Lizzy bends, pulling up her pant leg to the knee—
“Dr. Allcome to E.R.” the P.A. announces. “Dr. Allcome to the E.R. please.”
“Oh lord Jesus!” the woman complains. “Stay here, child.”
She leaves a moment to call the main office, expecting the “All Come” sign to involve young Lucy and her father, Pat Ruffleskin.
“Nope,” the woman at the front desk tells her, “some man got hisself caught stealin’ medical supplies from an ambulance. Think it was that guy that used to date that nurse Brenda. One of the doctors in E.R. seen him. They’re just puttin’ out a notice – keep an eye out for anythin’ suspicious, anythin’ missin’.”
“Good to know. Ain’t no one shown up to claim this young’un yet?”
“Nope.”
“Hey, Lucy,” she calls out to the room around the corner, “sweetie? Hey Lucy, is there anyone we can call? Where’s your mommy?” Back to the phone, “Hold on.”
The line is paused a moment.
When the nurse returns to the phone a moment later, she laughs, “Girl, I think I just seen a ghost. That suspicious enough for you?”
A princess band-aid on the abandoned, slow-spinning rolly chair was all that remained of young Lucy Ruffleskin.
AMBULANCE
“Remain seated, sir. And calm down.”
“I-I am k-k-calm,” Chris has trouble responding through a face covered in snot and tears, and he can’t even wipe it away now that his hands are cuffed behind his back.
The deputy stares down at him but Chris is unable to stare back.
“Dude—” Chris tries pleading again but the remnants of the pepper spray, as well as the deputy, prevent him from speaking further.
“You will address me as Deputy Pickett, not ‘dude’. I didn’t become a deputy to be called—”
“Lo-look,” Chris sniffles and an involuntary whine escapes his lips, “let’s jus’-jus’ take a step back, man.”
“Not ‘man’—not ‘man’ or ‘dude’ or ‘bro’. I told you to address me,” his anger grows with every word Chris speaks, “as Deputy Pickett. Or so help me…”
Chris smears a bit of the slime from his face onto his shoulder, trying mightily through the excruciating pain to open his eyes. He succeeds but can only open one, with anything past three feet a silhouette.
There’s the shadow of a woman about ten feet from him, standing cross-armed and nervously smoking – Nurse Walker-Stevens. Chris gives her a squinty, smiling nod of acknowledgement as he responds to the deputy, “Whatever you say, Cochise.” And even through the pain, the snot, the tears, Chris maintains the smile.
The deputy gives an exasperated sigh.
“I’ma get the taser—”
“Is that a mustache?” Chris asks, squinting up – he’s speaking of the thin line of hair on Deputy Pickett’s upper lip. “Where’d you get that, seventh grade?” He chuckles and mumbles to himself, “Hard to see even without the pepper spray.”
The deputy doesn’t say anything, his face shaking and turning red from anger.
“Face so red, looks like you got pepper sprayed, too,” Chris jokes.
Deputy Pickett kicks him hard in the hip.
Chris leans to the side, groaning.
The silhouette of Nurse Walker-Stevens approaches until Chris can see her face clearly.
“Wilkins Winslow Pickett, you do NOT EVER kick an unarmed man.”
“Kick him?” he looks down at Chris, mock laughing, “Kick him? I’m gonna taze him—”
“Wilkins, you rotten little child! You will do no such thing or your grammie’s gonna hear every word.” [“I love you,” Chris tells her from the ground but neither the deputy nor the nurse pay him much attention.] “You will not touch this man until Chief Armstrong—”
“But he was provoking me,” Deputy Pickett whines.
“Well, I still have my pepper spray if he gets out of hand.”
Chris rubs and rubs his eyes until his vision clears a bit more.
A couple dozen yards away, the shadow of a little girl comes out of the front entrance to the hospital and hails a patiently waiting cab. The girl stands frozen at the open door to the cab, her body turned in Chris’ direction. Nonchalantly, he nods and flicks the hands cuffed behind his back in a motion for her to continue on.
The shadow of the little girl raises her dark arm.
Chris can’t make out the shadow but it’s a tiny thumbs up.
THE CALM
While his brother sleeps, David hears him repeat the same words in a low, mumbling tone – distant, like he’s whispering it to someone in a far off dream.
“...Mans el-Ray Pasquale…”
When he does finally wake – two full days after the initial incident – his first statement is the same group of words he had been repeating the entire time:
“Mans el-Ray Pasquale.”
They had figured it was gibberish, just some Spanish phrase he clinged to while recovering. David had searched the internet for any sequence of the words and found an eerily relevant article:
Philadelphia, PA – Former Senate Aide for Republican Senator Richard Atwater died Tuesday of complications from pneumonia.
A morning-crew cleaning woman for Spencer Crafts Hotels found the body of Mans el-Ray Pasquale, 34, lying lifeless on the floor when she entered to clean his room at 8:45 Tuesday morning. Paramedics were called and Pasquale was announced dead on the scene. The CCPD has released a statement naming the cause of death as likely to be due to complications from pneumonia, though results from an autopsy are pending.
In an official press release, Senator Atwater described Mans el-Ray as a hardworking individual that had only recently left his office for personal reasons. He went on to call the incident a “damn shame” and that he was “grateful to have had Pasquale as a part of the team.”
Mans el-Ray lived with his wife and four year old son in rural New Jersey. First interning on the campaign for former Mayor Douglas Rincard, he ascended to the position of Senate Aide at the beginning of last year. For reasons not yet known, he exited the Senator’s cabinet earlier this month, citing personal reasons, and had since been staying in various hotels around Philadelphia.
“It’s sad,” Ally Masoncourt, a close friend, had said of the incident. “He was a sweet man but just a private person…and I guess it got the best of him.”
“I need to speak to Mans el-Ray Pasquale,” a hoarse voice whispers.
David notices I’m awake only after I form a full sentence.
“Hey,” he says in a soft tone, “how do you feel?”
“...weak.”
“What do you need?”
“I-I need to speak to Mans el-Ray Pasquale,” I say again.
“Is that a man in Philadelphia?” David asks, curious.
“Yes.”
“You can’t, then,” David tells me, leaning over with a glass of water. “Drink this.” I drain the entire tall glass of water. “Mans el-Ray Pasquale was found dead in a hotel room in Philly a few days ago.”
I breathe deeply after finishing the water, staring up at my brother.
“Then I need to go to Philly.”
“No—what? Look at me – hey! Look at me. What – in – the – fuck – just happened?” he asks angrily, leaning in.
“I…” and it’s just as hard to find the words as to speak them.
“I deserve to know. Our lives—our lives are probably in danger, right?” David asks, and he has a point.
“No, they’re not in dan—”
“I don’t believe you! You don’t—what you did, in front of Lizzy! What – the – fuck – happened out there? I want to know.”
“Someone I haven’t seen in a…in a long time – they showed up while I was eating. They uh…they poisoned me with a very specific poison,” deep sigh, “it was something that had been given to me before. A very specific place, very specific poison, very specific group of people – and this visitor put it in my water before I go
t to the table. I…” clear my throat several times, “They…we have an old grudge and the person…they came to warn me.”
“And he tried to kill you? The fuck kind of warning is that?”
“It’s…it’s complicated.”
I’m hoping that’s the end of it; David stares back, waiting, and when I don’t say any more, he pounds the table with his fist, then sticks a finger in my face:
“You’re a fucking asshole,” he growls. “Lizzy—what you did…the scare you put in her—in me! You fucking died in front of me! Do you have any idea how FUCKING SCARY THAT IS!” he screams, lowering the volume but maintaining the intensity, the fury, “How – fucking – dare you! Next time, either die or go to the hospital – don’t you fucking call me like that again. You—you promised it was over,” his lip quivers.
I’m unsure if it’s anger or sadness.
“I’m sorry. I was wrong. I think something bad is about to happen and…and I have to stop it.”
a brief interlude about the seven devil nation
The Marauder’s Trap
The familiar smell of opium and tobacco woke me at dawn.
Someone was close against me, their face downturned, smoke from a pipe between their lips unavoidably billowing into my face, deep up both nostrils.
His eyes connected to mine briefly.
His name was Steve and he was from Cincinnati.
I stifled a cough, my eyes hazy from the smoke but – as he moved away to pull something out of a bag – focus was impossible and the forest was swirling. My first thought was that his opium had affected me; when he forces me to hit the pipe, blowing the smoke in my face, I’m positive it’s affected me.
“Whazzzz,” but I couldn’t function enough to speak properly.
Sensing this reaction, Steve whispered, “It’s stronger than we expected.”
Is he talking about the opium in his pipe? What’s…happening, is it…my head, it hurts, and it’s all, like, brain-groggy…eyes refuse to see anything clearly – everything was blurred except…in the distance, there was a black smudge, but it was coming toward me, moving—no, floating at me, faster, picking up more and more speed – a fucking black-robed, hulking beast running—no, floating full speed toward me—
I gasped, closed my eyes, and something stung my neck with such pain.
When he pulled away, the blurry outline of Steve had a clear, visible creature held between his fingers like a syringe – large, hissing, its single fang with a drip of clear venom, its thousand tiny legs scuttling desperately to be placed back on the ground.
He whispered quickly in response to my immediate panic:
“Uhl bitey-nine. Sh!”
He put a finger over his lips adjacent the pipe, but his finger detached from his hand and crawled entirely up into his nose, causing his eyes!—they went ghost-white and his skin turned to scabs, falling off in clumps onto my legs. When I tried to brush them off, both hands struggled behind me, fighting against the brown skin of a rough snake wrapping my wrists and tying me to a large—it was a post, a roman column behind me when I turned to look, and my gaze lifted to see it go so far into the sky that it didn’t end – but on a perch not twenty feet overhead sat a big-eyed, sickly green and yellow-tinged gargoyle staring down with black, slimy drool falling from his mouth and onto the scabs in my lap—when I cringed to look away, the dozens of scabs on my lap grew legs like spiders but with too many, closer to nine or eleven, uneven in their number legs as they grew out in all angles of the misshapen creatures—
Something painful.
—white FLASH—
Unconscious.
* * *
And I woke to a group of strangers arguing loudly.
Less than a tenth of what they said was decipherable:
Time – something about time – waiting, maybe…they spoke so fast, in such a strange dialect, it sounded like a single sound being repeated, followed by a word I recognized, followed by the sound again…mmmm mmmm mm mmmmm mm mmmmm fail mmmm mm mmmm lake, maybe…they were behind me and I couldn’t see how many there were but, listening, there was at least four different voices – each one making a different sound.
Zzzzzz zzz zzzz z zzz zzzzz zz tail zzz zzzzzzzz.
Dddd dd dddddddd death. Death ddd dd d death dddddd.
Finally, one spoke in a voice I understood clearly:
“You will do as you – are – told, you jackanapes!” a snooty female voice indignantly scolded in a refreshing English, only the slight gauzy mask of a South African accent to throw me off. “If I say he stays here – ALIVE – then he stays right bloody here, alive. Translate.”
Another voice translated (it sounded like an effeminate male), then listened to the three men simultaneously respond in loud, argumentative, nasty bursts, then returned with their translation:
“Um, oh dear, they are not happy.” The voice was definitely male, possibly South African, and effeminate. “One of their own was killed last night – they want more money.”
“They can have his share,” she answered like it was an after-thought.
About ten feet from me, she passed and I caught a muddled profile from the side – tall, sporty, gray-blonde hair in a…bun, maybe—I was still hazy, my eyes unable to determine small details.
“He’s awake, get over here,” she called calmly.
A tall stick of a man rounded the tree and, keeping a distance of about five feet from the tip of my bare toes, squatted close to the ground.
“Charne, can you check your bag for the needles?” he asked the woman.
“Busy, Albert,” she responded.
A blurry swarm of blotches, and I could barely discern four or five figures – one of them large as a bear, one hand still clutching a dagger and arms spread wide like a wrestler—it was Maggie the ogre! Finally, a familiar face. The other men gathered behind Maggie the Ogre, who was behind the thin man named Albert – Albert was balancing on bended knees and, even without the ability to define features, I was certain the thin man was staring with curiosity while the others had nothing but anger, contempt.
“The poison,” the thin man said, standing to face the woman I could no longer see, “it’s got to be affecting him.” He checks his watch. “And it’s going to get much worse.”
Maggie the Ogre and his four friends mumbled their curses in low voices, careful not to be disruptive, but their chorus of whispered threats were like a pack of low-growling wolves waiting for their prey to die or venture just far enough from safety.
“Why do you say that?” I heard the woman ask, placing the voice behind some brush; it was followed by the faint sound of her urinating.
Slowly, like a camera on autofocus as it shifts foreground to background to foreground, details were coming in and out, close, distant, close.
“Well, for one, he’s not screaming yet,” the man said, using his shirt to clean tiny, circular spectacles, then he mumbled “savages” under his breath, returning the glasses to his face before continuing, “...it’s been several hours, so it—well, it should’ve taken full effect. Or it is right now.”
The thin man named Albert bended down again – cautious, crouching on both knees so as not to dirty himself – while his eyes searched me carefully. My head rolled back, limp, and I gave a short yelp toward the treetops; I stopped, looked around, and covered my face with the most fearful expression I could physically muster; then I backed up closer against the tree, cowering. I was pretending. These two, Albert and the women, they didn’t appear to be from here but they knew enough about these bandits to identify their favorite weapon, the poison of the Amerwoncik, and its side-effects.
[The five men laughed; one of them sounded like they hexed me.]
“Nevermind,” the thin man shouted before realizing the woman was at his side, handing down a tiny purse.
Something about the woman’s feet gripped my attention – open-toed sandals, not especially well-tread, but that wasn’t it:
Her toes were manicured.
/>
My neck muscles tensed so hard my head shook, my face turning beat red, and I lifted up, eyes wide open as if I was convulsing – before I was to lay it on thick and go into full-on cardiac arrest, I glared at the old woman looking back at me in disgust. She stepped forward, her shiny, plastic face clear. “Don’t get—” the thin man had begun but the woman was already close.
With a swift movement, she slapped me clear across the face.
“He’s faking,” she said with certainty.
Dazed, a series of thoughts ran through my head:
Who the fuck are you?
Am I still hallucinating?
What the fuck is happening?
She hadn’t moved from her spot close to me, saying:
“Welcome, Mr. Ridley. We’ve been looking for you.”
the next nine days
THE NO-ONE’S-DOWN PLAN
Once I regain consciousness, David leaves and doesn’t return.
I spend an extra day in the hotel room.
While there, I have this phone conversation with my brother:
“I think you and Chris and Lizzy – I think you guys should take a vacation. Maybe Canada—”
“Uh, I’m not going to Canada.”
“Why not?”
“Remember? The book signing – I got New York at the end of next week and London at the beginning of the week after. It’s the reason Kate’s still here…”
I had completely forgotten about David’s recent book, Captain Rivet & The Fantastic Ambruster, since he had completed and finalized it seven months earlier; this was the fifth in a series of children’s books that were growing (albeit slow and moderate) in popularity with each release. Enough time had passed for him to nearly complete the sixth in the series but, as with any time he published a book, the publishing house asked that he do a few signings in New York and London.
“You found out a reason why Kate’s still here?”
“I’m pretty sure she just doesn’t want to go home,” he says, an answer Chris and I had hinted at before, trying to be earnest without sounding harsh. “But she’s going back when I go, promised to show me the city in ways I haven’t seen – since I fucking hate London—wait-wait-wait, you know what?” His tone changes – short, angry – as if remembering something, but he doesn’t say anything more.