“Oh, sweet mercy, Sammy,” the older man croaked in a weary voice as he slumped back against the pillows.
“It’s okay now, Gabriel. You were just dreaming. Take a few deep breaths and try to relax.”
“He’s out there, Sammy. I know he is. I can feel him. He’s out there waiting for me.”
“Nobody’s out there. It was just a bad dream.”
“No, Sammy. You don’t understand! He’s out there and he knows I know it. He escaped, he’s gotten free. But I’m too weak now Sammy, too weak. I can’t stop him this time,” he said.
Sam watched as Gabriel turned his head to stare out the window into the night’s darkness. He seemed to be searching the sky for something and seemed more than a little relieved to see that whatever it was wasn’t there. He turned back to face Sam.
“He knows. Knows where I am. He’ll come for me, too. You mark my words, he’ll come for me. And this time he won’t be the one who loses.”
“Come on, Gabriel. There’s nobody there. No one is going to come after you. You were just having a bad dream.” Sam was growing nervous himself, Gabriel’s agitation like some kind of infectious disease, quickly spreading.
Relax,he told himself.The old man’s starting to lose it upstairs. Had to happen sometime, right?
Sam sighed. He genuinely liked Gabriel. He was a quiet patient, never needing much but a few kind words now and then, but old age was bound to have caught up with him at some point and it looked like it finally had.
“Tell you what, Gabe. I’ll just sit right here next to you and keep you company. That way no one can get to you without going through me, okay?” he said, smiling to show there was nothing to fear as he pulled a chair up next to the bed. The old man’s hand sought his own, and Sam held it gently without saying anything, calmly waiting for Gabriel to fall back asleep.
Fifteen minutes later, just when he got up to leave, positive that the old man was sleeping peacefully, Gabriel spoke out of the darkness in a thin, whispery tone.
“Watch the sky, Sammy. When he comes, it will be on night’s velvet wings, as swift as the darkness itself. It will be too late to save me but not too late to save yourself, as long as you watch the sky…”
He sounds so certain,Sam thought as he stepped to the door, and for a moment considered going back to question Gabriel more closely to see if there was any substance behind his talk. But then the man’s gentle breathing reached his ears across the short space of the room, and he changed his mind.
He’s asleep now. If you wake him up, he’ll only be frightened again and may not be able to get back to sleep so easily a second time. It’s better to just let it go. He probably won’t even remember it in the morning,Sam thought to himself.
That was when he looked toward the window and saw the dark, hulking shape perched on the balcony just outside.
“Oh, my God!” he said in a frightened whisper, his arms falling limply to his sides. He was suddenly too scared to move.
It’s here,he thought.The thing Gabriel’s afraid of is really here! It’s come for him, just like he said it would!
But after a moment or two, when whatever it was didn’t move, Sam began to doubt what he was seeing.
What’s your problem?he asked himself irritably, willing his body into motion.There’s no such thing as flying demons or whatever the thing is supposed to be. It’s probably just a chair someone forgot to take back inside, that’s all.
Keeping that idea foremost in his mind, Sam marched across the room and flipped on the light switch on the wall next to the sliding glass door to the balcony. The lamp hanging on the wall outside came on, flooding the balcony with light.
He’d been right.
It was only a chair.
Feeling more than a little foolish, Sam turned the light off again and slipped quietly out of the room. He returned to his station at the other end of the hall and sat back down. He picked up his book, intending to return to the place where he’d left off, but found that he didn’t have the heart for it anymore. Not after Gabriel’s nightmare and his own scare moments later.I’ve been frightened enough for one night already, thank you very much. Tossing the paperback aside, he grabbed a stack of files and began updating the charts.
He never saw the dark form that returned to the balcony of Room 310 just moments after he’d left the room, never knew it spent the rest of the night staring in through the window at the old man lying peacefully in his bed.
More than once Sam found himself glancing up from his studies to peer out the windows into the darkness, searching the night sky for he knew not what.
There was never anything there, but for some reason that didn’t make him feel any better.
20
FORENSICS
Damon sat staring at the forensic reports in short-tempered silence. The interviews earlier that morning hadn’t produced anything useful, and these reports seemed to be a dead end as well. The scientific team had examined the bullets recovered at the scene. Ballistic tests proved that all of them had come from Jones’s sidearm. The flattened condition of each bullet proved they had struck their target, a conclusion bolstered by the presence of blood samples on each. So far, the technicians had been unable to match the blood to any known species, however, making them come to the conclusion that the samples were somehow contaminated. Further tests were being conducted.
What a damned mess.
Glancing at his watch, Damon realized he’d have to get moving if he was going to be on time for his meeting with Strickland. The sheriff left the station house and drove over to the medical examiner’s office. He rode the elevator down to the hospital basement with three surgeons; his manner hard and grim, the two dead officers very much on his mind, the physicians enduring the ride in silence, studiously not looking in his direction. At the lower level Damon stepped off the elevator and moved briskly down the hall until he came to the morgue.
The room was starkly lit with bright fluorescent lights. Three autopsy tables were spaced evenly, a bank of movable lamps hanging within easy reach over each one. Large drains dotted the floor. Two of the tables were occupied, their contents covered with white plastic sheets. Around the lip of the drain beneath the table containing the larger bundle, Damon could see a thin pink froth left over from when the floors had been hosed down after the morning’s work. His shoes squeaked as they crossed the still-damp linoleum.
Strickland was at one of the sinks, washing up.
“Hello, Ed,” said Damon, entering the room.
“Sheriff.”
Ed dried his hands and moved to close the morgue’s doors, assuring them of privacy. “I’ve spent the last ten hours doing multiple autopsies, first on the Cummings couple, then Blake’s butler, Turner, and now on your two officers.”
Damon’s jaw clenched at the thought of his murdered men, but he did not interrupt the other man.
“In each and every case, I found the same types of evidence, the same confusing issues.” He moved over to one of the autopsy tables. A body lay on top of it, covered by a clean white sheet. Reaching up, he switched on the bank of lamps above it, then pulled the sheet down to unveil the remains of George Cummings.
“The reason I called you down is simple.” Strickland hesitated, took a deep breath, and said, “Whatever killed this man wasn’t human.”
Damon stared at his friend for a moment in silence, then said, “Come again?”
Ed looked down at the corpse before him, an expression of honest bafflement on his face. “In all my years of pathology I’ve never run across something as strange as this. Every time I think I’m getting somewhere, I find something else that completely shatters my current theory. I haven’t finished all the tests I intend to do, but I’ve got the feeling that once I do, I still won’t know any more than I do right now, which is practically nothing. There’s only one thing of which I am positive.” Strickland looked up and met Damon’s disbelieving gaze. “Nothing human killed this man.”