by Callie Stone
“This is a nightmare, right? Tell me this is a nightmare,” whispered Natasha.
“I wish it was,” replied Troy.
The people were all screaming at the tops of their lungs, begging and pleading for their lives in several different languages, but I could understand every word. A lot of the time the screams would be cut short as the people were either trampled or shredded to pieces by something we could not yet see.
It did not seem real, but at the same time it was all too real.
It indeed reminded me of my last few days of humanity, in the thick of wartime. Some of my worst days, indeed.
We stepped back from the windows as we heard something scratching on the outside of the train. It sounded as if whatever it was it had claws like fucking razors and a distinct lack of patience.
“What’s that?!” exclaimed Natasha.
“That,” replied Michael, “would be our welcoming party.”
The noise of the scratching continued as the sound of heavy panting came through the speakers. The noise was so loud it was like someone was standing right next to us, aboard the train. I had never heard anything quite like it before and I had heard some pretty weird shit in my time.
“What the bloody hell is that?!” exclaimed Natasha once more.
“The sound of why nobody else was on the train to Zurich,” I replied. Of course, the level of chaos around us must have been brand new or we would never have even reached the outskirts of the city.
In an instant, the scratching had stopped, all of the noise had stopped. What followed was yelling. Not terrified screaming like we had heard for a solid half-minute, but just loud and half-interested yelling in German. The lights in the tunnel flickered on again, and what appeared to be an engineer in a reflective orange vest strolled up casually, and stopped when he spotted us.
“Are you Americans?” he shouted in a heavy Swiss accent.
“English!” Natasha yelled back. “What the hell just happened?” she asked.
“We are not sure yet,” the engineer yelled back. “There seemed to be a transformer explosion, but we got the power back.”
“Did you not see all the people panicking, running in the tunnel?” Kieran demanded, his bemusement far overriding his usual shyness.
The engineer just looked confused.
“In this tunnel? Nein. Now, back inside the train, ja?” Incredibly, the train started rolling again. “Oh, and for your safety, the doors will now be locked until the train reaches your destination.” He flashed a quick smile, turned around, and went back to whatever it was he was doing.
“They really don’t know a thing,” I said.
“Yeah, I guessed as much,” Natasha replied, clearly thinking. “Does this mean everyone in the train is a...”
“That man was no creature of any kind,” I stated confidently as the train picked up speed on the last stretch of track to Zurich HB Station. “He was human,” I assured Natasha, as reassuring as that statement could have been in that moment, at any rate.
“He was human,” agreed Troy, a bit surprisingly. “There is another circle of dark magic somewhere close to here.” Troy had a proverbial thousand yard stare into the distance as the train slowed down on its approach to the station.
“Thanks, captain obvious,” Michael remarked as we pulled into the relative peace and quiet of Zurich’s largest train station.
“This is where one of the portals is located,” I reminded Troy. “Somewhere in this city.”
“The visions, I mean.” Troy still seemed to be focused on some unknown point in the distance as the five of us remained huddled in a circle between train cars. “The closer we get, the harder it is to tell what is real.”
The train came to a stop. The surrounding transit hub was empty, as far as I could tell.
“This is our stop,” said Natasha. “Let’s go.”
We exited the train and walked out of the station.
“Stay focused,” I reminded Troy as we set foot on Zurich’s streets, still quiet in the predawn hours.
“I’m trying, alright?” he snapped back.
The three of us stopped in the shadow of a towering glass box of an office building as Kieran fumbled with his phone. “Should we try to find the flat, or?”
None of us seemed to know how to answer that question.
“Ideally before it gets bright,” I responded for my own sake.
“This map is not loading,” Kieran complained, an uncharacteristic hint of frustration in his voice.
I had frustrations of my own to contend with as I spotted a haze of orange starting to form along the darkness of the eastern horizon.
“The sun will be coming out to play soon enough,” I announced, trying to add a hint of wit to my continued reminders to the others of my need for self-preservation.
Two humans, locals by the looks of their business attire and put-upon expressions, passed us a little too closely for my liking. There was one man and one woman, on the younger side, maybe married and commuting together. They both gave me a flash of a puzzled glance as I stared at the horizon. However, they seemed to be caught up in their own little world, perhaps in the events taking over their city. Their expressions were those of worry, but not of dread. They knew something was wrong, but they likely had not been affected yet, not directly. I thought about what that engineer said, about the ‘transformer explosion’. There was a way that humans had of explaining things in a fashion they could understand. How everything was a transformer explosion, or a power outage, or just somebody’s delusions or some form of mass hysteria that was making people see and hear things they should not be seeing or hearing. But when these incidents begin to build and build, even the most skeptical of humans start to wonder. I wondered if these two were the types to immediately rush for their cell phones as soon as things started to happen.
“We are usually more professional than this,” I heard Kieran sneer, the stress palpable in his voice as he struggled with the map on his phone.
The Swiss couple had started to walk faster, I noted, before turning back to my team.
“Are you sure about that?” Michael asked of Kieran’s observation.
There was no chance for any of us to respond or even consider that because the still city air was pierced by a discordant symphony of brakes squealing, metal smashing and crumpling, and glass shattering and crashing to the ground. As we all spun in the direction of the noise we caught sight of a huge, white Mercedes cargo van in the midst of crashing into a row of parked Smart cars. There was hardly time to take all of that in before there was another loud series of crashes and bangs, coming from the opposite direction this time.
We turned to see a black van weaving and speeding down the one-way street the wrong way. It was impossible to know exactly what was about to happen next but the sound of screeching tires was enough to draw our eyes back just in time to see the white cargo van smashing into the black van.
The noise was awful, but we kept watching out of horrific fascination as the scene unfolded.
The alternating tones of Swiss emergency vehicle sirens soon followed, wailing up and down almost in an iambic pentameter of urgent sound drawing closer and closer. The police cars pulled up on the sides of the conflict, lights flashing, but nobody got out. We could not tell what was happening with the two vehicles just yet, but it looked like they were still moving.
I stood there for a moment more, unsure of who to help first.
“Let’s go, before they start to question us,” Michael suggested, perhaps wisely.
“Es fährt niemand!” I heard one of the officers exclaim.
“Wie ist das möglich?” another replied in apparent disbelief.
“There was nobody driving,” grumbled Troy, under his breath. The officers were starting to visually scan the area.
Kieran seemed to be on top of the slight movements of the officers, of all the humans in the vicinity, as much as any of us. His eyes, and subtle direction of his nose, darted to th
e officers then in the other direction, presumably to where we were headed.
“Let’s go, the flat is just blocks away,” Kieran whispered, and we followed as stealthily as we were capable of as a team, walking away from the site of the accident. After a short walk, we reached the large apartment building that served as our temporary hideout in Zurich. No sooner had we ascended the stairs to the front door when a voice called to us from the shadows of the stairwell.
“You are very early,” it said. We all recoiled at the sudden appearance of a dishevelled man with a thick beard and frazzled hair. He looked like he had not bathed in weeks. “I didn’t even hear you come in!” he continued. The way he was peering at us made me feel like he could see right through me.
“Who are you?” I asked. “How did you know we were coming?”
“I am Henry,” the man said, ignoring my questions.
“Your name is Henry?” Troy asked in a way that I believe startled all of us. “Really?”
“I know who you are,” he hissed to Troy mysteriously. “I know of the threat you represented. That you will always represent.”
“What?” I asked, having no clue what this man was talking about.
Glaring, I took in his appearance: long, unkempt black hair and a beard of the same colour with hints of grey. Also, disheveled and filthy clothing that was probably white at one time. Upon further inspection, his garb did not appear to be modern in any way I could discern, nor did it seem to be from any earthly past era.
“Don’t play dumb with me, Alexander,” he went on interrupted. It was a vanishingly rare moment in which I needed to conceal a bolt of alarm I felt.
“How do you know who I am?”
“He does not,” Troy interrupted.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Henry said simply. Just infuriatingly fucking simply and meaninglessly.
“Who are you?” I asked again.
“I told you,” he said shortly. “I am Henry.”
“No!” I was beginning to lose my temper. “What’s your real name?”
“I don’t see why that would be important to you,” he replied. “You’ll have to make do with my sobriquet.”
“Why are you following us?” Michael queried, stepping forward as if to menace the fae.
At least, a fae is what I was starting to think him to be. His attitude of condescension and disinterest in our attempts to probe his origins were certainly fae-like.
“I’m not,” he said. “I was just walking along the road, and you happened to be on it. Coincidence, happenstance, call it what you will. Please do not interrupt my journey.”
“Where are you going?” I asked, baffled.
“Does it matter? I would have thought that that was obvious,” he answered. “I am going to the market. I wish to barter for goods and then sell them for a profit.”
“You are going to some market in central Zurich, predawn, and you happened to greet us here, by name.”
“Do not get drawn in.” It was Troy, finally with more to say. I had never heard his voice sound more tentative than it did in that moment.
“I know you.” By then the thing’s gnarly face and voice were clearly pointed in Troy’s direction. “But do not act as if you know me. We’ve heard tell of you showing your face, and here I am seeing it with mine own eyes. It is not about me, it’s about what I represent. My name isn’t important,” he said to us. “You may call me Henry.”
“We don’t give a damn for you,” I said.
I was ready to charge forward and smash him across the face, but I didn’t. There were forces at play which I did not believe any one of us understood.
The thing which identified itself as Henry vanished as suddenly as it appeared, although its stench lingered behind.
“Friend of yours?” Michael asked, turning to Troy.
Troy shook his head slowly. “We need not listen to him or heed his magic tricks.”
“Like knowing my name?” I snarled.
“Exactly.” After answering, Troy started to immediately walk into the building as if that could possibly be the end of it.
“Was that a fae?” Natasha questioned.
“I believe so,” Troy said, pushing open the door to the lobby. “Or something like that. This realm is not his home.”
I knew that Troy was right. Henry was clearly a creature of the woods, for his form was much like that of a traditional being haunted by a demonic existence—little more than a man-shaped child’s nightmare, with everything about him being wrong, but only slightly so you would not be able to explain what was off in any meaningful sense.
Closing my eyes for a moment to try and picture Henry’s face from just moments earlier, I could not be sure if the image in my mind’s eye was that of our fresh encounter or a hazy memory nightmare resurfacing from some recent slumber.
Things became hazier with my growing fatigue as we rode the lift up to the flat, and I simply walked right into the nearest bedroom and collapsed.
“Evening, sleepyhead.” With that greeting, Michael was the only one of my teammates to acknowledge me as I wandered into the living area after having slept some hours.
“What is happening?” I had to ask as I sat on the plush carpeted floor where Natasha, Troy, Michael, and Kieran were gathered, surrounded by notepads, pens, markers, and a map of Zurich serving as a centrepiece.
“I’ll tell you what’s happening.” Troy sounded stressed, on the verge of angry. “More explosions, fires, a record-setting number of water mains bursting in the past week, more mysterious van accidents...”
“Kalgin, Alexander,” Natasha interjected.
“In so many words, it would seem so,” Troy conceded.
“You’re always going to say that because one of them is after you.” Michael placed his hand, in at least a half-joking way on Natasha’s shoulder.
To her credit, Natasha literally shrugged him off.
“And what about Henry?” Michael pointed to Troy. “One of your friends, wasn’t he?”
“Not friends,” answered Troy, looking at the carpet. “But I recognized him as likely one of my own. But if it’s demons terrorizing Zurich, or fae and their dark magic, all the incidents seem to be centered here, in this Friedhof park.” Troy pointed to a green triangle on the map of Zurich.
“Actually, it’s a cemetery,” I noted. I recognized the map key symbol from where I stood.
“Really? That explains all the ghosts that have been sighted here lately,” said Michael.
“Shut up,” Natasha growled. It seemed like she may not have gotten much sleep since her nap on Troy’s shoulder on the train. Usually she would be the first to laugh at one of Michael’s jokes. “You do not even know what’s been here lately. This is a place, I think it’s clear now that this is the place of dark magic and demonic energy.” She emphasized her point by tapping her finger against the map.
I knew Natasha was right, but I didn’t expect her to be the one to say it. Still, I was glad she did, because none of the others suggested it. It seemed like they all wanted to go straight for the kill.
“We should split up and search the entire area,” I suggested.
“We agreed that there was to be no splitting up,” Natasha argued.
She looked straight up at me, the only one of the team standing, the odd man out, as I looked down at her sitting right next to Troy.
No splitting up, indeed.
“You’re right.” I conceded the point to Natasha as she was right, certainly, and my motivations for trying to split us all up may have been suspect at best.
And, besides, it looked as though my team had narrowed it down to a single location in Zurich. If the demons were coming through one spot, that was likely to be the portal. A portal that was a point on the pentagram, and one they would fight like hell, literally, to keep functional. This was something worth sacrificing not only my pride for, but all of us would need to give our all for, perhaps sacrificing everything.
“Let’s g
o then,” I said as I walked away from my team’s little huddle on the floor and towards the door of the flat. The others followed and we descended down in the elevator.
The streets were empty, but if this was a point on the pentagram then there was one area that would be clogged with demonic activity. It would be a place where they feared not the light. We set off in that direction, sticking to the shadows as we moved through the streets of the city. The others were quiet and I knew exactly how they felt. “Is this the demon district?” Michael asked, showing his nervousness in his way. “Or the fae district?”
“It may be the latter, partially,” Troy sighed.
We kept moving for several minutes until we reached our destination, a large graveyard. The street lights didn’t reach there, or had fallen prey to one of the fires or outages, and the buildings were all close together, providing plenty of cover for anyone trying to lurk. That is what our first step was at least.
“Well, there’s a few demon souls wandering about,” I whispered as we snuck through the graveyard.
It is not likely that any of us were feeling great, exactly, since our arrival in Zurich. Yet the awful sensation which began to overtake me in that cemetery was almost unlike anything that I had felt previous in all my years. ‘Almost’ because there was one exception: just before we had fallen through the magic portal in Paris. This time, there was that deathly aura which started to surround everything around us, including the gravestones. There was also the distinct feeling that something was watching us.
The deathly quiet which had seemed to envelope Switzerland’s largest city since we had been there was abruptly shattered by an aural blanket of shrill panic, a swell of terrified screaming surrounding us as a red fog came pouring out of the portal, engulfing the cemetery.
We had been spotted.
“Where are you running to?” a familiar voice scratched through the thick sounds of terror. Whether we were running or not, which we were not, seemed to make no difference to it. I could tell, and could smell, that it was that Henry thing again. His long, loping gait easily kept pace with me as he walked alongside, and I didn’t dare tear my eyes away from him to see if the others were holding their own against the demons that must surely be swarming them.