Diablero

by Toby Tate

  “Did you say Brickhouse?”

  “Have you heard of him?”

  Lisa nodded. “Yeah. He was your partner, right?”

  Jonathan turned his eyes away. “Yes. The papers called it an accident. It wasn’t.”

  “Oh? I thought the sheriff said he surfaced too fast on a dive and got the bends.”

  “That’s what the sheriff said. But he wasn’t there when it happened. I was.”

  Lisa said nothing.

  “I pulled him up out of the water. Before too long, he went into convulsions and…well, you know the rest.”

  Jonathan resumed his pacing. “With a remote-control robotic camera we found the wreck of the Adventure exactly where my dream predicted it would be—at the bottom of a sub-oceanic cave, which is why no one had been able to find it before. The cave opening was barely bigger than the ship itself. Inside the wreckage, we found a secret compartment in the captain’s quarters that was partially rotted away, and within the compartment was an old wine bottle that contained what we thought was a map. But it wasn’t a map.”

  Jonathan abruptly stopped and turned to Lisa, making her flinch.

  “I wish you’d quit doing that,” she said.

  “What we did find in the bottle was an ancient animal skin, older than the ship itself, with some writing on it that looked like Latin, but I know it wasn’t Latin. It was some kind of hybrid language, like a code. I took a photo of it and e-mailed it to a friend of mine at a museum in Raleigh to get it translated. I‘m not sure what happened to that e-mail, but I believe that whatever was written on that skin has something to do with these murders.”

  Jonathan’s stare became more intense, making Lisa uneasy. Hidden behind the kitchen bar, she slowly put a hand on the butt of her pistol.

  “I believe it contained a spell.”

  Lisa showed her surprise. “A spell? What kind of spell?”

  “A spell to raise the dead.”

  Lisa stood stock still, not breathing, thinking of what to do next. Put him under arrest? She could say he was breaking and entering, but she had let him in herself. She could just say that he suddenly went crazy. After all, she was a cop and it was his word against hers.

  “I know how all this sounds,” he said. “Believe me. I’m a scientist; I deal with facts. But if you had seen what I‘ve seen, you wouldn’t think it was so far-fetched.”

  Though Lisa was leery of the man standing across from her kitchen bar, she was also curious. “What exactly did you see?”

  Jonathan’s eyes became distant and haunted.

  “When Dan was still on the bottom, he worked close to the cave, near the edge, looking for anything that might have detached itself from the wreck on its way down. Then, he said he saw something move under the sand and thought it might be a crab or a flounder. But it wasn’t. It was something that scared the shit out of him, so much so that he immediately started hyperventilating and then just started talking gibberish. He began his ascent, but was in too big of a hurry.”

  He gazed down at the apartment floor as if he could see his partner engulfed in the murky darkness of the Atlantic, trying to make his way to the surface. “I yelled at him to slow down, to decompress, but he just kept ascending and hyperventilating and talking nonsense. There was nothing I could do to stop him. I ran over to the side of the boat, and watched him bob up in the water, frantic with fear, trying to grab the ladder to hoist himself out of the water.”

  The man looked up at Lisa. She was beginning to think there might be something to what he said, some kind of twisted truth. She softened her expression, encouraging Jonathan to finish the story.

  “I helped him up the ladder onto the dive platform. I could tell he was already pretty bad off. He seemed confused, as if he wasn’t sure where he was. I got his mask and tank off, and he kind of fell back on the deck and just lay there. Then he suddenly grabbed me by the collar and pulled me right down in front of his face. He looked like he was close to insanity. His eyes were wild and unfocused. I’ve never seen anyone so terrified.” Jonathan turned and walked slowly back toward the living room in silence.

  “So, what did he say?” Lisa asked.

  Jonathan took a deep breath, hesitating, not wanting to dredge up the memory of his friend’s last moments. He licked his lips and ran a hand over his black, curly hair, then spun back around and faced Lisa from across the room, trying his best to maintain his composure.

  “He said, ‘The bones, Jon, the bones. They’re alive.’”

  Thirty-three

  John Aiden woke up sprawled in the middle of his exhibit room. He felt like he had gone on a bender. A large goose egg throbbed on the side of his forehead. When he had fainted, he fell head-first onto the floor and now had a headache the size of the Dismal Swamp. His limbs ached as if he had just lost a wrestling match, and he had to struggle to force himself to move.

  Propping himself up on one elbow, he reached for his glasses, which had fallen off but remained miraculously intact. Aiden slipped them on and looked around the room. His eyes came to rest on a heap lying at his feet, and he remembered it as the reason he had fainted in the first place.

  Cautiously, he sat up and tried to stand, but found it difficult. His legs wobbled like those of a newborn deer. His headache felt like someone was working over his brain with a jackhammer. He reached up and felt the fleshy, raised knob on the side of his head, wincing at the pain.

  Aiden studied the figure on the floor, and then noticed his Glock lying nearby. He reached down to pick it up and nearly fell, but managed to keep his balance and retrieve the gun. It made him feel safer, felt good in his hand, but he doubted it would be effective against the thing on the floor.

  Suddenly the shape made some kind of movement, like it was trying to catch its breath. It was turned on its side, away from him, but he was afraid to touch it. Instead, he walked around to the other side.

  When he saw it, his jaw dropped.

  It was a skeleton. And it seemed to be alive.

  The being was encrusted with sea barnacles and looked as if it had been underwater for eons. The large chalice that had been fashioned from the skull of Blackbeard and removed from Aiden’s display case now seemed to be attached to the rest of the skeleton, and growing its own bone mass at an astonishing rate.

  More amazing were the visible signs of muscle tissue beginning to form and attach, ligament by ligament, to the bones. It reminded him of an intertwined mass of huge, rapidly-moving slugs, stretching with every evolution, then coming to rest as each one found its mark and anchored itself to the bone. It was like watching a body decay in reverse. The green encrustation was starting to dry and turn to dust, flaking off the bones like old paint and falling to the floor. It was growing a new body.

  Though he wanted to, Aiden didn‘t move. Couldn’t move. He simply watched as cell upon cell, muscle upon muscle, vein upon vein, formed and linked to other cells, muscles, and veins. Internal organs grew at such speed it made Aiden think of the time-lapse films he had seen in school of flowers opening and closing, or snails making their way across a landscape like sprinters in an Olympic race. The facial bones, which had grown from the chalice itself, were now covered with muscle of their own. Skin was starting to form, covering the muscle and veins underneath like an ocean tide creeping over a sandy beach.

  The power this being possessed was beyond anything mankind had seen since Christ himself had walked the earth. But Aiden knew this was far from the work of Christ, and far from the hand of God. He was sure, in fact, that it was just the opposite.

  And what’s more, he wanted to be a part of it.

  Thirty-four

  Lisa stared at her guest for several silent minutes, letting his story sink in. She wondered just how crazy Jonathan Jefferson was. His partner had said the bones were alive, but of course Lisa knew that was impossible. Bones don’t just come to life on their own…do they?

  She thought about Hunter’s phone call and her own nightmare the night before. S
he felt like she needed to hear the words again, just to be sure she hadn’t imagined them.

  “He said the bones were alive?”

  Jonathan nodded slowly, his eyes like two pools of black water, somber and troubled.

  “So, what happened next?”

  Jonathan’s mind seemed to return from somewhere far away. He focused his eyes on Lisa. “Well, then he just lay down and eventually started convulsing. I took the boat back to the island, called the Coast Guard on my radio and told them what had happened. But by the time I got there…” His voice trailed off.

  Lisa felt a knot in the pit of her stomach. To lose a friend is a horrible experience to have to live through, especially when that friend practically dies in your arms, and you know there’s nothing you, or anyone, can do.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  Jonathan attempted a smile, but the experience of the last two weeks weighed him down. “It’s okay. I haven‘t even had time to really think about it much.” He breathed a heavy sigh. “We spent a lot of years together, Dan and me. We bought that boat and chased our dream of finding sunken wrecks like two school kids following a pirate’s treasure map. When we found the Adventure, we thought we had made our fortune. It was incredible to see it on that monitor. And then to go down and actually witness it first-hand was…well, the experience was beyond words.” His eyes seemed to glow as he spoke, but the darkness quickly returned. “Then, to have this happen.”

  Questions started to form in Lisa’s mind, the cop in her overriding the emotion of her sympathy toward Jonathan.

  “If your friend had decompression sickness, couldn’t he have been hallucinating?”

  Jonathan stopped pacing and turned. “He could have, but the reason Dan surfaced in the first place was because something had terrified him to the point that he ignored his years of dive training. He saw something down there, and I think what he saw was something that had become reanimated, something that was alive that shouldn’t have been. It was just too much for his mind to handle.”

  For the sake of argument Lisa decided to throw rationality out the window. “You said you knew who the killer was. Do you think Blackbeard the pirate came to life down there and is now walking around killing people? Kind of like a zombie?”

  Jonathan casually walked back to the bar and took a seat. He crossed his arms on the bar and looked at Lisa. “What do you know about Blackbeard? I mean the real Blackbeard, not the fairy tale version.”

  She turned and walked slowly towards the refrigerator, her back to the man, considering the question, then stopped and spun around. “I just know that he lived in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and that he was greatly feared by sailors and merchants all along the east coast and even into the Caribbean. I also know that he was supposed to be in league with the devil. Everyone around here heard that story as a kid.”

  Jonathan smiled. “Aha! You just hit the nail on the head. He was supposed to be in league with the devil. But there is no supposition about it. He definitely was, and what’s more, that devil continued to occupy those bones even after the pirate’s death.”

  Lisa shook her head in disbelief. “Look, Mr. Jefferson—”

  “Jonathan, please.”

  “Jonathan, you’re a nice guy and I‘m sure you mean well, but—”

  “Have you ever heard of Diablero or the Death Defier?”

  Lisa’s heart rate suddenly jumped. She felt herself getting flushed as she recalled Hunter’s words on her answering machine.

  “How about Obeah?” Jonathan continued.

  “Go on,” she said quietly.

  “In Sonoran Indian lore, the Death Defier is a human that can cheat death and has the ability to transform into any kind of animal—a bird, a coyote, a wolf, anything. He must also feed off of the living in order to maintain his energy. Basically, he feeds on their—on our—souls.”

  Lisa narrowed her eyes. “How does he do that?”

  “I don‘t know. He just does it. He beheads the victim and captures their soul somehow, then that person becomes a part of the creature as he absorbs their life experience, their knowledge, their memories, everything about them.”

  Lisa was horrified to think of people suffering through such an experience. How would it be to look out at the world through the eyes of a monster, knowing there was nothing you could do to stop it and no possibility of escape?

  It would be hell on earth.

  She shuddered. “How do you know all this, anyway?”

  Jonathan smiled ever so slightly, as if hiding the world’s biggest secret. “I have inside information.”

  She took a drink of tea. “What kind of inside information?”

  “I know someone who knows something about what’s going on. In fact, you could say he wrote the book on the subject.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “Someone I’ve known for a long time, my whole life, in fact.”

  Lisa was growing frustrated, tired of playing games with this man. She wanted answers. “Okay, you said you knew who the killer was. Why don’t you enlighten me on that?”

  Jonathan frowned. “You mean you haven’t figured it out, yet?”

  “Hey, you came to me, remember?” Lisa said, getting pissed off at the rambling nature of this conversation. “Stop playing games and just spit it out. You think the bones of Blackbeard the pirate are walking around killing people because he’s some kind of reincarnated Diablero or whatever. Right?”

  He held up his hands in resignation. “Hey, you said it, not me.”

  But Lisa wasn’t giving in that easily. “But that‘s what you meant, wasn’t it? Edward Teach is alive and on his way to Virginia.”

  Jonathan nodded slowly. “Simply put, but that about sums it up.”

  Lisa wasn’t sure if she had just been victorious or if she was just being conned. But her gut told her, like it or not, the man sitting in front of her was not crazy and could be trusted. And her gut instinct was rarely wrong. The fact that everything Jonathan had said seemed in line with the message from Hunter was something she couldn’t ignore.

  “So what’s your plan?” she said.

  “First, we need to talk to someone in Charleston, South Carolina.”

  Lisa felt like she had just been punched in the gut. “Did you say Charleston?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  Lisa’s mouth hung open for a few seconds before she answered. “Nothing, it’s just that…” She trailed off, thinking of Hunter and wondering exactly what it was he had gotten himself into.

  Thirty-five

  John Aiden sat against a wall on the hardwood floor of his exhibit room, knees pulled up to his chin, watching the transformation before him play itself out. He could see no more signs of growth, but thought that perhaps there might still be something happening internally.

  As he had this last thought, however, the creature began to stir. A moan escaped its mouth, and Aiden froze with fear. Long, jet-black hair cascaded down onto the floor, obscuring the face from view, and he could just make out a beard of the same color sprouting from the chin.

  While Aiden watched, the head lifted slowly from the floor. The being sat upright, much in the same position Aiden had been. They stared at each other in apprehension. Its face was quite handsome, reminding Aiden of Errol Flynn, the old movie star, with a long, black beard. The eyes, however, green as the cold, bottomless north Atlantic, filled him with terror. They showed no signs of bewilderment or confusion, as they should have after such an ordeal, but rather were clear and focused on a purpose that Aiden could not begin to fathom. Looking at those eyes, he felt as though an eternity of knowledge and wisdom lay within. The man seemed to be sizing Aiden up, as if to decide whether he was of any value.

  Faster than Aiden’s brain could comprehend, the man was instantly transformed into a giant wolf-like creature, at least a hundred pounds heavier than the largest bear Aiden had ever seen.

  Aiden had no time to react as the thing g
rabbed him by his throat in a clawed hand and hoisted him off his feet. A snout smelling of rotted flesh puffed into his face. He felt his pants become wet in the crotch as he struggled to breathe. Aiden clutched at the immense, hairy appendage that held him, but it was like steel, solid and unyielding. He stopped struggling and tried desperately to communicate as the beast turned its heavy head slowly from side to side, like a dog inspecting its prey before devouring it. Rows of razor-sharp teeth glistened and dripped saliva. A deep-throated rumble came from within its huge body, warning of impending attack.

  Instead of attacking him, however, the beast relaxed its grip ever so slightly, allowing Aiden a gasp of air. His feet continued to dangle above the floor by at least a foot.

  Then, the thing spoke in a throaty, deep rasp that Aiden thought could only be the voice of a demon. “Speak,” it said.

  Aiden took a breath of stinking air and tried to choose his words carefully. To say the wrong thing could mean anything from decapitation to disembowelment. Finally, he croaked, “I…I,” he said with a strangled voice. The grip loosened a bit more. “I can help you,” he finally managed to say.

  “You?” the thing snarled. “How…can…you…help…me?”

  “I…I have a boat,” was all Aiden could get out before he began to slip into unconsciousness.

  The vise-grip around his neck suddenly loosened, and Aiden fell to the ground, sprawled out like a child who had just fallen off his bicycle. He looked up from the floor, expecting to see the wolf-creature staring back with feral, red-rimmed eyes, but instead saw the man who had been there before, hair hanging in black strands around his black-bearded face. Aiden felt relieved, rubbing his neck with a hand, trying to get some feeling back.

  The man stared down at him, like a lion eyeing a lamb. “Where is this boat?” the stranger asked.