Chapter 1 - The Stranger

Never before so happy to see a cab, she dove in headfirst and sprawled across the backseat, forcing herself to revel in the pleasure of her prone position and not to think of what might be crawling on and beneath the hot sticky vinyl.  “You’ll have to put on the safety belt before we can go, Miss.”

Lindsey Coleman righted herself and gave the cabbie her address as she pulled the shoulder strap across her chest.  She let her head fall back against the seat for several long moments before reaching down to unstrap her shoes.  The straps had cut into the flesh across the tops of her feet and around her ankles, leaving little red roads through the swelling.  It had been a long day.

She wound the ankle straps of her shoes through the shoulder strap of her purse and wondered if she’d ever want to wear them again.  Maybe she should just leave them on the seat.  Her feet would thank her.  Her boss, on the other hand… 

Her thought was cut short as the cabbie slammed on his breaks, pitching her hard against the nylon seatbelt strap.  She opened her mouth to swear at him but instead saw what had made him stop.  A man stood in front of the cab, staring in through the windshield, completely unaffected by the near death experience.  

If it were happening on a movie screen, Lindsey thought she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from laughing.  But here, in real life, happening to her, she understood why a script writer would have written it this way.  He was taller than what would ordinarily be called tall, broad enough to be proportionate, wearing a black hat and long black coat, despite the heat of the night. His hands were deep in his coat pockets and the whole scene gave Lindsey chills.

The man turned slowly away from the cab, as if the cab had been the inconvenience, as if the cab had made him have to stop, not the other way around, and continued across the street.  He covered the three wide lanes in about half the steps of any average sized man and was gone as suddenly as he had appeared.

Now fully awake, Lindsey considered telling the cabbie to forget about it, she’d walk the rest of the way from here but before she could complete the thought, her feet began to throb in response. So she decided to enjoy the rest of the cab ride to her apartment.  She wished that he could drive her up the stairs to park directly in front of her door.

When they arrived, she paid the twelve dollar fare in ones, apologizing half-heartedly as she counted them out to him, and staggered to the sidewalk.  She stood at the base of the front steps and lifted her eyes to her bedroom window, on the fourth, and top, floor.  The old building had been built before elevators were fashionable so she steeled herself for the walk up.

Halfway between the third and fourth landing, Lindsey felt the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stand on end.  Something didn’t feel right.  She stopped and pressed her back against the wall, pulling her cell phone from her purse.  She stared at the keypad for several seconds, debating what number to dial.  She punched 9-1- clear, twice before pulling up her contacts and scrolling through to find Erin’s number.  

Her friend of nearly twenty years picked up on the second ring.  “Are you okay?” Erin and Lindsey’s mother both worried about Lindsey walking home from her job at two in the morning so they made her promise to call Erin, or 9-1-1, if she had any trouble on the way.  

“I’m not sure.  Something doesn’t feel right.  I just wanted to have you on the phone, in case.”  She wasn’t at all clear about what Erin would be able to do if she really needed help but just having her on the other end would be comforting.

She made her way to the top of the stairs and stood in front of her apartment door.  The building was set up with four apartments, each occupying its own floor.  At each landing there were two doors, the apartment door and one that opened into a small storage closet that was included with each apartment.  Lindsey kept cleaning supplies and winter coats in hers.  Both doors were closed, and when Lindsey tried the knob on the apartment door, it was locked.  She still wasn’t convinced that everything was completely Kosher in the pickle jar so she kept Erin on the phone while she fished her key out of her purse.  

When she got into the apartment, the sense that something was wrong grew even stronger.  “Something’s not right,” she whispered into the phone.

“Do you want me to come over?”

Lindsey thought for a moment.  “Could you?”

“Of course.  I’ll be there in just a few.”

Without another word, Lindsey flipped the phone closed and slid down the door to sit on the floor.

She was still sitting like that, back against the door, knees pulled to her chest, when Erin used her key to unlock the door.  The Irish girl who looked like someone had shaken her out of the illustrations of a children’s book, pushed against the door, unable to move both it and her friend.  “Linds, Linds, you have to get up.  I can’t open the door.”

Lindsey shook her head, clearing out the cobwebs that had formed in her vigilant trance, and hauled herself unsteadily to her rounded, swollen feet, feet that screamed in protest.  She looked guiltily at her friend.  In the time she’d been waiting, she hadn’t heard or seen anything out of the ordinary in the apartment; the door had been locked when she’d gotten there, there was no reason to think anything was wrong, no reason, of course, except for the feeling of dread and foreboding in the pit of her stomach and all along her spine.

Erin simply smiled sympathetically and led her friend to her couch.  “Sit here and I’ll check it out, see if there’s anything out of place.”  If there were anyone more qualified than Lindsey to check the apartment, it was Erin.

After a few minutes, she returned to the living room looking satisfied.  “Looks like everything is where it should be.  Do you want me to stay for a while?”  Lindsey nodded and Erin joined her on the couch. Lindsey told her friend that she still felt like something wasn’t quite right then recounted the man the cabbie had very nearly run over on the  way home.  “That is weird, but I doubt it has anything to do with you.  He was just one of those jerks who thinks ‘Yield to pedestrians’ means everywhere, all the time.”

She got up from the couch and headed toward the kitchen.  “Are you hungry?  Can I fix you something?”

Lindsey considered the question for a long time before answering.  “No.  Yes, I’m hungry, but I want to go somewhere.  Maybe if I go out and come in again, this feeling will go away.”  She got up and wobbled on sore feet to her bedroom.  A few minutes later, she reemerged wearing plaid cotton pajama pants, a t-shirt and flip flops on her feet.

“A full 180 from the leather skirt and b**b shirt.” Erin chuckled.

“Shut up.  That leather skirt and b**b shirt pay my rent.”

“Ha! I’ll bet it does.”

Lindsey pushed her plate away, gathered her coffee cup in both hands and turned in the booth seat to lean back against the wall, putting her feet where she had been sitting.  She let loose a long drawn sigh, letting the length of the day go with it.  “How do you manage both jobs in one day?” Erin asked after she was sure her friend was relaxed.

Lindsey shook her head slowly.  “I try not to.  But most days it’s not so bad.  Today was just long with the festival and then the festival overflow into the bar.  The tips were phenomenal tonight, though.”

“How was the festival?”  By night, Lindsey Coleman was a bartender at a highly trafficked bar in the center of town.  Nearly every big event that happened in town happened within walking distance of her bar so whenever there was something going on, they had a big night at the bar afterward.  

By day, she worked as a photographer, covering those events for a local entertainment magazine, distributed weekly by one of the city’s two major news papers.

“Great.  There were a couple of really great bands…”  Before she could say any more, the door to the diner opened and the tall man in the hat strode in. 

“Is that the guy?” Erin asked, startled by his size.  Lindsey was only able to nod.  The man looked at the two girls for a long moment before turning and crossing to the back of the dining room in five long strides.  “What do you think he’s doing here?”

Lindsey shook her head and turned back to sit correctly on the bench seat.  “I don’t know and I don’t think I want to know.” 

“Have you seen him before?”

She shook her head. “Not that I can remember but maybe at the bar.  If he came in without that coat, I may not have noticed him.”

“He is kind of creepy.”

“He is super creepy.”

“You okay?”

Lindsey waited a long moment before answering.  “Yeah, I’m fine.  How was your day?”

Erin considered ignoring the subject change but decided there wasn’t anything left to say on the subject of the man in the black coat so she shrugged and said, “Not bad.  Long.  While you were enjoying the benefits of the festival, I was enjoying a day without any customers.  It was dead.”  Erin managed a bookstore that was farther from the center of town.  Hot sunny summer days were normally good for business; people could come in and browse and drink a cold drink in the coffee bar.  But when there was something going on downtown, they all flocked to that.  If they did any shopping on days like this, they did it because they wandered into one of the downtown shops to get out of the heat for a few minutes.

Lindsey nodded. “At least when it’s busy, time goes by faster.”  She stirred her coffee absently, watching the thin layer of foam spiral around her spoon, creating a tiny whirlpool. 

After several long, silent minutes, Erin stood up.  “Let’s get out of here.  That guy’s giving me the creeps.  You can come home with me, if you’re still worried about your apartment.”

“No.  I’m sure it’s fine.  After all,” She pointed to the man in the far corner. “If he’s here, he can’t be there, too.”

“I can’t argue with that.”

Lindsey watched from a distance.  She was in a patch of dry grass, waist-deep, looking out on what looked like an abandoned wheat field.  The girl had her face but nothing else about her was the same.  She had been bound at her ankles and wrists and tied tightly around her chest, waist and knees to the trunk of a large tree, the only thing in the field besides the remnants of a forgotten, hand-tooled, wooden fence.  Small rivulets of blood trickled out wherever the rough horse rope touched her flesh.  Lindsey could only watch, unable to help, unable to move, unsure if she were really even there.

There was no sign of whoever had put her there; as far as Lindsey could tell she and the girl with her face were the only two in the field.  The sun was lowering quickly behind the low, flat horizon and the twilight that pushed it down brought with it a sense of foreboding that got under Lindsey’s skin and made her shiver violently.

At the edges of her vision, Lindsey thought she could see something moving, something large and hulking, dark, absorbing the last of the sun’s light.  There were three, maybe four of them, but when she turned in any direction to get a better look, there would be nothing there. 

Lindsey woke with a start, her blankets on the floor and the thin sheet that remained soaked with sweat and clinging to her skin.

Tuesday nights were never terribly busy but tonight was unusually slow.  Lindsey had dusted liquor bottles and washed every dirty glass, even some that weren’t dirty but hadn’t been used in a while and was now sitting down in front of the little video game machine to feed it quarters out of her tip jar.  The bell above the door rang as someone passed through it and Lindsey looked over the top of the machine to her partner.  Micah nodded and went to greet the newcomer.

“Merlot, please.” The man’s voice was slow and deep and resonated in Lindsey’s ears.  Even though she had yet to hear him speak, she knew that the voice belonged to the man in the black coat.   She froze, not sure what to do next.  Part of her wanted to confront him, ask why he was following her but an even bigger part screamed in terrified response. She decided it was better to try to ignore him and continue with the game she’d set out to play.  She didn’t want to know why he was following her.

When she was able to call up the courage needed to glance his direction, she found that he had taken his glass of wine, and the bottle it had been poured from, and found a seat at a table near the door.  At a chair facing directly toward her stool at the bar.  He wasn’t looking at her; his attention was trained on a small notebook lying flat on the table in front of him.  He seemed to be reading from it, rather than writing in it.  The part of Lindsey that had stopped her from confronting him spoke up again, questioning what the man was reading, and wondering if it was notes about what he’d seen while following her.

He had removed the heavy black coat, draping it over the chair to his left, revealing a well-fitted black silk shirt and midnight blue tie.  Where his hat had been (she saw no sign of it now) was now visible a head of thick black hair that fell in waves over the tops of his ears and in bangs that reached to his eyebrows.  His “normal” appearance, without the creepy coat, actually did more to heighten Lindsey’s discomfort than alleviate it.

She felt eyes on her and turned to find Micah staring at her from behind the video game.  “Is everything okay?  Do you know him?”  He pointed with his sharp chin at the man.

She stared into his blue eyes, trying to decide if she should tell him.  She and Micah had always had a strange relationship.  They shared a lot of their lives but there were certain things that Lindsey just knew weren’t going to enhance their relationship.  Would he tell her she was being paranoid when she told him that she thought this man had been following her since Saturday?  Would he laugh?  Would he play the valiant knight and confront the man?

Maybe she was being paranoid.  Maybe he was new in town… Her instincts knew enough to not let her finish that thought.  He may have been new in town but that wasn’t why he was following her.  It was more likely that following her was why he was new in town.  And he definitely was following her.

Had he broken into her apartment Saturday night?  After she’d returned from her trip to the diner, she had gone over the apartment with a fine-toothed comb, looking for anything that might indicate someone had been there who shouldn’t have.  She hadn’t found anything but couldn’t shake the violated feeling that someone had been there, uninvited, while she’d been away.  They’d been ten blocks from her apartment when the cabbie had almost hit him; had he been leaving her apartment?

She got up from her forgotten game, muttered something to Micah about organizing the storage room and disappeared into the back of the bar.  The longer she was around the strange man, the more uneasy she felt.  She couldn’t stay out there as long as he was there. If he stayed too long, she might have to fake sick and leave.  

She set about cleaning up the storage room, like she had said she was going to do.  It hadn’t been done in a while so she hoped it would kill enough time until he left.  

When she had filled a garbage bag, she headed out the back door to the dumpster.  She lifted the lid and threw the bag in.  She turned to go back inside and there he stood, not ten feet from her.  When she opened her mouth to scream, he was behind her in a blink, with his hand over her mouth.  “Please, ma cherie, I do not intend you harm.  But it is very urgent that I speak with you.”  When he was sure that she wasn’t going to scream, he released his grip on her and turned her around to face him.

“If it’s so urgent, why have you been following me for three days?”

“I had to wait until you were alone.”

“So you could ‘talk‘ while chopping me into little bits, no thanks.”  Startled by her own sudden flash of courage, she clung to it as long as she could and turned on her chunky wedged heels and started for the door before she could freeze.  “Find someone else to add to your collection.”

“Lindsey, you must hear what I have to tell you.”  She stopped in her tracks, her feet unwilling to obey the “run” command that her brain was screaming at them.  She waited helplessly for him to begin whatever macabre story he was going to tell her before cutting her throat from behind.

“Do you ever see things that you are never completely sure were ever really there?”

Whatever had been holding her feet in place, loosened its grip and allowed her to turn to face her addresser.  “Everyone does.  That’s nothing special.”

“Everyone thinks they see things.  Ghosts, alien spaceships…humans are wonderful manipulators.  They can even manipulate themselves into believing they see what they are trying to convince others of.  Whether they really have seen anything is often the greatest debate to which there is no real answer.

“But what you see, Lindsey, what you see is different.  Because it is real but you never really see it.  It’s always at the very edges of your vision, never in full focus, and when you try to bring it into focus, it disappears.  Am I right?” 

Caught off guard by the accuracy of his assumption, Lindsey had no choice but to confirm it.  “Sometimes, yeah, yes, sometimes there are things…What are they?  How do you know I see them?”

“Because, Lindsey, they are a part of what you are.  They are what you were born to fight.”

Her mood changed almost as quickly as it had when he’d started talking about the dark figures in the corners of her eyes, when she’d thought someone finally understood and she wasn’t crazy for seeing them.  But to hear she was born to fight them, to fight things she couldn’t see and had never known, for absolutely certain, that they were ever really there…that was too much. That took this conversation spiraling back to the bizarre creepy place where it had began and she turned to leave.  “Please don’t leave.  I need you to hear…you need to hear what I have to tell you.”

She stood with her back to him for several moments, considering whether to hear him out or tell him to jump in a lake.  “Inside,” she said finally.  She hoped she’d feel more comfortable with witnesses present.  She led him inside, flashed a wary look to Micah, and found a table away from the other customers.

“The creatures on your peripherals, the shadows, are demons.  You are a demon hunter.  It is in your blood, has been since ancient times.”

Lindsey’s only reaction, the best she could manage, was to stare at the strange, tall, broad man.  She couldn’t settle on an emotion long enough to express any of them.  Her mind ran the course from anger to fear to disbelief to amusement and back again.  Did this strange man really follow her around the city for three days to come into her bar and tell her that she was a demon hunter?  With a straight face?  

Of course he kept a straight face.  You don’t put this much energy into a prank just to burst into a gigglefit at the last minute.  But more than keeping a straight face, something in his eyes told Lindsey that it wasn’t a prank.  He truly believed in what he was peddling.  Whether it was real or not, it was real to him.  She stood up from her chair and pointed to the door.  “I think you need to leave.”  He stood as well, towering over her by at least a foot, and started to protest. “Now, before I call the police.”

He nodded to her, returned his hat to its place atop his head and made his way to the door.  “Please think about what I have told you, Lindsey.”

Think about what I have told you, he had said.  Like she had any choice but.  The rest of the night had been silent, compared to the news that she was a demon hunter.  News, ha! The very word nearly made her laugh aloud.  Delusions of a stark raving madman, that was closer to accurate.

She filled the bath with steaming hot water and lit a handful of candles then turned off the overhead light.  It had been another long day and she wanted nothing but to stretch out and relax for a while.  

A circle had been cut in the grass.  A baby lay in the center and three figures in animal skins danced around her; from her vantage point outside the ring, Lindsey couldn’t distinguish male from female; and they sprinkled her with herbs and crushed leaves.  

While two of the figures continued their strange anointing dance, the third picked up the baby and began chanting to her, placing kisses on her forehead and her heart alternately each time a phrase of the chant was completed.  Although she didn’t recognize the language, Lindsey was able to use the chants to identify this figure, at least, as female.

She lay the baby back on the ground and produced a knife made of bone from the belt of her heavy animal skin robe.  She drew it across the baby’s belly, leaving a shallow red trail in her otherwise unflawed alabaster flesh.  Lindsey gasped for breath but the baby showed no signs of a reaction.  The woman touched a finger to the wound and dabbed her own forehead and chest with the blood.  Then she repeated the ritual, touching the bloody finger to the foreheads and chests of her two companions.

The bathwater was cold when Lindsey woke. 

Reviews

[Zoey]

I love this chapter because you can feel the emotion between the characters. I can't wait untill you write more!!! :D