Benny was getting nervous, much more nervous now. “What is?”
“Hush,” I said.
“Green Eyes?”
“No. The rest of it. It knows him.”
“Now you’re just talking crazy talk,” he said, trying to infuse the words with some levity. It came out strained instead.
“Look at the meter.” Dana moved close to it again, and stared down at it without touching it. “This is wild.”
“We can see it fine, but we don’t know what it means,” I said, for Benny and myself. “What do those numbers mean?”
“They mean energy. Lots of it. Electrical energy, to be more precise. We’re not too close to its source yet, but it’s moving around. It’s moving, but not coming for us or anything. It’s like watching a tiger pacing, if that tiger were made of liquid. My God, what is this thing?”
“A guardian.” Another word popped into my head, inserted by my subconscious or by some instinct I didn’t recognize. I said it out loud. “A sentry.”
“Eden? Eden, what did you just say? Benny, darling, move your flashlight. Don’t shine it right on the meter, I can’t see what it says when you do that.”
“Sorry.”
“Eden, what you just said. Say it again.”
I obeyed, because I knew that it meant something important. I said it louder, with a touch more volume than a normal speaking voice. “He’s a sentry. And he heard me, didn’t he?”
“You’ve definitely got his attention.”
“What?” Benny was beyond more complex questions, which was fine, because I had no complex answers for him, and neither did Dana.
“It stopped moving,” she said. “For a few seconds.”
“He stopped moving for a few seconds. And now he’s coming towards us, isn’t he?”
“Something is. Or someone, if you like it better that way.”
She didn’t need to say it. We could all sense it by the way the static hummed harder in our ears. It came before him, like a force around him, pouring itself through the trunks and along the winding riverbank. We could feel him. Even Benny could feel him coming for us.
“Sentry.” I used the word because it drew him. When I said it, the static swelled, a pulse or a wave answering me.
“Eden,” Dana said, but whether she was warning me or asking what I was doing, I couldn’t tell.
The last rays of daylight slid behind the mountain, and we passed the point of almost dark. Benny and Dana held their lights aloft, and they beamed them left and right, trying to pin down the source of the sound. I left mine in my pocket still. I think I forgot about it. I think I didn’t care.
I am coming.
He spoke, and we heard the words before we saw him. They had a timbre not terribly different from the EVP we collected. It wasn’t terribly like the EVP either, but there was so little to compare it to that nothing else was even close.
I am coming.
“He’s coming,” Benny said, and it was the closest thing to a sob I’d ever heard him make.
Dana kept the coolest head; she snared her camcorder and slid her right hand under the strap to hold it anchored against her palm. “Shit,” she grumbled. “Shit,” she said again, because it refused to switch on. “He’s doing this. For God’s sake, turn on,” she ordered, but it failed her.
And he came to us, as promised. Through the trees, and into our personal space he oozed, or glided, or manifested. We hadn’t made it to a clearing, or to any kind of open space at all. We were surrounded on all sides by the trunks, and by this brilliant-eyed creature who towered over us all.
“Hello,” I whispered.
Up close, he was even more remarkable than I remembered. He must have been nearly eight feet tall, and even with this estimate I got the impression he was crouching slightly to better meet our level. His shoulders were drawn in, and his hands hung long at his sides. The things at the tips of his fingers were not claws, exactly; but they were long nails, and they were yellowed and dirty, a filthy amber. He could’ve stood up straight and still scratched his knees with those thick, long-nailed fingers. A dense curtain of brownish hair fell vertically over his apelike arms; the ends trailed down around his hips.
When first I’d seen him, I hadn’t gotten close enough to catch his face, or I hadn’t seen it clearly beyond the tart-bright eyes. But here he stood and he stared down at me, as if he were awaiting some order—because I was the one who had said his name.
The face that gazed from such a height was a construct of fantasy nightmares.
Beneath the famously gleaming eyes, a flattened nose with wide nostrils hunched. He had no upper lip to speak of, but a wide mouth all the same; and from each corner two huge, bony fangs curled up from his heavy lower jaw to protrude and crease his cheeks.
“Whoa.” From the corner of my eye I saw Benny, his own smaller jaw hanging open. Dana did not speak, but I saw her hand moving slowly in her pocket. When she pulled her hand out again, it held the tape recorder.
“Sentry,” I addressed him, because it was a sound he recognized and claimed.
He nodded, and like every other gesture of his, the movement looked massive.
I am here.
“Thank you. Thank you for coming. We hoped…” I looked over at my friends, and they were staring too hard to speak. “We wanted to talk to you.”
His mouth—that fearsome straight line punctuated with teeth at either end—moved and constricted, as if he meant to smile or grimace, but lacked the facial muscles for either. I couldn’t tell if he was glad or if he found us annoying.
“Please,” I said, since talking kept him at a polite distance. “Are you the Sentry of the battlefield—the one that’s south of here?”
His enormous, hair-draped head dipped again, but he offered no further information on the matter.
Introductions seemed in order, so I offered them. “I’m Eden. This is Ben, and Dana. Is there, um, some name you prefer? I don’t know what to call you except by that title.”
Sentry.
“Okay. Sentry it is.”
He didn’t move when he spoke, though his mouth made the appearance of writhing slightly. Whatever sound his words made they did not come from his wall-like chest. My eyes were beginning to water; from pure distraction, I’d forgotten to blink.
I seemed to be face-level with his chest, but as dense as he appeared, there was a sense of fluidity about him too. It confused me and preoccupied me, the way a being so seemingly solid could also look ready to evaporate at a moment’s notice.
Maybe I waited too long to speak. He turned his attention to Dana and Benny, who still stood all-but-petrified beside me.
It is a name your people gave me.
He looked back at me and I understood. “The settlers? The white people?”
The old warriors, he corrected me.
That one took me a second. “The generals. There were two of them, Boynton and Van Derveer. That’s what they called you, a sentry?”
Yes. I guard them.
“The dead?”
He turned away then, and I thought at first that I’d offended him somehow. His shifting looked like a ship changing course—slow, and ponderous.
I left them.
“We know. They said the pact was up. You had a pact with the two old generals.” He nodded, though his back was facing me now, so I only saw his shoulders bob. “You only had to stay until the last child of the generals was gone. And now there’s a boy who’s missing.”
Dead.
Benny found his voice. “I knew it.”
Killed not in war. Not to be eaten.
“We call it murder these days,” Dana chimed in. “Do you know where he is? Do you know who did it?”
I could answer the first question, and I did. “He’s buried in Dyer’s field, isn’t he? Back behind the house there. That’s what the ghosts have been trying to tell us.”
Yes. Ghosts? He faced me again, or rather he loomed above me once more. I saw something like eagerness in that inhuman visage.
“The dead. They’ve awakened. They walk the fields, trying to communicate. They said you were gone. They told us you left them. And they tried to tell us about the body someone buried in Dyer’s field.”
Bodies.
“Bodies?”
Two men. Both killed. Same man dug the hole for them both. He paused. The dead. They walk?
“They walk,” I confirmed, but I tried to steer him back to his first point. “You said there were two? We only know about the one—the Boynton boy. There was another, too?”
Yes. One more. The dead should sleep. I have failed them.
“They’re okay,” I said, because surely it was more or less true. “They’re okay. They’re just worried. They want to know where you are, and what happened to you. They don’t understand.”
They understood well enough to tell us about the pact, but I figured that knowing why and understanding why weren’t the same thing. “I know you fulfilled your agreement,” I told him. “I know you were doing what you thought was right. No one is angry with you. But they sure would love it if you’d come back.”
I stayed. I honored the agreement. The last one died, and I can leave.
Benny broached the next question softly. “But you can stay if you want, too. Can’t you?”
The Sentry didn’t answer. Maybe it simply hadn’t occurred to him. I didn’t know why it wouldn’t, but there was much about this creature I did not comprehend. “Was there anything in the…in the agreement you made—was there anything that said you had to leave?”
Those lizard-hued orbs narrowed, and glanced away from me, as if he was thinking. I felt an almost tangible pressure lift when his gaze was removed.
A sentry follows orders.
“Is that what they told you? Is that why they gave you this name?” I asked, and then I did the dumbest thing I’d ever done in my life. I took a step towards him, even though every instinct in my body told me not to. Every primal nerve ending screamed at me to stay away, but something more modern made me press on. I didn’t touch him; I couldn’t offer him a gesture that human. But I inserted myself beneath his averted gaze.