A lot later than I intended it to go up, here, finally, is chapter seven of Reaper! I tell you, sometimes the things that you have the most definitive ideas about can be the hardest to put to words, as the visuals and events in this chapter were. I wanted this all to look and feel a certain way, and it didn't translate well to paper. I think I did alright, but more than any before it, expect this chapter to receive edits down the line. Otherwise there isn't much to say. This chapter, hopefully, speaks for itself.
Memories
Having plucked the fears from her mind, the smoke withdrew from El’s face and writhed around her threateningly as she stood motionless in the center of the room.The smoke suddenly flared outward and surrounded the girl and the Reaper. Max was used to this part. Others couldn’t see, but unless Max chose to reject the images stirred in the minds of his victims by his powers, they would display for him in that smoke, twisting around him, creating shapes and images that were distorted and out of scale.
This time was different, though. For the first time Max didn’t resist the images, and so they came more frequently and in more detail. He saw dark corners of dark rooms where all of the furniture was far too big, speeding cars making loud sounds, animals gnashing their teeth, fire, spiders, and assorted unseen horrors lurking in shadow and darkness. The fears were numerous, and far more varied and specific than the general fears that Max usually dealt with.
I need a guide through all of this, Max thought, and as soon as the notion crossed his mind, El took his hand. She was awake and aware! This had never happened before. Usually those affected by Max’s power were too paralyzed to do anything but plead as their fears played out before them. El, however, was able to keep her footing, keep aware, and even look around and perceive what Max himself was seeing.
Is she just that strong, Max wondered, looking down at the girl who was so willing and able to face her own personal horrors, or is this because she allowed this to happen willingly? Of course it didn’t really matter. With El at his side, finding the fear-laden memory that they were searching for should be easy enough. It would only be a matter of concentration, and Max was sure that concentration was something that El had plenty of.
“W-what do we do now?” El asked, her hands shaking.
Max wasn’t sure. Already so many things had occurred which he hadn’t expected. He resolved, however, to remain strong for El. To make it seem that he knew what was happening, even if he didn’t. El was being faced with the worst parts of her own subconscious. Strong or not, any additional stress could push her over the edge.
So in response, Max said, “Just focus on that...that day, on a detail that you do remember, and let the rest of it come naturally.”
At Max’s side, El nodded. She closed her eyes and focused. At first nothing happened, and then, sensing that El, and by extension El’s psyche, was unaware and vulnerable, the terrifying things which lurked in the open joined with the ones shrouded in darkness and moved toward her, meaning to dig into her mind and rend it asunder. Max had anticipated this. This was the beginnings of the Penalty Game. Max was sure that he could hold the fears back, since it wasn’t his intention to punish El, but to help her. He concentrated, conjuring smoke to intercept the incoming fears, but to his surprise, the smoke that he conjured made the fears even bigger.
“Sooner rather than later, preferably,” Max said to El in a measured voice, stepping between her and the fears. He heard her take a deep breath, and then, just before the advancing figures could reach then, the smoke changed shape, pulling back from them and taking on the form of an open room.
“Where are we?” Max asked as the place came more into focus. It seemed larger than it should have, and it only took Max a moment to realize that this meant that the memory came from a time when El was much smaller. As he looked around, he saw details sharpening, and new objects and features taking form in whatever corners of the room that El took notice of. So Max followed her gaze.
He watched as the walls of the room came into focus, or as much focus as they could being made out of smoke. They looked rough, but not rigid. They fluttered, but not because they were formed from smoke. They fluttered because they were canvas, like the walls of a tent. Max’s suspicions were confirmed when El’s gaze reached the center of the wall to the left, and an opening appeared there, hanging open.
“This is the tent that we lived in on the dig,” El told Max, unnecessarily at this point. “I know this.”
She grew tense, “This is a nightmare that I used to have. This is it, the moment that my parents were killed.”
She looked up, and a surface formed from the smoke, coming into existence just above us. “I’m a little kid, under the work table that Mom and Dad kept near the center of the room. Dad told me to run and hide there. I don’t think they knew that the man would make them take him right back to the tent. I think they assumed I would be safe there. Turned out I was. The man never saw me.”
“What’s going on outside?” Max asked. He’d realized that he could hear a crackling beyond the canvas.
“I don’t know,” said El, “not for sure, but I think the man set the camp on fire to force my mom and dad out in the open so he could...make them do whatever he needed them to do. I don’t know what it was. I never heard the part where he made his demands.”
“But you did hear part of the conversation?” Max asked.
“Yeah,” said El. “I didn’t understand it, though, so some of the details always stay vague in this dream. In this memory, I guess. The stuff I didn’t get is always interspersed with random nonsense words that I did understand at the time. It happens when Mom and Dad walk in, any second now.”
It was a moment later when the entry flap opened and two people walked in. Both were sparse on detail, much like this place around them. They had also clearly been romanticized in El’s memory. The male figure of El’s father was broad shouldered and barrel chested like a superhero, and the feminine figure of her mother was exaggeratedly elegant. Both turned and stood defiantly facing the entrance, as behind them another figure emerged. This one was tall and slim, standing above the entire room, his face blackened out, pinpoint red eyes being the only visible feature. When he spoke, his voice echoed with an almost demonic cadence.
“Where are they?” the threatening figure of the murderer demanded. “You said that the doormats were here. Show me.”
Doormats? Max wondered. What did that mean? What word had El’s young mind substituted this for?”
“How foolish can you be?” El’s father replied back, his voice clear, confident, and reassuring. “I had them with me. I always did. When I saw the fires, when I realized what you were planning to do, I tossed them into the flames. The doormats are gone.”
“You must have made double cades to send back to the universe,” the figure in the doorway said, leaving Max puzzled once again. “Tell me how to find them and you might make it out of here alive.”
“We’ll never do what you ask,” El’s mother replied, as defiant as her husband, “Especially not after seeing the potent oil of that artichoke.”
Doormats, double cades, Max thought, growing frustrated, potent oil and artichokes? What does this all mean? What did these people really say?
He wondered all of this as smoke, not his smoke, but smoke from the fires, began to pour into the tent and draw in close to Max and El, partially obscuring their view. The room suddenly seemed to grow tighter, like it was getting ready to close in and press them like a vice. The figure spoke a few more words, which El hadn’t heard over her own rapid heart beat, and then he raised his hand. Something gleamed in it. Max recognized it as a knife, though it was jagged, overly long, and distorted, so no details of the object could be made out.
The figure swung the knife wildly, and transparent blades, like shards of glass, launched themselves from the knife edge and flew, silent as ghosts, toward El’s parents. There was a desperate screech of pain and anguish and sounds of liquid splattering against sand and canvas as the figure in the doorway laughed wildly, as if he genuinely enjoyed what he was doing. Things began to grow dark and dissolve as the assailant laughed hysterically, and El’s other fears began to creep into the place where the observers waited. Max looked over at El. She was breaking down, giving into the horrors that she felt. Any longer and the Penalty Game would begin. El would face the Experience of Death, and she might not ever wake up.
“Ellie,” said Max in the most confident voice he could muster, “you have to be strong. You have to face your fears and send them away.”
El, however, didn’t seem to hear him. Her eyes were locked on the approaching fears, and she was shaking, frozen in place, giving them power. So Max did the only thing he could. He took El by the arms and turned her to face him. He locked eyes with her, and he said, “El, I’m here with you. Focus on me, clear your head, and send your fears away.”
El drew into him, making Max blush, and the fears drew back. The room around them began to lose focus and dissolve back into smoke, taking many of the fears with it. “I remember this,” said El, deep in thought. Then, more excitedly, she announced, “I remember this!”
She turned around, and rather than her poor parents or her other various lurking fears, the smoke took the form of a large table with various papers and objects strewn upon it, with two people beneath it. One was a young girl, very obviously the young El, and the other was a man in his late forties with graying hair and a thick mustache. Both looked on horrified at something before them, and then the man drew a terrified El into himself to muffle her cries and save them from being discovered. As she cried, this man cried along with her, but he never took his eyes off of what was happening in that room, waiting for the moment when it would be safe to take the girl away to a place where she could be more readily protected.
“You being here with me,” El told Max, “helped me remember. My parents didn’t send me off to hide alone, they sent a friend of theirs with me to keep me safe while they tried to stop whatever was happening. It was his idea to take me to my family’s tent, not theirs. They probably didn’t even know I was here. When my parents were...were killed, he made sure I didn’t scream.”
She looked me in the eyes, “He was with me when the rescuers came. He’s still alive, too. His name is Arlen Cord. Professor Arlen Cord. I think he was the friend who helped my dad sponsor the dig in the first place. I think I can find him!”
Suddenly, even under the effects of Max’s spell, El wasn’t afraid anymore. Across the magic which still connected them, Max could feel not despair and hopelessness, but excitement and hope. The dark smoke which surrounded them turned bright white. Max and El both turned and looked around with awe as new images began to form around them.
El at school making friends for the first time after the loss of her parents. Young El being picked up by her father. El playing with a happy dog. El suiting up in her full combat gear for the first time. It didn’t take much reasoning to realize that, somehow, Max’s spell had stopped showing El’s most fearful memories, and started showing her happiest ones, the ones which kept her going when things went wrong. The ones which gave her hope and strength. So it was shocking to Max when he saw, amongst these other things, a memory of himself taking down his hood and revealing himself to El, showing that he trusted her with something of himself. El looked away, embarrassed, and the smoke began to recede rapidly until it was gone, and the spell had ended.
Quickly El stepped away from Max and turned to look at his table, becoming interested in the contents of one of the boxes. Max could tell that what he’d seen made her uncomfortable, made her worry that they made her weaker in his eyes. They didn’t. In fact seeing that she’d been able to hold onto those things for as long as she had made her seem even stronger to him. He didn’t know how to tell her that, though, so he moved on.
“Do you know where this Professor Cord would be?”
El was almost startled by the sound of his voice, but she recovered quickly and turned to face him again. “No,” she said. “I’d almost forgotten about him until today. But I can find him.”
She walked over to her bag and removed a cell phone, some cables, and a small box with a cord coming out of it, with a little white chip, like a sim card, attached to the end. “I rigged this up,” El said, gesturing with the hand which held the small box, “to randomly generate dummy account data whenever I plug it into this phone and give me internet access. I can only get away with maybe an hour or so at a time, but it works. If I can charge these overnight, I’ll be able to search for Mr. Cord in the morning.”
She smiled. She had a lead, and it had gotten her excited again. Max was surprised that he also found himself excited, not because he was a step closer to stopping a dangerous man, or proving his innocence to himself, but because El was excited. He watched her turn and plug the two devices into an outlet, charging them off of the emergency generator.
“I’m turning in,” said El. “It’s like Christmas. I want tomorrow morning to come now! Because, thanks to you, by tomorrow, we’ll have a lead. Tomorrow, for the first time, I might be able to find a way to get a step ahead of the guy who killed my mom and dad.” She smiled at Max affectionately, “Thank you.”
Then she turned and began unrolling her sleeping mat on the floor. She lay down, and Max, after a moment, turned to his mattress and did the same. For the first time in a long time, he found sleep restful.
Several hours later, the following morning, Detective James came in for his shift at the station. He eagerly made his way straight to his computer. He was early, but he’d figured that the program that he’d left running all night would be finished by now. He’d figured correctly, and so, when he sat down, his eyes fell upon monitors filled with names and faces and reports pulled from various places online for his viewing convenience.
After a moment or so checking general information in those reports to assure that his search had executed correctly, he began sifting through them for any which seemed more interesting than the others. It wasn’t long before he came across a news report about a pair of archeologists killed at a dig in Egypt, and the names of the only survivors of the attack: their daughter Ellie, and a professor named Arlen Cord.
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