by Joey Ruff
I couldn’t look at him. He was as raw and exposed as I felt, I could hear it in his voice.
“I don’t know how it happened, but those bastards let the kid slip. Eight years old, wearing a pair of dirty shorts and a vest made of charges, the boy ran towards our camp. Maybe he was ordered to take out as many soldiers as he could. Especially ranking officers. Hell, I don’t fucking know. I just saw his hand on that trigger and that resolve in his eyes. He would’ve fucking killed so many…” His voice broke, and he took a deep, steadying breath. “I was the only one with a gun close enough to act, brother. Someone screamed, and the gun was just there, in my fucking hand. I had the scope centered in on that boy’s head. It was just fucking instinct. It was what I was trained to do. I didn’t think. I just…”
I cautioned a glance toward him, saw the tears rolling off his cheeks as he stared at a cold spot on the tile where, for him, it was all playing out again in real time. “I pulled the fucking trigger, brother.” He closed his eyes. “Eight fucking years old.”
He was quiet for a minute, and I didn’t say anything. Didn’t know what to say. But my hand found his shoulder. “There’s some really fucked up shit, brother. We don’t ask for it. We’re just part of the show. My shit ain’t like yours. I know that.” He shook his head and stifled a laugh. “Oh god, I fucking know that. I don’t know what kind of shit’s going on in that head of yours, but I’ve had my ride.”
“How do you deal with it?” I said, my voice weaker than I’d hoped.
“I don’t know that I do….” He shook his head. “I just keep waking up. Different day, different problems. Eventually, and I can’t tell you how long, the old problems just aren’t as in focus. Some weeks, maybe, I go a few days without seeing that kid in my head. But I’ll be real honest, brother, that kid isn’t the only horror story I got. He wasn’t the first, and he won’t fucking be the last. But he sticks out.”
I nodded.
London looked over at me. He must have realized that he looked as bad as I did. I’m not sure why we did it, but we just laughed. It felt like a release.
“I need another beer,” he said. “You want one?”
“No,” I said. “Just water.” My throat was so dry. “A tall one.”
He nodded and stood. He offered me his hand, but I shook my head. “You go. Let me put some clothes on.”
Once he left, I stood and dressed, stopping in front of the mirror and seeing again that old familiar face staring back at me. I realized that the hollow eyes staring back at me were filled with fear.
I found London in the kitchen, and he handed me a tall glass of ice water as he chugged his beer. We didn’t say anything, just leaned against the counter and stared into the backyard through the large kitchen window. It was full dark outside. Nothing could be seen but a few stars in the distant sky and the dim light on the side of the barn. As I looked out the window and thought how peaceful everything appeared, something happened. The dogs started barking.
“Sir,” Chess said, appearing on the counter beside me. Chess never appeared when there was company, but the fact that London’s presence didn’t deter him suddenly filled me with dread. “There is a problem,” he added. “Four more intruders have just entered the house.”
26
Swyftt
“The Tree man’s business,” Huxley said. In his accent it came off as “Da Tree mahn’s bid-ness.” He was sitting on my shoulder like a sodding parrot. “That might actually mean something to me, Swyftt, if I knew who this Tree man was.”
“He’s… I don’t know. Butt-buddies with St. Clair. The preacher.”
“And that means, what?”
I walked away from the sign, crossing in front of the factory on the side nearest the road. I figured it was dark enough that nobody would see us. “It means the church was hit. It means the factory for one of the deacons was hit. What’s the common denominator?”
Hux didn’t say anything.
“They were both against Ezra,” I answered, scanning along the wall with my cell phone light.
“Are you saying you still believe Ezra is guilty of conducting the Ballad Nocturne?”
“I’m saying it’s looking more and more like she’s the number one suspect, is all. She’s a bloody practitioner, and it takes a talent more magical than musical to enact the spell. Also, she’s been conveniently absent since the Saksanai attacked her house. Not to mention, she’s a right dodgy cunt.”
“So you’ve said.”
“I don’t trust her, Hux. I know she was your wife and all, but…”
“I trust her less than you, Swyftt. About as far as I can throw her with these tiny little arms, honestly. Look at me, she made me into a poppet. And I was married to her.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming.”
“Just because the witch floats does not mean she’s made of wood.”
“If that’s a Monty Python reference, there should be something about a duck, in there, too.”
“Ezra is not behind the Ballad,” he said, ignoring me.
“I’ll file that under noted, but not fully believed. Since DeNobb said it, it’s been marinating. It’s those eyes, mate. There’s something dark behind them. Sure, she’s all young and pretty. Which, by the way, I don’t fucking understand how someone like that married you. No offense.”
Huxley didn’t say anything for a minute. As we rounded the corner of the building he said, “Who are you talking about?”
“Your bloody ex wife. Who the fuck else?”
“I was forty-seven when I died, Swyftt. Ezra was fifty-three.”
I stopped walking. Then I just laughed. I couldn’t help it. What he said made no sense. He had to have been joking. I looked over at the doll, unable to tell if he was serious or not.
“Ezra King was six years older than I,” Hux said. “And she was little more than a dabbler when I met her.”
I shook my head. “Of course. She fooled us all.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Ezra what we met, mate, what gave this doll of yours to Nadia, didn’t look a day over thirty and that’s being very generous.”
“That’s not possible. She would have to be more than sixty years old now.”
“Well, somebody should fucking tell her that. What did she do, find the Fountain of Youth?” Before he could answer, my phone rang. It was Ape. I didn’t have time for him. I hit the ignore button, and started walking again.
“Don’t you need to answer that?” Hux asked.
“He was looking something up for me, but I think I figured it out.” I shook my head. “Don’t worry about that. We were talking about Ezra. The Ballad. How does someone become Dorian Gray?”
“Plenty of spells, Swyftt, can reverse aging. None of them are good, of course. Aging is a byproduct of the curse. To go against that is to go against…”
“Which curse?”
“Original sin.”
“Right,” I said, feeling a little annoyed. Huxley was a devout Catholic, despite being a voodoo man. He believed the Holy Scriptures more than I ever did. “Adam and Eve and all that. Aging and death entered into God’s ‘perfect’ creation with the bite of a sodding apple.”
“For the record, nobody said it was an apple. We’ve been over this.” He was quiet for a second before adding, “You’re a lot more cynical than I remember.”
“Yeah, fuck you.”
“Regardless,” he went on. “Any spell of that nature would take far more power than she could conjure on her own.”
“St. Clair said before he came to town, she had a whole coven.”
“How long ago was that?”
“A few months, I guess.”
“And yet she looked as you say only this morning?”
“At first. Last I saw her, she looked ridden hard and put up wet.”
Huxley fell quiet for a minute as I brushed the flimsy boughs of a tall bush away from the wall and searched the bricks with my light.
“When we were
wed,” he said. “I taught her enough that she was able to go from dabbler to mambo, but it took a few years. For her to go from mambo to coven priestess on her own...”
“Sounds ominous.”
“It is certainly not good. She wouldn’t be stupid enough to brand herself….”
“Like with cattle?”
“Like the mark on your arm.” When he said it, my arm flared hot, sending cold, uncomfortable chills through me. I ignored it. “But yes, the analogy is not far off. It is a dangerous game to accept power from such a source.”
“What other source is there? Lay Lines? You said that…”
“Possibly. But I do not think mana energy would uphold a spell so dark. There would be dire consequences. Pure Creation energy used for such a dark spell would be catastrophic. Especially for her to maintain that level of power once the coven members were chased off. Perhaps together they could harness the power, but alone…”
As we came around the back corner of the factory, my light found the Ballad’s mark, the circle at the center of the X, in the middle of a peppermint swirl. This one looked a little less peppermint, given the forest green spray paint that had been used to put it there. It hadn’t even been hidden, either. It was just slapped up on the side of the building for all to see.
I swapped the phone over to camera and took a picture, switching back to flashlight as Huxley said, “Shine the light over there.”
I swung the light around to where he indicated. There was a spot, maybe a hundred yards down, where the brick exterior wall had been broken, pieces removed and cast around in the grass. No doubt, the damage had led to a hole in the wall that had since been covered by a makeshift patch of plywood. From the size of the patch board, I judged the hole behind it to be almost the size of a door, although stopping around waist level, rather than going all the way to the ground.
As I neared the area, the light cast shadows around the edges of the board. Looking closer, I saw the grooves in the remaining brick. They were narrow, shallow, and not very long. I didn’t need to use my ability to know the apes had been here and done this. Judging by the pattern of the grooves, the four close, sequential marks grouped together all around the edges of the board, I guessed they were from fingernails raking across the stone.
One of the corners of the board wasn’t fastened very tightly, and I was able to peel it back to look inside. It was completely black. I shone the light in, but there was nothing to see. The hole didn’t go all the way through.
I took a step back and looked around at the amount of brick scattered at my feet. Certainly, none of it had been taken. If I pulled the board back and took the time to piece the puzzle back together, it would likely make a whole picture. That got me thinking.
Huxley must have been thinking the same thing, as he said, “Vandals. Powerful forest guardians reduced merely to vandals. Whose interest does this serve?”
There was no real purpose to the destruction. The apes weren’t trying to cripple the factory or shut down production. They weren’t trying to get inside to steal anything, not looking for a meal, if indeed the plant continued to process chickens or some other food. From what I could see, it was just for show.
“So, if Ezra did do this,” I said. “What was her goal? Just to prove that she could? That seems an awful lot of trouble to go through.”
“I told you, Swyftt. It was not her.”
“Who then?”
“Still don’t know?”
I was growing impatient. “Why don’t you fucking tell me?”
“Go take a reading on the sigil down there.”
“You can’t just say it?”
“You will accept it faster if you see it for yourself.”
I sighed. “Fine.”
Maybe I did it to punish him, but I grabbed Hux from my shoulder and set him down on a rather thick chunk of stone on the lawn. Then I took my light and marched the distance back to the Ballad symbol, leaving him alone in the dark.
As I neared the sigil, I removed my gloves and set my phone down on the ground, letting the light shine up the wall. With my hand only inches from the paint, I could feel the throb of my gift, like an electric current surging. I also felt the burning of Aegir’s mark on my arm. I took a deep breath, ignored it, and put both palms directly against the rough brick.
The cold swept over me, like dunking head-first into a pool of ice water. It was a welcome change from the heat and humidity that had been accompanying me, but it didn’t last. The heat returned, but less intense, and the darkness remained. There wasn’t the light from my phone, just that of the moon casting a glow just around the small expanse of grass that existed between the factory and the forest.
I sat there for a while, it seemed. Something like a half hour. Maybe more. I think I may have fallen asleep. At the very least, I zoned out, listening only to the static drone of crickets, the intermittent bird calls, the rhythmic croaking of bullfrogs.
What pulled me out of my trance, was hushed whispering. It was almost like bickering. Bantering back and forth between two parties. It was quiet at first, but grew increasingly louder. It wasn’t long until I saw two lumbering shadow forms come into view. They were man-sized and man-shaped, definitely not skunk apes. It was too dark to see them beyond their dark clothing. The moon was above and behind them.
They wandered aimlessly for a minute, looking around, scanning the wall, the trees. Eventually, the shorter said, “Let’s just pick a spot and go. We don’t want anyone seeing us here.”
The taller turned directly to me and said, “Fine. This spot’s just as good as any.”
I recognized their voices, but I couldn’t immediately place them.
The taller one said, “Keep an eye out,” and stepped toward me. Toward the wall, rather.
The shorter said, “Do you remember what that symbol looks like?”
“I don’t have to remember,” the taller one said, producing a can of spray paint seemingly out of nowhere. “He wrote it down for me.”
“St. Clair?”
The taller one stopped shaking the spray paint and turned to look at his partner. I caught just a glimpse of his face in the moonlight. Just the cheek. Just enough to see his pale skin. “Did you say St. Clair? Are you stupid, Baylor? St. Clair doesn’t know shit. He thinks what attacked him was that bitch’s golem or whatever.” He turned away, looking the wall over, and gave the can another good shake. “The preacher man only plays the music. He’s fucking clueless.”
The man lifted the can and started spraying, moving his arm in a wide, arcing motion. Behind him, his partner said, “I don’t think that’s right, man.”
The tall one stopped, lowered the can, and turned around. “It’s right. Look at the stupid picture.”
The short one pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and used a pen light to look at it. From what I could tell, the paper bore the sigil, which wasn’t a surprise. What was a surprise, was the reflected light above either breast pocket. The first came from the gold-plated nametag that read “Baylor.” The other came from a silver police shield.
That was why I recognized the voices. They were at the church. Baylor must be the name of the smart-mouthed partner, which would make the taller vandal Officer Brisbane.
My list of suspects just narrowed significantly. St. Clair was involved. I heard that much from their own mouths. He played the music. The cops did the grunt work, and the one that drew the sigil had to be none other than the Tree Man himself.
The question now, was why.
27
I drove ninety down the back roads. Part of it was that I was in a hurry. Mostly, it was because I was so angry at the cops I was daring them to pull me over. Maybe it would be Brisbane and his little buddy, Baylor.
Hux was sitting in the passenger seat atop the phone book that now stood open to a residential address. “This isn’t a good idea,” he was saying.
“Fuck that, Hux. I’m tired of being fucking lied to.”
“We’ll get Nadia back. You don’t have to do anything extreme.”
“Who’s planning anything extreme? I’m just going to ask the lying fuck twat a few questions. So long as nobody gets in my bloody way, it’ll be easy peasy.”
“Jono…”
“Don’t fucking start with me.”
“I understand what you’re feeling. I do….”
“How can you understand? It’s my fault. Nadia’s in trouble because of me. You always said, rule number one. The best weapon is knowledge. I didn’t have all the facts. I was ill-fucking-equipped. And now she’s been taken.”
“Nadia can take care…”
“NO!” My voice was a roar. Deep and guttural, animalistic. Hux stopped short, and cold chills swept over me. I felt a little guilty, but didn’t say anything. I was done feeling helpless. This shite was ending tonight. One way or another.
We turned down a quiet residential street, neat, tidy houses with neat, tidy yards lining both sides. It was idyllic. I was still going almost sixty and slowed as I read the house numbers on the mailboxes.
“Twenty-four-fourteen, twenty-four-twenty. What’s the fucking number?”
“Twenty-four-fifty-two.”
I stopped in front of the house, pulling up alongside the curb facing the wrong direction and slammed the car into park, turning off the engine. As I opened the door, I told Huxley, “Stay here.”
Before the door shut behind me, I heard him say, “That’s really not a good idea.”
The house wasn’t big, but it wasn’t little, either. Just a one-story colonial house with a covered porch across the front, white with grey shingles. There were hanging pots with ferns between the pillars.
