Protectors of the Veil

by Dawn Matthews

“Oh, good. Whatever is best for the organization,” Josh said. “I am in the dark about a lot of reasoning behind what we do, and I know the small amount of truth that I do know is a drop in the ocean of knowledge. I also know that what we’re doing is important. I put my full trust in you and Atum’s decisions.”

  “That is all very true. Our methods might seem extreme to those that don’t understand why we do what we do. However, all of existence is at stake. I thank you for being a part of our team,” Van said.

  “Thanks, man, I appreciate that.” Josh looked up and realized they had already reached their destination. They were in a park, and there was only one person there. It had to be Daniel Silva.

  Van spoke into Josh’s head, “He is speaking with the sacrifice, but the sacrifice is fading and almost gone.”

  “What do you mean ‘fading and almost gone?’” Josh thought back.

  “His energy is being used, that’s what happens to sacrifices. Their energy is used to perform high energy tasks,” Van said matter-of-factly.

  “Do we wait until the sacrifice is gone?” Josh asked.

  “Yes, it will just be a moment,” Van replied. About a minute later, Van said, “Okay, he’s gone. Silva does not understand what happened.” He began walking toward the man and Josh fell a step behind.

  Silva was screaming, “WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE DID YOU GO?” He was panicking.

  “Daniel Silva?” Josh said. “I’m Agent Josh Green and this is my partner Van.” Josh noticed that the man’s eyes were flitting back and forth between the two. Sometimes mediums can see them, sometimes they can only see Order. Either this one could see Chaos as well, or Van was showing himself. Josh wasn’t sure which. They both flashed their badges quickly. The man was small, thin, and skittish. He started backing up.

  “We just want to ask you some questions.”

  “NO!” Daniel yelled, “YOU’RE TRYING TO SILENCE ME!”

  Van hadn’t taken his eyes off the man; he was clearly trying to decide if the man could be saved or not. His decision was visible. Daniel started to go slack and drool. He was kneeling on the grass, his hands covering his head. It was like his brain turned to mush before Josh’s eyes, which was more or less what Van had done to him.

  “Wow, I didn’t know you guys could do that. Why do we send Sam in if you can do this?” Josh asked.

  Van shrugged, “There are no people around right now. Imagine if someone was close enough to see what just happened? It would have been obvious that something was amiss. We can’t take those kinds of chances. However, if there is no risk, why make Sam do all the dirty work? He will not recover, nor will he ever speak again. You will drop him off at a local hospital, tell them you found him wondering the street. I will remain invisible until we get back to the garage.”

  Josh did what he was told. He took Silva to a local hospital. He told them he saw the man on the side of the road and that he was drooling. He couldn’t get a response from him, so he brought him to the hospital. When Josh returned to the car and shut the door, they were immediately back in the garage.

  CHAPTER 15: BEFUDDLED

  Sam decided to peek at the case Bertha just gave to Josh Green. She was confused and not sure how to feel about the human sacrifice thing. It LOOKED as if the Team was on the side of Chaos, but as far as she knew human sacrifice was not something Chaos was into. She had an excuse to go talk to Atum and clear things up since Bertha burst into her office. Maybe this is what Bertha was wigging out about. She doubted it, but it was worth a shot.

  Sam walked down the hallway to the secret closet that took her to the ship. Atum was sitting at his desk waiting for her. She knew they could read minds, but sometimes she forgot. “Oh, hello…sir.” She saluted him like her military training had taught her to do. There was no protocol for an interdimensional God, so that would have to do.

  “At ease, Samantha,” he said to her. He was very understanding when it came to the customs of humans. “I take it this is about Bertha in a roundabout way.”

  He knew, damn it; she could keep nothing a secret from Atum. “I guess you know what this is about.”

  “I do,” Atum said as he folded his fingers together, “but you go ahead.”

  “No,” Sam said, “Let’s cut to the chase. You know why I’m here. I kill for many reasons, but killing someone as a sacrifice was never on my list of things that were okay.”

  “I disagree,” Atum said gently, “every person you kill is as much a sacrifice as the man that was eaten on the moon. You are correct about the Team being on our side. You’re afraid that we’re like the opposition. I can assure you that, while there are undoubtedly similarities; our side is not insane. Let me tell you a story:”

  “OVERBOARD”

  Three police detectives were joking around a desk when a uniformed police officer handed Det. Gary Hall a piece of paper with an address on it.

  “Sorry to break this up,” she said, “but duty calls.” She walked away before the men could say anything. They all just groaned.

  Gary looked down at the paper and went to his desk with his coffee thermos. He took the lid off and pulled open the bottom desk drawer where he hid the whiskey. He dumped in as much as the thermos would allow and hid the whiskey bottle back in the drawer. After screwing the lid back onto the thermos, he locked the drawer. He knew it was going to be a bad day. Every day was a bad day. He took a big swig of the hot liquid with his eyes closed. When he opened them, his partner was standing in front of him.

  “You need to lay off that shit before you get fired,” he said.

  “Every homicide detective drinks…eventually. Don’t worry, Talbert, one day you’ll be the detective with whiskey locked in a drawer and having a young rookie lecture you on how to keep the job that you’ve been doing for 20 years,” Gary replied.

  Gary stood and put on his beige trench coat and hat. It wasn’t a requirement of the Baltimore PD to wear a hat and trench coat. It was kind of like how cultists wear robes before doing rituals; the trench coat triggered a switch in his brain. It turned him from Gary to Homicide Detective Gary Hall. No matter how much he drank, his mind was sharpened when he put them on. He used to watch Columbo and all the other great detectives who wore a trench coat and hat. The image of detective was solid in his mind, and he didn’t feel like a real detective without a trench coat and hat.

  He adjusted the rim on his hat, grabbed his thermos, and quickly walked to the garage. His partner, Joe Talbert, hurried to keep up. The two got in Gary’s car and drove to the crime scene.

  The location was a dock on the Chesapeake Bay. Gary parked the car and the two men made their way to the body. At the boat, they were met by Officer Patricia Gund. “Gund, what’s going on?” Gary asked.

  “Detective Hall,” she said and sighed, “we’ve got a hell of a mess on our hands.”

  “What happened? You got any details?” Gary asked.

  “Not much, but I’ll give you what we’ve got. One Felix Jones, approximately thirty years of age. According to his friends, they were here staying on the boat for a few days. He had a strange encounter with a man that was very odd, their words, not mine,” she said.

  “Odd how?” Gary asked.

  “Maybe you should hear it straight from them,” she said. She looked very uncomfortable with the whole thing. That was odd for a cop that had been looking at dead bodies for decades.

  “You’ve been on the force for a long time, Trish, why has this case got you rattled?” Gary asked.

  She sighed again before speaking. “We have seen weird shit before, but nothing like this. The way the guy was killed is just strange. The witnesses heard strange chanting before the...incident. Our guy went out to check on the noise and was strangled. They saw something jump off the boat and into the water. They found their friend and this was beside him.” She held up a plastic bag with a small statuette of some kind of sea monster. It looked to be carved of some kind of stone. It had peculiar markings on the bottom, like some sort of strange h
ieroglyphics. “This is some creepy shit, Hall.”

  Suddenly they heard a splash and some screaming coming from inside the boat. They ran in and saw some very freaked out police officers, coroners, and witnesses. There was tape around an area, but no body.

  “What the hell just happened?” Gary asked.

  At first, nobody said anything. They were all in shock. They brought the paramedics in and treated everyone for shock. Everyone wanted taken somewhere else, anywhere but the docks or near the water.

  Once everyone was taken to the hospital, Gary questioned them all with Talbert in toe. First, he wanted to know what happened on the boat when the body disappeared. Gary decided the coroner was the person he should ask first.

  “How you doin’ Frank?” he asked.

  “I’m still pretty shaken,” Frank replied. “I don’t think I’ll ever be the same again.”

  “Wow, what the hell happened? What did you see?” Gary asked.

  “I was bent over the body checking out those neck wounds. I saw something, movement, out of the corner of my eye on the deck. When I looked up, I saw...” Frank stopped talking. His face went white as a sheet as he was clearly reliving what he saw.

  “Frank?” Gary said.

  Frank looked up with haunted eyes. “You’ll never believe me. I saw it and I don’t believe it,” he said shakily.

  “Just tell me what you saw. I’ve known you a long time, I know you’re not insane,” Gary said trying to reassure Frank.

  Frank nodded and took a deep breath. “This is so crazy. I saw some kind of weird fish people. They had webbed hands. There were three of them. Two were like fish and one was more like a cephalopod. It had tentacles on its face. They weren’t the ones that took the body though, THREE GIANT TENTACLES FLEW THROUGH THE DOOR, GRABBED THE BODY, AND DRUG IT OVERBOARD WITH A HUGE SPLASH! I SWEAR THAT’S WHAT I SAW!”

  Gary nodded, “Okay Frank, it’s going to be okay. You let the doctors treat you. I’m going to get a statement from everyone else.”

  “You don’t believe me! They’ll all tell you the same thing!” Frank said.

  “I’m sure they will, Frank, but you know this is procedure,” Gary reassured him.

  Frank nodded and sighed, “I’m sorry, Gary. I’ve been a skeptic of everything since I was a child. I’ve never seen anything unusual. I’ve heard other people say they saw weird stuff and I laughed and made fun of them. I was an atheist, now my world has been turned upside down. it’s like my feet are no longer on solid ground.”

  Gary nodded, “I understand, Frank. You’ve been through a lot tonight. Do you need me to call anyone? I don’t think you should be alone right now.”

  “Nah, thanks Gary,” he replied. “I called my wife a few minutes ago, she’s on her way. She’s going to laugh her ass off, she’s been a believer of supernatural and weird shit forever.”

  Gary smiled, “Hey, maybe this will improve your marriage.”

  “Hahaha, that would be something, wouldn’t it?” Frank said.

  “You take it easy, Frank. Good luck with the wife,” Gary winked at him.

  “Thanks, Gary, I may need it. Good luck to you on this case. You both be very careful,” Frank said. “This might be the most dangerous case you’ve ever been on.”

  Gary and Joe stopped in the hallway before questioning anyone else. “What do you make of that?” Joe asked.

  Gary sighed, “I don’t know what to think. Frank is one of the most stable, straight-laced guys I know. He tends to be very realistic. He won’t even watch movies that have any kind of fantasy in them. I can only figure something unusual happened. Let’s see what these others say.”

  “What if they all corroborate his story?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t know,” Gary said, “maybe there were men dressed as fish?”

  “And the tentacles?” Joe asked.

  “It’s too early to tell,” Gary said. “We need to get the statements of what happened recently and also about the fight our victim had with the other boater. We need to find the boater and question him as well. He has to be tied into this somehow.”

  Joe nodded and they went to the next witness’s room. Each witness told the same story.

  “There is a discrepancy, some describe two fish men while others describe three,” Joe said.

  “No,” Gary said, “if anything that makes the story more credible. They were all sitting in different positions. Some people would only have been able to see two from where they were sitting.”

  “Surely you don’t think this story is real?” Joe asked.

  “I’m not sure what to think at this point. I do know that every one of those people saw something and believe they saw fish people and giant tentacles. We need to talk to this other guy, Karl Brody,” Gary said. “And don’t call me Shirley.”

  “What do you mean?” Joe asked.

  “You’re too young to have seen Airplane, go find it online some time,” Gary said.

  They had also asked the witnesses about Karl Brody and Felix Jones. Again, the witnesses all told the same story. Felix Jones and five of his friends (the witnesses) were coming to his new boat for a day of relaxation. They had planned on catching their dinner and spending the night under the stars on the sea. While they were loading the boat, Karl Brody ran into Jones’ girlfriend, knocking her into the water. The witnesses inferred that Brody did it on purpose. It was pure conjecture, but it was certain that Jones believed he did it on purpose. After the girl was fished out of the water, Jones got in Brody’s face accusing him of pushing her intentionally. They all said Brody was very strange. He looked more “like those fish people” than a man. He walked with a limp, which is why Gary Hall figured he probably knocked the girl in the water by accident. All the witnesses said that Brody told Jones to “watch himself.” Brody tried to walk away when Jones grabbed him by the shoulder and punched him in the face. The others told Jones to leave Brody alone. Brody looked into Jones’ eyes and said, “You will pay.” Then he walked away.

  Brody lived on his boat with his brother.

  “Good evening, sir,” Gary said. “My name is Detective Gary Hall, and this is my partner, Detective Joe Talbert.”

  Both men showed their badges to the man. He looked deformed. As the witnesses stated, he did resemble a fish or something that came out of the sea. The man said nothing, so Gary continued. “We are looking for Karl Brody. Are you Karl Brody?”

  “Why? What you want with him?” The man spoke strangely. He slurred his words as if his mouth were having trouble forming the words. It was a very small mouth, at least in width. Well, it was similar to the mouth of a fish. Gary noticed the man’s fingers were webbed.

  “A man whose boat was parked a few boats down has died, and we were told that Karl Brody had run into him yesterday. We just want to ask a few questions,” Gary said as reassuring as he could.

  “He a suspec’?” the man asked.

  “We’d just like to cover all our bases. It’s purely protocol. Do you mind if we come aboard?” Gary asked. He wanted to go inside to see if there were any other artifacts in the boat that matched the one they found on Felix Jones’ boat.

  The strange man stared at them for a few minutes before saying anything. Instead of answering the question, he yelled, “KRL” which Gary surmised was his version of Karl.

  A few minutes later a man came lumbering out of the cabin. He looked similar to the man called him out. “Karl Brody?” Gary asked.

  “Yeah?” Karl said.

  “I’m Detective Gary Hall and this is my partner Detective Joe Talbert.” Again, both men showed their badges. “We’d like to ask you about something that happened to you yesterday. May we come aboard and talk with you?”

  “What is this about?” Karl asked.

  “Please, sir, let us come on the boat and speak to you. It’s just a formality. We found a body three boats down from yours and we understand the man attacked you. We would like to hear your story,” Gary made sure to sound like he was on his
side to gain the man’s trust.

  “A’ight den,” he said. “C’mon up.”

  Karl walked back into the cabin. The sun seemed to bother him. The two detectives followed. Upon walking into the cabin of the boat, they noticed a lot of artifacts similar in design to the one found with the body of Felix Jones. There was no doubt in Gary’s mind that Brody was connected to Jones’ death. The question was how.

  “Would you mind telling us in your own words what happened between you and Jones the day of his death?” Gary asked.

  Brody gave a similar story, of course, his version said he knocked the girl into the water by accident and Jones hit him. For the most part, the story was the same.

  “What did you mean ‘he would pay for it?’” Gary asked.

  “He dead now, i’nt he?” he said.

  “And why is he dead?” Gary asked, thinking maybe this case wouldn’t be so difficult to solve after all.

  “Deep onz” he said.

  “Deep ones?” Gary asked. “What are deep ones?”

  “Kin,” was all he said.

  “Your family? Why do you call them deep ones?” Gary asked.

  Karl got up and motioned for them to follow him. He went to the back of the boat where there was an open wall to the bay. There was a ramp leading to the water. There was nothing else. No dingy, no jet ski, just a ramp. Karl looked at them and smiled as much as he could. It was full of menace. He walked to the ramp and tapped on it. He stepped back to a corner and started laughing. Gary and Joe both looked out to the water to find what was so funny. They didn’t wonder for long; a giant tentacle rose from the water and climbed up the ramp. Both men screamed and headed for the exit at the other end of the boat.

  They were not fast enough. One tentacle grabbed Joe’s leg and pulled him toward the water. Gary chased after him and grabbed his hands. He pulled as hard as he could, but it wasn’t enough. The creature was too strong, and Gary was pulled off his feet. When he hit the ground, the wind was knocked out of him and he couldn’t hold on to Joe’s arms. Another tentacle appeared on the ramp after Joe was taken under. Gary fled the boat as fast as he could. Once on the dock, he ran to his car. He drove off as fast as he could. He wasn’t sure if the creature could come on dry land or how far those tentacles could reach but he wasn’t sticking around to find out.