Chapter 17: Sabian
10 months had past since I had entered that barn with absolute dread. I had called an ambulance, and the police who arrived remarkably quickly considering we were in the middle of nowhere. In truth, I had believed Sam was dead when I found him. In a way I guess he was. I tried to cut him down but worried I might break his neck or something when he fell. I couldn’t find a pulse and he was cold, but apparently significant blood loss does that. When they said they found a pulse I was stunned, and accompanied the ambulance to the hospital where one of the police officers from Sam’s own area command arrived while he was in surgery and I was contemplating my miserable efforts to change my crumbling world for the better by helping Rachael.
In my grief for Amber, for Kes, for my marriage (which I hadn’t exactly helped to save either) I had let myself get lost in the hope that Rachael was more than just an ordinary woman who could do extraordinary things. I was right, but boy was I wrong. She wasn’t some kind of mystically inspired Asatru, wasn’t even something of good. I had also been right with regards to the existence of Wraith, of the evil ghostlike possessive spirits that held wickedness in their hearts. I had been clenching the arms of the uncomfortable plastic hospital seats when the officer found me, and introduced himself. Explaining what had happened was one of the most difficult things I had ever done. Especially seeing as if Sam survived I wondered what he would say.
Turned out Sam wouldn’t say anything at all. Not a thing, refused to mention anything about Rachael, even though the officers who visit him prompted him regularly – at least at the beginning, until they decided that if he wanted to be left alone, they would honor that, or give up on him. I knew all this only because I went to meet with Sam daily while he was in rehab, and then again when he was able to go home, when he lost his job – I had drinks with him to commiserate.
In spite of the fact that Sam feigned memory loss to everyone else involved, when he spoke with me it was quite clear he remembered every detail down to the glowing eyes that still woke him in a sweat in the middle of the night. He and I learned to agree on a lot of things such as who she was, what she was, and the fact she had divulged that she took Rachael’s body so many years ago helped us trace her history and find out who she was, or had been. But it became very clear that the Rachael who had been a teacher at the local primary school, who had been engaged to a local real estate divorcé and busy planning her wedding when she disappeared. And she had done just that – disappeared. There were some records of her attending a sleep centre, some tie in’s with Uther, the otherwise unidentified impossibly aged corpse they had found out in the desert a few hours from where Rachael and Jonah had been discovered. Other than brief mentions though, nothing else.
I moved to a new house, the divorce paperwork cam through from Natasha and my life took on an inevitability that didn’t sit well with me, Sabian the great entrepreneur, the negotiator, the consultant to the local and international hotshots had all but disappeared. One night, feeling particularly sorry for myself, I decided I had to make some firm choices: to forget what had happened and move on as best as I could, or drop everything and in the pursuit of madness. Moving on had proved harder than it sounded, and dropping everything meant losing all my resources, everything I had worked hard for my whole life. I wasn’t going to let Rachael take that as well, not after I let her take so much from me already. So I struck a deal with myself – well both Sam and I did, but I ended up somehow seeming to be the only one who held the bargain truly together. I mustered all my strength, and I made sure that it seemed for all intents and purposes to the outside world, that I had fully returned to normal. My clients were happy, my PA was appeased in her worries, Sabian had returned. By day at least.
My nights had been taken up by something very different though. While Sam recuperated I had invested a great deal of time and money into doing some deep digging into the occult, all manner of supernatural, and anything else that might serve useful to us. I researched numerous myths, legends and occult histories, acquired talismans, weaponry and amassed herbs, crystals, and anything else that might prove useful. In doing this, I learned a few tricks along the way, including how to guard myself and my house from, and most useful - how to find indicators of the unnatural in seemingly ordinary events. For example, some of the best underground underworld figures I had networked with frequented a new club ‘The Devil’s Cave’ – turned out the place was owned by a witch of enormous power, and there were various rumours, I couldn’t discount, that she was a vampire as well.
Of everything I collected though, mounted on the walls of my private enclave, or encased in chests, it was the mirror box and Stiletto that I kept on a pedestal. It had arrived by courier on my doorstep the morning after Rachael had disappeared, leaving Sam and I in her wake. I greeted it in the morning when I awoke, then fell asleep watching it at night. It featured in my dreams and inspired me to propose to Sam an idea that had been forming, for me, and now, for us. Something we were almost ready to take up and turn from imagining to reality.
There was something else I had in my possession however that could make or break my future and was the key to everything coming together for my plans. The token. Natasha had brought it to me the night I had found Sam. She had come to pick me up from the hospital the very night she had expected me to pick up my belongings from our porch. But then, that was the type of person she was. I missed her company more with each day, week and month, especially since she had headed off to finish a project in Germany, and start preparations for her next great monument to the hoteliers industry.
I missed Amber dreadfully also. I visited her grave with a weekly diligence, and used the time to reflect on how I had grown over the last year since her death. Rachael coming in to my life had been both a curse as well as a blessing. After all I owed her both mine and Natasha’s lives, along with my friends’. I couldn’t overlook the fact that she opened my eyes to a whole other world as well. I had immersed myself in a realm of magic, where the rules I had been taught over the years were suspended. I had loved that, and still did, even in the times I thought I might be mad - before something else proved I wasn’t.
Regardless, I was back to ‘normal’, even if that did mean I had a double life on my hands. Sam however hadn’t been so able to keep up pretenses by falling into old habits, and patterns.
Before he had even had a chance to properly heal, he had been sent home with minimal rehab, been fired and had to move. He declined my offers to help with a proper physiotherapy program, or help him keep his apartment. I even offered him work, but he needed to do it on his own – he said as much, but I saw it in his eyes. He studied as hard as I did, plotted even harder, and during the day picked a labouring job that helped him keep his physical strength up.
Sam had changed and it was clear in the way he carried himself, pushed his limits, and even in the place he lived. I avoided it, to be truthful, as much as possible. It was bare, dark and disheveled – and reflected Sam’s internal state. It made me uncomfortable because although I was filled with anger, regret, and fear, he was brimming with pain, rage and vengeance. We both knew though that we were bent on finding her again.
The night before we were planning on taking the last big step in what we had decided to do, Sam and I sat at a local bar, bent on finalising the details. There had been a spate of deaths across five small towns several miles north at the border. We had been there before, asking questions, paying people off and trying to uncover the who, what, where and why. While we hated to admit it, this one was beyond us, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a little more assistance.
“I think asking for help is risky Sabian.” Sam leaned back against the plether booth and guzzled his third beer of the hour. He wore his almost signature dark blue long sleeved shirt and black jeans. In the initial stages of rehab he had cut his hair shirt, complaining it always got in the way. That was the first time I had seen one of his friends, James – just after Sam cut his hair. They ha
d spent a long time reminiscing, before James had offered up that all things happen for a reason – that was it. Sam had practically chased James out the door. The man had given me a sad, but understanding look as he fled. James had been the only one not with an invested interest in Sam talking to them - .everyone else who had visited was from work. Even Sam’s sister, who had only managed three visits before deciding she had had enough of him for the time being, had pushed him to go to counselling, pushed him to see a friends of hers who was a psychiatrist, and then the eventual death knell to their contact – she suggested that he call on their cousin who was a priest.
Watching all these interactions, I had learned a great deal about what not to say around Sam now, and in reflection I wondered how much I had changed, how much my behaviour was driven by my recent experiences with Rachael. Sam, whatever level of insight he had in to how he reacted now, was driven more by fear than anything else. After all he had ended up with the worse part of the experience. I had just been duped, manipulated, made to be a fool, let myself be an accomplice to hiding two murders, but Sam had connected with her, spent the weekend with her before she tried to kill him. If that is what she tried to do. I still held firm that she tried not to kill him, but I guess being tied up, suspended upside down and stuck like a proverbial pig leads to a darker place than I was in. So when Sam said that asking Rachael to help us was risky, I knew it was the fear talking, making him second guess himself, even though we had been prepared for so long.
I pondered how to bring up the anxiety without getting the backlash “I know, I know…but maybe Sam, you might be a little …..
“I think we need more time. That’s all I’m saying.” Came the defensive rebut.
“For what?”
His eyes scouted the room. “To prepare,” I raised an eyebrow which made him pull his features together in irritation. “If we call on her, how are we going to make sure she’s under control – wont kill us? What if your assumptions are wrong Sabian. We’re dead.”
“And so?” I challenged.
“And so!?” Sam spoke too loudly and several people nearby shot glances in our direction. In a lowered tone, he continued. “I’ve been there, done that, and I’m not keen to go back to a place where she has a knife aimed at my internal organs again. If we do this, we do it right.”
I leaned closer. “The people we are trying to help don’t have time. We know the thing that’s stalking them is hidden, we know it knows them and we also know we are no closer to finding it than we were a month ago.”
Sam looked resigned now. “I know, you tell me daily.”
“I know you must be anxious.”
“Yeah anxious – that’s putting it mildly.”
“But I don’t think there is going to be any better time for the people that we can prevent being slaughtered, or for us. Do you want me to go alone?”
Sam protested. “No. You do it, I do it. Together like we planned.”
“Seriously, if you cant do this….” Sam shot me a deathly glare and I deflected the conversation slightly. “Do you want to go over the essentials of the case again? See if there is anything else we missed, anything that buys us more time?”
“No. You’re right, we are out of time. We call her tomorrow. But let’s go over the info again anyway.” From the seat beside him, Sam pulled out his black notebook he carried everywhere with him, a leather bound piece that had a wrap around strap to hold it closed. Unwrapping the book, he opened it to a page with a series of dot points.
I started the recap. “The creature we are looking for is body hopping. It jumps from one person to another, surrounding a group of women and men from seemingly typical looking suburban towns.”
“Evidence for assumptions are:” Sam took up. “Each of the eight victims was found dead by their partner or spouse the next morning, contorted, eyes and mouth open in fear and body seemingly dehydrated to the point of death….”
“Looked like half mummies to me.” I added shuddering.
“Like I said, severely dehydrated. On investigation, there are marks that suggest pressure on the chest and neck as though a person knelt on their chest to pin them down while strangling them – and the prints match the partner, only the partner doesn’t know anything about it, is legitimately distressed, and is missing memories from the day before.”
“And vouched to be of good standing by peers and associates.” I pointed out.
Sam nodded and continued on. “In each case the only link is that the people are from the same town, the victims all have varying social connections, friends, hobbies, and no one is talking. There are signs of black magic though, being animal deaths, pest problems in spite of treatments, charred pentagrams cited in the local cemeteries, and I am still convinced there has to be a link between the victims – maybe they summoned something they couldn’t control?” He gave me a pointed look that I refused to acknowledge.
“There are minimal indications that the victims may have had some involvement in magic yes, but not black magic…”
“Same, same.”
“No. Different!” I insisted. “Besides, where is the link between the people themselves?”
Sam shrugged. “Four went to the same high school. Two others worked as interns at the same job.”
“But there seems to be no overlay, and you are talking about people in their forties. That’s a very long space in between bare associations….”
“Reality is we may never know.” Sam stated disappointedly as he finished the last of his beer.
“Unless we get some help.”
“So where do we go?” He asked me.
“To the last place of interest. Tomorrow night. I bury this in the ground,” I produced the token Rachael had left me. I wore it attached to a tether around my neck and it felt heavier every day. “Then light a candle over it. When the flame burns to the ground, she should join us.”
“And then?”
“Then I have to be really specific in what we are asking for.”
“To leave no loopholes where she can rip us to pieces.” He added.
“Pretty much.”
There was a pause, the silence filled with bar music and the sound of glasses clinking behind the bar. I waited for him to find an excuse, make up some half cocked reason as to why we shouldn’t go ahead. It never came. Instead he nodded to himself silently and seemed to be going over things in his head before he exhaled and looked determinedly at me. “Yep. It’s time.”
“She will be able to help.” I assured. “She’ll know what it is that’s doing this, and tell us how to stop it.”
“Are you certain?”
Somewhat, pretty much, kind of… “Absolutely.” I replied with authority.
“Let do it then.”
With that, Sam and I left, to have one last restless night’s sleep before meeting up again the next morning to drive the 9 hours to our chosen location. As we parted ways in the dark, crisp night we walked in separate directions. Over the time we had known each other, I had been truly honest with Sam, admitted everything, but now I asserted that I knew what I was doing with absolute confidence, when in fact I was really just as emotionally driven as he was, feigning conviction in my own words so I could move through all the preparation. What I didn’t tell Sam, and what I didn’t really want to admit to myself was a hard truth. When we were through with it all, I was actually going to miss her.