October 18, 9 a.m. Year of the Curtain+5
Los Angeles, California
Brie Sanders was starting to get frustrated. Page after page, photograph after photograph… since the Curtain was pulled back, the web had exploded with pages, databases, timelines, and Wikis about monsters of all shapes and sizes. Photographs and accounts of encounters that had taken place decades ago and been dismissed as hoaxes were now being re-examined with a more discerning eye – at least among the believers. And all of these were goot things. But it wasn’t quite helping at the moment. Back in high school, Brie read up on the lost library of Alexandria. The idea of a central repository of all the world’s knowledge was wonderfully appealing to her, and the idea that it had been lost forever was just as tragic. When she discovered the Internet, it was a godsend – almost as much information, plus a hell of a lot more gossip about celebrity venereal diseases. But there were times, like this one, when she realized too much information could be just as damaging as not enough.
She’d finished up the makeup job for the principal actors in this movie two hours ago, and although she’d probably have to do touch-ups around lunchtime, for now she had the freedom to surf the net, looking for pictures of demons and apparitions from various cultures, trying to find something that matched the sketch in her hand. She drew it herself, doing her police sketch artist routine to recreate a description Dixon Moreno allegedly gave his defense attorney of the demon he claimed was possessing him at the time of the murders. If she could find something, anything that showed it was an actual creature from some world mythology… it may not be enough to get him an acquittal, but it sure as hell would blow up the internet when she posted it.
There was a knock on her trailer door and she peeked through the window. Recognizing the face on the other side, she motioned for him to come in. When he climbed the steps to the trailer and saw what she was doing, Max Quinn started to laugh.
“Again with this, Brie? Come on, don’t you think if there was an actual demon on record that matched that face, somebody would have found it in the last five years?”
“Maybe they haven’t looked in the right places.”
“They’ve been looking. There are a lot of people who want him to be innocent, you know.” Since Moreno’s attorney first floated the idea that he was not in control of himself when he went on his killing spree, a certain percentage of the Curtain Faithful had adopted him as a poster boy, Brie included. If they could convince a jury of his peers that there were, in fact, apparitions controlling him, that would establish a major precedent for future cases. For the same reason, Curtain Deniers were pretty vehement about not even allowing the argument to be put forth in a court of law. Max, Brie knew, was in-between. He was certainly a Curtain believer – after what the two of them had gone through together last Halloween, it would have been impossible for him not to be – but that didn’t mean he necessarily believed Moreno had been a victim of a Curtain creature.
“While you’re having fun looking, Curtis wants me on the set,” Max said. “I thought you may be interested in this, though. Ever heard of this girl?” He handed Brie a card with a name on it, and a very familiar URL.
“The Huntress? Max, how did you get this?”
“I met her at the support group the other day. That didn’t work out, by the way.”
“A bunch of Chihuahuas?”
“Not a pit bull in the group. But you’ve heard of this girl? She’s legit?”
“Legit?” Brie opened a new tab in her web browser and clicked a link in her favorite places – she didn’t even need to look at the card. A second later, the webpage for the Huntress popped up. There were a lot of photos there – monsters she’d left slain in her wake, piles of dust that were apparently the remains of some vampires, and quite a few zombies with precisely-placed bullet holes in the center of their foreheads. Brie was as good a monster makeup artist as you could find, but she didn’t think she could make a re-killed zombie look that convincing without really expensive CGI for the wounds.
“She did all this?”
“Says she did. I’ve always been inclined to believe her. Why did she give you her card?”
“I think she’s a kindred spirit,” Max said. “If nothing else, I bet she’s been studying… and that’s exactly what we need.”
“You think she can help us find the origin point?”
“If she can’t, we’re back to square one. Want to get in touch with her?”
Brie smiled. “Oh, I think we just must.”
