by A. R. Wise
“You know the interesting thing about science?” asked Vess, as if almost entirely ignoring or avoiding Lyle’s question. “It’s just an attempt to explain the unexplainable. Science is like an adult, standing over our shoulders, reaching past us to help put a puzzle together that we can’t quite figure out. Trick is, no one’s sure about anything.”
Lyle expected Vess to continue, but the sickly man seemed content to stop there. “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Lyle.
“Everything you believe to be true is just one discovery away from being proven wrong.”
Lyle stared at Vess and snorted in amusement. “If the military hired you to try and confuse folks, then they’re getting their money’s worth. You scientist fellows speak above my pay grade.”
Vess chuckled and pat Lyle on the back. “I’m no scientist, my friend. Not by any conventional definition at least.”
“No? I thought you were a science guy,” said Lyle, confused. “The way you were talking about that Tesla fellow earlier, I figured you were an egghead just like he was.”
“An egghead?” asked Vess, amused but mildly offended.
“No disrespect or nothing. I just don’t come from that stock.”
“Yes you do,” said Vess. “We all do. You can’t opt out of science, my man. It’s as much a part of you as the blood in your veins.”
Lyle snickered and shook his head, “You sound like the Baptist friends of mine, preaching your ‘truths’ and whatnot.”
Vess stared out at the gulls and said, “There’s no such thing as truth.”
“Well, you’re an odd chap, that’s a truth if ever there were one.”
Vess didn’t offer a retort.
“If you’re not a scientist, then what in the blazes are you? What are we doing here?”
The tall man looked down at his hands in contemplation for a few moments, and then glanced sideways at his companion. “I study other things,” said Vess. “Darker things.” Vess reached into his coat and pulled out a folded cloth that he handed to Lyle. “Be careful with that,” said Vess.
“What is it?” asked Lyle after taking it.
“Open it up,” said Vess as he reached back into his coat for something else. He pulled out what looked like the hilt of an ancient dagger, but the blade had long ago broken off.
Lyle opened the folded cloth and found a few pieces of jewelry. They were gold figurines that looked like they might once have fit on something larger. One of the smaller pieces was connected to a bracelet, and it was clear that it had been meant as a depiction of a pagan God of some sort. It had the body of a human and the head of a snake. Its arms were long, and it was holding a staff that had been bent and misshapen over time.
“What are these?” asked Lyle.
“Those were given to a young boy as a gift,” said Vess. “Be careful with them. They’re quite old. They were given to the boy as a way of honoring him for his sacrifice.”
“His sacrifice?” asked Lyle.
“Yes, that’s part of what I used to study. Not necessarily just human sacrifice, but all the ways mankind used to try and contact their deities.” Vess regarded the bladeless knife, turning the old thing over in his hand to inspect the twine that wrapped the handle and the decorative skull on its pommel.
“So why’d you bring this stuff with you?” asked Lyle.
“It’s symbolic,” said Vess as he put the bladeless hilt back into his coat and then reached out to take back the jewelry. “They’re special to me.”
Widowsfield
March 13th, 2012
2:55 AM
“Oliver’s still here somewhere,” said Rosemary as they looked at the blood trail that he’d left behind after Paul had shot his foot.
“My assistant is going to try and follow his tracks,” said the nurse, Helen, who they’d been following out of the facility. “He needs to be bandaged up. I don’t think his injury was life-threatening or anything, but still, he can’t run around bleeding like that.” She motioned down to the trail that headed off deeper into the facility.
“Where do you suppose he went?” asked Jacker as he stared down the dark hallway.
Helen shook her head. “Beats me. I doubt I’ve seen even half of this place. My days are spent with the sleepers.”
“How long have you worked here?” asked Alma.
Helen sighed and raised her brows. “Too long.”
“Since 1996?” asked Paul.
“No, no,” said Helen, as if worried the others would think poorly of her had she been an employee at the time of the event. She looked over at Rosemary, and then back at the others, and her discomfort was apparent. “They hired me several years after that. Well after the first sleepers started to die.”
“How many died?” asked Paul.
“In my time?” Helen considered the question for a moment and then said, “A couple hundred or so.”
“Christ,” said Jacker as he ran his hands through his curly, shoulder length hair in exasperation. “How come you never went to the cops or anything?”
Helen was hesitant to answer, but the scrutiny of the group only intensified with her silence. “I made some mistakes here, for sure. I’m not claiming total ignorance. I knew what they were doing was messed up, but I was hired to try and help the people in there be comfortable, not to question what caused all this. The reason they kept me on for so long is because I don’t ask questions.”
“I guess that’s one way to live a guilt-free life,” said Paul, clearly discontent with her answer.
“Everyone makes bad choices from time to time,” said Rosemary, surprising the others by coming to Helen’s defense. “Trust me. I know better than most.”
“Should we try to find Oliver?” asked Paul.
Rosemary shook her head. “Not yet. He’s not leaving town, I guarantee it. For now, the most important thing for us to do is to find Ben and get him back here.”
“What happens if we do manage to get him back here?” asked Alma. “What do we do then?”
Rosemary didn’t have an answer. Everyone was waiting for one, so she just offered something she hoped would placate them. “The Watcher will take care of him.”
“I’m not going to hand my brother over to be killed,” said Alma.
“We can do whatever it takes to save Ben, but we’ve got to do whatever we can to keep The Skeleton Man out of the real world. He’s too dangerous. Now let’s stop wasting time.” She put her hand on the nurse’s shoulder and said, “Helen, show me where your car was parked.”
Helen led the way through the hallway to the door of the parking lot. Rosemary went out first, eager to track Michael down. The darkness was prevalent, shrouding most of their surroundings save what the moon revealed. The lot was nearly silent, devoid of even the chirp of crickets. Cada E.I.B. was fenced off from the rest of the world, a prison of concrete, steel, and glass. All around them lived The Watchers, who Rosemary was acutely aware existed in the dead things that stole the world from nature. The walls, windows, and floors were anything but innocuous. They were the playground of the creatures that Oliver had awoken.
There were tire tracks on the pavement. In Michael’s haste to escape Widowsfield, he’d hit the gas too hard, leaving behind the tracks; like a signature he hadn’t meant to write. Rosemary gingerly removed the glove on her right hand, and then reached out to lay her fingertips on the black skid mark.
Paul, Alma, and Jacker stood with Helen, beside the door that led back into Cada E.I.B.’s facility. They watched as the psychometric worked.
Rosemary closed her eyes and waited for the past to be revealed to her. Over the past five years she’d gotten better at practicing her gift, although she still hated doing it. Every time she focused on drawing information out of the world around her that she had no business knowing, her mind struggled to maintain sanity. She’d developed a strong appreciation of what was and what wasn’t the truth about her own life, since it was so easy to accept that some of the things she rem
embered to be true hadn’t actually happened to her at all. There were too many instances in her life when she was certain that she’d done something in the past that had actually been done by someone else. Discovering that your memories don’t belong to you is something that the human brain doesn’t handle very well.
She took her hand away, and then nodded over to Alma. “He had the nurses help him load Ben in, and then took off.”
“Do you know where to?” asked Alma.
Rosemary shook her head, and then looked out toward the gate. “We can go up there and see if we can find another track.”
“What about the gurney?” asked Jacker. “Maybe you could use that to…”
“No,” said Rosemary as she regarded the empty bed on wheels that sat beside her. “Not if that’s the bed that Ben’s been laying on for years. No way in hell.”
“What are you planning on doing then?” asked Jacker. “Walking the whole way and touching the ground?”
Rosemary pointed to a security van that was parked near the entrance. “I’ve got the keys to that van. We can take that and drive out to each intersection. I can get out and try to touch the road to track them down. Not too many vehicles drive around this area, so it won’t be hard to follow him – at least until we get out of town.”
Paul grimaced and shook his head. “That trick of yours is going to be pretty hard to do if he gets on the highway.”
“Hopefully your friend in there can find him before that happens,” said Rosemary in reference to Rachel’s attempt to use Helen’s license plate number to track Michael down.
“All right then,” said Paul as if he was giving in to something he didn’t want to do. “Let’s get moving.” They were all tired, but Paul seemed wearier than the others. Rosemary realized that he’d woken up earlier from the forced sleep the group had fallen into, and hadn’t rested the way the others had. Paul met The Skeleton Man, and had learned about what happened at Terry’s cabin, but Rosemary also understood that the creature had either lied to Paul about some of the details – either that, or The Skeleton Man had lost some of the facts to The Watcher’s lies as well.
As they headed for the van, Rosemary couldn’t decipher which parts of her recollection about Paul’s time with The Skeleton Man he’d told her, and which she’d gleaned from the key he’d given her. Trying to pick apart the difference caused a headache to begin to torture her, and she decided not to worry about it. Before long, the lives of these strangers would be laid bare to her as their personal belongings poisoned her mind with their memories. She would be quickly overwhelmed if she tried too hard to organize them.
Rosemary lived her life teetering on the edge of insanity, or so she hoped. It was entirely possible that she’d fallen off that ledge long ago. Sometimes the secrets she kept felt like they belonged to someone else, as if all the bad things she knew she’d done might not have been her own sins.
“You drive,” she said to Jacker as she handed him the keys she’d stolen from the security guard named Alex that had confronted her by the reservoir.
Paul and Alma happily sat in the back as Rosemary walked to the passenger seat and started to adjust her plan on how to put an end to the Widowsfield nightmare.
CHAPTER 5 – Fewer Players
Widowsfield
Free of The Watcher’s Lies
Grace Love heard the boy call out for his father. She was getting her order pad from under the counter, although she knew she wouldn’t need it. Desmond and his son, Raymond, always ordered the same thing: A Salisbury steak for Desmond and a BLT for Raymond. It was an endearing trait of the pair, and their consistent habits had become a comforting part of her job.
Grace knelt down, and her knee pushed up on the underside of her apron, causing her red, polka-dotted sunglasses to fall out of the pocket. She picked them up and put them in her bouffant as she stood back up.
She turned to walk toward the only populated table in the restaurant, but saw that it was empty. Her patrons had vanished, leaving no trace they’d ever been there.
“Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle,” said Grace with a confused chuckle as she looked toward the bathroom, guessing that the two had a sudden emergency to attend to in there. She was surprised to see that an ‘Out of Order’ sign had been hung up over the men’s room. She grimaced when she guessed that the cook had plugged up the toilet and just stuck the sign up instead of plunging it.
“Juan,” said Grace with an angry flair to her voice. “Did you much up the toilet again?”
No one answered.
“Juan?”
Grace glanced through the window that breached the separation between the dining area and the kitchen, but Juan was missing. She started to lean through the window to search for the cook, but when she placed her fingers on the metal shelf she recoiled, expecting pain. The heat lamps always turned the shelf blisteringly hot, but despite having worked here for years, Grace continually made the mistake of touching the metal. However, this time the shelf’s heat didn’t sting her. Curious, she tapped her finger on it again to see if it was hot, but found that it was barely warm at all. She resolved to change the bulbs, deciding that even though they were still on, there was something wrong with the heating filament inside of them.
“Juan, where’d you disappear to? Is this some sort of joke?”
Grace went to the swinging door and shouldered it open, but there was no one in the back of the restaurant. She walked through the empty space to the walk-in refrigerator and pulled the hefty handle, but found the door was locked from the outside. If Juan was in there, then someone had locked him in.
She started to get nervous, and called out again, “Juan?” She pulled the thin metal bar out of the hole that prevented the handle from opening and let it hang from its chain. She pulled the handle and felt the rubber seal break as she tugged the heavy door open. Cold air pushed out at her, but she didn’t feel the sensation that she expected. The fans inside of the cooler were on, and she could feel the air hitting her skin, but the temperature was lost. There was frost on the zinc oxide shelves inside, and she could tell the freezer was still working properly, but she couldn’t distinguish the temperature, as if her skin had lost the ability to tell a difference.
“Grace,” said a male’s voice.
She spun, startled, but there was no one in the kitchen with her.
“Who said that?” her question was labored by her encroaching fear.
“I’m here,” said the man again.
Grace turned in a circle, leaving the freezer door standing open, the mist drifted out of it and disappeared as it cascaded across the greasy floor. There was no one else in the kitchen with her.
“Desmond?” she asked as she recognized the man’s voice.
“Yes.”
“Where?” She stuttered as she continued to search for him. “Where in the blazes are you hiding? What sort of joke are you guys pulling on me?” She tried to find the humor in it, although her fear refused to subside.
“I’m right here.” Desmond put his hand on Grace’s shoulder, and she twirled in shock to find him standing behind her.
“Son of a…” she nearly cursed as she clasped her breast. “Desmond. How’d you do that? Where… Desmond?” She could see his familiar face, but also recognized that he wasn’t completely there. It was as if he were an illusion, or a hologram. She could see him, but could also see through him to the door behind.
Grace reached out to touch Desmond, but her hand slid through his chest as if he weren’t there. A stinging cold bit her fingers and she pulled them back. Then she began to back away, as if fearful Desmond might attack, but she was simply trying to comprehend what was happening. Her brain struggled to make sense of what her senses promised was real.
“No…” Grace blinked rapidly and then she began to touch her own skin, an inexplicable reaction that she needed to do, as if it was necessary to ensure she was really there. “How?”
“Grace, I’m so sorry,” said Desmond as
he took a step closer.
“Stay away!” Grace staggered back, terrified of the approaching phantom.
Desmond’s visage faded away.
Grace’s sneakers hit a slick patch of grease and the sole of her shoe squeaked as it slid out from beneath her. She nearly avoided a fall, but then her clumsiness interceded and sent her flailing backward. She bashed into a stack of hefty cardboard boxes that were used to tote vegetables. The sturdy stack of boxes did little to soften her fall, and she tumbled to the floor, smacking her hip against the tile. Her sunglasses fell out of her hair and the delicate, plastic frame cracked when they bounced off the greasy, black and white tile.
She was crying out in fear as she tried to recover from her stumble. Grace pressed her hands on the slick floor, a week’s worth of gunk beneath her that Juan should’ve mopped, but he was never concerned much about cleanliness. As she slipped again, she cursed the cook.
“Grace,” said Desmond, although his voice was the only proof of his existence.
“No!” Grace got to her knees, her hip pulsing from the impact with the floor. “Stay away from me.” She gave up trying to get to her feet, and crawled to the back door that led to the alley. The fire station was just behind the diner, and she planned to escape there and plead for help.
Grace gripped the door handle and used it to help herself up. Then she pushed the back door open without daring to glance backward. A blinding flash of yellow light greeted her, and she instinctually raised her arm to shield her eyes.
The light was warm, but pleasantly so, its heat a soothing influence on her addled senses. Once she experienced the warmth of the rays hitting her, Grace’s fear subsided. She lowered her arm, unafraid of the light that greeted her outside of the building. Despite its intensity, the light didn’t hurt her eyes. She gazed out, and felt her eyes begin to produce tears. Within the glow she caught sight of human shapes moving, casting shadows that the rays burst past, like crepuscular, heavenly light piercing clouds.
“Dezzy,” said Grace, but she couldn’t look away. “Are you seeing this?”