Chapter Twelve:
All Along the Watchtower
Elliott Michaels watched as the obnoxious pretty boy fed had walked out of his office. Thinking back he should have chosen his words with a bit more caution, but this asshole was trying to bad mouth one of his best dancers, Rosie. "Bastard has a lot of fucking nerve, that's for sure." he muttered under his breath as he spun around in his chair and rolled to a small cabinet behind the desk. Reaching inside he let his hand dance across several bottles before landing on the cognac. Wrapping his hand around the neck of the bottle he removed it and set it on the desk. Glancing around he saw that he had nothing to pour it in and slid open the drawer on the top left. "There." He spoke to himself as he let the warm liquid slip out of the bottle and fill about half the glass he had set on the desk. "Relief."
As he felt the cognac slide down his throat and the slow burn course through him he let out a long breath and directed his attention to what the fed had been saying about Rosie. While he didn't want to consider the chance that she might be involved with the murders, she was the one who had found all three of the bodies. Chance? It could have been. The first, this Robert Conrad, had been killed in one of the backrooms that she had favored using so it was logical that she would have found the body first. She would often lead a john back there and do her thing. The second, Danielle Wallace, the lesbian who was with another one of his dancers, was a fluke accident. Elliott thought about how she had located that body and wasn't shocked that she was the one, but it was odd that Rosie had walked in the stall having only missed the killer - if there was one in this case, considering it was declared that she had died of a heart attack. The last was the most disturbing.
From what Elliott was told, via second hand accounts and an interrogation with the Roanoke County police, Rosie had found Trent drained of his blood in her dressing room. This had struck Elliott as strange because she was the only one who had her own dressing room and the key. It was as if the killer was trying to make it look like she was doing it. Still, having listened to what Rosie had told him about the discovery he found it incredibly unlikely that she was even on the radar. She was clearly shaken and despite his offer for her to take the night off she had asked to stay on. "Ever the workaholic." he said to her as she shivered at the thought of using her own dressing room again. He vowed to make sure the room was cleaner than it had been when she was first offered it. Still, he couldn't deny that something about the whole situation didn't sit right with him. Something wasn't adding up.
Running his left hand through his brunette hair, Elliott stood up and staggered over to the door and shut it. He wished the fed had been at least kind enough to do that, but there was no sense in dwelling on it now. Besides, it also offered him a chance to shut off the lights and rest his eyes a bit. He could feel a tension building behind his eyes and the light would soon become his enemy. As he staggered back to his chair he found it too difficult and crashed in the one the fed had been sitting in less than fifteen minutes earlier. "This is too fucking stressful." he said aloud to the room. He could hear a faint echo bounce through the room, but thought nothing of it.
It didn't take long for him to feel the first pang of stress creeping up on him; crawling like a cockroach under his skin, reminding him that there was still the matter of dealing with Rosie. He would have to speak to her, he knew that. There was no way around it. She was at each of the crime scenes and she had found all three bodies. But she wasn't affected by such things. That's what didn't sit well on Elliott's stomach. The Rosie he knew would have freaked out and taken a month off, if she ever came back, from work after the first death. Yet, for some reason, she was acting like it was nothing at all. It was "just another day at the office." Had he missed some subtle change in her demeanor? Could it be that she had something else, something worse, heading her off in her personal life that he was unaware of? He liked to think that she could come to him with anything, but was she?
As his mind scanned through the endless possibilities, he heard the echo again and sat up. "I can hear you." he declared, still fighting back the pangs of pain beating through him. After several seconds of no response he sat up further and rested his glass on the desk in front of him. "You better not be fucking with me, I swear to Christ I will kill you if you are!" Elliott shouted, becoming increasingly aware now that he wasn't as alone in the room as he had imagined he was. Sliding behind his desk he sat down and reached under the desk to where he had a Colt .45 ACP hidden. Drawing the hammer back, he listened for the echo to stir again. "Hello?" he called aloud, feeling his muscles tense now. Someone else was in the room with him; he knew it. There was no way he was alone.
Suddenly, as if to answer his demands, the stereo in his office kicked on. Elliott spun around looking in the direction of the sound, but found nothing. The sound of Jimi Hendrix echoed throughout the whole office, 'There must be some kind of way out of here', said the Joker to the Thief...'there's too much confusion, I can't get no relief'. Waving the weapon around, Elliott tried to train it on something, anything that was moving in the room with him. His eyes strained as they darted back and forth, from each wall to the next, to the lounge area, the cabinet behind him, and finally the entrance. He found nothing. "Show yourself!" His voice was drown out by the musical musings of Hendrix. He could hardly hear himself, let alone someone else who was in the room with him.
Business man, they drink my wine, plowman dig my earth...none were level on the line, nobody honored his word...shot through the room like a bullet through the air. Elliott could feel his pulse quickening and his mind becoming sharper. The adrenaline was kicking in and his former military training taking over. The fear was at once replaced with cold calculation as he inched his way through the dark room, taking each new step with extreme caution. The music made it increasingly difficult to hear, but he tried to dull it out as he made his way to where it was coming from. Elliott sucked in enough air to fill his lungs, held it, and released it as he moved forward. He decided the stereo would be his first destination. Kill the music and allow himself a chance to hear the intruder.
Drawing closer to where he had installed the stereo several years earlier he could hear Hendrix musing, 'no reason to get excited,' the Thief kindly spoke, 'there are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke, but you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate, so let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late', the song echoing now through his brain as he remembered the reason he had left it in the stereo days earlier. It had spoken to him; these deaths acting as a catalyst for his demise. He knew he was the Thief in the allegory of the song and knew that this was no mistake that the song was playing now. The mysterious strange whom he was stalking now wanted him to know how he felt about him and had full intention of taking his life. It was in this moment that Elliott knew he was hunting the serial killer who had stalked his employees.
The revelation came as the music took over. Elliott knew this bridge better than most, having spent most of his adult life trying to learn to play it on his own failed attempts at being a guitarist. This was around the same time he felt he was better off devoting his life to making money off sex. Sex was something that always sold, and he knew he had found a niche market in the small rural community of Roanoke, Virginia. There was nothing quite like what he was offering. His was the first, and still the best, gentleman's club in the area. "I know who you are..." he shouted over the music, still unable to hear himself over Hendrix. He knew that if he still couldn't hear himself he wasn't even talking to himself, let alone the assassin before him.
As he reached the stereo he found himself unable to shut it off. He smacked each button, hoping to quell the cacophony that the music had become, but he was unable to. Hendrix continued to drill in his mind his impending fate as he sung the final lines of the song, and all along the watchtower, Princes kept their view while all the women came and went, the barefoot servants, too...and outside in the cold distance a wild cat did grow, two riders were approaching, and the wind began to howl...Elliott could feel his eyes becoming strained now beyond their own abilities and the pangs of pain were coursing through his entire body. Gripping his head he wanted the music to stop, each new riff louder and sharper than the last, and he felt a sense of dread as the song started over and the familiar line echoed a second time though his head.
"Sit." A male voice echoed through the room, over the music, as Elliott spun around to locate the voice. He found nothing, but the music died and suddenly the lights flashed on. Elliot could feel the brightness of the light cut through his cornea. "We have things to speak about, you and I." the male voice came from behind him. Before he knew what was happening he found himself thrust down in the same chair he had been in minutes earlier, trying to unwind, and two strong hands holding him down. As his eyes adjusted he looked to see who was holding him down and he saw two delicate, feminine hands, hands that he knew all too well. The hands, he knew in seconds, belonged to his Rosie. Her grip was stronger than he could have ever believed, but attention was drawn away from her as another figure, this one a male, sat down across from him and snapped his fingers to direct his eyes to him.
"Who the fuck are you?" Elliott demanded of the man sitting in front of him, in his chair, at his desk. The man was youthful, with mussed black hair, stern eyes, and a dusty cream colored overcoat. The man also seemed to be wearing a suit underneath, though the tie was clearly off center. Elliott tried to remember the man's face, feeling like he had met him before, but his mind drew a blank. Fighting back the fear that was once again eating away at him he tried to loosen Rosie's grip on him, but found it wasn't working. "What do you want from me?" he asked, his tone firm.
The man considered the request and played with the glass of cognac that was still on the desk. The man traced the edge of the glass and Elliott could hear a low hum. "What do we want from you..." the man mused aloud, "that's a really wonderful question. Hey, Ross, he would like to know what we want from him. Isn't that cute!?" The man leaned forward and pinched Elliott cheeks. He could feel the room temperature drop several degrees as the man leaned back in his seat. For a moment he wondered why the man was calling Rosie 'Ross', but his mind was directed back to the man in front of him. "We would like you. Well, more like your skin."
"My skin..." Elliott spoke slow as if he was unsure of what the man had said. "You want my skin. What the fuck does that even mean?" The man laughed aloud and Rosie/Ross laughed with him. Moments later he felt Rosie's hand dig further in his shoulder. "Ouch!" he shouted as he tried to spin around to face Rosie - Ross - but he was once again unable. This was when he knew that he was living on borrowed time. "At least tell me what this is about." he tried to plead with the two strangers in the room with him, but he knew it was no use.
The man stood up, directed his attention to the window that overlooked the club, and turned back to Rosie - Ross - and Elliott. "Ross, would you like the honor? I have to take care of Sam Winchester. He's about to become a serious problem and you know as well as I do, he's expecting his brother's secret lover Castiel. Well, once he realizes that his brother is...not coming for him and won't be meeting him back at the motel. I'm needed, to say the least." the man said and suddenly left within the blink of an eye. Elliott tried to shift his weight, but found he couldn't.
"I'm sorry it has to be this way, but this skin is falling apart and you know something? Being stuck as a woman is the worst." the woman before him said, the woman he had believed to be Rosie, but now had extreme doubts on that. "I'll be so thankful to be able to be a man again!" she said with an excited tone. Elliott was able to move now as the woman spun around to face him. But it was too late. He could see her face was falling off, revealing a strange, almost skeletal being underneath. He tried to scream, but it was caught in his throat as the creature reached into her coat pocket and removed the strangest looking blade that he had ever seen. "This won't hurt, but I must ask that you don't scream. Rosie here tried to scream, but...well, we all know how that ended." she - he - said as he drew the knife across Elliott's cheek drawing blood.
The worst of it was that Elliott was awake for most of the process, feeling each inch of his skin being peeled away, ripped up, and nerves searing with pain as the woman - man - creature - being tore it off of him. He was unable to move, unable to scream, and as he felt everything dull he saw that the being was consuming his flesh as if it was a hamburger. Fidgeting, Elliott felt the creature climb up his body, from between his legs, and the final thing he saw was it's claws sinking into his eyes. And then, everything went black and cold.
