“Here we are,” Zack said. He turned and grinned at me. “Good luck.”
Valentine’s door was covered in BEWARE OF DOG and NO TRESPASSING and NO LOITERING signs as well as crucifixes. As far as I knew, she didn’t have a dog, no one had ever trespassed before, and she wasn’t religious.
I knocked lightly. So light, in fact, it was barely audible in the quiet of the alley. After about three seconds, I turned, ready to hobble my way to the parked Cruiser and said, “Welp, she’s not here. Let’s go to HQ.”
Maddie stopped me. “Not so fast,” she said. Then with her other hand she hit the heavy wooden door with her fist. Thunk-thunk-thunk.
From the other side of the door, I heard shuffling, then a squawking voice that reminded me of a bird drowning in peanut butter.
“Who goes there?” Valentine asked.
We didn’t answer, didn’t have time to answer, before the peephole slid open and one magnified eyeball shined in our direction.
“Oooooh, Abraham!” Valentine squawked.
Valentine was ancient, had been in the game for a long time. For some reason, she talked like an avid fan of William Shakespeare who had never read one of his plays.
Val did the things regular healthcare couldn’t fix. She could undo curses, exorcise demons, cure headaches, as well as stitch you up in a jiffy, all without much pain. Plus, she never asked you questions you couldn’t really answer truthfully to a regular doctor or nurse, like why you had a stake stabbed in your ass?
The door flew open and there stood the old woman. She wrapped two bony arms around my shoulders and squeezed me tight.
“I-I missed you, too, Val,” I said.
Then Valentine said, “Thou art so sweet!” and kissed me on the cheek with corpse-cold lips. My entire body convulsed at her touch, which brought up a flare of pain in my wound. “What endues thee to mine own house?” she asked. “I am fain thee hath caught me bef're I hath left. I am going on vacation lief.”
Translation: She was going on vacation soon and we’d either have to not get hurt or drive on to City Hospital to get our injuries fixed up.
Despite the weirdness, Val was pretty grandmotherly toward us, always pinching my cheeks and baking me goodies from one of her “ancient” recipe cookbooks (which usually tasted like grave-worms, and yes, I have had grave-worms in my mouth before). But the worst part of a visit to Val’s was—
Her eyes rolled backward, exposing the whites. She started moaning, which was a little too sexual for my tastes, and then she convulsed—also a little too orgasmically.
“I see…” Valentine murmured. “I see…”
Zack and Maddie slipped past her into the dank rat’s nest Valentine called a home, leaving me to stare into those murk-filled, rheumy eyes.
“Oh, the Aura tells me soooo much,” Valentine continued, her hand on my shoulder and now gripping me with all her might. Which wasn’t very much might at all.
Valentine was a psychic—and not a very good psychic at that. She was like an indecisive meteorologist when it came to telling fortunes.
“I see…rain!” she shouted. “And sunshine!”
Then her eyes rolled forward and her purplish pupils saw mine.
“You must be careful, Abraham, lest thou slip,” she said.
If that had a deeper meaning, I couldn’t begin to tell you what that was.
Behind her, Zack picked up a folded page from the Akron Beacon Journal and pointed to a strip of cartoonish suns and clouds and lightning bolts. The five-day weather forecast.
Rain and sunshine, he mouthed.
Maddie shook her head and slapped at Zack’s arm. She didn’t like it when we poked fun at Val.
And we weren’t making fun of her, not really. BEAST and its affiliates were full of zany characters. It was just right then I didn’t want to hear any fortunes. I just wanted my wound stitched up and then I wanted to go home and watch monster movies while I shed this weird night away like old skin.
“What didst thou trouble me with?” Val asked.
I turned around, showed her my torn flap of jeans and my hastily cleaned up wound.
“Got staked,” I said.
Val shook her head and made tsk, tsk, tsk sounds with her tongue. “Thy happens sometimes.”
“Not if you take your sunglasses off,” I mumbled loud enough for Zack to hear me.
He raised his eyebrows. “I couldn’t, man. You know that. I have to look cool.” He paused as he left the sitting area right off the front door and went into the kitchen. Then from there, he shouted, “Sorry your ass got in the way!”
I told myself that I’d say Sorry your face got in the way of my fist after I punched him, but knew I never would.
“Come, come hither,” Valentine was saying as she dragged me through the house. I maneuvered around stacks of old leather-bound books with symbols and runes I didn’t know the meaning behind, overflowing trashcans, more than one oddly shaped and age-weathered skull, and, at one point, even a cat. As far as I knew, same as the dog, Valentine didn’t have a cat. I shrugged it off. Her place was strange.
We passed the kitchen, where I noticed the refrigerator hanging open. Zack grimaced at the sight of a shrunken head in an old jar meant for pickles as he scanned for something to eat. After seeing the shrunken head and its face in a perpetual scream, I didn’t think I’d ever eat one of Valentine’s goodies again. Not even if you paid me.
Didn’t stop Zack, though. He was pulling out a package of cold cuts and a French’s squeeze-bottle of mustard.
“Look out!” Maddie said from behind me and if she hadn’t had said that I would’ve crushed the tarantula that was currently crawling through the hallway.
“Sorry,” I mumbled to the large and hairy thing. It looked up at me with red eyes and, I’m not kidding, waved one of its furry legs.
“My sincerest apologies,” Valentine said.
“It’s oka—” I began.
“No, not to you, Mr. Crowley. Bubba does not like it when I neglect to notify him of the arrival of guests.” Valentine looked at her wrist, which was bare, and said, “Especially at such a late hour.”
Bubba?
The tarantula disappeared into the shadows. Valentine, Maddie, and I navigated through the halls until we came upon the place known among BEAST operatives as The Torture Chamber.
It really wasn’t as bad as I make it out to be. But, whenever someone took a beating from Frankenstein’s Monster or had a scuffle with a pack of werewolves, this was the place Octavius would send you. Luckily for me, I’d only been on the “operating table” once before. It was during my first three months on the job. Valentine had told me that if you didn’t end up on the table in three months, then you weren’t doing your job right. Of course, she had said this all in her faux-Shakespearean dialect, but still, she was right. I also neglected to tell her the reason I had come to see her was because I’d slipped on a patch of ice while chasing a drug-dealing werewolf, who’d gotten away, I might add.
“Taketh off thy garb, Abraham,” Val said.
“Garb?” I asked.
“She means clothes,” Maddie said.
“I knew that—” I began.
“Stand ho thy arguing!” Val snapped.
We weren’t even arguing…
I didn’t really understand that, either, but I could tell by Val’s glare that she meant business. So I pulled my pants down until I was standing there in just my boxers. They had Christmas elves on them despite the holiday being about three months away. I bought a pack of X-mas themed underwear at Walmart. They were on sale. BEAST paid well, but not that well.
Maddie took one look at them and laughed. “I’ll be outside,” she said.
Thank God.
When Maddie left, I pulled my boxers down far enough for my wound to be exposed. Luckily, this meant that my man parts weren’t all up in Val’s face. Though, with the glasses she currently wore, which magnified her eyes about a hundred times larger, I was sure she could probably see
through my boxers anyway.
“Thy wound is not too deep,” Val said. “It shouldn’t require m’re than five stitches.”
Great, but I was hoping for just one.
On top of being a novice fortune teller, Valentine was a bit of a potions master herself, too. Thankfully, she was better at potions than she was at telling fortunes. So an injury such as mine would be right as rain in the morning after I downed one of Val’s homemade witch’s brews.
Still, stitches needed to be had.
Val cleaned the wound, really getting in there. Then, she got tweezers and said, “Thee might feeleth a slight pinch. You have splinters.”
In my ass, yeah, great.
I did feel a pinch, that was for sure, but it was over before I knew it. Then she numbed the skin with some liquid that looked to be in a spray bottle and began stitching me up. I only flinched a couple of times.
“And…completeth!”
“Thanks, Val,” I said. I stood up from the table and pulled my pants up.
“Oh, thou art not free yet, Mr. Crowley,” Val said. She turned her frail back on me and started rifling through the mechanic’s workstation that doubled as her medicinal storage. “Ah, there she blow!” And I was pretty sure that one wasn’t Shakespeare but was from Moby Dick or maybe some pirate book I’d never heard of.
She then handed me a clear flask filled with purple liquid about halfway to the cap. The contents inside were murky, like weird pond water. Honestly, this was one of the better looking “potions” I’ve seen. Once, Zack told me Val had him drink a bear’s menstrual blood after a particularly nasty run-in with a mummy.
Now that I was looking at the potion, I wanted to know what I was about to drink. Knowing I’d have to drink it anyway, I popped the top off of the flask and chugged the mixture down like I’d seen the countless winos in the cities do during my travels.
The liquid burned my throat, but once it settled in my stomach, I felt a pleasant buzzing swarming through my muscles. It was the kind of feeling you get when you’re just about to fall asleep, drifting toward unconsciousness, floating—or if that description doesn’t work for you, it was the same feeling one gets while hopped up on pain meds, Vicodin or Percocet, say.
“Better?” Val asked.
I nodded. “Much better.”
“Most wondrous. Now headeth home and rest.”
“I will.” I had no other plans that night, not after we stopped by Octavius’s office.
I wrapped my arms around Val, catching her off-guard. It was my way of saying thank you. Except, when we touched, I felt something—something I hadn’t felt before.
A spark.
No. Not the type of spark you’d read about in some gushy romance novel. Something darker.
I jumped backward, grabbing my hand and wincing. The movement broke through the numbness below the belt and that didn’t help much in the looking tough department. Just as I opened my mouth to ask what the heck just happened, I saw Valentine had slipped back into her fortune-teller self.
Except…something was different about the way she acted now.
A fresh frothing of spit dribbled from the corner of her lips. Lips, which were peeled back in a grimace, reminding me of a skull. Her eyelids fluttered like the wings of a butterfly on way too much cocaine. I didn’t know whether to ask her if she was having a seizure or not. Then again, when someone’s having a seizure they probably aren’t up to answering any questions.
She began moaning. Except, this was different, too.
She moaned my name. “Abrahammmmmmmm! Abrahammmmmm Croooooowwwwwleyyyy!”
As I stood there watching this ancient woman have a total spaz-attack, the door to The Torture Chamber burst open.
Zack and Maddie stopped at the threshold.
“What’s going on?” Maddie asked.
I couldn’t speak. My tongue was completely knotted.
“Grab her!” Zack suddenly shouted. “She’s gonna pass out!”
Sure enough, Zack was right. In the dark reflection of his sunglasses, I saw Val toppling over like a dead tree.
Not good at all.
Against the potion currently tugging on my muscles, I turned and snatched Val before she could break her head open on the corner of her toolbox. I don’t think Val had a potion for a busted head, but I was probably wrong.
She was in my arms and for the moment she was safe. The seizure or whatever the hell was happening hadn’t passed yet, though. Unfortunately, not only did I have a front row seat to this show, I was also the star of it.
“Abraham Crowley,” she spoke in a voice that wasn’t her own, “you will die!” And then she screamed at the top of her lungs. So loud, I almost let go of her and covered my ears.
Then it was over.
Her eyes wavered, blossomed with their usual purplish color, and looked at me. “Oh, my,” she said. “Oh, my.”
“What the hell?” was all I could say.
In my head, I was thinking: Big deal, we all die and living in Ohio all my life I think the transition to death will be pretty easy.
Maddie and Zack were on each side of Val now. They had their arms out like worried parents watching their kid ride a bike without training wheels for the first time.
“You’re gonna die?” Maddie said. “Oh, that’s simply not good, Abe.”
“Well, we’re all technically gonna die,” I said.
Zack shook his head. “Man, I thought you were in here giving Valentine the old bang-bang, but I’m glad it’s not as bad as that.”
“She said he was gonna die!” Maddie said, glaring at Zack. “How is that not worse?”
“Bang-bang?” I asked. “No wonder you’ve never had a girlfriend.”
“Hey!” Zack took a step back and folded his arms. “I’ve had a girlfriend. Remember that girl from Canada I told you guys about?”
I cut in. “Can we focus? Please?”
Everyone knew Zack never had a girlfriend. Ask him what the Canadian girl’s name was and he’d give you a different made-up name every time.
Still, I was more curious than frightened.
“How am I gonna die, Val?” I asked.
Looking haunted, she said, “I’ll tell you. Come with me.”
5
Val’s Vision
We were in the living room. I sat in a big, comfy chair. It was swallowing me up.
The living room was large, but it was so stuffed with junk—more stacks of books, mounted animals on the walls and leaning along the baseboards, sculptures of three-legged humans, naked portraits of werewolves and vampires in various sex acts, at least three old television sets with rabbit ears covered in tin-foil and everything, to name a few—that one felt like they were drowning in a wave of stale sweat and cigarette-smelling antiques as soon as you stepped foot onto the shag carpet.
Val began her speech. She didn’t talk like Hamlet anymore.
“I saw you, Abraham, standing at the threshold of a void,” she said.
That was curious, I thought.
“Void?” I asked.
“I-I don’t know for sure. It was just a flash,” Valentine said. The spoon resting in the teacup she held clattered—clink-clink-clink. Each clink was like the tolling of some great and dooming clock.
This was obviously the potion Val had given me kicking in. I tried fighting the feeling without much luck.
“So you saw Abe standing at some portal—or void, whatever. Not a big deal,” Maddie said, trying to make sense of this.
“That’s not all I saw…” Val continued. “I saw tentacles,” she said. “I saw tentacles snap out from the void and wrap around young Mr. Crowley’s neck.”
“Tentacles?” I repeated. “I’ll make sure to stay away from voids and oceans.”
Maddie frowned. “Take this seriously, Abe.”
“Yes, Abraham, thy tentacles of death are very serious,” Val said.
“We’ll see about that,” I said.
When the time came, if it ever would come
, I knew I’d be ready. I was a changed man after Lover’s Pass, one step closer to a vet like my father before me.
The sad thing was, Zack, Maddie, and Val thought otherwise.
I thanked Val again for fixing me up and showed myself out.
Outside, Zack and Maddie looked more worried than I felt.
“If we see tentacles,” Maddie said, “we’ll kick their asses.”
“Do tentacles have asses?” Zack said.
Maddie hit him in the chest, smiling. “You know what I mean.”
“Thanks, guys,” I said.
Shortly after saying our goodbyes, we got in the Cruiser and left.
6
The Dungeon
The NOD Office was housed below a building in the middle of perpetual renovations. Every few years whatever business was said to be moving into the building would run out of money and a new “business” would buy it and begin their own renovations. Ever since I’d been working at the NOD, the building was said to be a gym. They had even moved in a few old treadmills and fake weights, which helped sell the authenticity. The problem was, for the first time in a long time, people were excited for this building that was somehow always empty to become a gym and would often come up and knock on the door, wondering when the place would finally be open for business. Eventually, we assumed, people would catch on to this deliberate delay and call us out on it.
Zack pulled the Cruiser around back. There, through a locked fence, the asphalt sloped downward until you met a shuttered garage door. Up went the door and in went the car. The parking garage was dotted with a few other vehicles. Lola’s Kia, Storm’s Bronco, and Octavius’s Cadillac closest to the elevator.
“The future isn’t set in stone, Abe,” Zack said. His voice carried in the gloom. He was talking to me.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m not worried. I can handle tentacles.”
“And we’re here for you,” Zack continued. “Any tentacles get within a mile of you, I’ll blast them right in their tentacle ass!”
“Eh,” Maddie said, “maybe don’t talk about tentacle asses anymore.”
Fright Squad Page 3
