Harken

8 Silver And Red

More blood, more gnashing my teeth to contain the torture. The water from the faucet fell clear from the spout but hit the sink as red.

Something kicked in and my finger soon became numb, until the awful burning actually started to recede. It didn’t feel right for the pain to go away so quickly, but it wasn’t like I was going to complain about that. The blood began to slow as well, and within seconds all that was left was the clean, silver ring that had, by all appearances, come from nowhere.

The metal was very smooth and polished to a shine as the water washed over it. It was strangely pure: thin with rounded edges, a gleam to its surface, three simple lines cut into its top. I never wore jewelry. But it looked expensive and I might have liked it, if it hadn’t come out from under my own skin.

When I tried to pull it off though, the ring would not budge the slightest of an inch. Even though it didn’t feel tight or painful anymore, the ring felt like it was attached to bone.

I wasn’t about to spiral down into questions, asking how any of this could have happened, because I was too far past asking things I knew had no answer. Seeing the ring made me remember Father Lonnie’s reaction when he’d noticed my birthmark: had he known? Of course he’d known. He’d been looking for the ring all along, even when it was still hidden.

The bleeding had stopped entirely and the redness had receded. No need to wrap my finger in gauze anymore. So I scrambled back to my room in a daze, locking the door, pulling the bloodied sheets off of my bed and balling them up on the floor. Such a tedious thing to busy myself with in an attempt to forget the ring, though its weight on my finger refused to be ignored.

I hid the sheets in my closet behind some old laundry. But now I had nothing to sleep on.

I laughed. Sleep? Did I expect to ever sleep again?

Is that enough concrete proof for you? I thought. Something supernatural? I could handle that now. A conspiracy? I might even believe that. They wanted me dead? I could deal with that too. As long as I got answers. I needed the truth.

I was out of bed again as soon as the sun poked up, pulling the same church clothes from my closet, struggling to get them on. By then, my finger appeared entirely healed. Even bending it felt natural, though the band of the unusual metal felt like a weight. I shoved my hands into my pockets as I walked downstairs, my family still asleep.

I got onto my bike and started toward the church. Even the way the ring pressed against the handlebar was jarring.

I pedaled quickly even though being late for mass wouldn’t have hurt, since I was only interested in grabbing the priest after he finished. I guess some part of me hoped that if I went fast and down streets that no one frequented, I could avoid the attention of any of those people the priest had said were watching for me—Guardians.

Anytime I heard a car door open or brakes squealing, I had to glance over just to make sure no one was taking aim at me as I rode. Would there even be enough time for all my questions before the next mass? I had so many now. My anticipation only grew as I turned the corner for the church’s street.

From afar, I could see a crowd gathered outside the church, people again dressed up in their best shirts and dresses. Was church already finished? I knew I’d checked the schedule so I couldn’t possibly be that late. But everyone was outside, walking away from the church instead of toward it, covering their mouths, pulling their children by the arm frantically.

Finally I was close enough to see panic-filled faces and tears dripping from their eyes, to hear confused weeping as they stumbled in the direction opposite me. I glanced over the flashing lights that were further down the street, and saw police cars and ambulances, yellow tape around the front of the church blocking the parishioners from going inside. Traffic on the street was lined up as an officer tried to manage the chaos of people standing around, looking toward the sky, and pointing in disbelief. I skidded my bike to a stop and looked up, all the way up past the church door and then the circular stained glass window, to the pointed steeple above the bell tower.

I squinted because the sun was behind it, nearly blinding me. But in the outline, far at the top, I could see something that should not have been there. All in an instant, I realized what they were looking at.

Father Lonnie.

The morning rays of the sun streamed around his silhouette, his body bent backwards with arms extended, legs the opposite way, mouth and eyes open as if in a scream. The spire poked out of his chest, his corpse spiked through the middle like a nail through paper. He looked at us upside down, his body facing the sky but his eyes facing us with their lids open: skin white, a line of blood already dried from running down the steeple and onto the roof of his church.

My bike dropped from under me and crashed to the sidewalk. Every ounce of energy inside me felt like it was sucked away by a vacuum, I couldn’t even stand, falling onto my knees in the grass as I stared up, unable to tear my eyes from the horrible sight. I could hear the sounds: the crying of the people, the frenzied questions, the police officers ordering everyone to leave. A fire truck with a long ladder had finally arrived and they were extending the arm out, doing their best to reach Father Lonnie and at least take the ghastly site down as more people began to gather. I could only go on kneeling, staring up at the man I’d spoken to not many hours before: the man who’d told me he’d die if I lived.

The bloodstained roof of the church was a message to me.

“Please go home,” I could hear the police say over a megaphone. “Please let us do our jobs. Take your children and go home.”

I managed to get to my feet, forcing myself to walk closer. Even when I looked away I was unable to get the horrible image out of my head, seeing the outline of the priest in the corner of my eye, feeling like I would vomit if my own body had enough strength to. The crying got louder as I came closer, the grass trampled flat from high-heels and dress shoes, car horns honking as they tried to avoid pedestrians hurrying back to their vehicles.

“It’s horrible…” I heard an old woman say.

“God have mercy,” another whispered.

“This was by the gangs. He tried to help them but God knows they’d kill a man this way.”

Others hugged in circles, supporting each other just enough so they could walk away. The police and paramedics weren’t rushing though. They knew they were far too late now.

I’d never felt so truly lost. What was I supposed to do now? Where was I supposed to go? I fumbled to take my cell phone out of my pocket, thinking that I’d call Spud and ask him to come get me, but realized I had forgotten my phone back on my dresser.

I didn’t know if I needed to hide or if whoever had done this was still in the crowd, watching and waiting for me to pop up. I was almost certain that they’d found the priest by following me. Or was it the other way? Had they come to him demanding to know where I was, and he had refused to tell? So they killed him?

I drowned in the unanswered questions. Because of this I ran right into a police officer. He shoved me away and back into my senses.

“Look, kid, you need to go home,” he ordered me, pointing away. “I’m not gonna tell you again.”

I almost protested that I’d just seen Father Lonnie the night before, and that I knew who’d killed him. But all at once I remembered what the priest had told me: I couldn’t even trust the police.

I couldn’t trust anyone at all.

I mumbled an apology, turning to leave as quickly as I could. The loud engines of the fire truck rumbled, the ladder clicking as it extended high into the air toward the corpse. I reached the concrete and started back for my bike.

“Michael!” I heard someone hiss, making me jump. Over my shoulder, I saw someone else was now walking beside me. It was the monk, Brother James.

“Don’t look at me, look straight ahead,” he whispered, so I obeyed. Gray, unshaven stubble covered his chin and his eyes were bloodshot and terrified. His hands were folded in front of him, the long sleeves of his brown robe swishing against his shoes.

“Walk with me,” he said. “Around the side and to the back. Don’t look at anyone, all right? Just look ahead. Stay close to me.”

Maybe it was my fright that caused me to do what he said without question, or the urgency in his voice. I stayed at the same pace as him, stepping into the damp grass and crossing the lawn beside the church.

We passed through the shadow of the steeple and were out of view of most of the bystanders. The church had a side door with steps leading up to it and at first I thought that was where Brother James was leading me. But he passed it, going around the church. Behind the large building were some storage sheds and beyond that was a waist-high white fence surrounding a small, one-story house—the rectory, where the priest had lived.

He pushed the gate open. The walkway was made of large and carefully placed stones lined by yellow and white flowers. In the tiny yard there was a corner garden and a giant, ancient satellite dish the size of a car, now rusted and filled with rainwater like a dish. Bees darted in and out of the flowers and grass, unaware of the nightmare that’d happened nearby.

“Lonnie told me this would happen,” Brother James said under his breath, closing the gate behind me. “I knew when you showed up that there’d be trouble. And I tried to warn him but…”

“You saw who did it?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “But I know who. I don’t have a single doubt it was Guardians.” He sighed, rubbing his arms. “How’d you get a man all the way up to the steeple, eh? How’d you spear a man atop his own church? You’d got to fly him there.”

He pushed ahead of me toward the house. So he knew. I followed him quicker than before.

He pulled the screen open so I could pass through, then locked both doors behind us. The inside of the house was yet another piece of Arleta trying to prove we’d never left the 1980s: old orange carpeting, wood panel walls, pictures in old frames and wooden clocks covering almost every inch. It stank of air fresheners and cologne, rocking chairs and small tables and old upholstered couches stuffing the living room from the far wall to the linoleum-covered kitchen on the end.

The monk moved to the windows, glancing outside before he let the metal blinds fall. He darkened the room one window at a time.

“Am I safe?” I asked. It was odd for me to wonder it, when all other times I’d never been fearful of such things.

“Not anymore,” the monk said shakily. “But I don’t think anyone noticed you outside. Not anyone who’d be able to describe you, not with all the shock they’re in. Go close the blinds in the kitchen.”

In seconds there was nothing left but dim light peeking through the slits.

“This way,” he said, voice still low. He passed the kitchen, down the narrow hall and around the corner into a bedroom.

I knew immediately that this was where the attacker had found Father Lonnie. The furniture was in a knocked-over mess, wooden dresser with drawers and clothes spilling out, a smashed chair in the center of the room as the only remainder from a short-lived struggle. The bed frame itself was sliced up and down like the claws of some attacking beast… or the knife-like edges of claws I’d seen before.

But no blood. No sign of the dead man here besides the fight. That must have happened outside.

“It’s just…I knew this would happen. But I can’t believe it,” Brother James said painfully. “I just can’t. I thought Lonnie would never get caught, but then he was.”

He was coming close to sobbing but his hands continued to move, pulling open the closet door and shoving the clothes to the side. Beyond the clothes was a hidden, undersized door with two locks. He sniffled as he pulled keys from his pockets, undoing both and pushing inside. I had to bend over to step through the low doorway.

The room was musty, smelling of wood and dust like an old shed. It was long and thin, no windows or any other doors, a single air vent poking through the wall. Scattered around were desks, two giant safes in the corner, lamps and magnifying glasses and computers all around. There was a couch in the center with many of its buttons ripped out and some rugs covering the ugly concrete, the wooden support frames of the walls exposed with wires running in and out. A rickety, metal furnace sat in the corner with an exhaust pipe poking up to the ceiling, a fire going inside it though the room was much too warm already.

“What’s all this in here?” I asked. I heard Brother James lock both deadbolts behind us and the keys rattle back into his pocket.

“This is the home of the blog,” he told me. “Or at least it was. There won’t be any more of it now, I guess.”

Curiosity got the best of me, so I approached one of the desks. The computer was running a procedure, a green progress bar at 79% completion and files being listed below as they were erased one-by-one. All of the computers were doing the same thing. The desk was covered in papers and printouts, though I could see by following a trail of dropped notes that most of them had already been thrown into the furnace. Three empty document boxes sat beside the fire.

“I can’t believe I’m burning all of this,” Brother James said beside me. “This was Lonnie’s life. This was all he did: this and the Church. But it’s too dangerous to keep them now.”

“What is all of it?” I asked. He shrugged.

“Everything you could imagine,” he said. “Government emails. Memos between businesses. CIA, FBI, royal families, foreign officials. Leaks to online databases full of this stuff that no one’s even dreamed of being true.”

He breathed out despondently. “It’s all from Anon. Lots of truth no one gets to see.”

He sounded close to sobbing again. He obviously wasn’t going to stop me, so I grabbed some of the papers from the mess. The topmost one was written in what appeared to be Russian, but there were notes scribbled in the sides: a sharp handwriting that said to “POST THIS” with an arrow to a circled paragraph, and “REDACT” next to a part that was scratched out with black marker. There were pages of that report stapled together, with diagrams of an airplane and arrows denoting specific seats.

I pushed it off and found more beneath that. There were memos bound by paper clips, messages exchanged in a circle of email addresses that were jumbled letters and numbers. The message chain was long but the newest post was circled by a highlighter pen, which only read:

TO: 100-964

FROM: 1094-57

Confirmation of activity in Japan, now moved to March 16, earthquake. Keep away from the area for two days leading up and following the date.

Relocate all invested assets from Dreycorp a week preceding.

It was odd, until I recognized what they had been talking about. That was the earthquake that’d hit Japan days ago—the same that my teacher had shown us in class.

At the top of the page, a date marked when the email had been sent…four months ago.

I remembered suddenly what I’d read in the eyes of Dreycorp’s own CEO, that dramatic change that had overcome Harold Wolf some time before his death. Now it clicked into place: the fear of something that he was certain was coming to get him. He’d known all along, too. Maybe he’d been running from them, hiding in another country to escape the inevitable. It became painfully obvious to me that the earthquake—all that massive destruction, and all the lives that it had taken—had somehow been artificially created to kill this one man.

“How does Anon get this information?” I asked, looking up. “This is…this is almost unbelievable.”

And a treasure trove for me—a strange feeding of my addiction to truth. I didn’t give the monk a possibility of answering, digging further into the papers. There was a chart attached below the email, showing two graphs side-by-side. The one on the left showed a large circle with DREYCORP typed in the center, dated this year. There were uncountable smaller circles inside its bounds with even smaller names: food companies whose brands I saw all the time when we went grocery shopping.

The graph on the right also had DREYCORP, but it and its circles were now far smaller and beside two others, all three enveloped by another that simple said EXCELSOR. This chart was dated ten years into the future. A predicted merger, I guessed. Or rather, an inevitable one.

It was like crawling down into a hole only to find that just around the corner was another world, right under my feet the entire time. An email spoke of a nationwide banking chain that was going to fail, the deadline still two months away. It was brief and to the point: Pull your assets. Place them as investments in this other company. They were like instructions with no signature, no way of telling the author or the receiver. There were other attached pages detailing numbers and figures I didn’t understand, lines of text in some finance language. The email circle appeared to be a group of moguls and investment operators, sometimes posting emails that were forwarded to them by others. There were never any names: only the codes as identification.

Everything was a photocopy. Who was Anon to have access to all these things?

“That’s just some of the finance stuff,” Brother James said from beside me. “These are nothing. They’re far down the chain of power. We’ve only identified a few based on their anonymous handles. Have you ever read an email to a president before?”

“I didn’t even know the President had email,” I said in a quick breath, taking a paper that the monk slid in front of me. It was one page, dated for 2012 and addressed from 916-88 to 55-614, which only said:

Stay out of NY this October.

“You think you know what the world is?” Brother James said. “A lot of people think they do. But people are sheep. Humans are easily led when they don’t know they are following.”

“And Father Lonnie…” I said. “They killed him because he knows.”

“Because he knew,” Brother James corrected me like a machete slicing through the air. Past tense now; Father Lonnie was already gone.

“But he had proof,” I said. “He could have gone out and told someone. He could have used all of this to expose who they are!”

“You don’t understand,” the monk said. “It sounds so easy: take these documents and expose them. But to whom? The police? The FBI? Late night radio shows who’d broadcast us in the same segment they talk about alien space saucers?”

He scratched his arms. “They control everything, Michael. They command everything. Do you know how large the world is? Can you imagine how much power it would take to run the entire world, when few can even run an entire country?”

His voice had started to rise as he became more frantic. He yanked the papers out of my hands, tossing them across the desk into the pile.

“Some people believe in families that run the world,” he said. “Rich, powerful families who have been around since kings, still commanding countries in secret, causing wars at whim to build their wealth and releasing plagues as a part of procedure. But the families still report to these… to the Guardians.”

He shrugged. “But you probably think I’m crazy, still. You’re like everyone else. But the Guardians made it that way. They control the media and thus control the way people think: make anyone who believes in this to be a ‘conspiracy theorist’ or a ‘crazy old man talking about Illuminati’. But we’re not making it up. We’re right.”

I was becoming more and more alarmed as the monk’s voice sped up, his hands shaking as he grabbed papers from the desk and stacked them up, then shuffled them, only to reorganize them again.

“Look at Lonnie,” he said. “You don’t think this happens all the time? They want someone dead, so they make him dead. And not just his body: dead to anyone who’d loved him before. Tomorrow they’ll find meds in Lonnie’s room. Some prostitute will say his name in the news. They’ll find all these lies so that people will want to forget him, think his death was his own fault—a suicide by a drug-abusing, tithe-stealing, whoremonger of a priest. ‘Not Lonnie!’ they’ll say. But even his friends will believe it just because they’re told to.”

The monk hit the desk, making it rattle. “Anon didn’t do anything to save him. He just let him die. Where was Anon when Lonnie needed protection? Did he just let him die because it was for some greater good? To keep you safe?”

The monk pulled open one of the drawers and shuffled things around in it furiously. I glanced at the locked door. My heart had started to beat faster, afraid that the monk would soon faint into a shock. Which pocket had he put the keys in? Would I be able to drag him out to get the paramedics, who likely were still outside?

“I wish I was Lonnie,” he went on. “I wish I could be as brave as he was. But I’m not. This isn’t my war. And I’ve got a family: I’ve got brothers and sisters and both my parents.”

“Calm down, you’ll be alright,” I told him, holding my hands out.

“No it won’t be alright!” he exploded into a scream, and suddenly his hand whipped out from the drawer. In it was a pistol, aimed at me.

“Nothing will ever be alright now!” he shouted at me, his voice bouncing off the bricks and the metal furnace. I was frozen, hands extended, heart nearly stopping. The gun was a 9-millimeter: long and slender chassis, black and metal. It was so close I could see its front sight.

“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded. But the gun didn’t waver in his hands, even as the sweat that ran down his face and in his palms threatened to make it slip.

“I can’t be Lonnie!” he said through clenched teeth. “I can’t die that way.”

“I’ll leave then!” I told him, lifting my hands. “No one will ever know you had me here.” The monk was insane with terror.

“It’s too late for that,” the monk said. “I can’t let you go. Not if I want them to let me live. You’ve got to stay here until he comes back.”

Everything hit me at once, and I realized just how stupid and blind I had been. In my fright at seeing the corpse atop the church, I hadn’t taken a moment to dig for a Glimpse from Brother James, to even wonder if I should trust him at all. Now, across the room and deep in the eyes of this crazed man, I could see answers to all the question that had appeared. Threatened. Cornered.

Someone had gotten to Brother James before I arrived.

“Are they here?” I asked, knowing full well what was happening, why I’d been led back here. My mind raced for an escape.

“Soon,” he replied. “I—I told him you’d be back this morning after mass. I’m sorry, Michael. I just couldn’t do anything else when he…”

Then I saw why he’d kept his arms crossed all this time. His left hand was bent painfully forward and still didn’t move, scaling and red with the worst burns I’d seen. Parts of his skin were blackened even past his wrist, dried blood around white gauze he’d tried to wrap around it. When he saw I was looking, he hid his hand away again, still trembling.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “I’ll disappear. They’ll think you killed me.”

“They want you alive,” he whined. “They want to make sure. If I don’t keep you here, he’ll know. He’ll get me, just like Lonnie. You don’t think they can, and kill my whole family too?”

“But we’re on the same side,” I said, though I already knew the attempt was in vain. His mind was made up, strengthened like a barrier of fear he’d been building ever since the night before. I could imagine the horror he’d witnessed: the killing of his friend, the threat from a Guardian… who even now was likely on his way back here to collect me, and finish what Mr. Sharpe could not.

Never had such terror washed over me as I remembered the chase from nights before, and realized that I had fallen right into a trap. They wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. I had to get out of there.

Brother James’ gun hand had started to shake. I moved to the side, trying to get out of its way, but he stepped between me and the door again.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and even then I could tell that he meant it.

So I tried to run, knowing his conscience would make him hesitate to shoot. But he was fast, diving to the side, slamming into me and throwing me hard against the wall. I yelled, pushing him off of me, running again only to be knocked hard against my back, falling over and gasping for breath.

He was kneeling on top of me in a second. I grabbed the end of a fire poker that was next to the furnace, swinging it at him. I knocked his arm and he screamed, but he managed to grab it and wrestle it from me. I heard the reverberating metal fly to the other end of the room, smashing through a computer screen. All the while I continued to shout for help, my words bouncing uselessly off the walls.

I tried to roll over but he had me down, pushing my back with his knee, pressing a cloth against my face and blocking my mouth and nose. I gasped and got a whole lung-full of whatever chemical he was trying to get inside of me.

It hit suddenly, such a strong smell like alcohol and a doctor’s office. It only made me gasp more, dizziness racing through my head as I struggled to fight against it and the monk who held me down, no longer even needing the pistol to keep me there.

“Quiet down!” I heard him hiss at me. Something was banging above our heads, each sound like it was in an echo chamber. There was a crash. A pounding against the locked door.

Was it someone coming for me? Had they heard me?

But I wasn’t screaming anymore: why wasn’t I screaming?! I drifted on a magic carpet that hovered from the floor, room spinning, muscles still trying to lift me though nothing ever brought me up more than a few inches.

I could feel things happening inside me: strange sensations that felt like a dam threatening to explode and made me want to vomit at the same time. My finger throbbed where the silver ring was. It felt like it was tightening slowly, like the device that nurses put around my arm to check blood pressure. All of my skin felt like it was constricting, floating, plummeting…

The cloth remained pushed against my face, the room like I was looking at it through a fish tank before fading into black as my eyelids closed. I could still hear the sounds though. I heard a creaking of hinges, a crashing of wood being shredded. I heard two voices yelling, just before the pressure holding me down disappeared.

There was a shot.

Gentle arms lifted me.

Warm sunshine fell on my arms and legs.

Then I was going up…up…up into the air, until all I could hear was the wind and gentle echoes.

Sirens.

Birds.

Silence.