The first time I met Janie Forrester, I knew it was important. She had called a few days ago on the Jager Solutions phone line—a phone line that rarely ever rang and that I had never answered before. When I picked up, I was awkward and nervous, and that only increased when I heard her wonderful, melodic voice. I took down her information and hung up as quickly as I could, mainly out of some odd, misplaced fear of sounding foolish to her.
I had talked to my grandfather about the call and he arranged a time for her to come meet us here. That was significant in and of itself. In the past few months, there had only been two times we brought someone else here. I ended up killing one of them and the other was buried alive one building over. I suppressed a shudder at the thought of what had happened to Mark and of the thing that lay down there in that cement tomb, just waiting until it was free again. I tried not to dwell on the Gravekeeper and the weird memories...or whatever it was…that I had, but it still preoccupied me, haunting my mind from the dark corner to which it had been exiled. Maybe that’s why I nearly jumped out of my chair when some unknown buzzer went off and the television shifted over to a security camera at the front gate.
Aside from Grandpa showing me how the security system worked initially, I had rarely had to mess with it, and it took me a couple of tries to find the right button for the intercom. Before I hit it, I took a moment to study the figure outside of Jager Solutions.
The woman was beautiful, with a kind of sad grace that made her look somewhat older than her age, which I guessed was early thirties at the most. Even through the filter of the security camera, her brilliantly white hair and large eyes made her seem unreal or magical in some way. And for all I knew, she was. The little bit Grandpa had told me of her and her deceased brother was definitely every bit as strange as some of the things I had seen in the last few months.
Because I knew it was Janie. I knew from the description my grandfather had given me and from her appearing on the day we were set to meet—four hours early, but still. But more than that, I knew because something in me somehow recognized her, almost as though I was seeing an old friend after a long absence. I found myself smiling as I fumbled for the intercom button.
“Janie, this is Jason. Come on in. I’ll come out and meet you.” She opened her mouth to respond but then the gate was buzzing open and she pushed through to the interior of our little base. I ran upstairs to the main level of the large warehouse that housed my grandfather’s “batcave” and opened the exterior door before walking out to meet her. Janie held out her hand and I took it, feeling nervous and excited at the same time.
“Hi, there. You’re early. Um, it’s fine, it’s just…Dr. Barron, my grandfather, won’t be back for a bit. We had to rent a cement truck last week and he’s returning it. I…ah, yeah I’m rambling. Come on in.” I could feel myself turning red and wheeled away without waiting for a response. I stopped when I heard her speaking.
“Jason, wait a minute.”
I turned around and gave her a questioning look. Her eyes were dark and shining, seeming to brim with equal measures of intelligence and pain. She hadn’t moved from where we initially met and I could tell something was troubling her. Then she went on.
“I don’t understand what this is. What all this is.” She gestured around at the three warehouses surrounded by a tall fence festooned with security cameras at regular intervals. “I expected…I don’t know, some kind of real business? More people?” She gave a confused shrug before turning to me again. “And you…you just let me in? If you’re in your grandfather’s business, how would you not be more careful?”
She was reaching into her purse, and initially I thought it was for a phone, but with impressive speed she had a small revolver trained on me. “Which makes me think that this is some kind of trap. Maybe you got to Dr. Barron and now you’re using his reputation to pull in people he was connected to? Who are you really?”
I raised my hands, not out of any real concern about getting shot, but to try and put her at ease. Hoping I was smiling in a trustworthy manner, I replied, “My name is Jason Halsey. My grandfather is Dr. Patrick Barron. This isn’t some kind of trap.”
The gun didn’t waiver from its position pointed at my chest. “The problem is that’s just what you would say, isn’t it? Do you work for the House?”
I blinked at that. I knew from my brief conversation with her and what little Grandpa had said that she was connected to everything somehow, but it was still weird to hear someone else talk about the House of the Claw. Shaking my head, I gave a small laugh.
“I really don’t. I’ve killed quite a few of them, for what that’s worth.” She didn’t smile in return and I let out a small sigh. “Look, I get it. Good looking out and all that. But it’s going to be a bit before he gets back. It’s not as easy to get a cement truck on short notice as you might think, so he had to drive a ways. I don’t want to stand out here for an hour and I don’t want you to have to hold a gun on me that long. So what can we do to make you cool with things until he gets here?”
She seemed to consider for a moment. “If you were tied up. Tied yourself up…I’m not getting near you.”
I thought about that morning in the kitchen with my grandfather, him tied to the chair as he tried to explain himself, and I felt a wave of sympathy and guilt at the memory. I could do that, but it would kind of be lying by omission, wouldn’t it? Acting as though I couldn’t move when I could easily break free? Shaking my head, I lowered my hands.
“Look, I could tie myself up, but it would only be to trick you. I could get out of any rope we’d have around here. Maybe any chain too. And I don’t want to start off like that. Not with you, especially.”
She raised her eyebrow. “What do you…”
Acting on a sudden impulse, I darted forward and snatched the gun from her hand. She gasped and recoiled, her eyes suddenly wide with fear. I paused a second to get a better grip on the gun and clench my teeth before shooting myself in the forearm. The sound of the gunshot echoed off the buildings and Janie took another step back as her eyes moved between my face and my arm. I took in a couple of deep breaths as the pain subsided and raised my arm up for her to see better.
“Why did…oh God. How are you doing that?” Her mouth went slack as the bullet hole filled in, leaving no sign of the gunshot wound. Waggling my fingers at her, I smiled.
“I heal really fast. Among other things. A…well, my grandfather would call it a collateral effect of one of our earlier adventures.” I looked at her seriously. “My point in doing it was to show that you can trust me. I don’t have any intention of hurting you or I already would have. And yes, I get that showing you how easily I could murder you may not seem like the best way to vouch for my character, but it’s what I’ve got at the moment.”
She surprised me by letting out a short snort of laughter. “He said you’d do that.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Who said what now?”
“Dr. Barron. He told me to come early, to act like I didn’t trust you. He assured me you wouldn’t hurt me, and he expected that you’d hurt yourself trying to prove I didn’t have to be afraid of you. ‘To convince me the bear wouldn’t eat me because it could have already,’ as he put it.” Her eyes twinkled a bit as she stepped closer to me. “It played out pretty much exactly like he said it would.”
I took a step back, my face burning. Old motherfucker. I should have known he was up to something when he insisted on being the one to drive the cement truck back. “Well, fuck me, I guess. You could have told me before I shot myself.”
Her face grew serious again and she shook her head. “No. Because I wanted to know if he knew you that well and I needed to see if you were really willing to put yourself through that kind of pain just to make a stranger feel more at ease.” She paused, quirking an eyebrow. “It does still hurt you to get shot, right?”
I frowned at her. “Oh yeah. It hurts like a motherfucker.”
She grinned at me. “Well there you go then. Now I know you better too. Can we go in now? It’s hot out here.”
I led her downstairs into the living quarters and felt a new flush of nervousness kick in. Irritated as I was with my grandfather at the moment, I was desperate for him to come in and save us from awkward chit-chat. But Janie didn’t seem nervous at all, and as she asked me questions about our set-up down there and my history with Grandpa, I felt myself relaxing.
“How are you not more freaked out by all this?” I gestured to my fully healed arm and then the miniature compound we were in. “I know you said you know things. You know about a place called the Nightlands, right?”
She nodded. “Right. I’ll save that until we’re all together, but the short version of me is that me and my twin brother…” She swallowed as her face darkened slightly, “Martin…His name was Martin. He’s dead now. Murdered. But that’s not the point of what I’m telling, so it can wait.” I had opened my mouth to say something about how sorry I was, but I closed it again. She wasn’t interested in my sympathy for a person I’d never met. I could see in her face that she wanted, maybe needed, to talk to someone about something. So I stayed quiet and listened.
My brother and I, when we were young, we were left in a funeral home by accident. Something happened to us there that night. It changed us. We started seeing the world differently and would occasionally know things with no reasonable explanation for how we knew them. And while we had always been close, as many twins are, now we stayed together almost to the exclusion of others. As we grew up, we had a very happy, but solitary, life together.
The biggest reason for our separation from the world was a strange drive that had overtaken us in the months following that night we were forgotten. A puzzle that we solved together, and in doing so, unlocked a way to see into a magical new world that is known as the Nightlands. Over the years, we refined our techniques and developed quite a following. This was useful, not because we wanted the company, but because it gave us access to resources and knowledge that helped us in our work, our obsession.
Of course, we weren’t the first people to discover the Nightlands. And there were those that jealously guarded any access to that Realm. Chief among our unknown enemies was the House of the Claw—a cult that I know you’ve had several run-ins with. The things you and your grandfather hunt…I know relatively little about them. But I know the House of the Claw well. Martin and I made it our business to learn about them after our first encounter over a decade ago.
At that time, we were nineteen and just developing a small following in a few cities around the United States. We would travel around the country, periodically hosting our gatherings, performing our rituals, offering others glimpses into the Nightlands. We were still children in many ways, and surprisingly (considering the circles we ran in), we had never had much trouble from anyone we met. It never occurred to us that something like the House existed, much less that we were being hunted by them.
We had been in Seattle for a few days when we were taken on the street and carried to an abandoned tire plant on the outskirts of the city. They had covered our heads as soon as we had been abducted, and I remember wishing they would put the cover back on when I saw where they had brought us. As much horror as I had seen…it was always with a purpose. It came with a certain beauty. But this…this was pain and terror and murder. Unreasoning, hungry violence that just liked to taste the blood and smell the rot.
The plant had once been filled with machinery—that much was clear from the scars on the concrete floor where it had all been removed and sold off long ago. What was left was a giant room with an enormous black crater in the middle, the hole filled with black water that seemed thicker than it should and cast off an oily, rainbow sheen in the glow of work lamps that had been set up to push back the darkness from the center of the room.
Out from that water, that water that I was beginning to notice was stirring and rippling occasionally as though from some unseen current, there was a tidy ring of ruined corpses stacked two to three bodies deep as it went around to encompass the entire pool. I realized with growing horror that the wall I had been propped against was actually more of the same—fresher, oozing bodies on top that were slowly pressing down and mingling with the older, mushier bodies beneath, all of it squeezing out a dozen steady streams of rotting corruption that drained back into the water it surrounded.
I didn’t want to take in the details, but I suppose I had seen enough in my life by that point that it was inevitable. Against my wishes, my mind set to the task of dissecting and categorizing the state of those bodies, and what it found was strange. The people had been torn to pieces in many cases, though occasionally there would be a corpse that appeared unblemished…beyond whatever inevitable stage of decay it was in. We found out later they had been bringing the creature mainly local homeless people as well as a few children from further off. I think it was seeing an infant’s face in the midst of all that death and ruin that broke me that night. I remember knowing it was dead but feeling like I could still hear it crying.
Then I realized it was Martin I was hearing. He was letting out a loud, shrieking wail unlike anything I’d ever heard from him. He had been set down and unhooded after me, and while my eyes had been drawn to the ring of bodies, his had found the answer to what was stirring beneath those foul waters.
I followed his gaze until I saw it for myself. And then Martin wasn’t alone in screaming.
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Credits
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