Mortal Eclipse

by David Brookover

  “‘Fraid so.”

  “Posh! We’re going to the Lamplighter, and that’s that.” Her black eyes receded amidst deep fleshy furrows. That was that. Nobody argued with Glenna and won, including her three deceased husbands.

  The Lamplighter was one of two eateries in Duneden. The other was an upscale restaurant located inside the Duneden Bed ‘n’ Breakfast. The fast food chains shunned the small, unincorporated town, because of its international reputation as a witch haven, which the residents lightly refuted. Although they countered that their town was a Spiritualist community, the magical public image persisted, and the tourists came and went in droves.

  Glenna ordered the pot roast special, while the younger women each ordered grilled chicken Caesar salads. Glenna parked her wheelchair in the aisle at the end of the booth where she could easily see both her lunch companions.

  “You girls are going to waste away to nothing eating salads like that,” Glenna admonished.

  “We like our trim figures, Granny.” Della giggled as she ran her hands sensuously over her curves. “You’re just jealous.”

  “Della!”

  Jill and Della laughed until tears trickled down their cheeks. Finally, Glenna could hold back no longer, and joined in the laughter.

  After lunch, Glenna handed Della the check and two twenty-dollar bills, and asked her to go pay at the counter. When Della was out of earshot, the old woman took Jill’s hand.

  “I know you’ve been waiting for closure to your father’s death for a long time, and Valerie represents that final healing.”

  “Absolutely,” Jill replied.

  “But, honey, I see danger in that meeting.”

  “Danger’s my middle name.” Her attempt at bravado failed to soothe her unexpectedly agitated nerves.

  Glenna shook her head. “I’m not kidding, Jill. I have seen things recently.”

  Jill stiffened. Her appointment with Valerie Jakobs was the most important event in her life so far. “What kind of things?” she asked tentatively.

  “Just bits and pieces of pictures, I’m afraid, but among them I saw death.”

  Jill’s throat was suddenly dry as dust. “Mine?” she croaked.

  Glenna sighed deeply. “I’m not sure, hon, and that’s why I don’t want you to go alone tonight. Take Fritz and Hugo with you.” They were the most spiritually and physically strong of her eight great-grandsons.

  “I . . . I can’t. I promised her that we’d meet alone. If I show up with Fritz and Hugo, she might think I’ve double-crossed her and take off. Glenna, I need to talk with her. I need to know the truth!”

  Glenna patted her hand. “I know, dear.”

  Jill flashed her an uneasy grin. Fear dampened her excitement. Could Glenna have seen the Creeper in her visions?

  “I didn’t see him, Jill, but it’s likely he’ll be around.”

  Jill jumped in her seat. “How did you know I was thinking about . . .”

  Glenna pushed the wheelchair away from the table. “I’m a witch, dear. You should know that by now. Now you come by my shop on your way tonight, and I’ll give you a protective charm.”

  Jill’s thoughts drifted to stories she’d heard about the Creeper’s amazing powers.

  “Jill?”

  “Uh, yeah. Sure. Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me, honey, I’ll be doing readings. I’ll have Gabriella whip something special up. Thank her.”

  “Really!” Jill caught her breath. Gabriella was Duneden’s most powerful witch, but few had ever seen her. Jill was the exception; she lived with her. Could Gabriella’s power really protect her against the Creeper?

  Jill hoped she wouldn’t have to find out tonight.

  Valerie Jakobs’s minivan screeched to a stop as it rounded a sharp curve of the two-lane country road outside of Hillsboro, twenty-seven miles from Duneden. Two cars had collided, and blocked her path. Valerie leaned back and waited for her racing heart to slow. She had almost crashed into them, and the prospect of lying seriously injured in the middle of Hicksville and possibly bleeding to death was stressing her to the max.

  Gradually, her reason returned, and reality settled in. Being the first driver at the scene, she knew it was her duty to see if everyone was all right. Her heartbeat slowed some, and she climbed from the air-conditioned minivan. The heat hit her like a sledgehammer, and she swooned against the car, fighting a wave of nausea and dizziness that nearly crumpled her to the asphalt pavement. Pulling the door open, Valerie stuck her head inside the cool interior until her woozy spell passed. It wasn’t easy growing old, she pondered sadly, and at sixty-eight, it seemed more difficult with each passing month. She adjusted her hearing aids to maximum reception so she’d be able to listen to the conscious accident victims describe their aches and pains. Then she could make them feel comfortable until the rescue vehicles arrived.

  Valerie peeked through her open door window, hoping that no one had seen her near-fainting episode. It was flat-out embarrassing, that’s what it was, but thankfully no one had. There wasn’t a sign of human life in front of her, or for that matter, anywhere around her. Cows grazed in a grass pasture on her left, and countless rows of tall corn waved in the rural breeze to her right. She grinned. The accident was the only blemish on what appeared to be a picture perfect day in Southern Ohio. It felt good to be back after thirty years.

  Although both cars were badly damaged, it took her a half-minute to realize that there were no accident victims present. She figured that the cops and ambulances had already been there, and taken the injured to the local hospital, but it seemed peculiar to her that the wrecked cars hadn’t been moved off to the side so that others could pass. Drainage ditches, filled with black bracken water, lined both sides of the road, and prevented passage by any vehicle larger than a moped. Frustrated, she started back to her car. She’d just have to find another back road to Duneden.

  An engine started, and Valerie looked back at the wreckage, but both cars remained undisturbed. Maybe the engine belonged to a tractor somewhere behind all that corn. And, maybe the farmer driving it could advise her of another route to Duneden. Too many maybe’s to be foolproof.

  She tapped her hearing aid control box; it was tough judging sound direction with the infernal contraption. Satisfied that it was working properly, she turned, took a single step in the direction of the minivan, and then froze.

  The minivan was speeding toward her.

  Valerie stumbled off the road and fell headlong into drainage ditch bordering the pasture. The minivan braked sharply, and missed the other cars by inches as Valerie scurried awkwardly up the bank, and stood shivering against a fence post. Her heart hammered her ribs, as she gasped for air like a fish out of water. Her doctor had warned her that too much physical exertion could trigger another heart attack, and she reasoned minivan incident was what he had in mind.

  An abrupt pressure crushed her chest, and jolted her body. She slipped to her knees, gripping the fence post as if it were a lifeline, and fought off the diaphanous shroud blanketing her consciousness.

  The minivan car door was slammed shut, and a sturdy figure wearing a brown monk robe waded across the bracken water and stooped over her.

  Valerie gazed up into the shadowy features beneath the cowl.

  “Hello, Thomas,” she said, as if greeting an old friend.

  “Valerie.” The Creeper’s voice was rolling thunder. “We always believed you were dead.”

  “Oh, I think the others were well aware of my successful escape. They kept it to themselves to conceal their weaknesses from you; otherwise, they might not have been able to control you.” She clutched her chest and groaned loudly; after a few minutes, the attack subsided. She looked up again at Thomas through watery eyes. “They weren’t supermen, you know.”

  “I understand that,” he said.

  “Do you?”

  He tilted his head in thought.

  “Let me see your face again,” she said. “Pull back the cowl.”

/>   The Creeper remained motionless.

  “Please, Thomas, I don’t have long. My heart’s going. I can feel it. It’s worse than my last attack.”

  The Creeper shoved back the cowl, and Valerie smiled like a mother first seeing her son after long separation, undaunted by his hideous deformities.

  “You haven’t changed much over the years,” she said. “Only gotten bigger.” Another violent shutter made her grimace. “You . . . you tried to run me down, Thomas,” she scolded. “I guess they’ve succeeded in turning you all the way.”

  Scores of buzzing bees skipped between clover blooms nearby. The hypnotic sound calmed Valerie’s fear of death. It was inevitable now. She felt it.

  “You could have been so much more, Thomas. I always told you so. Remember my telling you that?”

  He grunted.

  “Now you’re like a programmed machine. A killing machine.”

  “Why have you come back?” he asked.

  “To clear my conscience about those horrible experiments by sharing the whole story with the right people,” she answered defiantly. “You can help me. Confess everything. We’ll walk up the front steps of Congress, and make ‘em listen. That’s the only way to keep those bastards who did this terrible thing to you from repeating the experiments.”

  “What right people?”

  “Jill . . . Jill Sandlin. She knows almost everything anyway.”

  A low snarl curled his thin lips.

  Valerie closed her eyes. The pain seared her chest, and crushed the air from her lungs, but she somehow managed to cling to life.

  “I loved . . . you. Just like you were . . . my own.”

  He bent to her. “I remember.”

  She smelled his sweat. His savagery. “But after what you did to, Mark, I had to leave you. Hate was a stronger bond for you than love at that point.”

  He clasped her hands in his large humanoid hand as she cried out. Life was rushing from her.

  “But I want you to know that I forgive you,” she cried, caressing his cheek with her fingers, and staring into his yellow eyes. “It wasn’t your fault. The bastards played God with you, and then twisted your soul.” She collapsed into his arms and whispered, “I . . . still love . . . you as a son, Thomas . . . I . . . ”

  His mouth closed over her thin neck and ripped it away in one terrible motion. Valerie Jacob’s dying words whistled from her open throat like an oddly tuned woodwind, as he spat out the stringy flesh and gristle into the tall grass. He lifted her bleeding corpse above his head and tossed it into the scummy ditch water. Her body smacked the still surface, sending pink splash cascading in all directions.

  A wail-roar of grief and rage spiraled into the afternoon sky, frightening the nearby cows out of a week’s milk.

  Chapter 24

  “Please come with me, Special Agent Bellamy,” the man said, keeping his flashlight beam trained on Nick’s face. His command sounded more like a request than a threat.

  “Lower the damned light,” Nick snapped.

  The shaft of light sank to his chest.

  “That’s better. Now who the hell are you ,and why should I go with you?” Nick asked angrily.

  “I can’t answer the first question, but as to the second, Mr. Osborne is waiting downstairs for you in a black Navigator. There have been developments in your case that he needs to brief you on,” the shadowy voice explained.

  “I’m suspended. Osborne couldn’t be here.”

  “This is no trick. The chief needs to see you immediately.”

  Nick considered the dilemma, and then said, “I’ve already been kidnapped once today, and I’m not anxious to go for another ride.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “So, hand me your gun, and I’ll follow you to the parking lot. If this is on the level, you’ll get your gun back. If not, you can shoot me here and now.”

  The man considered Nick’s offer.

  “All right.” He flipped his gun and pressed the handle into Nick’s hand. “Follow me, sir.”

  Nick grabbed his travel bag, and they walked down the empty stairwell to the rear of lot. Nick noticed that the cop car was nowhere in sight. He grinned in spite of the situation. Rance had somehow tricked the blue boys into leaving.

  A black Navigator was parked beneath a maple beyond the reach of the parking lot security lights. He and the unknown operative jogged through the drizzling rain. The back door opened, and Nick hesitated.

  “Rance?”

  “Nick?”

  Nick recognized the voice, and handed the gun back to the messenger.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “That’ll be all for tonight,” Rance told the man.

  The man strode quickly across the lot, and faded into the far shadows of the hedge where Nick had come through earlier. Nick entered the dark Navigator.

  “I would say good evening, Nick, except that it’s anything but,” Rance said, switching on a soft overhead light. The deep circles beneath his eyes indicated that he had been rousted from bed not long ago.

  “Are you arresting me?”

  Rance chuckled briefly. “No, no, nothing like that. Officially, you’re not suspended.”

  “Wait a minute! You said that . . .”

  Rance thrust his flattened palms at Nick’s chest. “Hold on! At least allow me to explain.”

  Nick’s temper cooled to a back-burner simmer.

  “Shoot.”

  “I suspended you, because it was part of a plan. A joint venture between the DEA and Orion Sector.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” Nick quipped sardonically.

  “I know. This morning, I put on that charade to throw our mole off the scent.”

  “In Orion Sector?”

  “As incredible as it seems, yes. In fact, the mole was at our meeting.”

  Nick recalled the Ethyl impersonator. “You mean one of the guys at the meeting was an impostor?”

  Rance’s highbrows shot up. “How did you know?”

  He explained about Ethyl Jurkowski.

  Rance lowered his head. “The killer was impersonating Agent Lawton, your brother-in-law. It appears that he’s intent on eliminating your family one-by-one. I had the meeting taped, then reviewed. He left the identical video footprint, as he did in the DEA’s Colombian surveillance video.”

  Nick was stunned. Even though he disliked Lawton, he was family. What the hell was the Creeper up to? Was he attempting to keep this case personal for Nick? If that was the plan, the son-of-a-bitch was succeeding.

  “And there was my headache during the meeting, just as the undercover agent described outside DelaHoya’s place,” Rance explained. “My guess is that your assassin has some damned powerful telepathic power that enables him to project, or press, any image he wants us to see into our minds, which gives us a frigging headache.”

  Nick appeared skeptical.

  “It’s just a theory,” Osborne added.

  “Well, you’re one up on me,” Nick replied. “So what’s so important that it dragged you out of bed and into a night like this?”

  “First, our people intercepted your call to Neo, and then his CALL to the DEA. I rousted my driver and an old, covert acquaintance who owes me a few favors, and checked out the Virginia safe house myself,” he explained. “What a mess! How the hell did you manage to get out of there?”

  Nick looked away. “You’re not going to believe it.”

  “At this point, my mind is an open book.”

  Nick hesitated, and finally explained his mystifying trip back to the mall.

  “Mall? What were you doing there to begin with?”

  “Maybe I should start from the beginning.” Nick described everything that had happened to him since he left Ethyl’s brownstone.

  Rance sighed deeply after Nick finished. “Incredible. Do you still have the DVD?”

  Nick patted his travel bag.

  “Good. That’s the only copy in existence. Let me make a copy, and I’ll get it back t
o you.”

  Nick shook his head. “This is staying with me. I’ll send you a copy.”

  “Don’t trust me?”

  “I have plans for it.”

  “Care to share them with me?”

  “Later.”

  Rance nodded. “I understand.”

  Nick was apprehensive about asking his next question, but he had to know. “Is Lynn . . . all right?”

  “I’m afraid I’m just full of bad news tonight, Nick. She’s alive, but out-of-her head crazy. Something shocked her badly down there. Her hair’s as white as a snow cone.”

  “Jesus!”

  “I don’t suppose you could identify whatever ripped the elevator apart like it was a paper box?”

  “I heard the damned thing, but I was back in Kansas before it left the elevator.”

  “The upstairs and the outside perimeter were bloody messes. Those DEA agents were slaughtered like animals.”

  Nick recalled the terrible screams echoing down the elevator shaft amidst the freight train rumbling. He shifted his thoughts before he pictured the kinds of death that would produce such gut-wrenching sounds.

  “Anyway, I want you to watch my video now.” Rance pressed a button in the rear console and a freeze frame of Senator Hollis Danforth came up on the small monitor. “After reading the section of your Danforth report for the Justice Department that didn’t make it to our meeting this morning, and simultaneously studying the DEA video, I found this particularly disturbing.” He hit another button, and Danforth sprang to video life.

  Hollis Danforth was fifty-nine years old, and had been a United States Senator from Georgia for thirty-two years. His facial features were sharp-edged and stoic, and exuded a charming grace whenever he flashed his Hollywood smile. His hair was salt and pepper and close-cropped in a military style. Except for a slight bulge at his belt, he was in excellent physical shape. He was a pretty boy, Nick observed. His plastic smile mesmerized the women voters in Georgia every four years, and sent them flocking to the polls to cast their votes in his favor.

  Nick also recalled that the senator had been a widower since the 70’s, choosing not to remarry. Of course he wouldn’t, Nick mused. He was a woman magnet. Why settle for one when he could have hundreds? Even thousands. Before old Hollis died, he might leave a larger sex legacy than Wilt Chamberlain.