As though meeting the green-eyed ocean lady from my dreams weren't enough to shake me clear down to my sneakers, I was hit with a second shock while I was still reeling from encountering Wish.

The night before we were to close out the Chicago play date, Rick collapsed on stage. He'd been looking pale and clammy most of the afternoon, and gulping down aspirin by the handful....but he kept getting worse.

The way he was feeling showed in his playing; the fans probably didn't notice the change in his work, but everyone in Ill Noise did; we were all intimately familiar with his style. And then, just as we finished the last set for the night, everyone saw it; he turned to leave the stage---and went down like a load of bricks. He came down on top of his guitar and cracked its neck, but that was the least of anyone's worries; he was screaming in agony, clutching his abdomen with both hands, he'd gone as white as a sheet and sweat was pouring off him like he was standing under a running shower.

It was a good thing they'd taken to keeping paramedics on-site at concerts now as a matter of course; they were up on stage with him and taking his vital signs less than a minute after he hit the boards.

It turned out to be appendicitis. They got him to the hospital in time to save his life - just barely, from the sound of things - but it was so close that the doctors told us he was going to be out of comission for at least two months---maybe more.

That left us with a quandry: We could try to find another guitarist and carry on with the tour while Rick convalesced, but Rick's style was unique; half our stuff was built around his picking. Trying to find someone who could duplicate his style well enough to pull the substitution off was going to be impossible....and even if we could find a workable substitute, it could take anywhere from weeks to months to work him into the band's groove properly. When a band works together long enough, everyone gets to know everyone else's moves, timing, and schtick so well that everyone practically reads everyone else's minds while they're playing; everything fuses together into a gestalt---a whole that's somehow greater than the sum of its parts....and something that's a true thing of beauty.

But drop a newcomer into the mix, cold, with no chance to practice and fit into the groove, and all you get is cacophony and the urge to tear your hair out. No one wants to come hear a band play in that condition, no matter how big a rep it has; if you spring a band in that condition on paying customers, most of them will demand their money back---and a few of them will be a lot more unpleasant than that (no one wants a riot at a rock concert---at least, no one with any common sense and a conscience).

In the end, it was decided that it just wasn't worth the hassle of trying to break in a new guitarist; the remaining play dates on the tour were rescheduled, and the tour proper was simply postponed for the duration of Rick's convalescence. Like it or not, we had two months of down time ahead of us---maybe more.

Personally, I've never gotten along well with enforced idleness; if I'm going to goof off, it has to be my own idea or I just can't relax and enjoy it decently. I usually end up stressed-out worse than if I hadn't tried to relax at all. And now, all of a sudden I was staring at sixty days of nothing to do but absolutely nothing; one thousand, four hundred forty hours of sitting around twiddling my thumbs when I was all wired up to perform; eighty-six thousand, four hundred of what should have been gloriously serene, blissful minutes that I was going to end up grinding my way through like a feed mill chewing kernels of dried corn into cornmeal. The entire notion grated on my nerves.

But, there was nothing else to do, except maybe rattle around Chicago like a marble in a coffee can...and the weather just then was too cold and windy for me to even consider doing that. So, I made the best of things; I got on the phone, rented a beach house in Malibu by long distance, booked a flight, coaxed Rocky into his cat carrier---and the next day I was settling my backside onto warm California beach sand.

I sighed as I felt it grit up into my back, all warm and prickly; if I had to kick back and relax against my will, better to do it someplace warm and comfortable....right?

I'll say this for the beach: The environment and the sound of the surf can be amazingly soothing. I drifted off in a matter of minutes.

And I was dreaming, again. In the dream, I was still lying on that same beach, just drowsing and enjoying the sunshine and the roar of the surf. There was no detectable transition between waking and sleeping, so I wasn't aware that I was dreaming.

Voices intruded on my awareness---familiar voices. I roused, still feeling groggy, and turned over toward the sound of those voices---and found Wish and Tommy coming up the beach toward me, wading along the surf line, knee-deep in the water. They suddenly stopped dead and turned out toward the ocean, staring up at the sky. Fear washed across their faces.

I turned to look at whatever they were reacting to, and found a huge, black blot high in the sky; it was descending toward them with terrifying speed. It had an uncomfortably bat-like shape, and it had an air of horrible, skin-crawling menace to it. I didn't know how I knew it, but I knew, just as surely as if it were wearing a sign flashing its intent out in neon letters, that it meant to kill Wish and her brother!

Wish screamed and turned to run up the beach toward me; she'd barely gotten underway when the bat-shadow-thing swooped down over Tommy. Where the shadow of the thing swept across him, all the details in Tommy's form seemed to erase, moving up from his feet to the top of his head in the space of a split-second, like someone letting a window shade snap up. When it passed, the only thing left of Tommy was a kind of blank, featureless outline of a human being, moving like a marionette with half its strings cut.

The shadow chased Wish on up the beach, slowing as it caught up to her. I came to my feet, screaming in wordless protest and anguish, knowing that I was about to see my green-eyed ocean lady erased from existence like an Etch-A-Sketch drawing...

And then the blot-thing swerved aside at the last instant, swooped around in front of Wish, placing itself between her and me, and settled to the sand. I could see Wish through it, half-obscured by its darkness, back-pedaling frantically in the poor footing of the sand as she struggled to keep from crashing into it. Just as she managed to brake to a halt, the blot of shadow began to dwindle, darkening and solidifying as it shrank. In the time it took me to blink once, the blot of shadow condensed inself into the form of a large man clad in black. He lunged toward Wish, fingers clawed, as if to rip her to bloody shreds...

"Excuse me."

I woke up with a jolt that almost tore my stomach from its moorings. A stranger towered over me; he was tall, muscular, dark-haired, steely eyed, and pasty-skinned. He dressed in black slacks, black wingtip shoes and socks, a black turtleneck sweater and a long-sleeved black jacket over it---the sort of clothing someone would wear in that kind of sweltering-summertime environment only if he suffered from a medical condition that left him feeling cold all the time, even in a warm climate....or he enjoyed playing tag with heat stroke.

I noticed about him a darkness that hovered about him, like a thin, swirling fog. I blinked uncertainly; I wasn't exactly seeing it with my eyes, but it was there; I could perceive it, somehow. I remembered those odd times when I'd seen shifting glows of colored light around some people that seemed to have nothing to do with the lighting conditions around them, and wondered if these were the auras I'd heard tell of---and now I found myself wondering, fleetingly, if this was an aura too. The problem was, everything I'd seen and heard about the subject indicated that auras were characterized by colors, and light....and this cloud of whatever-it-was was dark, completely devoid of color. And it felt faintly, loathsomely cold where it brushed up against my skin.

I realized with a jolt that this was almost exactly the same sort of shadowy thing I'd seen swooping down on Wish and Tommy in my dream!

And that set off alarm bells in my head---loud ones. I had to work hard not to show my reactions outwardly, though; something just told me that showing them to this character would be a really bad mistake....

In alarm I saw that he was holding Rocky up to me---by the scruff of the neck. And Rocky was squalling in pain---but strangely, he wasn't really struggling to get free. That made no sense whatsoever: The little guy'd gotten caught in a barbed-wire fence as a kitten, and torn the back of his neck up; it'd never healed properly. Picking him up by the scruff was an invitation to getting shredded into bleeding sushi, because picking him up there hurt. He loved and trusted me, so he'd tolerate me picking him up by the scruff as long as there was no other way for me to get a hold of him---but not for more than a few seconds.

But let anyone else pick him up that way, and he'd do his best to shred the offending hand to steak tartar. Yet, he was just dangling from this dark stranger's hand, squalling in pain and squirming spastically, but making no effort to scratch him and get free...almost as if he'd been drugged. I also noticed that the darkness around the man was clustered most thickly around Rocky; it seemed to be trying to choke the life out of him.

Part of me bristled like a growling dog at all this, but the prudent part of me, the one warning me not to show my true reactions to this stranger, covered it over and made me act as if nothing were wrong, as if this were just some ordinary, everyday encounter, and I was just some airhead Valley Boy surfer dude. I wasn't sure why, mind you, but the warning was too strong to ignore...so, I just scrambled to my feet, blinked at him sleepily, as if I had no clue to what was going on, and gulped, "Huh?"

He raised Rocky casually, at arm's length, as if he were weightless - not an easy thing to do with a cat that weighs almost fifteen pounds - and with a perfectly straight, almost blank face, asked, "Is this yours?"

Traces of a British accent clung to his words. Something about that set my hackles to bristling all over again. Sternly, I ordered them to cease and desist, and to my surprise, they settled down---reluctantly, but surely.

"Uh---yeah!" I took Rocky from him quickly; he was suffering, and I couldn't stand that. But putting my hand into that darkness around Rocky made my skin crawl, like I'd put it into a swamp---or an open sewer.

"Uh---sorry, man. He been buggin' ya, or somethin'?"

I actually managed to sound slightly brain-damaged. I felt a flicker of perverse pride at that, for some reason.

The corners of his mouth bent upward in what was obviously intended to be a smile, but it didn't spread any farther than that. A real smile spreads all the way across the face, and even the eyes get involved in it; this "smile" of his was nothing more than a facial accessory. No other part of his face got involved in the matter in any way, and his eyes, irises near white,---well, those were as cold and dead as last week's fish-market special. Whatever was looking out of them at me wasn't human, no matter what surface appearances said.

I began to understand why that unnamed part of me was prompting me to play dumb and innocent; whoever or whatever this character was, he was dangerous in ways I wasn't capable of understanding yet.

The - for lack of a more accurate term - man held a hand out politely and murmured, "Nicodemus Castevet. I'm your neighbor. I own a number of parrots, and the cat was prowling about. It gave them quite a fright."

Something about having that hand approach me set off alarms all over the inside of my head; that unnamed part of me backed away from that hand as if it were red-hot, making it very clear that I was not to touch it, no matter what!!

Now, I've always prided myself on my good manners; Mom and Dad were very strong on proper manners and common courtesy, and they made sure I turned out that way too. If not for that - and what I could perceive of this---thing's---true nature - I probably would have taken a swing at him for mistreating Rocky the way he had.

It was a good thing I didn't give in to my baser instincts; I found out later that people and things who attacked Nicodemus Castevet had a way of coming up missing---or found dead and mutilated.

Instead, I took the high road, and Mom and Dad would have been proud of me; I concentrated on comforting Rocky, pretending not to notice the outstretched hand, and hoping he'd take the hint and remove it. "Oh---sorry, man. He musta slipped outta the house when I came out here. I'll keep a closer eye on him from now on."

....because God knows what you'll do to him if you ever get your hands on him again, you---whatever you are!

I knew for a fact that Rocky had been inside the beach house when I'd left; I'd seen him curled up on the living room sofa when I'd closed the patio door behind myself. I never let him out to wander in strange places, because it's just too dangerous; cats are too curious for their own good, and when they find themselves in a new place, they can't help but go exploring...and strange places all too often have teeth bigger than an unsupervised cat can survive. Either someone had gotten into the house while I was asleep, and left the door open, or this Castevet character had gotten in and grabbed Rocky for some reason. Just what, I wasn't sure, but considering what I could tell of him, I wouldn't have put it past him. That unnamed part of me commented something to the effect that it wouldn't have put the Holocaust past him, either...and the scary thing about it was, it sounded like it knew what it was talking about.

Castevet looked as though he were considering saying something else, but hesitated; he searched my face for a moment, seeming to be puzzled at not finding something there that he'd been expecting to find, then finally backed away a step and turned to leave, murmuring, "Yes. See that you do that."

As he walked away, Rocky finally managed to regain enough physical control and courage to growl at him. Castevet glanced back in mid-stride and fastened those cold, colorless eyes on Rocky; the growl died with a curious, hiccoughing sound, and Rocky began shivering violently. Something about Castevet scared my cat so badly that he wouldn't even run away from him; even if I'd had no psychic leanings of any sort, that alone would have told me that this Castevet character was bad news---in spades. Animals may not be as smart as humans in a lot of ways, but I've believed for a long time that they're all telepathic to some extent....and it's almost impossible to fool an animal about your nature. If you're a good person, they know it...and if you're mean and nasty right clear through, ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the animals you meet are going to avoid you like the plague, because they know what you are the minute they lay eyes on you.

Castevet's eyes flicked away from Rocky as though he had no meaning whatsoever in the world, and he strode away up the beach.

I concentrated on Rocky for a few minutes. He really needed calming and loving; his eyes were dilated wide in that way that says a cat's trying to go into shock, and he needed to be eased out of the state before I ended up with a dead pet on my hands. I scratched his ears and chin and murmured to him and just generally let him know that he was safe, and loved---and he finally began to relax and look around uncertainly.

When I finally managed to get him to relax enough to begin purring again, I started back to the house---and froze in my tracks. I'd just happened to glance down, to make sure there was nothing dangerous down there to step on in my bare feet, and noticed something that made the hair all over my entire body stand straight up.

The only tracks in the sand were mine.

The path I'd taken down from the house was clearly visible; the place where I'd been lying in the sand was obvious; the disturbance in it where I'd gotten to my feet to retrieve Rocky from Castevet was plain as day, down there around my feet....but there were no other signs of anyone else having walked through this area for at least two days. The place where Castevet had been standing was undisturbed; the route he'd taken when he'd walked away up the beach toward the house just to the north of mine was equally unmarked.

I took a deep, shaking breath. Castevet hadn't been an illusion; Rocky's presence and emotional condition was indisputable proof of that. So, how had he walked across all that sand without leaving any footprints??

I hurried back to the house, put down a warm saucer of Rocky's special KittyKatMilk to help settle his poor, frayed nerves, and then headed for the bathroom; I needed a shower...bad. In particular, the hand with which I'd retrieved Rocky from inside that dark miasma that had surrounded Castevet felt like it needed to be scrubbed down with toilet bowl cleanser.

Copyright 2007 by Wren Hazard and Dennis Crabtree

Chapter Eight |Table of Contents |

---

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page