Openings (Book One of The Pawn's Game)

OPENINGS

Book One of The Pawn’s Game

By Victor Nox

Copyright 2012-2017

Smashwords Edition

Chapter 1

When Nietzsche said, He who fights monsters should take care that he does not become a monster. I don’t think he was talking about me. In my position, his statement is both too literal, and well, just plain wrong. Think about it. Most your garden-variety monsters literally can or do turn you into one of them. Vampires can make you one of them. Werewolves turn you into one of them, if you survive. Zombies do it too. And they aren’t nearly the most dangerous beasts running around these days. Also, Nietzsche got it wrong when he said that becoming a monster is something to we should avoid. The only way to beat these things is be more ruthless, more efficient, and more brutal than they are. Luckily, I’m not some blood sucking night stalker or shambling undead cannibal. I’m something much more vicious, a human being. My name is Jed Morehouse, and I fight monsters.

Unfortunately, the glory days of monster fighting have long since gone the way of myth and legend. Neither I, nor anyone I have ever met, had actually seen a werewolf or a vampire, and the last reported sighting of a zombie was in a hospital in Barbados. That was a teenage girl, a sad creature and no harm to anyone. As such, generally, I fight much more mundane monsters. It’s not what the Conclave envisioned when they created my post back in the dark days, but when most of your serious targets have left this mortal coil, you continue with the less serious ones. These days I hunt down simpler things, humans mostly. You know the type. Serial killers who use rituals that are a little too close to the real thing, men and women who are into alchemy and have a penchant for poisoning, and religious zealots of one flavor or another that my bosses suspect of having at least a small genuine tie to their preferred deity.

The Conclave doesn’t like people trying to make life more interesting than society can readily accept. Mundane equals safe in their minds. So when someone shows up on their radar with signs that something metaphysical is going on, they send me out to check into it and, if need be, take it out. Sure, you can lock up a nutcase for murder but unfortunately, that doesn’t stop the things he’s working with from wreaking havoc. Since the authorities are neither aware, nor equipped to handle that sort of thing, it falls to us.

That was the reason why I was spending a bright spring morning in the mess hall of a Vermont State Correctional Facility. Something about one, Phillip Conway got my superiors’ hackles up. He wasn’t a very dangerous person by his file. Mostly laundering and fraud charges, but the nature of the charges shed some light on why I was hunting him. They had to do with an unapproved church he ran. He and about twenty or so followers were trying to revive what they called the old gods. According to the pamphlet he handed out to anyone who would take one, the old gods had not left the world by choice but rather we had forced them out by the industrial revolution. All the fossil fuels, electricity, and radio signals that had cropped up over the last hundred years or so had, according to Phillip, scrambled the communication method by which these old gods were talking to mankind. It sounded very simplistic to me, but there must have been something to it if the Conclave sent me to track him down, so what did I know?

We had arranged with a select few of the guards on duty that day for me to have a little private chat with Phil. We couldn’t have gone the official route since, well, we’re not official in any way the justice system recognizes. So we had to go with an old standby, bribery.

The Conclave used bribery to fix many of its problems. Money was the grease that made the wheels of our operation run smoothly. Since some of the major power brokers of the time had started the Conclave several hundred years ago, they had some heavy weight to throw around when they wanted to. A long-term investment in securing themselves and their property against such things as trolls and ogres sounded like a good idea to the land and castle owners of the time. And so, by the time the early 1800s came around they rivaled the Vatican for sheer economic size. Bribery had become the simplest and quickest way through red tape and we used it frequently. Today the Conclave’s coffers are only a fraction of what they were back then, but it’s still the fastest way to grab some authoritative power without actually having to go through an authority.

A vacant utility closet near the cafeteria was chosen for this our conversation, and the guards were kind enough to put a couple of chairs, the files on Phil, along with a rather nice looking piece of improvised cutlery in there in case he wasn’t going to be cooperative. I couldn’t bring my own tools due to the security protocols, but I wouldn’t need them for this excursion. I located Phil as the prisoners filed in for what I could only loosely call food, and then nodded to the blonde behemoth of a guard who stood by the room’s entrance. The guard escorted Phil quietly and without fuss out of the mess hall and into our makeshift interview room. I followed a few yards behind, taking the measure of my target.

He was middle aged, balding, a bit on the pudgy side, and seemed completely unfazed by what was going on. I took this to mean either he didn’t understand his situation, or he just didn’t care. I was hoping for the former, as ignorance would mean he was just some loony with a religious lean. If he were the latter, I would have to be wary of him. People who realize the hazards of the situation Phil was now in and don’t start shaking make me nervous.

Phil sat down in one of the chairs and I took the other one.

You have fifteen minutes, the guard said, then walked out of the closet, shutting the door behind him. I grabbed the files and scanned through the first couple of pages of Phil’s arrest report. I like doing this at the beginning of an interview. It makes the subject seem less important to me, and the twitchy types start to squirm. Overall, the combination of feigned disinterest and silence make for a smooth transition into the next stage.

After a good long time, I shut the files and looked straight into Mr. Conway’s eyes. I saw nothing. The eyes were there but there didn’t seem to be a person behind them. It’s hard to explain if you have never noticed this yourself. There is some sort of life that’s in a person’s eyes. Some sign of intelligence; you can see it in certain animals too. It’s the reason why no matter how good the CGI in a movie is or how well crafted a doll is, the eyes always give away the fact that what you’re looking at isn’t alive. Phil Conway had dolls’ eyes.

I was starting to see why my superiors were taking an interest in this man.

Mr. Conway, do you know who I am? I asked.

He gave no reply. He just sat there staring at me with a grin on his face.

Mr. Conway, I represent certain interests. Interests who need to be persuaded that your actions and intentions regarding the church you headed are harmless ones, Again, he gave no answer.

Mr. Conway, are you listening to me?

It was at this point drool began oozing out of the left corner of his mouth, making its way to his chin. This was not what I was expecting. Usually the more harmless targets started to grovel and make proclamations about how they’ll never do what they did again. That is, if they had any idea who the Conclave was. Phil just sat there with that stupid grin on his face and those dead eyes, stubbornly drooling at me.

I took the blade the guard had left for me and gently made a small cut in the back of his right hand. It wasn’t deep and he only bled a little but there was no response. Not even a reflexive jerking of his hand. Whatever or whoever Phil Conway used to be, he was gone. The person sitting in front of me was just so much meat and plumbing now. He was obviously alive; at least clinically, but anything you could call an identity had left the body.

I called for the guard. The Viking turned security officer peeked in through the closet door and I asked him if Mr. Conway had taken any medication during his incarceration. He said that he hadn’t. I asked if Phil had been in any fights, or had anyone reported him for strange behavior. The guard said that since Mr. Conway had only arrived nine days ago there really hadn’t been much of a chance for him to get into trouble just yet. Finally, I asked if he knew Mr. Conway to go catatonic or drool on himself frequently.

It was then that the guard looked skeptical and said, No sir, he’s been perfectly coherent anytime I saw him. I’m pretty sure if he was showing signs of a medical issue like that he wouldn’t be out in the general population.

The guard then changed his focus from me to the drooling man sitting across from me and looked very worried. What did you do to him? the guard asked.

I didn’t do anything to him. Well, besides cut his hand a little, I replied.

The guard started sweating. You had better make this right, or at least give me a good reason why this man became a drooling vegetable, or my ass is in trouble, and I’ll find a way to make you part of that. He said it in a tone that most people reserve for the man who ran over your dog.

I sighed, put down the files I was holding, and went to the back of the closet. There I found a mop, a bucket, and some wet floor signs and started arranging them in the hallway outside the closet. I told the guard to go fill up the bucket and slosh it around the floor a bit then went back in the closet to deal with our empty friend. I picked up the blade once again and made a three inch cut on the back of Mr. Conway’s head. He couldn’t feel it, or if he could, he gave no sign.

I waited until I could hear the guard coming back. His footsteps made more of a racket than I was expecting in the empty hallway. He sloshed some of the water around the staged mopping area and helped me drag the empty man out and lay him down in a position suggesting he slipped and whacked his head.

Tell whoever asks, that you pulled him out to mop the floor. Just to make sure the new prisoner knew who was in charge around here and that you could command him to do anything at any time. I doubt you’ll catch much flak for that. Though you had better report it before our time is up or someone might get their own ideas before you can get your story across. He scowled but accepted this course of action. He didn’t have time to think of something else. He ran off to report an injured prisoner and I got to work on making myself scarce.

It was just another example of people wanting to believe something simple rather than the truth. I doubted if any of the guards not in on our little arrangement would bother looking into it. They wouldn’t want to question such an obvious explanation. Those kinds of people cling to the notion of Occum’s razor being the end all in rational methodology. Don’t get me wrong. Occum was a smart man; but his razor doesn’t always cut deep enough, and because it doesn’t, people like that often miss the real but strange reasons for things. There are many people like that. They make my job much easier.

The two other guards we had temporarily put on our payroll let me through the gates and check points without hassle. After making it to my car and out of the compound, I had time to go over what I had just seen and what it could mean. I didn’t know of too many things that would fry a man’s brain like that, at least not without destroying or damaging the body along with it. I guessed it could just be a normal thing like a stroke or aneurism, but I was no doctor and wasn’t even sure what the signs of those things would be. Since the Conclave was involved, I decided that tracking down normal explanations was probably going to be barking up the wrong tree. So what kind of paranormal thing could do that to a man?

While getting onto I-91 south I noted the fact that, until I got there, he had been acting like a normal human being and added it to the list of upsetting things about my excursion. He certainly wasn’t a drooling mess when he entered the cafeteria which suggested that whatever happened had happened right then. Could mean that I triggered it somehow? I didn’t want to be responsible if something bad came out of this. The Conclave doesn’t bother with what you might call due process. They’re more into sticking you into a deep hole and forgetting about you or finding other unpleasant things to do to you until you can convince them that they should stop. They don’t normally bother unless something seriously goes wrong like exposing them or their work to the public. However, when they bring the hammer down on an offender, they take the term, Going Medieval literally.

Did he recognize me from somewhere? I didn’t see how that was possible. I had never laid eyes on Phil before that day. Could he have somehow known whom I work for and taken some kind of mental cyanide pill? Possible, but that didn’t seem right. There was nothing in his file to suggest he was aware of either the Conclave or what it might mean for him. Nothing about the man Phillip Conway that I could find in my prep work suggested he was the suicidal or martyr type. Even if he was the type to end his own life, he had been under prison intake surveillance for the previous week and wouldn’t have been able to prepare something like that.

By the time I had gotten to the Massachusetts state border, I had eliminated Phil frying his own brain as a possible explanation in my own mind. The natural causes were still on the table, but unfortunately, so too were some darker possibilities. The darker options were much more in line with my job description.

I mulled this over for the rest of the trip to North Adams where the Conclave had my handler set up. During my apprenticeship, I read up on the previous Hunter types that held my job, their exploits, and the details of their targets and how to take them out of the picture. Most of what I read was so archaic that it had little bearing on the modern world. No one was going to tell me I had to go to Transylvania to shut a vampire down for instance. However, some of it was still relevant and I searched my memory for a tale, legend, or case file about something that could cause what happened to Mr. Conway.

Other than some vague recollection of reading about something similar somewhere, I came up snake eyes. It felt familiar, but the feeling was all I really had. That meant I was going to have to not only report what happened to my handler Al, but also ask for his help. I grimaced at the thought of that. My handler was not an easy man to get along with, mostly for the same reason he was so good at his job. He was pragmatic. I mean far and beyond what most people think of when they hear that word. I can honestly say that if you didn’t know Al you could mistake him for being bloodthirsty or a sociopath if you had caught him in the wrong light.

He wasn’t, and outside of work, I hear he is actually a decent fellow. I wouldn’t know personally, as I have never spoken to him outside the confines of his office. I don’t think anyone currently employed by the Conclave has. We are not encouraged to interact socially. I hear him mentioned by the locals from time to time, though. I also saw him once several towns to the east presiding over, of all things, a little league baseball game. Seeing him in such a mundane setting was such a surprise that I almost drove my car into a tree. I knew that when I got back I would not find a little league coach smiling at me. I would find the no nonsense steel gaze of my handler.

I wound through the incongruous streets and back alleys of North Adams that I could only assume the city planners designed to inspire uneasiness in outsiders. They seemed to run off in odd angles and inclines as if they were designed more to connect the drug store with the gas station than the normal goal of making navigation easier. You could be lost in only a few blocks if you went down the wrong road and found yourself missing one of the blind turns.

I knew the way; I had grown up around there, so the asphalt maze was familiar. I made it to Books and Baubles, the store Al ran, in good time and parked my old sedan across the street. As usual, the door sign read closed. Al didn’t like waiting on customers so he did his business online and by appointment, trading in old and rare things. Selling first edition books, antique jewelry, as well as some hard to find and not entirely legal artifacts from past and current civilizations constituted his day job. He was semi-retired when I had met him and although his stipend from the Conclave, I was sure, was a hell of a lot more than I made, he kept the shop up for his own reasons. I think he just liked the work and keeping up on esoteric lore. He was one of the world’s experts on all things metaphysical, though he himself never practiced any of it. At least that’s what he told me.

I was in sort of a trial period with the Conclave. After graduating from the apprenticeship, everyone becoming a Hunter had to go through three years of a monitored on the job performance review. My handler was there to guide and assist me in my journey to become a full-fledged contract Hunter. That was the theory anyway. In reality, Al was there to keep my ass in line and report my fuck ups back to the people above him. I only had one more year of this to go through, and as long as Al and I kept things professional, I didn’t see a problem with it.

I used the key Al had given me to open the heavy wooden front door, and walked into a bibliophile’s dream. Al had lovingly arranged the books from floor to ceiling in old-fashioned wooden bookcases, the kind with glass shuttered doors. The store smelled like heaven; all wood pulp, glue, and leather. If one stayed there for a few hours, it would be easy to forget all the cell phones and digital media that seemed to drown modern society. The shop was a sanctuary from the omnipresent electronic flood. Some days I wished that I could just go there outside of work, just to relax and get away from things. He would never allow that though, so I took a few seconds to breathe in the atmosphere before making my report.

I made my way to the back of the store and opened a door marked, Employees Only. There I found Al at his desk documenting and packaging a large piece of parchment he would be mailing out to some avid collector. He was a short man and coming from me that’s saying something. I’m not what they call vertically challenged, or whatever the politically correct term is these days, but I’ll never be able to dunk a basketball, and I had a good three inches on Al. What he lacked in height he made up for in muscle. Even in his waning middle age, his neck was the size of a tree trunk and you could still see there was considerable power under the layer of comfortable living he had put on in the last decade or so.

Hey Al, how’s business? I said by way of a greeting.

Not bad. How’d the thing in Vermont go? he responded, glancing up from his project.

Yeah, about that, I think we might have a problem, I said scratching the back of my head.

Now he gave me his full attention and narrowed his eyes a little. What do you mean ‘we’?

I mean that something fried the guy’s brain. I went to interview a supposed cult leader or something of the like and met up with a walking vegetable. And from what the guard said, it happened just as I arrived.

So? he said, nonplussed.

So, I sure could use some of that wisdom and guidance stuff out of you right about now. I have to file a report in about two hours and I don’t want to have to fill in all of his responses with he drooled.

Al rolled his eyes and said, So you want me to hold your hand on this one?

No, I just need to know what could fry someone’s brain like that in such a short time frame and without damaging the body, I said indignantly.

My indignant attitude and general bravado was a performance I continued more out of habit than inclination these days. I was a hell raiser through my training days and had earned the reputation of the Conclave brat. I was used to acting tough. However, as I became more experienced and came to realize where I really stood in relation to my superiors the doubts crawled in. When I realized that the people with real power were not impressed, and that I didn’t have half the chance I once thought I did against them, it became a facade rather than a belief. I had been questioning myself a lot recently, and finding that rather than resenting the people I answered to, like Al, I was respecting and wanting to impress them. Still, despite my personal issues, I had a reputation to maintain and old habits die-hard.

Al packed up the parchment and set it aside. Then he asked me to recount everything I observed during the interview. I did. Part of the apprenticeship training was in observation. Most people don’t really care or don’t have the time to look at things too closely. They are quite content to get the gist of things and move on to the next subject. The downside of that is they usually miss many important details by blitzing through subjects so quickly. You could miss the fact that the person was wearing mismatched socks for instance, that the watch they were wearing was several sizes too big, or that they were blinking with a second set of eyelids. The little things could mean a whole world of difference. I slipped into my student mode and recalled every detail I could dredge up from memory.

Al listened to it with some patience and no expression. When I had finished, he thought for a minute and said, You were right to bring this to me. My eyes widened a bit in surprise. I had never seen Al welcome a distraction from anyone, at least not in a work capacity.

Go into the vault and get the third book from the left on the top shelf and bring it to me, he said.

The vault was where Al kept all the books in his possession that the Conclave deemed too dangerous for the public. As far as I could tell, it had once been a bank vault circa 1930. It was a massive steel thing with manual antitheft measures rather than the modern electric ones. If you tried to break into it, shafts of hardened metal would come out of the door and lock into the doorframe. After that, you weren’t getting it open if you didn’t have a cutting torch and a couple of days to spare. However, it was open, presumably because of Al’s current project, so I did as he said.

It