Jabberwock Jack (12 page)

"How you doin'?" It was Szandor. He sounded like he had too much to drink, but unlike me, he sounded a happy drunk. There was loud music in the background.

"What do you want, Szandor?" I said, bringing the bottle to my lips for another drink.

"Ooo, testy tone. I'm guessin' things did not go well. Not that we're surprised. Are we Lem? Me and Lem are bonding and on the prowl. Dickie never showed up, but that's fuckin' Dickie. However, we're out here at... where the fuck are we? Well, I don't fucking know either, that's why I asked! Fucking Lem. Anyway, brother, we wanted to see how you were doing. Maybe you want to come meet us - wherever this is. Dance away your troubles, find some girl with that famous Mikkel luck."

"I'm fine where I am. I don't want to go out to a club."

"Well, maybe we can come over," countered Szandor. "We come over, finish off the night shootin' the shit over there. Male bonding with whiskey and movies. The best way! We'll put on your favorite movie. What the fuck is that again? Once Upon a Time in China?"

"That's not my favorite movie."

"Well, who the fuck cares? We'll come fucking watch whatever! We'll find some laughably bad women in prison film and watch that. Cheer up your whole fuckin' night!"

"No, I'm fine. I don't want you guys to come over."

"Okay, so no bullshit now, Mikkel. We're super fucking worried about you. She's like your goddamn kryptonite and we're worried you're right there now drinking from the bottle and feeling sorry for yourself, but like in a totally bad way! Not in like the good way you would do if we came over."

I paused to look at the bottle in my hand half raised to my lips.

"I'm fine," I repeated.

"You keep saying that, and each time you say it I believe you less."

"Okay, let me rephrase," I said. "I want to be alone tonight. If one of you comes over, you're getting this bottle tossed at your face."

"That
would
technically get it out of your hands," said Szandor.

"Look, I'm fine. Fine.
Fine!
" I practically shouted. "If you're not going to believe me, then get the subtext that I want to be fucking alone tonight and will fight you tooth and fucking nail on that. Leave me the fuck alone, Sandy! Got it?" Szandor hates that nickname.

"Got it," said Szandor glumly. "Don't... ah, fucking forget it. I'll see you tomorrow." He hung up without waiting for my response.

You know what's great for your shitty, drunken, heartbroken mood? Fighting with the only other person that matters to you and then feeling like a regretful shit for everything you said after. And you know what's
not
the cure for that, a not-the-cure which I doubled down on? Alcohol. Lots of alcohol. Old friend whiskey, carry me home.

Despite my earlier predictions, it was Szandor who had to pull
me
out of bed in the morning. He half carried me to the van and slumped me in the passenger side. Lola Mandragora looked down on me disapprovingly and shook her hips for me begrudgingly. As my brother drove us to the hunter meetup, I was vaguely aware of his looks of concern at each stop sign, but he respectfully didn't say anything of note. Nothing I needed to respond to. He had seen this before. He had been with me during and after Hurricane Carly the first time around. He figured it was best to not mention things and let everything sort itself out. Whether this was the best idea, only time would tell.

Dead Promises

"We are here to slay a beast," said Jericho at the front of the room. "A murderous predator who is a blight upon the world. One who lurks in the depths of this city." This was the beginning of our briefing.

We had made the meeting on time, but my head was still killing me. My thinking was slow. I looked around the room. Chairs had been set out in the open space of the warehouse, but there were a few empty seats. Some hunters had elected to stand. Not me. My hangover was such that slouching in a folding chair was all I wanted to do... unless there was a couch I could take a nap on. My brother was in a chair next to me. Normally he wouldn't take this briefing seriously and would have his feet up, ready to interject with asinine comments whenever possible. But he sat up straight and attentively. Because he knew I was out of it, his concern for getting the details for both of us for once outweighed his general resistance to authority and school-like settings. If you asked him, he'd say he was doing it for me.

Jericho paced the front of the room as he continued his speech. "You all know you're here to kill Jabberwock Jack. Most of you have never even seen the beast. Few have survived such encounters. Know that this is a dangerous mission. Risk is high, but we do the world a great service."

"Can we get onto the practical details? We're hunters. We all know the risk, so let's save the doom and gloom speech for rookies." This hunter was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. He was Hispanic and had a mustache and goatee. His dark hair had no gray, his face not overly lined, so I put him in his thirties, maybe early forties. He wore an Australian slouch hat, a brown leather jacket, jeans, and snakeskin boots, which made him seem more Crocodile Dundee than sea serpent hunter. His name was Diego.

Jericho narrowed his eyes in a glare, but then nodded in agreement. Judging from the small group assembled, Szandor and I were the closest things to rookies, so the speech was unnecessary.

"The subject of this hunt is Jabberwock Jack," continued Jericho. "As you all know, Jack is a gigantic beast, far larger than anything you may have encountered. We lack a good measurement for him, but we've guessed Jack may be about fifty to a hundred feet from head to tail. His body is long and snake-like. He may have small fins or legs, but unfortunately, between those of us who have seen him, accounts differ. Here are the facts we all agree on. Jack is white and scaly. His head is like that of a snake or reptile. He has one large red eye, the other was... damaged. His jaws are massive. Jack can swallow a human being in one gulp without chewing. His teeth are several feet long. That's Jack's primary means of attack. Unfortunately, we have no defense other than getting out of the way. So be on your guard."

"It seems so unlikely that such a huge creature would still exist in this day and age," said Diego. "I've hunted far and wide but never seen evidence of something that big actually existing. Nessie has never been proven, nor any of the others. Do we have any pictures of Jack? Video?"

"No video exists of Jack," said Paulie, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He was lounging in a cushy desk chair in front of one of the computer desks. "Hard to frame him in a shot when you're running for your life or getting eaten. The photos that exist are pretty much worthless. They're bad Loch Ness Monster shots. White blurs, the impression of long bodies. Trash."

"So do we even know this creature exists?" said Diego. "I only track confirmed creatures. I'm not chasing someone urban legend."

"I have survived an encounter with the beast. It was me who took Jack's eye." Jericho's words ended in an icy tone.

"Mikkel and Szandor also saw Jack. In the past few weeks," said Meat, gesturing to my brother and I. "Their description matches up with known details. Either that was Jack or we have another similar gargantuan beast."

Diego looked at my brother and I incredulously. "What, those kids? They saw and survived this monster that supposedly leaves few of his victims alive?"

I could feel Szandor coil and tense in the seat next to me. I'm sure a dozen biting retorts surged to his lips, ready to be flung at Diego like the most venomous of primate poo.

But Meat spoke first. "Whether the two of them saw it is not at issue. They did."

"And that's a fact you'll have to accept as part of this briefing. Understood?" said Jericho.

Diego paused, taking a look at my brother and I, then back at Jericho. He nodded.

"Jack is a predator and make no mistake he is very lethal," continued Jericho. "While he prefers to swallow men whole, those teeth can easily rip flesh. But he is a cunning foe. He prefers to lurk in the water, but he can move easily upon land as well. He will use the terrain to his favor, striking from a stealth you would not expect of so great a creature. He's easily as smart as a man and has a strong survival instinct. Jack has lived for centuries and none have killed him yet."

"Centuries?" said Szandor. "No shit?"

"No shit, kid," said Paulie. "There are stories of a creature like Jack for as long as people have been in the Avalon area, but the first real account of anything with a solid description of Jack pops up in 1832. A man named Daniel Wexler was on the river, almost at Lake Avalon. His dog started barking and then jumped into the river. A gigantic white creature came to the surface for a moment, then disappeared. The dog was never seen again."

"That could be anything," said Szandor. "Maybe the dog just drowned and there was... I don't know, a dead cow in the river."

"It wasn't a dead cow, kid. 1868. Vitaly Ivanovich was on a boat on Lake Avalon with his wife and two children. He sees a massive dark shape in the water. The lake swirled, like a whirlpool. Ivanovich saw a white flash and long teeth. He was found on the shore later that day, barely communicative. The boat was in broken pieces all over the shore. Ivanovich's right arm was missing and so was his family. He raved about the white demon until he died two days later."

"That's just a boating accident," said Szandor, but his protests were becoming weaker.

"Do you know who Ellis Husker is, kid?" said Paulie. "Founder of Huskerville. In his memoirs, he claimed to have seen a huge white snake swimming through Lake Avalon on a spring day with a strange red sky. That's widely believed to be cause for one of his eccentricities. After that day, he refused to step foot on a boat and was known to panic when he crossed bridges. Outwardly, people just thought he preferred to stay in the community he created. But he said it was the snake."

"But that's just -" started Szandor.

"Kid, I got a huge dossier of disappearances near the lake and river over the history of Avalon. They're not quite as explicit, but there are a bunch of people who have gone missing. No new zombies, no ghoul remains. People just gone from the banks of the river or gone from the lake. It's gotta be Jack. Either way, I don't advise swimming in Lake Avalon. Ever. Not in anything but the shallows, at least." Paulie ended with a long drag from his cigarette.

There was an awkward silence. I broke it, since there had been something I had been wondering and there never was a good time to ask it.

"Why is he called Jabberwock Jack?" I said.

"That's from 19th century Avalon historian and sometime explorer Clayton Heath," said Paulie.

"Heath?" I said, "isn't that...?" I looked over to Meat. Everyone called him Meat, but his name was technically Benthem Heath. That name hadn't suited Meat at any point in his life, so his marine nickname was all anyone ever used.

"My ancestor," said Meat. "My family has lived in New Avalon for a very long time."

"Damn, so do you like have an ancestral estate around here?" said Szandor.

Meat shook his head. "Just because my family has been here a long time doesn't mean things went well. At one point my family prospered, but nowadays it's just like any other family. Dysfunctional and squabbling."

"So anyway, Clayton Heath was an explorer," said Paulie. "And we might call him a historian, but really all he did was go around and collect stories and compared them. Unfortunately, we lost a lot of what he had written. But what we have is good. He particularly liked the urban legends and stories of unexplained monsters."

"I guess the apple didn't fall too far from the tree," whispered Szandor to Meat, who just smiled.

 "Well, Heath's major contribution to all this is that he also met with the Appaquagh," said Paulie.

"The who?" said Diego. Clearly not an Avalon native.

"The local American Indian tribe," said Paulie. "Now mostly dispersed."

"The
true
owners of Avalon," said Fala.

"Yeah, whatever," said Paulie, rolling over her interjection as if he had dealt with her comments before. "So Heath found that in their own stories they had a being that was so much like the monster that Heath kept seeing mentioned around Avalon. But he had a lot of trouble with the Appaquagh pronunciation. So he improvised and made it familiar. And so Jabberwock Jack. The name stuck."

"What is the original pronunciation?" I said.

"His name is Jagherherawagh," said Fala.

"I could see why that would be difficult to pronounce," said Szandor in a low voice.

"Your name for him is just a corruption of his holy name," said Fala petulantly. "Jagherherawagh is more than a monster. He is a spirit of the Avalon basin. He is one of the First People and has existed since Avalon was born. It is he who is the true resident of Avalon and we who are invaders."

"It sounds like you don't want him dead," I said.

Fala cocked her head coyly. "My tribe is broken and scattered. The spirits of Avalon did not protect us, the spirits did nothing to clot our blood nor save our lands. I will not hold to my tribe's misplaced respect and tradition, not when we have received nothing in return. What little I've learned of my people's true heritage I learned in Ravenfall, not in Avalon. But I know this: if the death Jagherherawagh spreads is just the movement of the world, then so is our hunt for him. For now I will assist Jericho in his ascendancy, following my own path, my own song, my own dance. Though," she said, her face forming a strange smile, "there's something to be said about being able to witness one of the spirits first hand and know him." Something flashed in her eyes. Honestly, it was dark and somewhat disturbing. I didn't want to be in a dark, desolate place with her, which of course was where we were going later.

"The Native American stuff is cool and all," said Szandor. "But that's all ancient history. Why does that matter now?"

"Because Jack's still killing, kid," said Paulie. "In the past century, there have been many mentions of the White Beast of Avalon."