“Wait,” Joyce interrupted, her tone skeptical, “like a novel, you mean? A mass market paperback?”
The old man nodded.
“Struck me kind of odd, too,” he said. “I bought it on the spot, and took it back with me to the flophouse. Turned out to be a reprint of a pulp novel that first come out back in the Great Depression, and the cover illustration had originally appeared on the front of the magazine. The story was about a masked avenger type called the Wraith, and it mostly seemed to be about him fighting crooked politicians and gangster types in 1930s Recondito, but every so often he’d run up against something supernatural in a back alley or someplace like that, and then the writer would go on a tear about invaders from the ‘Otherworld’ who infect men’s minds and steal their memories and personalities.”
Izzie and Joyce exchanged a sharp glance, eyebrows arching.
“Yeah, I know,” Jett said, “but at the time I didn’t know anything about the Ridden yet. I was more interested in the cover art. There were a couple of short bios in the back of the book, and it turned out that the writer—Alistair Freeman—had died in a fire back in the forties, but the cover illustrator, who was credited in the indicia as ‘Chas. A. McKee,’ was still alive and living in Recondito. Only it wasn’t ‘Charles’ McKee like I originally assumed, but Charlotte McKee. And when I borrowed the phone book from the front desk of the flophouse and checked, sure enough there was a listing for that name. And I couldn’t get to a payphone fast enough. I just had to know, right then and there.”
“Whether she had it?” Izzie asked. “The Sight, or the knack, or whatever you want to call it?”
“It stood to reason,” the old man answered. “The thing she’d painted on that cover? It was just too much like what I’d seen to be a coincidence. So I called her up and asked.”
“You just called a complete stranger and asked if she had psychic abilities?” Joyce sounded even more skeptical than before.
“What can I say?” The old man chuckled, his bony shoulders lifting slightly in an abbreviated shrug. “I was all het up. She had every right to think I was a babbling lunatic, calling her up out of the blue and asking her about a painting she’d done forty years before, and whether it was something she’d really seen. All I’d given her a chance to say was something like ‘Yes, this is she’ when she answered the phone, and after that it was just me talking a mile a minute. But when I paused long enough to take a breath, she said that we should probably meet in person to talk about it.”
The old man looked down at his hands contemplatively, flexing the knobby fingers.
“When I first saw her I thought that Charlotte McKee was as old as the hills, a shrunken up little blue haired biddy in a housecoat and slippers. But I suppose she was younger then than I am now. Time’s got a way of catching up with you when you’re not looking.”
“What did she say?” Izzie prompted when the old man got that far-off look in his eye again. “Did she have the knack?”
“No,” Jett answered with a sigh. “But she told me that she’d been in love with a man who had it back when she was young. And he’d been the one who had described to her the thing she painted on the cover, because he’d seen it himself. She said that he had the ‘Sight,’ and that he’d studied on how to use it with an old Mayan who’d come up from Mexico.”
“Wait, are you talking about Roberto Aguilar?” Izzie interrupted.
The lines on Jett’s face deepened as he frowned harder, and he seemed to tense at the mention of the name.
“That’s a name I’d not thought to hear again,” he said in a low voice. “But no, Aguilar was another one of the old man’s students, long after. By the time I met her, Charlotte McKee wouldn’t have poured a glass of water on Aguilar’s head if he was on fire. They’d had a falling out a long, long time before. The man she had loved was Alistair Freeman.”
“The guy who wrote the novel?” Joyce asked.
Jett nodded.
“Charlotte said that Freeman wrote the stories about the Wraith to keep folks off the scent of what he was really up to in the city. He figured that anyone who came forward and said that they’d seen a guy in a silver skull mask and twin .45s fighting undead monsters in the alleys would be written off as a crank.”
“So he was really doing those things himself?” Izzie thought about the silver skull mask that Fuller had worn when he dismembered his victims, and wondered for the first time where he might have gotten it. “They weren’t just stories.”
“A mix of fact and fiction,” Jett explained. “Freeman was what Charlotte called a ‘daykeeper,’ like the old Mayan who trained him. He’d come to Recondito because he knew that a great evil had taken root here, years before.”
“In the Guildhall,” Izzie said quietly.
“You girls have been digging around, haven’t you? Yes, Freeman spent years protecting the city from all manner of supernatural threats, trying to keep the Guildhall in check, until finally he couldn’t take it anymore. Charlotte didn’t got into too many specifics, but it sounded like one innocent too many got caught in the Guildhall’s mess, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Freeman marched right in the front doors of the Guildhall, guns blazing, and brought the whole place down on top of them. All that was left of him were a pair of silver-plated Colt .45s and some charred bones.”
“If it was that easy to stop them, why didn’t
