by Joey Ruff
I hurried the length of the alley, thinking maybe he’d spotted me coming and started sprinting or something, but all I found on the other street were a few parked cars along the curb and a few pedestrians further down the way, people in and out of store fronts and businesses. None of them in a top hat or a coat of any kind. No signs of the man.
I collapsed against the side of the building, sweating heavily in the humidity from the brief run. As I caught my breath, I became aware of the café beside me. A wrought-iron fence about waste-high sectioned off part of the sidewalk. There were four tables, the three furthest of which were occupied by people younger than me, sitting together, gossiping, fidgeting with their phones, completely oblivious to everything around them. It would do no good even asking them if they’d seen the man.
I shrugged, writing off the loss, and turned to move back down the alley in the direction I’d come, when I heard Lara. “What’s wrong, John?”
She was sitting at the fourth patio table. While I would’ve sworn nobody had been sitting there two seconds ago, there she was, all by herself, with two cold drinks and a plate of something deep fried sitting in front of her.
“Lara?” I said. I didn’t know what was more strange, the fact that she was sitting there suddenly or that she acted as casually as if we’d had a lunch date. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“You look tired, John. Why don’t you sit down? I ordered you a lemonade.”
“I…”
She smiled at me.
A million thoughts flooded my head at once, but one thought prevailed: it was hot and I was thirsty. “Oh…okay.”
I walked around the iron fencing to the gate and crossed over to the table, taking the unoccupied seat across from her. I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming or just suddenly insane. Maybe a heat stroke, a mirage like in the desert.
“Take a drink,” she said, motioning to the glass.
Ice cubes bobbed in the cloudy, yellow liquid and condensation beaded on the side of the clear plastic cup. I reached for it and was startled by how cold it was to the touch. If it was a mirage, it was convincing. I drank. The lemonade was tart and sweet and cold. It was good. I drained the cup before I realized it was gone. She watched patiently, and when I’d slurped everything that I could from the cup and set it aside, she pushed hers toward me. “I didn’t realize you were so thirsty. You can drink mine.”
I looked up at her cup and then noticed her watching me. My eyes found hers, and everything stopped. Including my heart. Just for a second. I just stared at her.
“Lara… What the fuck is going on? How are you here?”
“Language, John. When did you start talking like this?” she asked.
“Probably about the time you took all those fucking pills and left me alone. Around the time I fucking needed you most and you were nowhere to be found.”
Her head cocked to the side and the corner of her mouth drooped just enough to make her appear troubled. “That’s not fair, John. I was hurting.”
“Cry me a fucking river, Love. You don’t think I was?”
“I had postpartum depression. Do you know what that was like?”
“I know.”
“Don’t tell me that. It’s easier for me to think you were naïve the whole time. That you didn’t neglect me on purpose.”
“I did know. In the beginning. When Anna was just a wee thing. I know it was hard, and I was there for you, wasn’t I?”
“Yes,” she said. She took my hand in hers. It was electric. She felt just like I remembered. No, better.
“Then what the fuck? Why bring it up?”
“You were there for me in the beginning, but then came the storm….” She was silent for a few minutes. I couldn’t look at her, and my eyes drifted to the plate of food between us. Fries smothered in chili and melty cheese, topped with jalapenos. It smelled good, but my stomach was turning flips. Eventually she said, “I loved Anna. With all of my heart, I loved her. People…random people would come up to me on the street and tell me what a beautiful girl I had, and how lucky I was, and I knew, logically, that they were right, but there was something inside of me that was just sad for no reason. I didn’t understand why.”
“I know.”
“And then I would feel guilty when these people would tell me how lucky I was. Because I didn’t feel lucky.”
“But you got over it, Lara.”
“No, John. I had better days. We took holiday, spent the day at Picadilly. We had really great moments together, John, but I never really got better. You didn’t know. I hid it from you.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because you were so happy. Anna was the sun and the moon to you.”
I looked up at her to see her sadness. “And you….”
Her smile was weak, dismissive.
“You were just as much my happiness as she was.”
“But I didn’t feel happy. I didn’t know why, and I wasn’t going to let my unrest and anxiety and sadness cloud your joy. John, I’d never known any human being could ever be as happy as you were when you looked at Anna.”
“Lara…”
“Then she got sick. You were driven, John. You were all-consumed with trying to solve her sickness like it was some kind of puzzle. Like it was one of your crime scenes. It must have driven you mad not being able to solve it. And maybe I grew jealous of all the attention you were giving to her, and when I finally tried to talk to you and let you know how I was hurting, too, you were so consumed by Anna’s illness, about trying to find a cure, that…”
Her words cut like a knife. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know. I don’t blame you, John. There were times I cried myself to sleep because I felt nothing. I longed to be as passionate and driven with curing our baby girl as you were, but I couldn’t be.” She stifled back a tear. “I never blamed you.”
“Then…what are you here for?”
“Does it still hurt?” she asked.
“It hurts every fucking day.”
“It doesn’t hurt me anymore.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Don’t you wish you were dead like me?” she asked.
“Some days,” I conceded. “The days it feels like the pain is the only thing keeping me alive.”
A heavy darkness fell over the table. It pressed like a weight against my shoulders, forcing my head low. I couldn’t even look at her.
Then as suddenly as it came, it was gone. When I looked up, Lara was leaning back in her chair, an absent look in her eyes as she stared off at something in the distance. She was eating a French fry as if nothing had happened.
“Why did you leave me?” I asked.
“I was ashamed, John. Ashamed that I couldn’t be the wife you needed me to be. You were so sad, and I couldn’t let you get any sadder…”
I stood instantly to my feet and screamed at her. “I fucking lost my shit!!”
Her eyes locked onto me as she said, calm as you please, “John, sit down.”
I grew very aware then, noticed every eye on that patio trained on me. People passing by on the sidewalk stopped and stared.
Sheepishly, I sat. “We’d just lost our baby girl, Lara. The only fucking thing I needed in the world was you. Not having you made me go insane for…months. I don’t…”
“I couldn’t stay. I had it in my head that you would blame me for what happened. That you would grow to resent me. I was hurting and scared and confused. It was better that I go when I did. At least, that’s what I thought.”
“It destroyed me. I sat in our room for a week. I didn’t eat. My parents finally dragged me out. I was dehydrated. Medically dehydrated. I spent three days in hospital on a drip. I was forced to see your doctor. I refused medication.”
“John, I…”
“My entire fucking life was destroyed because of you.”
“You hate me.”
I didn’t say anything, just stared at the table, unable to meet her gaze.
“I would hate me, too.”
I felt the anger and rage building inside of me, felt the pressure behind my eyes as my hands began to shake. I turned away so she couldn’t see me cry. My fucking ghost wife.
“How did you do it?” she asked. “Get better?”
I squeezed the heel of my palms into my eyes as though my tears were blood, as though crying were nothing but a wound I could apply pressure to and make it stop. “There was a priest. He was a school mate of my dad…. Convinced me to join Seminary.”
“You were a priest?” Her voice was almost melodic. Her tone almost amused.
It infuriated me, but I took a deep breath, tried to ignore it. “What good is a priest who has no fucking faith? My pain didn’t go away. Not from God. God was a fucking joke. I talked to him once. I was in a coma. He showed up. I asked him about Anna…. Why Anna had to die…?”
I felt her hand on mine. “What did he say?”
I pulled away, sobbing too hard now to say any fucking thing at all. I didn’t want to be crying. Crying made me feel weak. I hadn’t felt this weak in so long. I hated myself.
My fist slammed down on the table like a gavel, knocked my empty cup of ice onto the ground, tipped her full lemonade over in the center of the table. I felt my lap grow cold and wet, but I didn’t care. I threw my head back and screamed.
Everyone must have thought I was fucking mental.
I heard a voice in the back of my head. It was Huxley. He said, “The first rule is to always appear confident. In control.”
I took a deep breath, fought through the pain. I blinked the tears from my eyes, only to find several waitresses and a man in a tie, probably the manager, staring through the store-front window at me. I turned to the other tables to see them all watching me nervously. Just me. I was sitting at the table by myself. There was no plate of fries, no spilled cups, no scattered ice. No Lara.
Yet my lap was still cold and wet.
11
Apparently, the bloke in the tie had decided it was time for me to leave and started to open the door. I didn’t wait around for him, instead hopping the little metal fence what surrounded the patio. Trying to put as much distance as possible between me and the prying eyes of the diner’s patrons, I ducked back down the alley.
As I retraced my steps back down the alley, I noticed something on the wall that I hadn’t previously. Just behind the dumpster in red, paint maybe, was a sigil. At first, it looked like the wheel of a bicycle, but then as I came closer, and especially with the red coloring, it looked more like a red peppermint candy. It was round with a dozen or more spokes that spiraled in toward the center, like water swirling down a drain. However, in the dead center of the sigil, over where said drain would have been, was an X with a much smaller circle cut out of the middle of it.
Seeing the sigil was chilling for two reasons. One, I was certain it hadn’t been there the first time I’d come down the alley, and St. Clair mentioned sigils appearing all over town. Two, I had seen that same bloody sigil a long fucking time ago. Had I seen it at a happy place like the circus or a theme park…hell, even a fucking dog park, it would have been less ominous. However, the last time I’d seen the thing was on a case I worked in Transylvania.
Surely this conjures images of Dracula. Let me clear the air: Vampires are a bunch of bollocks. The word Vampire was basically just a catch-all term coined by some ancient arseholes to describe any monster that feeds on humans. It’s as specific a term as the Midnight, which I used to encapsulate every sodding creepy-crawly and monster that I filled with bullets. I hated the fucking word because the general consensus of what a vampire was, according to movies and literature, didn’t fucking exist. There was no singular creature that looked human, turned into a bat, hated garlic, drank blood and exploded in daylight. It didn’t happen. There were plenty of creatures, like sirens, that fed on humans and passed as one of them. The idea of Vampires was just a lump-sum to encapsulate all the nightmares that plagued people in the old world because they weren’t imaginative enough to think there were multiple types of creatures out there. Or maybe they just didn’t care, having to worry about things like chamber pots and the Black Plague.
All that being said, there’s a reason that Transylvania was considered their home. It was a fucking terrifying, desolate place. Every kind of monster had free reign there at one point or another, from savage, blood-thirsty warlock cults to the oldest pack of werewolves I’d ever encountered. Plus, the church had virtually no presence there. I’d seen things in Transylvania that made the Faces of Death movies look like Disney cartoons. Seeing that sigil brought to mind all kinds of horrific shit.
I didn’t know what it meant, but it was serious black magic. The kind that likely involved literal bloodbaths and the organs of wee babes.
I pulled my phone out and took a photo of the sigil. I needed to know what it meant. If I could send it to Ape, he might be able to pull something from his research…
I jumped. I was fucking tense enough from raw ghost-induced emotions and cultic sigils appearing out of nowhere, that the sudden clamor behind me caused me to scream like a little girl.
When I turned, I noticed that one of the alley doors, the ones that had no exterior knobs, was standing slightly ajar.
I swapped the phone for my five-seven, holding it down toward the ground, but clicking the safety off. With a deep breath, I took a step forward, trying to listen. I heard a loud, echoing clatter. Another step, slow, then another. With the barrel of the gun, I eased the door open further. It was heavy. I put my back to the cold metal and nudged it further open with my shoulder, just enough to step into the shadowy room beyond.
I entered into the back room of a store. It was a storage room, and the tall, empty metal shelves that lined every wall made the place feel like the interior of a ribcage. The floor was bare concrete, and the place was much cooler than outside, so much so that it was almost cold.
The only light was coming from the alley behind me, and as I let the door shut gently, the entire room fell into thick, claustrophobic darkness. I reached to the front of the gun barrel and clicked on the light that was mounted there, sweeping the room and listening. There were no sounds, just the whirring of the air conditioning and the rattle of the vents overhead.
The door to my left was locked, so I moved further into the stock room. It wasn’t very big, roughly the size of St. Clair’s office at the church, but I swept the corners to make sure it really was as empty as it appeared.
On a few of the shelves, I noticed writing in black marker, but I couldn’t read it. Either the penmanship was terrible or it wasn’t written in English. I bit the tip of my left glove and pulled my hand out of it, keeping the flashlight aimed in the general direction of the doors. I could feel the residual energy over the markered letters, something dark.
I took a deep breath and touched it gently, allowing myself to slip only briefly into the past. I caught a single image. The shelf had held cardboard boxes filled with tomes and stopped-glass jars of dried herbs, things labeled aconite, metel, and datura. Standing in front of the shelf was none other than Ezra King.
This had been her shop. No wonder it was empty.
I spun the light around at some of the other shelves, noticing similar markings written on several others, though not all of them. Maybe it was her way of keeping inventory.
As I reached for another shelf, I heard the noise again. This time, from the next room. I stole over to the locked door, slipped my glove back on, and put my ear to it, listening. There was a definite shuffling noise on the other side. I couldn’t make it out. I tried the knob again, still locked. So I kicked it in.
While it didn’t give as easily as St. Clair’s, it splintered the wood in the frame and swung open. I followed the door with the five-seven raised and ready, but didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. A quick sweep of my light revealed only bare concrete floors, more empty shelves, and an abandoned register counter. It was nothing but a typical retai
l space. The storefront directly ahead of me was floor to ceiling with tempered glass covered in paper to restrict visibility. Except in the right corner, where the glass had been shattered and the torn paper flapped in a gentle flow of air.
Instinctively, I moved along one of the shelves toward the broken glass. I wasn’t paying the kind of careful attention I should have been, so the movement in my periphery went almost unnoticed. Almost.
The attack came from behind. I noticed the movement in the shadows on the floor first, turned on impulse, and the blur just barely registering at the corner of my eye. I feinted to the left to deflect most of the blow, but it still struck me. They’d been aiming for my head, but instead caught my shoulder. It was a preferable trade, even if it did hurt like fuck and cause me to drop the gun as I was knocked off-balance and struck the wall with my left shoulder.
The blur came again, aiming high, and I dropped to the floor mostly on purpose. It hit the wall above me, and I rolled forward and scrambled for the gun. Faint light was peeling through the covered store-front windows, but the main source of light was from the beam beneath the barrel, which made it easy to spot.
I took a knee and pulled the light back up on my attacker before he could recover. What stood in the doorway was not what I expected.
Fuck, I’m not sure what I expected anymore, but this thing was oddly familiar. When the beam first hit it and my heart skipped a beat, all I saw was the dark, coarse hair and the massive size of the thing. My first instinct screamed Wendigo, and I fought the urge to empty my clip into it. Mostly because I knew the scaly exoskeleton of the thing – if it really was a Wendigo – would deflect the bulk of my shots. When it lowered its arm from its face, I noticed the complete lack of insect-like mandibles.
It had a mouth, a normal mouth, and two large eyes that squinted out at me over some kind of nose. It snorted and stood tall, nearly touching the ceiling with the top of its head. It stood an easy eight feet, shoulders like a linebacker wearing pads, a head much smaller in comparison. The hair that covered every possible inch of this creature, apart from the palms of its hands and its toes, was as jet black as you could get. The thing looked very much like a giant, escaped gorilla, but its face was almost human, though more elongated, like a baboon. There was also an intelligence, an awareness, in its eyes.