by L. E. Perry
"When I'm convinced," Jordan answered tersely. This was crazy.
Jordan had purposely made his demands unacceptable, having promised to take the job if Carl accepted them. Jordan could make good use of that money, but to commit to nearly round-the-clock work, and live in someone else’s house to do it, was giving up more control than he could stand. He’d tried to force Carl to make the decision he wanted so he’d be guaranteed to give up on this crazy idea. But it had gone the wrong way. With that much money, he could buy his mom a house she’d be willing to move into, and get her out of that God-forsaken slum. That was it. That was what he wanted more than anything. At $190,000 a year for two years, he could do it. Especially if he didn’t even have to pay for a place to live for that two years. Everything he needed was covered, the income was free and clear.
The waitress came to remove the plates, and Carl dropped his card on the edge of the table. She lifted it deftly with Jordan’s dishes and disappeared.
"I'll need two weeks to give my boss time to find a replacement," Jordan said finally, pulling a notebook out to look at a calendar in the front of it.
Carl rubbed his face. There was blond stubble on the pale gold skin. "I need you in three weeks at the outside, Jordan. Twenty-two days from now, on the evening of the twenty-first."
"You'll have me, but no sooner. I haven't seen my family for a year, and I'll be working overtime for the next few weeks, training their journeyman to reach a master level. I won’t have time to call... Huh...” Jordan was staring at the calendar.
“What is it?” Carl asked.
Jordan pointed at the day he’d marked on the calendar. “Full moon. That’s just more proof: you’re freakin’ loony.”
Carl shook his head in disgust, but Jordan saw a wariness in his eyes. He’d probably hit it on the nose. Carl thought he was transforming into some kind of monster when the moon was full. So, Jordan could take the job, get the pay, and when Carl was institutionalized after he talked to Carl’s father about everything, Jordan could walk away with enough money to finally take care of his mom, and to start a business.
They cemented the deal with signatures, not handshakes. Jordan still felt like he was being bought, and he didn’t like it, but he’d put up with it for just long enough to get what he wanted out of the deal.
Chapter 2 – The New Job
Three weeks later, Jordan sat on a city bus, staring out the window at the freeway as it rushed past. There was sun over the water of the Puget Sound, but a damp mist fell on the buildings. After taking two days to get from Los Angeles to Seattle, he was getting tired of buses, whether greyhound or city transit. Carl’s deadline had left him four days at home with his mother, as well as his sister, who was thirteen and growing fast, but he had been exhausted during their time together, considering work and personal arrangements. He should have taken Carl's offer of a plane ticket, but there was less leg room on a plane than a bus, and he knew bus stations, not airports. Travelling by bus also gave him transition time. The thought of stepping on a plane in one part of his life, and stepping off it a few hours later in another part, was slightly unnerving to him. He still wasn't sure he'd made the right choice about accepting the position, but he'd given his word and he couldn't go back now.
Aside from the few clothes he had in his pack and his two handguns, including a semi-automatic pistol he had in a shoulder holster under his windbreaker, his belongings had been shipped ahead of him. They consisted of a dozen or so large pillows he slept on when he had kinks in his muscles, (the mattress he'd been using was borrowed), some clothes, some weights, and a guitar and amplifier given him by the family of a friend. He'd rather have kept the friend, but death was a cruel negotiator.
The bus pulled off the freeway in downtown Seattle. He'd watched the misty skyline as they came in, but he couldn't see the Space Needle from here. Someone had told him once that if Seattle had a major earthquake, that iconic structure would be the last thing to fall. He found that hard to believe, it looked so spindly compared with the rock-solid obsidian face of the Columbia Tower or any of the other familiar buildings of the Seattle skyline.
He pulled his bag out from under the seat and got ready to be elbowed. It only happened when people didn't see him. When they turned around to apologize, their jaws would drop in dismay at his size. They cowered away from him as if he would crush their skulls for putting an elbow in his ribs by accident.
He thought of his mother and sister again, in the same house he'd grown up in. It sat in a subdivision called Rainier, a dismal namesake of the beautiful mountain visible from the bustling city on the rare days the sky was clear. The neighborhood was still going steadily downhill. The assistant he'd hired for his mother recently was apparently doing a good job at helping her get around. Maybe, with the extra money he'd have when he started getting paid by Carl, he'd be able to hire an RN. Even after seven years, his mother still had a lot of pain, and spent too much time at her doctor's office. He'd told her it would be better if she simply moved to a wheelchair-efficient home, but she refused. It would cost too much. He wanted her out of there, along with his little sister Kira, too. He didn't care to visit that house; too many memories, and too easy for his violent father to find.
He saw Carl's car from the window as the bus pulled into the slot reserved for it at the corner. Amazing. Parking downtown was a major undertaking. Jordan wondered how much Carl paid the previous occupant for the metered parking spot. Stepping through the automatic door, Jordan alighted, stood aside, and stretched in the lightly falling mist. Carl jogged over, slightly damp.
"Come on, mate, we've got to hustle," Carl said in his soft British accent. "I've only got three months of data, shows me losing it tonight around 7:00 p.m. or so. I'd rather be at home well before this happens. This it? You travel light. Quickly now, you'll have to drive. If I lose it on the highway we'll become a traffic jam, and the ticket for that is horrific. Over there," Carl was directing him the whole time he spoke, though it was obvious to Jordan where he was going. Carl was wearing a pair of sun-sensitive, wire-rimmed glasses.
Jordan made a point of standing solidly at the corner and waiting for the light to change. Carl looked like he was going to jaywalk and dodge the cars, and Jordan didn't want his new job to start in the emergency room. When the light changed they crossed to the car, Carl opened the trunk and quickly took Jordan's bag from him.
"Good thing I travel light," Jordan stated, looking at the lack of trunk space.
“It's got a bit of room behind the seats as well," Carl answered, handing him the keys. Jordan unlocked the doors, slid down into the seat, and started the car. As the systems in the vehicle powered on, he found the stereo tuned to a classical station and a blare of violins assaulted his ears. He turned the noise off, and heard the car purring as if it had missed him. Checking his rearview, he pulled out into traffic and up to the light, remembering how the car had responded before. His memory hadn't done it justice. It handled like a dream.
Stopping at a red light, Jordan looked down one of Seattle's many commercialized alleyways. A memory of new age, ethnic restaurants fronted on neon-gothic alleys flooded over him.
"Is I-5 the best way?" Jordan asked, turning to Carl.
"You could cross the lake and take 405, but at this hour you wouldn't gain anything. Traffic is surprisingly light right now. We'll be taking Highway 2, which begins after the two converge up north."
Jordan checked his controls briefly, then shifted into first again as the light turned green. He'd need to turn left within two blocks. Driving with a manual transmission downtown was usually a hassle because of the steep hills, but the well-adjusted clutch on the Jaguar made it seem as smooth as a highway. Turning onto the entrance ramp, Jordan considered taking it to its limit on a familiar freeway, but thought better of it with a glance at Carl, who was engrossed in his phone. He was charting his temperature with a temporal thermometer every few minutes, alternating with a blood pressure cuf
f, recording all of it in the notes app on his phone. Leave it to Carl to have exactly the right equipment everywhere he went.
"Anything?" Jordan asked a short while later, looking across the bridge toward the University of Washington campus and thinking about the cherry blossoms that lined a pathway between the old brick buildings called "The Quad.” All through high school, he had dreamed of walking through them on his way to class, books under his arm. He still dreamed of it.
He realized Carl had answered his question. What was it he'd said? Slow rise?
"Temperature or blood pressure?" They were past the Huskies stadium. He had missed seeing the Space Needle again while transferring lanes repeatedly through the downtown area.
"Temperature is increasing slightly. That's likely to be nerves. Blood pressure just lowers on following mornings, but I thought I'd check."
"What's your resting pulse rate now?" he checked the rearview and shifted lanes.
"Seventy," Carl answered, jotting more notes on the page.
Jordan mouthed ‘seventy’ before saying anything. "What happened to you?"
"Classes, books… this infernal illness."
"Whatever happened to walking between classes?"
"Classes all in the same place," came the terse reply.
Jordan made a mental note to himself to take a wide variety of classes each semester, if he ever got the chance. Then he shook his head. "You had a resting pulse rate of forty-five in high school."
"I was running every day in high school, and I drank a great deal less coffee."
"How much has this... this condition affected your resting pulse rate?"
"Eh…" Carl answered, then looked up at the windshield, thinking. "My resting pulse rate was lower early on, but it's back up now. A little higher, actually."
Carl appeared more interested in his measurements than their conversation, so Jordan left him alone for the rest of the trip, except to get directions every half hour or so. They began to climb steadily up into the mountains as the mist gave way to sunshine, and Jordan looked up at the deep blue peaks, the emerald fir trees, and the rivers, so clear you could see the rocks at the bottom as if through warped glass. He could almost taste the ice-cold water, and he rolled the window down to smell the evergreen trees. It was quite a bit cooler up here than downtown.
Carl directed him to a winding road on the left, and they followed a river higher still. Jordan could see the timberline high above them, where the trees just dwindled to shrubs, then to grass, and finally to bare gray rock with patches of snow on the shaded north slopes. He had to pay too much attention to the road to see if there were any goats visible. If they were up there, it would take a great deal of patience to spot them. They would look like pale rocks, or small patches of snow, until one moved. He watched the river dance along beside him, rushing in the other direction. Once Carl was hospitalized for his delusions, Jordan would to take his severance, and spend a few weeks up here (thank God he had that in ink, and with bodyguard duty removed, too). The beauty of the place always took his breath away. And scaling the peaks was a hell of a good workout, if you did it right.
Twenty minutes later, after passing a quaint combination café, lounge and tiny grocery store, Carl motioned him to turn off onto an oiled dirt road. He slowed down rapidly to avoid the ruts and the washboard marks made by logging trucks coming down with heavy loads.
Carl barely spoke, only gesturing instructions for the route with a loose wave here or there. After several turns, the road took them to a huge grassy field, the top of which was adorned by a castle of a house Carl had referred to as a "cabin.” The huge structure was made of gray stone on the lower half, with enormous wood timbers holding up a slate roof with sharp, steep lines, and a vast triangle of windows between diagonal roof braces. It was set against a backdrop of granite peaks that jutted skyward like fists raised in defiance of gravity. Jordan half expected to see a moat below the wide basalt steps that led up to solid mahogany doors. There was also an entrance on the side, covered, where a car could pull up and dispense passengers beneath a rain canopy. The driveway led past the canopy and around back. Roughing it, Jordan thought sardonically.
Carl had the thermometer in his mouth again, and was thumbing the data into his phone furiously. Jordan pulled up to the garage in the back. A short, covered walkway bridged the short distance to the house, which was nestled against a rise of stone at the northern edge of the clearing. Carl jumped out of the car, motioning for Jordan to do the same. Jordan looked at his watch. It was 6:45 p.m. The sun was well behind the tall peaks, though the sky was still clear blue. The valley where the house was situated would have given a view of the sunrise, if it weren’t for the tall peaks beyond. Carl shoved the notebook into Jordan's hands, having taken the last reading.
"The contractor just finished reinforcing the storage room this morning. I'll need to have you watch me closely and record everything that occurs."
"Reinforcing?"
"Steel reinforcement. I'll be locking myself in. There are bars on the windows, all that, so I don't crash through and tear my skin like I've done before. I’m tired of having to find my way home every morning, and then having to bandage myself."
Jordan looked for scars on Carl's hands and arms, but there weren't any. He was angry that Carl hadn't mentioned this sooner, but he followed him in after plucking his bag out of the trunk, not sure yet whether he would be sleeping tonight. Carl was jogging into the covered walkway that led between the garage and through one of two back doors, the only doors Jordan had seen without stairs. It looked like a servant's entrance.
Carl stopped in the doorway and waved at the bright, airy kitchen with a series of brushed-nickel appliances. "Kitchen with stocked pantry. It's all yours; restock it as you need. I have accounts with the companies listed on the inside of the cupboard by the telephone, and I've already added you to several, including Rosie's down in Baring." He jogged down a short hallway toward the front of the house, then up a broad curved mahogany staircase that led up from the opulent wooden doors of the front entrance.
Jordan studied the astounding architecture and huge slate floor tiles while following Carl up the curved staircase. Once he’d left the brightly lit kitchen area, it was like some European "Tara," only darker. Carl turned left, then showed him a door that led to a bedroom. "Your boxes are in there, or at least three of them are. If you own any more, they haven't arrived. There are intercoms hooked up to the sound system in the living room downstairs, where there’s also a library of music on the computer and tablet, mostly retro-pop. The bath is down the hall."
Jordan stopped him. "Have you ever used a gun?"
Carl looked at him quizzically. "No. Why would I?"
Jordan dropped his bag and reached into the vest of the light jacket he wore, pulling out his pistol. "Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter. I keep it by the front door wherever I live so I can get to it quickly.” He didn’t mention the one he’d be keeping at his bedside. “You got a closet by the front door?"
Carl was staring at the gun. "Ah, no... why don't you keep it in your own room?"
"Not much good there if I’m downstairs when someone comes up to the door."
"Are you expecting someone?" Carl asked quietly.
Jordan stared at him for several seconds. "How about the back door?"
"There's a closet there, but–"
"The gun goes in the closet. Don't touch the gun until I've shown you how to use it. This thing'll blow your hand off with the type of bullets I have in it."
"I'd rather not have it in the house."
"You get me, you get the gun. Live with it." Jordan put the gun back in its holster.
Carl frowned. "You work for me."
"And you live with me," Jordan repeated, meeting Carl's eyes.
Carl nodded warily.
Jordan put his bags down.
Carl spoke quietly. "I'd like to complete the tour, but I'm a bit pressed for time–
"
Carl halted abruptly, and Jordan heard the hiss of breath that was all a person ever heard of pain from Carl. He might be pampered, but he was never a coward. Carl dropped into a crouch, holding his rib cage. He finally crumpled to the floor. His flesh went pale, then he stumbled back up into a wide-legged stance, pulling his glasses off and tossing them onto a rug. "Mark the time, Jordan, and stay on my heels here. Your assignment has just begun."
Carl ran down the hallway, talking over his shoulder. “Keep a record of everything you see, and check the time at which you see it. Every move I make, every sound, the way I breathe—" Carl stopped to clutch his arms and hunch over. Jordan checked his watch, then ran to catch Carl, supporting him as he slowed. Carl stepped down the staircase gingerly with Jordan's aid.
They went swiftly through a hallway and down another set of stairs. Carl seemed to be losing control of himself rapidly. He dodged into a room just off the base of the stairs and slammed a steel-barred door shut between himself and Jordan. Jordan heard the solid clink of an automatic locking mechanism, then watched through the bars as Carl dropped to the floor and immediately pulled his clothes off. Jordan was about ready to walk out when he saw Carl convulse, then stretch taut like a wire. Jordan started recording a video on his phone to capture what was happening, since he didn’t trust his senses.
Carl's arms began to shorten slowly and he shook his head, curly blond locks of hair flying away in large clumps. The palms of his hands sprouted thick pads as the fingers shrank to short stubs. The fingernails fell off and heavy claws gradually emerged. Carl's legs transformed more rapidly, shrinking in toward his body and seeming almost to bend backwards as his feet elongated to become part of his legs. His chest became deeper and narrower. His face twisted in a grimace of agony and his ears rose tall and triangular as they migrated like living creatures up to the top of his skull, which became narrow and flat. His jaw, upper and lower, stretched outward, and his nose turned flat and wet as it was carried forward on his lips, which spread wide and black as if splitting his face in two.
