DarkWalker (2 page)

“Listen, it’s not every day someone comes along I can talk with as freely as you,” the ghost said. “I mean, there’s plenty of fine young meat here, girls that’ll coo and cower till they’re pale in the face. But not like you. You’re rare.”

Jack grunted a monosyllabic laugh.

“A
watcher
, here in my bar,” the ghost said. “That’s not every day. Vampires . . . shit, I see one or two of them a week. Even demons.” He lowered his voice, confiding. “I do tend to stay away from them. Scare the hell out of me.”

Jack tightened his fists. Wouldn’t do any good; he couldn’t exactly
hit
a ghost. The girl smiled as she turned, sipping her drink, and left to find her friends—or friend or stranger. Jack didn’t know, and he didn’t care.

“We all play our roles,” the ghost said. “Do you even know what you are?”

“Annoyed,” Jack suggested.

“More fundamentally,” the ghost said. “You’ve got
Sight
, man. You see what we see—you can see
us
. All of us and everything.”

Jack closed his eyes. “I’ve been keeping records.”

“That’s good,” the ghost said. “You’re a Watcher. You’re supposed to watch.”

“Watcher, eh?” Jack had never heard the title. The things he saw—spirits, witches, werewolves—rarely engaged him in conversation.

“It’s your role. Like mine is to haunt. And I’ll be damned if I don’t enjoy it.”

Jack narrowed his eyes. “Aren’t you already damned?”

“Semantics,” the ghost said. “Anyway, it’s not true. Just because I’m a creature of the night doesn’t make me evil.”

The music shifted, the dance floor thinned, and a crowd formed at the bar. Jack slipped aside, toward the door, but the ghost persisted. “Tell me things. What’s it like out there anymore? What’s it like to breathe? I haven’t had air in . . . I . . . I don’t even know how long.”

Jack stopped and turned to the spirit. He seemed worried, nervous, anxious, floating from foot to foot as if shifting weight, and his eyes were big and watery. “Life,” Jack told him, barely speaking above a whisper, “is a series of dark nights. I see people die. I count the variations. I take odd jobs for cash sometimes, but usually steal it from corpses. They don’t seem to care anymore. I watch, because you’re right. It’s a role. All the world’s a stage, right?” The ghost smiled. Sincerely. “When night fades, I crawl into a bed just like every other damned thing that stalks the night, and I do it because I don’t know any other life. You want to know what life is like? You want to feel breath? Ask her.” He nodded toward the pretty girl with the blue drink. “I haven’t got one.”

Jack turned and went out.

4.

A breeze carried the scents of cinnamon and jasmine. A tarot reader had set up a table a few yards from the bar. Ribbons of silk weaved through her long, flowing hair, which had been dyed a variety of colors: blondes, reds, browns, without order. She shuffled well-worn cards, an old deck by the look and smell of it. Her skin was flawless. Bracelets jangled, necklaces dangled. Her dress spread around her feet, even while sitting, like a sunburst. She had a unique quality to her look, a hardness to her jaw and eyes that was rare in street frauds. But a fraud, she most certainly was.

A hopeful young girl had given the woman twenty dollars to read her fortune. The seer promised riches, a husband, the fulfillment of various generic wishes. But it wasn’t the seer that caught Jack’s attention. Nor the girl.

Slightly to the seer’s right, unnoticed, stood a tall gentleman. Black suit. Beard. Cane. His head had been shaved, which seemed incongruous considering the attire.

Jack had seen many things over the years. He knew the seer was false because he’d recognize someone gifted. In the beginning, he had difficulty distinguishing between the living and the dead; it was now as easy as red and blue. He knew the names of most things. He had counted eleven types of vampires, seventeen things called ghosts, and all manner of “mythical” creatures. So he recognized nightwalkers, even when—as in the man watching the seer—he had no idea what it was.

The man looked briefly at Jack, locking eyes. A shiver—an honest, spine-spanning
shiver
—rippled down Jack’s back.

Ignoring it, or at least pretending to, Jack folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the brick wall. He was between the bar and the seer, who was just finishing up with the girl. “A long and wondrous future,” the woman was saying.

The man with the shaved head tapped the street twice with his cane. It was a dark wood, perhaps oak or mahogany, something with a red tinge to it.

The girl rose, dizzy with visions of diamonds and gold, slightly tipsy but not quite drunk. She stumbled with her first step, in Jack’s direction, but only once. Her smile was genuine, masking a sadness that had little true depth. Dumped, Jack assumed. Tonight. Maybe in this very bar.

The stranger strode past Jack without a glance, using the cane with his perfectly manicured right hand. An Egyptian hieroglyph was tattooed in the nape of his neck.

The girl, and her pursuer, turned down a side street.

Jack, of course, followed.

It was a stupid trait, he knew, and would someday get him killed. But, as the ghost inside said, he was a watcher. He watched. Recorded what he saw on his laptop. Compiled it meticulously, as if preparing for an exam. Dates, times, places, even the ambience. Moon phases. Temperatures. As if this information might be useful somewhere.

It might get him committed.

Washington Street
was darker than
Orange Avenue
, but still well lit, sparsely used but not empty, with a pizza place at the corner, police station down the road, a public parking lot across the street. The girl was halfway down one of the aisles, walking between cars into a thicker darkness, an unnatural mist she didn’t seem to notice.

Jack followed into the dark. He glanced toward the window of the police station; if anyone watched the street, the mist obscured him. Only three people existed in the dark: girl, stalker, and watcher.

Oblivious, the girl pulled keys from her purse.

“You won’t be needing those,” the man told her. He’d closed the distance between them and folded his left hand over hers. Startled, she turned, pulling slightly away from him, but didn’t free her hand.

His voice was clipped, the accent too well disguised to be traced. Maybe British. Or Russian.

“I . . . I should be getting home,” the girl said, looking down.

“You are home,” he told her. Still clutching the cane in his right hand, he lifted her chin and forced her to look up at him. She reminded Jack of Silver Screen starlets, black and white beauties long deceased. He wanted to help her, call out to her perhaps, or somehow interfere.

A flash of dark penetrated the mist, blinding Jack momentarily, and the girl became ash. The man inhaled. She flowed into his nostrils like cocaine. He consumed her whole body in one breath, and leaned heavily on his cane.

Morbidly, Jack wished he could see the man’s face.

The mist vanished, replaced by normal night.

The man tapped his cane on the tar of the parking lot, turned briskly on his heels, and strode in Jack’s direction. The cane barely made a sound.

“I appreciate privacy,” he said, stopping alongside Jack but looking beyond, toward the street.

“Of course,” Jack said. He suppressed his anger, his frustration, his impatience. It had never done him any good.

“I don’t like being watched.”

“Nobody does.”

The man chuckled and tossed Jack a coin. “For your troubles.”

As the stranger walked away, Jack examined the gift: a 1926 ten dollar gold coin in mint condition. Sighing, he pocketed the coin and fished out his own keys. He’d had enough interaction for one night.

5.

On a typical night, Jack saw one, maybe two things worth noting. Most were as simple as a living shadow or a red-eyed rat. Once, maybe twice a month, the things he saw acknowledged him: the smiles and nods Jack hated. Three times tonight: a wink, a conversation, and . . . what, a warning?

But, as the saying went: the night was young, an hour still till
midnight
.

It was called the Witching Hour, and the air often changed with the day. Ghosts became more vocal and visible. Some creatures came out only after the twelfth strike of the clock. Some walked only at twilight. There was no single set of rules, except perhaps that they generally ignored Jack. He’d never figured out why.

They didn’t ignore him entirely. But when seeking victims, their dead or crimson or feline eyes passed over him. Sometimes, Jack felt neglected.

He wondered, sometimes, if he was meant to defend their chosen victims. He sharpened some stakes and bought a Bowie knife with a silver blade, but it felt wrong. There was no other way to describe it. The first time he prepared to go out hunting, his car wouldn’t start. When he walked, it rained—not a light drizzle, but heavy, splattering drops that were soon strengthened by a gale. A black cat looked at him from the top of a fence and shook its head. People got in his way. His head ached. His stomach revolted. He retched for thirty minutes, giving up every scrap of bile in his gut, just for the idea.

When he turned around to give up for the night, wind and rain ceased. His car started without a hitch the next day. Pain receded. He added the stakes to a barrel fire he shared one night under a bridge. If there was a troll, he never saw it.

Another time, he decided he had to make something of himself. He moved with sideways intent, strolling casually, unarmed, unprepared, unconcerned, until something struck his interest. He confronted a beast disguised as a man. He stared the thing down. The thing stared back. The thing had a victim, a girl, whom it had been content to feed from without killing; it cracked her neck. It dropped her body at Jack’s feet. It hissed. Jack was paralyzed, not by fear, but by invisible chains suddenly weighing down every limb and constricting every muscle. He tried to move, struggled, and could not even retreat as the beast disguised as a man came closer and sniffed him, and licked his cheek with his rough, inhuman tongue. The saliva burned. The beast pulled back sharply, raised its claws, and appeared very close to ripping Jack’s insides out through his throat. It didn’t. It couldn’t. No more so than Jack could do anything to stop it. After the beast finally left him, Jack collapsed next to the dead girl and, silently and inside where it counted most, cried for her.

Some nights were clean, completely uneventful, and he managed seven hours of sleep.

No night had ever been like tonight.
Not even
midnight
yet
.
A wink, a conversation, and a warning.
Did it mean anything?

Probably not.
A real seer might give him answers, but they rarely said anything useful. “You can see, yes, so watch.”
Watch
. That’s all he did. Jack walked in the dark, watching, not knowing why, unable to choose any other path.

Jack had left his car on
Jefferson
, away from the downtown area, between railroad tracks and the interstate.

There was movement in the shadows.

Damn. This was neither supernatural nor inexplicable. Teenagers. Knife-wielding, attitude-wearing, drugged-up little shits who had been getting high behind the fence when they saw Jack walking all alone and thought it’d be a good idea to hit him up for money. Beat him, kill him, whatever it took.

Jack counted three of them. They were young and stupid, but that didn’t mean a fourth or fifth didn’t hide in the bushes.

It was a useless fence, ending abruptly at the end of the parking lot; anyone could simply walk around it. Jack was already on the far side, away from the police station and downtown—and the street lamps that were popular there.

The moon, waxing and nearly full, cast plenty of light. Despite the heat, the “leader” of this pack wore a leather jacket. He hadn’t bothered to hide his weapon, a pathetic switchblade he tossed from hand to hand. He paused, briefly, when he realized he’d been seen.

Jack rolled his eyes.

“M-m-maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” one of his followers said, blinking excessively and rubbing his palms down the sides of his jeans. “He-he
ain’t
a-scared.”

Jack did not step away. Only the leader seemed fully intent on scoring this fight; the others trailed behind him, perhaps sensing the same thing that stopped vampires from taking Jack’s blood.

“Yeah, I figure you got a wad of cash in them pockets, bro, and I figure you’re
gonna
just hand it over nice and friendly like,
ain’t
that right?” the lead kid asked. A pale scar streaked the side of his face, from the corner of his eye to his ear.

Jack showed his empty palms. “Don’t want trouble,” he said.

“Too late,
ain’t
that right boys?” He glanced to his left and right, but had to look back to see his support, his
posse
. Fled from the strangeness, the danger Jack exuded, the slight tint of dark he’d absorbed; it made him unpalatable even to mundane threats.