Untitled Novel - Summer 2010

Chapter 2

Lindsey watched from a distance.  She was in a patch of dry grass, waist-deep, looking out on what looked like an abandoned wheat field.  The girl had her face but nothing else about her was the same.  She had been bound at her ankles and wrists and tied tightly around her chest, waist and knees to the trunk of a large tree, the only thing in the field besides the remnants of a forgotten, hand-made, wooden fence.  Small rivulets of blood trickled out wherever the rough horse rope touched her flesh.  Lindsey could only watch, unable to help, unable to move, unsure if she were really even there.


There was no sign of whoever had put her there; as far as Lindsey could tell she and the girl with her face were the only two in the field.  The sun was lowering quickly behind the low, flat horizon and the twilight that pushed it down brought with it a sense of foreboding that got under Lindsey’s skin and made her shiver violently.


At the edges of her vision, Lindsey thought she could see something moving, something large and hulking, dark, absorbing the last of the sun’s light.  There were three, maybe four of them, but when she turned in any direction to get a better look, there would be nothing there.


Lindsey woke with a start, her blankets on the floor and the thin sheet that remained soaked with sweat and clinging to her skin.





Tuesday nights were never terribly busy but tonight was unusually slow.  Lindsey had dusted liquor bottles and washed every dirty glass, even some that weren’t dirty but hadn’t been used in a while and was now sitting down in front of the little video game machine to feed it quarters out of her tip jar.  The bell above the door rang as someone passed through it and Lindsey looked over the top of the machine to her partner.  Micah nodded and went to greet the newcomer.


“Merlot, please.” The man’s voice was slow and deep and resonated in Lindsey’s ears.  Even though she had yet to hear him speak, she knew that the voice belonged to the man in the black coat.  She froze, not sure what to do next.  Part of her wanted to confront him, ask why he was following her but an even bigger part screamed in terrified response. She decided it was better to try to ignore him and continue with the game she’d set out to play.  She didn’t want to know why he was following her.


When she was able to call up the courage needed to glance his direction, she found that he had taken his glass of wine, and the bottle it had been poured from, and found a seat at a table near the door.  At a chair facing directly toward her stool at the bar.  He wasn’t looking at her; his attention was trained on a small notebook lying flat on the table in front of him.  He seemed to be reading from it, rather than writing in it.  The part of Lindsey that had stopped her from confronting him spoke up again, questioning what the man was reading, and wondering if it was notes about what he’d seen while following her.


He had removed the heavy black coat, draping it over the chair to his left, revealing a well-fitted black silk shirt and midnight blue tie.  Where his hat had been (she saw no sign of it now) was now visible a head of thick black hair that fell in waves over the tops of his ears and in bangs that reached to his eyebrows.  His “normal” appearance, without the creepy coat, actually did more to heighten Lindsey’s discomfort than alleviate it.


She felt eyes on her and turned to find Micah staring at her from behind the video game.  “Is everything okay?  Do you know him?”  He pointed with his sharp chin at the man.


She stared into his blue eyes, trying to decide if she should tell him.  She and Micah had always had a strange relationship.  They shared a lot of their lives but there were certain things that Lindsey just knew weren’t going to enhance their relationship.  Would he tell her she was being paranoid when she told him that she thought this man had been following her since Saturday?  Would he laugh?  Would he play the valiant knight and confront the man?


Maybe she was being paranoid.  Maybe he was new in town… Her instincts knew enough to not let her finish that thought.  He may have been new in town but that wasn’t why he was following her.  It was more likely that following her was why he was new in town.  And he definitely was following her.


Had he broken into her apartment Saturday night?  After she’d returned from her trip to the diner, she had gone over the apartment with a fine-toothed comb, looking for anything that might indicate someone had been there who shouldn’t have.  She hadn’t found anything but couldn’t shake the violated feeling that someone had been there, uninvited, while she’d been away.  They’d been ten blocks from her apartment when the cabbie had almost hit him; had he been leaving her apartment?


She got up from her forgotten game, muttered something to Micah about organizing the storage room and disappeared into the back of the bar.  The longer she was around the strange man, the more uneasy she felt.  She couldn’t stay out there as long as he was there. If he stayed too long, she might have to fake sick and leave. 


She set about cleaning up the storage room, like she had said she was going to do.  It hadn’t been done in a while so she hoped it would kill enough time until he left. 


When she had filled a garbage bag, she headed out the back door to the dumpster.  She lifted the lid and threw the bag in.  She turned to go back inside and there he stood, not ten feet from her.  When she opened her mouth to scream, he was behind her in a blink, with his hand over her mouth.  “Please, ma cherie, I do not intend you harm.  But it is very urgent that I speak with you.”  When he was sure that she wasn’t going to scream, he released his grip on her and turned her around to face him.


“If it’s so urgent, why have you been following me for three days?”


“I had to wait until you were alone.”


“So you could ‘talk‘ while chopping me into little bits, no thanks.”  Startled by her own sudden flash of courage, she clung to it as long as she could and turned on her chunky wedged heels and started for the door before she could freeze.  “Find someone else to add to your collection.”


“Lindsey, you must hear what I have to tell you.”  She stopped in her tracks, her feet unwilling to obey the “run” command that her brain was screaming at them.  She waited helplessly for him to begin whatever macabre story he was going to tell her before cutting her throat from behind.


“Do you ever see things that you are never completely sure were ever really there?”


Whatever had been holding her feet in place, loosened its grip and allowed her to turn to face her addresser.  “Everyone does.  That’s nothing special.”


“Everyone thinks they see things.  Ghosts, alien spaceships…people are wonderful manipulators.  They can even manipulate themselves into believing they see what they are trying to convince others of.  Whether they really have seen anything is often the greatest debate to which there is no real answer.


“But what you see, Lindsey, what you see is different.  Because it is real but you never really see it.  It’s always at the very edges of your vision, never in full focus, and when you try to bring it into focus, it disappears.  Am I right?”


Caught off guard by the accuracy of his assumption, Lindsey had no choice but to confirm it.  “Sometimes, yeah, yes, sometimes there are things…What are they?  How do you know I see them?”


“Because, Lindsey, they are a part of what you are.  They are what you were born to fight.”


Her mood changed almost as quickly as it had when he’d started talking about the dark figures in the corners of her eyes, when she’d thought someone finally understood and she wasn’t crazy for seeing them.  But to hear she was born to fight them, to fight things she couldn’t see and had never known, for absolutely certain, that they were ever really there…that was too much. That took this conversation spiraling back to the bizarre creepy place where it had began and she turned to leave.  “Please don’t leave.  I need you to hear…you need to hear what I have to tell you.”


She stood with her back to him for several moments, considering whether to hear him out or tell him to jump in a lake.  “Inside,” she said finally.  She hoped she’d feel more comfortable with witnesses present.  She led him inside, flashed a wary look to Micah, and found a table away from the other customers.


“The creatures on your peripherals, the shadows, are demons.  You are a demon hunter.  It is in your blood, has been since ancient times.”


Lindsey’s only reaction, the best she could manage, was to stare at the strange, tall, broad man.  She couldn’t settle on an emotion long enough to express any of them.  Her mind ran the course from anger to fear to disbelief to amusement and back again.  Did this strange man really follow her around the city for three days to come into her bar and tell her that she was a demon hunter?  With a straight face? 


Of course he kept a straight face.  You don’t put this much energy into a prank just to burst into a gigglefit at the last minute.  But more than keeping a straight face, something in his eyes told Lindsey that it wasn’t a prank.  He truly believed in what he was peddling.  Whether it was real or not, it was real to him.  She stood up from her chair and pointed to the door.  “I think you need to leave.”  He stood as well, towering over her by at least a foot, and started to protest. “Now, before I call the police.”


He nodded to her, returned his hat to its place atop his head and made his way to the door.  “Please think about what I have told you, Lindsey.”





Think about what I have told you, he had said.  Like she had any choice but.  The rest of the night had been silent, compared to the news that she was a demon hunter.  News, ha! The very word nearly made her laugh aloud.  Delusions of a stark raving madman, that was closer to accurate.


She filled the bath with steaming hot water and lit a handful of candles then turned off the overhead light.  It had been another long day and she wanted nothing but to stretch out and relax for a while. 


A circle had been cut in the grass.  A baby lay in the center and three figures in animal skins danced around her; from her vantage point outside the ring, Lindsey couldn’t distinguish male from female; and they sprinkled her with herbs and crushed leaves. 


While two of the figures continued their strange anointing dance, the third picked up the baby and began chanting to her, placing kisses on her forehead and her heart alternately each time a phrase of the chant was completed.  Although she didn’t recognize the language, Lindsey was able to use the chants to identify this figure, at least, as female.


She lay the baby back on the ground and produced a bone knife from the belt of her heavy animal skin robe.  She drew it across the baby’s belly, leaving a shallow red trail in her otherwise unflawed alabaster flesh.  Lindsey gasped for breath but the baby showed no signs of a reaction.  The woman touched a finger to the wound and dabbed her own forehead and chest with the blood.  Then she repeated the ritual, touching the bloody finger to the foreheads and chests of her two companions.


The bathwater was cold when Lindsey woke.