was a little scrambled by that point in the evening and she was trying to fight the incessant growling of an empty stomach.
“He was my husband!”
Hartwell was ready for just about anything but the word ‘husband.’ Even if she said that they went out for while, he would have been able to brush off most of it.
Apparently the loving stroking of the hair portion of the evening was over, because Hartwell glided over to the shore as they both landed on their feet.
“You were married to Billingsley? When was this?”
Hartwell and Maggie were so in love since she was reincarnated and became a vampire that this was the first time they had a real fight. Come to think of it, they barely fought on their first-go-round back in turn-of-the-21st century San Francisco either.
“Before we were married,” Maggie replied.
“In this life?” he asked.
“No, the first,” she countered.
The light finally went on in Hartwell’s head, “Oh, he was the guy that died on the same day of the miscarriage? But he’s not dead.”
The look Maggie then gave Hartwell could have potentially killed him if he was a mere mortal.
“I told you that I don’t want to talk about it!” she yelled and then unfurled her massive wings and flew away.
He was about to go after her but she screamed, “And don’t think about coming after me!”
Hartwell had so many questions, but his mind instantly shut down from the emotional toll of being separated spiritually from his wife for the first time in over a century. He sat down in the sand and thought back to a time when he met Maggie and how his life had no real meaning before he tried to rob her bank. It was the days before he hit it big and staked his claim of gold – it was also a time when he first considered ending his miserable life, with the other time being after Maggie and Daniel, then Nathanial, tragically lost their lives during the 1902 Black Plague in San Francisco.
Daniel glided out after he sensed his father’s sadness and then returned to a mortal position by landing on his feet and sitting next to his father in the sand, the two men gazing out into the rolling ocean.
“Are you all right?” Daniel asked.
“Not really,” Hartwell replied. “You see, my son, in most worlds when life ends it ends, but in our world nothing is apparently over even when it’s over.”
Daniel had to fully process his father’s words and then came to understand the point of his message.
“So, what you’re saying is that the man that came over last night was dead and now he’s not?”
“Yes,” Hartwell replied.
“Well, we were dead at one point and now we’re not,” Daniel replied in the most honest way he could.
Hartwell was not one for restating the obvious, “Well, this man was your mother’s husband before she was my wife. In fact, he was dead and buried years before I came on the scene.”
Daniel was back being confused, “But you greeted him like you knew him.”
Hartwell half-grinned, “We were boys back in the day.”
“Is he a vampire?” Daniel asked.
“He was back then. Or at least that’s what I saw,” Hartwell surmised and then called on his cynical side to begin weaving his latest conspiracy theory.
Hartwell continued to pick Linda Vinson’s brain on what happened from the time Billingsley died until he walked through the front door of his house, but she provided little clarity. The person that Hartwell should have been talking to was Linda’s daughter Claire, who had become a virtual conduit for all things Billingsley following her exit from the world of Alexander Lowery days earlier.
While her mother and grandmother were out of the house, Claire strolled over to the beach by herself and took a seat on one of the stone and wood benches on the boardwalk facing the ocean. At the same time, Daniel was also walking on the boardwalk to sort out a part of his parents’ past that he never knew existed.
Instinctively, he walked over to where Claire was sitting and he sat down next to her on the long bench. They looked at each other, somehow knowing that it was meant to be this way, and he put his left hand on her right shoulder and the picture show began as they both looked straight ahead at the 3D images displayed in front of them.
“Cool!” she said as he removed his hand from her shoulder and then sat back to gain any comfort while learning what all of the ruckus was all about. He also made sure that any passers-by on the boardwalk would not see them or have the urge to sit on the bench – it was if they were not even there.
The Gabriel Billingsley story started when he was still married to Maggie, who he called Margaret, and various scenes of marital happiness were shown on a purely G-rated level. Daniel was relieved to not have to watch his mother kissing another man – it was difficult enough for him to watch Hartwell and Maggie kiss in the first place!
Then the story shifted to the part where Gabriel was having business problems and was nearing the brink of insolvency. He starts talking to a young Brenda Vinson and Claire immediately chimes in, “Is that my grandmother?”
She leaned closer to the images and said to Daniel, “Can you pause that, please?”
Daniel was a proponent of self-service, so he replied “All you have to do is poke your index finger at the screen.”
So Claire literally pushed the air pause button and the images froze. “You can zoom in the same way you do with an iPad, and if you want to know who the people are in the scene you can touch them with your finger.
Claire did just that and the name, “Brenda Vinson” appeared on the screen. She then touched the man’s head and the name “Gabriel Billingsley appeared.
“I think I saw her talking to him the other day at the drug store? Can we look at that for a second?”
Daniel once again put his hand on Claire’s shoulder and the images that she saw at the drug store reappeared in front of her eyes. She locked on her grandma’ and the man and then touched the man’s head and the name “Gabriel Billingsley” once more appeared.
“I knew it!” she exclaimed.
“Can we watch the rest of the original feed now?” Daniel asked.
Claire looked over at him and smiled, “Yeah, I’m ready.”
Daniel swirled his finger around in a circle and the original images replaced the modern-day images in front of them. Claire was becoming even more comfortable with Daniel, “I bet you didn’t even have to do that little trick with your finger.”
Daniel laughed, “No, but it looked pretty cool, didn’t it?”
“Yep,” she replied in laughter.
They both sat back as the initial scene between Brenda and Gabriel unfolded.
“I see nothing but trouble in your immediate future,” Brenda stated.
“Then maybe this world is not for me,” Gabriel replied in want amounted to the initial piece of his response about coming back at a later date.
The movie rolled ahead to Maggie being at home in the bathroom and collapsing to the floor in tears once she realized that something was wrong internally and she had lost her baby. Claire started crying and so did Daniel, so he zipped off the beach and came back with a box of Kleenex for Claire and an ice bucket for himself.
Billingsley didn’t even have the courage to say goodbye to his wife or even comfort her in her true time of need. Instead, he chose the easy way out by having his witch stop his heart in the middle of the busiest intersection in the city. Maggie slowed her tears long enough to answer the door after someone knocked, but the grim sight of the mortician sealed this day as the worst she had ever experienced in her life.
A brief scene of the funeral was followed up by a time-lapse video sequence of the grave and about a week going by with no change in the area. However, as the day swung to night on day seven, the fast forward feature slowed and the picture returned to normal speed. Daniel zipped out and then zipped back in with two huge tubs of popcorn, a cherry fro
zen drink for Claire, and a blood sippy bag for himself.
She nodded in thanks and then they nervously watched in anticipation as a form exploded from the flat ground and then came back down to earth, making a thunderous impact as it made contact with the ground.
“Slo motion,” Daniel said between bites of the popcorn.
It was hard to see what the creature was that launched out of the ground, so Daniel started the frame again and touched the form and said, “Image clarity and definition,” and then rotated his right finger 180 degrees to the left to rewind the frame to the point of ground clearance.
“They should put these in the schools. Then maybe I would have paid attention all of those years,” she said while continuing to stuff her face.
“I’m with you on that,” Daniel agreed as they banged fists somewhere in the middle.
The eyes of Gabriel Billingsley were distinguishable behind a whole lot of hair. It wasn’t until he crashed down to the ground that it became crystal clear what the group was now up against. He was now a huge ape that appeared to be taking all of his rage and anxiety out on his chest as he pounded his fists and roared in deference to everything unholy.
“Whoa!” Claire exclaimed.
“Whoa is right,” Daniel stated. “I didn’t see that coming.”
Since his Margaret was between worlds after her death, Gabriel decided to focus his energy on the bane of his existence, the man that moved into his place in his absence, Thomas Hartwell.
It was Billingsley that masterminded a plan to keep Hartwell