Eyes to See

by Joseph Nassise

  Still no movement.

  Good.

  Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he advanced swiftly on the other vehicle. He checked the backseat, then the front. His initial guess was correct; the car was empty.

  Which meant they were on foot somewhere up ahead.

  He’d already made the decision to follow them wherever they went, but there was a time for initiative and a time for decisions that would be remembered at a later date by those up the chain of command. Now that he knew where they were, going after the fugitive alone and without backup would come across as just showboating. He at least had to make the call.

  He walked back to the cruiser he’d borrowed from the station lot and called it in. He identified himself to dispatch, let them know his location—his twenty—and then asked to be patched in to the Danvers police. Not five minutes after he hung up with Captain Stenck there were two squad cars pulling in behind his own. The officers got out and offered their assistance, just as they’d been ordered to do. Stanton wasn’t surprised to discover he even knew one of them, Patrolman White, a solid officer who had recently been cited for bravery under fire on a cross-jurisdictional case Stanton had previously been involved with. The two men nodded at each other and introductions were made all around.

  Stanton was pleased. Invoking the name of the task force had paid off. Now he had to get his man before the real task force got wind of what was going on and short-circuited his efforts.

  The detective explained to the uniforms what they were up against and, satisfied that they understood the gravity of the situation, set out with them to find his two fugitives.

  It didn’t take long to discover their trail; the shattered lock on the power station door was too recent to miss. So, too, was the open manhole cover that led into the tunnels below.

  Never one to shy away from the difficult or the challenging, Stanton was the first man down the ladder. One by one, the others followed.

  Flashlights came out, illuminating the tunnel ahead. Pistols came out as well; Stanton had told the uniforms working with him that both fugitives should be considered armed and dangerous. He’d purposely neglected to tell them that Hunt was blind because, at this point, he was no longer sure that was truly the case.

  They had only traveled a couple hundred yards into the tunnel network when Stanton spotted a flash of movement up ahead. He signaled the others to stay quiet as they quickened their pace forward. A fork loomed ahead out of the darkness. When Stanton flashed his light down the left-hand passage, he was rewarded with a glimpse of Hunt’s face as he was caught looking back down the tunnel at them.

  “Freeze!” Stanton shouted, bringing his gun up but declining to fire because he knew he was too far away for the shot to be accurate.

  Apparently Hunt had come to the same conclusion, for he didn’t pay any attention to Stanton’s command and quickly disappeared down the tunnel ahead of them.

  “This way!” Stanton shouted, and took off in hot pursuit.

  They chased Hunt through a series of quick turns and forked passages as he led them deeper into the tunnels. Hunt was unable to increase the distance between them, but at the same time, Stanton and his men were unable to close it. Several times the detective thought he had lost the trail, only to catch a glimpse of movement up ahead, movement that drew him forward once more.

  In his eagerness, Stanton got out ahead of the others, racing to close the gap between him and his quarry. Several minutes passed before he realized that he could no longer hear his colleagues’ footfalls behind him nor could he see any sign of Hunt up ahead. Stanton slowed, and then came to a stop.

  Silence filled the space around him.

  He was alone.

  He tried the radio, but all he got was static.

  All this earth and concrete must be blocking the signal, he thought.

  With his pulse quickening, he retraced his steps, concerned that Hunt had somehow doubled back on his people and ambushed them from the rear. He reached the first fork and turned right, confident in his direction. But by the time he reached the second, and then the third junction, he became less certain. Several minutes later he came to a halt once more.

  There was no sign of the officers who had accompanied him into the tunnels.

  Even worse, he realized he was now quite lost.

  “Shit!”

  With no other choice but to continue walking and hope that he either ran into his men or a section of the tunnel that looked familiar, Stanton took a few moments’ rest and then headed off once more.

  He had been on the go for ten, maybe fifteen minutes more when he heard sounds of struggle coming from up around a bend in the tunnel before him. Extinguishing his light, he crept forward in the darkness until he reached the turn. A faint light was coming from the other side.

  Cautiously, he slowly eased his head out enough to see around the corner.

  A lantern stood in the center of the tunnel ahead and by its light he could see Hunt kneeling in the semidarkness. He was rocking back and forth slightly, holding his stomach, as if in pain.

  Stanton readied himself to charge around the corner and arrest the son of a bitch when something about Hunt’s movements made him pause. A few seconds later he was glad he had.

  As he watched, the skin at the top of Hunt’s head slowly began to peel back away from his scalp. It rolled down the side of his face, exposing dark skin and eyes that gleamed silver. A weird keening noise was coming from Hunt’s mouth; the sound sent shivers up Stanton’s spine. It didn’t seem even remotely human.

  Hunt toppled over and began to twitch wildly, jerking back and forth in undulating rhythms. Stanton was reminded of the time he’d seen a giant boa shed its skin; Hunt’s transformation was almost identical, his new flesh slowly emerging from the old.

  By the time it was over several minutes later, something strange and altogether inhuman squatted on the ground in the length of tunnel ahead of Stanton. Even as he watched, the creature’s apparently malleable skin shifted and reformed, until he was looking at the face of Patrolman White, one of the men he’d entered the tunnels with more than an hour before.

  He froze.

  When the fetch finished conforming its body so that it resembled the young police officer it had just gutted like a fish, it looked down the tunnel in Stanton’s direction. Only the detective’s inability to move saved him from being seen as he knelt there rigid in the darkness.

  With a cry that never should have emerged from a human throat, the creature then moved off deeper into the tunnels.

  After it was gone Stanton expelled the air in his lungs in a harsh rush, unaware until that moment that he’d been holding his breath.

  What the hell was that thing?

  How in God’s name were they going to stop it?

  He didn’t know. Didn’t have a clue. But he did know that stopping it was his responsibility.

  And if he had any hope in hell of doing so, he couldn’t let it get too far ahead.

  He got up and carefully began to move down the tunnel in the direction the creature had taken, the darkness surrounding him like a huge stone just waiting to crush him beneath its weight.

  49

  THEN

  The night I met Stanton was probably one of the worst nights of my life. I’d already lost my daughter, my wife, my job, and my house. That night, I lost my self-esteem as well, and it would be a long climb back out of the pit before I found it again.

  I’d been living in one fleabag hotel after another, skipping out before the rent was due and moving on, changing names like a snake shedding its skin. I’d finally run out of cash though, and hadn’t eaten in three or four days. I’d lost count.

  I had to do something.

  The idea to knock off the convenience store popped into my head as I walked past. It was late at night and the kid behind the counter didn’t look like he knew his ass from his elbow. If I brought Scream in with me, the clerk would probably hightail it out of there, leaving me
to rifle the cash register at my leisure. Besides, who would believe him when he said a blind guy had robbed the store?

  Should work like a charm, I thought.

  I tried not to be too obvious when I checked the aisles for other customers and then walked up to the clerk.

  “Give me the cash,” I said politely, and then sotto voce called for Scream.

  The kid outright laughed at me, until Scream materialized over my left shoulder and sent him running off, shrieking, into the night.

  I had my hand in the cash register when the off-duty cop who’d been in the beer cooler out back walked up.

  “You sure you want to do that, dipshit?” he drawled.

  Startled, I spun around, dropping my cane to the floor.

  “Now I’ve seen it all,” he said with a chuckle. “They teach you how to rob convenience stores at the Association for the Deaf and Blind?”

  I tried to fake my way out of it. “The clerk took off. I was just trying to get my change.”

  “Yeah, right. Turn around and spread ’em.”

  He had me up against the counter and was frisking me when the three gang members came in the store behind us. I couldn’t see them, but the aura of menace they exuded was hard to miss. Beside me, Whisper suddenly flickered into existence, an urgent expression on her face. She mimed the act of pulling a gun from beneath her shirt several times until I got it.

  “Be careful, they’re armed,” I said softly to the cop beside me. That’s when the shit hit the fan.

  Turns out it was initiation night for the Wolverines and the price of membership was shooting a police officer. Bullets filled the air like angry wasps, but my warning had been enough to give Stanton the edge he needed. Rather than being caught unawares, he was ready to return fire the moment things spun out of control. When it was all over, the floor of the mini-market held not the body of a dead cop, but the corpses of three gangbangers instead. My warning had saved Detective Stanton’s life. That and the fact that he couldn’t prove I was robbing the store resulted in him letting me off with just a warning, but he apparently never forgot that the blind guy had somehow seen the hit coming long before he did.

  And when he’d next come across a case that he couldn’t explain, he tracked me down and demanded my help. It was his interference, more than anything else, that stopped the long slide that I’d been on and put me back on the road to recovery, if not sanity.

  Strange how everything comes around full circle, isn’t it?

  50

  NOW

  The ghosts dispersed shortly thereafter, leaving me lying at the bottom of the stairwell, dazed and bruised in their wake.

  Seeing me there, Dmitri rushed back down the stairs to my side.

  “Hunt! Are you all right?”

  I nodded, then, “Yeah, I’m fine. Just banged up a bit.”

  He reached down and helped me back to my feet, a look of unease on his face.

  “What the hell just happened?” he asked.

  At first I was surprised by the question, but then I realized that, unlike me, he hadn’t been able to see any of it. I did my best to explain, letting him know about the ghosts and what I had learned from them.

  He seemed to accept the situation without much difficulty. I guess when you can turn into a polar bear at will, petty little things like ghosts don’t bother you too much.

  After giving me a few minutes to catch my breath, he led us back up the stairs and into the east wing of the Kirkbride building, just as we’d intended.

  We spent some time wandering through the halls until, a short time later, we found ourselves in an enormous room near the back of the building. The darkness of the place allowed me to see just fine. The floor stretched out before us, half the length of a football field if it was an inch. A glass ceiling soared high above and rows of windows lined the walls on three of the four sides. There were two doors on either side and one at the far end.

  “What is this place?” Dmitri asked.

  “Solarium, I think,” I said, recognizing it from the plans I’d studied in the past.

  The vegetation that had once grown here in neatly tended rows had run riot, filling the place with crawling vines and wide-leafed plants of various shapes and sizes. In the center of the room a dark and crippled old oak grew right up through the floor.

  It was so strange to see a tree growing in the middle of the room that we had to wander over and take a look.

  For the second time that night a feeling of unease settled over me, like a cold hand that danced down my spine and settled somewhere in my gut. It increased as I drew closer to the tree and then seemed to fade away again once I stood beneath its skeletal branches.

  The tree wasn’t just dying but diseased as well; a thick black tar-like substance spilled from cracks in its trunk. At some point in the past someone had tried digging into the earth in front of the tree, though they hadn’t gotten too deep before the root system had stopped further efforts. A small plaque lay discarded in the loose earth nearby.

  “On this spot once stood the home of Judge John Hathorne, Esquire,” it read.

  Seen through the gray filter that had become my sight, the tree and its surroundings bore a sense of desolation and ruin that perfectly matched the uneasy feeling I had standing there.

  It was time to move on.

  Before I could make the suggestion to Dmitri, however, we heard someone approaching the nearest door; footfalls sounded loud in the stillness of the cavernous room.

  Even as we turned to face the entrance, the door opened, revealing a figure standing there, a bright light in its hand.

  The illumination blinded me and I instinctively turned away, shielding my eyes.

  The light immediately dimmed and a voice said, “That’s certainly not the reception a girl wants to get.”

  “Denise!” I shouted and rushed across the room toward her, snatching her up into my arms and swinging her about.

  There was a long moment of surprised silence and then she said quite distinctly, “Put me down, Hunt.”

  I did as she asked and stepped back. She was giving me one of those looks that said I’d just embarrassed myself beyond belief, but I didn’t care. Despite what I’d said to Dmitri earlier, until this moment I’d been half convinced that she was dead. Seeing her here, alive and well, had broken through my carefully controlled shell. Seems I was a bit more taken with her than I’d admitted even to myself.

  Dmitri hurried over and the two of them spent a moment reassuring each other that they were all right.

  “What happened?” Dmitri wanted to know, and I echoed his question.

  Denise told us about her brief captivity at the hands of the fetch.

  “This was there when I awoke the second time,” she said, offering the journal to us. As we leafed through it she explained what she’d discovered; how Judge Hathorne’s Circle had discovered the existence of the fetch and had ultimately faced off against its sorcerous creator, Nathan Eldredge, binding him into a mystical prison for what they’d hoped was all time.

  In return, I told her of how we’d been cornered in the stairwell by the ghosts of the fetch’s victims and what I had learned from them.

  “The Magister told us that each of the victims was one of the Gifted, but the truth is even stranger than that. Each of the victims is in fact a direct descendant of one of the original members of Hathorne’s Circle.”

  It sounded outrageous; I knew that, but as I watched Denise consider the implications I also knew that I was right.

  Then Denise abruptly went still.

  Seeing her reaction, both Dmitri and I spoke over each other, asking, “What?”

  “Hathorne’s Circle must have used some kind of ritual magick to bind Eldredge into the prison they fashioned for him. It was the only way to ensure that the spell would last for as long as they needed it to.”

  “So?”

  “So a spell like that, one powerful enough to seal a fellow sorcerer outside of space and time, would
have to be powered by human blood. An animal sacrifice just wouldn’t do it.”

  I had this sudden image of Hathorne and his crew standing around an altar where a young woman waited for the knife. Shaking it off, I said, “I thought they were supposed to be the good guys?”

  Denise gave me an irritated look. “They are. I wasn’t implying they killed someone. They probably all gave up a little of their own blood to power the spell. It’s how I would do it, if I was powerful enough to attempt something like that.”

  “And?”

  “And if that’s the case, then one way to reverse the spell would be to destroy the bloodlines whence it came. Blood symbolizes the power inherent in life; destroy the bloodline and you destroy the life, therefore you destroy the power of the spell. Killing the ancestors of the Twelve would release Eldredge from his cell.”

  “But why?” Dmitri asked. “What could he hope to gain?”

  “Life,” she replied, and suddenly I understood.

  Eldredge had died because his physical body had been sealed away inside the mage’s prison. But if he could reverse the magick that kept him there, offer a debt of blood larger than that given by those who had imprisoned him, he could return to the state he was in when he had first been sealed away. I explained as much to the others.

  “Okay, say that’s the case,” Dmitri said, clearly trying to think it all through. “Then why would the fetch want to bring Hunt into the picture?”

  Denise started to shake her head, indicating she didn’t know, but I cut her off, a sudden suspicion forming in the back of my head.

  “What would happen to the fetch if Eldredge was destroyed, Denise?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Either the fetch would be destroyed or the bonds that tie the two together would be severed, releasing it to act on its own. Which is why we need to stop standing around, find the vile thing, and put an end to them both.”

  Dmitri agreed.