Riverwatch (8 page)

Damon took out his notebook and jotted down his impressions and general facts about the scene. He’d learned long ago to make a record of everything at a crime scene; you never knew what was going to be important later. When he was finished, he stepped inside the room for the first time.

*** ***

Jake watched the Sheriff make a careful inspection of the body. Damon squatted next to the corpse and felt for a pulse on the man’s neck. He sat back on his haunches and visually inspected the corpse, taking care not to touch anything else. After a few moments he jotted down some notes and even sketched a quick diagram of the situation. Jake recognized the hallmarks of a methodical and patient man. Once the Sheriff had finished with the corpse, he turned his attention to the statue above it, going over it with the same care and diligence he’d shown with the body.

Jake didn’t want to be in the room with either the statue or the corpse. His earlier excitement had quickly died when he and Sam had discovered Kyle’s body. Now all he wanted to do was retreat back up the stairs into the bright sunshine and forget about what he’d found.

He stepped back into the passage, a glimpse of movement catching his eyes as he did so.

He turned in the doorway, staring at the statue, watching its eyes, watching its hands.

Must have been the Sheriff.

Statues don’t move.

The Sheriff called out to him as he turned away.

"Where does this go?" Damon asked, pointing behind to something him that Jake could not see due to the intervening statue.

"Where does what go?" Jake asked. He stepped to his left and gaped in surprise at the doorway now visible on the other side of the chamber.

"Where the hell did that come from?" Jake asked.

*** ***

Damon watched Jake examine the door and knew he wasn’t faking it. He really hadn’t known it was there. The iron door had been coated with a thick layer of dust and dirt, causing it to blend with the wall in the dim light. In the horror of finding the statue looming over Kyle’s body, it had been overlooked.

The Sheriff intended to let the forensics team open the door once they had thoroughly checked the chamber. He hadn’t counted on Jake’s curiosity. Before the Sheriff could stop him, Jake had grasped the solid iron ring that served as a door handle and pulled with all his strength.

The door swung inward with a groan.

Sunlight flooded the chamber.

Without a word Damon stepped over to stand next to Jake.

The two men stared out the doorway onto the carefully trimmed green of the Forest Lawn Cemetery

"Holy shit," Jake said under his breath.

The Sheriff agreed. Holy shit was right. They must have traveled a couple of hundred yards underground, clear off the Blake property and onto the adjoining one. He hadn’t realized they’d gone that far.

He stepped out into the sunshine with Jake at his heels. As one, they turned to face the doorway.

The door proved to be the entrance to a white marble mausoleum that was built into the side of a small hill. Across the lintel of the doorframe was carved a name.

Sebastian Blake.

Chapter Eight: Ressurection

Inside the tomb.

Movement.

It began as nothing more than a subtle shifting in the darkness, a change in the rank air that filled the buried structure, a stirring sense of motion that was more felt than seen, as if the air pressure had suddenly lowered.

Gradually as the moments passed the motion became more substantial until at last it could be seen with the naked eye, had anyone been watching.

A patch of darkness, darker than even the heavy gloom that filled the tomb’s every nook and cranny, detached itself from the shadows in one corner and drifted like a curtain of mist into the center of the chamber. It churned about in rich, lazy spirals, a bubbling, seething witch’s brew that whirled and spun about itself.

The mist became a haze; the haze became a fog, and still it writhed and rolled. With each revolution it slowly gathered substance from the darkness around it. When the cloud was several feet in diameter, it slowly wrapped the statue in its inky embrace.

The murk began to adhere itself to the finely wrought stone, slowly at first, and then faster, as the intelligence guiding it gradually awakened from a long sleep, its senses progressively becoming more in tune with physical reality.

The human blood shed earlier acted as a catalyst, providing the ingredients required for him to again assume a corporeal form. The dark union of forces that had sustained him for so long did the rest.

A light sparked about the statue, a tiny flash of crimson the size and shape of a cigarette ember, located somewhere near the center of the thing’s chest. With each pulsation it grew slowly brighter, bit-by-bit, until it reached the intensity of a carefully contained fire. There was no heat. The strange light seemed to give off an unnatural chill that wafted forth and turned the air inside the tomb several degrees colder than it had been moments before. The blood-red light flickered across the face of the statue, causing its teeth to gleam eerily in the glow.

The cloud pulsed and swelled as it coalesced about the figure, until it was a semi-solid mass of churning black, mated to the stone, covering every exposed inch of its surface.

The light flared suddenly brighter, so bright that it would have blinded anyone in the room in its gory red glow.

But no one was there, and so the change went on.

Unheeded.

Unhindered.

Unnoticed by all but the one who’d triggered it and the other who’d sought so desperately to prevent it.

A smell suddenly filled the air, a stench like the cloying reek of sulfur or rotten eggs. With it the light flared in a flash that lasted for several long moments.

When the light died down and the darkness returned, the beast that had been hidden for centuries stood in the center of the room where the statue had stood just moments before.

In the darkness, yellow eyes gleamed brightly.

The beast remained where he was for a moment or two, rejoicing in his newfound freedom. The rush of the stolen blood in his veins brought a rhythmic pounding to his ears, and after the ages of silence even that slight, internal sound was like thunder.

He reveled in it. He was alive.

The creature once known as Moloch walked towards the door, eager to escape the confines of the dank, stone structure where he’d been imprisoned. He moved with steady deliberation; the first steps slow and awkward, the joints in his knees and hips seemed rusted tight with disuse. After a few more steps the tissues began to remember and established the proper rhythm.

Where his movements had at first been disruptive, jerky, they now became fluid, composed and filled with a savage, feline grace. He walked the circumference of the room. Once, twice, three times, each step renewing his familiarity with physical motion and the laws that governed it.

As he walked he worked his arms, swinging them back and forth at the elbow and rotating them in their shoulder sockets, flexing the muscles of his biceps. He clenched and unclenched his fists.

Moloch opened and closed his jaw several times, snapping it shut to hear the sharp click of his teeth, force enough to crush bone to a pulp.

He delighted in the tension and release of the muscles in his back and legs. The sound of his claws scraping the rough stone underfoot sent a shiver of pleasure through his frame.

Moloch strode across the chamber. With a shove from one muscle-laden arm, he swung wide the door. It crashed against the outer wall with a loud metallic clang. He was barely aware of the sound, so entranced was he with the sight through the open door.

There, just steps away, lay freedom.

Sounds were assaulting him from all sides; the whisper of the wind, the trip-hammer of tiny hearts in the shrubbery.

He laughed, the sound welling up from the depths of his throat in manic glee and echoing into the night.

It was a sound that was less than human.

Lights gleamed off in the distance. Spying them, the beast’s thoughts turned to the terrible, gnawing hunger that had awakened deep inside. Too long he’d been locked inside that stone, imprisoned and left to die alone in the darkness. Too long he’d existed in that twilight between this world and the next, his life extended by the dark forces that had imprisoned him there.

Now he was free; free to act and to feed.

He extended his arms. The leathery wings that lay smoothly against the surface of his back extended with them, rustling in the breeze like the sound of a quickly snapped sheet. Bunching the muscles in his scaled legs, Moloch gave a powerful downward shove and cast his body upwards into the dark night.

Chapter Nine: Explanations?

Edward Strickland, Medical Examiner for Porter County, stepped into the chill confines of the morgue and switched on the lights. Though it was late in the evening, Strickland was preparing to perform one last task for the night, a task he had saved until the end, so that other duties would not prevent him from giving it his complete attention.

Strickland was an agreeable man in his early sixties, and had been M.E. for the last sixteen years. Despite his constant joking that the only reason he’d been able to retain his post was due to the fact that nobody else wanted it, he was a competent professional who got the job done and got it done right the first time. He was nearing retirement, but was in no way ready for it.

His work was a constant intrigue to him, and he pursued it with an almost fanatic devotion. To find him working far into the night, as he planned on this occasion, was not an unusual occurrence. The silence in the morgue after-hours was deep and peaceful, soothing, vastly different from the hectic pace that enveloped the facility during regular hours.

Brilliant fluorescent lights illuminated the room in which he was working, washing across the institutional green walls and slick linoleum floor. A body lay on the mortician’s table before him, its flesh a sickly shade of gray, the color of death. A wide white tag was tied to the big toe on the corpse’s left foot, giving the deceased’s name, age, and proximate cause of death. Strickland gave the tag a quick glance.

"Halloran, Kyle, Caucasian male, age 26, probable overdose," he read to himself, humming aloud to the strains of Mozart that wafted through the room from the speakers set in the ceiling above, just loud enough to be heard.

His rubber-soled shoes made barely a sound as he circled the body before him, carefully looking it over for any obvious telltale injuries, dictating his findings aloud so the microphone above the table could pick them up for transcription.

When he thought he’d seen all there was to see, he moved to the tray of instruments that was set up alongside, and picked up a scalpel. The cool metal of the blade glinted sharply in the light.

"Now, my dead, young friend, " he said to the corpse as he reached out and made the first incision in the slightly rubbery flesh, "let’s see what secrets you’re hiding."

Three hours later he was finished. When he’d first read the tag, Strickland had expected the post-mortem to be a rather straightforward piece of work. But now that he was finished, he realized that this was anything but a straightforward case. He discovered a number of things that just didn’t make any sense, and while they bothered him, they also sparked his professional curiosity; something that didn’t happen all that often anymore. In over thirty years of forensic medicine, he thought he’d seen it all. The body on the table before him proved him wrong. Determined to get to the bottom of things, he dialed Detective Wilson’s office extension.

"Hello?"

"Damon, its Ed. Figured I’d find you there. Don’t you ever go home?"

Wilson laughed. "Sure, right around the same time you do." The two men had known each other for years, from before Damon had gone off to Chicago. They’d gone to the same high school together, had even dated some of the same women. Their friendship had picked up again once Damon had returned home.

"What’s up?" Damon asked.

"I just finished that autopsy on the young fellow you pulled out of that crypt over on the Blake family plot."

"Halloran. Kyle Halloran."

Ed grunted. "Yeah, that’s the one. Thought you should know that it wasn’t your everyday, run of the mill experience. Some of the results I got are pretty strange."

"Strange funny or strange weird?"

"Strange weird."

"Like what?" Damon asked. Hell, it was an open and shut case. Witnesses said the guy had been drinking and snorting enough cocaine earlier in the night to flatten an elephant. Too much physical exertion after all that and you ended up in cardiac arrest.

"Well, for one thing, it wasn’t an overdose that killed him."

Damon laughed. "Yeah, right. Try telling that to his heart and respiratory system. They’re still trying to figure out what hit them."

"That’s just it, Damon. The toxicology tests showed high traces of benzoylecganine, so the guy had been doing cocaine earlier that night, enough to send most people straight to the moon. Combine that with a blood alcohol level of 1.8, and you can be damn sure he was as high as a kite when he went. Probably didn’t feel a thing. But it wasn’t the drugs or the booze that killed him." Ed paused, and then said, "He bled to death."

"What?" Damon asked, shocked.

"You heard me," Strickland replied. "He bled to death."

"But that’s not possible, Ed. There were no wounds on the body, and we certainly didn’t find anything to indicate that at the scene. For a guy that size to lose enough blood to kill him, we should have found a lake of the stuff. We didn’t; the place was as dry as a bone."

"Didn’t you tell me the floor of that tomb was just dirt? Could it have simply seeped into the ground and whoever was at the scene just missed it?"

"C’mon Ed. My men are better than that. Besides, I’m the one who answered the call. There wasn’t any blood. Nada, nothing, zippo. Catch my drift?"

Ed sighed. "Yeah, I hear you. It’s been bothering me, too. But it gets worse. I can’t figure out how it happened. There weren’t any wounds on the body, nothing but a fairly shallow cut on the palm of one hand. It probably hurt like hell, and bled a bit, but certainly not enough to kill someone."