The Seventh Seal

"Watchman, How Much Longer the Night?"

Canto VI

Façades

Scene 1

"I'll come to you tonight, dear, when it's late,
You will not see me; you may feel a chill.
I'll wait until you sleep, then take my fill,
And that will be your future on a plate.
They'll call it chance, or luck, or call it Fate."
— Neil Gaiman

Two men, both in black leathers, met again where they had parked their fancy motorbikes. In the shadow of the building where the streetlight failed to reach, they seemed to be living extensions of the darkness itself. They had found nothing. They were too late. They spoke for a minute in a language that no passer-by would have recognized, and then mounted their bikes. From inside the building, a faint scream reached their ears on the street. They each smiled in the darkness. They had not found their prey, but that had not stopped them from having a little fun.

"I would have liked to stay and savor the terror of the ones who are discovering our handiwork," said the one in the peculiar language.

"Yes, but the police will be along shortly, now," said the other.

"Too bad we have to keep such a low profile," said the one.

"Oh well," sighed the other.

With that observation, they both started their bikes and zipped away into the night-clad Chicago streets to search for further clues of their intended target.

Scene 2

"The fact that something 'boggles the mind' merely says something about the mind, not the something."
— Dave Barry

On the night that Brisco Smith received a visit from Raphael, Brisco's mental state had settled into a resigned bitterness. He didn't drink to excess, he didn't smoke, he didn't have any kind of drug habit, but, lately, the potential for such self-medication was not far from his mind. So, when the archangel floated into his life, Brisco was shocked, yes, but also somewhat relieved. The possibility of a change, of having a purpose and a value beyond what the world thought of him, was almost enough to convince him to say yes to the archangel without further questions. The presence of an angelic being in front of oneself is rather convincing on its own, of course. But, then again Brisco was a realist, and a bit of a skeptic.

"You've got to be kidding," was Brisco's first coherent contribution to the dialogue.

"While the almighty and ever-living God does have quite a sense of humor," said Raphael reverently, "she does not ever seek to deceive, and certainly not for amusement purposes."

"She?" interjected Brisco.

"One pronoun is as good as another, is it not, when contemplating that which is beyond all understanding?"

"Actually," answered Brisco, "the 'beyond all understanding' part does bring to mind the feminine."

"You find this all rather difficult to believe, do you not?" asked Raphael.

"Of course." Despite the overwhelming sensation of the ineffable that accompanied the archangel's presence, despite the certain knowledge that this was not a dream, at least not as he experienced them until now, Brisco was, one might say, a 'doubting Thomas'. "How do I know this isn't mental illness; or a really, really vivid dream; or that you're not a devil masquerading as an angel?"

Raphael was unfazed by Brisco's line of thinking. "Very good questions, all. You believe what you see, but you do not entirely trust your eyes. You understand what you touch, like the machines you work with, yet you also trust your intuition to tell you what your hands cannot. You trust your experience, but only after it has been tested."

"I suppose that's all true," admitted Brisco. He had not thought much about such things, but recognized himself in what the being was saying.

"These are all qualities that can serve you well, if you are aware of both their limits and potential. Be assured, you will have ample opportunities to test your experiences if you accept God's call to be one of the chosen."

"What am I supposed to be 'chosen' to do?" asked Brisco.

"You are chosen to serve God, fully and consciously; to fight against the malignant cancer of the forces of darkness; to aid those in need; to heal those wounded in soul and body; to expose both truth and deception to the light," answered Raphael, knowing that he had not answered the real question in Brisco's heart. In all wisdom, it was best to follow a questioner's lead before cutting to the quick.

"Um..., that's all fine, but..."

"Perhaps you would like to know something more concrete," smiled Raphael.

"Yeah."

"Your dreams and visions will be your guide. Specifically, you will dream of events which require you to act on behalf of heaven. In this way you will be able to disrupt the plans of the Adversary. You will see visions of other Sentinels who can aid you, and who will require your aid. You have already begun to experience these dreams, although you may not have made sense of them yet. Know, then, Brisco Smith, that your dreams this night will be clearer, and lead you to an opportunity to intervene, or stand aside. Then, perhaps, your understanding will be increased."

"Increased, but not complete, I take it," commented Brisco.

"Our understanding is never complete."

"Our understanding? Does that include you, an angel and all?"

Raphael smiled gently. "My understanding is drawn from my connection to the divine One, without which I would be but a withering branch. In that sense, only Adonai's understanding is ever really complete. I am but a dim reflection of the divine reality."

Brisco had some issues with an apparent archangel referring to themselves as a "dim reflection", but he chalked that up to his level of understanding, which, admittedly, wasn't very high on the cosmic scale.

Scene 3

Hobbes: "Do you think there's a God?"
Calvin: "Well somebody's out to get me!"
— Bill Watterson

Christine Jacobs was at the top of her game. Her veterinary practice was successful, her investments were paying, and her finances were to the point where she could afford her dream to buy a condo.

Then, the problems started. Strange dreams at first. Voices in the air. Nothing that really disrupted her life at all. Then the dreams became nightmares. After the third night in a row, she was unusually tired and grumpy during the day. When the voices and visions started slipping in during the day, she made an appointment with her physician. They could see her in two days.

When she woke up in the middle of that night to find the strange figure, wrapped in an ever-shifting... something that she could only catch out of the corner of her eye, she broke down in tears.

"Fear not, Christine. I am Jeremiel, an archangel of God. I have come that you may help save your people."

Christine tried every trick she had ever used in a nightmare to wake herself up. But still, the strange being with the beautiful face stood before her. Blinking back the tears, she just watched silently, certain she was having a hallucination. Do they have drugs for this?

"You are uniquely positioned to help thwart those who seek to lead the people into darkness. Know that your abilities can make a difference."

Christine was listening fully now, less afraid and more curious. "How can I do anything?"

"Sleep now, and dream. Then, act on your conscience."

As she closed her eyes, she could still feel the powerful presence in the room with her. If this is not a dream, then my hold on reality is more precarious than I thought.

Scene 4

"Everything monstrous happening in the world has an ancient ancestry. The monster is intrinsic while our awareness of the monster has evolved."
— Frank Cawson, The Monsters in the Mind: the Face of Evil in Myth, Literature, and Everyday Life

When Jebediah's dreams began to get stranger, he just attributed it to stress. Monsters in the stairwell—wouldn't a psychoanalyst have fun with that. He began to get less and less sleep, and soon it was affecting his performance during the day. The others that worked with him were now watching Jeb as much as outside threats, he knew. If he didn't get his act together, well... he tried not to think about it.

Sometime during one rainy, gloomy night, Jeb woke up to find Gabriel in his apartment. Yeah, Gabriel, as in the archangel. Jeb's hand fumbled for a gun before he realized that he didn't feel the least bit threatened. Just as well: Jeb didn't own a gun. He just carried one when he was on duty. Bullets probably wouldn't have improved the situation much, anyway.

The next day, Jeb went through the motions of a shift on the job, but he could tell he wasn't fully effective. Fortunately, it was an uneventful day. When he left Mr. Thompson's office, he took his bike up onto the highway for a long ride and some serious thinking time. When darkness fell, he slipped back into the city and began to prowl the streets of St. Louis' south end. Before long, he came to a building he recognized and parked his bike.

Why am I doing this? He stared at the shape of his hands through his tight leather riding gloves. His conversation with the Gabriel-being had left him with this... compulsion. He could see the faces of the girls in his head, and the faces of men, with a clear image of one man in particular.

The tenement house was a run-down, plain, drab, lousy place to be, much less live in. The rats on the street here, scurrying through the refuse on the sidewalk, were as bold as the pigeons near his own apartment. Jeb walked into the front door of the tenement house, still wearing his gloves, and carrying his helmet in the crook of his arm.

"Can I help you with something?" A weasel-faced man sat in a dirty, padded chair in the lobby, nursing a cigarette and watching a TV set. The man didn't even look up at Jeb.

"I'm here to see Yamadori," said Jeb. The other man looked up at Jeb then, took a final drag on the remains of the cigarette as he examined Jeb, and flicked the butt into the corner of the room.

"Sure. Fifth floor." The man turned his attention back to the TV and began fishing in his shirt pocket for another cigarette.

Jeb waited a moment, and then fished a five-spot out of his pocket and tossed it into the man's lap.

"Oh, right. Sorry. Did I say fifth floor? I meant third. Knock on three-oh-two and say you'd like to see the butterflies."

Jeb went to the elevator, thought better of it, and pushed open the door to the stairwell. The stairs were not well-lit, but he met no one along the way. At the third floor, he took a deep breath and stepped into the hallway.

The old plaster of the walls was torn away in places, and the lathe boards looked like the exposed ribs of a decaying zombie out of a horror flick. The hall lights were all lit, but dim, exaggerating the dusty, haunted-house appearance. An odd shape in the shadows of the corner at the end of the hall revealed to Jeb that there was a camera there. Jeb walked over to the first door on his left. #302. He knocked.

A moment later, a lock slid back, and the door opened a couple of inches, enough for Jeb to see the face of a pudgy, middle-aged man with a mustache over the chain on the door.

"I'd like to see the butterflies," intoned Jeb. The door closed, and Jeb heard the chain slide and fall. The man opened the door again, motioning for Jeb to come in. The front room of this apartment included a reclining chair facing a pair of TV's. Although the screens faced away from the door, Jeb could see by the reflection in the glass of a cheap framed print on the far wall that one TV was linked to the camera Jeb had spotted in the hall, and the other was showing the opening credits of a porn movie.

"So, what would you like to see?" asked the pudgy man. "We have several options tonight, at a very reasonable price." Jeb's left jab knocked the man back into the wall, and Jeb caught him, lowering the unconscious man to the floor quietly. There was a roll of duct tape on the counter of the kitchenette, and Jeb used it to truss the arms and legs of his host.

This isn't the person I'm looking for, Jeb sighed to himself as he removed the keys and wallet from the pockets of the unconscious man and dragged him into the apartment's excuse for a bedroom. Looking through the wallet, he saw the driver's license that named the unconscious man "Theodore Parker". There was more than two hundred dollars in cash, tens and twenty's mostly, which Jeb pocketed. He looked around enough to confirm that the camera signal from the hall wasn't being recorded, and then he disconnected both TV's. Taking the duct tape with him, he left his helmet just inside the door, and stepped out into the hallway.

At the first room he came to, number 303, he found the key conveniently marked with the room number and opened the door. The room was dimly lit, and smelled of incense, sweat and sex. A mattress was on the floor in the middle of the room, clothed in sheets that were certainly not fresh. Across the room, wrapped in a thin blanket, an Asian woman sat in a chair and looked at Jebediah with a confused expression. Just like in the dream.

Not knowing really what to say, now that he had gotten this far, Jeb said "I've come to set you free. You are free to go, and escape this hell-hole."

The woman's expression of confusion deepened.

"Where is Parker?" she asked.

Jeb closed the door. "Um, he's taking a nap," Jeb said, holding up the roll of duct tape.

The woman's face brightened a little. "You are not the police?" the woman asked.

"No, I'm certainly not," checkled Jeb.

The woman's expression darkened and became very serious. "Where is Yamadori?" There was genuine fear in her voice.

Jeb was confident that the face he was looking for from his dreams belonged to Yamadori. "To be honest, I haven't bumped into him yet."

The woman grew very agitated. "If we try to leave, he will kill us!—"

"I'm not going to let that happen," interjected Jeb, trying to sound confident. "If you can help me with the others, I'll take care of the John's and..." images of the monster in the stairwell floated in Jeb's mind, "anything else we run into."

The woman paused a moment, looked around the room, and then nodded. She dropped the blanket, confirming Jeb's suspicion that she wasn't wearing much else. She quickly moved over to a cardboard box in the corner and extracted a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt and shoes.

"Do you need to grab anything else?" asked Jeb.

The woman looked at the floor. "This is everything I have."

Jeb pulled the cash he had taken from Parker and handed it to the woman. "Here. Parker doesn't need this anymore."

Jeb went to the door. "Do you know how many rooms are being used?"

"All the rooms on this floor, I believe," said the woman. "But I really do not know how many that is."

"I'll go, and send the other women to you in this room. When I let you know that the coast is clear, you can all leave." When Jeb tried to open the door, he found it was locked. Of course. The locks are to keep them in, as much as keep anyone out. Using the key, Jeb stepped out into the hallway and instructed the woman to hold the door open for the others.

In the next two rooms, he found women by themselves, and quickly instructed them to go room #303. In the third room, his surprise entrance scared both the John and the girl. And she was certainly no more than a girl, although Jeb wasn't good at guessing the age of Asians. He quickly subdued and taped up the man, and sent the girl to be with the others.

In the same manner, Jeb went to each of the eight rooms "for rent" on that floor, finding two more John's, whom he bound up for the police to deal with. When he returned to check room 301, Jeb found that he did not have a key for this door. Yamadori's? Taking a breath, Jeb stepped back and rammed his full weight into the door.

The door snapped open without as much resistance as Jeb had expected, leaving him standing in the entry to the unlit apartment amidst splinters of wood from the broken door jamb. Jeb went immediately into a crouch, knowing that he was silhouetted against the light of the hallway, and that anyone in the apartment already had the drop on him. After a tense moment without anything happening, Jeb, reached up and found the light switch.

The apartment was, at the moment, unoccupied. The furniture was worn but comfortable. Although no one had dusted in here in a very long time, there were obvious signs that someone was currently living there, just not at home at the moment. Trash in the can. Mail on the counter addressed to Yamadori. Knowing that everything would be combed for evidence, Jeb avoided touching much. Clothes. Toothpaste. DVD's. All normal stuff. Remembering a scene from his dream, Jeb reached up to the exhaust fan in the bathroom, it probably doesn't work, anyway, and pulled it down from the ceiling so that it dangled from its wires. It came loose easily. Looking up through the hole, Jeb saw three thickly packed white envelopes. He took one down, and could see that it was filled with cash, as were the other two in all probability. The police won't miss this one. He left the fan dangling to assure that the other envelopes would be discovered, and then retreated from the apartment.

Scene 5

"It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning."
— Claude Bernard

Christine was not scheduled to work the next day, so she took a walk in the clear morning air. A breeze from off the lake wound its way through the streets to where she was and helped to relax her. She wandered through several neighborhoods, staring at the sidewalk in front of her feet most of the time, sorting through the images of her dreams, but in all honestly just trying to clear them from her head. The familiar sounds of the neighborhoods were comforting: the cars passing slowly by, a diesel engine off in the distance, birds chirping, and the breeze in the trees over her head.

She stopped and looked up at her surroundings. She was in the park. The one from her dreams. There, off to her left, was an old merry-go-round, thankfully unoccupied at the moment. In fact, no one was in the little park. Without thinking, she looked to where the dream-beast had stood in the shadows. Nothing, just open ground between some bushes, with dappled sunlight seeping through the leaves of the trees. Before she was aware of what she was doing, she stepped into the park toward the merry-go-round.

How am I supposed to do anything about the dream, when I'm here during the day? No one is here. Thank God. A straight, thick branch from the overhanging tree lay on the ground not far from her. She stood silently for a few moments, staring at the fallen branch. Frustrated, she picked up one end of the branch—it was twice as long as she was tall—and jammed the broken end up under the merry-go-round. That didn't solve anything, though. She saw that the pattern of little feet running in circles around and around had created a circular ditch, with a small mound of kicked-up dirt like an orbital path around the ditch. Her mind suddenly realized that the mound created a fulcrum, and the branch, the lever. Without even realizing what she was doing, she jumped up onto the projecting end of the branch. As her weight hit the wood, it levered the merry-go-round up from the ground... and off its axle. The merry-go-round fell to one side in a loud thunder.

Christine was embarrassed by the noise and her vandalism, so she stuck her hands into her pockets, put her head down, and walked briskly away.

Scene 6

"It means the world's about as solid and as reliable as a layer of scum on the top of a well of black water which goes down forever, and there are things in the depths that I don't even want to think about."
— from Rose Walker's diary, in Sandman #16: "Lost Hearts" (Neil Gaiman)

When Jeb returned to room 303, he found himself facing eight scared, desperate women and girls.

"Do you have anywhere to go, anyone that may be able to help you?" Jeb asked.

Most of them looked at Jeb with blank stares, but then the first woman Jeb had encountered spoke up. "Yes, I think so. If I make a phone call before we leave, I know someone I can call."

"The police are going to want to know your side of the story," Jeb pointed out.

"I do not believe all of us are citizens, here," said the woman. "I fear that they will send away any who are not."

"The police will need your testimony to clean this place up and make sure the men are prosecuted. If any of you are citizens, or willing to take the risk, please, I beg you, call the police and tell them everything. Especially for the girls' sake," Jeb said, motioning toward the youngest. "There is a phone in the next room. While you are making the call, I need to check out one more thing." He handed the envelope of cash from Yamadori's apartment and the keys to one of the women. "Don't leave this floor until I come back."

Jeb walked down the hallway, retrieved his helmet, and went to the stairwell. This is where the dream was really weird. Opening the door, he stepped through and began descending the stairs. Around the first bend, he met a tall, young Asian man with a confident smile. The face from the dream. Jeb stopped in the middle of the stairwell, blocking the man's ascent. The man's smile faltered a little.

"Yamadori?" Jeb asked. The man's smile disappeared entirely. As soon as Yamadori's hand disappeared into his jacket, Jeb's foot caught Yamadori in the jaw. Yamadori stumbled back into the wall of the landing, but remained upright, now with a knife in his right hand. Yamadori smiled again, a smile that made Jeb want to run like nothing else ever had. Yamadori advanced on Jeb, who easily dodged and then stepped in behind the knife swing, striking Yamadori expertly at the shoulder, elbow and wrist in quick succession. Knives were wicked implements. One good strike could put a person in the hospital or beyond. Jeb's attack was intended to disarm Yamadori, who obligingly dropped the knife as he screeched in pain.

Yamadori stepped back against the wall, and brought up his left hand. Except that, where his left hand should have been, a claw, like that of a crab, filled the space at the end of his wrist. Yamadori stepped forward and swung at Jeb several times in quick succession with the snapping claw. Jeb dropped his helmet and put all of his effort into dodging, and retreated up the stairs as Yamadori attempted to land a blow. The monster in the dream had a claw. Once Jeb's feet were on the level floor of the next landing, he stood his ground and used his advantage of his higher elevation to land a powerful kick squarely in Yamadori's face, sending the claw-handed fiend sailing down the stairs to the landing below.

As Jeb came down the stairs, Yamadori rolled to his hands and feet and began to get back up. How much can this guy take? As Yamadori stood, Jeb could see that any humanity had slipped completely away, for Yamadori's face had transformed into an insectoid nightmare, complete with mandibles around the mouth. Jeb's sanity held on long enough for his survival instinct to take over. With a flurry of blows, Jeb drove the demon that was Yamadori into the wall and kept at him until he was on the floor, no longer moving.

Jeb stepped back, closed his eyes and leaned against the landing wall, catching his breath. What he had seen itched in his mind, and he struggled to keep his composure. When Jeb opened his eyes again, the body inside Yamadori's clothes was devolving into a muddy slime. The police are going to find it difficult to figure out what happened here. I'm not sure that I can really figure out what happened here. On the positive side, I can't be charged with murder, since there is no body. What was that thing?

After Jeb had regained some of his composure, he retrieved his dropped helmet and returned to the third floor.

:: End Canto 6 ::

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