N.L. Bryar

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He picked it up off the nightstand, this intruder did. Long fingers touched behind its frame, thumbs running up the sides, like cradling the head of a precious infant, which, in his world, the grown woman in the photo will very much be. He noted she had her grandfather’s high cheeks, rascally smile, and lithe bearing. She stood on a beach under a brick arch reading “Punta Pescadera”, a deep-sea game-fishing-pole over her shoulder, a rope in her other hand. At the other end, dangling upside-down, arms crossed, eyes slitted askance at his sister, the other grandchild — the one who didn’t make it.

The intruder turned over the picture frame. Hooking the nail of his little finger beneath the staples, he bent them, then lifted the backing free. Outside, the moon passed behind clouds, darkening the room, but the intruder’s keen eyes still made out what the woman had written. “Grandpa David; Here we are in Mexico. Kevin washed out to sea yesterday following the songs of mermaids. But I fished him back. He’ll look great over your mantle. Love Nikki and Kevin.”

Good, her sense of humor is a step ahead of her grandfather’s. At which thought, the intruder turned his eyes to the figure in the bed.

“Hello, David. How long it’s been,” spoke a voice unchanged in the eighty-odd years since last the old man heard it. Even from the deep, deep sleep of Oxy Codone, David Marshman lurched awake with the speed of a mouse-trap. From any other voice, he might puzzle over those words a moment, calling up the memories of lost friends, acquaintances, or enemies. Not this voice. Distinct for David, right down to the core of his being, the way one can tell a baby-rattle from a diamondback.

David lay as still as a corpse, eyes wide though blind in the dark. Desperation hammered in his ribs, yet he was afraid to move a muscle, afraid even to breathe, under some naive notion it would give his position away. Of course, lying in a hospital bed pegs your position.

Silence. David was asking himself had he just emerged from a nightmare, or woke to one?

“Will you not speak to me, old friend?”

David Marshman scrambled— in the cursedly slow, disorderly way his hundred year old, narcotic-infused, frame allowed him— to fetch his glasses. Trembling, he knocked the Readers’ Digest to the floor, then toppled a cup of long-melted ice-chips atop it, a chapstick finally clattering down to join the heap. He was still fumbling about when the intruder pushed the side-rail button that turned-on the cold, sharp light.

He spun his head around, his gaze now fixated on the tall, pale man standing beside him. David’s left hand still groped among the nightstand’s diminishing occupants.

“No greeting?” the man said, pausing and directing his gaze to the glasses David sought. He finally pawed the pair, which he then brought faceward, never peeling his gaze from the man standing beside him. “I know it’s ill-mannered to show-up unannounced, but … we have an urgent development.”

With no response from Marshman, the man huffed. God, he looked exactly the same. Exactly. Skin smooth as marble, and with the same coldness and gravity of it, and the clear, piercing eyes, blue-black like the sea … at the scene of some nocturnal shipwreck. But no bullet scars in that perfect forehead.

“David, I assure you I have not come tonight to exact some revenge,” the intruder said, gesturing as if to shoo away a gnat. “In fact it seems time is more vindictive to you than me.”

“Wha … What do you want, Bishop?” David said, in a voice that mixed the echo of defiance with the creakiness of age and the gerbil trill of fear.

The pale man shrugged. “To pay my respects, I guess. It’s a rarified community that knows the secrets you and I know, … who know what’s at stake when the artifact resurfaces.”

David’s mouth dropped open. Just then he noticed the empty picture frame, the photo held in the Bishop’s hand. Nikki. His Nikki. So, there it was, the Bishop aimed to get his clutches around his granddaughter the very way he wrapped his lifeless fingers around the mere picture of her.
David’s throat made a pining plea and he shook his head with what felt to be the speed of a hummingbird’s wings.

“I won’t let you destroy her life,” he said, his heart hammering, the words nearly silent in the rasping of too little breath.

“Believe what you will,” the Bishop replied, again with a gnat-shooing gesture. “But the Unholy Grail has returned and your blood-line has … unmet obligations. I suppose I’m here, also, in case you yourself have some final curiosity I could fulfill.”

The Bishop’s eyes glowed rich amber and fangs peeked from beneath his lip.

“Go to hell!” David spat, sweat beading on skin going ashen. His body quivered and pain clenched his chest and lanced up his left arm, as if a python began its feast there while its victim still wiggled.

The Bishop stepped closer, peered down, and shook his head. “My apologies, David; I didn’t plan to frighten you to death,” he said. “You know, I am a churchman, if you’d like to receive Extreme Unction,… though I believe in earlier years you strayed from the faith.”

“D…damn y…you!”

“Quite possibly. Only I have work to do first. Oh, do you have any last words I should pass on to Nikki?”

David, face wracked with pain, scowled his contempt, then thrust the back of his head into his pillow, arching upward in a coaxing argument against his own failing heart.

“No! No! No!”

“On that note, Aline sends her love. She’s eager to meet Nikki, too. Goodbye, David. Know that we will succeed this time. I can feel it in my blood.”

David Marshman departed our mortal realm with horror etched on his face.

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