Oath Keeper

by Jefferson Smith

  DelRoy glanced at the bottle again, but his eyes snapped back to Ned just as fast. He was in full-bore detective mode, and for now, the bottle wasn’t the issue. Ned was. He had to listen to Ned. Find the flaws in his story. Poke holes in them.

  Only he couldn’t.

  Sure, there were gaps you could fly a cargo plane through, but the problem wasn’t really Ned. With a story like his, what you think is or isn’t possible is irrelevant. What matters is what he thinks is possible. So you pay attention to that. But listening to Ned was like listening to a foreign tourist talk about life in his village back home. You can tell by the expression on his face and the light in his eyes that it’s all very real and natural to him, despite the fact that what he’s saying is completely insane.

  “So if I understand, you make dolls for a living. Over there. Dolls that talk.”

  “Look, Detective, do you think I don’t know how this sounds? Do I strike you as retarded, or delusional?” DelRoy started to answer, but Ned waved him off. “I mean aside from the story you’re hearing now. You’ve known me for a week. I know how odd I may have seemed at times. I don’t fit in here. I never have, and I know that. But truthfully, at any point this week have you thought to yourself, ‘This guy is dangerously unstable?’ Or have you been thinking more, ‘This guy doesn’t fit in?’ Like maybe I was raised in a commune or something and don’t know the social etiquette here?”

  To tell the truth, that was pretty much exactly what he’d been thinking.

  “Good,” Ned said. “I can see I wasn’t far wrong.”

  DelRoy grimaced. He was far from ready to accept the story. In fact, it was much more likely that Ned really was a master-class liar—one so talented that even a hardened city detective’s refined truth senses could not pick it up. But even so, debating something this whacked out would only spin his wheels, so he opted to play along. Act convinced.

  “Well,” he began, letting a half-convinced smile pave the way. “This story of yours does fit the facts better than anything I’ve been able to come up with. Even I know it isn’t some trick bottle you bought in Japan. I’m not sure what I believe yet, but I suppose it’s possible that it isn’t your story that’s crazy, Ned. Maybe it’s the facts that are crazy, and your story has just enough crazy to fit them. But does it have to be another planet?”

  Ned shrugged and sat back in his chair. “I don’t actually know what to call it. ‘Planet’ seems right, but I’ve never seen it from space or anything. I have no idea if it’s a round ball that floats in blackness the way the Earth does, or what. Would it help to think of it more like the world on the other side of the wardrobe?”

  DelRoy laughed nervously. “I guess that’s better than the one down the rabbit hole.” Ned smiled. “But you do realize nobody else is going to believe you, right?”

  Ned rolled his eyes. “Of course I do. Why do you think I don’t tell people?”

  “But now you’re telling. Just because I mentioned the feds?”

  Ned nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “But not because I’m going to stick out like a dancing corpse, as you so delicately put it. There’s something else now. Maybe worse, and I don’t know what it means. Although I have no idea how he found out about me.”

  “Who?”

  “The hobo,” Ned said. “The one who wrote Sue’s note. He said, ‘Follow Nafosh.’”

  DelRoy cocked his head. “So?”

  Ned leaned over to grab the gin and took a long pull. “My name is Ned Nackenfausch,” he said. “But that name sticks out over there. It’s too alien sounding, so nobody calls me that.” Then he shrugged helplessly and pointed at the note.

  And then it clicked. “‘Follow Nafosh,’ He meant you. You’re Nafosh.”

  All Ned could do was nod.

  * * *

  That night, Detective DelRoy started making calls. Even after promising Sue he would do so, it had still not been an easy decision to keep that promise. The whole thing with Ned had come out of left field and now it just laid there, a time bomb, waiting to go off. If it did, DelRoy was going to lose some serious cred. Maybe even his job. But what choice did he have? Look the other way, like everyone else seemed to be doing? Let the nuns win, leave the vanished cases vanished, and let the kids just continue to rot in that hole?

  And how would he ever face Sue again?

  In the end, that was what made his mind up for him. The thought of Sue having to move on with her life, without ever knowing what had happened to her daughter. He pulled out his phone list and started dialing.

  Not official calls, though. Only people higher up the command chain could make an official request to one of the national agencies, but with the number of familiar faces he’d seen at the nun’s party, he couldn’t be sure who to trust locally. So instead, he made some unofficial calls. To people he’d worked with over the years. People who were not based here in town. People who knew people.

  With their help, and a little luck, he was finally able to reach somebody who seemed to give a damn. The Deputy Director of the newly formed National Children’s Protection Agency. Unfortunately, being a new agency and eager to make its mark, the Deputy Director made an unexpected—and terrifying—decision.

  He was going to raid the orphanage.

  “There are children at risk,” the D.D. said, when he called DelRoy at home the next morning. “You’ve intercepted a serious threat made against them, and even if you don’t think your vagrant was serious, I can’t afford to take that chance. I had some of my boys take a look, and a lot of your facts check out. It’s clear that these orphans are living in abusive conditions, abandoned by the system, left in the care of negligent guardians, and the surrounding infrastructure is not up to the task of correcting things. This is a textbook case of the state falling victim to its own internal issues and completely failing to fulfill its obligations to the people. Leaves me no choice but to intervene in the matter.”

  “But sir—”

  “Don’t worry, Detective Donnelly. You’ll receive full credit for bringing this to our attention.”

  “But sir—”

  “No, son. Don’t thank me. I’m just doing my job. It’s for the kids, after all. We’ll be going in at fourteen hundred, and I’d really like for you to be there, if you can, son. It’ll look so much better in the photos if we can spin the local-boy-does-good angle.”

  “But sir—”

  “I’ll see you on site at thirteen-thirty. We can coordinate the talking points then.”

  “But sir—”

  “So long, Donnelly. You’ve done well here. Real well. We’ll see you soon.”

  The line went dead.

  DelRoy could only stare at the silent phone still gripped in his hand. The time was now eleven o’clock.

  When he got to Sue’s place, there was no answer at the door, although the newspaper lay at his feet, so she was probably still home. He pounded again on the heavy wooden door, and was just about to go around to the back, when a bleary-eyed Sue peered out at him through the window.

  “Martin?”

  She looked groggy. He must have waken her up. “Open the door, Sue. Things are happening quickly, and I need to talk to you.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were ready to leave. As soon as he’d mentioned the impending raid, Sue had bolted to full alertness. “Somebody is actually doing something,” she said, her voice edged with dreamy wonder.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But to these yahoos, ‘doing something’ probably means something that’ll involve terrifying little kids with a bunch of storm troopers in riot gear.”

  Sue’s shoulders sagged.

  “If we leave now,” he said, “we can get there before anything happens. Maybe we can get a chance to talk to the girls. Warn them or something.” Then he looked around. “Where’s Ned?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Here’s Ned,” Ned said, as he came into the kitchen. He was carrying a brown bag full of fresh bagels and two coffees. “Um, sorry, Det
ective. I didn’t know you’d be here. I only—”

  “Not now, Neddy. We’re on our way out. The Old Shoe is about to be raided!”

  “What?”

  “We’ll tell you in the car. Come on!”

  When they got to the Old Shoe, everything was quiet. Rather than wait for the feds, as he had promised, DelRoy jumped out of the car and bolted up the front steps, with Sue and Ned right behind him. The front door was unlocked, and they went inside, pulling the heavy door shut behind them. Ned locked it.

  “Better not,” DelRoy said. “Could be considered obstruction.” Ned’s eyes widened, but he unlocked the door without complaint.

  “Hello?” The detective’s voice echoed throughout the old building, but there was no answer and the building reverberated in eerie, mid-day silence.

  “That’s odd,” Sue said, stepping forward to peer into Sister Regalia’s office, which was open, but empty. “There’s always been somebody in the office before.”

  A loud thump from somewhere above them jerked everybody’s eyes upward, but before they could react further, another thump knocked them all to the floor.

  And with it, the entire building began to shake.

  Chapter 27

  “Earthquake!” DelRoy yelled, as he pulled himself to his feet, clutching at the frame of the Sister Superior’s office door. Ned and Sue helped each other crawl to the wall, and then clung there to ride out the quake. Outside, a car alarm squawked itself awake, alerting anyone who might not have noticed all the shaking.

  That shaking went on for almost half a minute, but behind it, and behind the alarm… DelRoy cocked his head. There was another sound. Stranger. Quieter. Like a far-away whimper of a creature in pain, but he couldn’t be sure. More likely just some sheet-metal twisting in the tremor.

  When the shaking stopped, Ned looked up. “Did anybody else hear that moaning?” DelRoy nodded. So it hadn’t just been his imagination. But whatever it had been, it was gone now. DelRoy reached into his pocket and clicked the key fob to silence the warble of his car alarm, leaving a very different kind of warble in the distance. The kind sirens made.

  “Emergency response?” Sue asked.

  He shrugged. “Or the feds, on their way here. Either way, we don’t have much time.” Then he turned and headed for the stairwell across the hall. “You try to find your helper-friends, Sue. Take them out to the car and get in the back. I’ll find out what’s going on upst—”

  But Sue shook her head. “No deal,” she said. “Something weird is going on. We stick together.”

  So that’s what they did. They had checked the second and third floors—both empty—and were just reaching the fourth floor landing when the sirens were suddenly loud enough to be right in the stairwell with them. Then they stopped, to be replaced by the muffled thumps of car doors and shouts of command from outside.

  “Damn! It is the feds, and they’re here early,” DelRoy said.

  Somewhere above them, something crashed, like a stack of pots being dropped into a sink. A sink inside the building.

  “Come on,” he said. “Skip four. That came from the fifth floor!” His feet pounded like thunder on the stairs, echoed a moment later by Sue and Ned as they followed close behind.

  As DelRoy charged out into the fifth floor hallway, he caught a strange odor. Tangy, like after a lightning storm, but fragrant too, like fresh-cut lumber or a greenhouse. It was a scent of living things, and it stood out brightly against the institutional smells of old dust and cheap floor wax. Below them, he heard the hollow booming of fists banging on the door. Not much time. DelRoy looked around quickly. There were half a dozen doors down the main hallway, and the first two were open. One on the left, one on the right. He waved Sue toward the right-hand door and took the left one for himself.

  Inside was a large, squarish room with high ceilings. Bits of paper and cardboard littered the floor, and a low line of boxes ran along the far wall, underneath the windows. One section of the row had toppled over, and five or six bronze bowls lay scattered across the floor, having spilled out from a few of the boxes.

  DelRoy looked around, but there was nowhere for anybody to hide. The commotion had probably been caused by the quake toppling a poorly stacked section of the box wall.

  “Nothing here,” Sue called, from the other room. “But I can see the police cars. They’re getting out a ram.”

  He turned at the sound of her voice, and that’s when he noticed the large red circle painted on the wall behind him. He stepped toward it and dabbed at the paint with one finger. It was sticky, and the detective stared curiously at the reddish fingerprint that now appeared on the tip of his finger. He rubbed at it with his thumb and the redness smeared into a streak.

  “Still wet,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Ned had stepped into the room, and a moment later Sue came in behind him. DelRoy held up his finger, red side out. “Paint,” he said. “On the wall. It’s still wet.” Ned stepped further into the room to see what he was talking about, but Sue ignored it and came right over to where DelRoy was standing.

  “The police are trying to get in,” she said, “but the door is stuck.” She turned a glare toward Ned as she said it, but her brother raised his hands in innocence.

  “I did unlock it,” he said. “Even opened and closed it to be sure I got it right.”

  Sue turned back to DelRoy. “Could the quake have jammed it?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But even so, we haven’t got much time before they break it down. Where do you suppose everybody went?”

  There was a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, and then suddenly, the room was filled with green light and the heavy scent of forest.

  “Who the hell are you?” said a voice behind him.

  Sue gasped and DelRoy spun around and. The wall inside the red circle had vanished, revealing a brilliantly lit forest in mid-summer. In the middle of the circle, a nun was stepping over the threshold, out of the forest, and into the room. A wicked smile twitched at the corners of her lips.

  “Sister Anthrax!” Sue said.

  “Get them!” Sister Anthrax said.

  And then DelRoy saw them, swarming from behind the nun. “Oh my god. You weren’t lying,” he said, as an army of monkey men boiled into the room. All of them armed with long, white clubs.

  * * *

  A dark haired man in a black rain jacket stood at the window of the upstairs dorm room, looking down at the scene on the sidewalk out front. The word “CAPTAIN” blazed from his back in bright, reflective lettering. Directly below him, the Deputy Director was striking a pose on the front steps, talking to reporters. Aside from that, all he could see was the assault van and the four dark, unmarked cars that were parked at various angles, blocking the street to traffic. Plus an extra unmarked. Probably DelRoy’s, but no sign of DelRoy himself.

  But that wasn’t the only thing missing. Everything about this scene made him feel… wrong. Where were the gawkers surging up the sidewalk? The neighbors peering out of alleys, or from behind curtained windows on the other side of the street? Maybe it was that—the complete absence of any community around this place—that made him uneasy. Behind him, somebody coughed.

  “Uh, Captain Fisher?”

  “Any sign of DelRoy?” Fisher asked.

  “No sir. Not inside.”

  Figures. The Captain turned away from the window to face his second. “Okay, Lambert. And what’d we get from surveillance?”

  Lambert looked at his notes. “A man matching the description you gave did enter the building, sir. We’re assuming it was DelRoy, but Mitch asked if you could ID the photo, just to be sure. The guy was in the company of a middle-aged couple, apparently civilians. No ID on them yet. That was at 12:40, about four minutes before we arrived on scene.”

  Fisher nodded. “Anything else?”

  The lieutenant shrugged. “Just that whoever he was, he had no trouble with the doors, which apparently weren’t even locked. They entered withou
t incident, about a minute or so before the tremor. Looks like that’s what jammed the doors up so bad for us. And of course, they logged the nun coming in.”

  Right. The nun. What had they been thinking? Head striking a nun making sandwiches.

  “Anything more on her?”

  “She went in at 12:25, carrying a bunch of shopping bags. Whatever happened, it’d probably already gone down before she got here.”

  He’d have words to say about the nun thing, but for now there were more pressing questions. Fisher took a pack of gum out of his pocket, selected a stick, and pushed it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully. If DelRoy was on the level, there should be a dozen or more nuns in custody, and thirty or forty kids waiting to be processed by Children’s Services. But all he had was that one semi-conscious nun, and not even DelRoy around to yell at for answers.

  “Where is she now?”

  “We’re holding her in the command car. I thought you’d probably want to talk to her.”

  “I do, Lieutenant. I do.” Then he nodded across the hall to where the evidence team was doing their thing. “Have them double check each other, and make sure we get photos of everything. After coming in this heavy and nothing to show for it, we’re going to want our asses covered a million ways from Sunday.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Fisher was half way through the door before he stopped and turned back. “Oh, and Lambert, if you do happen to come across Martin DelRoy around here somewhere, stuff him in a sack and bring him to me, will ya?” The lieutenant blinked back at him for a moment and then nodded. Nice guy, Lambert, but a little too stiff. The Captain winked at him and then stalked away down the hall. Why did it have to be nuns?

  * * *

  “Hello, Sister. My name is Fisher. Captain Benjamin Fisher. Can you tell me yours?”