CHAPTER 22
Harold had never been so tired. He felt like he’d been drugged or perhaps he’d hit the bottle too hard again. A coma was going to wash over him in heavy waves, and he welcomed it more than he’d welcomed anything in all of his life.
Aqua had left him to himself with a dancing candlelight as his only companion. Frank would be in the room three doors down she said, and if he walked past the doors and took a right at the end of the hall, he’d be in Boris’ chambers. A little ways a way from that, the shriveled man who’d worn the heavy, metal armor known as the Knight was recovering from the short battle they’d participated in, but Aqua was not hopeful. The Knight no longer had the will to live, and he had talked of his soul going to the Black Pits on more than one occasion.
Harold looked at the gleam of silver which laid on the night table. Orange and red danced off its reflection. It was times like these when he missed — and he can’t believe he’d miss such a thing — the ease and convenience of the Deathblade.
He knew there was something special about the weapon. He knew it painted a red target on his back. And by catching the way Aqua had looked at it in the greedy way a jealous child would look at the kid on the playground with all the latest and greatest new toys, he knew he might’ve bitten off more than he could chew by accepting an alliance with these so-called Renegades.
But he was so tired; he couldn’t stay up to watch his own back let alone Frank’s. The fact they’d been split up, though he didn’t protest when Aqua had told him Frank would be three doors down, worried him more than it should’ve.
His hand reached out and brushed the smooth pommel of the sword — white Wolves carved from what seemed to be the finest ivory. It was almost like a work of art, like it belonged in some prestigious museum. But it had done the job, and Harold reckoned it would continue to do the job so long as destiny didn’t pull out the rug from beneath his feet.
With the sword in hand, warmth radiating through his palm, he leaned over and blew out the candle, then closed the one eyelid that could be closed partially, and he drifted off into sleep.
He accepted it.
But he didn’t accept the dreams which followed because they were not dreams in a sense. Dreams are fake, they are manifestations of our own deep and dark consciousness, but what Harold dreamt was not fake; it had happened many years ago, and most of his mind had repressed it for good reason, had locked away the dark memories behind a six-foot thick wall of steel and concrete. Aqua’s drugs were a wrecking ball of the consciousness, and when his synapses fired harder than they’d fired in a long time, that wall of safety was turned to dust.
He was in a dark place. It was so cold his burned skin seemed to ice over, so cold he couldn’t move when the red eyes manifested out of the surrounding darkness. They growled in unison, a chorus of death. Yet, he knew what they were; he had always known.
He was a kid again. It was his thirteenth birthday and his mother had promised to drop him off at the park an hour’s bike ride into the city. He had lived on the outskirts of Gloomsville in a crummy apartment building. Mom had to bus into the city when their car — a 1987 Oldsmobile — was on the fritz and it alway seemed to be on the fritz or at the shop or at a friend’s house who’d fix it for cheap. When he was sure she was gone, and he’d successfully ditched school, he’d be off on his own because school sucked for Harold Storm, but the park wasn’t anything to brag about, either.
There was a pond with more trash than sickly looking fish floating lazily inside of it, a basketball court where more drug deals than pickup games occurred, and a baseball field with a diamond of grass instead of dirt and white lines and littered broken vodka and beer bottles. If you walked around the parking lot or got deeper into the heart of the park you’d find used condoms, syringes, homeless, hookers and whores. It was a simple American park.
A voice raked through Harold’s sleeping brain: Got a dollar, kid? Just gimme a dollar! It was the voice of Jack Gallagher, the man who’d always smelled like piss and strong liquor, the man who lived at the park, or frequented it enough for Harold to see him every time him and his friends wanted to shoot hoops or play kickball.
Mom got off at ten. Normally, she’d expected Harold to have the dishes cleaned and his bedroom picked up, but he’d whined the night before.
“Moooom, it’s my birthday tomorrow.”
“Is it already? Happy birthday, Harry. Listen, buddy, I have to work a double. Picked up Frannie’s shift so I’ll be gone all day. How about this weekend we go to the zoo? Ice cream, maybe a movie, too if you’re up for it.”
He had nodded, but the weekend was so far away. That was like four more school days.
“Tell you what,” she had said, noticing the defeated look in his eye, “I’ll even let you stay home from school tomorrow. How about a little hooky? Sound good, love?”
A smile cracked on his face.
“One condition,” she said. Her eyes got that look he hated — that I’m-so-serious-and-I’m-only-doing-this-because-I-love-you look. “You gotta visit with your father. You’re too young to be out in the city by yourself.”
Well, there went all of his birthday fun, he thought.
“I’ll call him up. Maybe you two can go to the park awhile. He’d love that. When I was pregnant with you, Harry, he always talked about playing catch with his little boy. He knew you was gonna be his son way before Doc Ellington told me I was having a boy. He just knew it.”
Harold didn’t say anything, only sat at the kitchen table trying not to breathe in too much of his mother’s second-hand smoke.
Mom had called up his dad, though Harold fondly remembered him not being much of a father. He was more like the uncle you saw every major holiday who’d bring you a wad of cash for your birthday he missed over the summer. He always smelled like cigarettes, listened to really old-sounding rock music Harold wouldn’t appreciate until he was older, and he eyed every woman as if they were human food and he was a starving mutt.
Still, he got to miss school.
Mom woke up late and didn’t have time to get him up and ready to go to the park. The weather was holding well enough for October to make biking there a breeze unless his daddy was going to pick him up, but his mom had looked in that morning and said, “I don’t think he is, kiddo. Best you just meet him at the park if you’re up for it.” Dad worked a few blocks from the park at some kind of machine shop, but Harold had never seen him there, and he always seemed to have some kind of get-rich-quick scheme in the works that never actually worked.
Besides, Harold wanted to go to the park anyway.
The morning sunshine warmed the back of his neck; he had his baseball with the New York Mets logo on it he’d gotten in a Happy Meal or something, his glove which was worn and smelled of dirt and sweat and leather, and a pair of cleats he’d outgrown about a year ago tied and slung over his shoulder. He’d hoped his dad brought a bat, but if not, he was sure there’d be a pickup game of some sorts going on between all the kids who either didn’t go to school or just flicked constantly like him. Dad would be content to sit in his car and smoke the day away. Maybe he’d even leave. In all honesty, Harold liked it better when he wasn’t around.
And as the sun beamed overhead then began its downward sweeping arc to the west side of the city where the skyscrapers and looming buildings would block out its last dying rays, Harold found himself wishing his father would’ve shown up. He would never admit it, certainly never say it out loud, but he was lonely. A couple of older kids showed up for some baseball, but when another of their friends brought a girl and a couple packs of cigarettes they’d lifted at the corner store, they left nothing but a cloud of dust behind them. Even Jack Gallagher’s drunk musings couldn’t keep him company. And he’d have to get out before the sun went completely down, especially if he wanted to live to see his fourteenth birthday next year.
He pushed himself up from the little circle of dirt he’d been sitting in for the last four hours beneath a
dying tree, brushed off the pieces of mulch and twigs and bramble and turned back toward the path.
The sky had begun to get dark. Darker than it should’ve been. He no longer heard the sounds of the city: the yelling people, the cars, the honking horns. It was like being at the bottom of a pool, the water muting all sights and sounds and smells. But he could hear his heartbeat. Hell, he thought people in China could hear his heartbeat.
Harry, you’re thirteen now. Be a man.
But tears threatened at the corner of his eyes. He was not a man, wouldn’t feel like one either until he was nearly burned to an unrecognizable lump of flesh and possessed a power greater than he’d ever had any right in possessing.
The eyes were what he saw first along the path out of the park. They lit up one at a time, a horribly angry red. Seeing the first pair put a hitch in his step. He had almost tripped and fallen off the concrete into a divot where a pipe leaked water that gave off a hot, shitty smell.
His bike was chained up to the fence behind the dugout.
Another pair of eyes bobbed in the darkness to his left. He could no longer see the lights in the apartment buildings overlooking the park. The streetlights were dead. He pumped his legs faster, one cleat banging against his chest while the other banged against his shoulder blade.
A low rumbling echoed down the path. The path seemed to stretch for miles, getting thinner and thinner as he looked down its length. Then the shapes trundled out from the trees.
Harold’s voice escaped from his mouth, escaped between teeth too clenched to say anything properly, “Guys, this isn’t funny. You just quit it, you guys. Don’t make me call my mom. I got a cell phone. Heck, I’ll even call the police.”
Of course, Harold didn’t have a cell phone and if he had, it probably wouldn’t have gotten any service in the heart of the park and it would have been too unwieldy and clunky to hide from the kids he’d seen earlier, and when they saw it, they would’ve surely beaten him up for it, perhaps even broken it out of sheer spite and jealousy.
These were no shapes of the fifteen year old and sixteen year old gangbangers he’d seen earlier. Guys like that didn’t have glowing, red eyes, didn’t hunker down on all fours like beasts. That’s what Harold saw now. That’s what stared at him now.
Beasts.
The light seemed to come back slowly and it only focused on them like players on a stage.
Then the mouth opened. He saw a stream of thick slobber dribble from the corner of the maw. The red light from its eyes faintly illuminated the teeth. He saw how long and jagged they were.
The rumbling again, this time louder, predatory.
Yet Harold couldn’t stop himself from walking forward. It was as if this beast was calling to him. More eyes lit up on his left and right. His legs kept pumping. He dropped his cleats, his glove, but the baseball was still in his pocket.
Each step Harold took, the beast’s growls revved like that of a dying jet engine. He saw their silver fur somehow shining in the pitch-darkness. Their snouts stuck out of the bushes and shadows, all growling in a chorus of death.
He no longer felt the urge to run, now he felt a strange sense of curiosity. Yellow eyes met his own.
“G-Good boy,” Harold said.
It was a dog; a large, dog. It had looked more like a wolf than anything, but there was no such thing as wolves in the city, even a thirteen-year-old Harold knew that. The dog’s teeth bared again, and as he got closer he saw the red dripping from the tips of its fangs as if the beast had just eaten, had just killed. Harold took a deep breath, smelling the kill.
“Come here, boy,” Harold said. The words sounded like he was speaking another language from far away.
His breath was ice in his lungs.
The dog took a couple of steps forward, and Harold could see how weighty this thing was, how it sent up little clouds of dirt with each step.
He began to shake. His hand was out…to do what, he wasn’t completely sure. Maybe pet the thing, or let it consume him. He believed that’s what it wanted, believed it had come to Harold because he was Harold.
His fingers dangled there in front of the dog’s mouth. The surrounding pack growled in unison, in anticipation.
The nose was wet and cold, frigid cold. He held his fingers there for what seemed like an eternity, dangled them in front of the beast’s muzzle.
He felt no fear. The fear was gone.
It shouldn’t have been.
Because the beast leaned forward with the ferocity of lightning strike, and he pulled his fingers back from where the warm, blood-tinged breath blew out into the chilly, night air.
Jaws snapped at him, clamping together as if its teeth were made of steel. Those bloody eyes narrowed to slits, ready to pounce, and in all the excitement, in the shattered, dreamy loll, Harold had stumbled over his feet and laid sprawled out on the path. Blood rolled out from burning wounds on his palm, where he’d tried to catch himself.
And in real life when this had happened there had only been three dogs — it wasn’t until later when his mother had drawn him a bath and he’d sobbed as the running water masked the noises that he realized they were dogs and not wolves.
His mom had found him, already searching through the park and calling out his name until she finally heard his strangled cries for help. They were strangled because the dog had stepped down on him with all its weight, toenails dug into his skin, punctured him an inch deep. It, like its distant cousin the wolf, had learned to go for the soft spot of its prey, and that soft spot was Harold’s exposed neck. Mom came flying out of the bushes, a taser she’d bought at Vinny’s Pawn Shop in hand. The noise, that horrible, sizzling and shocking noise, was enough to drive the beasts back into the thickets of trees and bushes with their tails between their legs.
But this was not real life no matter how much it felt like it to Harold Storm. And sometimes, more often than not, the dreams were way worse.
His mother never came in this version, she wasn’t swinging her purse in one hand and her stun gun in the other. There would be no trip through the Dairy Queen drive-thru for a vanilla cone they really couldn’t afford and there would be no hot bubble bath, either.
Because the dog’s — Not a dog; a wolf, his mind screamed — mouth closed around his neck. Hot blood gushed out from the wounds. Teeth dug into him like the fat kid at a pie eating contest. Splatters of red. Splatters of black.
Never-ending pain.
He screamed a soundless scream into his pillow as he slept in a room that was once a dungeon. The door was cracked now and a pair of eyes, blazing white in the darkness of the room, watched the Protector known as Electus toss and turn on the opposite side of the sword that had once destroyed Realms.
And when the killing inside of Harold Storm’s mind had finally stopped and the horrible dream bled into nothingness, a normal man — an un-drugged one — would have woken up screaming, bathed in his own sweat.
But he didn’t. Instead, he dreamt dreams full of death.
Aqua smiled near the doorway as she smelled the fear ooze from his pores and she thought with a smile on her face: The drugs still worked, even in here, they worked.
But Aqua had forgotten about Frank.
CHAPTER 23
Charlie stood rigid, biting his nails. It had been so long since he’d bitten his nails. It might have been two-thousand years since he’d done it, back when he’d help betray the man named Jesus Christ, when he’d help nail him to a cross. Those were the days when Charlie was weak, when he feared.
In Hell, he feared no more. In Hell, he was the fear.
But now, he’d come back to this nasty habit…over what? A woman.
Not just any woman, a sing-song voice said in his mind.
His woman.
But there would be no way the Dark One would know, would there? The box did more than keep him in; it stripped him of his powers…so the legend said, and who was Charlie to dispel legends?
The seeing glass sat stolidly on the
edge of its shelf, tempting Charlie to come pick it up, calling for him in a Siren’s voice. Come and see and fear no more, Charlie-boy.
He got up from his chair, legs working toward the towering bookshelf. He was going to do it. He was going to give in.
But the Witch’s voice spoke like it always did. Oh, how it sounded so real as if she were standing next to him, her hot breath sweet and welcoming on the nape of his neck, standing up the hairs one by one.
Do not get addicted, Charlie. Addiction will be your downfall if you let it.
He had smiled smugly then. Charles was a Shadow Eater of Hell; he’d helped take down one of the Mortal Realm’s most important people; he had become Satan’s right-hand man; something as trivial as addiction would not be Charlie’s downfall. No, he’d never die. He’d live for as long as he wanted, and if he ever went out, it would be in a blaze of bloody glory and he would take the worlds down with him, that much was true.
One look with the all-seeing eye will lead to another, then another, the Witch crooned.
She was right. Charlie resisted for many years, resisted to the point of the glass gathering a heavy sheen of dust, but then Harold Storm had come along. The stupid Realm Protector fell into a prophecy that was destroyed a thousand years before with Jesus Christ, then again with Orkane.
But they had been wrong. His Master was wrong; Charlie was wrong. They were all wrong, and if Charlie had risked a glance into the glass, maybe he would have seen it. It was too late now. Not only would his cuticles suffer the consequences, but so would the Realms and so would his reign. And he could look no more into the glass. Fearing the Witch’s words after he’d shrugged her last comment off, and those words were: You will go crazy if you stare too hard and too long, he raised an arm up over his face, as if he were shielding him from the sun’s bright rays. It was a simple form of protection, and it may or may not have worked. He inched closer and closer to the looking glass. All he wanted to do was check on his Beth, make sure she was okay, make sure it was all going to plan.
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