And people rush home to the ones that they love,
You better take a fool's advice and take care of your own,
One day they're here, next day they're gone."
- Don Henley, "New York Minute"
HAVE URGENT INFO CONCERNING CARLYLE EXPEDITION STOP NEED YOUR AID STOP ONLY TRUSTWORTHY PARTY STOP ARRIVE JANUARY 15 STOP JACKSON ELIAS
Well, as you can imagine, we weren't about to ignore that. Not after Campeche, not after what we knew about our good friend. We had to go, he needed us - this level of urgency was not like him, and we feared another kidnapping was in his future. Wasn't it always? Immediately, each of us made our own travel arrangements to the Ritz-Carlton, where Elias was staying, to meet with him - but first, we took the time to look into his research on the Carlyle Expedition.
The Carlyle Expedition, we knew, was some cockamamie last-minute affair that rich bigwig Roger Carlyle organized. It was a well-publicized affair, the papers loudly announcing their trip to London, then to Cairo and finally Kenya. Unfortunately, it seems out in Kenya something terrible happened - they were ambushed by some bushmen or something, Nairobi natives, and slaughtered brutally. The murderers were caught and hanged, but we feared worse yet for Elias, perhaps that he'd run into some vengeful friends of the murderers. Our worry only grew once we arrived at the Ritz, blizzard-condition weather be damned, and spoke to the man at the desk who quickly attended to us.
"Jackson Elias?" He asked, looking us over. "Oh yeah, a guy by that name did come in here, he's staying up in room 410. Asked me to comp a room for some friends of his..."
His eyes scanned the name, and confirmed it was us. He was really impressed to meet us, seeing as he'd read Elias' book The God of Mitnal and apparently, our adventures down in the Yucatan had been greatly embellished. He asked all sorts of questions, which most of us were happy to answer, and quickly got us to our room, room 214.
Good old Elias - of course he'd rent us a whole executive suite for everyone! The in-room fireplace was a nice touch, a great spot to warm our bones as the wind picked up and the snow outside whipped about blindly. Night was falling, and it falls fast during a New York winter - something none of us, particularly Byrd, was too pleased about since he'd come all the way from Sao Paulo just for this. Inside, we recognized each other, engaging in a little catch-up and realizing that once more, Elias sent us all the same telegram.
"So, anyone else got a little deja vu?" Brad murmured, raising an eyebrow.
"I swear to God," Hemlock responded, rubbing his temple in irritation, "If Jackson went and got himself kidnapped again..."
Unfortunately, the Marshal didn't have time to follow up on that thought before a phone call disturbed the proceedings. Well, that made all of us more than a little concerned - Elias' frantic voice, his mad giggling, his insistence we come to room 410 immediately, none of that was like him at all. He always had a cool, level head. He always joked around and always kept his wits about him. This... it sounded like he either fell off the deep end, or was in grave fear of his life... and that only confirmed all of our fears. What later confirmed more of our fears was when the power, due to the storm, finally gave out as we walked up the stairs to the fourth floor.
"Hey guys," Ted responded, catching up with us after realizing the elevator wasn't working. "Power's out."
"We noticed," Brad said dryly, his Bronx wit apparent.
By the dim, flickering flame of Hemlock's lighter, we crept down the hallway to room 410, the wind outside howling like an enraged thing. The cold up here, and we all felt its terrible chill, crept into our very bones - had someone left a window open? Why was it so quiet up here, wasn't the Ritz normally a pretty hopping place even on a weekday? It was eerie, and it nearly made us wish for the noise of the traffic below or the jungles of Mexico, anything to cut the silence...
Our first inclination something wasn't right was when we felt cool air seeping from underneath the door of the room. Frigid, like the biting frost outside, it crept to us and set deep worry in our hearts. Had someone opened, or broken, a window? Had Elias gotten insane and suicidal, and leapt to his death outside? Then, we heard shuffling, and men speaking - but not in English.
"Clayton, the hell is that noise?" Hemlock whispered. "Sounds foreign..."
"I dunno," he replied. "Sounds... almost Arabic? Maybe African? Sure as hell ain't English..."
Hemlock then knocked and called for Elias, but we got no response. The door was locked, and as soon as whoever was in the room heard us, they went quiet. Pretty Boy Brad made fast work of the lock on the door and pushed it open gently, but there was no way in hell any of us were headed in there unarmed, with someone that could possibly have been Elias' kidnapper or worse.
We saw the window was open first, snow and blistering cold billowing into the room and chilling everything to below freezing. Then we saw the mess the room was, disheveled as if it had been rifled through. The assailants? We didn't see them. But we did hear them, or at least Hemlock did. Let me tell you, the sound and sight of a black man angrily yelling in some bizarre language as he leaps out of a closet, wielding a huge machete-like knife and shirtless with some bizarre red head dress on, is not one you easily forget. Hemlock barely stood a chance with how fast the attacker was - a swing of a blade, a flash of silver, and the revolver he held fell to the floor, his hand still attached to it. Poor guy collapsed and was out cold in seconds from the blood loss, barely had time to react to the pain.
From there... God, all hell broke loose. Two more men with the same headbands leapt almost from the shadows themselves, one black and the other white, both with a mad gleam in their eyes. They just... came at us, screaming and flailing those long blades of theirs like animals, and it was an all-out shootout from there. Clayton took a blade to the chest and stumbled back, just barely managing to stay conscious even from the grievous slash wound he had across his rib-cage; I swear you could see his ribs move in the wound. Dr. Baker immediately went to work trying to stabilize both Clayton's and Hemlock's blood loss, keeping them alive before picking up his handgun herself. Brad shot wildly into the dark twice and missed as the lunatics advanced. Ted, as one of them tried to butcher Byrd, thought fast and shot the attacker point blank, obliterating the guy's head and that ugly, tentacle-like red head dress with it. Brad somehow managed to hit the white attacker, killing him, and with that the final assailant tried to make a break for it.
He was fast and managed to slip out of both Ted and Pretty Boy's grip at first before finally being shot in the kneecap by Dr. Baker, who was having none of this loon's bullshit. He wasn't going anywhere, least of all out the window like he had planned to, and at that point he curled up and surrendered.
"You no shoot!" He cried in broken English with a clear Kenyan accent. "You no shoot! Please, I talk!"
Of course, we questioned what happened, and he proved marvelously unhelpful. What he did tell us, however, was that apparently the white guy he was with was the leader and they were supposed to kill a man in this very room. Then he pointed to the bed, and on the bed we saw Jackson Elias... at least, what remained of him, flayed open and eviscerated like an animal.
I don't mind telling you, we all saw red, finding our friend like that and his murderers clearly showing him no mercy. Brad was angry enough, he took his hatred out on the wall, swearing and yelling in emotional agony. His childhood friend, slaughtered... Poor guy. Out of all of us, I think he took Elias' death the hardest. And hell, how couldn't he? Elias' last moments must have been those of unimaginable fear and agony, something Dr. Baker confirmed by looking at the corpse. I swear, the woman has an iron will, nothing breaks her. Not even the death of someone so close to her. She took one look at the remains, and you could almost see the change in her eyes as she went into medic mode, examining the body as we questioned the Kenyan man. Death, according to her, was quick and brutal, he bled out before he even had the chance to scream. Clear score marks on the bones indicated the brutality of the attack. She found a human bite pattern on his heart, and on his forehead... she found a bizarre symbol, carved there as if Elias had been sacrificed.
It then became apparent to us that, if this guy had evidence on him, well, maybe the others did too. We were right. Amongst the two others, we found the following:
- A pamphlet, apparently for a lecture by some Professor Cowles guy visiting from Sidney, Australia and reporting on an Aboriginal cult.
- A business card, to the Penhew Foundation in London.
- A letter to a Miriam Atwright, responding to a question Elias had about a book that was not available, but mentioning that potentially other books on the subject could help him out.
- A letter to some guy named Faraz Najir in Cairo, who had apparently had contact with a Sir Penhew of London and that Elias was planning to investigate (or already had, it wasn't exactly clear).
By this time, Hemlock had woken up, and noticed the terrible pain in his hand as well as the carnage surrounding him. Call it Mohawk intuition, but he didn't seem upset so much as angry. He wanted vengeance, and he wanted it now. Good thing he was awake, too, because we all heard the police kick the door in, guns drawn, not long after.
Hemlock, good soldier that he was, was able to defuse the situation and explain to the lieutenant with the cop crew what had happened. As policemen swarmed the area, Lt. Martin Poole, a cigar-smoking man with a white mustache and a trench coat, took our statement. He took one look at Elias' corpse and the weapons of the attackers (which Clayton later confirmed were pranga, a sort of African bush-knife), and immediately knew we weren't guilty. Thank goodness for small mercies. He mentioned we should follow up with him; he had a few questions to ask us outside of the obvious - but not here. Not the time or place for it, he said, and besides - Hemlock and Byrd both badly needed a hospital.
While they were in the E-unit recovering, the rest of us shakily returned to our homes, trying to get some sleep. But damned if any of us could, after what we saw in room 410. Why would anyone do this to Elias, and what the hell had he gotten himself into this time? We'd find out soon enough... although I still don't think any of us realized how deep the rabbit hole went.