Mortal Eclipse

by David Brookover

  A quick survey uncovered the volume on the far wall.

  “C’mon, Hefe, we’re late for our meeting,” he said. He grabbed the drug dealer’s arm, and they stepped through the bookcase into a small, windowless, oak paneled room.

  Gabriella smiled at Nick from behind a massive oak desk. “Some memories die hard.”

  Nick scratched his head as the agitated Hefe parked himself in one of the plush, burgundy leather chairs facing the desk.

  Nick was flat out bewildered. “Nice trick. A hologram.”

  “Something like that.”

  “It’s strange, but I don’t recollect visiting Duneden, and yet I seem to remember that hidden entrance and this room.”

  “It was a memorable experience, an adventure, and most little boys love adventure.”

  “Then I was here before?”

  “Trust your memories, Nick,” she replied vaguely.

  He sat beside Bustillo and contemplated that brief mental clip from his past. “You were the little blonde girl,” he suddenly blurted out.

  Gabriella lowered her head. “Yes.”

  “But you could walk back then.”

  “It’s a long story. Maybe another time,” she replied tersely.

  Bustillo rolled his eyes. “Hey, your trip down memory lane is very touching, but can we get on with this?” he grumbled.

  Gabriella straightened. “Of course.”

  “I’d like to say my peace and get outa here.” He looked at a disapproving Gabriella. “Pardon my poor manners, lady.”

  “Okay, let’s get started, Hefe,” Nick said. “Tell us what you know about the government project, Mortal Eclipse.”

  “That’s a shitter full, agent man.”

  “I know. Tell us when and how Danforth recruited you as a project investor.”

  He leaned back and stretched his legs. “Danforth approached me through some friends of friends back in the summer of 1971. Your summer, not Colombia’s. He took a bunch of us through the facilities here in Podunkville and explained the kind of investment returns we could expect. Of course, he wasn’t talking about monetary returns.”

  Nick knit his brow. “Then what kind of returns was he talking about?”

  “Someone or something to take care of our dirty laundry,” Hefe replied.

  “A hit man.”

  “Jesus, I didn’t think I had to spell it out for a G-man!” he snapped.

  “I like things spelled out,” Nick countered. “Then what?”

  “He explained that the feds had pulled the project funding when he was so close to achieving success.”

  “Did he mention the name Daniel Merrick?”

  “Yeah, once or twice. Danforth implied that the guy was trouble from the go, so he got erased. End of sob story.”

  “Did he say why Merrick was a problem?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. That was a long time ago.” He thought a moment. “I believe he said this Merrick schmuck had a Washington contact. A big wig or something. Anyway, Danforth found out that Merrick was spilling everything to the government snoop. All the gory details, you know. And Mr. Washington was making waves to the pentagon brass behind Danforth’s back about the inhumane methods and practices and the high death rate, and he eventually convinced the Pentagon to cut the project’s funding.”

  “What happened to Merrick?” Nick asked.

  Hefe shrugged with a half smile. “I didn’t ask, but one of the partners heard later that there was an accident involving one of the freaks. Seems it went berserk and did a real number on Merrick. Can I move on now?”

  Nick nodded.

  “There were thirteen of us investors in all, and we sent the money on a regular basis through our laundered corporations, and Danforth forwarded the project updates. At least the details that he wanted us to see.”

  “You got regular updates the whole time?”

  “No, not at the beginning. Seems Danforth’s wife got herself kidnapped just before Christmas in ’71, and he took time off to help your people look for her. Of course, your guys never found her.” He paused to emphasize that detail.

  Nick ignored the barb. “Was she pregnant?”

  “Yeah, she was, now that you mention it.”

  “How did Danforth hold up during the ordeal?”

  “Like a trooper. After a couple months of no ransom note or any lead on his wife’s whereabouts, he went back to work. His success came soon after that.”

  “Success?”

  “Yeah. He finally hit the jackpot with twins. He was a happy camper, and me and the boys breathed a little easier. Some of us were having second thoughts about our investment,” Hefe said.

  “Twins?” Nick was worried. Two Creepers?

  “That’s what I said, but a year later one of them died. Mark, I think his name was. Thomas was the one that lived.”

  “The same Thomas we ran into in Florida?”

  Bustillo squirmed uncomfortably. “Yeah.”

  “No other successes?”

  “Nah, he told us he stopped with the one, but I’m sure he was intending to breed the thing.”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  “Thomas tried to kill Danforth, so Danforth planned to eliminate the bastard.”

  “But if he murdered Thomas, then he’d be back to square one,” Nick observed.

  “Wrong again. Danforth had a bunch of the creature’s frozen DNA, so he could clone the thing.”

  “Did he do it?”

  “Not that I ever heard, and I hear a lot.”

  “Why didn’t Danforth kill Thomas like he planned?”

  “The thing escaped somehow, and Danforth closed up shop.”

  “When?”

  “It would have been around early ’75.”

  “But why would Danforth shut down? He could’ve created another super-hit man.”

  “Yeah, well there was more to it than that. Stuff I don’t really know much about. Something about a ragman.”

  “Ragman?”

  “A reporter. A slime. He kept snooping around this dump and somehow scared Danforth away.”

  Nick exhaled sharply. A reporter? Could he have been Joe Sandlin? If not, there was another loose end to research. He’d know soon enough when Jill told him all she knew about Mortal Eclipse.

  “So you and your friends got stiffed on your investments.”

  Hefe smiled. “Hardly. Thomas contacted us a couple years later and did free-lance wet work for us.”

  “How much did he charge, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  He laughed. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “That’s right, the same as I’m charging you for all this information.”

  “But . . .”

  “He’s a smart cookie. Ugly, but smart. Payments can be traced, no matter how well they’re handled. He didn’t want to be found. Ever.”

  “That doesn’t compute. Who was looking for him? He wasn’t even a blip on national or international intelligence radars,” Nick asked.

  He tapped a fist against the side of his head. “Duh. Try Danforth. He wants Thomas dead in the worst way, but you know, the ironic part is that Thomas does wet work for him, too.” Hefe laughed again. “Strange damn world, ain’t it?” He regarded Gabriella. “Pardon my manners, again.”

  Gabriella propped her elbows on the desk, leaned forward, and glowered at him. “I don’t care for manners, especially coming from vulgar drug dealers like you.” She glanced at Nick. “If you’re done with our guest, I think he should be on his way.”

  He raised a finger. “One more question. You don’t happen to know where I could find Thomas? If I locate him before he visits you, you’ll live.”

  Hefe Bustillo stood. “If I knew that, I’d have my own guys whack the son-of-a-bitch. I don’t trust the feds to get the job done.” He threw Gabriella a contemptuous look. “I enjoyed the pleasure of your company, and if you weren’t in that gimp mobile, we might have made some sweet music together, if you know what I mean.”
/>
  “What a disgusting thought, Mr. Bustillo.” She waved her right hand. “Goodbye.”

  Bustillo vanished from the table, and Nick jumped.

  “How about giving a guy a warning?”

  She laughed.

  “Where is . . . he?” Nick managed.

  “At home in Fort Lauderdale with a mouth full of soap.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “How long do you think it’ll take the soap to really clean up Bustillo’s filthy mouth?”

  Nick was stunned. “I . . . don’t really have a clue.”

  “Let’s make it twenty-four hours then.”

  “But why? This seems so . . . childish.”

  “To teach the slimy drug dealer a little lesson and to discourage him from sending any of his friends to Duneden. You and I know everything about his involvement with Mortal Eclipse, and if he should become uncomfortable with that fact, I want him to think twice before trying to ‘whack’ us.” She grinned.

  “I withdraw my objection. By the way, I thought you didn’t like swearing.”

  “Only from the mouths of scum like Bustillo.” She stretched to her full-seated height, waved her hand again, and the current edition of the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel appeared on the desk before Nick.

  “Read the local section while I get Jill.”

  Her wheelchair spun around and taxied toward the wall opposite the bookshelf while her hands remained folded on her lap. Nick noticed that there wasn’t a motor, but why should he be surprised. This was Duneden.

  He plucked the local section from the paper and gaped at the headline:

  Two Local Businessmen Found Murdered

  The subhead read:

  Peter Karas and Chan Kim Victims

  Nick scanned the article for the cause of death, but the police had declined to give that information to the press. They said it would hinder their investigation.

  Nick saw right through the official smoke screen and realized the cops had been served a federal gag order. This was Rance’s doing. Nick knew it. Just as he knew that the Creeper had ripped the throats out of those big men like it was child’s play.

  “Anything interesting?”

  Nick’s heart skipped a beat. Gabriella sat watching him from the charmed wall.

  Nick collected his composure. “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “I thought as much. Well, I’m off to get Jill. After you hear her father’s story, be prepared. Your life will be changed forever.”

  Chapter 54

  Danforth and several of his unworldly companions flew through the violent maelstrom toward Duneden in the form of crows. The winds buffeted the soaring flock as they alighted in the cemetery outside the witches’ town. The constant lightning flares disclosed the corpses, a sign that Withers’s had failed to dispose of Bellamy.

  The others waited, preening the ground splash from their feathers, as Danforth hopped around the carnage, pecking the two stiff, sodden carcasses lying in the grass. No magic involved with their deaths. He flew into the former sniper’s lookout window. Another dead mercenary, and again, there was no magic involved with his death. Danforth flew out the second story window and searched the area for the fourth mercenary, but found only a small, water-filled crater twenty yards from the farmhouse. A grenade misfire, no doubt. He cawed angrily, but the sound was instantly whipped away by the squall. That damn Bellamy was as good as advertised. He beat the odds this time, but next time he’d be dealing with the master.

  He spied Withers’s crumpled corpse on the front porch. Danforth gave a mental command to his troops, and they once again rose into the air for their flight into Duneden. Poor Withers. He was never going to enjoy that retirement he looked forward to for so long. If the snipers had eliminated Bellamy, their secondary command was to kill Withers and dump him in the Gulf of Mexico, far away from Danforth’s underground realm.

  Despite the storm, Duneden residents clambered onto their porches and pointed at the flock of crows gliding above the town. Danforth wondered what the big deal was. Hadn’t these bumpkins ever seen crows before?

  Then it hit him. Of course, how stupid of him. He’d been gone so long that he’d forgotten that no bird, not even a sick or maimed one, had ever flown over Duneden. He immediately changed their course to the old dairy plant where the crows landed and suddenly became chattering gray squirrels with curled bushy tails. It would have been an inspired spectacle for a naturalist as four-dozen squirrels invaded the trees and leaped and scuttled their way to watchful posts in the high branches overlooking the front gates to Gabriella’s estate.

  Neo awoke with a start. A grating, high-pitched metallic groan assailed his ears, and when he attempted to cover them, manacles prevented his arms from reaching his head. He gradually remembered two giant lizards dragging him down to the castle dungeon and shackling him to the wall. Suddenly, panic iced his flesh. There was something else, too. Something horrible. His eyes fearfully dropped to where his legs should have been, but the lower half of his body was one big, scaly flipper. He was now a merman!

  Neo sat in the dark, terrified, cold, thirsty, and hungry. He hadn’t eaten in days. His mind was criss-crossed with cobwebs from his terrible ordeal and had difficulty thinking of anything but his lost legs and Nick. Where was his friend when he needed him? Why didn’t Nick charge down there with his magical woman from the White World and transform him from Charlie Tuna back to a man?

  God, what if he remained a merman the rest of his life? What would his precious Liz do? Keep him in an aquarium? Donate him to Sea World? Sprinkle his meals on the water’s surface? Strap on goggles and a snorkel when she wanted sex? How do fish make love anyway?

  Footfalls echoed in the tunnel beyond his barred prison and interrupted his misery. It sounded like the click-clack of two horses being led along the dank stone corridor outside his cell. Had Danforth changed others into horses? Why not, he reasoned. Bring ‘em in to share his cell. The stench couldn’t get much worse.

  Two substantial brutes marched on thick, shaggy centaur legs and held torches above their hairless, bony Neanderthal skulls. They were exceedingly tall with barrel chests, knotted sinewy arms, and hideous faces. The mouths, eye sockets, and noses were badly deformed and flowed at an angle across their faces like melted wax. They thrust their ugly faces close to Neo’s cell.

  “Beat it!” he shouted, but parched words emerged as a musty squeak.

  They snorted and stamped their cloven hooves, but eventually calmed and continued past. The light from the flickering torches gradually faded, but Neo’s anger was still red hot. He directed what little energy he had left to his arms, and with a mighty grunt, ripped the shackles from the stonewall. Wetness tickled his sore wrists, but that didn’t matter now. He had completed phase one of his escape plan.

  Moving in absolute darkness was awkward enough, but learning how to do a fish flop was another thing. Instead of crawling on his hands and knees, he moved on his hands and flipper, and he discovered that the flipper was more powerful than he first realized. Learning to control the damn thing was not child’s play. Any motion, no matter how trivial, involved all new nerves and muscles, and the scaly flipper kept flinging his body over his hands, ass over applecart. After numerous experiments with forward motion, he got the hang of it.

  After what seemed like hours, he crossed his cell to the bars. Now what? He pondered the problem for a few minutes; then the solution popped into his head. Rolling over on his back with the flipper curled above his head, Neo slammed it hard against the bars. They showered him with iron rust, but held. He tried again. The racket echoed loudly along the tunnel. On the fifth try, half the bars collapsed and bounced noisily off the floor.

  Neo fish-crawled in the direction of the centaur freaks. The floor of the tunnel sloped downward sixty degrees, so the descent spent little of his remaining strength. After fish walking about three hundred feet, he heard the gurgling of rushing water ahead. Neo noted that as the volume increased, so did the c
ondensation coating the floor. He moved downward until he saw the faint glimmer of the freaks’ torches.

  The gurgling was now a muffled roar. He was close to the source. As he rounded the corner at the end of the tunnel, he gazed upon a large cavern where light and shadow boogied on the walls and floors to an unheard beat. A clear, almost invisible river, cut through the center of the cavern. The two freaks huddled beside a large boulder across the river, busily chipping fragments from its smooth glassy surface and stuffing them into leather pouched strung about their long necks. Their backs were turned toward Neo.

  With a half crawl, half slide, he approached the river at a beached whale's pace, not wanting to attract their attention. The river was the only viable means of escape in his current condition, and the faster he hit the water, the better he’d feel. A fight with the centaur freaks was to be avoided at all costs.

  When he reached the river’s edge, he got a better look at the boulder. It was pear-shaped, with the circumference of the widest section measuring about eighty feet, and its mirrored surface glowed an eerie red-orange. Neo remained frozen with fascination. When he should’ve been swimming for his life, he was rubbernecking a damn boulder. It was at once captivating and menacing.

  He’d worked many cases involving space fall-out in different parts of the country, including populous cities. One such phenomenon occurred outside Philadelphia. He and his old partner, Sam Davenport, had investigated a large crater alongside a high school gymnasium that was caused by a meteorite similar to this one. In Neo’s professional opinion, the boulder across the underground river appeared more extraterrestrial than terrestrial.

  The freaks’ grunting broke his preoccupation, but they were still oblivious to his presence. Neo figured he had stalled long enough. He lowered himself to the icy river and sliced the surface with an infinitesimal splash. After swimming both directions for a short distance, he decided to go with the flow. Propelled by his powerful new appendage, he cruised quickly through the subterranean maze and burst through an opening in the lake floor. Neo didn’t need a map to guide him to his destination. He just swam like hell toward the air above. His body exploded from the misty surface and landed awkwardly in a whopping belly-flopper. It was storming, but Neo didn’t mind a bit. He floated placidly on his back, sucking wind and thanking God for his deliverance from death.