Authors: Nic Widhalm
Jackie blinked, staring at the spot Karen had occupied a second ago. She should have been surprised, but a part of her had almost expected this. Her hands trembling, the beginnings of tears in her eyes, Jackie pulled her notebook from her bag and opened to the page she had shown Valdis.
There, near the top of the page marked “Enochian Alphabet,” she found what she was looking for. Clutching the notebook tightly, Jackie returned to the bar and ordered another bourbon. The bartender tried to start up a conversation, but the detective waved him away. The bourbon traced fire down her throat, and the cheap, acrid aroma burned her nostrils.
Drink or go home? Drink or go home?
She needed a computer. She needed a fucking
army
of computers. She needed something, anything, that would explain what she had just seen. An answer for a woman disappearing in front of her eyes, for a man taking on five drug-addicts with nothing but his bare-hands and surviving.
Jackie needed something to explain what the symbol on Karen’s neck—a glyph that matched the same pattern as Friskin’s birthmark—meant for the world around her.
Part Two
TESTING
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“No way. You’re not coming.”
“But it won’t make any
sense
to you! Don’t you think someone with knowledge and…and…
maturity
should witness this? Someone who can interpret what it means?”
Hunter sighed. “No. I don’t.”
“Oh, now you’re just acting like a child,” Valdis threw up his arms and stormed out of the room.
“Who’s acting like a child now?” Hunter muttered. He waited to see if Valdis would come back, then returned to packing his bag. His room was musty and damp, but over the last three days Hunter had made it into a sort of temporary home. The space, part of a series of discarded rooms in the cathedral’s catacombs, was mostly stone, so Hunter had begun by having Valdis spirit a few old carpets and moth-eaten sheets from the pantry, and had draped the cold rock walls with as much insulation as possible. There was no window in the tiny cell, so Hunter had fixed the walls with dozens of candles—which created something of a problem until he devised a make-shift chimney to shuttle the smoke under the door—and spent most of his time straining his eyes and reading under the dim light. Now, after only a few days, he had to tear it all down and pack away as much as he was willing to carry.
Three days had come and gone with agonizing slowness. Hunter had always considered himself patient—had to be when you were coaxing the illusion of life back into a corpse—but under his current conditions he had begun to dream of freedom with a restless obsession.
His dreams had taken on an unusual urgency, racking him with visions and nightmares at all hours. With no cell phone, or reception even if he’d had one, Hunter had no idea what the outside world thought of him. His wife—
Ex-wife, start getting used to it
—his job, the police—Valdis would tell him nothing. Only that the world still existed, people still went to work, and the only thing Hunter needed to focus on were the readings the priest left him each day.
It was enough to drive a man mad.
And the reading material—that was something else. Hunter had never been one for books—or sports, math, politics, or music—but the manuscripts Valdis assigned had put even his normal apathy to the test. “Tedious,” did not begin to cover it. Long treaties on the nature of heaven, the spirit world, the existence of celestial beings, not to mention four different translations of the Bible, the Catholic Apocrypha, the Qur’an, assorted collections of Gnostic teachings, and a healthy dose of Old testament scriptures in the original Greek. Never-mind that Hunter had a hard enough time reading English.
Valdis also felt the need to include some of his own work; publications from various magazines—of the stack, Hunter only recognized Newsweek—and periodicals dealing with a variety of religious subjects. The priest was especially proud of an essay he had written on the misinterpretation of the word “Hell,” stemming from the Greek translation of Tartarus, and…that was about as far as Hunter got.
The common theme in Valdis’ writings was a re-examination of “angels,” and their relationship with scripture. There was also a liberal sprinkling of conspiracy theory, which helped market his research to magazines and online publications. The priest liked to hint—he never outright said it, for fear it would damage his credibility—that there was a kind of secret society of men and women who studied angels and their activities on Earth. A group that had spent the last two thousand years in hiding, afraid to reveal their secrets to the world. Whether this was an actual theory or just a publicity stunt, Valdis never said. He just insisted Hunter read the stack.
At first it had been exciting. Hunter had thrilled when Valdis told him the cryptic markings in the ancient basement had referred to him. Finally, an answer for the dreams, the sense of foreboding, an explanation for the fever dream of angles, Apkallu, and talking corpses. But after that tantalizing hint, Valdis sealed shut tighter than a snare drum. Muttering about needing to finish his translation, Valdis had thrust Hunter into his cell, and spent the last seventy-two hours trying to cram a life-time of Catholic dogma and angelic lore into the large man’s aching skull.
All of it had come to a head tonight.
“Alright, let’s go over it one more time,” Valdis had implored Hunter earlier that morning, referring to the large man’s original discussion with Bath and Karen three days previous.
“That’s
it
,” Hunter bellowed, releasing all the pent up frustration and cabin fever he had been holding inside. “Get me out of this place,
now
.”
“We will, we will. But we need more—”
“No more excuses, Father. I’m leaving tonight.”
It hardly needed to be said, since tonight was the “meeting” Hunter had been dreading and anticipating for the past three days. But a part of him worried Valdis would never let him go. Angel or not.
But Valdis didn’t mind Hunter going to the meeting, as the old man told him at length. That wasn’t a problem. What
was
a problem was Valdis’ bull-headed insistence on accompanying him. Never-mind the risks—like Bath killing the old man without a second glance, and probably Hunter for bringing him along—the mere idea of being around the priest for another hour brought Hunter close to screaming.
Instead he destroyed the room.
Now, with only a few minutes between him and sweet, winter air, all Hunter could think about was finally getting some answers.
“Answers aren’t going to help you unless you figure out the
question
,” Valdis had warned after Hunter’s first night in the stone room. He had awakened after only a few hours, screaming, his head full of red-tinged nightmares, his nostrils wincing from the stench of blood. After awakening like that, the last thing Hunter wanted to hear was more psycho-babble from Valdis.
Now, as Hunter packed the last of the manuscripts and notes Valdis had left him into a dirty old pack he’d found in the church’s catacombs, he thought back to that conversation with an odd pang of guilt. The priest had only been trying to help, and God knew Hunter was in scarce supply of friends. But the thought fled as he remembered Bath’s black stare, and the sensuous pull of Karen’s thighs. In only a few minutes he would meet both of them again, and, despite Valdis’ claim, Hunter
would
get his answers. Whether he liked them or not.
“Are you sure you won’t change your mind,” Valdis asked as he escorted Hunter though the labyrinthine turns of the church’s underground catacombs.
“I’m sure.”
“Then take some advice at least,” the priest led Hunter to the steep stairs they had descended three days earlier. “Don’t trust them, don’t believe
anything
they say and come back as soon as possible.”
“Because I can trust
you
?” Hunter said with a disdain he immediately regretted.
Friends
, he reminded himself. “I mean…I’m sorry, I
do
trust you. What I meant…”
“What you meant is that you’re wary. And you should be. Just make sure your distrust extends beyond myself.”
“I appreciate everything you’ve done,” Hunter said, following the priest up the stairs and into library’s bright light. He threw a hand across his face, tears streaming unhindered down his cheeks as his weakened eyes adjusted.
Valdis closed the trapdoor and covered it with the rug. “It’s been my pleasure, you know. To help one of the Apkallu, to see the living embodiment of my work,” The old priest smiled gently and placed a hand on Hunter’s arm, lowering it so he could meet the tall man’s eyes. “Remember what I said about the war. Don’t forget to ask questions.”
“I won’t. I mean…I will. Ask questions.”
Valdis nodded. “I know you will. You know the way out, so I’ll leave you here. Good luck, and, well…you know the rest.”
Hunter smiled, trying to mask his anticipation at leaving, then turned and exited the library. Another minute and he was out of the cathedral and into the cold, winter air. To the west he saw the sun just touching the tips of the Rocky Mountains. In another hour it would be night.
Valdis was worried. Hunter had gathered that much from the priest’s riddles and half-answers. The literature he left with Hunter centered around the nature of the afterlife, and the role of the celestial beings called angels. It had been a slow, agonizing couple of days, but Hunter had managed to glean two things: there wasn’t supposed to be a war; and, if there was, it was
supposed
to be between angels and demons. There had been no mention of the concepts Bath and Valdis had shared with Hunter—the idea of two separate factions of angels having a
continuous
war, with no connection to the devil or mankind.
Hunter had never been a religious man. He had almost no spiritual upbringing from his parents. But he had gleaned enough from movies and pop culture to deduce Valdis’ fear—if there was a war in heaven, what happened to the humans who died?
As he neared the bar where Karen had told him to wait, Hunter tried to clear his mind and prepare himself for whatever was to come. There would be a time and a place to think on the questions Valdis had raised.
The bar came into view, the same faded sign displaying its hours (an ambiguous and unhelpful “6am-close”), the title, “The Drunken Midget” painted in broad-strokes across the top of the building, and the windows clogged with smoke and bits of trapped snow. Hunter grinned as he anticipated his reunion with Karen, her of the piercing, emerald eyes, and reached for the door. But just as his hand gripped the metal handle someone on the other side pushed the door forcibly open. Grunting an apology as he moved aside, Hunter didn’t notice that the exiting patron hadn’t moved from the doorway.
“It’s you!” A voice cried, and Hunter looked up to meet the eyes of a woman. There was nothing remarkable about her; brunette, average height, good shape, jeans and a brown leather jacket just like hundreds of women Hunter had seen any day of the week. The only thing that made her stand out was she was currently staring at Hunter with large, open eyes.
“Um…sorry?” Hunter looked around awkwardly, wondering if she might be talking to someone else. That’s when her hand darted inside her jacket, and Hunter saw the outline of a revolver hanging from her shoulder. Before he could think, Hunter pushed the lady hard enough to slam against the building, yelled, “Sorry,” and ran.
Pelting down the sidewalk, Hunter looked desperately for a place to hide, running into the first alley he found. It ended after only a few feet. Panicking, Hunter entertained hiding in the garbage before a hand suddenly grasped his arm, and he turned to see Karen’s deep, black eyes.
“Wha…” Before he could finish his sentence the alley disintegrated around him in a flood of tiny, grain-sized images. Cold, sharper than a thousand knives, stabbed at Hunter. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t see, the world was void. And then color rushed back and he was in another alley, longer and with slightly different brick. He collapsed to the ground, stomach seizing, and emptied his lunch on the stained concrete. Continuing to heave, he watched from a removed part of his brain while his body vomited repeatedly. Panting, he stared at the ground, his mind struggling to catch up.
Karen. Bar. Black eyes. Vomit.
Once the world swan back into focus, Hunter raised his head and saw the silhouette of Karen standing at the mouth of the alley, bathed in sickly yellow streetlight. He struggled to his feet, his legs feeling distant and wobbly, and leaned against the dirty brick wall.
“How…what…?” Hunter shook his head feebly, his mind unable to process what his body already knew.
“Time for that later. I was only able to move us a few blocks, which doesn’t give us much room to maneuver. So, if you’re done acting like a little girl maybe we can get the hell out of here?” Karen stepped fully into the alley, her eyes flashing, a determined set to her shoulders. Hunter nodded weakly, and followed as Karen led the way out of the alley. Looking quickly in both directions, she walked confidently onto the sidewalk and made her way up the street. Following doggedly, Hunter tried to mirror Karen’s confidence and detachment, but found it impossible as his body shook and convulsed in the freezing night air.