Riverwatch

Chapter Twenty-Six: Revelations

Jake awoke.

He lay flat on his back in bed, his eyes straining to see in the darkness. His muscles tensed, and he was surprised when, a second or two after awakening, he realized he was holding his breathe.

For several long moments, there was silence.

Just when he’d convinced himself that he was imagining things, the loud pounding that had awoken him resumed.

The front door, Jake realized distantly.

He glanced at the glowing hands of his watch.

Who the hell was banging on his door at two a.m.?

Finding his jeans where he’d dropped them beside the bed, Jake swung his legs out from under the sheets and pulled the jeans up over them.

The knocking continued.

"Hold your damn horses. I said I was coming!" he called in the direction of the front door.

The pounding had awoken Loki and now the dog added his barking to the din.

"Quiet boy!" Jake said as he rounded the corner and snapped on the foyer light. Loki stood in front of the door, barking furiously, but when he saw Jake he backed off and settled down.

The sudden quiet left in the wake of Loki’s silence was interrupted a second later as the pounding resumed for a third time.

Jake lost his patience. He turned the lock, disengaged the bolt, and threw the door open violently.

"Look you stupid son-of-a…"

He got no further.

The flood of words leaving his mouth trickled to a stop the moment Jake realized who it was standing on his front steps.

It was Sam and his friend was a mess.

The knees of his jeans were stained with mud and grass. His shirt was buttoned improperly and on its front was a long streak of drying vomit.

Sam looked up and Jake knew something terrible had happened.

At last he found his voice. "Sam! What the hell happened?"

Travers smiled sadly. He opened his mouth to answer, but got no further.

His chin dropped, his shoulders slumped, and without uttering a sound he collapsed directly into Jake’s arms, unconscious. The beer can he’d been holding behind his back clattered to the floor.

"Aw shit, Sam." Caruso muttered as he manhandled his friend into the apartment and out into the living room.

As they passed through the foyer something slipped out of Sam’s half-tucked shirt and fell to the floor. Loki scooted in and retrieved it as Jake dumped Sam unceremoniously onto the couch.

Jake struggled with his friend’s limp body for a few moments until he’d managed to get the soiled clothes off him. He tossed these into the wash and then got a spare blanket out of the hall closet to cover him up. He retrieved the beer can from the floor, then went outside and looked in the window of Sam’s car. The other five cans of the six-pack were on the front seat, still in their plastic binding. Satisfied that Sam wasn’t going to die of alcohol poisoning in the middle of the night, Jake went back inside.

Loki was lying on the floor, gnawing on his newfound toy, whatever it was. His own hangover forgotten in the excitement, Jake reached in and pried whatever it was from between the dog’s jaws, ignoring the low growls that he got in return.

"Shut up, boy," he replied distractedly as he turned the object over in his hands.

It was a videotape. There was no jacket and no writing on the label; nothing to identify what it might contain.

Jake’s curiosity meter rose a notch.

He walked into the kitchen, the dog trailing eagerly at his heels. "See what you did, Loki?" Jake said as he held the tape in front of the dog’s nose and indicated the saliva hanging from it. "You got slime all over the tape. How am I supposed to watch it now, huh?"

The Akita whined as if in apology.

"Yeah, I know. You just couldn’t help it, right?" The banter with his pet helped take his mind of Sam’s condition and he relaxed a little as he cleaned the outside of the video tape.

Jake returned to the living room, slipped the tape into his VCR, and switched on the television. Settling comfortably onto the floor with his head against the cushion of the couch behind him, he sat back to watch the show.

The face of an old man filled the screen as the tape began to roll, and without having to be told Jake knew this was Sam’s friend from the nursing home, Gabriel. The man smiled and began speaking.

"Well, Sammy. If you’re watching this we both know it’s too late to do anything for me." He smiled grimly. "Don’t worry, my friend. I’ve waited a long time for this day. Longer than you could ever know. My time is up, but I’m afraid that yours has just begun."

Jake leaned closer to the television, his interest aroused. The old man was talking as if he’d passed away. Could that be why Sam was so upset? Because Gabriel had died?

He glanced over his shoulder. Sam looked half dead himself. His head was thrown back at a strange angle, his mouth agape. If it weren’t for the steady rise and fall of his chest, the illusion would’ve been perfect.

Shaking his head in sympathy, Jake turned back to the screen as the old man resumed his speech.

"I know you didn’t ask for this, and I know if you had your choice that you wouldn’t want it either. But there is no choice here. You must do as I ask. You must! You’re the only one who might possibly understand, the only one who won’t dismiss the entire story as pure nonsense."

Say what?

"You’ve got to believe what I’m about to tell you. I know it’ll be hard. It’ll seem strange, even unbelievable at first. But it is true. On that, you’ve just got to trust me."

The old man paused. He was staring straight at the camera, and from Jake’s viewpoint it seemed as if Gabriel was staring straight out of the screen, directly at him. Though it was completely irrational, Jake had the odd feeling that even now Gabriel could in some way actually see him.

It gave him the creeps.

But what Gabriel said next was even more frightening.

"If you don’t believe me, more innocent people will die."

Jake straightened up. Gabriel was talking about the recent murders! Did he have something to do with them?

Little fingers of unease began caressing the back of his neck.

Jake made no move to turn the tape off, however.

Just a few more minutes, he told himself.

"Remember the story I told you a few weeks ago?" Gabriel was saying. "About the Beginning? About the Nightshades and the world before the coming of Man? You’ve got to believe me Sam when I swear to you that it was all true! Every word of it!"

"And now it is up to you to take up the fight.

"I am the last of the Elders, the last of my people. We were a brave and noble race, but when I am gone we will exist no more. We will pass out of this world and only a faint echo of our glorious times will remain, meager memories that your people believe are nothing more than myths and legends."

Time out here! Jake thought, frowning. Nightshades? Elders? What was he talking about? It sounded as if the old guy didn’t think he was human, which was completely absurd. Had the guy gone completely off his rocker?

"As I told you before, millions died in the Great War between our two races. When it was over, only a handful from either side survived. A few of us cried out for peace between our two peoples. They believed the Elders and the Nightshades could exist together, side by side in harmony, working to rebuild a world we’d come close to destroying in our greed. But others among us, myself included, disagreed." The old man’s fist clenched and his voice rang with remembered pain. He shook his hand in the air. "White-hot hatred burned in our hearts and in our minds there was only rage. We swore we would obtain vengeance for our dead or die ourselves in the attempt."

Despite himself, Jake was moved by the man’s impassioned words, even as his mind sought to deny their authenticity. It was clear that Gabriel believed what he was saying to be the truth.

He watched as the old man lowered his fist and stared at it, as if surprised to find it there. Jake could see small red half-moons in his palm where his nails had pressed savagely against the tender flesh of his palm when Gabriel uncurled his fingers.

Gabriel went on, but the passion was gone as swiftly as it had come. His voice was now little better than a whisper and thick with the knowledge of choices made in error.

"We hunted each other through the ages, neither side gaining the upper hand. Hiding from the humans who had grown in number and spread their own civilization across the globe, we continued our war in the shadows. Savage clashes occurred whenever we would meet. We fought, and fought, and fought some more, until there were too few of us for it to matter any longer. Yet still we continued. We knew nothing else by then; the fight consumed us, body, mind, and soul. In the end, it became our only reason to live.

"It continued that way for centuries, until only two of us remained. Myself, and a Nightshade by the name of Moloch."

Gabriel’s eyes burned with fanaticism. "He tried to flee, to escape my wrath but I was better than he. I tracked him relentlessly, never tiring in my chase. I had the conscience of an entire race on my shoulders and I swore to myself that I would not fail, that they would not have died in vain. Moloch would pay for his crimes. Victory would be ours at last!

"The chase led me here, to Harrington Falls, which at that time was nothing more than a small, pioneer settlement. Moloch had taken refuge in the home of a human, a man who sought to harness the ‘Powers of Darkness’, as he called them, for his own evil ends. I confronted the Nightshade there and the battle was intense. The fighting between us went on for days and many times he had me on the brink of defeat. Each time I would recall the faces of all those who had fallen before me and my strength would be renewed, until I could turn the situation to my advantage.

"In the end, it was him who was defeated.

"It was then that I made my greatest mistake. As he lay there at my feet, awaiting the final blow that would send him into the darkness forever, I found I couldn’t finish what I’d begun. For decades, destroying him had been the sole purpose of my life, the very reason for my continued existence. When I thought of what it would be like to live without that burden all I could envision was a bleak life, living without the company of my people. Even the world was something I no longer recognized, Man was everywhere; the last, wild sacred places dwindling by the day. In that moment of triumph, I realized the irony of my existence.

"If I destroyed him, I would in fact be destroying myself as well.

"Despite my loneliness, I did not want to die.

"In the end, I compromised. I used the last of my powers to rob him of his physical existence, imprisoning the rest of his being, his soul if you will, inside a void, a sphere of nothingness. This was in turn sealed inside a stone likeness of him that his human ally, Sebastian Blake, had fashioned. I sealed the statue and its precious contents away in a place where I thought it would never be found while the townspeople were sending Blake on to his last reward.

"I was no longer the Hunter. Now I was the Guardian. Once again, I had a purpose in my life, a reason to continue.

"Decades passed and the Beast remained locked in his cell. He’d lost his body, but his mind still functioned; he was helpless, trapped with only his thoughts for companions for all eternity. I hoped he’d eventually lose his mind, but not before he suffered long and hard for what he and his kind had done.

"Such was the nature of my vengeance." Gabriel’s voice rose once more. "I was a fool! The years passed. I roamed the world as one of you, pretending to be an ordinary human, hiding my true identity. Nightly I would let my consciousness return here to check on my captive, to insure that all was well with his confinement. In time I grew overconfident. My visits became weekly, then monthly, and before long entire decades would pass before I would return. I was enjoying life as a human, crude though it was in comparison to our world, and sought the kind of pleasures from life that I had missed in my earlier years because of the War.

"My people have much longer life cycles than your own and so I watched generations pass me by while I remained as I was and always had been, young and strong. Eventually, time caught up to me and took its toll. Our lives may be longer than yours, but we are every bit as mortal in the end.

"Knowing my death wasn’t far in the future, I returned here to live out the last of my days.

"That’s when it happened.

"Just after I arrived, Moloch escaped."

Jake was staring at the screen with his jaw hanging wide, absolutely astounded at what he was hearing. Everything the old man said was bullshit but what bullshit it was! The best part of it all was the fact that Gabriel believed it all. Every word. You could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice.

Gabriel went on. "I am too old to fight him as I once did. My body is weary and my power wanes. If you are watching this then you know I was too weak to defend myself and the War is at last over. But you are young. You have the power of truth and righteousness on your side, as I had so long ago. You can defeat him!

"He has killed several times in the last few days and will no doubt kill again and again unless he is stopped. You must find him and destroy him once and for all. You must succeed where I have failed."

The old man’s face took on a look of chagrin, as if he were begging for forgiveness. "I wish I had more time to teach you what I know. But I waited too long, hoping against hope that I would be strong enough to finish the deed. How wrong I was! I can tell you this; he has gained new abilities since his release, abilities even I am uncertain of. But he has gained a weakness as well. He requires blood to remain corporeal, or the sorcery he used to release himself will be undone. Do not repeat the mistakes I have made, my young friend. Remember, when he comes, he will come on night’s velvet wings. Watch for him. Find him and destroy him. The fate of your world now hangs in the balance."

With that final statement the tape ended.

The screen in front of Jake went blank.

Holy Shit! Jake thought a few moments later, once his mind had managed to digest everything the old man had said. Nightshades? Civilizations long before the rise of man? And that shit about chasing the Dark One down through the centuries, that was rich. The guy was a certifiable loon, that was for sure, but hell, he had one heck of an imagination, you had to give him that.

No wonder Sam liked him.

Shaking his head in amazement, Jake flipped off the set and headed back to bed, intending on catching some sleep. He could talk to Sam about things in the morning.

He was in the process of double-checking the lock on the front door when something clicked in the back of his mind.

Jake stiffened and his eyes widened involuntarily. His mouth opened, but no words came out.

Images flashed inside his head, one after another, coming so fast that they seemed to blend together into a hideous collage.

Halloran’s corpse.

The statue they’d found inside the crypt.

The news reports about the murders.

The butler’s body.

The visions Katelynn had been having.

Gabriel pleading with Sam to stop the thing from killing again.

Good Lord! Jake thought. Could everything Gabriel had said be true?

At that moment Jake felt a mental hinge beginning to let go in the back of his mind. With it, his entire foundation of rational thought began sliding down a long dark ramp.

All right, Jake. Don’t freak out on me here, he told himself. Get a grip and just think this whole thing through logically. There’s got to be a better explanation for all this. There has to be!

There wasn’t.

A part of him deep down inside knew it.

Calming himself, Jake went into the kitchen and sat down, considering the whole situation step by step.

The killings had begun Tuesday afternoon or evening, only a short time after Kyle Halloran’s body had been discovered in Sebastian Blake’s crypt. Since then all hell had broken loose. In the space of 48 hours five, possibly six, people had been hideously murdered. Jake knew from the news reports that the bodies had been ravaged as well. In one case, the death of an elderly couple, they had been mutilated so badly that the police hadn’t been certain as to how many bodies they were actually dealing with when they first arrived at the scene. Jake had even heard rumors that parts of the bodies had been eaten.

Judging from the frantic pressure the papers were putting on the sheriff’s department, Jake suspected that the authorities were no closer to catching the killer than they had been from the very start.

Why?

Because they were looking in the wrong place?

Because the killer wasn’t human, as they so naturally assumed?

While the logical side of his mind was telling him to knock off the bullshit and go back to bed, the other half, the one that loved to read horror novels and play Swords and Sorcerers, was saying, Why the hell not? Weirder things happen all the time, right? Take a look around. How many UFO sightings were there last year? What about the Loch Ness monster? Sure, and the National Enquirer is up for the Pulitzer Prize this year, the other half of his mind piped in, but, again, Jake ignored it.

Suppose the creature did exist.

That would account for the police having so much trouble finding the killer, wouldn’t it? A demon, or whatever you wanted to call it, wouldn’t leave the usual sort of evidence that police investigations relied upon. There’d be no motive, no connections between the victims. There wouldn’t be any fingerprints, or fiber traces, or paper trails for them to follow. There’d be no murder weapon; no pistol, no knife, no lead pipe or candlestick. Any blood or tissue samples the police recovered wouldn’t do them any good. What could they match them to? The same went for teeth marks on the victims.

The creature could leave behind a trail of corpses and still be practically untraceable!

This is crazy, he told himself, but he wasn’t quite ready to let it go.

Not yet.

His theory would also go a long way to explaining what it was that Katelynn was seeing in her "visions". Once he made the simple jump in logic that said such a thing might be possible, everything else fell solidly into place.

Okay.

Say it does exist.

How could he prove that?

Jake got up and poured himself some coffee. He had a hunch he was going to need it. He crossed to the junk drawer and dug around until he found a clean sheet of paper and a pen. He took them both back to the table.

After a couple of minutes, he began writing.