Ibenus (Valducan series)

by Seth Skorkowsky

"Put the weapon down!"

  The man straightened. "Move!" He charged, swinging his sword.

  Victoria fired. But the man was instantly on the other side of the hall, still closing in.

  He swung. She fired again, but the man was now a full meter from where he should have been.

  James screamed and slammed into Victoria from behind. The gun fired harmlessly into the wall as she pitched forward. Her foot slipped on a discarded bottle. A white-hot shock of pain exploded from her rolling ankle and she fell onto the gritty floor.

  The sound of ripping fabric and an awful clicking, and James' screams silenced.

  Teeth clenched, Victoria twisted around to see an enormous man-sized insectile creature on top of James. Its cluster of scythe-like mandibles clacked madly against each other. Two of its four arms ended in long, serrated points. It raised one and slashed down into James' shoulder.

  He screamed again and bashed his baton against the monster's head to no effect. The beast rammed its blade-like arm straight down into James's chest. He coughed blood but continued to bat his stick against his attacker.

  Victoria screamed. She raised the still smoking gun and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  Then the sword-wielding stranger was above her. The creature's head snapped towards him. Before it could move, the man slashed his blade into its back. Its chitinous shell split with a loud crack. The monster hissed and lashed one of its blade arms, slinging James' blood across the walls.

  Dodging the wild swing, the stranger ripped the sword free. He vanished and was suddenly directly behind the monster, his weapon coming down into the back of its skull.

  Cool blue flames burst from the monster's mouth.

  "No!" Victoria cried as the burning monster collapsed on top of James. She reached for him and the stranger took a wary step away. Blue fire flickered along his golden brown sword.

  "It won't burn him," he said. "But he does need an ambulance."

  The strange fire spread over the creature's body but hadn't ignited James' clothes yet. He gasped weakly. The blood pooling beneath him was black in the spectral light.

  One hand still on his sword, the stranger grabbed the dead monster by the shoulder and rolled it off James. The fire didn't seem to hurt him at all. The creature didn't appear to be burning either. There was no smoke. No heat.

  Footsteps thundered up the hall. The second man, the big one, was racing toward them. He held a flanged medieval mace. "Are you all right?" he asked with the deepest voice Victoria had ever heard.

  "Yeah," the swordsman said.

  The big man looked down at Victoria. Instinct told her to look away. The men might kill her if they thought she could ID them. But the brief glimpse at his masked face revealed that he was black.

  "Who are they?" he asked. That accent? French?

  "Police." He tore open James' bloodied shirt and winced. "This one's banged up bad."

  The big man growled rather than grunted his agreement. "We need to go."

  "Yeah. Hey," he said to Victoria.

  She looked at him.

  "You hold this here," he said, motioning to the ball of torn shirt he pressed against James' chest. "In one minute, call 999."

  James moaned.

  "Who are you?" Victoria asked, reaching a tentative hand for the rag. Hot blood squelched between her fingers.

  The swordsman rose. "Tell them whatever you wish but the truth. No one will believe you."

  "Come on," the Frenchman urged. "Let's go."

  "Who are you?" Victoria repeated. Tears of fear and rage welled in her eyes.

  The big man was already headed down the stairs. The swordsman started after but looked back at her. "I'm sorry this happened to you both." Then he was gone.

  Chapter Two

  Two weeks ago:

  "What have we here?" Victoria leaned in toward her monitor, trying to make out the magnified, pixelated shape. She saw a scarecrow with a stag's head, but only because the description called it that. To her, it looked like a strange tree. Why did all sighting photographs have to be so damned dark? She sipped her lukewarm tea and copied the image, saving it to her 'Monsters' file under the name, 'Wendigo?'

  The phone beside her erupted into Phantom of the Opera, giving her a start. Victoria eyed it, wishing it to disappear. Only one person had that ringtone.

  The caller ID only verified what she knew. Shit. Sunday already?

  Victoria straightened in her seat, cleared her throat, smiled fakely, and picked it up. "Hi, Mum."

  "Victoria, how are you going?" Mother asked in an overly-cheerful manner.

  "Oh, I'm doing much better. Everything's…" She scanned the filthy flat, every surface cluttered with food wrappers, dirty dishes, loosely arranged rainbows of Post-it Notes, tissues, dirty clothes, and unpaid bills. "…great."

  "Wonderful. And…therapy is going well?"

  There it was, straight for the throat. No small talk, no skirting it, just the principal concern: 'Are you still mad?'.

  "Well," Victoria said, forcing the smile to remain. Mother could always hear a frown. "We've made a lot of progress. Doctor Abbington believes the trauma of my attack and DC Kettington's death caused only a temporary hallucination. But he still wants to make sure my recovery is complete, you know."

  "Good, good. That's wonderful dear. So…CID will take you back soon?"

  "Looks promising." She ran her fingers through her blonde, uncombed hair.

  "Wonderful, dear. I'm so happy to hear that. It's been so terribly hard for you, I know. Soon it can just return to normal."

  Normal, she thought with a bitter smile. "I can't wait. Listen, Mum, this is a bad time. I was just about to head out?"

  "Oh. Plans?"

  "Yes, I'm meeting a friend."

  "A man friend?" Mother asked with that leading edge. Now that the first business was done she could begin her normal nagging. Mother seemed to believe that Victoria being single at twenty-five was the single greatest tragedy since Margaret Thatcher's resignation.

  "That is none of your concern," Victoria said. If she was going to lie she figured she might as well go for it. "But, as a matter of fact, yes. And…I'm running late."

  "Best not to leave him waiting," Mother said, a delighted spark in her tone.

  "I won't. I'll talk to you next week, Mum."

  "And you can tell me all about him."

  "I will. Love you."

  "I love you too, dear."

  Victoria clicked the phone off and released a tired sigh. Eventually she'd have to explain that CID had let her go. While they might have been able to look beyond her entering the building without calling it in, an action that resulted in James' death, her fantastic story of baby-faced monsters and giant insects had made it unsalvageable. By the time anyone had arrived, the dead bugs had become rats and a small dog that had been missing for the previous week. The burning monster had turned into an Oliver Grey, a truck driver who had also been missing for nearly a month. There was of course no trace of the knife that been used to kill DC Kettington or the blade used in the death of Mister Grey. Then there was the illegal firearm that, even though she had claimed was found at the scene, contained James' fingerprints on the brass casings. Once it was all put together, the conclusion was that Victoria's career was over.

  Her mind again focused on the two men and whoever had been driving that van. Who were they? How did that one move the way he did, seeming to teleport? The strange sword was a bronze khopesh, an Egyptian weapon. She'd been able to figure out that much. Victoria had assumed the primitive weapons were for silence, but why those particular ones?

  But that was only the very tip of the iceberg. What were those monsters? Oh she'd told her therapist she believed it was a terror-induced fantasy, but she knew better. Why did they change after death? What was with that eerie fire that didn't burn?

  Suspension, then unemployment, had provided ample time to search for the answers
and, like most things these days, the internet knew all.

  There were websites and uploaded videos. Some called them monsters, others said aliens, or the living power of Satan. Conspiracies upon conspiracies. Victoria would have written them off as nutters once, and some undoubtedly were. But now, finding herself lumped in with them, she could see sages among the madmen. All she had to do was sort the wheat from the chaff, as they used to say in CID. She read and watched every single one she could find. The comments below the videos insulted their creators, laughing about tin foil hats. But one in fifty was a kindred soul, someone who sheepishly confessed, 'I, too, have seen something.'

  And while she did share this with her newfound contemporaries, Victoria possessed something they didn't: Cop Instinct.

  She was a detective. Searching chaos for patterns was what she did, and she was bloody damned good at it. Those men were out there. The facts were out there. She only had to gather and sort them.

  Victoria had files upon files, a bulletin board shingled in scrawled notes and printed photographs. She had grid-work of information laid out before her couch like tarot cards. She would find the truth.

  The stories were always different. The weapons, the monsters, nothing was the same but yet it was.

  One mobile-phone video showed a madman with a machete chasing a man through a New Orleans street. Then the would-be victim hurdled a three meter fence and ran off with unbelievable speed. Another, a shaky video from Rio, captured a woman in nothing more than a thong, battling a huge flaming man on a hotel balcony. She cut his head off with a sword to a burst of pyrotechnic fire. Further research on this revealed that while considered a Carnival stunt at the time, police found a real body. It wasn't burned, but there were other burn marks at the scene. The suspect had used a fake ID and was presumably still at large. This led her to researching stories that involved archaic weapons.

  Victoria found a security feed from the mid-90s that showed a woman holding a spear step directly through a brick wall as if it wasn't there. A body was later found inside the building she had entered. Stabbed to death. From Japan, there came a video of a man with a bladed staff outrunning a car. A long-range video from Australia showed a person launch a bolt of lightning out of what appeared to be an axe, and killing a man in fire. Like with Rio, and with her own personal experience, the recovered body was nude and wasn't burned.

  One insane theorist brought up how many of the murder sites had lurid pasts. Not discounting anything any more, Victoria researched this and found it also true. There were patterns. So many patterns that it couldn't possibly be coincidence. Could it?

  She researched each site before the videos and pictures had been made, also finding a distinct fingerprint. Old deaths, recent deaths, unexplained sightings and phenomenon, and then nothing. Sometimes a body, usually naked. Sometimes an arson with a burned body inside. Then the killings stopped.

  This only reminded her of her own debut in this secret play. The videos of giant ants, then the men appearing in their clandestine black van, a nude corpse, and then the ants were forever gone.

  Yes, this was all related.

  She could find these men. It didn't matter if they were Illuminati, agents of the Catholic Church, aliens, or the bloody Knights Templar, she would find them.

  Victoria re-read a recent forum post. Someone had seen a monster. No one believed them. No one but Victoria and a few of her kindred new family.

  She would go there. She would watch. James had taught her well. Victoria would have her answers, prove she wasn't mad. She'd do it the Manchester Way.

  Chapter Three

  Present day:

  Gerhard sat on a hard bench, peering at his tablet and trying not to watch the uniformed school children. At least, he hoped to appear as if he weren't watching them. They talked and giggled, their bored eyes passing over the relics safely encased behind glass and lit with clean white lights. His fingers tightened as the children reached the half-circle weapon display, its blades thrusting outward like a steel-spoked star.

  Did they notice it? Could they see its beauty?

  They shuffled past, none seeming to fathom the flawless magnificence before them.

  Their teacher herded them onward, deeper into the museum, toward the Aboriginal Collection. Their footsteps and chatter faded off down passage, leaving him alone once more.

  Gerhard released a shallow breath. No one had seen it. While he wanted to shout, "Look! How can you be blind to such perfection?" he enjoyed the knowledge that no one but him knew the secret.

  Licking his lips, he rose and slowly approached the high window separating him from that perfection. There, second from the top, a polished keris, the graceful curve of its wooden grip beckoning to be held. Gold erupted at the wide base of its blade, trailing down along it like dragon scales, following its waving curves. Thirteen there were, undulating back and forth, back and forth, hypnotically. Gerhard's palms began to sweat as he studied the dark steel of the blade, the folds of different metals like wood grain.

  Oh, there were more elaborate ones than this, true. Its neighbor with its ivory and jeweled handle and decadent blade. It only had nine waves, not the masterwork thirteen of his. His, as he now thought of it, was elegant in its function and simplicity. Sheathed it would be restrained, not gaudy, holding its gold and art within the plain scabbard like a beautiful secret only known when drawn.

  Gerhard looked around, verifying that he was alone. He was positioned so the black domes of the security cameras could not observe as he lifted the tablet to his chest and snapped a picture of his keris. He had done this act many times in the three weeks since he first saw it. Nearly two hundred photos he had now, each one capturing a new facet, a new hidden beauty that it had revealed to him.

  In those three weeks, Gerhard had devoured more knowledge of the Indonesian blades than he would have thought possible. He'd found many for sale online, hoping one might satisfy his need to hold it. Some were garbage. Many were works of art themselves, fetching thousands of euros. But none could match his. None could fill the void.

  He so wanted to touch it, hold it in his hands, feel the weight of it. He wanted to press it against his cheek, feel the cool, smooth metal against his skin. He wanted to taste it, wanted to absorb it into his own body and become one with it.

  Was he going insane?

  Movement at the corner of his eye, a reflection. Gerhard had become skilled at noticing these things, fear of someone walking in on these private moments.

  He sidestepped along the display and scanned the other relics, feigning admiration.

  Two men entered the room. Gerhard glanced back, smiling. One of them was old with white hair and sunken cheeks. He walked with a cane but stood straight. He smiled back. The man beside him was tall with broad shoulders, high, sharp cheekbones, and close-cropped blond hair. He looked more like a bodyguard than any son or grandson of the old man.

  "Indonesian keris blades," the old man said as he stepped up to the glass. The accent to his raspy voice sounded British. He turned to Gerhard, his sharp eyes friendly. "Beautiful, yes?"

  "Yes," Gerhard answered.

  "You must forgive me. My German is not so good. Do you speak French, English, Italian?"

  Gerhard pursed his lips. He'd taken a course in English but wasn't very skilled. "French."

  "Ah, good," the old man replied in smooth French. The British flavor was gone. He returned his gaze to the displayed weapons. "Which one is your favorite?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "The keris. I noticed you looking at them. Which is your favorite?"

  Paranoia tingled along the back of Gerhard's neck. He gave an embarrassed smile, hoping the hairs weren't standing on end. "There are…many beautiful ones."

  "There are," he agreed. "Do you know which one is my favorite?"

  Gerhard shook his head. How did he have a favorite? He just arrived. There hadn't been time to study them, see which one outshone the—
>
  "That one. Second to the left." He gestured with his cane. "Wooden handle. Gilded blade."

  "Mine as well," Gerhard gushed, a little too enthusiastically. "It's magnificent." He suddenly felt embarrassed by such excitement, but it felt so good to know someone else saw it.

  "It is," the old man said, seeming unfazed by the sudden outburst. "Sixteenth Century from Java."

  Gerhard blinked. "How do you know that? There's no card saying its age."

  The old man smiled. "I own this display."

  "Oh, I…I see," Gerhard stammered, fighting to hide the complete shock. This, this was the man who owned such a beautiful thing. What would that be like? And here he was blubbering like a destitute child introduced to a rich boy's toys. This man was laughing at him.

  The old man offered his hand. "Alexander Turgen."

  Gerhard looked at it a moment before accepting it. "Gerhard Entz."

  Alexander motioned to the blond man, warily watching from behind sawed-off glasses. "This is my associate Taras Orlovski."

  Taras nodded and Gerhard realized it wasn't wariness like a bodyguard, but more like a brother meeting his beloved sister's fiancé for the first time. "Good to meet you." His accent was Russian.

  Alexander motioned to keris. "Would you like to see it up close, Mister Entz?"

  Gerhard blinked.

  "I can arrange a private viewing." The old man winked. "I know people."

  "Yes. Yes, I would love to." Excitement fluttered through his stomach. He felt dizzy with it. A private viewing! Would they let him touch it? Surely not. He shouldn't get his hopes that high, but a private viewing! "When, when could we do that?"

  "You're here now."

  A knot clenched in Gerhard's chest. "I…my lunch is nearly over. I need to leave, but I can come back later today." His supervisor had already reprimanded him for tardiness from lunch this week. Further infractions would result in disciplinary measures.

  Alexander nodded understandingly. "But you'd much rather now." It wasn't a question. Simple truth.

  Gerhard slowly nodded. "I'll need to call my office. Let them know."