"They're cartoons. That's all."
Kneeling, Danube placed his hands on the man's shoulders and stared into his eyes. Unblinking, Dave stared back, as sweat formed on Danube's forehead, popping out in beads that looked like tiny pearls. Still he would not relinquish his contact. On Dave's shoulders his hands began to tremble, but he did not waver. He let his thoughts search, weaving their way through the man’s brain patterns.
It was not magic exactly, just an exercise, a process he had learned long ago. He used it infrequently, but today he had no desire for delay and the struggle of hours of questioning. He needed truth quickly.
After a few more moments, Dave began to tremble and a thin trickle of saliva slipped over his lower lip. His eyes began to roll back in his head, and only Danube's hands kept him upright.
Releasing his grip, Danube watched the man slump onto his side. He had sensed no presence of magic here, and he doubted this man was capable of what would be required to perform the acts which had touched Heaven's life.
The girl rushed over to him, crying as she looked down at the slumped form on the couch. "What did you do to him?"
"Less than what he’s shooting into his arm does," Danube said, tilting his own head back and massaging his temples with his fingertips.
"He's dead."
"He will be fine. Let him rest."
"You bastard. What did you do?"
"I cleared his thoughts. The process was taxing for him." He turned his back on her and walked out the front door, almost stumbling as he exited.
Devon was resting her head against the steering wheel.
She lifted it when she heard the door on his side close. "Two thousand miles to dine on a dish of red herring," he said.
"Where to now?"
"I want to go to the place where they make the Gnelfs."
Tanner shut his computer down. He wanted to get over to Gabrielle's. A feeling of concern had found its way through the storm of his imagination to nestle in his brain. Normally when he was writing he was able to shut out other notions and feelings even in the worst of times, but today he could not. He kept thinking of the things he had witnessed and of the eerie warnings Danube had conveyed.
The old adage of naming a fear to make it go away came to his mind. But this fear could not truly be named, or if it could be given a name, like Gnelfs, it could not be understood, and that was at the heart of the saying. If a fear could be understood it could be conquered, but how could one understand some esoteric and forgotten myth that threatened to tear away reality?
When, Gabrielle showed him into the living room, he shook hands with Marley and Althea, and then helped himself to a cup of coffee from the service on the coffee table. Casually, Gabrielle sat down on the floor in front of his chair and rested one arm against his leg.
Heaven was now curled up at the end of the couch, her head resting on Althea's lap. Her eyes were closed, and breath purred softly through her nostrils. She seemed so innocent and angelic—so at peace.
They all watched her for a while, their vigil silent except for the occasional sound an appliance made or the creak or groan of the house. Each noise made eyes narrow and muscles twitch. They were waiting for something bad to happen.
"Have you heard from Danube?" Tanner asked, to end some of the tension.
"No calls."
"I wonder about this man," Marley said. "He's a priest and he isn't a priest?"
"He's as mysterious as some of the other goings-on," Tanner replied. "I think I trust him, but I don't know what to make of him."
"I've studied the Bible and good and evil all my life. I've never thought anything like this could be possible, that it could manifest like this," Marley said.
"Why did it have to choose me?" Gab wondered again. "A couple of days ago it looked like I might be getting my life in order. Now everything is screwed up again.”
"I wish I could help you toward a resolution," Althea said. "That's my job, but I just don't know what to do in the light of all this. The parson and I spent the afternoon going through some of his books and searching the web, and we didn't find anything pertinent."
Tanner related again what he had discussed with the rabbi.
"We didn't delve very deeply into these themes in the Old Testament in seminary," Marley said.
"The Book of Raziel is apparently very powerful."
"I don't see how Dave could have laid his hands on that," Gab said.
"Ex-husbands can do a lot of things you'd never expect," Althea stated authoritatively. "You're married to them. You live with them. Then, when it’s over, they're something totally different. They can do things you'd never believe the nice guy who used to send you roses would have pulled."
Gab looked skeptical. "I don't know. There's got to be some other explanation."
Before anyone could reply, the sound of the laughter filled the room.
Chapter 12
After a bit of discussion in the offices where Gnelfs were merchandised, Danube obtained the creators' office address. They preferred to work in the little studio in which they had started out.
Stepping into the air-conditioned reception room, Danube found a petite blond secretary behind a small mahogany desk.
"I need to speak to the creators of the Gnelfs," he said aloud.
"Do you have an appointment?" she asked brightly, in her voice a seemingly calculated Southern California inflection.
"It's very important that I speak with them," Danube said.
She smiled. "Sir, do you realize how many people say that? The Gnelfs are very popular. We have visitors frequently even though our office is not listed. If we accommodated every request for a personal visit we wouldn't be able to create more Gnelfs material. Now if you'd like to leave something to be autographed for your children …"
"A child may die if I do not speak to them about the origins of their work."
"Sir, I hardly think this could be a matter of life or death."
"Ask them if they know anything about The Book of Raziel."
"I'm not supposed to bother them. They're on deadline with a new project."
"Please."
Hesitantly she moved away from her desk and through a door. She returned in a few moments, face puzzled.
"That seemed to get their attention," she said. "Go right in."
The Gnelfs creators were laboring in a cluttered writer’s room in which a large white board faced a table holding laptops and crumpled note paper. The wall was decorated with framed images of the various Gnelf characters. The creators were both in their early thirties. One was tanned and had smooth blond hair. The other, who sat behind a drawing board, was heavier, wore glasses and sported a beard, while a snap-brim hat covered his thinning hair. They both looked nervous.
"Can I help you?" the heavy one asked.
Danube stood in the doorway, looking from one man to the other, studying them quickly, spotting weaknesses and dangers with this hasty assessment. Softly, he spoke, introducing himself.
The heavy one shifted about on his stool. "What the hell do you want?"
Danube found a seat facing the men. "I want to talk to you about your creation," he said. "You are?”
“What?" the blond man asked.
“Your names."
"I'm Robert Eden," the blond man answered. This is Allen Hyde."
"Eden and Hyde. Creators of Gnelfs and Gnelfland."
They nodded, intimidated, wondering if they should call security. He kept his eyes focused on them to keep them in place. He intended them no harm, but he wanted no interference.
His strength had been taxed by the encounter with Davis, the touch for Devon, and the effort to get past the receptionist. He wasn't up to the strain of battle or the further effort needed to extract information.
"The two of you do most of the preliminary artwork?"
"What is this about?" Hyde asked.
Danube closed his eyes, fighting to control impatience and building anger. "I need answers about your
work," he said. "I don’t have the time to go through the effort of creating a façade in order to talk with you, and I do not have the patience to try to make you believe who I am or why I am here. Now, you do the artwork?"
"I did the initial stuff," Hyde answered, still a bit indignant. "On the TV shows, hell, there's a whole staff of people. Inbetweeners, character—"
"The books," Danube said.
"Yeah, that's kinda how we got started."
"Why did you put the symbols in there?"
"What? What symbols."
The color began to drain from the blond man's face. In spite of his tan he seemed to go pale, snow white. "You're not from one of those coalitions or something, are you? You're not going to organize a boycott? We're not Satanists."
"I need to know why they are there—and where you found them," Danube said.
Eden glanced over at his associate. "Hyde put them in there."
Hyde smirked, and his eyes rolled upward in disgust. "They're nothing," he said. "Just like Procter and Gamble's man in the moon."
"They are a little more pertinent than that," Danube said. "They have an actual connection with ancient rites."
Hyde grimaced again. "We didn't know that, man. We just wanted something that looked authentic."
"Look, those are the earlier books anyway," Eden said. "When we signed the cartoon deal and the merchandising agreement, they made us ease up. They were afraid somebody would get the wrong idea."
"Someone did," Danube said. "Someone very powerful, I'm afraid. While those marks are harmless on their own, they can be utilized. They are marks for conjuring or binding, and once they are planted in a child's mind—"
"Come on," Hyde said. "They're bullshit. This is California; we picked up some stuff in some shops. It's nothing. It's like crystals or such."
Eden leaned across the table and touched Hyde's arm. "Remember? That night we were scared."
"We'd had a few mind-altering substances. Who knows what happened. It could have been an earthquake."
"You were attacked?"
“Tell him,” Hyde said.
"We were fooling around, doing some sketches on the white board. We were doing a deal where the Gnelfs were opening up a cave of treasure, and it was sealed with this magic symbol. They couldn't enter. We were trying to figure out what the seal would look like, and Hyde was doing some sketches. We were playing with some designs, inverting things, turning them around so we'd have a symbol of our own, not a duplication of those in the books we had."
"And what happened?"
"We heard something," Hyde said. "We turned and the door flew open. There was nothing there, but the room got cold. So cold we started shivering. It didn't make sense. It was warm otherwise."
Eden remembered. "That's what I said then," he noted. "I was sitting here at the desk talking to Allen while he was drawing, so I got up to close the door. I figured I'd check the thermostat on the air conditioner too. We were trying to treat what had happened rationally.
"Before I made it to the door something picked me up, I mean right up in the air, and then I was pitched over the desk."
"I got up then and ran toward him," Hyde said. "And the drawing table turned over. I spun about and looked toward it, and all of these exacto knives started coming for me like darts. It was like a scene from one of those horror movies. You know, where they do it with butcher knives?"
Danube indicated he understood.
Before continuing, Hyde wiped a bead of perspiration from his forehead. Recalling the incident was reliving it.
"I don't guess those knives would have killed me," he said holding up one of the small instruments. It had a long silver handle and a small, razor-sharp blade. "But the lot of them would have cut me up pretty badly."
"You escaped how?"
" Dropped. They went over me, like a school of fish. That's where they wound up."
He pointed toward one of the framed images on the wall. Eden turned to it and lifted the picture off its hook to reveal the slits where the blades had become embedded.
"There was no explaining that," Hyde said. "I stayed on the floor for a while and asked Rob if he was all right. He was bruised, but he was okay."
We started to get up then." Eden's expression was sober. "We didn't get far before the stuff on the drawing table started flying."
"Wind?"
"It was weirder than that," Eden said.
“The paper is kind of heavy." Hyde picked up one of the large rectangular cards he used for his work. Running a fingertip across the edge of it, he gave Danube an idea of its texture.
"It started kind of whipping through the air. Slashing toward us," Eden said. “We tried backing up a little. It followed us. I threw my arm up, and one of the sheets raked across it."
He held up his right forearm to reveal a thin white scar which streaked through his tan. “It felt like I'd been cut with a sword."
As their descriptions continued, Danube let his mind pick up the memories, re-creating the scene for himself as they told of how they had faced a swirling onslaught. He saw it as if it were happening before him…
The sheets began to spin en masse, twisting about in a uniform pattern that created a huge whirling column. As tall as a person, it came twisting through the air like a ballet dancer, ripping and slashing.
The blood from Eden's wound dripped down his arm, indicating the force was not imagination. It was unexplained, but it was real.
Together they overturned the desk and huddled behind it, letting the paper slam into the desktop to disburse in another burst of wind.
Then, in an instant, it re-formed, taking a position on the other side of the desk and swirling after them again. Before they could move, it slashed forward, cutting Eden near his forehead and slicing through the loose shirt Hyde wore. They scrambled over the desk, and, fleeing the whirling cylinder, leaped over the drawing table.
Despite his weight, Hyde proved agile. Noticing a single piece of paper still resting on the table, Hyde had snatched it up.
It was the last drawing he had been working on, and it featured one of the symbols. He had been sketching a panel in which the Gnelfs open a chamber in a forgotten cavern. The symbol had something to do with openings in some ancient ritual, so he had used it.
As the column of paper moved up over the drawing board and hovered as if about to strike, he ripped the page to shreds.
When that happened, the column was no more. The now-limp paper showered to the floor as if it had been dropped from someone's hands. When it connected with tile, it was still and flat, offering no further sign of animation. As the two men knelt on the floor, looking at the paper, they heard the faint sound of—God almighty! —laughter.
"After that, we thought we musta had some bad shit, but we stopped using the symbols," Hyde said.
“But countless editions of your books and episodes of the cartoon were already on the market."
“We couldn't pull all that shit back," Hyde exclaimed. “You know how much money that would cost the publishers? Hell, it'd make headlines too if we started talking about some weird experience like that. Everybody would think we're crazy."
"You realized the menace of the power those symbols controlled, and you did not attempt to do anything?"
That was the only time anything happened. We didn't think it was real," Hyde said. "Hell, do you know what it was? Can you tell us?"
"Something you did acted as a summoning—through the symbol. You let something in a realm beyond this world reach through, but you closed the opening before true harm could befall you. The creatures have no true form in this realm, so they manipulated what they could to torment you.”
"What do you mean, no form?" Eden asked.
“They are not physical beings. They are spiritual, ethereal. They do not have a tangible presence, so they must either possess something or find some other way to form a physical presence. Fortunately your thoughts were not focused enough on the symbol or they could have utilized th
e image of it in your mind, and then there would have been no way to banish them. It is interesting the way they attacked you. The wounds you suffered were aggravating yet not life threatening. It was as if your tormentors were … playing pranks."
The laughter followed the wind through the living room, loud echoing laughter. Heaven sat up abruptly, clinging to her mother.
"It's them," she said. “The Gnelfs."
Gabrielle wrapped her arms protectively around the child and looked back to Tanner and Marley. She didn't have to speak. Both men were already on their feet, and Althea moved to her side, placing her body protectively over the child as well.
As the wind tore at his face and played with his hair, Marley stared into it defiantly until it subsided. Tanner stood at his side, watching him, hoping the preacher knew what to do, but Marley seemed confused. His fists clenched and unclenched, and he kept wetting his lips with his tongue.
He was about to speak when something crashed down on the coffee table, shattering the sheet of glass that covered it, splintering the wood. The table crumpled, no more than a pile of fragments.
"Get the girl out of here," Marley shouted.
Althea and Gab carried Heaven between to the hallway. As they exited the room, a vibration began to stir the glass fragments and wood.
"I rebuke you," Marley shouted as the vibrations continued. He raised one hand and pointed toward the table. "I rebuke you in the name of the Holy One. I rebuke you and command you to go back to the pits from whence you came."
He looked at Tanner then, as if realizing he was being too melodramatic. The vibrations were continuing, and Tanner could feel shockwaves beneath his feet even though the house was on a concrete slab.
When he looked back at the table he saw the glass blast upward, as if an explosive charge had been ignited beneath it. Shards were driving forward like buckshot, and he shoved Marley down, snatching a chair cushion.
He swung it just in time to deflect a spray of shards. The pieces padded into the thick upholstery like shrapnel, but they did not pass through.
Marley was shouting the Twenty-third Psalm now as he crawled behind the couch. Tanner dove after him as the sharp wooden slivers from the table sailed, small misshapen arrows. Some struck the couch and others flew over it, zipping across the room to become embedded in the wall or tangle in the curtains.
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