Monster Hunter International

  "Okay, fine. But if you try anything stupid, I will beat you down. I'm just itching for a reason to get my violence on. Got it?"

  "Fine. Just hurry up." I unlocked the cuffs and waited patiently as he made his way to the bathroom. He closed the door behind him. I opened it.

  "Nope. I don't trust you."

  "Fine. Suit yourself . . . freak."

  I waited while he took care of business. Once he had washed his hands and pulled back his hair, I escorted him back to the bed and put the cuffs back on. He gave me no trouble. I passed the food over and he gobbled it down messily.

  "You knocked me out," he said between bites. "If I was in the shape I used to be, I would have kicked your ass."

  "Whatever you have to tell yourself," I said.

  "Don't get cocky. I've been around guys like you. I know your type. You're hired muscle. Just a trigger puller. I bet Earl brought you on because you're good at hurting things. You know what? That don't make you special. Hurting things is easy. Understanding them is hard."

  "I don't like to complicate things. I see the monster. I shoot the monster. There. Nice and simple," I said.

  "Let me let you in on a little secret, kid. Guys like you are a dime a dozen. A real Hunter understands his prey. He knows how they think. He succeeds where others fail because he knows the monster better than he knows himself. I was the best Hunter we've ever had because of that."

  "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster . . ." I said.

  "And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. Ahh . . . an educated man. Well, you're not as stupid as you look. Don't quote Nietzsche at me, kid. That German crackpot wouldn't know a real monster if it bit him on the ass."

  Actually I hated philosophy. I had memorized the quote from the intro of a video game. "You about done?" I asked.

  "Julie told me a little about you. You're the dreamer. You've been having visions. You want what I've got up here." He tapped the side of his head with his fork, leaving ketchup in his hair. "You want me to help you find Lord Machado."

  "Pretty much."

  "I can do it, you know. The other Hunters can read those old books forever, but they ain't gonna answer your questions. It isn't what you read, it's putting the information together in your head like a puzzle. Only when you're all done can you really see the picture. I've had lots of time on my hands for the last six years. I've sat in a padded cell all day long with nothing to do but put those puzzles together. I can see the whole picture now. You fools are still trying to find your corner pieces and sorting them out by color."

  "Is there a point to this, or are you just trying to get me to punch you in the head some more?"

  "Here's the point: I can help you. I can tell you where and when Lord Machado is going to use his artifact. I can tell you what to do. I can tell you how to stop him. I can even tell you how to kill him. The dead guy in your head can't answer those questions, but I can."

  "So why don't you just tell me what I need to know?"

  "Because, kid, what's in it for me?"

  "The world doesn't get destroyed. That sounds kind of beneficial don't you think?"

  "I tell you. You tell Earl. You guys kill Lord Machado and the seven. You save the world, cash big fat checks. You get to be heroes. I go back to Appleton and rot in a cell until the day I die. You want my help, you let me go and I'll tell you everything I know."

  "And I'm just supposed to let somebody who opened a gate to hell in the middle of Alabama walk free."

  "I learned from my mistakes. I won't do that again. I'm not as crazy as everybody thinks I am. I know the score. Let me loose, I promise not to meddle in that business again; I'll just disappear off the radar and nobody needs to know where I went. I've got money, fake IDs, passports, all stashed. You let me go, and nobody ever hears from me again. I'll go down to Mexico and sip margaritas on the beach with pretty senoritas."

  "I'll run that past your daughter."

  "Julie's squeamish. She's a goody two-shoes like her mother. Believe me. I've learned from my mistakes. I'm done. Earl will tell you no. My dad will say no. They don't trust me. My offer is to you, kid. Think about it." He smiled hopefully. I did not trust him as far as I could throw him.

  "How about you give me a little information up front? Let me see if what you know is worth it."

  "I give you enough pieces of the puzzle, you'll figure it out yourself. You won't need me and I go back to Appleton. On good days maybe I get to play Ping-Pong in leg irons with Dr. Nelson. Look out the window while crazy people whine about what monsters did to them. Like those pussies know jack squat about real torment. Whoopee. No way, kid. I talk. I walk. That's the deal."

  "Screw you, Ray." I took his empty plate and walked away.

  "Wait!" he cried. I paused with my hand on the doorknob. "You have to understand. I can't go back there." I opened the door. "Stop. Listen. I tried to bring my wife back. Is that so wrong? I loved her. I know I made a mistake. I was desperate. You would do the same. I loved her too much to let her go. I know not to try again. I saw things in that rift. Things you can't even begin to understand. I know what's out there. My mind is scarred worse than your face. Believe me. I promise that it won't happen again."

  "Good-bye, Ray. I'll send somebody up around lunch for a bathroom break." I stepped out the door into the hall.

  "Wait! Don't leave me alone! You want some information. Fine," he shouted. I paused. "There is no real Place of Power. It isn't a fixed piece of geography. There's a nexus of magical energy. The place is where those lines intersect. They are always moving. They are always changing. But I know where and when they are. Those professors that got killed, it's because some of the dead cultures they studied had their fingers on the puzzle. They maybe had bits and pieces. I can see the whole puzzle. I can see the picture. I can even see the box the pieces came in. It's going to happen at the full moon."

  "Tell me more, Ray."

  "You have three days before the concept of linear time becomes obsolete. Lord Machado thinks he knows what he's doing, but he's wrong. The world you know is going to cease to exist. Billions will die, and the handful that survive are going to be nothing more than cattle living in a blinded stupor. Mankind is going to be nothing but food and entertainment for the Old Ones. You had better think about my offer, kid. The clock is ticking. In three days it stops. Forever."

  "Your dad made me an offer," I told Julie when I found her on the main floor. She must have gotten bored after cleaning and hauling up all of the interesting weapons from the basement, because she had busied herself by returning to her renovations.

  "Make yourself useful and hold this." She handed me the end of a tape measure. "Put it against that edge there." She walked a few steps and lowered the tape to the floor. She took a pencil from behind an ear and marked a spot on the floor. "I need more flooring. I've got enough to finish the front hall, but not the main entryway."

  "You don't want to hear his offer?" I asked. I think that I already knew the answer to that one.

  "Let me guess. Let me go. I promise to be good. No more demon summoning. Blah, blah, blah. I'll tell you what you need to know." She let the tape measure snap closed in her hand and dropped it into a pocket.

  "Pretty much. But he did say that the Cursed One is going to strike on the full moon. That gives us just three days."

  "Not much time. Figures. Bad stuff always goes down on the full moon. How did this get here?" She bent down to pick up a belt sander that was lying on the floor. Grunting in sudden pain, she paused, and slowly stood back up. "Forgot. Big hole in my shoulder. Would you grab that for me? I need to put it away."

  I picked up the sander. "You should take it easy."

  She shook her head. "I can't. I'm a little tense. My insane dad is upstairs, in the home that I grew up in. It's just a bit awkward is all. . . . I like working on the house. It keeps my mind off of things, you know?" I nodded. "It helps me to keep busy. I feel bett
er when I'm improving something."

  The whole mansion was torn apart. Every room that I had been in so far had some project begun in it, but very few had been finished. Apparently Julie had a lot of things that she did not want to dwell on.

  "You seem to be pretty good at it," I said. That was true enough. The work that was finished appeared to be meticulous and professional. Which was not really a surprise considering what I knew about Julie Shackleford's nature.

  "Thanks." She paused uncomfortably. "Enough about my dingbat father. I'm just glad he didn't stab you with his plastic fork."

  "I did check the bathroom for guns before I let him go."

  "Beat you to it." She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a .38 Detective Special. "Bathroom number three gun. I've got them stashed all over."

  "You really are my kind of girl."

  She smiled. "Thanks. Most regular people think I'm insane."

  "Screw regular people. They suck." It was good to hear her laugh again. "Since you're too injured to lay floor, how about a tour of the Heart of Dixie Historical Preservation Society headquarters?"

  "That I can do. And by the way, I never said thanks for saving my life from that gargoyle. That was a little too close." She absently touched the bandage on the side of her head.

  "No big deal. That was some pretty good driving."

  "If that jackass in the truck would have just let us pass, I could have lost them."

  "Jerk," I agreed.

  "Tour?" she asked.

  "Gladly."

  Chapter 18

  The Shackleford ancestral home was an imposing structure. Once one of the finest of the great antebellum homes of the Old South, it was the crown jewel of a once-massive plantation. Ages ago it had been the center of thousands of acres of timber and farming cut out of the woods of Alabama. The original builder's heirs had sold the home and the property to the first Raymond Shackleford nearly a hundred years before.

  "You can see out this window where the slave quarters used to be, the kind of empty spot right there. You can still make out the foundations. They were pretty rickety and busted up by the time I was a kid." Julie pointed out the back windows off of the main corridor. "I burned them down when I was twelve."

  "Why? Some sort of protest against the injustice? A young girl trying to right the wrongs of the past?" I asked.

  "Nothing so noble. Me and my brothers were learning how to make homemade napalm. Styrofoam packing peanuts dissolved into a bottle of gasoline. They make the best Molotov cocktails. I let one of mine get away from me. I'm just lucky that it didn't spread and burn the house down. . . . Those were the days."

  "I can understand. I did something similar once when I was a kid. My brother and I built a pipe bomb. Big thing. We smuggled powder out of my father's reloading room for almost a year so he wouldn't notice. Mixed it with a whole bunch of other ingredients. Detonated it in the backyard when my folks weren't home. It was a little bit bigger boom than expected though, dug a four-foot trench in the yard, cut the gas main and forced the neighborhood to evacuate."

  "No wonder the ATF has your name on file," she said. "I wonder if all future Monster Hunters blow stuff up as kids?"

  "Probably. The ones that live that long at least." I shrugged. "Hey, I was an upstanding citizen until I met you guys."

  "I bet. . . . Anyway, I was sad when the old slave quarters burned down. I was just a little girl. I hadn't really understood what they stood for. I mean, I knew what they were, but not why they were important."

  "Lot of history in the South," I stated.

  "Don't go getting high and mighty because of slavery. You grew up out West, you have no clue about the South. My family might own this house, but that doesn't mean that we approve of the kinds of things that happened here. I had ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, but I would be real surprised if any of them had two nickels to rub together, let alone owned a slave. People think that the South is racist, and it was, and some parts still are, but for the most part, we've dealt with our history. The biggest racists I've ever met aren't here, they're in politics, and they are smug bastards. They're the ones that are quick to play the race card, the ones that pimp poverty. Those are the real bigots."

  "Touchy subject."

  "I guess. But Bubba Shackleford employed black Hunters in his very first group of Professional Monster Killers. Remember 'Flexible Minds.' He made that little credo up. That's not just about the unnatural, it's about how you look at the world. He only cared if they could fight, and that they kept it together when strange stuff started. They were some pretty tough Hunters too. You don't want to know what happened to the Klan boys that messed with them."

  "I can guess." I could only imagine that after dealing with werewolves and vampires, yokels hiding under white sheets were not that big of a deal.

  "Rumor has it that a bunch of night riders ended up buried in the back forty. Great-great-grandpa never had much trouble from those folks after that." She changed the subject. "Let me show you the ballroom. This is probably my favorite room in the whole house." She pushed open some double doors and led the way into a huge space. The floor was vast and open, ornate antique chairs lined the walls, and an opulent crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. Most of the walls were mirrored, with old-fashioned and slightly distorted glass. A large stage filled the back corner of the room, complete with carved pillars capped in brass. Staircases spiraled around and upward to the second floor, perfect for the Southern belles of old to descend for their grand entrances.

  I walked into the room. My boots echoed on the worn smooth wood, stirring up small clouds of dust. I could imagine the parties of bejeweled women and men in Confederate gray, royalty of a forgotten time and kingdom. "Impressive."

  "I haven't done any work in here. I don't really want to. I'm just going to leave this one alone. We never used this room growing up. If this old place has a soul, it would be in this room. So I leave it closed." I watched her reflection in one of the many mirrors. She awkwardly placed her hands into the pockets of her jeans. "I know it sounds silly, but that's how it is."

  "I understand," I said, not really, but it seemed like the correct answer. Even though there had not been any music played in this room for generations, I had to resist the urge to ask her to dance.

  "Um . . . Through here is the formal living room. Now this one, we used a little, for guests and that kind of thing." I followed her through another set of double doors into a much less lavish room. This one was under drastic construction. Tarps had been thrown over the furniture, and sawdust covered almost everything. Only one wall was not in the process of being stripped and repainted. It was covered in painted portraits of Julie's ancestors.

  "Five generations of Monster Hunters," she proclaimed, "and a few who decided to stay out of the family business, but we still love them too. Even if they are strange." There were dozens of paintings. Most done in a classically formal style, kind of stuffy, and not really befitting the homespun, slightly insane, good nature of the family as I knew them. The first painting was of Raymond "Bubba" Shackleford, followed by a picture of his wife and children, and then each of the succeeding generations after that. There was a single blank spot on the wall where Raymond II was missing, but other than that there were a lot of pictures up there. In totality it created a beast of a family tree. The last of the pictures were of people I recognized. The Ray Shackleford IV that I knew as a wild-eyed lunatic was captured on canvas as a handsome, square-jawed man. His wife, Susan, had looked almost exactly like Julie did today. My tour guide's portrait must have been taken when she was younger. I did not feel that the painting had done her justice. She looked slightly artificial. I felt for the painter, capturing something like Julie's beauty had to be difficult. You could get the technical details correct, but how did you convey the spirit?

  "Lot of Raymonds. Must be kind of hard to keep track of them."

  "It's a bit of a tradition. Oldest son got the name. I'm the oldest in my family, s
o it went to my younger brother." She pointed at one of the last of the portraits. He resembled his father.

  "Where's he now?"

  "Dead," she said sadly. "It's been a few years."

  "I'm sorry."

  "No. He died well. You can't be sorry for somebody that brave. You can be sad, but not sorry. He earned his plaque at the compound. Even the best of us get it eventually."

  "What happened?" I don't know why I asked her, but I did. She hesitated only briefly before speaking.

  "1995. At the Christmas party, Monster Hunter International's one-hundredth anniversary. He was one of the ninety-seven Hunters killed that night. He was just a Newbie, but he fought like a champion. You should have seen him. He sure was something."

  "I've never heard the whole story."

  She gestured at one of the tarp-covered couches. I sat, and she sat next to me, under the watchful painted eyes of her ancestors. We sunk into the deep cushions with a rustle of plastic. I could taste the sawdust in the air.

  "It was a great party. Hunters know how to throw a great party—you know, live fast, party hard, die young. That kind of philosophy tends to grow amongst people with such a dangerous job. Everybody who wasn't in the middle of a case was there, so most of us at least. Well anyway, it was at a resort near Gulf Shores, right on the beach. Beautiful spot, Dad had picked it out, reserved it for us. At the time I was just glad that he seemed to be coming out of his mourning, coming out of the archives, and participating with the living again. I had been worried about him for so long. Little did I know that he had picked that spot because it was the right place and the right time for his damned summoning." She brushed aside some dust. "I should have seen it coming."

  "You couldn't have known. Nobody could have."

  "I know, but that doesn't change the fact that it was my job to know. I'm the historian. I'm the researcher. I'm supposed to be the one with the answers. That's my job, and this one was right under my nose. I knew Dad was sad about Mom's death, but I never expected him to do something like this. The resort was his Place of Power. We didn't know until later that it was built on top of what used to be some tribe's sacred ground. It was his chance to bring her back. While the rest of us were gathering down at the resort, he planted a bomb in the archives. None of us ever learned the real logic behind that. He had the information he needed stored in his head, so he probably wanted to destroy the books that had the information on how to stop him, just in case. That's my guess anyway. Burned a big chunk of it down."