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.
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