The Forsaken: Part IV

The Forsaken-Part IV

It’d been twelve hours since the mysterious mist encompassed the city of LeClaire. Like the rest of the townsfolk, Chief Jones was getting nervous. He didn’t have the personnel or equipment to patrol through such dense fog cover. The old cop felt out of his depth for the first time in years.

He called his wife to tell her he wouldn’t be home tonight. The town needed him to run things as a chaotic scene unfolded. They were on the evening news, but nobody dared enter through the strange mist blanketing the area. State police and county sheriffs had kept the press from trying to enter the city.

Lucas stayed at the station with Chief Jones. Seeing how the chief responded to the ominous event convinced him that Chief Jones wasn’t the power he should worry about. The old cop was barely keeping it together. Like the rest of the town, Arthur Jones was scared.

“Is this why you’re here?” asked Arthur.

Lucas looked at the old cop, unsure how to answer his query. He felt like this was connected, but Lucas wasn’t sure.

Lucas pulled Arthur aside and asked him, “Do you really want to know?”

Arthur didn’t want to know the truth. The truth scared him more than the mystery surrounding his home. He wasn’t a fool, though, and knew that the mysterious appearance of an investigator from the Roman Catholic Church coinciding with the strange mist around his city was too much of a coincidence.

“You think it’s connected, don’t you?” asked Arthur.

“Yes, chief. Yes I do,” sighed Lucas, staring out the front of the station.

“What should I do?”

“Put as many men on the street as we can find. Keep the peace, and assure the people of LeClaire that this anomaly is just a strange weather disturbance,” suggested Lucas.

“That’s it!”

“I would suggest two person cars, and if I were you, I’d institute a mandatory curfew,” Lucas continued.

Doubling up the cars would keep his officers safer and lower the need for backup units. Arthur got on the radio and told the units on the streets to find their way to the station and team up. He intended to patrol when he found someone to ride with him.

“Before I was an investigator with the church, I was a cop. If you give me a sidearm, a flashlight, and a pair of cuffs. I’ll ride along with you,” Lucas offered.

He couldn’t afford to say no. Arthur threw the keys to the armory to Lucas and told him to get whatever he wanted. Shortly after, the two men were in the chief’s Expedition and headed north. The tension in the silence between the two men was palpable.

“Why hasn’t there been a task force?”

“What?” asked the chief.

With six missing and now a seventh, Lucas questioned why the chief hadn’t called for a task force. He hadn’t heard any mention of putting together a group to investigate a rash of disappearances. With that many missing persons in a short time, he questioned the response.

“Every once in a while, people go missing. There’s been no suspicion of foul play. There was no reason to sound alarms,’ explained Arthur.

“And now?”

“I suspect it’s not a bad idea,” Arthur relented.

Lucas was curious. It was easy to convince him of the need to delve deeper into the disappearances. Why hadn’t he thought of this before?

“As chief of police, you have a lot of responsibility. How do you manage?”

Arthur looked at Lucas, wondering where he was going with the line of questions. He’d been chief for a long time, and there’d never been as many cases as there were lately.

“Do you have something on your mind, Mr. Shaw?”

Lucas admitted, “I was wondering, in a job like yours, do you keep your own counsel, or do you look to others for advice and guidance?”

After thirty-plus years in uniform, Arthur Jones knew the area, the people, and how to read the flow of things locally. He worked with local leaders, businesses, and regional resources. Arthur felt like it was his town, having lived there and protecting it most of his life.

“I get you’re new here, but we have done things this way for years. Until a few months ago, the people were all decent folks. The worst thing we’d ever have is a little too much drinking, an occasional bar brawl, or maybe some teenagers being irresponsible.”

“Did anything change?” asked Lucas.

Arthur continued driving through the northwestern area of town. He had his red and blues activated to help people see him. While he considered if there were any changes, he kept looking for signs of trouble.

“Other than the tensions we all feel, I can’t say I noticed anything different.”

“That’s good,” admitted Lucas.

Lucas worked enough cases to have seen areas ripe with malevolence. In each of them, the people turned, and the area suffered before the dark force showed itself. Sometimes, it would be too late to return a town or a village to its’ former status.

“Does a chief ever experience problems he struggles with, the kind of problems he seeks outside counsel when searching for a solution?”

“Are you asking if I pray?” asked Arthur.

Lucas smiled, “Not necessarily. I’m just curious how the process works when you’re at the top.”

Arthur admitted that some cases will haunt a cop’s career. He remembered an accident from late spring that he struggled to deal with. He still couldn’t get it out of his mind. It forced him to think about retirement.

“We got called for a missing child. The girl was only six.”

“Your files didn’t include a child,” said Lucas.

“She’s not missing, and it wasn’t connected,” he told Lucas.

The chief explained how the girl wandered off. The town was locked down. They used barricades on the roads, put out a regional bulletin, and began a search. The Sheriff’s K-9 units helped track the girl’s route. In the end, it was Arthur that found her body.

“She lived in the trailers off of County Road 20. She must have walked along Dirk’s River and fallen into the water. I tried everything I knew how to do until the paramedics arrived, but she’d been in the water too long,” Arthur explained.

“Jesus,” sighed Lucas. “What a tragedy.”

“I’ll admit, it messed me up. The look on the girl’s face was a look of pure terror. The medical examiner from the state thought it was because of the hypothermia,” explained Arthur.

Arthur rambled on about the girl. The marks on her body and how the examiner thought were from the sticks and rocks alongside most of the river. The look on Arthur’s face told the story best. He didn’t believe the examiner’s explanation.

“What do you think caused it?”

“Have you ever felt terror? I mean the kind of terror that makes death look promising. What put her in the river that day was so horrific that it left a permanent imprint on her. Whatever it was, it was scarier than death itself.”

“Were there any leads?” asked Lucas, his curiosity peaked.

Arthur walked the path between the trailer park and where she went into the river. He explained how he used personal time to examine every inch of the trail. After weeks of going over things and then going over them again, there hadn’t been a solid lead or clue found.

The little girl’s face haunted his dreams. He tossed and turned some nights. When his wife suggested he take a mild sedative to calm himself, he began taking Valium at night. After that, he started to sleep again.

“So, your wife, she’s your outside counsel,” said Lucas.

Lucas knew the value of having someone who listened and gave an objective opinion. One of the better parts of marriage was having that sounding board. His wife had been his compass and always helped him maintain his true north. For Arthur, Mary Lou was his compass.

She was also Arthur’s blind spot.

“Has Mary Lou provided you any insights into the missing person’s cases?”

Arthur thought about it, and their discussions about the missing person’s cases were fruitless. Every night, when he arrived, they had dinner, and she would ask about the string of missing persons. She had remarkably little to say other than they would turn up. Until then, he hadn’t thought about it that much. Arthur thought his wife was being reassuring.

As he continued to drive, looking for people trapped in the mist, the old cop started feeling uneasy. There was a change that he noticed, and it was around the time of the first disappearance. Mary Lou now spent more time in the basement and was gone at odd hours. He never questioned his wife. She’d always been his trusted partner, confidant, and best friend.

“Why did you ask if I’d noticed changes in people?” asked Arthur.

“People tend to change if they’re engaging in criminality for the first time, hiding things, or struggling with darkness. A series of disappearances is a remarkably dark time in a community without a missing person’s complaint since the forties.”

Arthur slammed on the brakes. He turned to Lucas, staring tensely.

“Who the hell are you? I think it’s time you tell me why you’re really here!” he demanded.

“I’m a paranormal investigator from the office of the inquisitors. I’m sent to investigate instances of malevolence around the world.”

Arthur demanded that his partner be more specific with him. He knew Lucas was keeping things to himself.

“What is it that I can’t unhear?”

Lucas agreed to share the facts. He explained to the old cop that there was more than one type of evil on Earth. Since the beginning of the century, the church had to open its teachings. They recruited him after a tragedy struck his family.

“My wife and child were killed by something unholy. The being was an abomination to god.”

“What the hell was it?” asked Arthur.

“Arthur, what have you learned about the princes of Hell?” asked Lucas.

Arthur knew of the reference, but that was all he knew. Lucas explained the seven princes of hell, the hierarchy of the demons, and the powers they represented. Each was a manifestation representing the seven deadly sins. Each was more powerful than the last.

“This is why I’m here helping with your case. The church believes there’s a connection.”

Arthur was stunned. He wasn’t a ghost hunter or psychotic whack job. Arthur was a simple man doing a simple job, protecting the innocent from the bad guys. It was all cops and robbers, good guys versus the bad, and at the end of the day, you tried to go home and forget.

“Now, I answered your question. I’d like to know why you asked?” admitted Lucas. “Why now, in the middle of what’s going on?”

Arthur thought back to the first disappearance. She was a high school senior. The girl had an accident just a few months before disappearing. They thought she’d run off to avoid the consequences. That was a case Arthur was deeply involved with. The woman who died was a church member, a saint, by all accounts.

The second girl who disappeared was a dealer. She’d hurt more people slinging dope on the streets than anyone in Arthur’s career.

“What are looking or in LeClaire?” asked Arthur. “What’s this really about?”

“I think one of them is here, one of the seven princes,” explained Lucas. “And, I think that’s why people have gone missing, and why we’re driving through this blasted foggy mist.”

Arthur turned toward the front, put his squad in gear, and continued to drive. He listened as Lucas explained the last encounter with a prince. How it had taken over an innocent, someone probably desperate and needing something important.

“Would these seven prince of hell types have the power to say, cure a woman of cancer?”

“Certainly, if someone was willing to trade their soul and become an agent of chaos,” Lucas admitted. “Why?”

“I got a call from my wife’s doctor right before he disappeared. He wanted to talk to me about her cancer being back and how she’d stopped going to see him,” Arthur explained.

“So,” said Lucas.

“She never told me the cancer had returned. She’s been healthier and more energetic than she has in years. Her parents told me stories about when she was a young woman. About some of the things she was into,” said Arthur.

“Witchcraft, wiccan studies, the occult?” asked Lucas.

Arthur nodded his head.

“Dr. Ellis wanted to meet me but never made to dinner that night. His wife thinks he ran off with a young nurse or something. But, there’s been no hits on his credit cards, no wire transfers, and the GPS on his cell and in his car haven’t been active,” Arthur sighed.

“Did anyone else know you were meeting him?”

Sadly, Arthur could only nod, knowing the most likely suspect in his case. He grabbed his radio and called dispatch.

“This is Chief Jones. Send units to my residence. Secure the house. Suspicion of involvement in seven missing person’s cases. Suspect is….Mary Lou Jones.”

Twenty-five minutes later, Lucas and Chief Jones were pulling up to the chief’s residence. Several local units made it there before them, and the men were nervously standing outside. Arthur barked at his men, demanding to know why they weren’t securing the residence.

“It’s secure, sir. We’re not sure what we’re looking for. How does…well, how does she fit into this?” asked Walt Jenkins.

Arthur didn’t know what to say. Lucas stepped in, telling Arthur to catch his breath. Lucas walked the young patrol officer over to the rest of them.

“Arthur’s got a lot on his mind. You know your jobs. Process the house as if you were serving a search warrant. Be discreet about what you find, but bag and tag anything you find suspicious and someone videotape everything,” said Lucas.

“With all due respect,” one of the officers asked, “Who the hell are you?”

Arthur reached into his pocket and pulled out identification that told the patrol officers to listen.

“I’m here consulting, helping an old friend with the disappearances. Now, do I have to call the state police, or the FBI?”

One of the older patrol officers stepped forward, “Um, no sir. You guys heard the man, give the boss a break under the circumstances and let’s just get this done.”

As the patrol officers went back inside the house and began processing the residence of their Chief, Lucas consoled Arthur.

“I’m sure they’re good people. They just need to be led,” he said.

“What was that badge you showed them?”

“It’s a picture of me on an I.D. card that reads O.G.A. The federal symbol makes it all seem real.”

“What about my wife?” asked Arthur.

Lucas wasn’t certain. The last poor soul possessed by a prince of hell didn’t fare well. He didn’t want to make any promises.

We have to question her is all that he could say with any certainty.

“You’re not a cop,” Arthur reminded him.

“Do you want to know the truth, stick to procedural issues that will keep us from finding out if she’s involved?”

Arthur wanted to help his wife.

The two walked in and made their way to Arthur’s kitchen. An officer stood by with Mary Lou, sitting at the kitchen table as they drank tea. Lucas and Chief Jones entered and the chief told his subordinate to give them the room. When the young officer left, thanking Mary Lou for the beverage, the two men sat down across from the woman.

“What’s going on, dear? Why did they burst in the way they did?”

Arthur looked at his wife, held her hand, and admitted, “Because I ordered them to bust in and make sure you didn’t leave.”

“Why?”

Arthur’s eyes filled with tears. He struggled to think straight. Seeing the old cop fall apart, Lucas stepped in for him.

“How are you still alive?”

Mary Lou looked confused. She asked what he meant by such a thing, staring at Arthur’s distraught face.

“Your doctor was meeting with Arthur to discuss your cancer returning before he disappeared. But, I’m betting you know that,” said Lucas.

Mary Lou stared at Arthur, gripping his hand in hers. While Lucas continued to push the questions, Arthur felt himself being pulled away from the room.

Arthur stared at the disfigured gargoyle of a face that bellowed in his head. The sound of Aamon’s voice was booming, and as he listened, he heard the worst.

“No, I don’t want that,” said Arthur.

Mary Lou stared at Arthur, nodding her head. Arthur mumbled something, leaving Lucas to question him.

“What?”

A loud pop occurred and Lucas pushed away from the table. The second loud pop resulted in a scream and patrol officers scrambling into the kitchen, their guns drawn. They were too late.

To be continued…

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