Flailing my arms wildly, I ran, tearing at my clothing, trying to scrape off the red worms. All the while I was horribly aware that Frank was fluttering around my head, depositing more of the bastards down the back of my shirt.
Through a blackening cloud of hysteria, I spotted one of the man-made ponds that dot that part of the Park. My skin literally crawling, I ran for it.
The cold water abraded my skin and shocked my senses. I dove down to the floor of the pond and rubbed myself against the muddy bottom, twisting and writhing until I’d scoured my skin raw. Only when my brain was screaming from oxygen deprivation did I allow myself to rise to the surface.
I swam, sputtering, landward, and flopped face-first onto the concrete walkway, half-in and half-out of the water.
A gentle cooing made me look up.
Frank landed on my head.
I snatched a hurried breath and prepared to dive again.
Before I could submerge, a winged black shape swept over the tree line to the east. Frank’s talons dug into my scalp as the dark shape arrowed toward us.
It was a bird, a big black crow or raven.
The black bird circled the pond once. Then it screamed, folded its wings and plummeted earthward. Frank released my scalp. His wings beat furiously about my head and shoulders for a moment, and then he took off toward the shimmering steel canyons of Manhattan.
The raven pulled out of its kamikaze dive. With a sweep of its wings it shot past me and snatched Frank out of the air. A moment later, the raven and Frank struck the grass of the Sheep’s Meadow in a dull explosion of dapper gray feathers. Frank made a sound that was disturbingly similar to a human scream.
Then the raven pecked his eyes out.
I scuttled across the grass toward the avian massacre.
By the time I’d arrived at the scene, Frank had been reduced to a quivering pile of blood-soaked pinfeathers. The raven was busily snapping up the squirming red spaghetti strands boiling out of Frank’s corpse.
My stomach gave up trying to hold down the pint of Jack Daniels I’d ingested the night before and I leaned over and christened the Sheep’s Meadow with everything I’d swallowed over the last forty-eight hours.
“Thinking things through?”
The voice belonged to a man I hadn’t seen in two decades, a man I’d helped bury a week earlier.
“Looks like we showed up just in time,” the familiar voice rumbled.
I looked up.
Marcus Grudge stood there with the rays of the rising sun pouring through him like water through a sieve. He reached down, extended a big gnarled hand and smiled.
“Hello, son.”
17
Reunion
My dead father looked like a car crash victim.
Marcus’s body was a mess of torn muscle, ripped tendons and smashed bones. One eye dangled from its socket: As he pointed at me and laughed, it jumped and danced against his cheek like the “bouncing ball” from a karaoke video. The fronts of his shirt and khaki trousers looked like the mop from a Japanese slaughterhouse.
“You look disgusting,” I said.
Marcus looked down at himself. “Sorry,” he said. “Can’t seem to get this shape-molding thing down. Goddamn blood-suckers make it look easy. Watch this.”
A look of concentration tightened Marcus’s features.
Then his head fell off and rolled across the grass.
“God!” I hollered.
“Ain’t that a poke in the shitter?!?” the head chuckled.
“What the Hell are you doing?” I sputtered.
“Oh, get over yourself,” the head grumbled.
A moment later, Marcus reappeared. This time he looked almost normal, save for a massive gash across his throat and the blood spatter on his shirtfront.
“Sorry ‘bout the neck wound. That’s the one that took me out. Harder to manipulate.”
It had stopped raining by now, but the sun peeked warily from behind a skein of fast-moving clouds.
Marcus sat down next to me. He looked older, but that only made sense. The black had faded from his hair and he’d grown a slight paunch. Like me, Marcus was a big man, nearly six-feet-three inches tall. He’d played football in college. The exercise had rewarded him with an athlete’s broad shoulders and the easy gate of a man who was comfortable with physical exertion.
In one of my earliest stories I wrote about the adventures shared by a nine year old boy and the superhero who visited him when times were toughest. I’d named my superhero Captain Prometheus. I’d modeled him after Marcus.
We sat there, two strangers. My father was dead, or at least among the living dead. But I was alive.
And I was pissed.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’ve come back because you want me take up the family tradition, expose what the government knows about UFO’s or whatever it is that people like you do.”
Marcus shook his head.
“I’m here to see how you’re doin,’ Obadiah.”
“What?” I said.
Marcus shrugged. Through the gash in his neck a flash of bone winked at me.
“I didn’t get the chance to make an appearance at my funeral; tell you how sorry I am about the way things turned out between you and me.”
“You were at your own funeral?” I said.
“Yep. But I hadn’t yet learned to entify.”
“Entify?”
“To make manifest,” he said. “To convert mental energies into physical ones. Ironic, isn’t it? That’s what this whole mess is about, son.”
I cringed. The paternal tone he adopted so casually made the hackles on my neck stand at attention.
“What do you want?” I said.
Marcus sighed. He shook his head and lifted his hands in a “what do you want from me” gesture that was disturbingly familiar. After a moment I realized why: It was my gesture. I’d seen myself shrug in exactly the same way on television.
Pull it together, asshole, I snarled inwardly, furious at myself for allowing mere familial similarity to divert me from my target. I had a lifetime of solo science projects, missed Father-Son Weekends, and unanswered sex questions to get through. Marcus, the reality of his presence, was distracting me.
“Listen son,” Marcus said. “If it’s an apology you’re after…you’re right. I left. It was a shitty thing to do, abandoning you and your mother. If I had it to do all over again… I guess I might have gone another way.”
“You guess you might have gone another way?” my voice rising to a shriek. “Might have gone another… fucking… way?”
Marcus did my shrug again. Then he did something even worse: He smiled at me.
“Hey!” I snapped. “Don’t think just because you’re dead that you can ingratiate yourself with some lame-ass apology and a few cheap parlor tricks. I’m the one who spent my life wondering why the hell you left. I’m the one with flaming bitch bites permanently scorched across my ass from her temper tantrums. I’m the one who sat up nights listening to her cry.”
Marcus grunted. It was the same noise he’d made the time he came home, the day after my ninth birthday, the one in my dream, and learned that I’d burned our garage to the ground when I’d decided to end a dysfunctional relationship in the time-tested manner: with fire. The break-up had spiraled out of control, however, resulting in a harried call to the Bronxville Fire Department and a hysterical verbal assault from Lenore.
“If you came back hoping for some half-assed reunion where you get to say— ‘Ooops! I was a bad father! Sorry, chum!’ —then I forgive you and we become best buddies, you wasted a lot of ectoplasm learning to entify because I’m not interested.”
Marcus nodded. “Fair enough.”
“Fair enough?” I said. “Fair enough? That’s all you have to say? You left us, man. You left and missed it all: My high school graduation; that stupid prom picture I took with Lois McCaffrey.”
My head was spinning, the words tumbling out of my face like turds out of an elepha
nt’s backside. If Marcus had been alive at that moment I might have strangled him. As it was I needed some distance. He’d gotten too close too fast.
“You missed the first time I ever got drunk,” I continued. “I threw up all over the bathroom, passed out behind the toilet and got stuck. Lenore had to call the fire department to come and cut me out with the Jaws of Life. Where were you? I’ll tell you where: Gone.”
I glared at Marcus with what I hoped was the righteous nobility of a wounded saint. I’d rehearsed this scene in my mind a million times. At the climax of my fantasy monologue, Marcus always hung his head and begged my forgiveness. At that point I would either punch him in the stomach or tell him to go fuck himself.
In real life, Ghost Marcus shrugged and said: “Fair enough.”
“I swear to God if you say ‘Fair Enough’ one more time I’ll...”
“You’ll do what, son?” Ghost Marcus said. “Kill me?”
I stared at him until my head throbbed.
“Now, if you’re done venting, I’ve got business to discuss,” Marcus said. “I want you to take up the family crest.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I thought you were here to check up on me.”
“You’ll be alright,” Marcus said. “Trust me, a little anger can be a good thing in our line of work.”
“Hey,” I snapped. “There’s no ‘our line of work.’ I’m a writer, in case you hadn’t heard.”
Ghost Marcus shrugged.
“You’re a writer because you have no other way to channel the energies of the Bent. It’s sitting there in your blood waiting for you to get jiggy with it.”
“Get ‘jiggy’ with it?” I said. “What is that? Did you take a ‘How to Speak in Stupid Anachronisms’ class in the Afterlife?”
“Don’t be a smartass,” Marcus said. “While we’re sitting here circling our wagons people are dying. I just hope we’re not too late.”
“What do you mean ‘too late?’” I said.
Marcus pointed at the remains of Frank the pigeon where the raven was snapping up the last of the red worms. It flapped across the grass and landed on Marcus’s right arm.
“Friend of yours?” I said.
“In a way,” Marcus said. “Othello led me here. He even managed to foil their little assassination attempt.”
“Assassination?” I said. “Why would anyone want to kill me?”
“Because you’re next,” Marcus said.
Kowalski’s words came back to me then.
Better to have you hate him than lose you to the Wraithing.
“It’s an old story, son,” Marcus said. “The things that live in the shadows hate us just as much as we hate them. I’m beyond their reach now. But you’re not. I’d hoped to keep the Wraithing Pale out of your life. Oh, your mother and I had our share of problems like any other couple, I suppose. But I loved her from the moment I first laid eyes on her. That’s why I left. I wanted to protect the two of you.”
Marcus sighed heavily. His image wavered, flickering as the wind picked up strength. Then it steadied.
“But now I see that I was wrong,” he said. “You were born to walk the Road.”
“The Road?” I said.
“The Revenant Road, son,” Marcus said. “The road every monster hunter must walk. I’m just a little farther along than you.”
Overhead, the sun tumbled down the gaping maw of a massive black storm cloud. Thunder rumbled in the west.
“The things Kowalski told you are true, Obadiah. The woman you saw back at the house?”
“The dead Amazon?” I said.
Marcus shook his head. “The Dreamer isn’t dead. She’s a gatekeeper of sorts. Her mind is... well it’s a kind of portal, one that opens onto the Wraithing dimension. There are others like Stella, hundreds of Dreamers, all over the world.”
“Stella?”
“That’s what Kowalski called her. We never learned her real name.”
“Who are they, these Dreamers?” I said.
Marcus shrugged. “No one knows where they came from, or how long they’ve been here. They generate the energies that separate the dimensions: the planes we access when we dream, from this one. They call themselves the Nolane.”
The raven uttered a dry chuckle and ruffled its wings.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Neither do we, really,” Marcus grunted. “But the Nolane are incredibly powerful. I don’t know what would happen if the Dreamers ever woke up. Hell on Earth I suppose.”
“Then they’re the cause of all the problems,” I said.
Marcus shook his head.
“The Nolane are the reason we don’t live on the ninth circle of Hell, son. They act as buffers between the myriad realities. Think of them as, well, you might call them cosmic wardens. Without the Dreamers, the realities would have merged ages ago. But occasionally something from the Wraithing makes it past their defenses.”
I shuddered as a cold dread skittered down my spine.
“But why?” I said. “What do they want?”
“To possess a human mind,” Marcus said. “Someone scarred by deep suffering: loss or grief or hate. Some of them can re-shape the human body. They walk our world, stealing form and substance from mankind’s primordial fears, to prey on us.”
“Vampires and werewolves,” I said.
“Suckers and Wolves are the tip of the iceberg,” Marcus said. “Believe me, there are worse things. If one of them stays over here too long it creates a breach in the space between realities. The longer the breach stays open, the stronger the squatter becomes, sucking energy from both dimensions, until the rupture becomes permanent.”
“And you and Kowalski...?”
Marcus smiled. It was one of the few times I can remember seeing him do that. The fact that he was dead brought that fact home even harder.
“Kowlaski and I played ‘goalie.’ It was our job to collar the sports that get past the Nolane’s defenses and seal the breach. This little incursion was nothing compared to some of the cluster-fucks Kowalski and I set straight. Right, Othello?”
The raven spread its wings and chuckled again.
“He understands you?” I said.
Marcus nodded. “Some hunters are gifted with minor supernatural enhancements. We call them Bents. I happened to share a special connection with this old bird. Othello was my abettor. He pulled my fat out of a lot of fires. Except for that last one, right O?”
Turning to me, Marcus winked and jerked a thumb toward the raven. “He was off gettin’ laid.”
Othello croaked guiltily.
“That’s alright, brother,” Marcus said. “You remember Black Murray?”
“My garter snake?”
“Yep,” Marcus said. “He was your abettor. Had he lived he would have made an excellent companion on your Walk.”
Black Murray left us, tragically, a year after Marcus did. He had slithered out of his terrarium home and onto our blacktop driveway one balmy Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately our neighbor, Mr. Mayberry, had chosen that same afternoon to try out his brand new riding mower. As Black Murray lay sunning himself on the hot blacktop, Mr. Mayberry had rolled over him, flattening him instantly.
“I haven’t thought about Black Murray since...”
“Since you and your mother flushed him down the toilet,” Marcus said. “I know. She wrote me what happened in her letter.”
“Wait a minute, Lenore wrote you?”
Marcus nodded. “Intermittently,” he said. “At first it wasn’t too bad. She wrote me every week to tell me what was happening with the two of you. But sometimes the work took me out of the country. Sometimes months went by before I was able to collect the goddamn mail. I think, in the end, your mama just got tired of waiting.”
I made a mental note to call my mother as soon as my head stopped throbbing. I was angrier than at any other time I could recall.
“Part of me hoped that John Mayberry’s killing that snake meant you might be spa
red.”
Othello croaked again. Then he hopped off of Marcus’s shoulder, and settled on mine.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Marcus said softly. “Most Benders only get one abettor in a lifetime. Looks like you’re getting a second chance.”
I had to admit it: It felt right somehow, having that big black pigeon-killer preening itself on my shoulder. It felt like the most natural thing in the world.
I hated it.
“Look, Marcus,” I began. “I didn’t ask for this. I’m having a hard time accepting any of this.”
Marcus waved aside my protestations. Then he stood up.
“You hear that?” he said.
“What?”
Marcus turned to me, his face aglow, as if lit by the light from an alien sun.
“It’s time for me to go,” he said. “The Road is calling me on.”
“Now?” I squawked.
I’d suddenly remembered the ten million things I wanted to say to him. At the same time I hated the creeping emptiness that blossomed in the pit of my stomach at the thought of him leaving.
Marcus began to dissipate like wisps of smoke torn apart by high winds.
“Ask Kowalski about the Bent, son,” he said. “He’s a good friend and an excellent hunter. He’ll stick by you when the corners get tight.”
“Wait!” I said.
There was a flash of lightning, followed by the deep rumble of thunder. Then it began to rain in earnest.
I looked around, squinting to see a glimpse of my father through the downpour.
But Marcus was gone.
18
Legends
Seattle Washington, 5:01 AM. July 21st.
Murder is never pretty. Ritual human sacrifice in church can be downright inappropriate.
The Southwest Chinese Lutheran Sanctuary sat at the corner of 196th Street Southwest. In its heyday the sanctuary boasted one of the largest Chinese congregations in Seattle. It was built by a wealthy businessman named Bai Mu Shang.
A lifelong Buddhist, Bai had immigrated to the U.S. in 1946 seeking his own piece of the post war American Dream. Desiring to bring Buddhism to the shores of his adopted land, Bai commissioned the construction of a temple that would attract followers of the Four Noble Truths from all over the West.
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