“A man plans his course, but
The Lord determines his steps...”
- Proverbs 16:9
CHAPTER ONE
October 4th, 2011.
Cambridge, Ohio.
Michael sat alone at the bar with a double
whiskey, though he wasn’t drinking
so much as staring into it trying to establish
what it was that had brought him on
this journey from Columbus.
Yesterday’s newspaper article had read that four
teenagers over the space of
seven days had thrown themselves from their
dorm windows at State Park
University. Although the authorities were treating
it as some sort of suicide
pact, Michael suspected otherwise. People don’t
just throw themselves from
buildings for the sake of it and, knowing what he
knew now, he wasn’t about to
ignore it.
Michael Warden is an investigator.
Not your usual, ordinary type of investigator−like
the ones who track down
criminals or follow people suspected of having
affairs and such−but an
investigator of the paranormal kind. Some might
say a Demon Hunter; a Ghost
Buster. If only it was as simple as that.
He read the page that he’d printed out from the
Daily Tribune’s website
again to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.
Then he folded it up and placed
it back into his worn, black, double breasted coat
pocket. He knocked back his
whiskey and made his way out of the bar. It was
early evening in Baltimore,
MD, and a slight mist had started to settle in.
Michael still had a little over three
hours’ drive ahead of him to get to where his
reservation was: a small place
called The Sunshine Motel a couple of miles
outside of Garrett Co. He’d
planned on having an early night so he could
make a start on his new
investigation early the next morning, but he’d
made an unscheduled stop for
some food on the way.
He crossed the rush hour traffic and headed
towards his car. The dusty,
beige, 96 Chevy Cavalier (which had seen much
better days) was parked up on
the other side of the street. He reached for his
keys and was about to unlock the
driver’s side door when he heard a female voice
cry for help behind him. He
looked back to see a young woman struggling to
hold on to her purse as one of
three hooded youths attempted to prize it from
her hands.
“Hey!” Michael shouted over the noise of the
traffic, loud enough for the
youths to notice him as he immediately ran back
to help. Two of the hoods ran
off, leaving one−who had succeeded in his goal
−fumbling with the woman’s
purse. He looked up at Michael, dropped it in a
panic onto the sidewalk, and ran
like hell.
“Are you okay?” Michael asked as he passed the
young woman her purse
from the floor. She nodded, clearly shaken by her
ordeal, but instead of staying
with her and waiting while the cops were called,
he decided to do something
about it himself. After he’d visually checked her
over, he turned and ran after
her attackers.
The group of youths made a right turn down a
dimly lit alleyway between
two tall office blocks. Michael followed them. A
few faint street lights
highlighted a row of dumpsters down one side;
the heavy stench of their rotting
contents filling the air. They reached the end of
the alley, and faced with
nothing but a high fence which split the dark
space in two, they began to get
visibly agitated.
“You might as well give it up boys,” Michael
shouted to them after he
realized they were trapped. One of them began to
climb up the fence and easily
managed to pull himself to the top. Then he
jumped down the other side. “Come
on!” He gestured for his buddies but they were
bigger and heavier than he was and were having
some trouble executing the climb with the same
ease as their
friend.
Michael caught up to them and grabbed hold of
one of the boys−now half
way up the fence−by his waist and pulled him
down to the floor. “Get off me!”
The boy shouted as Michael grappled with him
before managing to pin him to
the ground. Too busy batting the youth’s hands
away as he tried desperately to
lay one on him, Michael hadn’t noticed that the
other boy−the largest of the
group−had jumped back down from the fence.
Suddenly a thick arm wrapped
around Michael’s neck, dragging him to his feet
and holding him back long
enough for the other boy to jump up, grazed and
bloodied. As he did, he pulled
a blade from his inside pocket and held it out in
front of him pointing the
dangerous end right at Michael.
Michael managed to break free from the large
boy’s surprisingly strong grip
after elbowing him right in his diaphragm. He
paused for a second and looked at
the knife: nothing special, just your everyday
Smith and Wesson pocket knife
with a three inch blade, but Michael started to
back away. There was no point
getting into something he wouldn’t be able to
explain to the authorities,
especially as he still had a long journey ahead of
him. The boy had obviously
seen it as a weakness and lunged straight for
him, causing Michael to jump back
out of his reach until his back hit a wall, which
stopped him from going any
further. “Son of a. . . ”
The youth never stopped and at the last minute
he lost his footing. Falling
forward, his knife plunged straight into Michael’s
stomach, causing him to gasp.
His eyes widened with surprise.
The boy looked down at what he’d done and his
face instantly paled.
Michael saw a moment of panic as he stared
straight into the boy’s deep indigo
eyes. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen
years old if he was that. After
a moment, the boy let go of the knife to leave it
sticking out from Michael’s flesh. He stood frozen
to the spot, his mouth working like a goldfish with
no
sound escaping.
“Come on dude, let’s go!” the boy’s friend urged
as he grabbed him by the
arm. “We gotta split before anyone sees us. Leave
him, come on!” That was
enough to snap the boy into action and they both
ran back down the alley to the
street, leaving Michael standing there looking at
the knife as blood soaked
through his gray T-shirt spreading outwards from
the wound. There was no
pain, though. In fact, he’d hardly felt a thing
which hadn’t surprised him too
much.
Now all alone in the alley, with nothing but the
sound of dripping water
from a leaky gutter nearby and the distant traffic
noise, Michael placed his hand
around the black handle, held his breath and
pulled the blade out slowly. It felt
strange, not like he’d expected at all. It was
almost numb with a slight scratchy,
pulling sensation as the cold steel exited his
flesh. He dropped it to the floor and
lifted his T-shirt to assess the damage. There
was now a deep slit right under his
ribs on the left-hand side, but he felt okay. There
was no panic because he knew
he’d be perfectly fine.
Under different circumstances, though, he knew
that right about now he
would be dropping to the ground and waiting to
die from such a lethal wound.
He’d already lost a lot of blood and was pretty
sure that the knife had punctured
his kidney.
That wasn’t about to happen to him though. You
see. . . Michael was no
longer human. The body he walked in wasn’t his.
Neither was the name he now
used. Both used to belong to someone else−a
young man. Someone who’d been
down on his luck, who’d had no family to care
about him, and his misfortunes
had led him to choose a dark path. Fortunately
for Michael, who now inhabited
it after discovering he could borrow a body. Which
he had many times. This
one, however, was more of a permanent thing.
After discovering that using
someone’s body could ultimately lead to their
deaths, Michael had managed to
find someone close to death, who wouldn’t need
theirs anymore. So, that man
was the reason he was standing in the alleyway
at that moment instead of being
hauled off in a body bag.
He assessed the damage to his shirt. “poo!” he
said, poking his finger
through the tear. “This was my last decent
goddamn T-shirt.”