AGE OF EVE: Return of the Nephilim (NONE)

by D. M. Pratt

  Eve saw in the dim light a moat made out of swamp water that surrounded the island of land that held the hospital. She’d seen it on the navigation map in her GPS as they drove. They were at the heart of the Atchafalaya Swamp Basin, a natural reserve that went on for hundreds of miles well beyond the patch of land she now traveled called Thibodaux.

  Out of the blackness of the woods, another nutria cried out from the distance somewhere to her left. It made the sound of a screaming cat or a frightened child and echoed off the water then faded back into silence. Its call intensified the chilling loneliness of this place and sent creepy shivers up Eve’s spine.

  The small, muddy road stretched out lazily at her feet, a patchwork of moist earth and abstract puddles that caught the slivers of moonlight fighting desperately to get in through the dense draping of moss as it arched above her. The moonlight reflected off the pools of water that peaked out between patches of algae and caught on the soft wind, danced gracefully on top. In its glow, Eve could see the brilliant ruby red, emerald green and coal black velvet moss carpet the path until it opened up into a shadowy clearing. Spotted among the patches of moss, hunchbacks of mulch lay swollen into mushroom-shaped clumps, built from the dead debris that caught on the grounds each time the thick waters ebbed and flowed on its journey across the land, gifts left each time the swamp rose and fell with the daily rains.

  At her feet Eve saw shades of thin white mist as it gathered its forces and crawled intermittently across the moist ground. The miasma reminded Eve of a poem about ghostly souls searching for someplace to stop their ceaseless journey, to rest perhaps so the living could remind them again of what life had once been like.

  In the sky above the light of the moon blossomed and fell across the ground before her as they stepped from the canopy of Spanish and Irish moss onto the main driveway.

  Eve noticed that Aria stopped as had all the sounds that only a moment ago rang out from the swamp’s night creatures. Eve stood crushed by the silence and raised her face to look at what had once been a citadel of sanity for the insane: Thibodaux Asylum.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  It took hours after the police received Eve’s anonymous call for them to reach Cora’s house, locate the bedroom and secret room inside the closet and remove the mirror. It took three men with blowtorches to melt the steel hinges off and 12 men to lift the large door from Cora’s safe room and pull it out of its titanium pocket. The last step broke the suction seal. Like a great desperate gasp, a rush of air hissed out from inside the closet. It was well over one hundred degrees and only the first of many clues that things were terribly wrong. The half conscious Detective Mac Blanchard, who lay in a heap, soaking in a pool of his own sweat and gasping for air, was the second.

  “Water,” Mac said in a hoarse, dry whisper.

  His tongue felt swollen, thick as a bail of cotton or an old sponge used to mop putrid water from the floor in a moldy basement. Two officers dragged him from the safe room and propped him against the glass doors of the shoe closet. Someone brought him a glass of water and placed it into his hands. Mac shook violently. He drank, spilling most as he reached for the second glass of water before he’d even fully finished the first. A third and fourth glass were placed into his hands and he drank them all.

  Several of the officers stepped into the oven that had been a safe room and marveled at what was left; the plastic jewel cases had melted, twisted as old men. All the control panels for lights, air and two phones hung useless, destroyed by the heat. All the plastic buttons and knobs on the control panels resembled surreal pieces of abstract art that could have been created by Salvador Dali. Nothing worked. The TV monitors were dead black or hissed with dancing static images made of colorful pixels.

  “What the fuck happened in here?” one of the older members of the rescue team said as he entered.

  He was Lieutenant Mitchell Hanover, fifty, velvety black, tall and round with dark, deep set eyes. A broad flat nose and a gold tooth that shone from the slit of his mouth finished his face.

  “I… saw it. It… wasn’t human,” Mac said, struggling to speak the words that hissed out of his still swollen mouth.

  Everyone turned to Mac. There was a collective moment of obvious did I just hear what you said disbelief at the words he’d just uttered. Querying faces and cocked heads looked at him, each checking to see if their ears were indeed working correctly.

  “What? What wasn’t human?” the older detective asked.

  “It came in here…living smoke…but it had a form…arms and legs… sealed the door, and then cut off the air, turned up the heat, melted the controls and fried the papers,” Mac said pointing to the stacks of warped paper in the safe room.

  “It? Like a dog?” the old detective asked.

  “No, not like a dog. Not like anything I’ve ever seen.”

  Just then a young thin cop raced through the door, his cell phone still in his hand.

  “Lieutenant, the woman, Cora Bouvier? She’s gone,” the young cop said.

  “She was in a fucking coma. Gone where?” Hanover barked.

  “No one knows. Officer Thaddeus was found dead in the bathroom and she was gone,” the young cop replied.

  Mac pulled himself to his feet and took two rocky steps to the door to leave.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “She’s gone to Thibodaux Asylum. Call Judge Decadroux and get me a warrant. We’re gonna need back up,” Mac said, struggling to get his legs under him and hoping they would support him.

  “Thibodaux? For what?” Hanover asked. “Who’s gone? Cora Bouvier?”

  Mac didn’t wait. He headed out of the room.

  “Secure this place and categorize all those papers and jewelry; nothing moves until I say so. I want pictures and a list. No sticky fingers or I’ll fucking cut them off,” Hanover said as he exited after Mac.

  “Mac!”

  Hanover caught up with the still wobbly detective. He placed Mac’s arm around his neck and helped him along the long upper hallway.

  “You need to go to the hospital,” Hanover said as they turned and headed down the main stairway of the Bouvier house.

  “I was working with that reporter, Eve Dowling from Southern Style Magazine. She’s Cora Bouvier’s best friend. She’s the one that got me into the safe room. We found a briefcase filled with papers from Robb, Gallager and Grant. It looks as though Millard Le Masters committed his grandson there.”

  “Le Masters!? You got proof we can use?” Hanover asked.

  “What’s left of them and she’s got some too, I think she took them,” Mac said.

  “You’re in bed with all the wrong folks on this one if you’re going up against Millard Le Masters, Mac. I’m not sure I’m ready to jump off a cliff behind you without a boat load of hardass proof.”

  “We’ve worked together for twelve years. I need you to trust me,” Mac said. “We found some papers that prove Beauregard Gregoire Le Masters is still alive and a prisoner and his grandfather, Millard Le Masters, might be about to kill him.”

  “Why?” Hanover asked.

  “Because Millard’s grandson Beau is the last heir to the Gregoire estate and fortune and it goes to him on his 35th birthday. The will states he has to reach 35 or everything goes to charities,” Mac explained.

  “Why would they do that?”

  “His other grandparents suspected Millard might do just what he’s doing. They wanted a way to protect their son’s life. Only if he dies after his 35th birthday does everything pass to his closest living relative and that, according to the papers that Cora Bouvier found, looks to be Millard,” Mac explained.

  “So the attack on Cora Bouvier was a murder attempt?”

  “We need to get to Thibodaux Asylum before midnight for me to prove it,” Mac said.

  Hanover listened as they reached the front door and the reality of all that Mac was saying registered into his brain. He stopped.

  “Mac, Thibodaux has been closed fo
r 15 some years,” Hanover said. “Whatever was there burned in a fire that killed over four hundred people.”

  Mac looked at him and felt a shiver crawl up his spine.

  “So, do we still need a warrant?” Mac asked.

  “If someone owns it and we go on their property without one, anything we find won’t be admissible.”

  “Then we need Judge Decadroux,” Mac asked.

  “We’ll stop by the Judge’s. She’ll hate that but I think she’ll sign off on a warrant.”

  “You may want to put out an APB on Le Masters,” Mac said.

  “I’ll put Detective Charlotte on it.”

  “Hanover, we’re gonna need back up,” Mac said. “And I’m not sure guns are gonna be the weapon of choice after seeing that thing,” Mac said.

  Hanover looked at him. He opened the front door and Mac walked out, stopped and looked back at Hanover.

  “Thanks for believing me,” Mac said.

  “Who the hell said I believed you?” Hanover asked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  Thibodaux Asylum, or what remained of it, stood broken, charred and twisted into a nightmare version of itself, a shattered reminder of the past. The great burned and rotting beams that still stood reached out of the dark soil and into the night like stiff ebony arms with clenched fists covered in blankets of moss. The few charred stone walls that remained crawled with billowing beards of hanging moss and loomed up disappearing into the intermittent shrouds of gray mist; moss clung to their base adding to the silent reminder of this once great citadel reduced to a decaying remnant of what had once been the main building. Behind the front wall, chest-high mounds of rubble huddled; black as pitch, they sprouted over the land, swollen clumps of earth and debris that made the land look humpbacked and tortured.

  Eve looked up at what was left of the main administration building. Its stone wall rose three stories, standing defiantly before them, a black pile of decaying stone with its few remaining details caught in the wet reflection of white moonlight. From what she could imagine Thibodaux Asylum would have been the equivalent of a fine, stately Southern house, a private home turned hospital at the end of the Civil War. Newer buildings were added on over the decades. Each addition expanded what had become a formidable bastion of mental health, a home for the misbegotten and hopelessly befuddled. The large hearth of a great stone fireplace stood with its bumpy chimney poking up through the piles of fallen lumber, the last mainstay of what dignity still remained. She studied the broken windows that glared like winking eyes and shattered teeth grinning menacingly down at her. In the silence she heard a whispering wind sigh as it passed through the branches of the giant bald cypresses and fluttered through the tendrils of hanging Irish moss. Its passage made the ragged growth wave like flags of surrender from a battle long lost and long forgotten.

  Aria read her mind.

  “No. Look again,” Aria said.

  “At what?” Eve replied.

  “At what is really there. Look behind the illusion.”

  Eve had forgotten the rusted iron fence that blocked her only moments before and how she’d shifted her mind, watched it change its form, vaporizing from a solid to smoke to let her pass. It changed only when she chose to look at it with different eyes. She took a deep breath, closed and opened her eyes and imagined Thibodaux in a different reality.

  Instantly, the façade of burnt corrupt remains, blackened and twisted by the fire and time, melted away and in its place Thibodaux Hospital unfolded: rock, brick, mortar and wood petals opened before her with the grace of a grand flower emerging into the sun of a new day.

  It was there, strong and whole, old but at the same time new. It had been meticulously cared for over the centuries and even in the darkness of night it felt very much alive. There were no lights in the main building or along the south and east wing, but far off in the western-most wing of the old hospital several lights glowed. Through the back entry windows, rows of fluorescent green lights reflected in the swampy waters that lay in puddles and encircled the grounds. The haze of lights faded and fell into the blackness of swamp and forest. The west wing stretched out beyond a rose garden with a half hidden path. It led to a small, above-ground cemetery that hugged the last line of trees before the swamp took back the land. Like the cemetery in Algiers the rectangle- shaped monuments stood guard over the dead. No angels watched over them, only lonely gray cement tombs that stood peeking into the indigo night. The hospital had shown itself to her new eyes. It stood before her whole and stately, no longer abandoned or forgotten, but daring her to come inside.

  “Here,” Aria whispered.

  Eve looked over to see the child holding out the burlap role of fabric that Evine had sent to help her. Aria’s eyes said everything. She offered it to Eve.

  “I can’t go with you,” Aria said.

  Eve looked at her. She was a child. Of course she couldn’t go with her, but how could Eve go alone, armed only with a primitive sense of reality that had to be coaxed and reminded to see the new reality she was just discovering?

  “I don’t know what power Kirakin holds over me. I think I can stay in your thoughts and in your heart. I just don’t know if I can help,” Aria said.

  “Just keep reminding me to open my mind and my eyes and look beyond the obvious,” Eve said.

  “If you are to destroy him, you must remember who you are and stand in your power. Do you understand?” Aria asked.

  “My power? I have no power?”

  “Yes, you do. That’s why he won’t hurt you. That’s why he keeps coming back to you. Don’t let him know your thoughts and remember to only use the silver spike when he is completely and utterly vulnerable to you.”

  “Vulnerable?” Eve said, as she thought of Cora and Ms. Clarisse.

  Eve looked at Aria and then to the hospital trying her best to shake the disbelief that clung to her all too logical mind, the one that kept saying This is bullshit, get the hell out of here!

  She sighed and accepted her new and improved reality. Other than that there were no vampires, this was a scene out of a Bram Stoker novel. Only it wasn’t a fantasy, it was very, very real.

  “Aria?” Eve spoke. “You said the Nephilim were twins? What’s the other brother’s name?”

  “I’ve never seen the twin. It is supposed to be as beautiful as Kirakin is hideous.”

  “But does ‘it’ have a name?” Eve asked again. “You never say its name.”

  “Evine called it Gathian,”

  “Twin sons of God?” Eve asked.

  “Godlings are not limited to gender, they just are,” Aria said.

  Aria, a child with a woman’s mind, the daughter of a sorceress and a demon that had forever changed her life, stepped into Eve’s arms and held her as tight as she could. Eve felt from Aria only sweet concern. She folded her arms around the girl, grateful for her courage. Finally, the two broke their embrace.

  Eve looked one more time at the burlap roll that rested in Aria’s hand. It was hers now and everything that happened would be of her doing. She took it into her hands. The burlap fabric felt rough and scratchy against her fingers and palms; a rush of energy made her hands tingle.

  “How does it work?” Eve asked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  Judge Dorthea Decadroux was a tall woman with the broad shoulders of a man and a ruddy complexion. Her face was stained with a galaxy of freckles that fell across her forehead and down her rounded full jowls; jowls that had once perhaps been cute, her fat cheeks now hung as gelatinous, fleshy skin flaps like those of a large, irritated bulldog whose food had been recently taken away. She had a fine moustache as well. On her head were patches of poorly dyed red curls that parted to let the light from the porch creep through her fine, thinning hair to reveal the details of her balding white scalp. The hair fell in ringlets across her forehead mixing commandingly with her eyebrows. It all tangled together in a nest and shaded the stormy green eyes that stared out angrily from narrow slits in he
r face at Mac and Hanover.

  “Why am I doin’ this at ten o’clock at night?” Dorthea demanded.

  She stood in the open door to her home. Her expression made sure her guests knew they were not welcome. Still, she let Mac and Hanover come inside.

  “We’re here for the warrant,” Hanover said.

  “My secretary is bringin’ it ova. I’ll sign it but I wanta understand why we are breaking down the gates of an abandoned hospital. What the hell do you think you are gonna find?” the Judge asked.

  She had a thick, southern drawl and a deep voice that carried as much testosterone as her manly features.

  “The property burnt down and we just found out it was sold to Millard Le Masters immediately after the fire for pennies on the dollar,” Mac said.

  The judge curled a lip, obviously not a fan. It seemed Millard Le Masters had very few fans.

  “You didn’t say anything about Le Masters being a part of this,” the Judge said.