Case 26: Entry 6

We went out to town as soon as the sun set. I had my semiautomatic crossbow, a small bag of charms, a crucifix, my revolver, a couple knives, and a rod designed to channel bursts of arcane energy. It's sort of like a more ghetto version of Loki's scepter. Yosef on the other hand was armed with a taser, a machete, and an abundance of jewelry and other adornments that were supposed to amplify his abilities. Roland carried a battle axe, several grenades, and a gun I recognized from my work with the agency. The recoil from that thing is more than a normal human hand can deal with. Finally, Michelle had a few amulets and rings she had picked up during her work, a gun with several runes and other images worked into it, three throwing knives, her katana, and a belt full of specialized ammunition. The sleeves into which the bullets were placed each featured an image suggesting what that bullet was used for.

The streets were completely abandoned as we drove to the same park we had planned to end the first exorcism at. No one was out driving, on a walk, or even in any of the shops and restaurants. Everyone there had simply accepted that this was a night on which to stay home. Which was a pretty good move on their part. We were only halfway there when an enormous feral dog with glowing green eyes slammed itself against the side of Michelle's van. We all decided to get out and fight now that the nasties were beginning to introduce themselves. Michelle got out of the van as the dog began a second charge and decapitated it with a single, effortless stroke of her katana. Yosef yelped and dodged out of the way a half second before a ghoul with long, sharp teeth and longer, sharper claws tried to pounce on him from the roof of a shop. Paranormal levels of intuition are extremely helpful in this line of work. Anyway, Roland brought his axe down on that one. Then eleven or so other monsters (most of them from some movie or other) came out to greet us. It was little scary until the velociraptor and the clown started attacking the others.

"I was wondering if that would take," I said as the others looked on in bafflement. "It's a little something I slipped into the summoning ritual."

Michelle gave me a mildly impressed and said, "You are a very scary man, Mr. Underhill."

Then she waded in and cleaned up the mess. I think that might have been the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. Anyway, we went through town like a buzz saw after that. Most of the monsters were actually kind of easy to beat. There were too many of them for Mr. Ash to exert any kind of control or focus, so they were all just running on what he had already put into them. Michelle and Roland were more than a match for them. At the same time, I dealt with the dead. I would "rebuke" Mr. Ash's hold on them in the name Adonai and by the blood of Yeshua. At the same time, Yosef ripped his presence out of the living minions who came after us. He was considerably more capable now that we had done a bit of damage to Mr. Ash's presence in the town and then focused the rest into the vessels we were now dealing with. The whole operation took about two hours, and it was exhausting. But we didn't have time to rest that night. We still had to finish off the big bad before he could recover.

It was Yosef who found the way. We went back to our cars and he led us to the old mine the little girl had supposedly disappeared in. Big surprise there.

I don't like caves. In fact, I don't like going anywhere I don't have the advantage. But we came there to kill the thing, and it hadn't shown any intention of coming out to us. So in we went.

It wasn't long before the mine ended and Mr. Ash's lair began. A few of the charms I had brought were for light, and Michelle had some small lanterns which caused irritation to vampires and other nocturnal nasties which she tossed around as soon as we entered it's lair. His hole had a more natural, cavernous feel. And there were a lot more bones. I don't remember the first thirty seconds or so very clearly. I know Yosef shouted a warning. I know we scattered as the wendigo fell from the ceiling. And it was indeed a wendigo. Mr. Ash stood at about eight feet tall by my estimate. He had grey skin; bloodshot, yellow eyes; six fingers complete with iron claws on each hand; bestial feet with hooked claws designed for climbing; a mane of coarse, dark hair; and a pair of thin, black antlers that followed the curve of its head. Much of it's body seemed emaciated, but then there were parts that bulged with muscle. The hands in particular were absurdly large compared to the mostly spindly limbs they were attached to. I remember that form quite well. I remember emptying my gun at it, although I still don't know if I hit anything. I do know that I got it with my rod. There was a rippling in the air and then some bruises or perhaps burns appeared on the creature's side. It opened its mouth and howled at me, and I could smell rotten meat on its breath. I tried to turn up the juice at that point, and the rod blew up in my hand. I think it still sent a blast at the wendigo, though, because I'm pretty sure that's when it swatted me away and broke a few ribs in the process.

Roland and Michelle were both trying to get the better of it, but it was too fast for them. At one point Roland got his axe stuck in Mr. Ash's shoulder, and he had to snap the handle off when he saw the blood flowing up the head and towards him. He wound up jamming the handle into the creature's side before it sent him flying. Then things took a turn for the worse as Yosef crumpled over. He had been trying to bind Mr. Ash, and the effort had been costing him dearly. There was blood flowing freely from his eyes and nose. He was probably the only reason it didn't kill us all in the first two seconds of combat. Soon it had Michelle on the floor, her sword lying a few feet away. It raised one arm to finish her off, and then Roland emptied his gun into it. A lot of things would have been splatter across the wall by that, but it just got knocked back a few steps. Michelle was still dazed, so it moved back in to finish the job. This time Roland was back and his feet and he tried to tackle the wendigo. That didn't go very well, but it bought Michelle a few more seconds before Roland hit the ground and was occupied with trying to stuff his entrails back inside. I saw the kanji on her blade glowing as the thing turned its attention back to her. And then it charged.

I can't tell you exactly what she did. I think there were four distinct movements that ended with Michelle standing behind the wendigo as it crouched down in agony. She had cut off its arm, but the dark blood was reaching out and dragging the severed limb back to the main body. Then the blade came down one more time. It was a high cost for that stroke. It cost decades of research from Tom Yukimura. From what I read, it cost the lives of a few brave souls who'd had some clue about the true history of this town. It cost bringing a band of supernatural experts together. It took all my experience and skill and that of everyone else on the team to put that sword in place. It fell on the neck of Mr. Ash, and it cut cleanly and easily until it was all the way through.

* * * * *

I think Yosef got us out somehow. I know I definitely didn't walk out when the stalagmites shattered and the walls trembled. However we got out, there was a helicopter there within twenty or thirty minutes. Straub had been waiting for some sign of the creature's demise. He got us all to a safe house and sent some people to collect our cars and our things. He likes to maintain a reputation as a good man to do deals with. I recovered quickly enough, and I wanted to be done with it all, but I also wanted to talk to him before I left.

"Why?" I asked him. "You said Tom Yukimura asked you to take care of this, what were you paying him for?"

The smug bastard folded his hands together and looked me over for a few seconds before he answered.

"I want Tom's help for a job I'm planning," he said. "Tom told me that he wouldn't allow me to break him out of prison for it unless I did this."

"Why not just send in a team, knock him out, and then put the pressure on once he's yours?" I asked. "Don't tell me you don't have a shapeshifter or two you could call up."

"I tried that," said Straub. "He put them all in a hospital."

"Such a badass," I muttered.

"I know, right??" said Straub in return.

That was the most I got out of him, so I decided to head out after one more stop. We're all going out to dinner to celebrate after everyone's recovered a bit more, so I didn't feel bad about skipping some goodbyes. Roland was propped up in bed with a pair of glasses and a kindle when I knocked on his door.

"I'll be gone in a second," I said after he invited me in. "But first, I just have to know. What are you?"

The old man smiled, gestured me to come closer, and then put his face up next to my ear.

"I'm Santa Claus."

I still have absolutely no idea if he was joking or not.

Case 26: Entry 5

I can't tell you what any one person said when I suggested the ritual, but the general message was something along the lines of "Have you lost your friggin' mind??"

After the shouting had died down a bit I started making my case.

"First off, as far as I can tell," I said. "This looks like the work of a very old, very dangerous wendigo. And the fun thing about wendigos is that they don't have a lot of weaknesses. There are some native secrets that can deal with them, but most of those have been lost and the only one I know requires the horn of a white buffalo and about a month of preparation. So far, the only weakness Mr. Ash has is the fact that his false forms are easier to kill. Aside from exploiting that weakness, all we can do is keep shooting, slashing, and hitting him until the sheer physical and metaphysical trauma is more than he can recover from. Secondly, we are all here because Straub decided each of us knew our stuff. In fact, I'd bet we'd already have been killed or driven out if not for the fact that everyone here is a professional. An expert. Together, I think we can handle what I'm proposing. And third, I'm here because my expertise is in monsters and folklore, and it is my expert opinion that this is the best way to deal with our dear friend, Mr. Ash. Oh, and there's one more thing." I smiled. "So far every mask we've gone after--except it's presence within the town itself--has been one that it chose to send after us. It knew the risks and it chose to go in anyway. But can imagine how it would terrify Mr. Ash to be dropped into a fight of our choosing? Can you imagine that thing being not just hurt, but scared?"

If I had been dealing with a bunch of perfectly logical people, the appeal to my own expertise would have been what brought it home. As it is, I'm pretty sure what really hooked the others was that last point. To be fair, it's probably hard to take a scrawny twenty-one year old seriously when he starts go off about his "expertise."

"There's still the issue of collateral damage," said Michelle. "If you call up every mask Mr. Ash has then some of them are going to go off killing locals."

"I'm not so sure about that," said Yosef. "Mr. Ash has been here for a long time, probably longer than this town even existed. Everyone here has been living with him for as long as they can remember, and when the sun goes down again I think they just won't find a reason to go outside. And I can tell you right now that he can't enter a home without an invitation." Then he glanced at me and added, "You were planning on doing this after sunset, yes?"

I nodded.

"The ritual itself will take a while," I said. "But I'd prefer for the little mini-Ashes to start popping up after dark. I'm not sure I could make them all manifest during daylight hours anyway."

There was still some chatter after that, but for the most part the argument was won. Soon we were all busy with preparations. I lent Yosef my stash of drugs designed specifically for paranormal uses (the poor dude had been running on Advil, marajuana, and some minor league amphetamines) and he went off to meditate, Michelle got all her weaponry ready and did whatever passes for relaxation when you're a monster hunter about to go on the biggest hunt of your career, and Roland went to a Denny's in Tahoe for breakfast. Meanwhile, I was working the first draft of the ritual. It took eleven drafts before I was ready to go.

I put it together using a couple using a ceremony from one of the few books of genuine wizardry I happen to have together with an Egyptian rite I had come across during my time at the Belmonte estate and bits and pieces of over a dozen other ceremonies and spells. What I came up with in the end started with eating some peyote and going through a mediation exercise to get in touch with the arcane world. Then I called up a spirit of dreams I'm on good terms with to assist in the ritual. Finally, I got to work on ruining Mr. Ash's day. I had to call up each of his masks one by one, extract a name from them, bind them, and then cast them away from me. It was then that I found out whether the forms of his victims were actual shades or just images. Some of the dead faces were just illusions, but many more were real genuine shades who were trapped in his grip so that he could continue to feed on them and to occasionally use them as sock puppets. That was creepy and so incredibly wrong, but it wasn't as weird as when I called up the living people who regularly acted as his masks. Like I said, this is a really nasty place, and there are plenty of people who have prospered off of the evil in this town. Those people, the ones who worked hand-in-hand with Mr. Ash even if they never consciously knew it, they became just as much a part of him as the nightmares he pulled out of the minds of those he terrorized. Tonight could get tricky.

But I'm not going to worry about that now. Now I'm going to get a good meal, call Cynthia (or anyone really who isn't in the middle of all this), and take a nap. I think I might get a good two hours in before the sun sets and everything goes to hell.

Case 26: Entry 4

Last night made me remember some accounts of similarly haunted towns that the Agency has on file. One thing I always found interesting was the remarks locals made about how the town was somehow wrong or how there was something cruel and wicked just beneath the surface. It's hard to consider those remarks in such an academic manner when I find myself in the middle of such a town. And what happened when I finally got to sleep didn't help.

I don't know if I had any normal dreams before it started, or if there was more to the nightmare before my recollection begins. All I know is my memory begins with waking up in the hotel bed in a room that was empty except for myself and Cynthia. She was standing in the doorway, and when she saw that I was up she started to say something. Before she could utter a syllable, a cluster of spindly, grey hands snatched her up and yanked her out of view. The door slammed behind her.

I ran after her, and when I found the door locked I started pounding on it and then slamming myself against it. I ran around the room, trying the windows and finding them just as secure. I shouted for her. I shouted for my compatriots. I should for anyone to help me escape.

"Don't worry about the girl," said a child's voice coming from the vent.

"She's gone to see Mr. Ash," said a similar voice from  the bathroom sink. "You'll go too, Underhill. You'll go to see Mr. Ash too. Mr. Ash loves visitors."

I backed up to the opposite end of the room and ran at the door as hard as I could.

"You'll meet Mr. Ash before too long."

I charged the door again. This time I thought I heard it start to give.

"The little morsel will meet him, too."

I charged again.

"And the old man can come along."

I hurled myself against the door.

"And Tommy's bitch, too."

I charged again.

"Mr. Ash can hardly wait to meet you all."

The door gave way, and I ran out as fast as I could. I kept running until I was out on the street. Then I wound down to a slow jog as I looked around. The sky was completely grey, and the streetlights shone with stale, yellow light. Many of the buildings were distorted, built to bizarre and cartoonish proportions. And along the sidewalk there stood the dead, the killers, and the nightmare beasts. I knew many of them from Tom's notes and others from our more recent research. I knew the Jewish boy who had been beaten to death, and the old woman barbecuing a human arm on her front lawn, and the little girl who had drowned one spring. I was slowing to a stop when I heard Cynthia scream and saw the sheriff shoving her in the trunk of his car. He turned to look at me, and I saw that his face was grey, his eyes were yellow, and his teeth were like needles. I broke into another sprint as he drove away.

Some part of me knew it was a dream, but I didn't care. Panic had taken hold and it wasn't letting go. I kept on running, feeling the grim atmosphere filling my lungs, infecting me just as it had infected the whole town. I needed to break free.

"A thousand years or more ago when Hogwarts school began,"

I sang. I reached into the ancient relics of my childhood and pulled out the song. I kept going until I felt the panic start to recede. The dead people and the nightmare beasts snarled at me as the whole street trembled with the music. Something hairy and ghoulish crawled toward me and opened its enormous maw.

"Old Tomnoddy, all big body, old Tomnoddy can't spy me-e..."

I belted out the songs with which Bilbo had distracted the spiders, and the thing scampered away. I kept on going with the songs of Tolkien and those of Redwall and Harry Potter and anything else I could remember. I saw the ghoulish thing and a handful of other horrors form a wide circle around me even as they winced at each note. I wasn't sure what would happen when I ran out of tunes.

Then they were all cut to pieces by falcons made of painted glass.

"You're on my turf now, bitch!" shouted the Yemeni psychic as rode up to the street on the back of a steampunk saber-toothed tiger robot. Then he seemed to notice me there and said, "Hey, Jack."

"Hi," I said. "So...uh...you're used to this kind of thing."

Yosef smiled brightly and said, "It's probably the first time this thing has gone mind-to-mind with an expert."

"So...now what?" I asked.

"Now you wake up," said Yosef a moment before the street broke open before me.

I don't know how long I had to fall through that jumble of images and lights before I woke back up. It could have been seconds or it could have been hours. Not too many hours, though, because there was only a five hour difference between when I fell asleep and when I woke up again. What I do know is that my companions and I all woke up rather shaken. Roland in particular looked pale. Through the whole job thus far I've been shifting between seeing him as a kindly grandfather and a hulking thug, and in that moment it occurred to me to wonder if he actually did have any grandchildren. If he did...I don't want to know what our enemy showed him.

"I am really sick of this thing," said Michelle. Then she looked at me and asked, "How do we stop playing around and finally kill it?"

I got up and went to my luggage. I spent a few moments shifting through books before I answered her.

"If we went up against it right now I don't think we'd stand a chance," I said. "Which is why I think we should stick with the same idea we had before. We take advantage of the creature's ability to inhabit forms other than its own. We confront it in those other forms and we beat it in those other forms until we've hurt the thing enough that we can go after it for real."

"So we're just supposed to wait for it take cheap shots at us and hope we keep coming out on top?" asked Michelle.

"No," I said. "So I spend the day putting together a summoning ritual that will force it to manifest in all its guises. Then we kill the bastard."

Case 26: Entry 3

I have to admit, before we started this morning I had some doubts about Tom Yukimura's suspicions. Those are gone now.

We started out the day by splitting up to do research. Yosef went around the town to see what he picked up while also using my camera, Michelle went to the library to go through old newspapers and town records, and Roland and I went to talk to the sheriff. I haven't worked with agents in person very often, but I have done it enough to know how to looks and sound like a spooky yet legitimate bureaucrat. Once I set the tone of the encounter, Roland mostly took over the talking. We didn't say exactly what we were in town to investigate, but we hinted that it was some kind of murder cult.

At first the sheriff seemed entirely cooperative, but then we realized he was leading us on with unimportant details and information we clearly already had. Whenever we tried to push for more he started getting indignant and forcing us to spend up to half an hour batting bureaucratic jargon back and forth. The exchange lasted over three hours and we learned nothing. Well, not quite nothing. There were a few incidents we hadn't known about before, among them the disappearance of a little girl a few years ago. Apparently it had been assumed she'd gotten lost in an abandoned mine, and the sheriff had plenty of very good reasons for believing it was just a tragic accident. It made perfect sense for him not to have filed a report to state or federal officials just as long as you overlooked the fact that she was a freaking kid. It doesn't matter how much it looks like an accident; when children disappear alarms are supposed to go off! That's more than just procedure, it's common sense. That one discovery me think there might be even more secret tragedies in this town than even Tom Yukimura suspected.

At the same time that was happening, Yosef was facing his own troubles. Unlike us, he was getting all kinds of data from his investigation. I think he must have gotten enough hits to map out more than half the supernatural hotspots in town, and there are a lot more here than in most places. The problem was that each hit landed like a hammer. He started taking pills after the first few hits, but it still kept getting worse until around noon when he had an actual seizure right before he passed out. He managed to call Michelle when he felt that coming on, but he cut off mid-sentence when he heard another voice echoing through his head saying, "I see you, little morsel."

Everything kind of came to a halt after that. We all went back to the hotel suite (usually I'd stay somewhere cheaper but Straub provided an extremely generous budget, and he laughed when I told him I'd try to use it sparingly) and Michelle and I put everything we'd learned together while Roland made sure Yosef wasn't dying or suffering brain damage. Yosef only passed out for two or three minutes (contrary to what the movies have taught us, it's usually a bad sign if you get knocked out any longer than that) but he was jittery when he woke up and it was a few hours before he seemed back to normal.

By three in the afternoon we had put together a narrative of the entire history of the town as it related to the creature. That's always important, taking the disparate facts of a case and arranging them into a coherent story. By five we had made an arcanographic map of the town which displayed the magnitude and kinds of concentrations of energy. By nine I had composed a ritual to bless the town and drive out the creature's presence. Michelle and I agreed that the creature's greatest weakness lay in its ability to project its consciousness into various forms. As long as it inhabited a form it was subject to the limitations and vulnerabilities of those forms, and its most exposed vessel is the town itself. We spent an hour and a half on rest and ritual purification, and then we went out.

Then we began to understand just how nasty this thing is.

We each drove to the site of a major tragedy and nexus of dark energy. The ritual started by remembering the victims and praying for their rest, then there was a series of chants rebuking the evil that lay over the town interspersed with verses and poems, some of which were specific to the site in question. The ritual ended with a prayer for the town and for God to bless our quest, and the scattering of a handful of small acacia chips (the wood used to build the Arc of the Covenant) inscribed with holy sigils. And yes, I do take those with me whenever I go on a case and it took a lot of time of effort to make them. The plan was to hit the biggest sites, wander the streets for a bit doing general purifications, and then meeting up a park that happens to be pretty near the exact center of town for the big finale. We also had a psychic link that Yosef put together (which is pretty damn impressive) to harmonize our efforts and alert us all if one of us was in danger.

I think we each got at least two sites taken care of before the trouble started.

Michelle was outside the ruins of a shop when she saw a tall, slightly overweight man who had been staring at her at the library coming out of the shadows at her. I was in front of a house where a family had been brutally murdered when the sheriff and two other men drove up. Roland was on the edge of town when a freaking mountain lion crept up behind him. Yosef was at a tree from which seemed to be a favorite suicide spot when a posse of high schoolers showed up and started calling him a terrorist.

Roland finished with his assassin first. It came at him from behind, which meant that its first attack didn't hit anything vital. It tried to reach around to bite or claw open his neck, but before it could manage that the man had already grabbed a hold of it and flipped it onto the ground in front of him--despite the fact that it had its claws hooked into his flesh. He made quick work of the big cat at that point. At the same time Michelle was fighting the man who seemed intent of raping her. He should have been out in twenty or thirty seconds, but it seemed like he just didn't notice the injuries she inflicted. In fact, he actually managed to keep punching and grabbing with an arm she knew for a fact she had dislocated. The man wasn't anywhere near as good a fighter as her, but he was plenty strong and what few punches made it through to her were harder than I think even he would normally be able to throw. After about seven or eight minutes Michelle finally pushed him past whatever breaking point he had, and she left him lying on the ground suffering the physical trauma of a minor car wreck.

I had a bit of a harder time with my adversaries. I knew I wasn't going to win that fight, so I raised one hand, used the other to remove any weapons I had on me, and calmly and clearly told the sheriff what I was reaching for and that I was surrendering. Then he punched me in the gut. There was a lot of punching and kicking after that, but I made sure not to fight back or run away. That would probably be more impressive if I was someone who had some semblance of combat expertise. Anyway, I just kept trying to talk to the sheriff. I asked him why he was doing this. I reminded him that I was not resisting. I asked him if this was the kind of thing he normally did. When he shouted something about me and the other "agent" trying to take over the town or spread nasty rumors I asked him how it made sense to attack a federal agent. Some of the questions were too confrontational and just made him angrier, but I kept at it. The key to undoing any psychic whammy is always separating your natural thoughts and feelings from the outside influence. In other words, I needed him to question what he was doing. It must have worked because after a while the sheriff told his boys to stop. He knelt down to where I was lying on the ground and told me that I'd better keep quiet. I thought I heard some shame or doubt in his voice when he said that. Then he just got back into his car and left. It's possible the whammy just ran it's course, but I really think if I can't kept up trying to interrupt it the encounter would have ended with my death.

Meanwhile, Yosef was being beaten by a crowding of laughing adolescents. I suspect he could have handled them easily on most nights, but he was still shaken from his earlier encounter with the creature. Not to mention that he was getting hits off his attackers that were as least as heavy as anything he'd sensed this morning. They dragged him to the edge of the woods and tied him to a tree. They were beginning to take turns with a baseball bat when Roland arrived on the scene. He decided to announce his presence by picking up one of the kids and tossing him across the clearing. When the kids refused to calm down he repeated the process. One of them tried to attack him with the baseball bat, which he caught mid-swing and yanked away from his attacker. Roland tossed one more kid before the rest had the good sense to run away.

In the end, Roland took Yosef back to the hotel while Michelle and I partnered up to complete an abbreviated version of the purification. It wasn't anything that could actually drive out the creature's presence, but I do think we at least managed to remove a couple footholds. And, more importantly, I think it hurt. It's good for my morale to suppose we caused that thing some pain, and right now we could all use a morale boost.