[Chapter 5] of [Book I likely won't finish]

It's been going a bit badly lately I have to say. I'm trying to slog through the middle at the moment and I've realized my adversary has no real goal (as usual one of my biggest problems). Anyway. Here's chapter 5 and I'll try to post on time again tomorrow. Heh.

Gregory Han lived an hour from Blackwater, at the edge of a bigger a town called Hamilton Park. He didn't answer his doorbell when Riz rang it once, and he didn't answer when she rang a second time. At the end of her patience, she lifted a fist to and banged on its decoratively carved wood.

Didn't she have better things to do than hunting ghosts? Whatever she'd seen on the road the night before hadn't been real. What more did she (and Huber) want to find out? As a police officer she wasn't even supposed to be alone out here either, but Huber had made no mention of taking a partner with her.

She banged on the door again.

"Blackwater police, open the (damned) door!"

Silence, but there was a scuffle somewhere behind the door that told her someone was home.

"Blackwater -" she started again, but was interrupted.

"This is Hamilton!" a voice snapped back. "You have no jurisdiction here!"

Riz rolled her eyes. "You reported an incident in Blackwater, thus we are required to investigate." She paused. "Do you want me to break down the door?"

She couldn't of course, not officially, but by the decorative door she judged he wasn't a guy to know legislation very well. She was right. When he did open the door (ten minutes later after some more shouting back and from) she realized he was an artist. His one bedroom apartment was small (not that this was an indication of artistry), and it was also crammed with cans of paint and finished paintings on canvas. It took all her willpower not to roll her eyes again. An artist. They were the worst. Entitled, they thought the world belonged to them, and if it didn't, they could shape it so it did. She saw the evidence all throughout his pictures, the discarded canvases and sheets of paper, and what bugged her most was he seemed to idealize his life as a starving artist. Riz didn't necessarily hate art (except Russian art) but she hated artists (of every kind).

It was only when her eyes wandered over to more recently painted pictures (the colour still too shiny to have been sitting in his apartment as long as the rest) that she halted. He'd painted a leshen, like the one she'd seen, tall, dark, with red antlers on top of its skull-head.

Riz swallowed against a suddenly dry tongue.

"You a gamer?" she asked, as casually as she could muster.

Han rubbed his hands together, and his whole body language told her he was uneasy. "No. No, I don't game. I haven't since I was a kid."

"Then what are these creatures?" she asked.

"They're - they're nothing."

Riz crossed her arms. He was avoiding looking at his paintings almost as much as he avoided looking at her, and as an Asian, despite her travels around the world, to her, he was difficult to read.

"So you just painted 'nothing' because you thought it'd be fun."

He didn't respond.

Riz decided to cut to the chase. "Are these the things you saw on the road when your friends, Mr. Miller and Mr. Wang, crashed their car?"

Han's expression changed from cowed to aggressive.

"I've already talked about it with your colleagues."

"And yet you can't get it out of your mind." It was a guess, but a good one. As quickly as his temper had flared, the air seemed to drain out of him and his chest deflated, but still he kept his mouth tightly shut. Why did he have to be so stubborn? This was exactly why she despised those closed-off art-or-nothing types.

"It isn't relevant what I thought I saw," he said, and he began to pack away the canvas that showed the leshen in its (their?) tall form. He threw blankets over some of them, sheets over others, but he didn't speak.

Riz was inclined to agree with him (what he'd seen wasn't real and thus not relevant to the police), but she couldn't push away the image of the leshen she thought she'd seen, and anyway, Detective Huber had sent her here to talk to the man, not accept his silence.

"Who says they're not relevant? I wouldn't've made the trip down here to Hamilton if I didn't want to talk."

Han halted in his covering of the paintings, but then continued quickly a moment later.

"Your colleagues didn't believe me."

Again, she desisted the urge to roll her eyes at his dramatic tone. It wasn't that she didn't understand him, because she did, but did he have to be so elusive? She put on her best patient voice, thinking how easy it'd been to talk to the boy yesterday night, although their emotions had both been highly charged. Ekko hadn't needed to be coddled.

"I'm not my colleagues, and you're obviously stressed out about this." To punctuate her words, she pulled up another painting of the leshen, this one more detailed than the others, which diffused into streaks of black (body) and white (skull) and red (antlers) after a few strokes to suggest a person's outline. "Don't you want to talk? I'm here to help you."

"I don't need help."

Phew.

"Well, I do," she said, ignoring her pride, ignoring her irritation at Han. "I need to know what you saw and when you saw it and why two people died in that car and you survived."

He glanced at her, and his expression was full of guilt, full of pain, and momentarily, she felt bad about making him speak, and had to remind herself it was for the greater good. Real or not, something was scaring the citizens of Blackwater, and it'd - Why wasn't she telling him?

"Listen, Han," she said, a bit calmer, a bit softer. "Whatever it is that scares you scared other people as well." She dug in her uniform jacket's pocket for the scrap of news she'd printed about Henny Pipers. "Here's a bit of a report of a woman called Henny Pipers. She's old enough to be your grandmother and she also (thinks) encountered something on the road late at night. It scared her enough she offroaded her car and in her flight back to town crashed into a lamppost opposite of the police office."

She watched him swallow, hard.

"You think I can help?" he asked, and she would have answered (yes, of course. You saw it, and you're the only one who can talk about it, considering Henny is now being held at the psych hospital), but a screeching voice interrupted her.

"Gregory! Who is it?!"

He gave Riz an abashed look.

"No on, gma!"

"I heard the doorbell you little skint. Don't lie to your grandmother's - Oh."

Riz hadn't known there was a staircase, but an elderly lady suddenly appeared in the corner of Han's apartment, from a staircase (that must've been where the smell of Chinese food came from), her narrow eyes narrowing even further as she took in the scene.

"Blackwater police," Riz introduced herself.

The older lady turned to Han.

"Have you gotten into trouble again? Is that why you never help out at the shop?"

Han's pale skin had turned a shade of dark-brownish pink she never observed on Caucasians, but it made sense, considering the shop below was a Chinese restaurant.

"This isn't the time!" he said. "This lady wants to know -"

"Is this how you speak to your elders?" the grandmother demanded, but Riz meant to see a spark of amsuement in her eyes. "I will bring tea." And away she went again down the steps.

Han couldn't meet Riz's eyes when his grandmother had left, but Riz was quite immune to the antics of the elder generation. After all, being an only child, she knew how it felt to be the focus on their scrutiny.

"Shall we sit?" she asked Han.

It was his home, and she was preposterous, but he was whipped, and she didn't have the time (or at least, she didn't have the patience) to wait until he remembered what civilized people did.

"Yes, oh, of course," he said quickly, and with delicate fingers plucked some of his paintings (flowers, in painstaking detail, mostly) off the kitchen table and then, as if his grandmother made him remember his manners, pulled out a chair for her.

Riz plopped down on it, and when he didn't look, made some space on his table by swiping away some more canvases, then put the detailed picture of the leshen she had held onto in front of him.

"So. The creature," she said. "Is this what you saw when Mr. Miller's car went out of control?"

His Adam's apple bobbed. "I - yes."

"You're sure this is what you saw? Dark skin, antlers on its head?"

"Why? Don't you believe me?" he shot back.

No, she didn't, or she shouldn't, but he was evidently traumatized.

"You seem uneasy talking about it."

"Wouldn't you be?" He threw up his hands. "My best friends died! I almost died." He lifted his shirt to show a long scar across his stomach. "And all because - because of some freakish thing in a mask."

Her eyebrows conctracted. "A mask?"

"What else could it be?" he demanded. "A monster? No. No, I'm not a child. There are no such things as monsters beyond the realm of my pictures. I know a mask when I see one and this - this person in the mask, what was his purpose? Have you caught him yet?"

She hadn't expected this from an artist, but collected herself quickly.

"No, but that's why I'm here, why I need your help."

"It must be a mask."

"I'm not saying it isn't."

But did he truly believe that it wasn't a mask? She wasn't sure.

"Can you tell me what happened?" she asked.

"We were driving along [country road] a week and a half ago," he said, grudgingly. "It was dark, around half before midnight, and we were the only car around. Wang was - was playing with his magic cards again, getting on our nerves, and Miller, well, he was talking about football, as usually, but somehow the topic changed after a while -" He cleared his throat.

"To what?"

"To uh - to - to women, if you want to know!"

That, she could relate to.

"All right, go on."

He blinked. "Well, we were talking about girls, and then suddenly, I don't know. We thought it was a deer, it just came out of the woods around us. It jumped into the road, or I don't know if it jumped, it suddenly was there, and all we'd seen before was a flash of fur or something, and Wang, he screamed, like a girl, and then Miller cursed and he tore the steering wheel to the side not to hit it, and then, and as we swerved past it I saw - I saw -"

"You saw this thing."

She held up the painting he'd made, and he gave a nod.

"What did you think of it?"

"In the moment? Nothing. I - we - the car slipped on some leafs, you know, the trees are just shedding and this was in the woods, where there's a lot of them on the ground, and we just slipped, and I stared at at that thing through the back window -" He went silent.

"And then?" she pressed. Despite herself, her heart rate had gone up slightly, and she could feel her pulse pound. There was something tangible here, some tangible fear, as if Han wasn't just recounting a traumatic event, but reliving it.

"And then nothing. Then I woke in the hospital, and my best friends were both dead."

The tension was still high, but her anticipation faded somewhat. Han lifted his head defiantely at the end, and she could see his eyes were red. She didn't know what she'd expected, but it hadn't been this.

"I'm sorry about that," she said, half expecting a snappish answer, but instead, he inclined his head with what she thought was gratitude. Then he said, "What have you found out? You're investigating the case, aren't you? Have you found the culprit, any lead?"

Riz shook her head. "It's difficult. Whatever - whoever it is going around like the wrath of - I mean whoever is underneath the mask only strikes at night at unpredictable locations. That's why I have to follow up every lead (she cringed at the word) I can get."

"Did I - Did I help?"

She wasn't certain, but that's not what he wanted to hear.

"Yes, I believe so."

"What will you do next? Will you find him?"

"Him?"

Han gave a nod. "It must be a 'him'. What woman would do such a thing?" His cheeks coloured again and he seemed to bite his tongue. "I'm sorry. I know there are also woman murderes. I just meant - the thing - the person was tall. I don't know how tall, but he towered over the car, and I couldn't see his face - his mask - clearly at all even though we passed only half a meter or so next to it when Thomas crashed the car."

7 feet tall. Riz kept her face carefully still. The night before, she'd thought the thing she saw on the road was extraordinarily tall. Taller than any man she knew, it'd looked taller than her favourite basketball players even at a distance. But there was no reason to tell Han that.

"That helps," she said. "I'll make a registry of tall men in the area and go from there."

"What if he's from outside?" Han asked. If he was a child, he would have been tugging on her sleeve.

"There aren't that many 7 foot people 'round, even in the US." And if there were, they'd all be playing basketball.

"And masks!" he said as she stood. "You have to find out who sells those kinds of masks."

"Uh - huh."

"I'm serious."

Riz turned around before the door, and saw Han's grandmother coming up the back stairs in a waft of Chinese-food-smell. Her stomach growled, but she ignored it. There were donuts in the office, still, and it was only an hour, not that she didn't love Chinese food.

"You're leaving already?" the old woman demanded. "I've only just finished the tea and there's fresh moon cake downstairs - only three dollars each."

Riz cringed, but only inside. The blackwater PD didn't need any more bad publicity.

"Mrs. Han, I'm so sorry, I have to get back to work. Mr. Han, thank you for your cooperation," she said formally, then closed the door in their faces.