The Night Sheriff, page 4
“You will not credit it.” She looks at me expectantly. I sigh. “I’m not sure how old I am, but I was born sometime during the reign of Basil the Second, the Bulgur Slayer, while he was the Emperor of the Byzantine Empire.”
Vandy looks at me blankly. “I’m sorry, I was prelaw. We didn’t spend a lot of time on political history.”
I roll my eyes. “Basil died sometime in the year 1025.”
She frowned. “So you’re supposed to be, like, a thousand years old.”
Bone Cat gave me a nudge. “She’s taking it well.”
She pulls her hand away from me with a flash of anger that freezes my heart. “Look, I know I said I like older guys, but you don’t have to be a jerk about it.”
I spin her about and grip her arms. She is alarmed now. I allow my voice to drop down into my hunting timbre. “I am not lying to you. I am over a thousand years old. No, I am not a ‘jerk,’ nor am I human, though I was once, a long time ago.”
She looks at me and a trickle of uncertainty fills her mind. She has heard stories about me, of course, rumors passed down via the employee grapevine through the decades. I encouraged them once. Perhaps it is time to refresh them.
“Let me show you.” She opens her mouth and I launch us upwards, unfurling myself into the night. Vandy gives a strangled whoop when we take off, but afterwards concentrates on maintaining her grip, as if I would let her go. Still, I appreciate it, as the screamers can be very distracting.
We soar upwards until the whole park lays shining below us. I pause at the height of my arc and slowly spin in place. Her eyes are wide and she radiates a combination of awe and terror that I find exhilarating to experience. I then allow us to fall freely. She squeals and clutches at me for several seconds before I snap my wings open and swoop downwards, spinning us around the tip of the volcano and then bringing us in toward the upper battlements of the castle.
Everyone assumes that the Castle is just an empty structure. This is not true. Aside from the guest suite that can be rented for an exorbitant fee, there are offices and a control room that monitors several of the nearby amusements. One of the otherwise inaccessible towers contains one of my resting places. Though thousands of people see the window and its snug little balcony every day, it does not appear in any of the park’s plans, and it is there that I set her down as I coalesce back into my human shape.
Vandy watches everything. She doesn’t cower, or even consider jumping. I am encouraged. I feel the familiar shape of Bone Cat precipitating out onto my shoulder, and I take a deep breath (more for the show of the thing), face her, and because I have lived in Southern California for over half a century, I cannot resist spreading my hands and softly crying, “Ta-dah!” It has the desired effect and her shoulders relax slightly, but she is still looking about the snug little room we are in, no doubt seeing if there is a possible escape route.
In this, she is not reassured. There is no door. All it contains is a chair, a bookcase stuffed with an eclectic mishmash of books, and … the coffin. The coffin was not my idea. I would have preferred a bed, but this particular room had been designed and furnished by Mr. Mortimer, who had always considered himself a bit of a wit. I kept it for the ambiance, and to remember him by. I just make sure that no one ever lifts the lid to see the Posturepedic® mattress inside. Seeing no way out, she keeps her back to the balcony and shrugs. “So what are you?”
This … was not quite the reaction I had expected. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly didn’t want her to start fainting or attacking me with assorted religious symbols, or even worse, prostrating herself before me, while begging to be allowed to become my dark servant or some such idiocy. Oh, I can tell that she is incredibly nervous, which was only to be expected. But I have to give her points for equanimity.
“He doesn’t know, toots,” Bone Cat interjects. “Heck, we know more about me than him.”
She stares at Bone Cat and purses her lips. “One mysterious creature at a time,” she declares.
Bone Cat nods. “Sharp thinking.” To me, “I see why you like her, chief.” He turns back and assumes what he thinks is a professorial stance. “So, I’m apparently some sort of manifestation of—”
“No,” she interrupts. “I want to hear about you,” she says to me.
Bone Cat looks mortally offended that anyone wouldn’t find him the most fascinating thing in the room, and, with a snort, dives into the open coffin and slams shut the lid behind him. Vandy folds her arms and waits.
“Supernatural creatures come from many places, but they are not produced by the evolutionary forces that shape the natural world.” I realize I’m trying to overcome my nervousness with pedantry. I take a deep breath and try again. “I used to be as human as you are, a very long time ago, but I do not even know if there is a name for what I have become. I am not a vampyre, although I do sleep during the day. I do not drink blood. I eat … fear.”
“Fear.” Vandy considers this. “How?”
The coffin lid slams open. “He scares it right outta dem,” Bone Cat shrieks. Vandy jumps. I slam the lid back down, pick the coffin up, spin it in place, and drop it back down on its lid. Muffled screams of rage can be faintly heard.
I carefully readjust my hat. “He is not incorrect,” I admit. “When a person is afraid, it … it sort of flows out of them, and into me. The more intense their fear, the more sustaining it is.”
She looks at me strangely. “That’s why you’re always so creepy whenever you catch somebody stealing something.” She thought about this. “Ew.”
I clear my throat. “I was brought here when the park was being built and charged with its protection.” I grin at her. “I keep the other monsters out.” A bit of an oversimplification, that, but I figure that the mere fact of my existence was already a lot for the girl to absorb. “But part of … the deal is that I cannot leave the park.”
Vandy frowned. “But you don’t look that horrible.” She blushed. “I mean, you look human.” She glanced up at me. “And who would know?”
I sigh. “It’s not a question of choice. I cannot leave the park. It is a magical compunction; a mystical legal contract called a geas. I cannot even cross the street.”
“Wait. When the park was being built? That’s over fifty years ago!”
I nodded. “I told you it was a very long time ago.”
“Wow.” We stood together and stared out over the park. “I mean … you say a thousand years, and that … that’s hard to wrap my head around. But fifty … that makes you older than my dad.” She thought about this. “Ew.” She was using that word a lot. “So … you’re like an eternal security guard.”
“Depressing, when you put it like that, but I cannot argue.”
Tentatively, she reaches over and threads her arm through mine. “Well, it’s kind of weird, but you seem pretty together, as far as monsters go. I mean, you’ve been here for over fifty years, so it’s not like you go around killing people.”
“I do, actually.” I was expecting the surge of fear that boiled off of her and I resolutely shunted it aside. Consuming it would have been … wrong. She whips her arm away and scrunches herself to the far side of the balcony. I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be foolish enough to try to jump, but I’m ready, just in case.
I continue to gaze out across the park. “Every now and then we do get a monster in the park. This is Zenonland. A cultural touchstone known around the world, and every now and then we get someone who sees the face the park shows to the world, the openness, the innocence, the childlike joy, and they want nothing more than to be the evil at its heart. The serpent in Eden.
“They come here expecting to find helpless children guarded by nothing but loving parents and simple humans.” I turn and smile at her. “But they’re not. They’re guarded by me, and no one expects me.”
“But … you kill them?”
I look away. “I didn’t at first. Mr. Bartholomew … Mr. Zenon was very much against the idea. I was to just scare them. Scare them very much, and then turn them over to the police.” I paused. It was easily fifty years ago, but the memory was still painful. Some memories last far, far longer than the people that forged them. “We didn’t really understand back then. What sort of person would want to kill children in a place of innocence … needed to …”
Vandy astonished me by putting her hand on my arm. I took a deep breath. “I found one of them about to kill a child and I swooped in and filled him with such terror that I thought his heart would stop. But …” Even after all this time, I still cannot explain it. “But there was more inside of him. Reserves that I did not reach. A … a core of arrogance and self-belief that could never be breached.” I lean wearily against the railing. “After surviving me, he was convinced that nothing could stop him. Oh, we turned him over to the police. He was out on bail within six hours and before the day was out he had grabbed a child as they were about to enter the park and he … killed him.” Vandy already looked ill, so I spared her the details.
“He got caught, of course. It was in all the papers, and the next night Mr. Bartholomew Zenon himself stood right where you are standing this very moment, and he turned to me and he said, ‘If you ever catch another bastard like that, you crush it like a black widow.’ And so, I do.”
I neglected to add that the next words from him were, “And for God’s sake make sure the body is never found. At least not inside the park.” Mr. Bartholomew always had his practical side.
Not the most heartwarming story, I’ll admit. I tried to think of something positive, to lighten the mood a bit. “I don’t kill children,” I volunteered. Vandy gasped. Drat. I really am not very good at this. “I can’t, actually. It’s part of the same geas.” I thought for a minute. “Luckily, I’ve never felt the need.” There. A positive thought! I smiled at her.
“I’d like to go now,” she said levelly.
Oh dear, well, I’d known this was going to happen. “I have to carry you down,” I told her. “There’s no other way.”
To her credit, she didn’t argue, or whine, or even check, she simply held her arms out. I sweep her up and we flow down to the street. It was like carrying a wooden statue. I gently deposit her upon the ground near the closest door to the underground. She blinks in surprise as Bone Cat rematerializes upon my shoulder. She glances up at the tower.
“Naw, it’s me,” he says reassuringly. “I only exist when this palooka’s feet are touching the ground. See, apparently I’m a manifestation of—”
Vandy turns to go while Bone Cat is still talking, which was for the best, really, since if she waited for him to stop talking, we’d be here until the sun rose.
No, this is good, really. If she’s smart, she won’t return. She’ll go back to college (a lawyer—I’d never have guessed), find a nice, human paramour who will respect her brain and make use of those hips and eventually take her and their children to King Dinosaur’s Reptile Circus and Salamander Aquacade, which I’m told is located down the street, and she will become one of the hundreds of people I have known throughout the centuries who had laughed and loved, cried and sang before falling before whatever instrument fate utilized to assert their mortality—remaining alive only within the corridors of my memory, because I knew I would never see her again.
Chapter Two
This chain of thought takes me down my own well of memories. As you might assume, I have quite a lot of them, although I will admit that there are entire centuries that blur together because of their overwhelming sameness.
Even stand out events like wars, plagues, and natural disasters start to evoke not terror, but déjà vu. You see enough supposedly Apocalypse-heralding comets, and you become a jaded connoisseur.
But things began to change in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Alchemy was being superseded by this newfangled Science, and its products were appearing even in our remote little village.
However, we didn’t have a lot of use for most of it, and when combined with an ingrained belief that “what was good enough for old grandfather was good enough for us,” the people of my village continued to be amazed by the occasional traveler who lit their fire with something other than flint and steel.
Oh, new ideas and devices infiltrated our little world, but we were easily a hundred years behind the curve.
In the twentieth century, the modern world began to seek us out. Whether we wanted it to or not.
The first taste of this came in what most people today call World War One. The Germans began stomping through the country and, with typical thoroughness, even invaded our village.
Now dealing with invaders was one of the few activities that allowed the people of my village and myself to openly work together. I am the first to admit that the relationship between myself and the people of my village had been a rather odd one. In the beginning I had tried to fit in, staunchly declaring that I was still one of them, but that particular fiction broke down after the first century.
For a while, I was tolerated because I still had family to vouch for me, and by the time that was no longer the case, there was no denying that I had helped them innumerable times, and, honestly, there was the unstated fact that none of them could have defeated me. After a few generations, I was simply a cornerstone of their existence. I had been a part of the village forever, and had protected them from bandits, invaders, natural and supernatural disasters, and kept the Grumbly Witch away.
This last was rather easier than most, as the Grumbly Witch was simply a folkloric anthropomorphism of unspecified biblical-level disaster. As such, it was a name that was familiar all through what people these days call Eastern Europe.
You would think that over time, I would become accepted, and perhaps even honored for these efforts, and to be fair this did periodically occur, especially after I had interceded in a particularly showy way. But then a new generation would grow up and, as new generations do, sweep away the old and look at established institutions with fresh eyes. Invariably, I would be tied to those old institutions, and the fact that my very presence was disquieting certainly didn’t help. I would once again find myself marginalized. They never actively turned against me, but I was regarded as a sort of universally shared creepy uncle, to be avoided until I was again needed.
It was during these periods when I questioned why I even stayed. Theoretically, I could travel anywhere I liked. While I had once been tied to the village by the bonds of actual family, a rather nasty bout of plague had eradicated the final, admittedly rather diffused, remnants of my bloodline, sometime in the late fourteen hundreds.
In the year 1575, I went so far as to actually leave. I had been taken by an urge to see the ocean, which I had heard about from a Romany peddler who had spun outlandish stories about it around a campfire, as well as a hundred other wonders to be found in the world, unaware of an additional listener ensconced in the treetops above.
It did not go well. Invariably, wherever I went, an extraordinary number of priests always seemed to appear, as if from nowhere, determined to send me “back” to some unspecified pit, or at the very least, drive me out of wherever I was comfortably sitting.
On the other extreme, I encountered a depressing number of bullies, thugs, corrupt officials, and otherwise ordinary people who, once they saw that I was both alone and “not from around these here parts,” would attempt to make my life miserable in any number of ways, ranging from the petty to the murderous.
By my reckoning, I had travelled less than a hundred miles and killed twice that many people before I finally gave it up as a bad job and returned home. Little Ǡniakặ Vellistǐnkeffrṍsş saw me arrive, made the sign against the evil eye, and then asked me what the young girls in the next village over were wearing.
It was then that I realized that while my relationship with my village was not ideal, that while they were uneasy in my presence, they never actually questioned my right to be there, and indeed, if pressed, took a perverse pride in the fact that I was watching over them.
This epiphany actually did quite a lot to improve my mental outlook about my place in the world. The villagers wanted a monster, something that united them, something that could be, according to the clergy, rendered harmless by prayer and a devotion to traditional values, helping to affirm their faith in an otherwise indifferent deity. Something that would, in times of obvious trouble, come to their aid. This was a role that I could play. Paradoxically, once I stopped trying to pretend that I was simply another human, albeit with peculiar dentition, when I embraced my role as “guardian monster,” I found that I was more accepted. People knew what I was and knew how to deal with me. And thus, the last several centuries of my relationship with my village had been rather pleasant.
When the Germans came, everyone pitched in, and we became a center of anti-German partisan activity. It was the first time that the modern era really intruded upon my world. The Germans had weapons that seemingly never had to be reloaded, and it was the first time anyone in my village saw airplanes.
It was my penchant for bringing these down that made us stand out, I think. We obviously had no artillery, but easily half of the planes sent at night simply never returned. Eventually, someone in Berlin did some cost analysis, and the German army learned to go around us, and we sat out the last two years of the war as spectators.
After the war, we had a few German visitors, mostly family searching for soldiers who had been reported missing in our area, as well as a few obvious military types trying to figure out how we’d kept their army at bay. They seemed to genuinely appreciate the small, respectable graveyard that held their bodies.
And then, seemingly in the blink of an eye, it was early 1940, and there was another war with the Germans.
