Riverwatch

by Joseph Nassise

  Number 310.

  Gabriel’s room.

  As he swung around the corner, his feet sliding on the slick tile, his arms thrust against the walls to maintain his balance, time returned to its normal pace, and for one awful moment Sam thought he’d black out as his senses rebelled against the illusions his mind was creating. But then he regained a foothold of control on his body and the grayness that was looming just behind his eyes receded.

  He skidded to a stop in the doorway of the room.

  In the split-second in which he first glanced inside the room Sam thought he’d been right; gremlins from Hell had indeed paid Gabriel a visit. The old man was thrashing wildly in his bed and Sam saw with horror that there was something crouched on the man’s chest, a small dark form which he was beating with his fists. The room was filled with the sound of screaming.

  As Sam’s eyes adjusted to the dimness inside the room, he realized the truth.

  Gabriel was having a nightmare.

  The object on his chest was nothing more than his own pillow. His trashing was a result of being entangled in his bedsheets.

  Relief swept over Sam like the touch of a cool ocean wave.

  Sam crossed to Gabriel’s side and tried to awaken him. The old man’s efforts were only making the situation worse, as each new tossing of his limbs twisted the sheets tighter around him, so that he must have felt like a fly caught in a spider’s web.

  The screaming suddenly stopped.

  In its place came a whimpering cry that filled the room, the cry of a rabbit caught in a snare, and Sam felt the hair on the back of his neck stiffen at the sound.

  His mind balked at the terror the man must be experiencing to reduce him to such a state.

  "Gabriel! Wake up! It’s just a dream! Wake up!" Sam yelled over the noise. It took some effort to pin one of the old man’s arms to the mattress after grasping hold of it, and Sam was surprised at the man’s wiry strength. He made a grab at the other arm and missed, getting a fist in the mouth for his trouble.

  "Gabriel, wake up!"

  This time his voice was of sufficient volume to cut through the terror of the Gabriel’s nightmare and reach him. He awoke with a start, and Sam held his arm tighter as he saw the sudden fear that surged in the man’s eyes.

  "It’s okay, Gabriel. It’s okay. It’s Sam. You were just having a bad dream, that’s all, just a dream." He spoke in soft gentle tones and gradually the fear he saw in the man’s wrinkled features receded, to be replaced by a look of utter exhaustion.

  "Oh, sweet mercy, Sammy," the older man croaked in a weary voice as he slumped back against the pillows.

  "It’s okay now, Gabriel. You were just dreaming. Take a few deep breaths and try to relax."

  "He’s out there, Sammy. I know he is. I can feel him. He’s out there waiting for me."

  "Nobody’s out there. It was just a bad dream."

  "No, Sammy. You don’t understand! He’s out there and he knows I know it. He escaped, he’s gotten free. But I’m too weak now Sammy, too weak. I can’t stop him this time," he said.

  Sam watched as Gabriel turned his head to stare out the window into the night’s darkness. He seemed to be searching the sky for something, and seemed more than a little relieved to see that whatever it was wasn’t there. He turned back to face Sam.

  "He knows. Knows where I am. He’ll come for me, too. You mark my words, he’ll come for me. And this time he won’t be the one who loses."

  "Come on, Gabriel. There’s nobody there. No one is going to come after you. You were just having a bad dream." Sam was growing nervous himself now, the man’s attitude like some kind of infectious disease, quickly spreading.

  Relax, he told himself. The old man’s starting to lose it upstairs. Had to happen sometime, right?

  Sam sighed. He genuinely liked Gabriel. He was a quiet patient, never needing much but a few kind words here and there, but old age was bound to have caught up with him at some point and it looked like it finally had.

  "Tell you what, Gabe. I’ll just sit right here next to you and keep you company. That way no one can get to you without going through me, okay?" he said, smiling to show there was nothing to fear as he pulled a chair up next to the bed. The old man’s hand sought his own, and Sam held it gently without saying anything, calmly waiting for Gabriel to fall back asleep.

  Fifteen minutes later, just when he got up to leave, positive that the old man was sleeping peacefully, Gabriel spoke out of the darkness in a thin, whispery tone.

  "Watch the sky, Sammy. When he comes, it will be on night’s velvet wings, as swift as the darkness itself. It will be too late to save me but not too late to save yourself, as long as you watch the sky…"

  He sounds so certain, he thought to himself as he stepped to the door, and for a moment considered going back to question Gabriel more closely to see if there was any substance behind his talk. But then the man’s gentle breathing reached his ears across the short space of the room and he changed his mind.

  He’s asleep now. If you wake him up, he’ll only be frightened again and may not be able to get back to sleep so easily a second time. It’s better to just let it go. He probably won’t even remember it in the morning, Sam thought to himself.

  That was when he looked toward the window and saw the dark, hulking shape perched on the balcony just outside.

  "Oh, my God!" he said in a frightened whisper, his arms falling limply to his sides. He was suddenly too scared to move.

  It’s here, he thought. The thing Gabriel’s afraid of is really here! It’s come for him, just like he said it would!

  But after a moment or two, when whatever it was didn’t move, Sam began to doubt what he was seeing.

  What’s your problem? he asked himself irritably, willing his body into motion. There’s no such thing as flying demons or whatever the thing was supposed to be. It’s probably just a chair someone forgot to take back inside, that’s all.

  Keeping that idea foremost in his mind, Sam marched across the room and flipped on the light switch on the wall next to the sliding glass door to the balcony. The lamp hanging on the wall outside came on, flooding the balcony with light.

  He’d been right.

  It was only a chair.

  Feeling more than a little foolish now, Sam turned the light back off and slipped quietly out of the room. He returned to his station at the other end of the hall and sat back down. He picked up his book, intending to return to the place where he’d left off, but found that he didn’t have the heart for it anymore. Not after Gabriel’s nightmare and his own scare moments later. I’ve been frightened enough for one night already, thank you very much. Tossing the paperback aside, he grabbed a stack of files and began updating the charts.

  He never saw the dark form that returned to the balcony of room 310 just moments after he’d left the room, never knew it spent the rest of the night staring in through the window at the old man lying peacefully in his bed.

  More than once he found himself glancing up from his studies to peer out the windows into the darkness, searching the night sky for he knew not what.

  There was never anything there, but for some reason that didn’t make him feel any better.

  Chapter Twenty: Forensics

  Damon sat staring at the forensic reports in short-tempered silence. The interviews earlier that morning hadn’t produced anything useful and these reports seemed to be a dead-end as well. The scientific team had examined the bullets recovered at the scene. Ballistic tests proved that all of them had come from Jones’ sidearm. The flattened condition of each bullet proved they had struck their target, a conclusion bolstered by the presence of blood samples on each. So far, the technicians had been unable to match the blood to any known species, however, making them come to the conclusion that the samples were somehow contaminated. Further tests were being conducted.

  What a damned mess.

  Glancing at his watch, Damon realized he’d have to get moving if he was going to be on tim
e for his meeting with Strickland. The Sheriff left the stationhouse and drove over to the Medical Examiner’s office. He rode the elevator down to the hospital basement with three surgeons; his manner hard and grim, the two dead officers very much on his mind, the physicians enduring the ride in silence, studiously not looking in his direction. At the lower level Damon stepped off the elevator and moved briskly down the hall until he came to the morgue.

  The room was starkly lit with bright fluorescent lights. Three autopsy tables were spaced evenly, a bank of moveable lamps hanging within easy reach over each one. Large drains dotted the floor. Two of the tables were occupied, their contents covered with white plastic sheets. Around the lip of the drain beneath the table containing the larger bundle, Damon could see a thin pink froth left over from when the floors had been hosed down after the morning’s work. His shoes squeaked as they crossed the still damp linoleum.

  Strickland was at one of the sinks, washing up.

  "Hello, Ed," said Damon, entering the room.

  "Sheriff."

  Ed dried his hands and then moved to close the morgue’s doors, assuring them of privacy. "I’ve spent the last ten hours doing multiple autopsies, first on the Cummings couple and then on your two officers."

  Damon’s jaw clenched at the thought of his murdered men but he did not interrupt the other man.

  "In each and every case, I found the same types of evidence, the same confusing issues." He moved over to one of the autopsy tables. A body lay on top of it, covered by a clean white sheet. Reaching up, he switched on the bank of lamps above it, then pulled the sheet down to unveil the remains of George Cummings.

  "The reason I called you down is simple." Stirckland hesitated, took a deep breath, and then said, "whatever killed this man wasn’t human."

  Damon stared at his friend for a moment in silence and then said, "Come again?"

  Ed looked down at the corpse before him, an expression of honest bafflement on his face. "In all my years of pathology I’ve never run across something as strange as this. Every time I think I’m getting somewhere, I find something else which completely shatters my current theory. I haven’t finished all the tests I intend to do, but I’ve got the feeling that once I do, I still won’t know anymore than I do right now, which is practically nothing. There’s only one thing of which I am positive." Strickland looked up and met Damon’s disbelieving gaze, "Nothing human killed this man."

  The words hung in the air between them.

  Maneuvering the lights down closer to the body, Strickland tried to explain. "First of all, the man’s head wasn’t cut off his body. It was torn off."

  He bent over the corpse. "See this ragged tear here?" he asked, pointing to what was left of the man’s neck. The flesh at that point rose and fell in uneven peaks and valleys. "If the killer had used a knife or some other sharp object to sever the head, we’d see a relatively smooth cut."

  "What about a saw?" Damon asked. "That wouldn’t leave a smooth edge, would it?"

  "No, but it would be a uniform tear. This is too uneven to be a saw blade." He paused and looked up to make certain Damon was following his explanation. When he saw that he was, Strickland continued. "Do you remember a game we used to play with dandelions when we were kids? Something about Momma having a baby and her head popped off?"

  "You’re not saying…?"

  Ed smiled a strange and bitter smile. "Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Something pulled this man’s head from his body as easily as we used to flip those flowers off their stems."

  Damon stared down at the corpse with a whole new sense of horror.

  "It gets worse. With the exception of his eyes, still in the head you recovered from the toilet and the intestines you found strung all over the bedroom, all the other soft organs in the body have been removed."

  "Removed?" The slight tremor in Damon’s voice suggested he already knew what Strickland meant by the euphemism.

  Again the smile. "Removed. Eaten. Devoured. Call it what you will. As far as I can tell, the beast, whatever it is, got his heart, his kidneys, his liver, even his tongue and testicles."

  "Oh, God," said Damon, as he fought to make his mind accept what he was hearing.

  "My thoughts exactly." Strickland flipped off the lights and covered the body.

  Damon finally got his thoughts in order. "How come you’re so certain it’s an animal? Couldn’t a human, albeit a very sick one, have done the same thing? Look at that guy Dahmer. He was certainly capable of something like that."

  "Sure, I guess it would be possible. But not in this case. No human left the teeth marks I found."

  "Teeth marks?" Damon echoed. He was starting to feel a little slow on the uptake.

  Ed moved over to the other table. Turning on the lights and drawing back the sheet as he had before, he exposed Cumming’s head and limbs.

  "The bones had been deeply scored at the point of separation from the rest of the limb. My first hunch was that the marks were caused by some kind of tool, maybe a tire iron or an axe, but on closer examination I realized that they were really the imprints left when the beast crushed the limbs between its jaws. Its teeth are curved inward, at an angle, so when they cut through the skin and hit the bone, they leave evidence of their passing," Ed turned the foot so Damon could see the exposed cross-section of the bone, "and if you look closely, you’ll see that the marrow has been sucked out as well. While the creature had less time with Bannerman and Jones, their bodies showed many of the same results."

  "Jesus! What kind of animal are we talking about here, Ed?"

  The Medical examiner shrugged. "Damned if I know. Something big enough to tackle a full-grown man. Something that’s not only not afraid of him, but also happens to like how he tastes. But I’m afraid there’s more. I found the same strange lack of blood with this body as I did with Halloran’s corpse."

  "You’re kidding me, right?"

  " ‘Fraid not. No blood, and the veins themselves collapsed throughout the entire system. I can’t explain it any more than I could when I talked to you yesterday. I’ve never seen anything like it."

  "So what you’re saying is that whatever killed Halloran also killed the Cummings’ as well?"

  "It appears that way."

  Damon was perplexed. "Why didn’t it feast on Halloran, too? Why just the older couple and my men?"

  "Who knows? Could be for a variety of reasons. Maybe it was just thirsty the first time." Strickland’s weak attempt at humor blew right past Damon. For all he knew, it might not be a joke at all.

  "You ready for the rest?"

  "There’s more?" Damon asked him, incredulously.

  Strickland picked the head up off the table and turned it around so Damon could see the fist-sized hole in the back of the man’s skull.

  The white gleam of bone could clearly be seen inside the empty skull cavity.

  "It ate his brain, too," Strickland replied.

  Chapter Twenty-One: Confrontation

  Later that night

  Gabriel lay quietly in his room, thinking about the past. Once he’d been young and powerful, but that time had long since faded into dust. His end was approaching, he knew that, and in certain ways he welcomed it. He lifted one frail hand and stared at it, remembering how it had appeared long ago, smooth and strong, a power to be reckoned with, not liver-spotted and weak as it was now. The years had, at last, taken their toll on his physical form.

  His mind was as sharp as ever, though, and he decided to make use of its powers one last time before he moved on from this place. Settling back against his pillows, he gathered his strength and with a sharp mental shove cast his consciousness out beyond the walls of the facility in which he lay to the crisp, clean air of the summer night. While the Na’Karat might have the physical power to fly, Gabriel’s kind flew in other, truer ways, and he wouldn’t have traded it for the world.

  He soared above the buildings, reveling in his freedom, then swooped down toward the forest floor below. As h
e did so, a rabbit jumped out of the undergrowth and stopped to feed on a patch of clover.

  What would it be like to exist as you do, my little fellow? he asked it silently. To have no responsibilities, no worries, to sleep at night without the burden of suffocating doubts that plague you like a leprous disease rotting you away from the inside out? What would it be like, to think only of the present moment, with no thought or consideration to the future or the past?

  The rabbit stiffened suddenly, as if sensing his presence and with a sudden burst of speed it spun to the right and disappeared into the undergrowth.

  Gabriel watched it go, following its passage into the woods by listening for the tiny thump of its heart. He wished his furry friend good fortune, and then sent his presence soaring high above the ground to view the world once more in the fashion of his youth, before the coming of man and the war that destroyed his people.

  Once his "eyes" had seen enough, he returned to his body and lay there in the darkness of his room, waiting.

  Instead of concentrating on the confrontation he knew would soon occur, his thoughts drifted.

  An image of a woman formed in his mind. She was beautiful, a golden-haired goddess with eyes of emerald green and cherry red lips.

  Ah, Mira, my beautiful Mira! How long has it been? he thought sadly. His heart ached for her just as it had in ages past, when they had walked hand in hand beneath the golden spires of their fair city. He loved her as strongly as he had in the days of his youth. If anything, that devotion had grown stronger with the passage of time, until he felt close to bursting with his longing for her. He could remember her face as clearly now as if he’d seen it only yesterday; he could trace its soft, gentle curves in the air with his eyes and feel the heat of her breath on his lips. He knew it wouldn’t be long before they were reunited, and he secretly longed for his journey through the ages to be over so that he could join her in the afterworld.

  Gabriel watched the ticking hands of the clock, and wished they’d move faster.