Protectors of the Veil

by Dawn Matthews

  Thirty minutes later, she slipped between the sheets and curled up against her husband. Sleep came quickly but it was beset with nightmares, images of hunched figures, lurking shadows, black cloth encrusted with stains. She awoke with a start. Somewhere far below on the street a dog howled. Gently, so as not to wake David, she climbed out of bed and peered out of the window. A skinny hound stared up at her, sharp teeth glinting in the street light. She snapped the blinds shut and stepped away from the glass. Her mouth was dry from too much red wine.

  The kitchen looked different under the muted shade of the back-light. She ran the water until it was icy cold, filled a glass and scuttled back to the bedroom. One more look outside reassured her. The dog had gone. Perhaps it had never been there and was merely the vestiges of her bad dream. She lay on her back listening to the snuffling noises of her husband. Her hand rested lightly on his back. An abrupt coughing fit made her heart pound. Julia rolled on her side, curling her body around his like a shell. “David darling, are you all right?” An overwhelming stench assaulted her nostrils. She tried to breathe through her mouth but the smell was unrelenting, the unmistakable smell of rotten fish. “David?” Julia began to push herself up. A low phlegm-filled chuckle came from beneath the covers.

  “What’s the matter miss? You said I could sleep wherever I wanted.”

  END.

  “The man was a Wendigo, and he ate the woman and her husband. They are no longer an issue, but the manager of the building walked in on the old man’s snack, and bit him. The police came in time, and shot the old man. The spirit of the Wendigo is now trying to get into the manager of the building. You must stop this at all costs. Make sure you are armed; this is a dangerous assignment. The police are already suspicious that something unusual is going on, as are the manager’s friends and family. If you fail, this one assignment could destroy the veil entirely. Good luck, Agent Peterson.”

  “Thanks,” Liam said. “I will not fail.”

  Liam had already grabbed his bag of goodies: guns of various sizes, rope, blunt instruments, etc. Liam was a pro at assassination made to look like an accident or a suicide. The higher the stakes, the more of an adrenaline rush he got. He loved his job. Liam didn’t go in a car; he went into a chamber that waited until the person he was assassinating was alone. Then he was teleported to wherever that person was.

  This time, the target was not alone. He had an unconscious woman thrown over his shoulder. He tossed the woman aside and lunged at Liam. Liam simply side-stepped. “Oh good,” he thought, “a challenge.”

  Liam’s bag was strapped to his back and he hadn’t had a chance to look for a weapon. The Wendigo got right back up and pounced on Liam. There was a stone fireplace with sharp edges close by. Liam rolled him over to the fireplace. The Wendigo’s sharp teeth chomped at his arm, but Liam held his head back. One more roll and they were at the corner of the fireplace. Liam smashed the Wendigo’s head against the corner of the fireplace until he stopped moving.

  “Oh shit,” Liam said to no one, “look at all the blood. CLEAN UP ON AISLE 3!” He didn’t have to say anything; the Gods could read his mind. The blood was suddenly clean, the body of the Wendigo gone, and there were no signs of a struggle.

  “Damn, you guys are good,” Liam said. The girl started to moan and stir, and Liam popped back into the garage. He had never even taken his bag off. He wasn’t able to make it look like an accident or suicide, but the man had changed into full-on Wendigo. That could only mean he had already eaten someone. Whatever he was hiding in that apartment is gone now.

  CHAPTER 11: CONSPIRACY THEORIES

  Liam headed back into the office. Again, Bertha ran out of the elevator and yelled, “Jason Olinski!” She had stopped yelling anything but a name. She gave him the case number and ran back in the elevator before the doors even had a chance to close.

  Jason grabbed his hat and made his way to the garage. He swiped his finger and plugged in his case number.

  “Good afternoon, Agent Olinski. Here is the story of your case…:”

  “MARKED FOR DESTRUCTION”

  Tip-tap. Tip-tap.

  I sit and listen to the sound of footsteps coming down the hallway, heading towards my room. Is it room service? I wonder. Or is it something else?

  My fingers tighten on the pistol. My friend Ben’s last present to me. I wait. The footsteps stop. Then start again. Coming closer.

  I bend down, look through the spyhole. The tipper-tapper stops just outside of my door.

  I look him over good and proper. The way I’ve taught myself to do, these last few weeks out on the road.

  He looks normal enough. But I can’t be sure. Not yet. That’s why my hand stays firmly on the gun.

  “Sir?” he says, and he taps gently on the door. “May I come in? Room service.”

  He does indeed have a trolley with him, just like a real hotel worker would. And yes, about forty minutes ago, I did order food. But perhaps they knew that. Perhaps they were just waiting for me to let my guard down, and now that I have, they’re about to strike.

  And something else hits me.

  Wouldn’t it usually be a woman doing this type of job? Without even being aware that I’m doing so, I raise the gun and place it against the spyhole.

  Just one shot. That’s all it would take. The gun may be small, which is how I managed to bring it up into my room, carrying it in my coat pocket. But I know how powerful it is. Just one pull of the trigger and the guy on the other side of that door, his brains would be splattered all over the wall, all over the food he’s brought, the food I can smell, and—

  It’s probably hunger that changes my mind. There are only so many greasy spoons and drive-through fast food joints you can do before your stomach starts to crave something that takes longer to cook than five minutes. Hence my earlier ordering of the steak.

  “Sir?” he repeats. “Your food order?”

  I think about it a further second, but my drooling mouth and my rumbling belly have already made my mind up for me. I place my gun inside the pocket of my dressing gown and swing the door open.

  “Thanks,” I say. “Come right in.” But I never take my eyes of him the whole time he is in the room, and I don’t feel safe and secure until I am alone once more.

  Then I stare at my plate.

  And jump right in.

  No matter what shit is going down in your life, there’s nothing like a good meal to make you think that all is right with the world. That’s probably why I have the weird episode the next morning, when a combination of the food and a decent night’s sleep makes me think, as I head out to my car, that I’m just a regular guy living a regular existence.

  Then I remember. And the smile that had been lurking there slides from my lips. I pull open the backseat of the car, and throw my stolen suitcase, containing the last of my meagre possessions, inside.

  All except my gun, of course. That stays up-front, with me.

  I take my place in the driver seat. But before I start the car, I look back at the hotel I’ve just checked out of. I wonder if I’m making a big mistake, leaving its staff, and the other people that were staying there, alive to tell tales about me. Maybe, I think, I should go back inside and shoot them all.

  But I’m not a monster. And I probably wouldn’t have enough bullets.

  So instead I sigh and shake my head and start the car. And head out on the run once more. But not for long.

  I see the police officer coming up behind me, speeding up his motorcycle, and a cold wave of panic washes over me. He’s telling me to pull over.

  I know why. By which I mean, I know what reason anyone who’s watching will think he pulled me over. See, I thought I saw one of them before. One of the things that are now chasing me, that are after me because of what I know, what I believe. It was just standing by the side of the road, waving one of the things it has in place of a hand, and though half of me was tempted to draw my gun and blow its fucking head off, I was too scared to do so. Not when
its two buddies were nowhere in sight, and could be waiting for me to stop so they could…

  So, they could do to me what they did to Cassie and Ben.

  Instead I put my foot down. Perhaps a little bit too hard. And now the traffic guy wants me to stop.

  I suppose I could just keep going. I could try to lose him.

  But it’s time I showed them. It’s time I took charge of this situation. And the smile I banished earlier, back in the hotel parking lot, returns to my face as I pull the car to a stop and wind down the window.

  The traffic officer walks over and puts his head down, looking in at me.

  “License and—”

  But that’s all he has the chance to say. Because I put the gun in his face and pull the trigger. Leaving him no mouth with which to complete the sentence. Night falls. Bringing with it a strange sense of calm. Plus, of course, another hotel.

  Another identity, too. I’m Chuck Walker now. Another alias I stole on the night of The Raid.

  Ah, The Raid…

  I haven’t thought about that much, these last few weeks.

  Oh, in one way I guess you could say I haven’t stopped thinking about it. That night was when everything came to a head, when my life changed forever. But I haven’t re-lived it much recently, you know? I haven’t really dwelled on it. Until now.

  I flick on the news on the hotel room TV, and I suppose it’s no big surprise that the killing of the traffic cop is splashed all over it. And I guess anyone else, if they’d done the same thing, would be terrified by now, would have driven much further from the scene of the crime before settling down for the night. But I’m not stupid. I dumped the car earlier this afternoon and got a taxi to this hotel. And there was no one around to give a description of me.

  Well…no one human, at least.

  But I know they will know who was behind the killing. I lie back on the hotel bed, feeling rather pleased with the affirmative action I have taken.

  The news station pulls out all the old clichés you always see when a law and order official is slain—his grieving wife, his cute toddler, his new-born baby. But they can’t fool me. Not after what I saw at The Raid, not after I found the thing in the library that started this madness off. For all I know, the guy I shot was one of them, clad in a disguise, and all the gore I saw coming out of the back of his head was fancy stage-dressing, nothing less.

  So, I feel no remorse. Just a sense of satisfaction that I’ve sent my pursuers a message: This quarry won’t be as easy to catch as they are used to.

  My sleep is less peaceful than it has recently been that night. Obviously replaying the events of The Raid has bothered me more than I thought.

  Or perhaps it’s just that I know I have a long walk ahead of me.

  Still, I act happy and cheerful with the front desk staff when I check out the next morning. But not too much so. People, they remember someone who is clearly too jolly. They wonder what he’s got to be so happy about.

  I’m just friendly enough, though, that they don’t notice when I slide a pair of scissors off the desk and into my coat pocket. Where it sits just nicely, alongside my gun. Knowing that I came here in a taxi, they offer to order another one for me. But I decline, saying I’ll walk. Of course, I don’t tell them where I’m walking to. Perhaps because I don’t yet know myself.

  I sigh, stepping out into the car parking area. Maybe I was presumptuous, ditching my vehicle. As far as I know, the police haven’t even checked this hotel yet. Why would they? I managed to cover quite a bit of distance before the body was discovered, before it made the TV news. I’m a few cities away already.

  But why take the risk? Why make it easy for them? That’s why I’m getting rid of the fake IDs, too.

  I walk out into the countryside, moving far away from the city, lugging my briefcase with me, perversely glad that it is about to become so empty. Out here there are no surveillance cameras, at least none that I can see, and when I reach a peaceful-looking lake I decide that this is about as safe as I am ever likely to feel again, and that’s when I draw to a stop and open up the briefcase with one hand and with the other I withdraw the scissors I stole from the hotel and I take them to the ID cards, one by one.

  It almost feels a shame to do so. I mean, they’ve worked pretty well for me so far.

  But I know that my hunters probably have a database somewhere, a list of all these names, and though I’ve moved around a lot, drove long, long miles between hotels, I don’t want to take the risk of them using the identities to draw a line that hangs me.

  So, into several bits the driving licenses and credit cards go, and the remnants I deposit into the river. Let the fish use them. The thought makes me guffaw loudly, laughter draining the tension out of me, and I look around nervously, hoping I haven’t just alarmed any campers. But there’s no one around. Just me and the clothes I wear and the gun I took from my good friend Ben.

  And, you know, what else do I really need? I guess I can’t really answer that question for you. Not now. But I’ll tell you what I used to need: People. One of them in particular. Cassie.

  She was with me that day, in the library. The day that our joint life, so awesome until that point, all went wrong. When we went rooting around in the reference section, trying to find something that neither of us had read or at least looked at before, and she reached down behind the dusty set of shelves and held it up and said, “Hey, Danny, what’s this?” I’ve replayed this moment in so many nightmares since then, remembering that damning second when I saw it for the first time and each time I remember it I weep, wishing I could change the past, wishing I could be smart and not look, but even in my nightmares the wishes never work and I always end up seeing it.

  That book. That fucking book.

  “Strange,” she said, and Cassie cocked her head, looking at it strangely. “It doesn’t have a cover.”

  Inaccurate, of course. It did have a cover. What she meant to say was, the cover was blank. There was nothing on it. No title, no picture.

  No author.

  I looked around myself nervously, suddenly feeling like we were doing something wrong. Even now I don’t know why I felt that. Was it some sort of premonition of the horrors that were to come? I guess I’ll never be fully sure.

  “Think it’s someone’s diary?” Cassie asked, looking at me. And she opened it up.

  I always shout at this point, in my dreams. I always tell her not to, say to leave the book alone. But in reality, I crossed over to her. In real life, I looked, too. And saw the rows of blacked-out text. Whole lines obliterated, the content obscured.

  I realized then that it was not a library book. There was no stamping sheet attached to its first page, no barcode you could scan to borrow it. No, it seemed instead to be some kind of journal. A diary of sorts.

  So why was every page consumed by thick black marks, leaving only about a hundred words, in a book of about three hundred pages, actually visible? And who had done the marking?

  We took it to a friend of ours, hoping he’d help us find an answer. That might seem a little too easy to you guys reading out there—too much of a coincidence that we’d already know someone with an interest in this stuff. But it wasn’t like that. Ben wasn’t a conspiracy nut—at least, not before we found the book—and that was fine, because we did not yet know we were sitting on a conspiracy. No, you see, Ben liked—and collected—weird books. That was how we’d met him, at an antiquarian book sale, and recognizing each other as fellow readers the three of us had become friends.

  He’d been dropping some serious wedge at that sale, too. The guy was minted.

  “What do you think?” I asked him, the book on the table between us, me on the couch next to Cassie, him sitting across from us.

  “Strange,” he replied, echoing Cassie’s first reaction when she’d seen the book.

  “Something self-published?” she offered now.

  “This is a bit weird even for those losers,” he said, and picked the book up.


  As he examined it, I did the same thing to his house.

  It was huge, and it was absolutely filled with books, from huge overflowing shelves to table-tops to the pile beside his bed upstairs, which never seemed to go down any. I’d often wondered if a person could read so many tomes in a single lifetime. When I’d put that very question to Ben, he had laughed and winked and said, “That’s the challenge, Dan.”

  Yeah. He shortened my name to that. It was only really Cassie that called me Danny. Kind of like a pet name. Or as close as we got to that, neither of us being super lovey-dovey types.

  God, how I miss her.

  But back to Ben. He knew his books. But apparently not this book. Which had me baffled.

  “What about the words that aren’t blacked out?” he asked, looking up at us. “Do they form anything?”

  “Not really,” Cassie said, and withdrew from her pocket and then consulted a notepad in which she had written the words in question. “It’s just the odd “the,” a “were” here and there.” She flicked the notepad closed. “Like that.”

  “So, if it’s genuine,” Ben said, nodding his head, a thoughtful look on his face, “they’ve done what they had to do.”

  “Genuine?” My eyes met his. “What are you getting at?”

  He didn’t reply. Instead, he went to make us all a drink. As he walked towards the kitchen, I looked to Cassie beside me, trying to catch her eye. But she was looking at Ben, and I felt a sudden surge of jealousy. Why was she looking at him, not me, as if he had all the answers and I did not?

  Hypocritical, of course, in that I was looking at him in much the same way. But still it hurt.

  He returned with three glasses of whiskey—much more expensive than you would have found at my house, I thought. But already my envy, so fervent a second ago, was starting to fade. He did not pick up the book again, just left it sitting on the table. He was silent for a few seconds. Then: