Okay. Time to address a few things that seem to have caught the attention of the masses: Characters. More specifically, character death. Would I honestly do something that mean? I don't know, would I? You'll have to stay tuned to figure it out. I'm a little hyper right now. I get like this around the time of major assesments. It makes me rather annoying to be around during the week of final exams. Am I honestly the only person who likes those things? There half days, for crying out loud and we've already covered all the material! I am not taking exams this morning. No, instead I will be taking the PSAT. Joy.

Right, onto the story. This weeks installation of "Of Gumshoes and Moonlighters" is a little longer than the others. I just didn't feel right having a cliff-hanger this week. I didn't have the heart. That and I really didn't want to break to continuity of the climax more than it has already been broken. Anyway, enjoy this little post and I look forward to seeing you all again next Wednesday.

Disclaimer: ... Perhaps the nineteenth time is the charm?

Access Denied

Richard drove a little over the speed limit on his way to Rachel's apartment. She would go there. Maybe Rachel would disappear overnight but Richard doubted it. His mind was on anything but his driving, a fact that wasn't missed by the people he managed to cut off.

Richard wasn't sure what he was going to do, even as he drove to Rachel's apartment to confront her. Rachel wasn't a bad person. Richard didn't think so, at least. Anger flooded Richard's veins until his every cell was silently screaming because that was all they could do. It wasn't as if Richard could arrest Rachel. For one thing, he didn't want to. For another, he wasn't authorized to make any arrests in Jump City. He'd managed to get away with it over the past few months because he'd been arresting stupid people who were obviously guilty. Rachel wasn't linked to The Raven except by Richard's intuition.

Richard liked Rachel. Finding out that she had been lying to him, maybe even using him, made Richard feel nauseous. He'd soaked up every last shred of contact he'd had with Rachel and ignored his own common sense. There had been an alarm going off in Richard's head ever since he'd first seen her and only now was he listening to it. The small smiles, the witty banter, the light pecks, the tender kisses; Richard had never stopped to think about the what-ifs. He'd done what felt right. Richard had allowed himself for just one moment to be human and from that moment came another and another. And this was the result!

As Richard maneuvered through the streets full of evening commuters only one thought was going through his head. One agonizing thought, one painful question, one answer that Richard both wanted to know with every fiber of his being and never wanted to know: How much of Rachel had been fake? The very implications of that question shattered Richard to his core before it was even voiced.

Richard pulled down a small side street, leaving the bustling city life behind him and heading for the residential areas. As Richard turned away from the never-ending night life, he was assaulted by a sight that was so out of place that it took him a moment to realize what was wrong.

The streetlights weren't working. Every streetlight was stifled, the light struggling to penetrate something that was trapping it more thoroughly than any pane of grime encrusted glass or five inch layer of dust.

Richard struggled to see the road ahead of him as his own headlights fell pray to the same overpowering darkness. As it turned out, the headlights weren't necessary. The street was completely empty, an event strange enough in itself. A few blocks away, Richard could see an eerie red light shooting into the sky. Without knowing how he knew, Richard knew that it was coming from Rachel's apartment building.

Richard applied more pressure to the gas pedal, urging the car to go faster. He needed to catch up with Rachel; he needed to talk to her. There were so many things Richard wanted to do. He wanted to accuse Rachel, he wanted to scream at Rachel, and, as Richard got closer to the apartment, as the red light filled his vision, he wanted to just see her and make sure everything was okay. Richard's entire body felt sluggish, as if he were covered in heavy fabric that had been submerged in water. He kept pushing through it.

Richard slammed on the breaks when he pulled alongside the apartment. Swirls of red erupted from the top of the building, obviously not bothered by the fact that they were passing through something that was supposedly solid. The night was filled with a low roar just on the edge of hearing that reverberated through the air and rattled its way through Richard's frame.

Richard threw the door open and sprung out of the convertible. The car door seemed reluctant to open. Richard ran up the steps of the building to a worn green door complete with peeling paint and an ornate lion knocker that had once been painted gold. Richard tried the handle and found the door swung open easily. Between the open door and the mysterious red light Richard's worry and anger were quickly giving way to fear.

Richard drew his gun from his hip holster and moved to enter the building. Everything was completely silent. As Richard crossed the threshold the low roar he had heard, previously faint and easy to pass off as nothing, now filled his ears, pounding in his head and howling so pitifully through the hallways that it hurt Richard's heart to hear it. It was a sound filled with such pain and agony that all the eternal residents of hell could not have competed with its pain.

Richard tried to follow the sound as the air continued to swirl around him, picking up loose papers and small objects and throwing them around pell-mell. Richard sprinted up the stairs, the wooly brown carpet over them snatching with tiny fabric fingers at Richard's shoes. Halfway up the third landing, Richard passed a redhead in her thirties who was carrying a pig. The woman wasn't moving. She seemed suspended. There was no movement, no reaction to the torturous noise cascading from the floor above. Just a statue.

When Richard passed the woman he paused for a moment. Before his mind could completely wrap around what he was seeing and doing Richard felt himself plucked up and plunged into what felt like ice water and yet he never moved. Sounds faded from Richard's ears with such a ringing finality that he longed for the return of the thunderous wind. Visions became indistinct until Richard lost the ability to maintain focus. His eyes drifted with his attention to the stair ahead of him, to the pig cradled against the redhead's bust, to the redhead's unconcerned face, to a strip of wallpaper that was falling off.

Richard felt terrific! He didn't have a care in the word. In fact, he felt freer than he ever had. There was nothing to worry about. No father he needed to get revenge against, no partner he had to push through life because he lacked the motivation to do it himself, no police chief who had a cattle prod shoved up his butt, no giant puzzles that needed solving.

Puzzle. Richard mulled over the word in his head. It had a nice ring to it. Puzzles were good in moderation and great things to take to the beach. Richard didn't feel like doing a puzzle right now. He just wanted to stay here and watch the light fixture swinging from the ceiling. Back and forth. Back and forth. Rachel liked puzzles. And the trance was broken.

Richard jerked his eyes away from the light fixture and charged up the remaining stairs to the forth landing. Richard felt winded as he finally got onto the fourth floor landing. Three doors down, a red light was issuing from a closed door. Just as with the light passing through the ceiling, is didn't seem too concerned with something as mundane as whether or not something was solid. Richard crossed over to the door, forcing his feet to move.

As Richard approached the door he experienced, once more, the sensation of being plucked up and plunged into something. When Richard regained his senses he found himself surrounded by a black fog. Richard was spinning out of control and quickly became nauseous as he flipped up and down, falling toward a gravitational pull that kept deciding to move to the opposite side of his body.

"You're quite a hardy specimen, for a human." Richard heard a thunderous voice chuckle as he tried in vain to regain his sense of direction. The darkness swarmed around him, pressing itself on his eyeballs until Richard was certain that it would punch straight through the jelly-like organs.

Richard fell onto what passed as solid ground and pushed himself to his feet. Or tried to. Richard stumbled as soon as one knee was up and fell unceremoniously onto what he realized was a deep maroon floor. The maroon felt rough and uneven but Richard was thankful to have ground beneath his feet again.

"It has been some time since I encountered a being capable of actively resisting my will. You are a curious being and a wretched creature: Fueled by righteous anger and the thirst to prove yourself to a person who will never accept you."

Richard lifted his head reluctantly to scan the blackness for the person speaking to him. After a while Richard noticed that there was a large maroon pillar with black stripes on it behind him. Richard looked down with a growing sense of dread to see that instead of a floor he was kneeling on a giant hand.

"You were not supposed to be here," the voice continued. Richard looked up and saw four horrible red eyes glinting at him out of a giant triangular face. Dirty white hair extended from the thing's scalp and two hideous antlers sprouted from its head.

Richard was at a loss for words. What in the world was this! Richard remembered with a jolt of fear that the artifacts had history behind them. The root of all evil, Scath, was said to have been captured in the pieces ages ago. Richard had laughed it off when he first learned this but, kneeling in Trigon's hand, he was forced to accept that demons were very real.

"How did you manage to break so many of the obstacles I set for you?" Richard didn't answer. He hadn't remembered that it was a question. It hadn't sounded like anything other than a statement presented as some strange test.

Richard started as the four gleaming eyes above him narrowed upon not being answered. "It does not matter," the demon continued after a moment, "your presence here was not expected but it is of no consequence. Your woman will soon have outlived her usefulness and I will be able to dispose of you pests."

Richard forced himself to his feet, fighting the tricks his head was playing on him. "What have you done to Rachel and Garfield!" Richard yelled.

Trigon grinned in a way that stretched his maroon features to extremes that made him look even more iniquitous than usual. "I have done nothing to your woman that she did not wish done. As for your friend," Trigon spoke the word with an undeniable trace of humorless mirth, "he made the mistake of trying to fight me but not being strong enough. Electricity is a crude method of power but humans supply it in generous amounts. Your friend has to make up for the energy he forced me to waste."

Richard could feel his temper bubbling under his skull, thrumming against the bone and forcing him into action. Richard raised his weapon, firmly clasped in his right hand, and fired. The bullet went all of two feet before stopping, suspended in the air. "What a pathetic attempt," Trigon chuckled. "Rudimentary projectiles will do more harm to you than to me." And with that, the bullet flipped around and shot toward Richard.

As Richard saw the projectile sail at him, Trigon's words echoed in the back of his mind. "It has been some time since I encountered a being capable of actively resisting my will." It was all about will. Richard closed his eyes and focused on getting away from here – hopefully before the bullet got to him.

The first thing Richard did once he fell onto the hardwood floor of the fourth story was scream. It was a short startled yelp and Richard stopped when he realized that he was out of the demon's hand and lying, unharmed, on the floor, as if he had never left. The hall was the same as when he had left and Richard got to his feet as if unsure of how to use them. Rachel and Garfield were in danger. The most important thing right now was for Richard to stop whatever was happening.

Richard holstered his gun as he rose off the floor. If at all possible, he wanted to avoid another situation where he could be shot. Richard pushed through the weighted-down feeling and strode over to Rachel's door. Richard was terrified but Richard wiped the fear from his mind to focus on one thing: The people he cared about needed his help. That placed him beyond any type of fear.

Richard halted before the door. As his confidence drained from him Richard hesitantly reached out for the door handle. As Richard interrupted the flow of light he felt his arm go numb. Then the light shot out through his arm to continue its journey, leaving Richard with the bizarre sensation that all the bones in his arm had disappeared.

Richard forced his hand over the door handle and with a great effort managed to twist the knob. As soon as the door was loosened a great force rammed into it from inside the room and threw the wood off its hinges. Richard jumped to the side and watched as the plain white door crashed into the opposite wall with so much force that it was reduced to splinters.

Richard turned now to the room and felt his heart jump into his throat. Rachel was inside, her mouth open in a silent scream. Richard saw her sitting cross-legged on the ground with her hair thrashing in the wind. Her eyes were wide open and sightless.

Rachel's hand was surrounded by red light. Small objects flew through the air and Richard noticed a paperclip sticking out of Rachel's arm where it had come to rest. There was a small ray of light that was extending, tendril like, to the fire escape. As Richard followed its progress he saw Garfield in a state not much better than Rachel's. He looked like he was in a drunken stupor but his eyes had rolled so far back that only the whites were visible and his tongue was hanging out of his mouth.

Richard didn't stop to think about what he was going up against. Instead, Richard ran toward the room. When he reached the doorway, a shimmering silver barrier sprung up and caught him in the chest. Richard arched his back as he was flung from the open doorway. The silver barrier shimmered back into nothing as Richard slammed into the wall and collapsed on the floor. Only to get up again and make a second run.

The second attempt was just as successful as the first. Richard fell with a grunt onto the floor. And pushed himself up again. He walked to the barrier again, this time going a little more slowly. When Richard was close enough, he reached out toward the door. The transparent silver sheen blocked his hand and repelled it so quickly and so violently that Richard heard, even over the raucous tornado, a distinct pop as his arm seared with pain and dislocated.

Richard felt a presence rummaging through his mind and scowled at the room while he tried to kick out the intruder. "You cannot help them." Richard tried to ignore the voice but it was in his head and left no corner for him to run to. "You are wasting your time. But you know this. What do you think to accomplish with brute force?" Richard closed his eyes and imagined Rachel's smiling face, her lilting laugh that was so rare and all the more precious because of it, her eyes, sparkling with mischief and an understanding that made Richard swell inside. "Yes," the voice in Richard's head said slowly, "but she belongs to me and your fifteen minutes are up."

Richard snapped his eyes open and looked into the room. Richard focused his entire mind and body on Rachel as he charged the barrier one last time. The pain was beyond description. Knives were tearing at Richard's flesh but it was more than that. They were inside of him. He was freezing but was simultaneously being burned alive. Richard just looked at Rachel and focused on what she was to him, what they had with each other, as the phantom weapons ravaged his body.

Richard fell to the floor but he had crossed the threshold. The wind was even worse in the room and pounded off the walls so strongly that it was hard to focus on anything. As if Richard had been hit by a freight train, he was slammed backward toward the invisible barrier. But Richard refused to be thrown into the hall again.

Richard was pinned against the silver sheet, which tried to push him off. Then the wind seized him and threw him right back and the volley continued. Richard felt his interiors slosh around as G-Force tried to tear his body in half. Richard tried in vain to move as the red light over Rachel's hand started to spread up her arm. Richard threw a glance to Garfield and saw that his head was shaking back and forth like he had just entered a seizure.

Richard had run out of ideas and as his actions became more and more limited the fear started to eat at him. This was over his head. It was over all of their heads. Richard focused on happy thoughts but suddenly happiness seemed to be a concept beyond his grasp: An abstruse subject of which Richard understood little.

Richard felt himself losing his grasp of reality as his body was thrown back and forth. Richard's brain was screaming at him to just shut down. If he stopped thinking he would stop feeling and getting rid of this pain was more than a good idea: It was a necessary one if Richard didn't want to end up with his liver in his ribcage. Blackness began to float into Richard's eyes. This was not an intrusive dark but a welcome one, a natural one. Richard's eyes closed and he drifted away from the room, the light, the pain, the emotion, and Rachel.

Where Richard traveled, there was nothing. There was no whiteness; there was no blackness; there was no weightlessness; there was no euphoria. There just was. Richard may have been moving but he didn't think so. Whether his eyes were open or closed didn't matter because the same image presented itself regardless. All Richard saw was a small speck of light so intense that it burned white. All Richard felt was the desire to get to the speck, all the while knowing that it was impossible.

Was this death? Richard didn't feel dead, though, having never been dead before, he had no criteria to judge against. Richard just sat, or floated, or swam, or drifted (he wasn't sure which) in a direction he couldn't discern. Regardless of if or in what direction he moved the light was still tantalizingly placed in his line of vision. He knew it was there but he wasn't getting closer.

Richard felt as if he was infused with lead. Before he had felt heavy and sluggish. This went much deeper than wearing heavy fabric. It was a feeling that penetrated deep into his flesh and burrowed into his skeleton until it rested in his bone marrow. It would be so easy to stop caring, to let the weight crush him into dust. Richard just couldn't keep going against this demon.

Even as Richard's mind gave into the feeling, even as his body was attacked by red tendrils of light without him being aware, his heart would not capitulate. His emotions, his soul, a magical thing deep within him started to fight back. It was a small thing, Richard did not notice it and if Trigon was aware of it he did not move to stop it. Yet it was strong enough to pick Richard off the floor one last time.

In a state beyond reason or thought Richard crawled along the floor, resisting against all odds, as if protected by a more powerful force, the gale around him. Richard's eyes were still closed and he still battled against the weight that threatened to pulverize him.

The light was getting closer. Richard could finally see the speck of light before him growing in size and heat radiated from it in a way that promised warmth and comfort and protection. Richard felt himself drawn to the speck. Richard reached out with his mind, desperate to caress the loving flame. At the same time, Richard reached out with his physical hand, guided by the same force that had seized his body at this critical moment, and closed around Rachel's outstretched arm.

As Richard's hand closed around Rachel's wrist, as the red light was momentarily blocked and forced to find a way through Richard's body, flesh touched flesh. As Richard brushed against Rachel's hand the light went out and Rachel, Richard, and Garfield drifted from the unnatural heaviness to the soft welcome hand of sleep.

Next Update: Wednesday, October 25, 2006