He and Celine had argued. When the two of them first met, she had been taking the pills. It was Celine who had introduced Brandon (through a phone call) to Ghost. It was Celine who had shown him that there was a different way; she had pulled him out of his depression, convinced him that life could still be worth living if you controlled the beast, and not the other way around. More than anything, though, she had given him something to care about. She had showed him that he and relationships could get along after all.
But as time passed, Celine had grown more and more restless. One mild night in July she had gone for a walk. He waited and waited and when she hadn’t returned, he struck out after her. She had emerged from the trees at the edge of the clearing surrounding their house, carrying a rabbit in her mouth. She had gone off of the pills, and the full moon had been just a few nights away.
Brandon convinced her to take the pills again but she had resented him for it. The following month she had presented him with an ultimatum: stop giving her shit about wanting to unleash the wolf, or the two of them could go their separate ways. He would see. She could show him; she was in control, not the beast. Brandon had relented and Celine stopped dosing. Ghost had been disappointed but was happy to continue supplying Brandon. For a few more years, they had made it work.
On this particular night he had tried once more to convince her to start on the pills again. He was worried about her. They had already relocated twice because of people moving into what they had designated as their “safety zone,” the area beyond which they did not believe the wolf would travel in one night.
“Bound… by wild desire… I fell into a ring of fire…”
Over the past several months, on the nights of the full moon, he would take his pills and come to this bar, far away from where she might endanger him. Celine always found game to hunt, but Brandon knew that she had been traveling further and further to the edge of the safety zone. She hadn’t known it, but when he went out on his own in the days following her hunts, he would track where she had been and how far she had roamed.
And so they had argued.
The bartender asked him if he wanted a refill. He looked down at a bottle in front of him, the bottle he hadn’t seen before, the inside coated a thick red. Then he sniffed the air, and he could smell it…
Oh no, God no…
“And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire… the ring of fire.”
He looked over to the pock-marked man, who smiled, showing a gap where his front teeth should have been. “Smells like mama’s cookin’,” he said.
That’s not what he said. He didn’t say anything.
Brandon rushed out to the parking lot, and the sky was alight. He could smell the smoke, the burning wood. Ash had begun to fall like snow…
That’s where we live…
The setting changed, as settings do in dreams. He was in his truck now, speeding up one of the game trails near their trailer. Ghostly trees, washed out by the headlights, whipped by. Brandon had the windows down. “Ring of Fire” was playing on the radio.
You turned off the radio, so you could listen for her howling.
“I fell into a burnin’ ring of fire…”
The truck topped a rise and Brandon could see the forest spread out beneath him. The timber for miles was ablaze. His trailer was down there in a clearing, and it was burning too. Not much left of it now, nothing to save, but that wasn’t his primary concern.
Celine.
The setting outside the truck changed again. He was in the midst of the woods now, windows up to keep out the smoke. The fire was ahead of him at first, and then it was all around him. He could feel the heat against the windows as the truck plowed through a tree that had burned to charcoal. Sparks showered the windshield as the truck bucked like a raging bull.
“I fell for you, like a child… Oh, but the fire went wild…”
The song just kept looping. He turned off the radio but it wouldn’t stop. The lights on the radio stayed on. He didn’t have time to worry about that. He had to get to her before it was too late.
A whupping sound blasted overhead, followed by a deluge of water, as if a giant bucket had been overturned just above him. A forest service helicopter had dropped water from the nearby lake.
The flame-light that had surrounded him was snuffed out. He sped on through the charred remains of Celine’s hunting grounds, window lowered, screaming her name. He took in a deep breath, coughed, breathed in again.
The wind changed, and he smelled it: the stench of burnt meat.
“I fell into a burnin’ ring of fire…”
No.
The truck barreled into a clearing and slid to a stop. Brandon jumped out and there he saw her… what remained. He stumbled over to the roasted corpse and fell down.
“I went down, down, down, as the flames went higher…”
Brandon reached out and lifted her head. She had reverted to human form in her death-throes. He didn’t think something like this could kill their kind. But then, there was so much he still didn’t know. The cauterized flesh had split down to the blackened skull. Even her teeth were black.
He held her there, disbelieving, crying until he had no tears left, cursing God or fate or whatever fickle forces ruled the universe and took her from him, as Johnny Cash’s gravel-filled voice drifted from the truck’s cab…
“And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire… the ring of fire.”
***
Ginny’s eyes snapped open. She looked around groggily, unsure of why she awoke. Moonlight streamed in through the sliding glass door. She turned onto her side, expecting to see Brandon, but the bed was empty.
Where did he get off to?
Looking down, she was surprised to see that she was wearing her pajamas. I don’t remember putting those back on. An eerie feeling crept its way over her body, like a small army of phantom insects.
She got up. Once at the door, she opened it a crack and peeked out. The hall was empty and silent as she opened it all the way. Why she felt compelled to leave the room, she didn’t know; it didn’t make any sense to be just wandering around in her PJs, but even as she thought this, she walked out and traveled down the hall toward the glass elevator bank.
That crawling sensation slithered over her once again. At the end of the hall she turned and looked back. Section by section, starting at the far end of the hall, the tracks of overhead lights shut off one by one. Ginny shook off the sensation that something lurked out of sight and she ran.
At the elevator bank there was one glass elevator with the doors open and the up arrow illuminated above it. Unable to stop herself, she stepped in and pressed the button for deck ten. As the elevator ascended she looked down through the glass onto the atrium and the piano bar.
It was completely deserted.
The elevator stopped and the doors opened. She stepped out into the open space and listened. The silence was absolute. She suddenly got the sensation of being completely alone, on some kind of derelict ghost ship. Her skin crawled. No… there was someone else on board. She could feel it. She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew.
With a sudden urgency Ginny ran around the elevator banks to the other side, to the buffet seating area. The space was dark and empty, quiet and still. In fact, the entire ship was still. Shouldn’t it be moving? She ran through the dimness toward the sliding door that led out to the adult pool. The door was normally closed but now it was open.
There was light outside, bright and radiant. Ginny ran to the stairs leading to deck eleven and up, then over through a breezeway to the port side, and there, toward the bow, she saw it…
The moon. It was massive. Ginny knew of the optical illusion that occurred when the moon was near the horizon but this was beyond any trick of the eye. The moon felt as if it had drawn to within just a few miles of the Earth, as if it were the eye of a child looking through a dollhouse window. It was imposing, and it radiated some kind of… sentience? Intelligence?
She
ran to the railing and looked out. The water was glass, and the ship was at a complete stop in the dead calm. Nothing moved. No sound was made. But then, a noise. Back the way she came. She ran back to the breezeway and through, and then she heard the sound again, a clacking sound. She looked up and the moon had risen higher, impossibly high in the few seconds it had taken her to come this far, and there was a form silhouetted against it. Vaguely humanoid, slumped and gangly, it took a few steps and Ginny realized that the clacking sound came from its feet… its claws clacking on the floor of the adult sunbathing deck. She could see fur on this thing, and its eyes shone bright, golden. It peered at her and bared its teeth, and she was reminded of her dog, the dog she had tracked down as a child: Ruffian.
Dog’s gone feral, Gin.
A low growl emanated from the thing’s throat, and it sprang.
***
Ginny sat bolt upright in her bed. She looked over to her left and panicked when she saw that Brandon wasn’t there, but then she looked up and saw him standing, looking out the glass door, and she sighed in relief. She wiped at her eyes as he asked if she was okay.
“Yeah, just a really fucked up dream, is all.”
“Must be going around,” he said. “I had one too. It’s okay; go back to sleep.”
“Yeah,” she said and looked over at him, and for a moment, her heart stopped. Brandon had turned away, but for just a split second…
His eyes had shone in the moonlight.
Chapter Ten
The Rapture would arrive in Juneau at 7 AM, in less than thirty minutes. Alexander had been awake since 5:30, preparing. He had packed most of his equipment in luggage, cold weather clothing in his garment bag. The suits he previously wore he had burned, along with Marie’s attire, at the room in Skagway. Marie’s blood he now removed from the small fridge and deposited in a cooler he had purchased, with a thick layer of ice cubes over top.
He stood at the edge of the bed, running through a mental checklist of items. Was there anything he was forgetting? It didn’t seem so. This would be it then. His journey was nearing its end. A journey that had truly begun just over twenty years ago.
Inside his left pants pocket he carried an item, a memento from his last kill. He fished it out now and regarded it in the palm of his hand. It was a token, a reminder of the exaltation he felt upon taking the life of a creature that dared to set itself above humankind. The slaying of that mutt was an important step on his current path…
It had begun incongruously, as so many things did, in the small town of Whisper Lake, Oregon. Word had reached the Network through military channels of a man, Jason Emblock, a Gulf War veteran. Jason had been involved in what was described as an animal attack during hostile action in the closing days of Operation Desert Storm, in Iraq in 1991.
Not long after returning to the U.S. and embarking on sick leave, Jason had been at the center of what basically amounted to a war in the small town; a war in which many died, including one Network operative. Thereafter, Jason went AWOL, disappearing along with his then-girlfriend.
Alexander had just completed a long hunt in Guam when he was tasked with tracking Jason. For months, the hunter had chased down leads while conducting interviews and research. Then as he had drawn tantalizingly close to ferreting out his prey… Jason Emblock simply disappeared. The trail had gone cold, and Alexander’s best guess was that his target had fled the country. Subsequent clues pointed to the likelihood, however, that Jason’s girlfriend had not absconded with him.
At first he had taken up her trail because he believed she might be privy to Jason’s whereabouts. Jason’s girlfriend, however, proved to be nearly as adept as her beau at eluding both the authorities and Alexander. After a few fruitless months, the assignment had been put on “indefinite hold.”
Life had gone on, and Alexander had nearly put Jason and the woman completely out of his mind when good fortune smiled upon him… Maggie Hopps, a housewife from Indiana and a self-appointed cyber sleuth, had become obsessed with the Emblock cold case. She had maintained a diligent dedication to Jason and the girlfriend’s discovery by continuously circulating photos throughout the Northern United States.
Maggie’s perseverance had borne fruit two months before when the girlfriend had been observed at a petrol station on Route 211 in Washington State.
The hunter would soon learn that the girlfriend was a mutt as well. Not a big surprise there. Finding and killing her had become his utmost priority. When that task was completed, it was she who indirectly led him to his next target, his current target.
Alexander looked down at the memento he had kept, a necklace with a rectangular pendant, and on it a white sphere against a field of black gold, belonging to Jason’s ex-girlfriend…
A woman named Celine Armistead.
***
He had told Ginny to go back to sleep, and she was groggy enough to do so. But Brandon hadn’t slept a wink since the nightmare about Celine’s death. He sat on the couch now, watching Ginny slumber, thinking of Celine. The dream had taken the real events and twisted them, as dreams did, but for the most part what he dreamt was actually what had happened.
After finding her charred body, he had held her. He hadn’t known for how long, but after the National Forest Service helicopter made its next drop, deeper in the forest, he had carried her to the bed of his truck.
The cabin was gone. There had been nothing left there for Brandon anymore. In just a few hours his life had been completely and utterly devastated. He had wrapped Celine’s remains in a tarp he kept in his truck and had driven game trails and back roads out of the woods and back onto Route 211, down to Route 2 and further out west.
By the time he had arrived in Deer Park, the sky had begun to lighten with the onset of dawn. Brandon had sat in the truck, outside the Briar Green funeral home until the sun finally crested the horizon. He had cried until there were no tears left to shed. He had shaken and he pounded the dash and the steering wheel and he had cursed every god who ever existed for taking Celine away from him. Finally he had collected himself and gone to the door of Roland, Celine’s older brother.
Roland had owned and operated Briar Green for ten years, and he maintained a residence on the same property as the funeral home. As soon as Roland opened the door, his eyes told Brandon that he knew something was dreadfully wrong. Roland had known about Celine’s “condition,” and though he maintained publicly that he had never spoken to Celine or known of her whereabouts, secretly he had always kept in communication through coded letters and occasional phone calls.
After inviting Brandon in, the two of them had talked over cups of coffee. Roland had nodded his head, and in his stoicism Brandon was reminded so much of Celine that it made his heart ache.
“I won’t have this turn into some kind of circus,” he had said, wiping the coffee off of his mustache and thick beard. “I’ll put her through the crematory, just like she’d wanted. She always said, ‘Don’t you dare stick me in the dirt, Rol. I don’t need to take up space. Just burn me and set me free.’”
Brandon had nodded. “And she always wanted her ashes scattered in the Gulf of Alaska. I mean to see that happen as well.”
That night they had held their own private ceremony. Upon seeing the remains, Roland had said, “Not much of her left to burn, is there?” He had then fallen quiet, and Brandon excused himself. Ten minutes later Roland had come to Brandon and said he was ready to continue.
When Brandon returned, Celine had been placed into a large cardboard box. They had wheeled her on a cart into the crematory, where Brandon helped Roland load the box into the cremation chamber. Both men had watched as the secondary chamber ignited and blue jets of flame shot down, igniting the box. Roland had shut the metal door and the two men had gone and ate a chili dinner that Roland had prepared.
They had eaten together in silence until Roland finally asked, “How you mean to scatter the ashes?”
“I’ve got money saved up. Celine and I always wanted to
take an Alaska cruise. I think I’ve got enough… I’ll scatter her ashes in the gulf. I’ll go to Juneau, get off there, and there I’ll stay.”
For the next three days Brandon had stayed with Roland, but Brandon was the kind who simply couldn’t live off of someone else for very long. Even if he was earning his keep, staying in someone else’s home just never felt right. Besides, Papa had always said that houseguests and fish went bad after three days.
When Brandon had been set to go, Roland had brought out the small box with Celine’s ashes and set it on the kitchen table. Brandon had reached into his shirt, pulled off a necklace and handed it to Roland. It was a rectangular pendant with a white sphere set against a black background. The moon against a night sky. Celine had given it to Brandon when they moved into the cabin together.
“You should keep this,” Roland had said.
Brandon had simply shaken his head and closed his hand firmly around Roland’s.
“She’d want you to have it. Look, once I leave… I’m starting over. New name, new life. But a life away from everything—all of this. I have to put it behind me. I’m not coming back.”
Roland had considered this quietly and respectfully. Finally he had nodded.
***
Brandon had left and later that afternoon reached the PO box he kept on Route 211. In the box had been three fake IDs, two thousand dollars in cash and two bottles of pills.
Next Brandon had called the Fiesta Cruise Company, enquired about the next cruise to Alaska—which would be leaving within two weeks—and asked about paying for his passage in cash. He had been told to go through a travel agent and to place a cash deposit with the purser for his Sail Away card upon boarding.
A few days later he had called Roland and told him he was able to secure a spot on an Alaska cruise. “Told you I’d make it happen. She’s gonna get her wish.”
The Turning Page 10