The Telling

by Mike Duran

  “Nams!” Tamra skidded down the gravel incline. Her eyes were fixed on Detective Lacroix and the body at his feet. “Nams!”

  Several people turned at Tamra’s cry, as did the white-haired detective.

  Tamra hurried through the stone archway with Zeph right behind her. She pushed past Lacroix and fell before the charred body of her grandmother, sobbing.

  A radio crackled, and several of the officers stopped what they were doing to watch Tamra hunched over the body, weeping.

  A pungent, musky stench tainted the air. Zeph navigated through several moldering corpses, much like the one he’d encountered at the morgue. He approached the detective, staring at the remains. The woman’s body appeared to have been blasted by intense heat. Annie’s face sagged to one side, a hideous deformity. However, there was no mistaking the features were that of Annie Lane.

  “Why?” Tamra knelt over the body, her chest heaving. “Why d–did you do that?”

  “It was her destiny.” Zeph uttered the words without thinking.

  Yet as Zeph studied the corpse, his heart leapt. Annie’s arms were just hollow skins.

  Like those of a dark angel.

  Lacroix cleared his throat. “I believe you are looking for her.”

  Tamra looked angrily at the detective. Her eyes glistened in the light.

  Lacroix pointed toward the rock structure where Annie Lane sat wrapped in a blanket, her bloody leg resting on a log. She looked tired, beaten up, and very much alive.

  “Nams!” Tamra scrambled to her feet, laughing and crying at the same time.

  Seeing Tamra’s wild approach, Annie waved her hands to fend off her granddaughter. She managed only to partly stifle the ensuing bear hug, wincing as Tamra embraced her neck.

  From somewhere nearby Sultana emerged from the shadows carrying some gauze and ointment, and Jim, the electronics whiz from Meridian, was right behind her. Sultana stopped and smiled as Zeph approached.

  “We knew you could do it,” she said as she bent over Annie and began inspecting her wound.

  “Yeah, well …” Zeph shrugged. “I didn’t.”

  Sultana chuckled and shook her head.

  Then Zeph looked at Annie. “So, what happened? How did you …”

  Annie’s gaze flitted about the encampment. “Weaver?” she asked, but as if she knew the answer.

  Sultana rose and fixed her gaze on him.

  Zeph glanced at Tamra and then said, “He didn’t make it.”

  Annie sighed deeply. “I think he knew all along he wouldn’t make it.”

  Zeph nodded ruefully. “I think he knew a lot more than he was saying.”

  An all-terrain vehicle arrived pulling a cart of miscellaneous items. Two men stepped off in hazmat gear, looking officially irritated.

  “So, what happened?” Tamra said, brushing tears off her cheeks. “How did you get away?”

  Lacroix approached, producing a notebook and pen from his coat pocket. “You can thank her.” He motioned to the open stone doorway into Camp Poverty.

  Zeph and Tamra simultaneously turned to see Janice Marshman emerging from the shadows, her face glowing with an eerie luminescence as she gazed into her digital device. She stopped and, seeing they were watching her, raised one eyebrow, then said, “I trust you will be taking Miss Lane to the hospital?”

  “Uh, of course,” Tamra said. She looked quizzically at Annie and then back at the director. “So, you knew all along?”

  The director clicked off the electronic pad and closed its cover. “As I told your grandmother, I am well aware of the history surrounding this area and the uniqueness of the Marvale properties. I’ve had suspicions. However, it was the remnant that enlightened me to other possibilities.”

  Zeph straightened.

  “Like I said,” Annie winced as Sultana applied ointment to her bloody shin, “we were watching you.”

  Sultana looked up. “Earl’s back down at the retirement place. He couldn’t make the climb, as you can imagine. But according to the detective,” she glanced at Lacroix, “Earl didn’t miss out on much.”

  The director peered at the steaming corpses that littered the yard. “I can only imagine what state my facility is in.”

  Lacroix looked up from his tablet. “Apparently, a sizable number of individuals have simultaneously dropped dead, leaving your beautiful facility and its residents in quite the panic. But I can assure you, ma’am, we will have this situation under control as quickly as humanly possible.”

  “I should expect no less,” the director said curtly. Then, turning to Zeph, she said, “I have long been aware of the tunnel complex that existed here. Fergus’s behavior—and his frequent visits here—had piqued my suspicions. The remnant contacted me, connecting the history and the mythology and warning of a larger plot. Mind you, I am not one to embrace the mystical with abandon, and I was skeptical at first. But being an avid reader, my mind is sufficiently stretched to include the, shall we say, weird.”

  “An avid reader?” Zeph asked.

  The director slipped a paperback novel from her sweater pocket. On its cover was an oval spaceship with three spidery legs.

  She quickly returned the book, cleared her throat, and continued. “As I am commissioned to oversee Marvale’s operations and the comfort of her residents, I must consider all angles, young man.”

  “Uh,” Zeph cleared his throat. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “With this additional information, I realized something quite large may be occurring here, something possibly in the realm of … weird. I kept a close eye on Miss Lane. However, things only became more mysterious. Reports of people changing, outbursts, late-night excursions, missing bodies. It was the stuff of Hollywood. When the detectives arrived tonight, we found her apartment looted and learned of Fergus’s death. I was prepared to make the journey here. It was fortuitous that we did.”

  “Indeed,” Lacroix said. “Being yanked off the investigation by Roth seemed rather fishy to us. When we learned he’d flown the coop and was operating covertly, without his superior’s license, we suspected someone did not want us seeking you out. Or snooping around your whereabouts. Luckily we did.”

  “So, what happened?” Tamra asked, staring at her grandmother. “When we left, those things were coming out of the tunnel. How did you, I mean, how did you not get … eaten?”

  They all turned to Annie.

  “It was like a dream.” Annie stared into the growing dark, recalling her tale. “A nightmare. Full of monsters. They came at me, and you all were there. Zeph and Tamra. Miss Marshman. Ghastly dry things. Not all there. And then I saw …” She reached out for Tamra’s hand as she spoke, and her granddaughter took it. “Myself. Something that looked like me. Its eyes glowed. And when I looked into them, it was awful. Everything I had ever lost, all of my grief and regrets, were in those eyes.”

  They listened, spellbound, to Annie’s tale.

  “All those dark things came around me, snickering and squealing. She hovered there—my other self—coaxing me in. Inviting me to surrender to the pain.” Annie shivered, staring into the twilit sky. “And I prayed. I clung to that word, Zeph. The word you spoke. You will be a remnant. You will stand in the gap. And it was like a beacon, son. Like a beacon calling me home.”

  Finally Lacroix cleared his throat. “I would not have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes. Whatever these things are, they scattered when we emerged from that god-awful tunnel. My partner managed to shoot several of them. Miss Lane fled out here, and they followed like some Pandora’s box set free into the world. Only to drop dead on the spot. Shortly thereafter we heard an explosion in the hills. Whatever happened up there, it cut off their lifeline.”

  Lacroix cast a long, hard gaze at the courtyard and its commotion. Then he turned to Zeph. “Seems we are back where we started, young man.”

  Zeph looked at Tamra. “Not exactly, sir.”

  The director clapped her hands and ordered the remaining employees back to work. She
turned to Annie. “The hospital?”

  “Yes,” Annie said, squeezing Tamra’s hand. “We’re leaving now.” The director nodded and then marched into the courtyard like a general surveying his wounded battlefield.

  Lacroix straightened his blazer. “Quite a brave grandmother you have there, Ms. Lane.”

  “Pshh!” Tamra snorted. “Pretty reckless, if you ask me.”

  Chat ducked through the archway, glistening with sweat. Lacroix seemed relieved to see his partner.

  “They’re gonna cordon off this area,” Lacroix announced. “So I suggest you all pack up and get this lady to the doctor. And don’t go too far. We will definitely require statements and whatnot.” He winked and then strode into the courtyard.

  Annie was staring at Zeph. “I knew you could do it.”

  Zeph sighed. “I didn’t really do anything, Annie. It was all of us.”

  “And the Telling?”

  He looked at Tamra and smiled, but did not offer a response.

  Chapter 65

  The mud-splattered Crown Vic pulled up in front of his house. Zeph drove the final nail into the new sign and climbed down from the ladder. He laid the hammer near his toolbox and wiped sweat off his forehead. Then he met the detectives at the gate.

  Lacroix walked around the car, surveying the new sign on Book Swap. “I thought you were givin’ up on this place.”

  “I was.”

  “Change of heart?”

  “You could say that.” Zeph brushed sawdust off himself. “Besides, I need to get my books from somewhere. So why not here?”

  Chat shut his door and leaned against the car with his arms folded, peering from under his cowboy hat at Mila’s house. Several strands of crime scene tape still lay in the yard, and a path had been beaten along the side of the house where investigators had trod while exhuming her body.

  Lacroix followed his partner’s gaze. “I take it you will be moving?”

  “Actually,” Zeph said. “I’m thinking about buying the place and turning it into a cactus jelly factory.”

  Lacroix furrowed his brow. “Either you have a warped sense of humor or more money than you are letting on.”

  “Both,” Zeph said. “So what’s the official word?”

  Chat looped his thumbs under his belt. “Cause of death was asphyxia. That’s all they’re sayin’.”

  “And except for finding her body buried in the backyard,” Lacroix added, “there is no evidence of foul play.”

  “Uh, being buried in the backyard is quite a bit of evidence. So who’s the suspect?”

  Lacroix drew a long tired breath. “At the moment? Walther Roth.”

  “Roth?” Zeph exclaimed. “You know it wasn’t him.”

  “I don’t know what I know anymore, young man.” There was affliction in Lacroix’s voice. “Our only other option is to conclude that interdimensional doppelgängers were murdering their counterparts. Which may work for a sci-fi sitcom, but’ll hardly fly in a court of law.”

  “They weren’t doppelgängers,” Zeph said. “Not exactly, sir.”

  Lacroix brushed at the shoulders of his jacket. “Well, it’s in the Army’s hands now.”

  “The military has the case?”

  “Moppin’ up what they started,” Chat groused.

  “Whether Roth was human or not,” Lacroix said, “whether he survived this event or was taken in it, he is our only link to the bizarre goings on. And an easy scapegoat. Whoever Walther Roth was, he sufficiently fooled the United States government, which, I admit, is not a difficult task. And whatever connection he once had with the military, they have not divulged. In fact, they have taken great care to obfuscate. Which leaves us to surmise that Robert Coyne and his son were the last vestige of Roth’s pet project. But what that project entailed, we may never know.”

  The three stood pondering the enigmatic unfolding.

  “This is the last remaining artifact from our adventure.” Lacroix reached into his jacket pocket and removed the plastic bag with the wooden bullet. “I suppose you wouldn’t want it as a keepsake?”

  Zeph’s eyes widened. “Very much so.”

  “Just don’t say you got it from me.”

  “No, sir.” Zeph took the bullet but didn’t tell the detectives it was forged from the Sacred Tree.

  Lacroix massaged the nape of his neck. “I would be remiss in not tellin’ you this entire affair has expanded my conception of what kind of universe we inhabit.”

  “I share your conclusion, sir.” Zeph glanced at Chat. “How ’bout your partner? Does he feel the same way?”

  “I liked that big Indian,” Chat said without emotion. “I only wish he hadn’t died in that cave-in.”

  Zeph peered at them. “So that’s what that was—a cave-in?”

  Lacroix nodded. “That ol’ mine was a death trap from the start. And whatever was goin’ on in there deserves to be buried forever. Fact, maybe it was never meant to be opened.” Lacroix steadied his gaze upon Zeph. “I am unsure as to what powers you possess, young man. But I cannot deny that you possess them. Things are fallin’ to your advantage. Course, the authorities will manage appropriate consternation over why twenty-seven people throughout our city, randomly connected, all managed to drop dead at the same moment. They have already floated the possibility of chemical contamination and mutant viruses. Even radioactivity. It will, no doubt, lead to bureaucratic overkill—studies and surveys, all manner of punditry and conjecture. Before being buried. But there is no way that you, or your girlfriend’s grandmother, can be indicted on some form of conspiracy, in case you were wonderin’. So whatever has gone on up there, and whatever type of phenomenon we were privileged to have witnessed, like everything else about this case, it will conveniently be swept under the rug.”

  “And that thing in the morgue?” Zeph asked. “The one that looked like me?”

  “Probably quarantined along with some alien artifacts in a remote underground warehouse in Area 51. Like the rest of ’em—it is long gone.”

  Zeph let his eyes wander. He thought about Ginny and her mummified remains at Meridian. Maybe evidence of the dark angels had always been right under their noses.

  “Is somethin’ wrong?” Lacroix asked.

  “Naw.” Zeph shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

  Jamie skittered from around Zeph’s house and stormed the fence, yapping at the detectives. Zeph intercepted the dog and held the shivering animal in the crook of his arm as it growled at Lacroix.

  The detective snarled at the dog, walked around the vehicle, and opened the door. “I’m sure they will have some questions for you. But I suggest you keep references to angels and extraterrestrials minimal. So whatever you do, do not leave the country. But please … do leave your house more often.”

  Zeph smiled at the ribbing. “I will.” As Lacroix stepped inside the vehicle and prepared to leave, Zeph said, “Hey! Thanks for everything.”

  Chat touched the tip of his cowboy hat and slung his thick, tanned arm out the window. As Zeph watched them drive off, he noticed the marquee on the Vermont had changed. This morning the sign read: Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

  He wondered, among other things, who had changed the sign. However, this day seemed a lot brighter than the one he’d worried about yesterday.

  As he pondered the words, another car approached, a turquoise sedan that looked vaguely familiar. It slowed at the Vermont before proceeding, doing a U-turn in front of his house, and parking at the shoulder. Annie opened the passenger side door and swung her casted leg out.

  “Nams,” Tamra said, hurrying around the car. “Just stay there.

  I’ll take care of it.”

  “What do you think I’ve got crutches for?” Annie shooed her granddaughter away.

  Dieter came barreling out of the backseat, skidding in the dirt. “A library!” He pointed frantically at Book Swap. “Tam! Tam! Is that a library?”

  Tamra glanced at the cottage. “I guess you could say
that.”

  Her response sent the burly young man into a near jig.

  Upon seeing Tamra, Jamie wriggled out of Zeph’s arms, bolted to the gate, and nuzzled his way through. With a delighted little laugh Tamra picked the animal up and held it at arm’s length as its tongue lapped the air.

  “Where’s the scooter?” he asked.

  “At home. With my grandma disabled, we’ll need something more practical. Anyway, I figured it was about time I dusted off Old Gloria.”

  “Gloria?”

  “Old Glory for short.”

  “So, do you name all your vehicles?”

  “Come to think of it, yes. Some appliances too.” She nestled Jamie under her arm. “So, Nams wanted to get a book. She’ll be immobile for a while and has lots of time on her hands.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it.” Annie got out of the car and steadied herself on the crutches. She clucked her tongue at Tamra’s effort to assist.

  “She’s staying with me.” Tamra glanced at her grandmother. “Like she should have been doing a long time ago.”

  “When I get better,” Annie said, “I’ll reevaluate.”

  “Oh, shush.” Tamra’s gaze drifted to Book Swap. “Hey, you painted a new sign.”

  “I figured it was time for a change. In fact, I’m getting serious about painting again. Just like Mila wanted.” He motioned to the easel on his front porch and a watercolor he had started. “Weaver would want me to tell the story. And Mila would want me to paint. So I guess I’ll have to find a way to do both.”

  “Well, if you’re fixing things up, I’d like to help.” Tamra motioned to Book Swap. “I noticed your front door needs to be rehung, and the plaster inside needs to be patched.”

  “Well …”

  “My tool belt’s in the trunk.” Tamra set Jamie down. “I’m off today …”

  “Your grandmother said you couldn’t fix everything.”

  “She’s right.” Tamra smiled. “But I can fix some things.”

  Standing there gazing at Tamra Lane, Zeph was hard pressed to deny that.