The Keeper: Part II
Colin Morgan lay in the second-floor bedroom, his ribs tender from the beating and his right eye swelling shut. A butcher knife rested by his side, twelve inches long and razor sharp, but he doubted that he could hack through the heavy wood of the door. Outside, the sun hung just above the horizon, and the shadows in the room were deepening, and the entire bedroom lay in a pall of gloom. The corpse on the bed appeared surprisingly peaceful, and if one ignored the wounds on her throat, Colin thought, her death could easily be mistaken for sleep. He rose slowly and stared at the fading light in the window – he had thirty minutes until sunset, and if the thing on the bed didn’t kill him, Norton Fisher was likely to murder him before morning.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They had roamed the interstates in the big sedan, haunting the smaller towns around Nashville like a pair of itinerant ghosts, and in each, Norton Fisher combed through the property listings and counted the number of police cars that passed on the street. He could have left at any time, Colin remembered with a jag of bitterness, but he had been oddly passive, watching the days unfold with the bored disinterest of a spectator until they reached Lexington, just south of the interstate and ten miles west of the Tennessee River. Fisher had rented a two-story derelict on the edge of town, boarding the first-floor windows and securing the doors with padlocks as Colin counted hay bales in an adjoining field, large plastic-covered rolls oddly reminiscent of oversized marshmallows.
When Fisher was satisfied with the condition of the house, they had returned to the highway. They received wire transfers of cash in Kentucky and dropped letters into the box of an Ohio post office, and in a derelict steel town in Pennsylvania, Colin had excused himself and wandered the streets until he found a dealer. That infraction had earned his first beating, and Fisher, who had forced the door of the bathroom as he tied off a vein, had pummeled Colin with a heavy belt until he passed out in agony. A few drops of the red elixir relieved most of the pain, and though he felt surprisingly good afterward – his craving for heroin receded like the fading of a nightmare at sunrise – Colin wondered whether the drug was responsible for his strange torpor. You tasted his potion, and now you belong to him. Occasionally, he wondered what had happened to the girl from the club.
They meandered for ten days before arriving in Portland, Maine. The warehouse was a brick building on the waterfront, empty save for a large crate, a panel truck, and the corpse of a night watchman. The watchman’s throat had been badly mangled, and Fisher had severed the corpse’s head with a large knife, the same butcher’s tool that now lay at his feet, and they had loaded the crate into the panel truck. In the dim light of the warehouse, he thought he had seen something, a large shadow that dangled batlike from the rafters, but he had said nothing to Fisher. He had asked about the crate, and had Colin been anywhere near his right mind, the old man’s answer might have sent him screaming into the night.
“From the dawn of time, man has been stalked by the spectre of death.” Norton Fisher had beamed as he spoke, the lunatic grin of a fanatic. “A select few have cheated the reaper and gained eternal life through service and obedience. I am the keeper of one of those few – I have served the Master for forty years, and the time of my own reward draws near. You will take my place, and if you serve him well, the reward will be yours one day.” Now Fisher waited idly downstairs, and though the old man sat in perfect stillness, Colin’s senses had been honed by the (blood) odd effects of the red liquid, and he could hear the creak of every floorboard, each intake of breath, the beating of the old man’s heart. Waiting to see if I live or die.
How much longer until the sun sets?
One hundred miles to the east, detective Liz Park sat in the interrogation room and gathered her thoughts. Stephanie White, twenty-one years old. She had been a good kid, a premed student with a bright future, before her encounter with Colin Morgan, but since that fateful evening, an evening whose events were extensively documented on the club’s security cameras, there had been four assaults in downtown Nashville, each worse than the last. Park had assumed that it was only a matter of time before someone turned up dead, but to her surprised, their prime suspect had walked right up to Tom Eckhart (“Like a fucking ghost,” he would say later) and surrendered. She looks so small, Liz thought, and she wondered whether a jury would buy that she was capable of such violence. They ran through a few preliminaries, and Eckhart nodded for her to begin.
“I already know what happened,” Park said in a low voice. “There are security cameras all over downtown, and we have video evidence of each attack. What I don’t understand is why – why a girl with her whole life in front of her would throw it all away like that. I want to help you, Stephanie, because something is happening that I don’t understand, but I can’t fill in the blanks on my own – I need you to do that.”
Later, when everything had gone off the rails, Park would remember Eckhart’s sharp intake of breath, the shiver of fear that ran down her spine, the sensation of overwhelming cold that seeped through the interrogation room. Dissociative identity disorder, the textbooks called it, a fragmenting of the personality associated with severe childhood trauma. Park had dismissed the whole thing as bunk, the stuff of pop psychology and made-for-TV dramas, yet there was no doubting the evidence of her own eyes – Stephanie White changed, in some subtle but definite manner, as a grin spread across the thin face – her features were still her own, but her mind belonged to another.
“All right.” A grin spread across the thin face. “I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
Colin used an empty vase to relieve his bladder and studied the vanishing sun through his window. He guessed that twenty minutes of light remained, sufficient time either to save his life or piss it away. They drove the panel truck as they left Maine, with the crate in the storage compartment and the black sedan towed on a trailer. They stopped only for fuel until they reached Saltville, Virginia, where they rested for three days. While Colin slept in the cheap hotel, a truck driver vanished from a rest stop, and a hiker failed to return from an overnight excursion in the mountains. Again, he had seen nothing, but as they left town, Colin had dumped a set of heavy trash bags into the river as Fisher watched from the shoulder of the road, relishing his discomfort.
When they reached the house in Lexington, the crate had gone into the cellar, and Colin had opened every second-floor window to disperse the rancid odor that filled the house. That was where the trouble started. Fisher became insufferable as Colin spent more of his waking hours outdoors, prattling on about blood and rewards and immortality, so when the old man left yesterday morning, headed to Memphis for God only knew what, Colin had walked into town.
The girl looked about eighteen, still pretty despite her addict’s thin frame, and Colin had pulled three twenties from his wallet. “Come back to my place, and I’ll share it with you.” Her brown eyes had studied him with the intensity of a prey animal, but she came, just as he had known she would – when you were an addict, you did things that others, the fortunate souls who had not surrendered their mental faculties to an overpowering need, would never contemplate. Like go into empty houses with strangers. They had used the empty bedroom on the second floor, nodding off for a good two hours before he prodded her awake. The girl was dressed in a dirty tank top, and Colin had savored the touch of her bare shoulder, the soft brush of hair against his neck, the tensing of her muscles as he had lifted the shirt, then he had heard the creak of a floorboard and seen the fear in her eyes – Colin had turned, and as the fist crashed into his face, he had seen the vanishing sun outside of his bedroom window. Norton Fisher had hit him again, and then there had been something else, a shadow that brushed past him with the force of a strong wind, enveloping the girl, and Colin had fainted to the sound of her screams.
He had regained consciousness at sunrise.
“Clearly, I made a mistake when I chose you.” Norton Fisher had thrown the knife at his feet. “I would prefer to kill you know, but your friend will have a better use for you when she awakens.”
Colin stared through the window at the fading light, willing himself not to believe. You saw one dead body and a few bags of trash, nothing more. Fisher had murdered the girl, and the shape that had plunged into the bedroom like some giant bird of prey had been nothing more than a figment of his imagination. The lack of blood was odd, for the room should have been covered by the spray of her severed arteries, but he forced the thought from his mind. His inability to account for the missing blood, Colin reminded himself firmly, did not signify the absence of a rational explanation. He glanced back at the girl and Colin felt a pang of conscience for the destruction that he had wrought, for he never meant for her to end up dead, lying on a dirty mattress with her throat torn out and her awful dead eyes staring upward at the ceiling…
The eyes. They had been closed before and Colin circled the room slowly, back to the wall, until he reached the knife. In his thirty seconds of retreat from the window, the bedroom seemed to have grown very dark indeed, and he gripped the wooden handle with white knuckles, refusing to believe. Surely her eyes had been open the whole time, and he was simply misremembering – when you were dead, you were fucking dead, and corpses did not simply get up and walk.
In the semidarkness of the room, Colin thought he saw the twitch of a finger.
He covered the distance in three steps, raising the knife as a shrill, panicked whine escaped his throat. His hand slipped, and the blade left a gash in two of his fingers as the point sheared through her neck and struck the bones of her spine, and when the screams began, he seized a handful of brown hair and made another hacking cut, driven forward by the scourge of mindless panic. He cut himself again, a deep slice through the center of his palm, but at last it was finished, and the head lay severed from the body.
The girl never moved, never uttered a sound, and the screams, Colin realized, had been his own.
“What now?” They stood behind the loading dock as Tom Eckhart puffed on a cigarette, and Liz clutched her arms tightly about her midsection, warding off the chill of early fall.
“You know the drill.” Eckhart crushed the glowing end of the butt against the sole of his shoe. “They’ll take her to the jail for a mental health evaluation, then a judge will decide if she’s competent to stand trial. Given the story she just told, I’ll be shocked if she sees the inside of a courtroom.”
“You don’t believe her?”
“And you do?” Eckhart scoffed. “The old man is real enough – we caught him on the security feed from the club – but a pair of guys playing zookeeper for a blood-drinking monster? A monster, mind you, with which she now claims a telepathic link… Super strength, super hearing? This is the stuff of paranoid fantasy.”
“At least we have a lead on Morgan,” she said, changing the subject. Midway through the interrogation, she had been called into the hallway, and a uniformed officer had given her the news – the black sedan that had driven Colin Morgan from the club had been picked up by a State Trooper’s license plate reader, a hundred miles west of the city.
“We have a lead,” Eckhart replied. “And if our suspect had given us anything useful, maybe we’d have enough for an arrest warrant.”
Her phone buzzed, and the color drained from Liz’s face as she listened to the voice on the other end of the connection. She asked a few terse questions and began walking quickly toward the motor pool, not waiting to see if Eckhart followed. Super strength. Super hearing. The interrogation room was soundproof, and Liz had been outside in the hallway. There’s no way she could have heard.
“Hey Park!” Eckhart was panting as he tried to match her pace. “What’s going on?”
“We need to get to the jail.” Her voice was calm, even as her heart thudded beneath her ribs. “Stephanie White just escaped custody.”
“I suppose I should congratulate you.” Norton Fisher prodded him with the toe of a patent leather shoe. “Were I inclined to gambling, I would have wagered that she would devour you at sunset. Perhaps you’re made of sterner stuff than I realized.”
“We need to get rid of the body,” Colin said.
“No – you need to get rid of the body. There’s a shovel in the garden shed, and you can plant her in the back yard.” Fisher turned his back, dismissing the younger man as Colin rose from the floor. “She was last seen alive with you, and if the police pay you a visit, don’t ask me for support. I expect you will survive the night, but the Master is finished with you, and I expect him to deal with you in his own good time –”
Fisher’s words were cut short as the knife slipped between his ribs.
Tom Eckhart stared at the ruined patrol car like a man waking from a dream. The prisoner compartment in the back had been hardened with steel-reinforced doors, yet she had peeled the door away with the ease of a child stomping a tin can. The door itself lay in the median, a good twenty feet from the car itself, which rested against a broken light pole. A blood-drinking monster… Stephanie White was little more than a kid, but she had sent a cop to the hospital with life-threatening injuries and had broken the arm of a motorist who stopped to render aid. Liz Park emerged from the trees that lined the far side of the street, her black hair pulled into a ponytail and a patrol rifle slung over one shoulder. She waved one tired arm and trudged to his position by the wreck.
“Any good news?” he asked, and she shook her head.
“The ground’s muddy where it slopes toward the creek, but we lost her trail within ten yards of the road.” She gave a lackluster kick to the tire of the wrecked car. “It sounds crazy, but –”
“But it’s like chasing a ghost.” He clapped her on one shoulder. “We’ll put the Marshals on her, and she’ll be back in custody before you know it.”
“No need.” Liz Park smiled, but a hardness lingered about her eyes. “We already know where she’s going.”
The old man took a long time to die, and Colin watched as the fear in his eyes yielded to incomprehension, then to apathy. When the final spark of life faded, he searched Fisher’s pockets for the keys, then loaded the sedan and drove to the river. When he returned at half-past midnight, Colin went upstairs to the bedroom. The floor had been awash in Fisher’s blood, but all traces of the dark liquid had vanished, like dew evaporating in the morning sunshine, and he waited at the window for a long time, staring into the shadows as the minutes ticked away toward the approaching dawn. When it came there was no sound, only a sensation of presence – he was no longer alone.
“Fisher is dead.”
“Yes.” The words came easily, for the time for evasions had passed. “I killed him.”
It drew closer, and at first, there was nothing more than deep coldness and vertigo, as if Colin had suddenly found himself on the precipice of a deep well. Then he felt it – the crawling sensation of fingers moving up his spine and brushing lightly against his neck, then coming to rest against his shoulder.
“You are stronger than he was,” it said with a dry chuckle. “As I knew you would be.”
Colin’s mind was filled with a hundred racing thoughts, but he set those aside, for beneath the whirling cacophony that filled his brain, there was only one need – a need, he realized now, that had been planted into him with the first taste of Norton Fisher’s elixir. I must keep Him safe.
“We need to move,” he said, staring into the darkness beyond his window. “They’ll be after us soon.”
To be continued…