Another Short Story - Possibly Chapter 1

It was so smooth that the brush seemed to flow like water through her silky hair, the shining locks seeming to respond more to her will than to the brush in her hand.  Dark brown, but still shining in the dim light of her bedroom, it flowed seductively around her bare shoulders, dropping far enough down her back to cover her shoulder blades.

The lighting was favorable, and the open window provided a gentle and warm summer breeze across her skin, which was playfully tousling her hair so that it moved rhythmically, twirling around her fingers as she gazed absent-mindedly into the mirror.

Absent-minded, but far from thoughtless, her eyes looked plaintively over her thin body in the mirror.  It had been so long since she had dared open herself up to another person, but the slowly encroaching loneliness was beginning to wear her down.

She accepted her solitude by choice.  After all, she was a Jetzyah maiden.  Her race had been known for millennia as the fairest and most beautiful that had ever walked the material plane.  She could, without any effort, attract anyone, male or female, to provide loving companionship, as long as she was pleased to have that companionship extend beyond the platonic.

She was Jetzyah.  Jetzyah had no platonic relationships.  That was their curse.  Many envied their many lovers, but few even realized that lovers and friends were not necessarily the same thing.

So she stood.  She brushed her hair.  She gazed into her mirror. In her dimly lit bedroom.

Alone.

A knock at the door interrupted her self-doubt.  As she turned, she gently laid the brush on the armoire and turned toward the bed.  Her hands closed around her silk robe, and she wrapped it around her bare skin, and padded to the door.  She already knew who was there, and knew why he knocked.  With a sigh, she opened the door.

"As usual, these won't fit through your slot, ma'am."

"It's fine.  I'll take them," she responded, trying not to notice his eyes involuntarily roaming over her body.

He handed her the enormous package of letters, and stood there, his professional demeanor quickly giving way to a warm grin.  She smiled politely, and closed the door.  He'd be fine.  The magical effect of her race would wear off over the next few minutes, and he'd remember that he had a wife.  She had noticed the ring.

She casually dropped the letters on the kitchen counter, and returned to the bedroom, allowing the silk robe to slide off and lie in the doorway.  She picked up the brush again and started to finish her hair, but her eyes kept wandering to the stack of letters through the doorway.  She quickly finished with her hair, and pulled some warm pajamas on.  Tip-toeing back to the kitchen, she set the kettle on the stove to boil, and dropped some dried chamomile leaves into a mug.

When the tea was ready, she snuggled under a blanket and began to read the letters that arrived.  She knew the drill.  They arrived every day, in three basic categories: outpourings of love with commitments to live and die for her if only she would accept their hearts, desperate cries of lonely people who believe they will die if she doesn't love them, and the usual outpouring of hatred and anger of people who believe they were scorned by her silence.  Many of them also included trinkets, mostly "keys to my heart", but there was also the usual selection of jewels, golden rings, actual cash, and a diamond or two from the more affluent admirers who provided her income.

She scanned quickly through them, receiving neither flattery from the poetry and doting, nor offense at the bitterness and anger from those who finally realized she would not return their letters.  She separated the useless trinkets from the items with actual value, and shredded the letters as she read them.

Near the bottom of the pile, she noted one unusually thick envelope that had no return address.  Was someone sending her something without actually hoping she would send something back?

She opened the letter, expecting it to be one of a thousand hate notes giving up on her.  The letter was hand-written, but the handwriting changed several times throughout, as if it was written by several different people, but the message flowed naturally:

            Jetzyah:

Yes, I know what you are.  I won't address you by your fake human name, and if this all goes according to plan, you'll never find out who I am either.  For now, just know that I'm somewhere between your guardian angel and your worst nightmare.

Pay attention: the Jetzyah are disappearing, and they're disappearing fast.  I've included a list of newspaper clippings and police reports about missing persons.  Of course, they don't know that they are Jetzyah, but as soon as you see the pictures, you will recognize them for what they are.

Time doesn't permit me to explain here what is happening, but it's bigger than both you and I, and it's moving swiftly across the globe.  They know your fake names, your locations, and they know what you are.

Meet me under Proctor's Pillar.  Come alone.

She read the letter over a few times, growing more alarmed each time.  The newspaper clippings in the envelope fell onto the floor.  When she saw the pictures, both her hearts began beating very fast in her chest.  There were at least two dozen photos.  As the letter promised, they were all Jetzyah.  She tore the rest of the envelope open to get at the police reports and found pages of reports, complete with the fake human names they had taken.

She struggled to slow her breathing down.  Should she run?  Who were the authors of this letter?  Could she trust them?  For all she knew, they were the ones kidnapping – and perhaps murdering – the Jetzyah.

But at the same time, she couldn't turn anywhere else.  She was scared, and knew basically nothing about what was going on.  If the Jetzyah were in trouble, then these were the only ones who could explain what was going on.  Whether she liked it or not, she had to cooperate with them.

She was terrified, but she changed her pajamas into a black head-to-toe outfit and full-circle cloak to conceal her alluring shape and headed out.  The one thing she did know – and the thought didn't make her feel any better – was where Proctor's Pillar of the Craft was.

***

The streetlights seemed far more ominous than normal as she walked from her apartment down the city street.  In many ways, the city was the same one she had always known.  But tonight, every car held a potential kidnapper; every shadow seemed to house an insidious evil.

The lights were spaced farther apart the closer she got to the cemetery.  The glow of the city faded, giving way to the darkness between the headstones, broken up only by small, blue lights that were expending whatever meager energy that had gleaned from the sunshine that day to illuminate a name here and there among the graves.

In the farthest corner, beyond even the fading blue lights, the trees grew taller, casting dark shadows almost to the point of blindness, but she pressed forward, through the last dozen stones until she reached the obelisk gravestone at the far corner.

The stone stood a full seven feet tall, cold and imposing against the night.  Round the middle, in bold capital letters, the name "PROCTOR" was carved in.  Above and below the name was an ancient rune that identified the stone uniquely in the entire graveyard.  The Jetzyah had used this place before.  But she had no key.  She would have to wait for whoever would come.

Holding her cloak around her, ready to run at the first sign of trouble, she approached the obelisk.  She turned around and around, peering into the darkness, waiting for whatever or whoever it was that would approach.

Several minutes passed, with only the sound of the whispering wind swirling around the grass, lifting and dropping her cloak, almost as if there were some sinister voice within it demanding the reason for her presence in this meadow of the dead.

Silently, she stood there, trying to see some sign of movement toward her, some sign that her presence here was known.  She had assumed that they would know when she arrived, since they had not provided a time to arrive.  Why weren't they waiting for her?

The moments passed, and she became more nervous with each breath.  The temperature became cooler, and she shivered.

After an hour of standing alone in the dark, she was about to give up.  She took a few steps back toward the light, but as she did so, she heard a sharp crack behind her, and she turned to find the obelisk cracked open, and with a scraping sound, it continued to move apart.  The earth beside it suddenly dropped down and out of sight to make way for the moving stones, and revealing four stone steps that led down into the grave.  When she looked down into the hole, she saw the stone vault holding the casket of Benjamin Proctor split lengthwise down the middle and move away, revealing the polished mahogany wood and golden handles that had carried his remains to this place.

She stepped down into the grave and tugged on the lid.  It opened, and she looked for the first time in years on the face of the man whose resting place the Jetzyah had disturbed for no reason other than the fact that his grave was easily identifiable due to his affiliation with the secret order the rune represented, and was conveniently located away from prying eyes.

His body had continued a slow decomposition, greatly delayed by the embalming process.  His skin was tight against his skull, and all his limbs had gone skeletal-thin as the tissue beneath them had disintegrated, but the features were still somewhat recognizable, and a small amount of hair remained, brittle and white, from his head.

Unfazed by the gruesome sight, she took his corpse by the hand and moved his arm away from his still intact suit jacket.  She reached into his jacket, into the pocket that would have been above his heart.  She found the switch there, and pushed it.  The bottom of the casket began to move downward, and she stood, straddling the corpse as she descended a full fifteen feet below the first six of the grave itself, into a tunnel that ran to the west, dimly lit with electric lanterns mounted on the wall.

She stepped off the corpse, and flipped the switch on the floor beside it.  The body was carried slowly back up, and sealed back into its coffin.  She could hear the now distant scraping sound of the entire grave reassembling itself to look exactly as it had when Proctor's family had first laid him there.

Then she turned west and began to walk down the tunnel.

"The main hall won't be necessary," came a raspy voice behind her, making her jump, "as we can exchange information here."

As she turned to face the foreboding messenger, she tried to steady her breathing.  She reminded herself that she needed the information that these people had.  All the same, when she saw the messenger, she almost screamed.

He was wearing a black robe, like she was, but his face was covered by a human skull he wore as a mask.

"Who are you?" She asked.

"Your guardian angel," he responded, "and your worst nightmare."