Midnight Solitaire (12 page)

And my God, how I adored her. How I adored them both.

Without warning, The Dealer brought it all down. He came out of nowhere, and suddenly we were in Hell and this thing was butchering my family. He shot me, left me for dead and destroyed Karen and Jodi. It’s not enough for him to simply kill. It’s a ritual for The Dealer, a rite. A massacre. I didn’t know that then, all I saw was a madman killing my family right before my eyes.

Once I was out of the hospital and had gotten through the physical therapy and was strong again, I went back to school, but not one of healing. This time, I learned how to end life rather than save it. I hired a weapons and hand-to-hand-combat expert, learned everything I could from him, trained constantly and absorbed the knowledge I needed. In my downtime, I researched and learned everything I could about magic—black and white—and what his demonic marks and spells and rituals meant. I learned how to read most, and how to fight them. It’s all I did, day and night, for more than a year. Then I sold everything except for that car and the clothes on my back, and headed out after him. I’ve been tracking him ever since. Six years. Six years of death, mayhem and evil, always one step ahead of me but so close I could almost reach out and touch him. I’ve been so close sometimes the bodies are still warm. I almost had him three years ago in a little desert town in Nevada. Came close in New Orleans too, right after the floods, but he slipped through and got away, bodies in his wake as usual.

In the years on the road I’ve learned even more. I’ve met with Shamans, White and Black Magic Witches, Voodoo Priests and Priestesses, Seers, preachers, mediums, monks, hardcore Satanists—you name it—everyone in the world of the occult, from practitioners to professors, I’ve talked to them all. I’ve picked their brains. And all the while, I’ve tracked him across the country and even through Canada and Mexico. If this storm hadn’t trapped us both, he’d have left the continent soon. I think he had his eye on Central then South America. Not that he hasn’t been there before, he’s been everywhere before. Wherever there’s life, he’s left behind death. It’s what he does. It’s what he is.

To find him, to track him and to eventually stop him, you have to believe in things you’re told don’t exist, things that are only believed by the ignorant or the wildly misguided religious sorts. Problem is, the things they believe are wrong, but the things they believe exist…do. The Dealer’s one of them. He remains in human form because he has to in order to move about our world in any physical sense. He hides inside us, within the flesh, but he is not of the flesh. He’s not human. Never has been. He’s spirit. A demon, a ghost, makes no difference what you call him. He has many names in many cultures, but it’s all the same. Evil is a disease of humanity. No one’s immune, no one escapes.

Landscapes, faces, cultures, beliefs, they all change, but he remains the same. He may wear something different, or move from one human host to another, but it’s all window-dressing. Unchanged in thousands of years, he’s been here since the earliest times, since the dawning. But time is different for his kind. There is no aging or decay. It passes differently for him. A day for him is years for us. Unless he’s stopped or the curse is lifted, he’ll be here until the world is a wasteland, until all conscious life has vanished from the face of the Earth. Then he can return to the land of the dead. His world. His home. And there, with all the souls he’s collected over all the years, he becomes a god. Until then, he’s trapped here, cursed to roam and slaughter through his blood rituals and demonic sacrifices. A nomadic killer from an ancient history and a reality discarded as fairytale long ago, he has one purpose. Destruction. It’s the despair that lures him, the sorrow and the pain. The hopelessness. He feeds on it the same as we take in oxygen, because he has known God. He’s spoken His name, served Him. He is of The Fallen. And when his kind fell, they fell for good. There’s no turning back. Not then. Not now. Not ever.

He always kills, but usually not in such numbers so close together. In the past it wasn’t necessary, and in certain situations too dangerous. He likes to follow storms and natural disasters, where it’s easier to kill and where often many disappearances and deaths will be blamed on the events. In New Orleans, after the floods, he was on a rampage. He killed in numbers I’d never seen before. Now he’s ramping it up and on a spree again. Maybe the curse is coming to an end, or maybe he knows there’s no way out and this time it’s him or me.

Few years back, I was tracking him through the west. I was on Highway 50 in Nevada. They call it ‘The Loneliest Road in America.’ Once you’re on it you know why. Parallels the old Pony Express trail. You can go forever without seeing another car or living soul. I found myself out there one night driving my way through. The Dealer was ahead of me and I was pretty sure he was headed into Utah. I hadn’t slept in days and the road was putting me to sleep. I’d made a lot of contacts with the underground by then, and wherever I went, one person into the occult would know another and tell me who to talk to whenever I got somewhere else. There’s a loose network if you know who to talk to, and if they want to help you. Most knew what The Dealer was and didn’t want him in their midst anymore than I did. But way out there on 50, it was just the two of us, all of our sins, and that endless road.

It’s the first time I heard the singing. Like Gregorian chants, so beautiful and moving, yet so unsettling at the same time. Nothing human could produce such beautiful sounds. We had tried over the centuries, and we’d come close, but never with anything that echoed forth as if resonating from some impossibly giant hall. It was a sound that made you cry like a baby. Not in fear, but joy.

I listened to the angels sing their ancient musical chants, and they led me off the road. I pulled over and began to walk out into the desert. It was night and pitch-black, no moon. But I could see. Somehow, I could see. I walked through the darkness until I came upon a small trailer about a mile or so in. At first it didn’t look like anyone still lived there, that maybe it had been abandoned a few years prior. But when I got up close and saw the lanterns burning, I realized there was an old woman sitting there in a rickety lawn chair. Huddled up in a threadbare blanket, she wore a kerchief on her head that did little to distract from the tangled mess of white tendrils that was her hair. She looked right at me, but her eyes were gray and thick with cataracts, and her skin hung from her frail skeleton like slabs of rotting dough. She rested both hands on an old walking stick carved from knotty wood. She wore rings of silver on every finger of her gnarled, arthritis-savaged hands, numerous silver bracelets on her wrists that jingled when she moved, and a filthy skirt that reached her ankles. On her feet were tattered sandals.

‘Been waitin’ on you.’ The woman claimed she’d called me to her. That she’d ‘seen’ me, seen what I was doing, what I was pursuing, and had brought me to her so that she could help me better understand. She explained she’d been born blind but with a ‘second’ sight. ‘You ain’t the light,’ she told me in a raspy, weak voice. ‘But you ain’t the dark neither. Not yet.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Just a guide, a messenger, nothin’ more.’

Things howled and moved in the night behind her, beyond her trailer. She seemed unconcerned; her deeply wrinkled and weathered face set like stone.

‘All he has is memories, same as you,’ she told me. ‘Real or not, don’t matter. The nightmares, the blood, that’s what matters. And the game. Cards don’t mean nothin’, not really. More a prop, see? But he’s always playin’ that game. Even when he ain’t.’

I’d seen the cards he sometimes left behind, and I’d even seen the tattoos on his arms—I’d been that close once—but never understood what they meant.

‘You playin’ too, just don’t know it.’ She blinked, gray eyes staring straight ahead, seeing nothing…and everything. ‘We all playin’ it, and we all playin’ alone. Only way to play solitaire, see? Same way we come into the world, same way we leave it. Alone, and in the dark.

‘The cards got a history, like everything else. Way back, they called them the Devil’s Picture Book. They had to do with gambling and fortunetellin’, so they was evil, see? To this day, you won’t never see no real fisherman or miner carry a deck of cards with them to the ocean or down below.

‘But them that knows better knows cards is like everything else. Good and bad. They been used to pray and foresee for just as long as they been used for evil. At the end, it don’t mean nothin’. Only them usin’ the cards has meanin’.’

‘Why did you bring me here? What do I care about his playing cards and games of solitaire?’

‘They’re his comfort,’ she told me. ‘The cards all got meanin’ to him in his sick head, got purpose in his rituals. The game ain’t for real but it’s a symbol just like the ones he paints on walls in human blood. It’s him, alone in the night, turning…falling…just like them cards…some to good…some to bad…all of them movin’ the game forward. Dealer either wins or gets trapped in the cards and has to start again. Either way, he’ll just keep playin’ ‘til somebody stops him. Stop him, stop the game.’

‘Am I the one?’ I asked her.

She nodded, leaning heavier on her walking stick. ‘I seen you in dreams, on the highways. I seen you in the snow…a snow full of blood, steaming guts all across it...and him…waitin’…waitin’ on you.’

‘I hear things.’

‘I know you do.’

‘Ancient songs.’

‘They’re prayers.’

‘What do they mean?’

‘What you think they mean?’

A hot wind blew up from the desert, moving through the darkness to the camp and the sparse light from the lanterns around the trailer. The air was thick and hard to breathe, full of dust and sand. Like Hell, I thought. Must be what it’s like to breathe the air in Hell.

‘He ain’t the only one. Neither is you.’

‘Why me?’

‘Just the way things is. The way it’s always been and how things is always gonna be. Least ‘til there ain’t nothin’ left. We are as it’s written, and round and round the heavens and hells go, see? Forever and ever. Amen.’

‘What if I fail?’

‘Won’t be the first.’ The old woman turned her head like she’d heard something off in the darkness, but her dead eyes remained forward, as if she could see me. ‘But I dreamed you was the last. Remember the game. We all cards, see? All with our places. Where we got to be. Can’t play red to red or black to black. God made the game, made all of us. Question is, who is God?’

‘I don’t care who God is. How do I kill this fuck?’

‘You don’t.’

I felt whatever little sliver of me still existed wither and die, and it took everything I had not to sink to my knees. ‘I’ve come so far,’ I told her, emotion getting the better of me. ‘Been through so much, I…’

‘Flesh is for killin’.’ A dark tongue slowly protruded from her mouth and licked her pale, thin lips. ‘Spirit, you got to bind.’

I closed my eyes, felt something drop into the palm of my hand. Until then I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding it out for her. In my grasp, attached to the end of a black satin cord, was a clear crystal roughly the size of a golf ball. The weapon that could stop him, the only weapon, short of a sword at the hip of an angelic warrior the likes of which still sang to me from the night, their divine choir consecrating all that had taken place and what was still to come.

‘Can you hear them?’ I asked the old woman.

‘Can you?’

‘Yes.’

‘But do you hear? Listen,’ she said, bringing a twisted hand to her chest and pointing a crooked finger at her heart. ‘Here.’

‘How will I know?’

‘You’ll know. Same way he does. He’s startin’ to remember his past, and that means the curse is weakenin’ and he’s almost home. Hell’s callin’ him. You gonna stop him, you got to do it before he gets there.’

I woke up hours later in my car, miles from where I thought I’d been. I thought it was just another nightmare, but the crystal was there on the seat next to me. It was real. Everything that had led me to that point and everything that would happen from then on out. All of it was real. My wife and child weren’t coming back, and The Dealer wasn’t going to stop killing until I bound and imprisoned him in his own evil and madness.

Maybe then—and only then—I’d have some peace. And those beautiful voices of the angels might become a welcome, a chance at transcendence and a return to something close to the promise of the life I’d once had. Not here, but somewhere else. Somewhere better, where Karen and Jodi waited for me.

Just like I’d been told in the desert, we were all playing the game, all using our own rituals. But you can’t play red on red or black on black. Spirit kills flesh. Flesh binds spirit.

There are rules. So it is written.

The old desert witch was right. Now I had to hope her magic was too.