Riverwatch

by Joseph Nassise

  "I’ll take it, base. I’m in the vicinity."

  "That’s a roger, Sheriff. See Jake Caruso at the site."

  "10-4."

  Damon replaced the microphone and headed for the Stonemoor estate.

  Back when he was on the force in Chicago, calls like this had been a fairly commonplace occurrence. They were called into abandoned buildings and derelict lots all the time, especially during the summer months when the stench of decomposing corpses would disturb the denizens of even the roughest neighborhoods. The winters weren’t so bad; a body could lie in the dark for weeks without being discovered. He’d seen his fair share; that was certain.

  But here in Harrington Falls? He couldn’t remember the last time there was a violent crime up here. Glendale was a bit different; a little more modern, more bad apples. Harrington Falls seemed to have missed all of that, nestled as it was in the mountains. The people were quiet folk. They kept to themselves and generally obeyed the laws. Aside from the occasional loud drunk or teenage shoplifter, the patrol in Harrington Falls was considered incident-free.

  Which made the call even more interesting.

  As Damon pulled up in front of the house, he saw two men sitting on the top step of the porch, obviously waiting for him.

  *** ***

  Jake watched as a large, heavy-set man got out of the Bronco. Roughly six-foot two, he had to weigh a good two-fifty. His hair was salt and pepper, right down to his beard and mustache. Both were carefully groomed and short in length. The man was dressed in the brown uniform of the Sheriff’s department, with a pistol clearly visible on his belt.

  Jake and Sam rose to greet him.

  "One of you Jake Caruso?" Damon asked.

  Jake said, "I am," and extended his hand in greeting.

  "Damon Wilson, Sheriff’s Department." The Sheriff shook Sam’s hand also. Turning back to Jake, he asked, "I understand you’ve found a body?"

  Jake nodded. "Down in the cellar."

  "Mind telling me what you were doing out here in the first place?"

  Jake explained to the Sheriff how he came to be there that morning, going back to the events of the day before. The Sheriff listened closely, made notes every few minutes, but otherwise left Jake to tell the story without interruption. When Jake was finished, the Sheriff turned to Sam and asked him if he could remember any other details.

  The Sheriff then suggested that Sam wait outside to direct the coroner to the scene, before asking Jake to lead him to the body.

  The two climbed the steps to the house, passing through the foyer and the kitchen, until they reached the stairway to the basement. The smell of mildew and decay from below reached Damon. For just a moment, he had a vivid picture of bodies lying for days in forgotten Chicago tenements, the memory of another time, another place. He quickly slammed the lid closed on that particular memory before it could escape the Pandora’s box of his mind. Chicago was a long time ago and Damon definitely wanted to keep it that way.

  Jake headed down the steps and Damon followed.

  "Sorry about the stench. When we began renovations this entire level was flooded. My men pumped out the fetid water the other night but the smell will probably linger for a while."

  "That’s how you found this tunnel?" Damon asked.

  "Yeah. There was a big stone slab in the middle of a small trench dug into the floor. The tunnel was underneath it."

  Jake had left the lanterns behind when he and Sam had gone to the trailer to call the police. By their illumination Damon could see the trench where the men had been working. When they moved closer he could see the opening to the passage itself.

  Jake stopped and picked up his lantern from where he had left it besides the opening. He nodded at the heavy flashlight the Sheriff was carrying. "You’d better turn that on."

  The Sheriff was surprised at the tunnel. It appeared to be man-made, carved from solid rock sometime long ago. The effort that went into such an undertaking had to have been incredible.

  Why would someone go to all this trouble? he wondered.

  He didn’t have much time to think about it, however, since they were rapidly approaching their destination. Ahead of them, Damon could see the remains of a brick wall that had once blocked the tunnel. Jake stopped a few feet away, allowing Damon to pass him.

  Damon stood just outside the chamber and gazed in at the body. He could see it was that of a white male, in his mid-to-late twenties, lying face-up and partially on his right side. The man’s face was twisted into an expression of horror. One arm was trapped beneath the body, the other hanging limply across the base of the statue. In the dim light, Damon could not make out any signs of injury.

  "This the way you found him?"

  Jake nodded. "I went inside the room and checked his pulse, but I didn’t touch or move anything."

  Damon shined the light around the rest of the room. The only objects were a lantern similar to the one in Jake’s hand, lying against the opposite wall, and a pickaxe, the handle of which was tangled up in the feet of the corpse. The room was otherwise empty.

  Damon next turned his light on the statue. A good seven feet in height, it was carved entirely from some kind of shining black stone that gleamed like black oil in the beam of his light. It appeared to represent a demon, or maybe a gargoyle. Two long, curling horns jutted from its forehead. Its strikingly reptilian mouth was open wide, revealing a double row of razor-sharp teeth. The creature’s torso was humanoid in appearance, but covered with thousands of tiny scales like the flesh of a miniature dragon. Wicked looking talons jutted from its four-fingered hands and feet. Bat-like wings swept outward from the center of its back. The craftsmanship was superb, giving the creature a sense of life. To Damon it seemed as if at any moment it might leap off the small pedestal on which it stood.

  "It’s certainly ugly," Damon said. Jake didn’t answer. The statue might have been easy enough to handle if that’s all it was, ugly. But there was something more, something near indefinable about it that instantly put Damon on guard. It was more a gut feeling than anything else, a sense of wrongness about the thing that disturbed him on some deep, primitive level.

  Damon felt the short hairs on the back of his neck start to rise and quickly turned his attention to the body on the floor. It took him a moment, but he finally recognized it as that of Kyle Halloran. Kyle had been one of the bad ones, constantly getting into fights at the bars down in Glendale. More than once Damon had to toss him in a cell for the night on charges of drunk and disorderly. He’d been the type to stay out of trouble for a month, maybe two, and then end up back in a cell on similar charges.

  Aside from the expression on his face, there were no obvious signs of violence. Damon could not detect any evidence of a disturbance in the dirt around him, either. Drugs were the first thing that came to mind. That would explain the lack of injury. The theory might also explain the man’s expression. Who knew what one might encounter in their own drug-induced hallucinations?

  "Recognize him?" the Sheriff asked.

  Jake nodded. "Kyle Halloran. Hired him last week as a temp. Bit of a loud mouth. My foreman said he was slacking on the job so I let him go yesterday."

  "Any idea what he might have been doing down here?"

  "I couldn’t even tell you how he found out about it. He wasn’t on the detail that was working down here."

  The Sheriff nodded his head. It seemed pretty obvious to him. Halloran heard about it from another worker, figured there might be something valuable hidden in the tunnel, and decided to check it out for himself. He’d probably been pumped to the gills with whatever he’d been on that week and had taken more than he could handle.

  Damon took out his notebook and jotted down his impressions and general facts about the scene. He’d learned long ago to make a record of everything at a crime scene; you never knew what was going to be important later. When he was finished, he stepped inside the room for the first time.

  *** ***

  Jake watched the She
riff make a careful inspection of the body. Damon squatted next to the corpse and felt for a pulse on the man’s neck. He sat back on his haunches and visually inspected the corpse, taking care not to touch anything else. After a few moments he jotted down some notes and even sketched a quick diagram of the situation. Jake recognized the hallmarks of a methodical and patient man. Once the Sheriff had finished with the corpse, he turned his attention to the statue above it, going over it with the same care and diligence he’d shown with the body.

  Jake didn’t want to be in the room with either the statue or the corpse. His earlier excitement had quickly died when he and Sam had discovered Kyle’s body. Now all he wanted to do was retreat back up the stairs into the bright sunshine and forget about what he’d found.

  He stepped back into the passage, a glimpse of movement catching his eyes as he did so.

  He turned in the doorway, staring at the statue, watching its eyes, watching its hands.

  Must have been the Sheriff.

  Statues don’t move.

  The Sheriff called out to him as he turned away.

  "Where does this go?" Damon asked, pointing behind to something him that Jake could not see due to the intervening statue.

  "Where does what go?" Jake asked. He stepped to his left and gaped in surprise at the doorway now visible on the other side of the chamber.

  "Where the hell did that come from?" Jake asked.

  *** ***

  Damon watched Jake examine the door and knew he wasn’t faking it. He really hadn’t known it was there. The iron door had been coated with a thick layer of dust and dirt, causing it to blend with the wall in the dim light. In the horror of finding the statue looming over Kyle’s body, it had been overlooked.

  The Sheriff intended to let the forensics team open the door once they had thoroughly checked the chamber. He hadn’t counted on Jake’s curiosity. Before the Sheriff could stop him, Jake had grasped the solid iron ring that served as a door handle and pulled with all his strength.

  The door swung inward with a groan.

  Sunlight flooded the chamber.

  Without a word Damon stepped over to stand next to Jake.

  The two men stared out the doorway onto the carefully trimmed green of the Forest Lawn Cemetery

  "Holy shit," Jake said under his breath.

  The Sheriff agreed. Holy shit was right. They must have traveled a couple of hundred yards underground, clear off the Blake property and onto the adjoining one. He hadn’t realized they’d gone that far.

  He stepped out into the sunshine with Jake at his heels. As one, they turned to face the doorway.

  The door proved to be the entrance to a white marble mausoleum that was built into the side of a small hill. Across the lintel of the doorframe was carved a name.

  Sebastian Blake.

  Chapter Eight: Ressurection

  Inside the tomb.

  Movement.

  It began as nothing more than a subtle shifting in the darkness, a change in the rank air that filled the buried structure, a stirring sense of motion that was more felt than seen, as if the air pressure had suddenly lowered.

  Gradually as the moments passed the motion became more substantial until at last it could be seen with the naked eye, had anyone been watching.

  A patch of darkness, darker than even the heavy gloom that filled the tomb’s every nook and cranny, detached itself from the shadows in one corner and drifted like a curtain of mist into the center of the chamber. It churned about in rich, lazy spirals, a bubbling, seething witch’s brew that whirled and spun about itself.

  The mist became a haze; the haze became a fog, and still it writhed and rolled. With each revolution it slowly gathered substance from the darkness around it. When the cloud was several feet in diameter, it slowly wrapped the statue in its inky embrace.

  The murk began to adhere itself to the finely wrought stone, slowly at first, and then faster, as the intelligence guiding it gradually awakened from a long sleep, its senses progressively becoming more in tune with physical reality.

  The human blood shed earlier acted as a catalyst, providing the ingredients required for him to again assume a corporeal form. The dark union of forces that had sustained him for so long did the rest.

  A light sparked about the statue, a tiny flash of crimson the size and shape of a cigarette ember, located somewhere near the center of the thing’s chest. With each pulsation it grew slowly brighter, bit-by-bit, until it reached the intensity of a carefully contained fire. There was no heat. The strange light seemed to give off an unnatural chill that wafted forth and turned the air inside the tomb several degrees colder than it had been moments before. The blood-red light flickered across the face of the statue, causing its teeth to gleam eerily in the glow.

  The cloud pulsed and swelled as it coalesced about the figure, until it was a semi-solid mass of churning black, mated to the stone, covering every exposed inch of its surface.

  The light flared suddenly brighter, so bright that it would have blinded anyone in the room in its gory red glow.

  But no one was there, and so the change went on.

  Unheeded.

  Unhindered.

  Unnoticed by all but the one who’d triggered it and the other who’d sought so desperately to prevent it.

  A smell suddenly filled the air, a stench like the cloying reek of sulfur or rotten eggs. With it the light flared in a flash that lasted for several long moments.

  When the light died down and the darkness returned, the beast that had been hidden for centuries stood in the center of the room where the statue had stood just moments before.

  In the darkness, yellow eyes gleamed brightly.

  The beast remained where he was for a moment or two, rejoicing in his newfound freedom. The rush of the stolen blood in his veins brought a rhythmic pounding to his ears, and after the ages of silence even that slight, internal sound was like thunder.

  He reveled in it. He was alive.

  The creature once known as Moloch walked towards the door, eager to escape the confines of the dank, stone structure where he’d been imprisoned. He moved with steady deliberation; the first steps slow and awkward, the joints in his knees and hips seemed rusted tight with disuse. After a few more steps the tissues began to remember and established the proper rhythm.

  Where his movements had at first been disruptive, jerky, they now became fluid, composed and filled with a savage, feline grace. He walked the circumference of the room. Once, twice, three times, each step renewing his familiarity with physical motion and the laws that governed it.

  As he walked he worked his arms, swinging them back and forth at the elbow and rotating them in their shoulder sockets, flexing the muscles of his biceps. He clenched and unclenched his fists.

  Moloch opened and closed his jaw several times, snapping it shut to hear the sharp click of his teeth, force enough to crush bone to a pulp.

  He delighted in the tension and release of the muscles in his back and legs. The sound of his claws scraping the rough stone underfoot sent a shiver of pleasure through his frame.

  Moloch strode across the chamber. With a shove from one muscle-laden arm, he swung wide the door. It crashed against the outer wall with a loud metallic clang. He was barely aware of the sound, so entranced was he with the sight through the open door.

  There, just steps away, lay freedom.

  Sounds were assaulting him from all sides; the whisper of the wind, the trip-hammer of tiny hearts in the shrubbery.

  He laughed, the sound welling up from the depths of his throat in manic glee and echoing into the night.

  It was a sound that was less than human.

  Lights gleamed off in the distance. Spying them, the beast’s thoughts turned to the terrible, gnawing hunger that had awakened deep inside. Too long he’d been locked inside that stone, imprisoned and left to die alone in the darkness. Too long he’d existed in that twilight between this world and the next, his life extended by the dark forces th
at had imprisoned him there.

  Now he was free; free to act and to feed.

  He extended his arms. The leathery wings that lay smoothly against the surface of his back extended with them, rustling in the breeze like the sound of a quickly snapped sheet. Bunching the muscles in his scaled legs, Moloch gave a powerful downward shove and cast his body upwards into the dark night.

  Chapter Nine: Explanations?

  Edward Strickland, Medical Examiner for Porter County, stepped into the chill confines of the morgue and switched on the lights. Though it was late in the evening, Strickland was preparing to perform one last task for the night, a task he had saved until the end, so that other duties would not prevent him from giving it his complete attention.

  Strickland was an agreeable man in his early sixties, and had been M.E. for the last sixteen years. Despite his constant joking that the only reason he’d been able to retain his post was due to the fact that nobody else wanted it, he was a competent professional who got the job done and got it done right the first time. He was nearing retirement, but was in no way ready for it.

  His work was a constant intrigue to him, and he pursued it with an almost fanatic devotion. To find him working far into the night, as he planned on this occasion, was not an unusual occurrence. The silence in the morgue after-hours was deep and peaceful, soothing, vastly different from the hectic pace that enveloped the facility during regular hours.

  Brilliant fluorescent lights illuminated the room in which he was working, washing across the institutional green walls and slick linoleum floor. A body lay on the mortician’s table before him, its flesh a sickly shade of gray, the color of death. A wide white tag was tied to the big toe on the corpse’s left foot, giving the deceased’s name, age, and proximate cause of death. Strickland gave the tag a quick glance.

  "Halloran, Kyle, Caucasian male, age 26, probable overdose," he read to himself, humming aloud to the strains of Mozart that wafted through the room from the speakers set in the ceiling above, just loud enough to be heard.