Sandra, a blonde, favored skin-tight scrubs in garish colors to augment her makeup, which appeared to have been applied with a paint gun. Her blue eyes swam in an array of eye liners and shadows that gave her a vaguely surprised look at all times. Lena was no shrinking violet, either, although her taste in makeup was more subdued. Jewelry was another matter entirely. Her straight brown hair rarely covered her trademark earrings, which ranged from spoon-like appendages covered in sequins to hoops that a parrot could roost in. Today, she had selected a demure pair of feathers plucked from some species of bird that took mating rituals very seriously, as no fewer than ten shades of greens and blues created a pattern that could cause a seizure disorder if one stared at them too long.
The women had worked there for the entirety of Gyro’s life and several years before, lending a familiar comfort to the clinic that made animals and owners just a little less nervous. For me, it made all the difference. In one step, Gyro had approached the counter and rested his enormous head on it for what he knew would be a generous scratch and fuss over his presence, both of which agreed with him immensely.
“Big boy! What are we doing today?” Lena asked, as Sandra continued to fuss over him.
“Just nails today, and thanks for seeing the big goof without much warning. He’s tearing up the new couch, and I lose every argument with him about staying off of the furniture.”
Risa and Wally selected new couches every six months, it seemed, as a result of the cumulative damages of a giant dog and a slovenly Argentine who spilled food on the cushions each time she ate.
“Gotcha, Ring. Let me take him back and we’ll have him out in a jiff,” Sandra said as she walked around the counter and opened the door to the grooming area.
Gyro immediately walked in, knowing that every trip to the Castle resulted in ice cream. He may have looked the part, but he was no dummy. I sat on a squeaky pleather chair for the ten-minute wait and thought about ice cream while looking out over the blizzard of traffic. It was these normal moments that I found myself craving from time to time, a sort of clearing of my psychological palate, and I know Risa and Wally felt the same way. Sitting in that fake leather chair with my legs sticking to the cushion was the closest I would come to ordinary for some time, and I knew it.
I had gotten a text message that Liz Brenneman’s lock was malfunctioning, so I dropped Gyro at home and headed for Hardigan Center. Liz, an attorney, had rented from me for six years, two of which were lost in a haze of wine and the crashing avalanche of an ugly divorce. Her ex-husband Lewis made my skin crawl. Wally and Risa had lobbied quite seriously for disposing of him in the Everglades after they had discovered just how foul a human being he had been throughout the marriage. Liz had drunk herself to the brink of disbarment, but then had managed to dig in and wrest some degree of normalcy from the ashes of a commitment she had taken very seriously. She occupied the spot to the right of the Butterfly and was a fixture in the front window, pacing back and forth in a harried rhythm with a phone held to her ear. At thirty-eight, she fought tenaciously to maintain a healthy body, especially since becoming sober and finding that life indeed continued, regardless of her previous desire to freeze time. Liz had the desperate beauty of a fancy guest soap that had been used too often but whose original features still stubbornly remained. With curly brown hair and blue eyes, she was an engaging face that fronted a bright mind. After the divorce and her rebirth, she had transformed from a ragged woman with an aura of sadness into something far more hopeful, and we were all thankful for the change, since we genuinely liked her.
I arrived at the center, parked, and got my toolbox out of the trunk. Liz’s neighbor to the right, Glen Ferloch, made eye contact with me and gave an awkward wave with his spindly arm, but, then, everything Glen did was awkward. A blonde Ichabod Crane twin with thinning hair, he stood two inches taller than my six foot three and weighed roughly half as much. With large teeth and a spastic manner, he moved about his office space and life with the rhythm of a twitchy stork, but was so earnest that he was impossible to dislike. Glen had located his business in the center two years earlier and paid the rent one day early without fail. He owned a small niche service that transported and transplanted highly desirable trees, an unusual job that found some purchase in the newly moneyed of the area. People purchased fully grown oaks, screw pines, and palms of all varieties at exorbitant prices in order to make new homes seem more established. His work attire never varied, much like his routine. Blocky brown work boot hybrids exacerbated the enormous length of his feet, and his impeccably-pressed chinos were always belted far too tightly and pulled to just north of his navel. A celery green polo shirt emblazoned with the Glen 2 Glen Trees logo crowned the entire ensemble.
“Ring! Morning!” Glen called as he reached out from his partially opened door and pumped my hand vigorously, his other holding a phone. “Just wanted to say hey!”
I nodded, and, before I could respond, he ducked his tangle of limbs back into his office and walked towards the back.
Liz was not at her desk, so I knelt at the lock and pushed gently against the center cylinder. There was a small amount of give but nothing that would merit me taking the mechanism apart without one critical test being done. I leaned forward and inhaled deeply, directly in front of the lock. Liz, who had been approaching me from the back of her office, stopped in her tracks with an abashed look. She raised her hands in a gesture of supplication and grinned. Citrus. The lock, of course, smelled like oranges, which meant that Liz had been using her key to stab her daily snack in order to begin peeling the resistant rind of the delicious fruit. The buildup of pulp and dust had, in turn, fouled the mechanism of the door, causing me to squat in the increasingly hot sun while spraying graphite into the lock in order to undo her wanton disregard for technology, in general. I gave her a menacing smile and drew in a lungful of air for a sound berating only to hear her phone ring through the glass at the perfect moment for her to effect an escape. She gave me a smile of apology and turned to her laptop, assuming a facial expression that meant the call was business of the paying kind. I opted to find her innocent of the offense at hand and walked back to my car. Looking the Center over, I knew that my landlord duties were concluded for the day and, likely, the week, which meant that it was time to relax until later, when Risa and Wally would determine what I was to wear for our club foray.
I could be many things around them, but being poorly dressed was not an option.
12
The Forest
To call Europe a continent is to agree, in principle, that there is a clear distinction between the East and West, as the land itself runs in an unbroken bulk from the Atlantic to Pacific oceans. From the salty pans of the southern French coast to the enormity of the undulating Pacific, the stones of the Eurasian continent are ancient and varied. Following the land eastward, the grip of European culture attenuates with distance. Massive plains and forests curl sinuously around the ancient spines of mountains thrust upwards from the basins and plains in a series of rigid divisions, defining and delineating the cultures of humans for millennia. Mountains give way to passes and valleys only to sweep forward in vast flatlands that have harbored every human habitation from the primitive to the sublime. At various locations, the hand of man rose and fell with the ages, sometimes lingering on in hidden cave grottos or lake bottom
s well past their natural existence. Antiquities were commonplace, with seemingly every spadeful of earth revealing bits and bobs of human influence. For every forgotten stone foundation, steeple, or slumping barn, there was a subterranean equivalent, where commerce, spirituality, or greed had driven human hands to prize ore from shafts and deposits wherever possible. Talus and scree announced the search for this bounty in grittily splintered piles, some covered with the dust of centuries, others fresh with the disruption of current use. Profit could be heard across the continent in the form of trucks carting masses of ore. Underneath the land, vast amounts of wealth inspired the same lust as the more obvious gifts on the surface. It simply required a different means of acquisition, and mankind was only too willing to break mountains in search of wealth.
But just as the earth had been probed, settled, and trodden upon, there were pockets of inaccessibility. Select craggy mountain passes soared above the timberline in a haze of ice and fog, impassable to everyone except the few who used them long ago to traverse the continent. These paths, dangerous and secretive, eventually fell into disfavor and were then covered by the drifts of time as other forms of travel superseded their practicality. Rarer still, tracts of immense primary forest survived in varying states of existence. Virulent nationalism protected some of these hidden groves as parks, bulwarks standing against the advance of modernity on a crowded landscape. The imbalance between social classes created others in the form of game reserves intended to keep the starving masses away from the lush bounties the land had to offer. In the geographic middle of one such fragment of time-lost woods, a small lodge, its stones green with age, rested in a cathedral of enormous oaks. Desperate maple, ash and spruce jostled for position under the roaming canopy of the oaks, which had been the undisputed masters since they began to spread upward and outward. Birch shed their bark in strips as they angled towards the panes of light of the diluted sun, low and timid on the horizon.
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