Byrd Man — Roleplayer Guild

Epilogue

Hollywood
8:20 PM

Charlie Rembrandt took a deep breath and closed his eyes. It was some kind of hallucination he'd just seen, it had to be. All the time spent ignoring sleep had finally caught up with him. He opened them again, slowly this time. He found that it didn't work The man was still standing across the street, leering at him. Charlie knew the lean, acne-marked face well. It had been on the cover of every LA paper during the summer of ‘85. As a boot, Charlie had been part of the taskforce to hunt the man who was hunting people for sport, the man who held a city of millions captive with his crimes.

The face of Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, was one Charlie would never forget.

And he kept staring at Charlie, that lopsided grin on his face. It was like he was in on some joke that Charlie wasn’t. And he looked the same has he did back in ‘85, hadn’t aged a day. Despite the fact that he was supposed to be dead for some years now. Charlie started towards him, ignoring people passing by on the Hollywood street. They were certainly ignoring the sight of the serial killer among them. Ramirez stood there, hands in his jean pockets and a bloodstained AC/DC shirt on his torso.

Charlie crossed the street. Ramirez continued to stare and smirk, even as he got closer and closer. Charlie was five feet away from him when he stopped. Not because of anything Ramirez did, but what came down the street. A maniac dressed in all black and a hood was running down the busy street with a hatchet above his head, screaming in German. Charlie watched him go, the only one there who even bothered to look up at the sound of the man's screams. He started to pull his sidearm out when the man disappeared.

And then he appeared again, this time further down the street and running back towards Charlie, still screaming and still waving the hatchet. He got to the spot he'd been at before when he disappeared, reappearing once more at the other end of the street and running back.

“What the fuck is going on?” 

---

East L.A.
9:44 PM

The landlady banging on the door woke John out of his sound sleep.

“Señor Constantine, el mago. Es la policía.”

“Bloody hell,” John murmured, picking himself up off the bare mattress that lay directly on the floor. 

He shuffled across the floor dressed only in his skivvies. Mrs. Sanchez was waiting for him at the door. Along with Charlie Rembrandt.

“We need to talk,” Rembrandt said as he pushed his way through past John.

He shut the door on Mrs. Sanchez and turned to look at John with wide eyes.

“I’m seeing things… things I don’t understand. The sky is green, I’m seeing… I’m seeing fucking ghosts. I saw Richard Ramirez hanging around Hollywood for fuck’s sake!”

John walked to his pack of cigarettes and struck one up. He offered the pack to Rembrandt, who eagerly lit up. He had complained about the taste a few days ago, but now he was steadily puffing away.

“What the fuck is going on, John?! You’re the expert in all this.”

“Suppose I am,” said John. He plopped back down on the mattress. “Ghosts and all that proper shite doesn’t work like you think it does. It’s all based on belief and psychic trauma. If you leave a big enough footprint, people remember you after you’ve gone. What you saw wasn’t the Night Stalker, but a psychic impression of him. It’s a copy that shuffles around, but it can’t hurt you or do anything at all but act on a loop.”

“Like the fucker I saw running down Hollywood with an axe? Just on an endless loop.”

“Oh, you saw Krazy Klaus?” John asked with a smile. “He was some bloke from the 20’s or 30’s who snapped and killed his whole family with a hatchet. There’s a ghost Bronco that goes up and down the 405, existing simply because millions of people watched it on live telly. It’s nothing to do with unfinished business or revenge of any of that that, it’s everything to do with the power of memory. That green bollocks in the sky? That’s the collective psychic residue of Los Angeles. Think of it like emotional smog.”

“But why now?” asked Rembrandt. “I’ve been living in this city all my life. Why am I seeing it now?”

“That contract,” said John. “The one you shouldn’t have touched, the one Ray warned you not to touch. It was an enchanted item, Charles. Powerful magic, simple but powerful. It seems that when you touched, it gave you far more than a shock.”

Rembrandt’s eyes looked down at his hand. He scowled and walked towards the window of Constantine’s apartment. Outside, the emerald sky churned on above. He could see creatures, hellish things that looked like featherless and skinless vultures, soaring in the thermals of the night.

“It pulled back the curtain, Squire. Opened your third eye and all that jazz. You’ve got the Sight, Charlie.”

He looked to his right when he saw John standing beside him, a wide grin on his face.

“Welcome to my world.”

END
Byrd Man Member

El Hombre Pájaro

Status

Recent Statuses

Bio

Most Recent Posts
