Legacy of the Watchers Series Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Nancy Madore

  “We all have nicknames on the water,” Al told her. “For instance Jimmy here…we call him Goby Keith, ‘cause he always thinks he’s reelin’ in a tuna when all he’s got is a goby.”

  “A goby’s a really small fish,” clarified the man in question, a small, wiry little guy with thinning hair and glassy blue eyes.

  “He ain’t much for reelin’ ‘em in, but he’s a master baiter,” added Flapper. There was raucous laughter all around at this. Even Nadia couldn’t help laughing.

  “And this here’s The Magic Man,” continued Al, pointing to the last of the foursome, “because he makes the fish come to him.” The Magic Man was a good-looking middle-aged man who Nadia guessed to be in his mid-fifties. He had kind eyes and the good-natured, knowing face of a man who is satisfied with life.

  “That’s right,” said The Magic Man. “One time…I was pulling my line out of the water, you know, preparing to re-cast, and a pike jumps right up out of the water after it!” he nodded to his friends, who confirmed his story with murmurs of approval. “Hooked him in mid-air!” he exclaimed.

  “Do you have a fishing name too?” Nadia asked Al.

  Al raised his head with pride. “They call me Ally Mc-Eel,” he told her. His expression became thoughtful as he turned to his friends. “I don’t remember why everybody started calling me that, though,” he said.

  “I think it just sounded good,” said Flapper, looking at the others, who nodded at this possibility.

  “Yeah,” agreed Goby. “Ally Mc-Eel. Sounds like a girl and a fish, all at the same time.”

  “A fishy girl,” added Flapper, and they all laughed again. Nadia noticed that Clive was laughing a bit too loudly and she gave him a look.

  “Ally McEel…ha ha ha,” he laughed, wiping imaginary tears from his eyes. “Oh, you guys are too much!” But then he abruptly—a bit too abruptly, Nadia thought—turned serious. “You said you saw a ghost in room five?” he reminded Flapper.

  “Sure did,” Flapper replied, turning serious as well. “I was drunk one night…”

  “Did you hear that Al?” interrupted The Magic Man. “Flapper says he was drunk one night!” This made all four men laugh again.

  “I was too drunk to drive even,” clarified Flapper—“So Valori—she and Greg own this place—she puts me in room five.”

  “That’s where they stick all the undesirables,” interjected Goby.

  “Hey!” objected Clive. “Gordon and I are in that room!”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Goby apologetically. “I forgot.”

  “So there I am, sleeping away,” continued Flapper, his eyes growing wide, “when a loud knocking on the bathroom door wakes me up. I get up, thinking, ‘What the hell? Is someone trapped in the bathroom?’ I couldn’t remember if I even used the bathroom before passing out. So I open the bathroom door and bang!” Flapper slammed his hand on the table, making everyone jump—even the three men who had undoubtedly heard this story a hundred times before. “The door flies out of my hands and hits the wall…like something came flying out of the bathroom so fast it hit the door hard. But there was nothing there.

  “So I’m like, what the hell?” he continued. “But, you know, I check behind the shower curtain to make sure nothin’s there and then I take a piss—since I’m already in the bathroom and all—and go back to bed.

  “Now Valori and Greg tell everyone that the ghost in five is friendly, like Casper, but I can tell you he wasn’t very friendly to me!” Flapper paused here to glance at the bartender, who Nadia later learned was the other half of the ‘Valori and Greg,’ who owned the place. Greg was listening as intently as everyone else to Flapper’s story, and at Flapper’s remark he rolled his eyes. Flapper ignored this and turned back to his audience at the table. “Next thing I know,” he continued—“I feel this weight on me, like suddenly the blankets got real heavy, you know? I try to get up but I can’t. I can’t even budge. It’s like I’m tied to the bed with duct tape! I try to yell out but my voice won’t work. Meanwhile the thing keeps getting heavier and heavier, til I think I’m gonna suffocate!”

  Nadia looked at Gordon and Clive. Flapper’s experience was eerily like the one she herself had experienced at the hands of Lilith the day Gordon captured Asmodeous in the ring. Clive’s eyes seemed larger than usual and even Gordon seemed alarmed.

  “By now I’m completely sober and ready to shit myself,” Flapper continued, “when all of a sudden, just like that, the thing lets up. But I can still feel it, real close…laughing at me. I can’t hear it laughing. I just feel that it’s laughing.” He paused here for effect. “So I jumped up out of bed, and quote, ‘get thee away from me Satan’—that’s from the Bible—and I got the hell out of there!”

  Everyone laughed except Nadia, Gordon and Clive.

  “I’m not staying in that room,” said Clive. This made the men laugh even harder, except Flapper, who, from his expression, couldn’t agree more.

  “Do you think it could be…” Nadia lowered her voice, so only Clive could hear, before finishing her question—“…one of them?”

  “I don’t intend to find out!” he exclaimed.

  Nadia couldn’t help it. The expression on his face was just too priceless. She burst into laughter. Even Gordon laughed.

  “Why don’t you sleep in there, then?” suggested Clive. He shook his head in disgust. “Friggin’ white folks,” he grumbled. “Drives me crazy in movies. Always some white chick, trying to get all up in the intruder’s face…” His voice became really high as he mimicked the white girl in question. “‘Hello? Hellooo? Feel free to follow the sound of my voice if you want to kill me!’ Stupid ass bitches.”

  “But…maybe you could catch it!” Nadia suggested, motioning toward the ring on Gordon’s finger.

  “Maybe you could catch it,” echoed Clive in the same, high pitched girl’s voice he’d used before. He snorted. “This ain’t no fish,” he told her. “You don’t catch ‘em…you conjure them.”

  “Well…maybe you could conjure it then,” Nadia amended, appealing to Gordon now too. The men from the other table were listening, but she was pretty sure that they had no idea what they were talking about and besides, she was too tipsy to care.

  “Yeah, that sho nuff is how we conjure them,” said Clive sarcastically. “By falling asleep in a room where they is.”

  “Anyway,” Nadia continued. “Why would a djinn be hanging around a hotel room?”

  “It might have found a connection of some kind there,” Gordon told her. “Something that links the two worlds.”

  “Hey,” Flapper looked at them through narrowed eyes. “Are you guys some kind of ghost busters or something?”

  “We were talking about a video game,” said Gordon. It made no sense, but everyone had been drinking too much to notice.

  “All kidding aside,” said Clive, addressing the man at the bar now—“I’m gonna need another room.”

  “Seriously?” the bartender asked, genuinely surprised. When he saw that they were, in fact, serious, he glanced at his watch and shrugged. “Valori will be finishing up in the kitchen any minute. She’ll take care of it for you.”

  “Thanks,” said Gordon. He looked at Clive, who had visibly relaxed now that they were getting a new room, and then his gaze moved to Nadia, and they both started laughing again.

  “Crazy white folks!” grumbled Clive, shaking his head. He turned back to Greg. “Say, you know much about the HAARP plant up the road?” he asked.

  Everyone in the room suddenly got real quiet.

  Flapper was the first to speak. “Sometimes,” he began in the tone people use to tell ghost stories around a campfire—“when they’re sending their beams into space, the caribou can be seen walking backwards!”

  “That’s right,” The Magic Man joined in. There was a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “And another time some guy got too close to one of their towers when it went off, and was instantly incinerated!”

  “All around them woods there’
s birds as big as antelope,” added Goby.

  Clive narrowed his eyes at them.

  “Come on, guys,” interjected the bartender. Like most of the people in the room, he had the look of an outdoorsman, with the ruddy complexion, the warm, clear eyes and an expression that seemed to indicate an overall satisfaction with life that you didn’t see very often in the city. He seemed the most logical person in the room, perhaps because he was the only one—aside from Gordon—who wasn’t drinking alcohol. His tone was friendly as he addressed Clive. “Many of our friends work at the HAARP site,” he explained. “They’re normal, hardworking people. No mad scientists. Like the rest of us, they hunt and fish and lead tough, Alaska lives.”

  “Do you hear much about what’s going on at the site?” Clive asked.

  “The towers themselves are only used a few weeks out of the year,” he replied. His clear, direct gaze, combined with his forthright manner, added weight to his words. “I believe it’s in the process of transferring from military sponsorship to academic. It’s used mostly to study the ionosphere. The people involved are academics…mostly kids working on graduate degrees.” He shrugged apologetically. “Seems pretty straight-forward to me.”

  “And the ghost in room five?” Gordon asked.

  “When Valori and I purchased the lodge, the prior owners were adamant that five was haunted. The locals believe the ghost to be a former business partner in the lodge by the name of John Paulson. Just to be on the safe side, we had the room blessed by a priest.” He glanced at Flapper with a good humored smile. “We haven’t had any ghostly encounters…aside from Flapper’s little incident. But he was pretty snookered that night, and I’m not even sure it was room five you were in, Flap.”

  Flapper seemed to be taking this under consideration.

  “So you don’t think there’s a ghost,” concluded Clive.

  “I believe in ghosts,” Greg replied thoughtfully. “I just haven’t seen any evidence of one in room five…or anywhere else on the premises, for that matter.”

  This seemed to sober everyone up.

  “We’re the oldest, original operating roadhouse in Alaska,” Greg continued conversationally. “It’s a crooked old lodge with millions of stories. I once spoke to a ninety-seven year old native who remembered when guests were brought to the lodge by dogsled for Christmas dances. It’s always been a popular location. The lodge is situated at the Gakona and Copper rivers. The Copper River is famous for its Sockeye salmon. And we’ve also got the largest national park in North America, the ‘Wrangell-Saint Elias.’ It’s an amazing world we have up here. It has a way of…stirring the imagination.”

  Nadia could see why. The land itself was extraordinary, with its vast lakes and surrounding mountains. It was untouched, awe inspiring and a little frightening.

  “Any advice for out-of-towners?” asked Gordon. “Should we look out for bears?”

  “Bears are much easier to avoid now that the National Parks recommended attaching little bells to your clothing when you’re in the woods,” Al told him.

  “The bears are scared off by bells?” asked Clive.

  “No,” said Al. “But whenever we see bear shit with little bells in it we know to run like hell.”

  The warm, well-lit room echoed with laughter.

  “And look out for our potholes,” warned Flapper. “Ours are the largest in America. They can total a car!”

  “And one more thing,” added Goby. “It’s a misdemeanor up here to push a live moose out of a moving airplane.”

  Chapter 41

  Fort Greely, Alaska

  Amanda could feel herself fading again, but this time she didn’t try to fight it. She wanted to fade now, and to just keep fading until she didn’t exist anymore. They were still sitting there, in the dark, staring at Amanda’s phone. What were they waiting for? Amanda didn’t want to know.

  But suddenly, the phone vibrated and lit up, indicating that there was a text message. Amanda’s finger was tentatively placed on the message box on the screen and the message popped up.

  ‘Time,’ was all it said.

  Her body rose up and approached the door of the storage room. Slowly and cautiously—peeking out in all directions—the creature opened the door and stepped out into the hall. It was silent and empty. They left the storeroom, walking briskly down the hallway, turning this way and that, as if they knew exactly where they were going. Amanda recognized nothing. The entire building was foreign to her. She was certain she’d never been there before…except that she couldn’t be sure that the creature hadn’t taken her there during one of her blackouts.

  They moved quickly. There was a strange determination in the manner in which she was moving that led Amanda to believe that there was more horror to come. She didn’t want to see any more. She didn’t want to be here.

  Tommy. She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She didn’t know how to process what just happened. She wasn’t even sure that any of it was real. Except that it seemed so real.

  She had killed Tommy.

  In that moment, Amanda would have given anything for the ability to scream. To just scream and scream and scream…

  They approached a door that had warnings posted all over it. Amanda couldn’t quite bring herself to concentrate on what she was looking at, although the sign that read ‘Clearance Required’ registered with her. They were in the restricted area…where neither Amanda, nor the creature, was supposed to be.

  The creature slipped the card it had taken from Tommy’s wallet into the slot of a steel box that was attached to the door. Then she entered a number on the keypad on the front of the box. The box began to beep. Quickly, she scrambled for the little plastic container in her pocket, flipped it open and, very carefully, removed Tommy’s eye from the fluid. She held it up to a small lens that was situated to one side of the beeping box. There was a loud click and the door popped open.

  On the other side of the door was another long hallway with a series of doors—all equipped with similar locks to the one they just came through. As her eyes shifted upward, Amanda caught sight of a video camera on the ceiling. They hurried down the corridor, stopping abruptly in front of a door with a sign that read, ‘Do Not Enter.’ This time, only a code was needed to make the door click open.

  They were now in a room that was filled with computers. Amanda could hear the soft humming as the various programs ran. They weaved in and around the computers deliberately, as if looking for a specific one. Finding it, the creature arranged Amanda’s body so that it was sitting cross-legged on the floor, facing the back of the system’s base. Reaching in Amanda’s second pocket, the creature carefully retrieved the scalpel it had used to sever Tommy’s eyeball. Her eyes moved over the back panel of the computer’s base, and selected a blue cable from the numerous wires that were connected to it. Cautiously—and much more skillfully than she would have thought herself capable—she cut into the blue, rubbery skin coating the cable, working the blade all around the cable’s perimeter, in a circle. She cut a second circle about an inch away from the first. Then she traced a line from the first cut to the next, and peeled back the blue outer layer to expose a cluster of tiny, multicolored wires within. Using the scalpel again, she delicately separated a green and white striped wire from the rest.

  Amanda now reached between her breasts and retrieved the strange-looking wire with the four clamps that she’d taken from the shelf in the storage room. She placed one of the four clamps over the tiny green and white wire from the computer cable, and squeezed. There was only the smallest resistance before she felt the wire give-way to the tiny metal teeth inside the clamp so that it could become firmly attached. She repeated this process three more times, attaching the three remaining clamps to an orange and white striped wire, a solid green wire and an orange wire.

  Next, Amanda reached for her phone and plugged the other end of the strange-looking wire—the end with the adapter attached—into it. The computer—or four of the wires from the inside of
one of its cables—was now attached to Amanda’s phone.

  The loss of self, the static, the trauma of what just happened to Tommy—it was all suddenly too much. Amanda was fading again, like she had when the creature was scanning the endless documents, but this time it seemed as if she were fading for good. She had the strong impression that this was not how it was supposed to be—that her soul was not meant to be trapped here like this, and that she would have been better off if she had died, like Tommy. At least he was free. A kind of bitterness consumed her. She felt that if she allowed herself to just fade away like this, she’d be left here forever, to eventually become dust with the flesh. And yet, she couldn’t muster the will to fight it. An eternity of nothingness seemed preferable to whatever lay ahead.

  She was vaguely aware that the thing controlling her was engaged in something diabolical. She had no doubts that it would succeed. It was waiting for something to happen again…and then it had only to change a few numbers. A formula. And then something terrible would happen.

  Amanda didn’t care. What did it matter? Whatever it was, it had no bearing on her existence. Tommy was gone, and very soon now, she would be, too.

  It was like a flickering light, slowly going out, as Amanda bleakly succumbed to oblivion.

  Chapter 42

  Gakona, Alaska

  Nadia opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was the digital clock sitting on the bedside table. It was just before six in the morning. She groaned and yawned simultaneously, thinking what a bad influence the guys were turning out to be. Pretty soon she’d be surviving on as little sleep as them. As well, her head was throbbing from all the alcohol she drank the night before. Rolling over, she saw that she was alone in the bed. Good lord! Was it possible that Will was up already?

  Her question was answered by the sound of faint noises coming from the bathroom, and she sighed in relief, recalling the scene at the tavern the night before. She needed to talk to Will before they met up with the others. In truth, she was a little afraid of what he might say or do next. That’s why she’d followed him out of the tavern—against Clive’s advice—in the hopes that they could discuss what happened. But Will had been much too upset to talk about it that first time she came to their room, and by the time she’d turned in for the night he was sound asleep. She needed to talk to him before anything else happened. But as she waited for him to finish in the bathroom, she wondered what she would say. She was well aware that he’d only gone along with this investigation because of her, and now she, too, was beginning to wonder if it was all just a big mistake. Was there something important here to discover, or were they just chasing rainbows? What did she hope to accomplish?