GNELFS (18 page)

"Sir, I hardly think this could be a matter of life or death."

"Ask them if they know anything about
The Book of
Raziel
."

"I'm not supposed to bother them. They're on deadline with a new project."

"Please."

Hesitantly she moved away from her desk and through a door. She returned in a few moments, face puzzled.

"That seemed to get their attention," she said. "Go right in."

The
Gnelfs
creators were laboring in a cluttered writer’s room in which a large white board faced a table holding laptops and crumpled note paper. The wall was decorated with framed images of the various
Gnelf
characters. The creators were both in their early thirties. One was tanned and had smooth blond hair. The other, who sat behind a drawing board, was heavier, wore glasses and sported a beard, while a snap-brim hat covered his thinning hair. They both looked nervous.

"Can I help you?" the heavy one asked.

Danube stood in the doorway, looking from one man to the other, studying them quickly, spotting weaknesses and dangers with this hasty assessment. Softly, he spoke, introducing himself.

The heavy one shifted about on his stool. "What the hell do you want?"

Danube found a seat facing the men. "I want to talk to you about your creation," he said. "You are?”

“What?" the blond man asked.

“Your names."

"I'm Robert Eden," the blond man answered. This is Allen Hyde."

"Eden and Hyde. Creators of
Gnelfs
and
Gnelfland
."

They nodded, intimidated, wondering if they should call security. He kept his eyes focused on them to keep them in place. He intended them no harm, but he wanted no interference.

His strength had been taxed by the encounter with Davis, the touch for Devon, and the effort to get past the receptionist. He wasn't up to the strain of battle or the further effort needed to extract information.

"The two of you do most of the preliminary artwork?"

"What is this about?" Hyde asked.

Danube closed his eyes, fighting to control impatience and building anger. "I need answers about your work," he said. "I don’t have the time to go through the effort of creating a
façade
in order to talk with you, and I do not have the patience to try to make you believe who I am or why I am here. Now, you do the artwork?"

"I did the initial stuff," Hyde answered, still a bit indignant. "On the TV shows, hell, there's a whole staff of people.
Inbetweeners
, character—"

"The books," Danube said.

"Yeah, that's kinda how we got started."

"Why did you put the symbols in there?"

"What? What symbols."

The color began to drain from the blond man's face. In spite of his tan he seemed to go pale, snow white. "You're not from one of those coalitions or something, are you? You're not going to organize a boycott? We're not Satanists."

"I need to know why they are there—and where you found them," Danube said.

Eden glanced over at his associate. "Hyde put them in there."

Hyde smirked, and his eyes rolled upward in disgust. "They're nothing," he said. "Just like Procter and Gamble's man in the moon."

"They are a little more pertinent than that," Danube said. "They have an actual connection with ancient rites."

Hyde grimaced again. "We didn't know that, man. We just wanted something that looked authentic."

"Look, those are the earlier books anyway," Eden said. "When we signed the cartoon deal and the merchandising agreement, they made us ease up. They were afraid somebody would get the wrong idea."

"Someone did," Danube said. "Someone very powerful, I'm afraid. While those marks are harmless on their own, they can be utilized. They are marks for conjuring or binding, and once they are planted in a child's mind—"

"Come on," Hyde said. "They're bullshit. This is California; we picked up some stuff in some shops. It's nothing. It's like crystals or such."

Eden leaned across the table and touched Hyde's arm. "Remember? That night we were scared."

"We'd had a few mind-altering substances. Who knows what happened. It could have been an earthquake."

"You were attacked?"

“Tell him,” Hyde said.

"We were fooling around, doing some sketches on the white board. We were doing a deal where the
Gnelfs
were opening up a cave of treasure, and it was sealed with this magic symbol. They couldn't enter. We were trying to figure out what the seal would look like, and Hyde was doing some sketches. We were playing with some designs, inverting things, turning them around so we'd have a symbol of our own, not a duplication of those in the books we had."

"And what happened?"

"We heard something," Hyde said. "We turned and the door flew open. There was nothing there, but the room got cold. So cold we started shivering. It didn't make sense. It was warm otherwise."

Eden remembered. "That's what I said then," he noted. "I was sitting here at the desk talking to Allen while he was drawing, so I got up to close the door. I figured I'd check the thermostat on the air conditioner too. We were trying to treat what had happened rationally.

"Before I made it to the door something picked me up, I mean right up in the air, and then I was pitched over the desk."

"I got up then and ran toward him," Hyde said. "And the drawing table turned over. I spun about and looked toward it, and all of these
exacto
knives started coming for me like darts. It was like a scene from one of those horror movies. You know, where they do it with butcher knives?"

Danube indicated he understood.

Before continuing, Hyde wiped a bead of perspiration from his forehead. Recalling the incident was reliving it.

"I don't guess those knives would have killed me," he said holding up one of the small instruments. It had a long silver handle and a small, razor-sharp blade. "But the lot of them would have cut me up pretty badly."

"You escaped how?"

" Dropped. They went over me, like a school of fish. That's where they wound up."

He pointed toward one of the framed images on the wall. Eden turned to it and lifted the picture off its hook to reveal the slits where the blades had become embedded.

"There was no explaining that," Hyde said. "I stayed on the floor for a while and asked Rob if he was all right. He was bruised, but he was okay."

We started to get up then." Eden's expression was sober. "We didn't get far before the stuff on the drawing table started flying."

"Wind?"

"It was weirder than that," Eden said.

“The paper is kind of heavy." Hyde picked up one of the large rectangular cards he used for his work. Running a fingertip across the edge of it, he gave Danube an idea of its texture.

"It started kind of whipping through the air. Slashing toward us," Eden said. “We tried backing up a little. It followed us. I threw my arm up, and one of the sheets raked across it."

He held up his right forearm to reveal a thin white scar which streaked through his tan. “It felt like I'd been cut with a sword."

As their descriptions continued, Danube let his mind pick up the memories, re-creating the scene for himself as they told of how they had faced a swirling onslaught. He saw it as if it were happening before him…

The sheets began to spin en masse, twisting about in a uniform pattern that created a huge whirling column. As tall as a person, it came twisting through the air like a ballet dancer, ripping and slashing.

The blood from Eden's wound dripped down his arm, indicating the force was not imagination. It was unexplained, but it was real.

Together they overturned the desk and huddled behind it, letting the paper slam into the desktop to disburse in another burst of wind.

Then, in an instant, it re-formed, taking a position on the other side of the desk and swirling after them again. Before they could move, it slashed forward, cutting Eden near his forehead and slicing through the loose shirt Hyde wore. They scrambled over the desk, and, fleeing the whirling cylinder, leaped over the drawing table.

Despite his weight, Hyde proved agile. Noticing a single piece of paper still resting on the table, Hyde had snatched it up.

It was the last drawing he had been working on, and it featured one of the symbols. He had been sketching a panel in which the
Gnelfs
open a chamber in a forgotten cavern. The symbol had something to do with openings in some ancient ritual, so he had used it.

As the column of paper moved up over the drawing board and hovered as if about to strike, he ripped the page to shreds.

When that happened, the column was no more. The now-limp paper showered to the floor as if it had been dropped from someone's hands. When it connected with tile, it was still and flat, offering no further sign of animation. As the two men knelt on the floor, looking at the paper, they heard the faint sound of—God almighty! —
laughter
.

"After that, we thought we
musta
had some bad shit, but we stopped using the symbols," Hyde said.

“But countless editions of your books and episodes of the cartoon were already on the market."

“We couldn't pull all that shit back," Hyde exclaimed. “You know how much money that would cost the publishers? Hell, it'd make headlines too if we started talking about some weird experience like that. Everybody would think we're crazy."

"You realized the menace of the power those symbols controlled, and you did not attempt to do anything?"

That was the only time anything happened. We didn't think it was real," Hyde said. "Hell, do you know what it was? Can you tell us?"

"Something you did acted as a summoning—through the symbol. You let something in a realm beyond this world reach through, but you closed the opening before true harm could befall you. The creatures have no true form in this realm, so they manipulated what they could to torment you.”

"What do you mean, no form?" Eden asked.

“They are not physical beings. They are spiritual, ethereal. They do not have a tangible presence, so they must either possess something or find some other way to form a physical presence. Fortunately your thoughts were not focused enough on the symbol or they could have utilized the image of it in your mind, and then there would have been no way to banish them. It is interesting the way they attacked you. The wounds you suffered were aggravating yet not life threatening. It was as if your tormentors were … playing pranks."

~*~

The laughter followed the wind through the living room, loud echoing laughter. Heaven sat up abruptly, clinging to her mother.

"It's them," she said. “The
Gnelfs
."

Gabrielle wrapped her arms protectively around the child and looked back to Tanner and Marley. She didn't have to speak. Both men were already on their feet, and Althea moved to her side, placing her body protectively over the child as well.

As the wind tore at his face and played with his hair, Marley stared into it defiantly until it subsided. Tanner stood at his side, watching him, hoping the preacher knew what to do, but Marley seemed confused. His fists clenched and unclenched, and he kept wetting his lips with his tongue.

He was about to speak when something crashed down on the coffee table, shattering the sheet of glass that covered it, splintering the wood. The table crumpled, no more than a pile of fragments.

"Get the girl out of here," Marley shouted.

Althea and Gab carried Heaven between to the hallway. As they exited the room, a vibration began to stir the glass fragments and wood.

"I rebuke you," Marley shouted as the vibrations continued. He raised one hand and pointed toward the table. "I rebuke you in the name of the Holy One. I rebuke you and command you to go back to the pits from whence you came."

He looked at Tanner then, as if realizing he was being too melodramatic. The vibrations were continuing, and Tanner could feel shockwaves beneath his feet even though the house was on a concrete slab.

When he looked back at the table he saw the glass blast upward, as if an explosive charge had been ignited beneath it. Shards were driving forward like buckshot, and he shoved Marley down, snatching a chair cushion.

He swung it just in time to deflect a spray of shards. The pieces padded into the thick upholstery like shrapnel, but they did not pass through.

Marley was shouting the Twenty-third Psalm now as he crawled behind the couch. Tanner dove after him as the sharp wooden slivers from the table sailed, small misshapen arrows. Some struck the couch and others flew over it, zipping across the room to become embedded in the wall or tangle in the curtains.

Marley rebuked the spirits again and shouted out assorted prayers and blessings. He had begun a liturgy when the laughter returned, low guttural chuckles that mingled.

Slowly, they began to subside. Tanner sighed as he collapsed back against the couch. Beside him, Marley continued to pray, his hands clasped together and his eyes closed tightly. He was asking God for protection for the house.