Firewalkers

by Chris Roberson

  “Mr. Jett?” Hasan said gently, approaching the man’s wheelchair from behind. “There are some people here to see you.”

  The old man just grunted in reply.

  Izzie got a better look as she and Joyce stepped around in front of him. His face was deeply lined, his skin like weathered mahogany, and there was a bare fringe of tight white curls that ringed his head from one ear around the back to the other. He had a blanket over stick-thin legs, his narrow chest and bony arms buried in a down coat, and bare hands with knobby knuckles rested like withered claws in his lap. There was an oxygen tank strapped to the back of the wheelchair, connected to plastic tubing that snaked up and over his ears like the arms of a pair of eyeglasses, ending with two prongs that were snugged in his broad nostrils. His mouth seemed to be settled into a perpetual frown, but his dark eyes were bright and lively.

  “Well?” the old man growled, sizing them up. “What do you want?”

  “I’m Special Agent Lefevre, FBI,” Izzie said, and then gestured to Joyce. “This is Dr. Joyce Nguyen, Recondito’s Chief Medical Examiner. We wanted to ask you a few questions about one of your old cases, from your days working as a private investigator.”

  The old man’s eyelid twitched for a moment, and his frown deepened.

  “I retired a long, long time ago, girl,” he said, his voice gravelly. “And I got little enough time left to me that I don’t want to be wasting it digging up the past. So why don’t you keep your questions to yourself and leave me be?”

  “I just wanted to know about . . .” Izzie began, but the old man interrupted her before she could continue.

  “So what, doc?” He rolled his gaze over to Hasan. “This going to be a regular thing now, you bringing people here to bother me? I didn’t do four tours in Vietnam just so I could spend my twilight years being hassled by any fool that comes along and wants to bend my ear.”

  “The Eschaton Center,” Izzie hastened to finish.

  The old man’s eyes slowly turned back in her direction.

  “We want to know what you saw down there,” Izzie continued, keeping her tone level but insistent. “Underground, where Parrish and his people carried out their secret rituals.”

  He studied her face closely, as if searching for something hidden there.

  “We think you might have encountered something . . .” Izzie trailed off for a moment, thinking of the right way to phrase it. “Something not from here.”

  The old man’s eyes widened fractionally.

  “I’ll be damned,” the old man said, looking from Izzie to Joyce and then back. “You got the knack, do you?”

  Izzie glanced over and saw that Joyce seemed about as confused as she was herself.

  “The knack?” Joyce asked.

  The old man gave them both an appraising look, and seemed to reconsider.

  “Well, maybe you don’t, at that.” He raised one knobby finger and tapped his chin thoughtfully. “But you’ve seen them, haven’t you?”

  He leaned forward slightly in the chair.

  “Seen . . . ?” Izzie prompted.

  “The Ridden,” the old man said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  Izzie and Joyce exchanged a significant glance.

  “Well, now. You have seen them.” The old man sat back in the chair, his expression softening somewhat. Then he gestured with one arthritic hand to Hasan. “Doc, you mind giving me and these girls a little privacy? I think we do have cause to talk, after all.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Some folks call it the ‘inner eye,’ or ‘second sight,’ or just the Sight,” G. W. Jett said as Izzie and Joyce settled themselves on a cold bench across from him. “I’ve heard in voodoo they talk about folks being ‘two-headed,’ and I figure that’s just about the same thing. Some folks are born with it, and some folks get it somewhere along the way, and there’s even some who can dip in when they drink or eat or smoke the right thing. Seeing the world not just with your eyeballs, but with something else besides, able to see all the things that regular folk don’t even know is there. Call it what you like, but my mother always talked about having the ‘knack,’ so that’s what

  I call it.”

  “And you have it?” Izzie asked.

  The old man frowned for a moment before answering.

  “Used to,” Jett said, a bitter undercurrent to his words. “I lost it along the way. It bothered me for a long time, not having it anymore, but eventually I decided that eyesight can fade, and hearing can go, and all the rest, so why not the knack, too? But I was born with it, yeah, and it took a long time getting used to it being gone.”

  The old man ran a hand across his forehead, almost as if brushing away a thought, and then continued.

  “When I was little I didn’t think too much about it. The knack was just something for family to know, and not something to talk about at school or church or whatnot. It wasn’t even that we were worried what folks might think, just that it was a private thing, not for anyone else to share. Everyone in the whole family knew, though, and there were always relations trooping to our house to get my mother’s advice, or help getting rid of some bad luck, or anything like that. Of course, back then I didn’t have the knack nearly so strong as she did, and all I could see were little hints of things, here and there. More like a tickling at the back of my head than a full-blown thought. But I always knew which neighborhoods to avoid, which houses and strangers to keep clear of, and I could just feel it if something wrong was about to go down.”

  Izzie couldn’t help but think of her own grandmother, and the way that so many friends and family had come to her when they felt like they needed a little help.

  “My mother died right around the time I was finishing up school,” the old man went on, “and lying in her deathbed she told me that there were dark days ahead for me. When my number came up in the lottery and I got myself drafted into the Marines, I was sure that’s what she had been talking about. And there were dark days aplenty over in Nam, true enough. But whether it was the knack or just dumb luck, I managed never to put a step down wrong, and was always ready when things went sideways out on patrol, and I got through it all without so much as a scratch. That’s when I first picked up the nickname ‘Harrier,’ when another grunt said I charged through minefields like I was harrowing the gates of hell. My luck held out long enough that I got cocky, even, and kept reupping after my first tour was through, and then again after my second, and my third. Fifty-two months in country in all, and it wasn’t until my fifty-first that being cocky caught up with me. The knack saved my ass that day, but that’s a story for another time, I suppose. But even through the worst of all that, the most that I ever got out of the knack was an intuition here and there, a feeling that something wasn’t right, or maybe a premonition that something was about to go south. I didn’t actually see anything until after I was back stateside. And then, the things I saw . . .”

  Jett took a deep breath and let out a ragged sigh, and folded his gnarled hands in his lap.

  “The first time I felt it was when I got off the plane in San Francisco,” the old man said, his eyes gazing off into the middle distance. “It was like something was tugging at me, like there was a string around my soul and someone was pulling the other end. The knack was telling me there was somewhere I needed to be. All I had in the world was stuffed in the seabag slung over my shoulder, so I changed into civvies in an airport men’s room, walked out onto the street, and hitched a ride with a truck driver heading in the direction the knack was pulling me. When the driver pulled off the interstate into the South Bay, I knew that Recondito was where I was supposed to be.”

  The old man fell silent for a moment, and stared into space.

  “Why?” Joyce asked, gently urging him to continue. “How did you know?”

  It took another second or two for the old man to bring himself back to the present, and for a moment Izzie wondered if he hadn’t gotten lost in his memories. But when he turne
d to look back at the two of them his eyes were clear and his expression lucid.

  “It was just a feeling at first,” he explained. “But as I walked around the town, it felt like there was always something hovering just at the corner of my eye. When I’d turn to try to catch a good look, I’d get just a glimpse and then it would be gone, every time.”

  “What were they?” Izzie asked. “What did they look like, at least?”

  “I couldn’t rightly have said at the time,” the old man said. “They were like hazy shadows, or mirages over a blacktop road on a hot summer’s day. I got the impression of things reaching out, like fingers on a hand or an octopus’s tentacles, but couldn’t quite bring it into focus. No one else ever seemed bothered by them, didn’t even seem to notice. For a while I thought it was all in my head. I’d tried acid a time or two, and had heard folks talk about lingering flashbacks. But that didn’t sit quite right with me. I could feel them, too, if I got close enough, down in the pit of my stomach. Hell, I could practically taste them.”

  Izzie could not forget that sensation of wrongness she’d felt whenever she had gotten close to one of the Ridden, the nausea in her gut and the foul taint on her tongue.

  “But that night, after the sun went down? That’s when I saw them clear for the first time.” The old man shook his head slowly and let out a low whistle. Then he turned his eyes to Izzie and Joyce. “You girls old enough to remember lava lamps?”

  “Sure,” Joyce said while Izzie nodded.

  “That was the first thing that came into my head when I saw the shadows,” Jett went on. “Those little blobs all stretching and squashing around. They trailed around behind some of the people walking on the street, like they were streaming out of their heads. At first I thought they were black as ink, but as I looked closer, I could see that it wasn’t just that they didn’t have any color, but that they were some color that we don’t have here, and my mind had just decided that black made more sense. Anyway, I tagged along behind one of the folks who had the shadows around their head like a halo, watching as it stretched and squashed. I was close enough that I could reach out and touch them. So I did.”

  A pained expression flitted across his lined face for an instant, and then was gone.

  “That was when I saw it for the first time. Not just the parts of it that were here, but what those shadows were a part of, someplace else. Not anywhere on Earth, or even in outer space, but in some other space. It was too large to fit in my head, with too many angles to make sense of, but I got this image of a living thing as big as worlds. A mass of writhing tendrils stretching out in more directions than I could comprehend, driven by an incredible hunger to consume. And there was a mind at the center of it all, thinking thoughts too vast and alien for me to understand, and all the sudden it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if it noticed me. . . . All the things I’d done and seen to that day, and I’d never been so scared as I was at that moment.”

  Izzie noticed the way that the old man’s gnarled fingers were clawing at the blanket draped over his legs, as if he were falling off a cliff and grasping for anything to hold onto.

  “I’m not too proud to say it,” he said, though Izzie could see that it did make him uncomfortable to admit, “but I turned tail and ran away. Didn’t even look back, for fear that the person I was following would turn and notice me. Because if he noticed me, I figured, then there was a good chance that it would notice me, too. And the thought of that . . . that thing knowing I was there turned my insides to ice.”

  The old man’s grip on the blanket loosened as he visibly tried to relax.

  “I holed up in a flophouse way out in the Kiev that night, and barely stepped outside for the next few days, leaving my room only to pick up packs of smokes at the newsstand or to hit the package store for bottles of rotgut whiskey and fortified wine by the armful. I drank because otherwise I couldn’t hardly sleep, since every time I closed my eyes I was back there in that other space, with that thing about to notice me. Only stone-cold drunk could I get any kind of rest, and even then, I’d wake up every morning in a cold sweat. Then, about three or four days after I’d hit town, I went out to the newsstand to pick up a pack of Camels, and one of the paperbacks on the rack caught my eye. The cover illustration showed a guy in a skull mask and fedora with a Colt .45 in either hand, looking up at something above him, crawling out of a crack in the night sky. And damned it if didn’t look exactly like the thing that I’d seen when I touched that shadow, or as close as a body could get with ink and paint.”

  “Wait,” Joyce interrupted, her tone skeptical, “like a novel, you mean? A mass market paperback?”

  The old man nodded.

  “Struck me kind of odd, too,” he said. “I bought it on the spot, and took it back with me to the flophouse. Turned out to be a reprint of a pulp novel that first come out back in the Great Depression, and the cover illustration had originally appeared on the front of the magazine. The story was about a masked avenger type called the Wraith, and it mostly seemed to be about him fighting crooked politicians and gangster types in 1930s Recondito, but every so often he’d run up against something supernatural in a back alley or someplace like that, and then the writer would go on a tear about invaders from the ‘Otherworld’ who infect men’s minds and steal their memories and personalities.”

  Izzie and Joyce exchanged a sharp glance, eyebrows arching.

  “Yeah, I know,” Jett said, “but at the time I didn’t know anything about the Ridden yet. I was more interested in the cover art. There were a couple of short bios in the back of the book, and it turned out that the writer—Alistair Freeman—had died in a fire back in the forties, but the cover illustrator, who was credited in the indicia as ‘Chas. A. McKee,’ was still alive and living in Recondito. Only it wasn’t ‘Charles’ McKee like I originally assumed, but Charlotte McKee. And when I borrowed the phone book from the front desk of the flophouse and checked, sure enough there was a listing for that name. And I couldn’t get to a payphone fast enough. I just had to know, right then and there.”

  “Whether she had it?” Izzie asked. “The Sight, or the knack, or whatever you want to call it?”

  “It stood to reason,” the old man answered. “The thing she’d painted on that cover? It was just too much like what I’d seen to be a coincidence. So I called her up and asked.”

  “You just called a complete stranger and asked if she had psychic abilities?” Joyce sounded even more skeptical than before.

  “What can I say?” The old man chuckled, his bony shoulders lifting slightly in an abbreviated shrug. “I was all het up. She had every right to think I was a babbling lunatic, calling her up out of the blue and asking her about a painting she’d done forty years before, and whether it was something she’d really seen. All I’d given her a chance to say was something like ‘Yes, this is she’ when she answered the phone, and after that it was just me talking a mile a minute. But when I paused long enough to take a breath, she said that we should probably meet in person to talk about it.”

  The old man looked down at his hands contemplatively, flexing the knobby fingers.

  “When I first saw her I thought that Charlotte McKee was as old as the hills, a shrunken up little blue haired biddy in a housecoat and slippers. But I suppose she was younger then than I am now. Time’s got a way of catching up with you when you’re not looking.”

  “What did she say?” Izzie prompted when the old man got that far-off look in his eye again. “Did she have the knack?”

  “No,” Jett answered with a sigh. “But she told me that she’d been in love with a man who had it back when she was young. And he’d been the one who had described to her the thing she painted on the cover, because he’d seen it himself. She said that he had the ‘Sight,’ and that he’d studied on how to use it with an old Mayan who’d come up from Mexico.”

  “Wait, are you talking about Roberto Aguilar?” Izzie interrupted.

  The lines on Jett’s face deepen
ed as he frowned harder, and he seemed to tense at the mention of the name.

  “That’s a name I’d not thought to hear again,” he said in a low voice. “But no, Aguilar was another one of the old man’s students, long after. By the time I met her, Charlotte McKee wouldn’t have poured a glass of water on Aguilar’s head if he was on fire. They’d had a falling out a long, long time before. The man she had loved was Alistair Freeman.”

  “The guy who wrote the novel?” Joyce asked.

  Jett nodded.

  “Charlotte said that Freeman wrote the stories about the Wraith to keep folks off the scent of what he was really up to in the city. He figured that anyone who came forward and said that they’d seen a guy in a silver skull mask and twin .45s fighting undead monsters in the alleys would be written off as a crank.”

  “So he was really doing those things himself?” Izzie thought about the silver skull mask that Fuller had worn when he dismembered his victims, and wondered for the first time where he might have gotten it. “They weren’t just stories.”

  “A mix of fact and fiction,” Jett explained. “Freeman was what Charlotte called a ‘daykeeper,’ like the old Mayan who trained him. He’d come to Recondito because he knew that a great evil had taken root here, years before.”

  “In the Guildhall,” Izzie said quietly.

  “You girls have been digging around, haven’t you? Yes, Freeman spent years protecting the city from all manner of supernatural threats, trying to keep the Guildhall in check, until finally he couldn’t take it anymore. Charlotte didn’t got into too many specifics, but it sounded like one innocent too many got caught in the Guildhall’s mess, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Freeman marched right in the front doors of the Guildhall, guns blazing, and brought the whole place down on top of them. All that was left of him were a pair of silver-plated Colt .45s and some charred bones.”