Little Bastards
Finally! Posting Little Bastards, as promised, sooner rather than later. This little story started out as being nothing more than a quick and ‘short’ escape valve, something to unclog the writing valves that were being overstuffed with too many unfinished and due stories. The fact that it ended up turning in to a 8000 words monster is solely and unmistakably to be blamed on Jackfan2, my wonderful beta-reader. Fortunately, she was there all along, correcting and adding some wonderful tidbits to this tale. My biggest thank you goes to her. Any remaining mistakes are, of course, there because I either added them on purpose or because I'm a moron. You chose.
It all started as a conversation, a question as simple as ‘what’s the most unlikely place to find Dean?’. At the museum seemed like the obvious answer. Unless there’s something to hunt there. Like this ;O)
Some people are born to be rich and famous; some others pass through life without rising much more than the dust beneath their shoes. Doesn’t mean one is worth more than the other, just that life can be a bitch sometimes.
Some people are born to be great artists; some others end up guarding the fruits of their labors. Doesn’t mean that one is less talented than the other, it’s just a matter of opportunity.
Given the right circumstances and a touch of good fortune, everyone can have a shot at doing great things, no matter who they’ve been in the past, no matter who they think they’re supposed to be. Its just chance. Fate. Karma. One of those days.
All things considered, it wasn’t even that bad of a job. Honestly, Jacob preferred the peace and quiet of the art museum to the raving madness and high concentration of stupidity at the local flip-a-burger joint. Also, less grease to wash out of his hair at the end of a day’s work. And the pay was better than he could ever hope for.
Besides, what better place for a grad-student working on his Masters in Art than a place with room after room filled with all the stuff his books and teachers talked about? Where else would he be able to actually be around and touch the stuff that he was studying? Or you know, pretty damn good copies of the originals?
So, it was the night shift and it was kind of screwing with his sleep, but hey! It paid the bills.
The paintings here weren’t even that bad. Most of them you could actually understand what the artist was going for, unlike some of those weird assed pieces that he’d seen at the NY MET, where cows’ heads came out of their asses and clocks dripped out of gaunt trees; paintings that were supposed to have greater meaning but were just plain ugly. Well, ok, to be honest, the dripping clocks were kind of cool, but WTF?!
No, these paintings were ok. Mostly landscapes and dead fruit, with a particularly auspicious section on female nudes. And it didn’t even count as porn. It was art. Not that he ever would... you know-
There had to be some degree of respect for art, either it was a dripping clock or a very accurate, very perky, painting of a nice pair of ti- tips! That was the one thing that Jacob missed from his days at King Burger (yes, the name was exactly like that. He’d sent an application to that other one with the more famous name, but they weren’t hiring at the time) but in the museum... in there he got to wear a cool uniform and carry a weapon. Well, it wasn’t exactly a weapon-weapon, more like a glorified baseball bat, but Jacob thought he looked pretty awesome twirling it around.
Marcy, from tickets and information, always said that he just looked like a nerd with a stick and that his fascination with wooden bats was the second creepiest thing that she’d ever seen. When Jacob had asked her what the first one was and Marcy showed him the Greek exhibition, he had to agree that she was absolutely right.
And it -almost mostly- had nothing to do with the guy who’d died there. Mr. Jenkins, his predecessor.
Ok, it had a little to do with the fact that the old man had been found dead in that very same room. The poor guy had walked those very same corridors and exhibition rooms over, and over and over again until his heart keeled over. Literally.
Jacob had no plans of ending up like that. He was guarding the work of others today to make sure that he had the degree to, some day, be the one deciding whose paintings where hung on which walls.
And the very first thing to go, when he was in charge, was the whole frigging Greek exhibition.
It wasn’t even all that good.
The walls had a couple of pretty cool mosaics and the lighting of the room was kind of awesome, all in golden and soft lights that made plain rock look almost smooth and warm. But the stuff on display itself, it was nothing to write home about. This wasn’t exactly the Louvre he was working for.
Other than your standard array of ancient gods and goddess, with their pretentiousness and snobbish looks, a couple of vases and jars and some non-precious jewelry, there was it.
It was the largest piece in the museum, not so much in height, but mostly because of the space it occupied. Most of the room’s center space was taken by a marble reproduction of the Dance of the Satyrs, by Poelenburgh. But, unlike the painting, the sculpted reproduction held none of the play and melancholy... just the lust and some deeply seeded and disturbing feeling that the various intervenients in that scene knew more than everyone else.
Truly, it was mostly because of the eyes. The dead expressions in the empty, white sockets, punctured globes that seemed to follow you everywhere you walked. The satyrs, in particular, were creepy as hell.
There were five statues of the little fellows, each more disgusting than the next, and each more disturbing than the following. They’re faces, unlike most of the depictions of satyrs that he’d seen before, were more animal than human, vacant eyes slithered and impossibly big, the horns in their heads wavy and menacing, their hands small, almost child-like, that ended in sharp, crooked claws.
They were all scattered through the rock formation that held the composition of statues, circling the sobbing girl in the middle. Naked, of course, because Greek artists and themes seemed to have something against clothing.
The level of grief that the sculptor had managed to imprint in that sobbing girl bordered on the chilling. Jacob could actually feel her despair, her pain, a strange need to protect her arising every single damn time he passed through that thing.
He didn’t even remembered Poelenburgh’s painting having any sobbing girls. In fact, the ones in the painting seemed to be having quite a bit of fun.
The way they were all posed and the looks that the satyrs’ had focused on her did not help. It was like someone had grabbed a snapshot of something very, very wrong happening.
Two of the satyrs were planted by the girl’s shoulders, claw-like hands buried inside her skin, while two others hovered near her legs, one of them licking her ankle. And standing in front of them all, the fifth satyr, tiny hands holding what looked like all of his guts, corded pieces of intestine coiled around is hoofed feet like a snake poised for attack. He was the one grinning the most, like the fact that half his insides were hanging outside was the best joke ever.
With their half-goat bodies, twisted and sharp horns and mischievous eyes, they looked... hungry. Lusty. Alive.
The piece wasn’t signed. Jacob had checked the first time he’d laid eyes on it. He was curious to know what kind of sick mind had thought that up. The level of detail and the skill of the sculpturing in itself were very good, like Michelangelo good, but even the museum had labeled it as ‘free interpretation by artist unknown’.
From what he remembered of the painting, ‘free interpretation’ was one big understatement.
Who ever it was, Jacob was sure it had been a very short-lived career. DaVinci came up with a lot of weird stuff during his time, most of which had certainly scared the crap out of his countryman, but the man was a certified genius. This... this was just bad taste.
Then, there were the weird sounds. The building was old, so the grinding of wood, the whispering of rusty pipes and the squeaking of random doors were expected. The rest, not so much.
Whispering voices that were heard when no one was speaking; whistled music that started out of nowhere and no one could ever find a source to; flickering lights that persisted to blink in and out of existence, even though Mr. Thompson had already changed all the light bulbs in the place; phantom drops of blood that showed up out of thin air and disappeared before anyone could clean them and -it was crazy, and something that he would never, ever, mention to anyone as long as he lived- but Jacob could swear that he could hear labored breathing whenever he came in to the Greek statues’ room, like a tired old man, wheezing air in to his lungs after two flights of stairs.
Given that from nine pm to seven am, Jacob was the only one in the whole museum and that he was, by a far stretch, no old man, it was all a bit unsettling.
Mrs. Derrick, the museum curator, always swore up and down that there was nothing strange going about in her museum and that her employees were simply being silly. And as her employees would rather be silly than unemployed, no one really pushed the matter to prove her wrong.
Still, every other night, Jacob could hear those whispers and breaths as clearly as his own heartbeat.
As he made his usual rounds and approached the dreaded room, Jacob was more than ready to find something odd and unexplainable in there and promptly ignore it, for the sake of his mental sanity and regular paycheck. It was par for the course and the unexpected was quickly becoming expected.
Unexpected and new.... exactly like the pained and muffled gasps and the veiled cursing that Jacob could hear as soon as he opened the door of the Greek room. The level of crap-your-pants that Jacob experience there and then was pretty impressive, even by the weird stuff usually happening standards.
The museum didn’t want Jacob carrying a gun. It was too much trouble with insurances and privacy policies for the administration to bother with. Jacob had never really had a problem with that, not being much of a gun lover himself and sure that, if he ever found himself in a position of needing to fire a gun, he would probably shoot his foot off first.
Right now, hearing those noises that were most definitely not in his head, Jacob would’ve loved to have a big assed automatic weapon in his hands -something that would put Rambo to shame- instead of the cheap wooden stick that he usually carried.
“Is there anyone here?” Jacob asked, proud that his voice stood to the challenge and almost didn’t quiver. Much.
The pained gasps and faint curses turned in to a very clear Fuck! and rushed sounds of rustling clothes. For one insane minute, Jacob was glad that there were actually clothes and a person involved in the noises, rather than five feet tall half-goat marble creatures with crazy eyes and hanging guts.
Then it hit him that he was an idiot and this was an actual intruder. The kind that they paid him to keep out of the museum. “Come out with your hands above your head. I have... I have a gun!” Jacob lied.
“Good... shoot those motherfuckers, will ya?” A man’s voice floated from near the statue of the Greek hunting goddess, with her big bow and tame game. Artemis, Apollo’s sister.
Pointing his flashlight in the direction of the voice, Jacob could see, barely hidden by the goddess bare legs and sandaled feet, another set of legs stretched out in the floor, blue jeans instead of white marble. On the floor, there was a dark pool of something near them. Blood.
“Shoot who?” Jacob found himself asking. He knew he was going to regret this, possibly lose his job... heck! He might end up loosing his life for being such a dumbass, but the intruder was probably hurt and they were in the scariest room in the whole frigging museum. It was sort of understandable why he wasn’t running to a phone to call the cops instead of chatting up the guy. One thing was sure: if the guy was saying that there was someone else in the room with them, there was no way Jacob was turning his back on any of them. That was how people usually got killed in movies.
On the other hand, it could all be a trick. Keep the night-guard entertained, while this guy’s accomplices surrounded him and... and... gosh, he should really start seeing fewer cop-shows.
“Do you see them?” The guy called out. “Can you see them?”
Jacob’s heart jumped to his mouth. The guy sounded pissed, like whoever else was in the room with the two of them was his personal enemy. Oh, God! What if this was some sort of gang war? Mafia? Yakusa?
Jacob took a deep breath. Too many cop shows and movies, he reminded himself.
He was still screwed though. This job was supposed to be about babysitting paintings and statues, not catch burglars. That was what the alarms were there for.
Quietly circling the stands and bigger statues, Jacob slowly made his way to the spot where the other man sat. Hidden behind the statue of Zeus, peeking between its stone trident, Jacob finally caught a glimpse of his opponent.
The guy was about his age, with short hair and a dark leather jacket that pooled around him on the floor in waves of well-worn brown. If he was carrying a gun, Jacob couldn’t see it and either way, the guy had both his hands hard pressed against his midsection. The meager light, a sickly yellow thing of piss-poor voltage, was close enough to the intruder for Jacob to see the glistening of blood escaping in between the man’s fingers and the beads of sweat that covered his face.
He didn’t look all that good. Which was actually good news for Jacob.
The guy looked white and pasty, enough to reflect more of the faint lights than the white marble statues around him. He’d been talking fine, but Jacob could still hear the strain in his voice, the half-gulped gasps that he was trying to hide. Whoever this was, he was hurt, badly. Jacob could catch him easily.
“See who?” Jacob finally asked, boldly stepping from behind his hideout. His legs were shaking.
The man on the floor jumped up, caught off-guard, a fleeting expression of disappointment and failure crossing his face. Jacob figured this was not a guy accustomed to be sneaked up on. The expression, however, was quickly and efficiently erased and replaced by a carefully planted indifference.
“The satyrs,” the man answered. Straight faced, like he hadn’t said the most ridiculous thing ever.
Jacob chuckled, theatrically -because, really, that was the only sane reaction to have when faced with such claim- but still found himself looking in the direction of the scary piece that took hold of the center stage in that room. He had to blink to be sure he wasn’t seeing things. Or rather, to see if he wasn’t going blind.
The naked girl, the one permanently desperate and trapped in the circle of satyrs, was still there, her eyes miserable and her hands crossed over her chest, protecting whatever was left of her dignity. The horny little bastards, however... “What did you do to that statue?” Jacob asked, surprised to find himself angry with the guy for messing with the sculpture.
It was, after all, a piece of art, despite his personal opinion on the evilness and ugliness of the thing.
In a strange spout of sense of duty, Jacob searched the rest of the room in panic, trying to figure out where the missing pieces of the sculpture could be. Maybe it was still salvageable.
The light in his hands shook all the worse the longer his search proved more and more fruitless. Where the hell were the missing pieces? All he could see was dust and broken rock on the floor in various spots. Surely the guy hadn’t...
The dry laugh the intruder let out was a scary thing to hear. There wasn’t a wisp of humor in it and yet, it felt like an old joke.
“I didn’t do a damn thing to it...” the guy said, sentence cut short by a shaky gasp, “... which is mainly the reason why I have a bloody hole in my gut,” the guy said, a deep breath ending in a bitten moan. He bent one of his legs, knee close to his chest, supporting his bleeding middle. “The satyrs came to life, if that’s what you’re going about.”
Jacob blinked, grasped the club in his sweaty hands a little bit harder. “You’re insane.”
The guy focused his eyes on him. They were maybe five, six feet from each other, but still Jacob felt the need to take a step back. The shadow of Artemis’ statue fell over the guy, and yet Jacob could see perfectly fine the greenish color in his gaze, as it turned as hard as tempered steel.
The guy’s look was frightening, steady and unbearable like he was actually shooting daggers from his eyeballs. It was the kind of look you hope to see in your friends’ faces when you’re in need of help and the look that makes you soil your pants when you see it on an enemy.
Right now, Jacob was pretty sure that this guy was no friend of his. Not after Jacob called him insane. Not to mention the whole breaking-in bit.
“Sure I am,” the guy agreed way too quickly. “Just don’t come complaining to me when one those horny lil’ pr- oh, fuck me! You’re not even carrying a gun, are you?”
Jacob felt a ridiculous urge to hide his hands behind his back. With his stick in one hand and his flashlight in the other, waving it around has he had been, searching the room for the impossibly at large satyr-statues, it had probably been amazingly easy for the intruder to take a good look at him and know that he’d been lying through his ass about his weapon.
Instead of taking the chance to attack him and make his escape, the wounded man simply laid there, the thunderous look on his face indicating his genuine displeasure at the fact that Jacob was not actually carrying a gun. Which was... odd.
The reason why, however, became painfully obvious when, five seconds later, Jacob felt something viciously grab his leg; he looked down. A very much alive, five foot tall, half-goat stone-thing was hugging his left leg, doing some sort of spastic and weird gymnastic with its body wrapped around Jacob’s calf.
As if it’d somehow felt the presence of eyes on him, the thing looked up to stare at Jacob. The same empty eyes that had given him goosebumps before were now filled with a red mass that seemed to glow in the dark. Like liquid lava that refused to spill outside of its eye sockets.
The thing grinned a toothy smile at the night watchman and without a care in the world, went on with its jerking movements.
“I think it really, really likes you...” the man on the floor said. “And if you don’t put a stop to it, he’ll soon want to move up in life, if you catch me drift.” The sarcasm in his voice was painfully evident.
Reacting on pure instinct and disgust, Jacob shrieked and brought his club down on the frigging stone satyr humping the hell out of his leg. In equal amounts awe and horror, he watched as the baton smashed the thing right on the side of its head, shattering one of the twisted horns. The satyr was not pleased.
Accustomed to seeing them with their mouths mostly closed or slightly opened in satiric snarls, Jacob would’ve never guessed the nasty set of teeth that the stone statue was hiding inside. Sharp too. “Sonofabitch!” Jacob yelled out as he felt the needle like set of jaws closing around his calf muscle and pressing in. Hard.
The second swing of the club was much more effective. Jacob watched in satisfaction as the recently ripped off head of the satyr flew straight in to the nearest wall and smashed in to a thousand pieces, leaving a football size indentation.
“Nice,” the injured man on the floor commented. A lazy smile slid across his face right before his body began to sag, slowly tipping sideways, like a puppet without strings.
Jacob raced to his side and put a hand on the guy’s shoulder, struggling to keep him mostly seated. Staring at the wounded man, panic mixed with the adrenaline rushing in his veins and he found himself shouting. “Hey, mister! Wake up!” Jacob yelled, the gentle shake he’d planed for quickly becoming a bone-crushing hold. “Please, wake the fuck up!”
There were fucking marble stones coming to life in the museum... his museum! Other than bad movies, where... how the fuck did something like that happened?
“Easy on the goods, ’mm awake,” the man said, jerking up and trying to escape Jacob’s bruising grip.
“Awake? Buddy, you passed out cold.” Jacob hadn’t meant for it to sound accusing, but shit, he was scared as hell. “Maybe you should just lay down an--”
“Nah,” the man said, trying to look around. Beads of sweat were popping out all over his forehead like mushrooms in the dark. “Just had a little disagreement with gravity... Did you get it?”
Jacob nodded; his head bobbing up and down at the same time his frantic eyes searched the rest of the room. It was dizzying exercise that he was having a hard time stopping. “Are there more of those things? What are those things?”
“Relax... that was the last of them-- for now, at least,” the man said, pushing a bloody hand against the floor, trying to get up. The wet palm slipped and he cursed again.
Jacob gave the stranger a helping hand up, flashlight forgotten on the floor as they both stood, illuminating their shoes. The minute he brushed the man’s side, Jacob recoiled at the slick, wet feeling, almost loosing his grip on the man.
The stranger hissed in pain and tried to push him away, but the effort was weak and pointless. There was little that he could do to stop Jacob from pushing the leather jacket aside and see the mess underneath.
“Just... lemme take a look,” Jacob pleaded, not really waiting for an answer or permission.
Under the top layered shirt, a button down that had seen better days, was a dark green t-shirt. The material was sliced through, practically shredded. All around the torn remains it was soaked through, dark and wet, with a blackish liquid lazily oozing from somewhere alongside the waistband of guy’s jeans.
“Oh, shit! That looks bad,” Jacob said, slamming his eyes shut. There was something deeply instilled at his core that made him gag every time he saw large quantities of blood on the wrong side of a person. This time was no exception. “That looks really bad,” he said, when his stomach settled somewhat, his fingers tugging some of the material where it stuck to the wound.
“Doesn’t feel all that good either, buddy,” the stranger said, sucking in a rushed breath. “Stop poking it!”
“Jacob... I’m Jacob,” he found himself mumbling, like introductions were the most important thing to get out in the open when a museum intruder was bleeding to death on his hands. “I gotta call 911.”
Caught off guard by the sight of that much blood and the sticky, disgusting feeling of the stuff all over his hands, Jacob almost jumped when he felt one of the stranger’s arms lift to drape around his shoulders, like they were the best buddies in the world.
Jacob could feel the weight of the man, pressing harder and harder on him until he was the only thing keeping the stranger from falling down. He smelled of leather and copper, like his whole body was a worn and used up weapon. The arm that was over him was solid, not over muscled, but tense, like corded rope. Efficient.
Even the vulnerability, with which he pressed his weight harder and harder into Jacob was deceptive and felt planned.
“I really, really wish you wouldn’t do that, Jacob,” the man said, quietly, his words raising all the alarms inside Jacob’s head. Alarms he didn’t even knew he had.
The feeling of the tip of a gun pressed against the soft surface of Jacob’s belly was unmistakable. The guy might be shaking all over, but Jacob doubted that he would miss at that distance.
Jacob tried to gulp and failed, his mouth too dry to produce enough spit to do the job. Stupid, stupid him had trusted a fucking intruder, just because the man was injured. And, ok, because statues were coming to life and running all around the place.
“Look... I swear I won’t tell anyone that you were here... I’l-I’ll make up some sort of story... explain the vandalized art... just, please mister, don’t shoot me,” he begged.
“The damn statues will be up and as good as new in no time... that’s why we need to hurry.”
Jacob was so confused by what the man was saying that he almost forgot about the gun. The scattered debris of both the satyr, whose head he’d broken, as well as broken pieces from the other four, whom, Jacob guessed, had been smashed by the intruder, lay all about. “The blown-to-smithereens statues will be as good as new as in...” Jacob stuttered, trying to figure this out, “... you want to superglue them together?”
The man actually chuckled, this time with some actual humor behind it. “As in, until I destroy the source of their power, they’ll keep coming back to life and killing people... like the old guy who worked here before you.”
“Mr. Jenkins?” Jacob blinked. “Mr. Jenkins died of a heart attack,” he offered feebly. More and more he was starting to regret taking this job. He was one step away from regretting moving to this town all together. “They told me Mr. Jenkins died of a heart att-“ he said, voice dissolving into a whisper.
“I’m sure he did,” the wounded man agreed, “sometime in between seeing these little bastards running around and one of them getting the old man’s insides splattered all over that Atlas statue’s outsides over there.”
The pressure of the gun eased up, even though the man’s grip was still tight on his shoulders. Jacob figured the stranger wanted him to believe in his words, not in the persuasive strength of his bullets. It didn’t help much.
Jacob looked at the innocent looking statue of the Titan that stood in one of the corners. He’d thought those stains were from mold...
“The satyrs killed him? Why would they do that?” Jacob asked, feeling slightly weirded out by the nonsense coming out of his mouth. He should be asking how... HOW the fuck something like that happens, not WHY... Maybe this all just one very bad drea-
“Don’t know... don’t really care. But we have to take care of them before we become the next item on their ‘to do list’.”
“You need a hospital... I should... I should call someone,” Jacob stuttered. Never mind the fact that he actually believed the gibberish that this guy was feeding him. He did not want to fight magically-alive-stone-satyrs, whose horns were sharp enough to gut his predecessor, anymore than he wanted to have his teeth pulled out with pliers.
“I don’t think they’re gonna allow us to do that,” the man said, his head jerking in the direction of the door.
Jacob followed his gaze and gulped. In front of their only exit, stood five satyrs lined up, whole, hale and pissed. With their nostrils flaring and hoofed feet stomping on the grey stone floor, they looked like bulls, getting ready to strike.
“How the hell...” Jacob paused. A fear, unlike any he'd ever known, constricted his chest. “W-what the fuck do we do?” He whispered through the corner of his mouth. Just how much of what he was saying the satyrs could actually understand, he wasn’t sure, so he made a mental note to keep his voice down, just in case.
The things were made of marble and, therefore, shouldn’t even have working ears, let alone understand a single word of English, given that satyrs were traditionally Greek and all that... in all seriousness, logic had flew out the window the minute he’d walked in that room, so who was he to start questioning it now?
Jacob felt the edges of hysteria closing in, mostly when one of the satyrs decided to flash his wicked teeth at him. Never mind fighting-- the need for flight was becoming rapidly overwhelming. “Maybe we could go out the window?”
The guy gave him a pointed look and for some reason, Jacob actually felt embarrassed, like somehow he was being measured and had fallen short of whatever expectations and goals had been set there. Which was all kinds of ridiculous. Except for the fact that they were on the fifth floor... and there were iron bars on all the windows... and yeah, the guy might have a point.
“You need to find my duffel,” the wounded man said, letting go of the tight grip he was keeping on Jacob and sagging back against the wall. He slid down, until he was back on his ass, landing with a pained grunt and a half-bitten ‘motherfucker’. Even in the semi-darkness, Jacob could see the trail of red that he’d left on the grey wall.
“Your duffel?”
“Green bag, long zipper, heavy,” the man said with a hint of sarcasm in his breathy voice. “I need something that’s inside.”
“What about them?” Jacob whispered, nodding toward the satyrs. After what he’d seen of them so far, he had no desire to turn his back on those eerie little creeps, with their sharp teeth glinting occasionally when they sneered at their intended prey.
The overnight guard couldn’t decide what was worse, the sounds their tiny hoofed feet made when they scurried about the room unseen, or this current scenario; the continuous back and forth communication that came off as a high pitched whistling between them and the staring. From their position at the door, they smirked, nodding, gesturing, actually cackling; it was as if they shared some private joke and Jacob got the distinct impression that the punch line was on Jacob and the stranger by his side. “Why aren’t they moving?”
“I think they’re waiting for something... or someone,” the stranger said, sounding lost inside his own head. His body remained still, but the man’s eyes were quietly and thoroughly searching the room, studying what was left of the marble sculpture and the others around it. “Either way, we should get a move on before whatever it is they’re waiting to happen, happens.”
“Yeah... yeah, we should,” Jacob agreed absent-mindedly. His eyes were glued to the little bastards, mesmerized by the details of the living sculptures, amazed by the fact that he could actually see the muscles moving underneath the stone, how the fur seemed to come to life every time they moved even though he frigging knew that they were all nothing but carefully chiseled, white stone. The one whose guts were hanging out had actually draped them around his neck, like some sort of gorish scarf.
The man on the floor kicked Jacob’s foot in annoyance. “Dude... my duffel!”
Jacob jumped to life, the guy’s voice inspiring obedience. And then he remembered that he was the night watchman there, and that the guy ordering him around was an intruder who should be grateful that Jacob hadn’t called the cops on him yet. Not that this was something that Jacob would want to explain to the authorities. “Stop ordering me around... I don’t even know your frigging name!”
The stranger gave him an odd look; his head tilting sideways like a pigeon studying a peculiar looking piece of corn. “Name’s Morrison, if that’s so important to you,” he finally said, indulgency all over his tone of voice, “... now could you please get my fucking duffel so that I can stop us both from being turned in to shish kabob? Or do you want my phone number too?”
Jacob felt himself blushing. This was why he hadn’t joined the military like his father wanted. He tended to get... sidetracked when he panicked. Reluctantly, he turned his back on Morrison, picked up his discarded flashlight and started to search the room.
The low-pitched sounds of the shifting satyrs were enough to raise the fine hair at the back of his neck -heck! of his whole damn body- but he refused to acknowledge them.
Jacob couldn’t begin to guess at what sort of miracle working wonder that guy might possibly have inside his duffel that would take care of five snarling satyrs and an unknown and mysterious power course, but Jacob was willing to give it a try. His bleeding leg was starting to sting as a bitch and he really didn’t wanted to get another taste of those nasty teeth.
“Where the hell did you leave it?” Jacob asked after a short while. The room wasn’t that big to start with, and he’d already checked everywhere.
The sound of crashing stone and pained grunts reached his ears. Morrison was busy, clubbing the satyrs left and right with his gun. The little bastards were on the move again.
“They threw it -guh!-near the window!” Morrison managed to squeeze out.
Jacob had no idea how the guy was able to fight those things. From what he could see, they didn’t move all that fast, but the one tiny bite that Jacob had in his leg had him limping... that guy was seriously hurt. By all laws and thresholds of human torment, he should be withering in pain on the floor.
Instead, the guy was moving like there was nothing wrong with him, swinging the butt of his gun with the precision of a Swiss clock, kicking hard enough to break stone. It was like a dance. Not one movement wasted, not one strike without consequences. There was no way that guy wasn’t a professional... something.
And then there was the fact that he was using his gun to smack the things, instead of just shooting them. He could understand the reasoning of not wanting the added noise before, when there was the matter of attracting Jacob’s awareness to his presence by shooting the hell of the place, but now... and it wasn’t like the alarms would be going off either, because with the amount of ruckus and destruction those little guys were causing and the amount of display, sealed glass that they’d broken already, if the alarms were functioning they would’ve gone off by now. Which meant they were off.
Jacob was sure that the intruder had taken care of those first, like any other burglar worth its salt would. Which meant that he wasn’t firing the gun because he probably had no bull- sonofabitch!
His foot hit something soft and Jacob looked down. He smiled when he finally spotted the green fabric of the bag he’d been looking for, hidden beneath one of the stands. Thoughts of being tricked by empty guns fled his mind as he turned to give Morrison the good news. “Found i--!”
Jacob froze in place.
The dust of the broken pieces of at least three of the stone satyrs was still settling all over the other statues and showcases making the place look like some sort of secret tomb straight out of the Indiana Jones movies. The faint blue light, filtering in from the hallway, partially illuminated the frozen statues of gods and goddess, giving each an eerily defined light and dark side. All that was missing now was some well thought of epic music and a surprise villain.
Well, maybe not the villain. Morrison wasn’t alone anymore.
The central piece of the satyrs’ replica was no longer in its rightful place. The naked lady that had always elicited such feelings of pity and protectiveness from Jacob whenever he walked by, was now standing over Morrison, looming over the fallen man, both of them speaking in hushed tones.
Jacob felt like an intruder in a private viewing of some weird plotted movie, the little hired extra that wanted to mesh with the lead actors.
The two remaining satyrs had their backs to him, each standing guard on either side of the woman. The three of them stood towering over Morrison, who was slumped back on the floor. No one was paying any attention to Jacob’s movements across the room.
On the wall behind Morrison, the big engraved mirror gave Jacob a perfect view of the stone woman’s face. She was oddly... beautiful. It scared the crap out of him.
“I’ve been waiting for one of you to come,” the stone-woman said. “Never expected that it would be you, though. My very own celebrity snack... what a pleasant surprise!”
Jacob's eyes widened - had she actually licked her lips?
“You should watch what you eat, lady... a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips,” Morrison answered with a snarl. “At least, that’s what my friend JACOB always says.”
Jacob jumped up at the out-of-nowhere mention of his name, hiding more carefully behind the statue that he was keeping between himself and the others. He couldn’t see anything but the soles of the boots on Morrison’s feet. How could the other man see him? Maybe it was some other Jacob...
“Funny... your daddy was funny too,” the woman said, her tone icy and dark. “I met him, once... did he ever tell you? No, I suppose he didn’t... there was a lot that man kept to himself. Guess it helps to be able to get inside people’s heads to learn all about someone’s dirty secrets, doesn’t it?”
She snapped two stone fingers at the satyrs nearest to her, the gesture curt and sharp, eliciting immediate action from the stone beings even though no verbal order had been given.
Jacob watched in wonder as a fine dust came out as a result of the friction between her fingers. Wait... did she say ‘inside people’s heads’? Fuck! What if she could find out about him just because he was thinking?
The thing was, he kind of needed to think if he wanted to survive this. Guess this whole thing kind of threw a whole new spin on the ‘I think, therefore I... ‘m screwed’ saying.
Despite the fact that they were a third of the man’s height, each of the satyrs had grabbed one of Morrison’s arms, forcefully pushing him to his knees and dragging the man to the center of the room.
Jacob could’ve made a dash for the door there and then. Mind reader or not, all three statues had their backs to him and the path out was clear and open. But running away meant much more than surviving, Jacob knew that. If he did managed to live to tell this weird tale to anyone, he would still have to deal with the fact that he would be leaving the other man to the mercy of these creatures.
It seemed insanely displaced, but by some weird chance, this was it. The one decision that would define what kind of man Jacob was: a coward or a hero.
The night watchman sighed in resignation, his decision easy to make when the satyrs threw the man unceremoniously to the stone floor and he cried out in pain. No one deserved to be left alone sounding like that.
Besides, heroes had short lives, but cowards lived miserably forever.
“You know, it wasn’t so much the fact that your father killed my family, as it was the fact that he thought himself so much better than us,” the woman went on, following the group until she was next to fallen man. The satyrs moved the stranger around like he was nothing more than a simple rag doll, arranging him to stand perfectly centered on the rock formation in the sculpture. The woman followed his every move, taunting him with words, while the satyrs busied themselves taking off Morrison’s heavy jacket and threadbare over-shirt.
“I mean, here was a man prepared to sacrifice his own son, to kill his own flesh and blood, and still he thought himself righteous enough to decide whether my family should live or die,” she whispered in Morrison’s ear. “How’s brother dearest, by the way?”
From his hidden spot, Jacob could see the green tinge to Morrison’s countenance at the statue’s words. Whatever she was throwing in to his face, it wasn’t as insane and far-fetched as it sounded. Geesh... and he thought his family had problems.
“So, the cat is out of the BAG,” Morrison finally spoke, his voice sounding more and more breathy. Uncomfortable as his position looked, pressed down against the sharp and uneven rocks, Jacob could see that the man was looking straight at him. “This whole thing is about avenging your psycho family, who, by the way, was as bat shit crazy as you? What did mommy gave you guys for brunch? WEED?”
The stone-woman’s answer was lost in the giant ding!dong! that sounded inside Jacob’s head. It finally clicked. Morrison was trying to catch his attention, talking to him without the statues realizing it, telling him what to do with the bag in his hands.
Making sure that he was well hidden from all the drama taking place at center stage, Jacob hunched down and, thanking the heavens above for the fact that the duffel’s zipper was already opened, quietly searched inside for... weed? Really?
“I hear he’s dead,” the stone-woman went on, the sound of tearing clothes peppering her vicious words. “Did your brother finally find out about his plans and killed daddy like he did with mommy? Or was it you?”
Jacob wisely chose to not look at what was happening. It was eerie enough to realize that Morrison had been arranged exactly in the same position that the frightened women on the center of sculpture had been before, let alone the barely hidden satisfaction with which she spoke. It was like she’d been trapped in that place of terror for such a long time that it was now a joy for her to see someone else in her place.
And speaking of eerie... the stuff Morrison carried inside his bag was chilling. Total psycho grade.
From weapons to knives to --frigging flamethrowers!--, the guy was a walking, talking arsenal. When his fingers brushed against some rough fabric with something crunchy inside, Jacob was sure he’d found the right item.
“What do you want bitch? Not happy with that thick and ugly stone skin you were born with, wanted BRONZE perhaps? Or maybe a nice, fresh CUP of coffee too to go along with those delusional cookies? No?”
Jacob’s eyes widened. He’d heard that right, right? It was getting harder and harder to tell the difference between Morrison’s pained gasps and the words he voiced louder for Jacob’s benefit. The urge to just grab the flamethrower and stop whatever it was the crazy stone woman was planning to do to Morrison was building up. Where on earth was he going to find a bronze cup?
When it clicked where he was, Jacob felt like kicking himself in the netherlands. This was the fucking GREEK exhibition. The only place where he would find more stuff made out of bronze was in the Bronze Age room.
On the other hand, this was a museum. There wasn’t a single thing in there that Jacob could move without having to break a thick glass or two. Which would be noisy as hell and certain to draw the crazies’ attention on him.
Irony was an unsympathetic bitch. So many choices and not a single viable one in sight. Would it have killed those bastards to have actually broken one of the exhibition stands that had something in it that he could use, instead of all others around?
And then Jacob’s eyes landed on the trashcan. The nice, tall, engraved, bronze trashcan.
“Funny you should mention the skin thing,” the woman said, producing a dagger from out of nowhere. “I do like yours... its all... smooth and freckly.” The look of unmitigated evil on her voice made Jacob swallow in fear. "It will look very nice on me."
“Hunting yourself a bit of man-skin, hum? Let me guess, you wanted to play GI-Joes and daddy insisted on dolls?”
The woman smirked, her stone fingers incredibly nimble as she cut a square of skin out of Morrison’s arm and ate it with a smack of her stone lips. Almost instantly, a patch of brand new, pink skin materialized on her forearm.
“Argh! Y--ou bitch... I’m gonna KILL ya! You’re gonna BURN THAT SHIT NOW!” Morrison yelled, looking straight at Jacob. There was no misinterpreting it now.
Jacob wasted no time, especially when the satyrs and the woman’s attention turned from Morrison to him. There were several bags of smelly herbs and who knew what else inside the stranger’s bag and, with no way of knowing which one Morrison wanted him to burn, Jacob just threw them all inside the trashcan.
Fishing the lighter from his jacket’s pocket, Jacob smiled. At least now, when his girlfriend started to pick on him because of his ‘filthy and disgusting smoking habits’ he would be able to tell her all about that one time when his habits actually saved his life. Or maybe not- she might think he was just crazy... or high. Possibly both.
Either way, there was an odd pleasure and satisfaction when Jacob dropped his lit lighter inside the trashcan and, in those scarce seconds before the bags of weed caught on fire, saw the looks on the statutes’ faces. Gone were the sneers and jeers of impending victory. They now looked like they just couldn’t believe he’d done that.
The blatant panic and that sheer disbelief were enough for Jacob to know that, crazy as this looked, it was the right thing to do. They had won.
The satyrs, who’d remained silent up to that point, let out a high pitch screech that managed to crack the glass on the thicker exhibition glasses, just before erupting in flames of an odd blue color and turning to dust.
The stone-woman, or whatever the hell she was, turned a murderous gaze from Jacob to Morrison, who lay helplessly beneath her. Jacob was too far away, she must’ve realized, but she could still try to exact her vengeance on the closer man.
Morrison stared defiantly, unflinching as she lifted the dagger in her hands high above her head, ready to plunge it deep inside his exposed chest.
Too far away to do little more than stare with his heart frozen in place, Jacob barely noticed when the gunshot exploded in the otherwise quiet room.
The marble stone that the fierce woman was made of burst into a thousand pieces, right before she herself was consumed by the same blue flames that had ended the satyrs. She was looking straight at Jacob, just before vanishing in to dust. The malevolent look in her white eyes would be enough to be giving him nightmares until his old age.
“Told you I wasn’t food, you BITCH!” Morrison hissed out. The gun in is hands, the fucking weapon that Jacob was certain had no bullets in it, now freshly fired, tumbled to the floor as Morrison’s arms lost the strength to keep it up and his eyes rolled inwards.
From the looks of it, Morrison’s body had just been waiting for the ‘all clear’ on the menace side to concede to the need to conk out.
The guy was a mess of blood, cuts and bruises. There was no way that Jacob was not calling 911 now. It would be hard enough to explain the half destroyed room. A dead body? No chance in hell he was risking that!
Racing to the guy’s side, Jacob was almost afraid to touch him. Morrison looked too still, not appearing to even be breathing at all, which would’ve kind of sucked. This was the end, right? Heroes got battered, but they always ended up surviving to get the girl in the end. So, ok, the girl was the bad guy here and none of them really wanted to end up with her, but there had to be some sort of justice to the fact that he and Morrison had just ended one evil bitch... some sort of reward.
Only, from the look of things, Jacob was starting to fear that, the minute he took his two fingers off Morrison’s neck pulse to go call for help, the guy’s heart would stop beating.
“Freeze! Step away from him!”
Jacob almost jumped in the air. After half the statues in the exhibition having come to life, he wouldn’t be surprised if he looked back and found out that the commanding, thunderous voice belonged to Zeus himself.
Instead of a trident, Jacob found himself facing a bright light and two black holes of a shogun’s double barrel, all pointed at him.
There was only one group of people that Jacob knew who went around stomping in to places and ordering people around to ‘freeze’, like they were some kind of instant refrigerator unit.
“Oh, thank God,” Jacob breathed out, happy that, for once, the cops had showed up without being called. “I’m the security guard here. You need to call for back up, we need to get this guy to a hospital.”
The shotgun never wavered from his face.
The guy holding it was nothing short of a giant. Or at least he looked like one, standing over the two of them, looming, furious, taking in the mess around them. He was also not dressed as a cop and alone. Didn’t cops always work in pairs? Oh... crap.
He looked young, but the way his eyes searched the room, first for menaces, then for exits and only at the end, focusing on the two remaining men, spoke of years of experience. And the way his eyes grew wide and then softened into concern and barely contained panic as he took in the scattered puddles of blood and their source... oh, man! These guys knew each other! These guys knew each other well, enough to care for one another.
“Look, I can explain-“ Jacob tried, thinking that, with no other culprit around, the giant was bound to assume that he had been the one hurting his friend.
“Go easy on the guy, Jimmy,” the wounded man said, his eyes still closed but evidently knowing exactly who was in the room. “He just saved our collective bacons.”
The concern on the other guy’s face quickly evolved into annoyance, even as he moved with effortless grace to kneel by Morrison’s side, taking in the tattered clothes and bleeding wounds. “I thought you were just going to ‘take a look around’?”
Morrison twitched on the floor, not so much in embarrassment at the grilling tone that the other guy was using, but just trying to ease his injured body into a more comfortable position. “I looked... they looked back. Shit happened,” he said with a shrug, like that was a common occurrence in his life. “Get me out of here, will’ya?”
It wasn’t a request, Jacob understood, and it had been directed to the new guy, not him. In fact, it was like the two of them had completely forgotten that he was even in the room and that he was still the museum’s guard.
The fact that he wasn’t even being considered in the equation should’ve clued him in on what was about to happen.
“Sorry dude... but you’ll thank us for this later,” the giant -Jim- said, actually looking sympathetically at him. Be that as it may, Jacob only had time to think ‘oh shit!’ before the butt of the shotgun descended on his head and everything went black.
When the cops shook him awake some fifteen minutes later, Jacob didn’t even had to open his mouth to explain what had happen. They had just taken in the messed up room, the destroyed sculpture and the blood all over and promptly declared Jacob as one hell of a night guard, who’d managed to chase away what was obviously a failed robbery.
And Jacob never told them that the fault lay with five horny little bastards and that Jim Morrison had helped him save the day. Who would believe him anyway?
The end.
And for those curious about it, here's Poelenburgh's painting 'The dance of the Satyrs'
It all started as a conversation, a question as simple as ‘what’s the most unlikely place to find Dean?’. At the museum seemed like the obvious answer. Unless there’s something to hunt there. Like this ;O)
Some people are born to be rich and famous; some others pass through life without rising much more than the dust beneath their shoes. Doesn’t mean one is worth more than the other, just that life can be a bitch sometimes.
Some people are born to be great artists; some others end up guarding the fruits of their labors. Doesn’t mean that one is less talented than the other, it’s just a matter of opportunity.
Given the right circumstances and a touch of good fortune, everyone can have a shot at doing great things, no matter who they’ve been in the past, no matter who they think they’re supposed to be. Its just chance. Fate. Karma. One of those days.
All things considered, it wasn’t even that bad of a job. Honestly, Jacob preferred the peace and quiet of the art museum to the raving madness and high concentration of stupidity at the local flip-a-burger joint. Also, less grease to wash out of his hair at the end of a day’s work. And the pay was better than he could ever hope for.
Besides, what better place for a grad-student working on his Masters in Art than a place with room after room filled with all the stuff his books and teachers talked about? Where else would he be able to actually be around and touch the stuff that he was studying? Or you know, pretty damn good copies of the originals?
So, it was the night shift and it was kind of screwing with his sleep, but hey! It paid the bills.
The paintings here weren’t even that bad. Most of them you could actually understand what the artist was going for, unlike some of those weird assed pieces that he’d seen at the NY MET, where cows’ heads came out of their asses and clocks dripped out of gaunt trees; paintings that were supposed to have greater meaning but were just plain ugly. Well, ok, to be honest, the dripping clocks were kind of cool, but WTF?!
No, these paintings were ok. Mostly landscapes and dead fruit, with a particularly auspicious section on female nudes. And it didn’t even count as porn. It was art. Not that he ever would... you know-
There had to be some degree of respect for art, either it was a dripping clock or a very accurate, very perky, painting of a nice pair of ti- tips! That was the one thing that Jacob missed from his days at King Burger (yes, the name was exactly like that. He’d sent an application to that other one with the more famous name, but they weren’t hiring at the time) but in the museum... in there he got to wear a cool uniform and carry a weapon. Well, it wasn’t exactly a weapon-weapon, more like a glorified baseball bat, but Jacob thought he looked pretty awesome twirling it around.
Marcy, from tickets and information, always said that he just looked like a nerd with a stick and that his fascination with wooden bats was the second creepiest thing that she’d ever seen. When Jacob had asked her what the first one was and Marcy showed him the Greek exhibition, he had to agree that she was absolutely right.
And it -almost mostly- had nothing to do with the guy who’d died there. Mr. Jenkins, his predecessor.
Ok, it had a little to do with the fact that the old man had been found dead in that very same room. The poor guy had walked those very same corridors and exhibition rooms over, and over and over again until his heart keeled over. Literally.
Jacob had no plans of ending up like that. He was guarding the work of others today to make sure that he had the degree to, some day, be the one deciding whose paintings where hung on which walls.
And the very first thing to go, when he was in charge, was the whole frigging Greek exhibition.
It wasn’t even all that good.
The walls had a couple of pretty cool mosaics and the lighting of the room was kind of awesome, all in golden and soft lights that made plain rock look almost smooth and warm. But the stuff on display itself, it was nothing to write home about. This wasn’t exactly the Louvre he was working for.
Other than your standard array of ancient gods and goddess, with their pretentiousness and snobbish looks, a couple of vases and jars and some non-precious jewelry, there was it.
It was the largest piece in the museum, not so much in height, but mostly because of the space it occupied. Most of the room’s center space was taken by a marble reproduction of the Dance of the Satyrs, by Poelenburgh. But, unlike the painting, the sculpted reproduction held none of the play and melancholy... just the lust and some deeply seeded and disturbing feeling that the various intervenients in that scene knew more than everyone else.
Truly, it was mostly because of the eyes. The dead expressions in the empty, white sockets, punctured globes that seemed to follow you everywhere you walked. The satyrs, in particular, were creepy as hell.
There were five statues of the little fellows, each more disgusting than the next, and each more disturbing than the following. They’re faces, unlike most of the depictions of satyrs that he’d seen before, were more animal than human, vacant eyes slithered and impossibly big, the horns in their heads wavy and menacing, their hands small, almost child-like, that ended in sharp, crooked claws.
They were all scattered through the rock formation that held the composition of statues, circling the sobbing girl in the middle. Naked, of course, because Greek artists and themes seemed to have something against clothing.
The level of grief that the sculptor had managed to imprint in that sobbing girl bordered on the chilling. Jacob could actually feel her despair, her pain, a strange need to protect her arising every single damn time he passed through that thing.
He didn’t even remembered Poelenburgh’s painting having any sobbing girls. In fact, the ones in the painting seemed to be having quite a bit of fun.
The way they were all posed and the looks that the satyrs’ had focused on her did not help. It was like someone had grabbed a snapshot of something very, very wrong happening.
Two of the satyrs were planted by the girl’s shoulders, claw-like hands buried inside her skin, while two others hovered near her legs, one of them licking her ankle. And standing in front of them all, the fifth satyr, tiny hands holding what looked like all of his guts, corded pieces of intestine coiled around is hoofed feet like a snake poised for attack. He was the one grinning the most, like the fact that half his insides were hanging outside was the best joke ever.
With their half-goat bodies, twisted and sharp horns and mischievous eyes, they looked... hungry. Lusty. Alive.
The piece wasn’t signed. Jacob had checked the first time he’d laid eyes on it. He was curious to know what kind of sick mind had thought that up. The level of detail and the skill of the sculpturing in itself were very good, like Michelangelo good, but even the museum had labeled it as ‘free interpretation by artist unknown’.
From what he remembered of the painting, ‘free interpretation’ was one big understatement.
Who ever it was, Jacob was sure it had been a very short-lived career. DaVinci came up with a lot of weird stuff during his time, most of which had certainly scared the crap out of his countryman, but the man was a certified genius. This... this was just bad taste.
Then, there were the weird sounds. The building was old, so the grinding of wood, the whispering of rusty pipes and the squeaking of random doors were expected. The rest, not so much.
Whispering voices that were heard when no one was speaking; whistled music that started out of nowhere and no one could ever find a source to; flickering lights that persisted to blink in and out of existence, even though Mr. Thompson had already changed all the light bulbs in the place; phantom drops of blood that showed up out of thin air and disappeared before anyone could clean them and -it was crazy, and something that he would never, ever, mention to anyone as long as he lived- but Jacob could swear that he could hear labored breathing whenever he came in to the Greek statues’ room, like a tired old man, wheezing air in to his lungs after two flights of stairs.
Given that from nine pm to seven am, Jacob was the only one in the whole museum and that he was, by a far stretch, no old man, it was all a bit unsettling.
Mrs. Derrick, the museum curator, always swore up and down that there was nothing strange going about in her museum and that her employees were simply being silly. And as her employees would rather be silly than unemployed, no one really pushed the matter to prove her wrong.
Still, every other night, Jacob could hear those whispers and breaths as clearly as his own heartbeat.
As he made his usual rounds and approached the dreaded room, Jacob was more than ready to find something odd and unexplainable in there and promptly ignore it, for the sake of his mental sanity and regular paycheck. It was par for the course and the unexpected was quickly becoming expected.
Unexpected and new.... exactly like the pained and muffled gasps and the veiled cursing that Jacob could hear as soon as he opened the door of the Greek room. The level of crap-your-pants that Jacob experience there and then was pretty impressive, even by the weird stuff usually happening standards.
The museum didn’t want Jacob carrying a gun. It was too much trouble with insurances and privacy policies for the administration to bother with. Jacob had never really had a problem with that, not being much of a gun lover himself and sure that, if he ever found himself in a position of needing to fire a gun, he would probably shoot his foot off first.
Right now, hearing those noises that were most definitely not in his head, Jacob would’ve loved to have a big assed automatic weapon in his hands -something that would put Rambo to shame- instead of the cheap wooden stick that he usually carried.
“Is there anyone here?” Jacob asked, proud that his voice stood to the challenge and almost didn’t quiver. Much.
The pained gasps and faint curses turned in to a very clear Fuck! and rushed sounds of rustling clothes. For one insane minute, Jacob was glad that there were actually clothes and a person involved in the noises, rather than five feet tall half-goat marble creatures with crazy eyes and hanging guts.
Then it hit him that he was an idiot and this was an actual intruder. The kind that they paid him to keep out of the museum. “Come out with your hands above your head. I have... I have a gun!” Jacob lied.
“Good... shoot those motherfuckers, will ya?” A man’s voice floated from near the statue of the Greek hunting goddess, with her big bow and tame game. Artemis, Apollo’s sister.
Pointing his flashlight in the direction of the voice, Jacob could see, barely hidden by the goddess bare legs and sandaled feet, another set of legs stretched out in the floor, blue jeans instead of white marble. On the floor, there was a dark pool of something near them. Blood.
“Shoot who?” Jacob found himself asking. He knew he was going to regret this, possibly lose his job... heck! He might end up loosing his life for being such a dumbass, but the intruder was probably hurt and they were in the scariest room in the whole frigging museum. It was sort of understandable why he wasn’t running to a phone to call the cops instead of chatting up the guy. One thing was sure: if the guy was saying that there was someone else in the room with them, there was no way Jacob was turning his back on any of them. That was how people usually got killed in movies.
On the other hand, it could all be a trick. Keep the night-guard entertained, while this guy’s accomplices surrounded him and... and... gosh, he should really start seeing fewer cop-shows.
“Do you see them?” The guy called out. “Can you see them?”
Jacob’s heart jumped to his mouth. The guy sounded pissed, like whoever else was in the room with the two of them was his personal enemy. Oh, God! What if this was some sort of gang war? Mafia? Yakusa?
Jacob took a deep breath. Too many cop shows and movies, he reminded himself.
He was still screwed though. This job was supposed to be about babysitting paintings and statues, not catch burglars. That was what the alarms were there for.
Quietly circling the stands and bigger statues, Jacob slowly made his way to the spot where the other man sat. Hidden behind the statue of Zeus, peeking between its stone trident, Jacob finally caught a glimpse of his opponent.
The guy was about his age, with short hair and a dark leather jacket that pooled around him on the floor in waves of well-worn brown. If he was carrying a gun, Jacob couldn’t see it and either way, the guy had both his hands hard pressed against his midsection. The meager light, a sickly yellow thing of piss-poor voltage, was close enough to the intruder for Jacob to see the glistening of blood escaping in between the man’s fingers and the beads of sweat that covered his face.
He didn’t look all that good. Which was actually good news for Jacob.
The guy looked white and pasty, enough to reflect more of the faint lights than the white marble statues around him. He’d been talking fine, but Jacob could still hear the strain in his voice, the half-gulped gasps that he was trying to hide. Whoever this was, he was hurt, badly. Jacob could catch him easily.
“See who?” Jacob finally asked, boldly stepping from behind his hideout. His legs were shaking.
The man on the floor jumped up, caught off-guard, a fleeting expression of disappointment and failure crossing his face. Jacob figured this was not a guy accustomed to be sneaked up on. The expression, however, was quickly and efficiently erased and replaced by a carefully planted indifference.
“The satyrs,” the man answered. Straight faced, like he hadn’t said the most ridiculous thing ever.
Jacob chuckled, theatrically -because, really, that was the only sane reaction to have when faced with such claim- but still found himself looking in the direction of the scary piece that took hold of the center stage in that room. He had to blink to be sure he wasn’t seeing things. Or rather, to see if he wasn’t going blind.
The naked girl, the one permanently desperate and trapped in the circle of satyrs, was still there, her eyes miserable and her hands crossed over her chest, protecting whatever was left of her dignity. The horny little bastards, however... “What did you do to that statue?” Jacob asked, surprised to find himself angry with the guy for messing with the sculpture.
It was, after all, a piece of art, despite his personal opinion on the evilness and ugliness of the thing.
In a strange spout of sense of duty, Jacob searched the rest of the room in panic, trying to figure out where the missing pieces of the sculpture could be. Maybe it was still salvageable.
The light in his hands shook all the worse the longer his search proved more and more fruitless. Where the hell were the missing pieces? All he could see was dust and broken rock on the floor in various spots. Surely the guy hadn’t...
The dry laugh the intruder let out was a scary thing to hear. There wasn’t a wisp of humor in it and yet, it felt like an old joke.
“I didn’t do a damn thing to it...” the guy said, sentence cut short by a shaky gasp, “... which is mainly the reason why I have a bloody hole in my gut,” the guy said, a deep breath ending in a bitten moan. He bent one of his legs, knee close to his chest, supporting his bleeding middle. “The satyrs came to life, if that’s what you’re going about.”
Jacob blinked, grasped the club in his sweaty hands a little bit harder. “You’re insane.”
The guy focused his eyes on him. They were maybe five, six feet from each other, but still Jacob felt the need to take a step back. The shadow of Artemis’ statue fell over the guy, and yet Jacob could see perfectly fine the greenish color in his gaze, as it turned as hard as tempered steel.
The guy’s look was frightening, steady and unbearable like he was actually shooting daggers from his eyeballs. It was the kind of look you hope to see in your friends’ faces when you’re in need of help and the look that makes you soil your pants when you see it on an enemy.
Right now, Jacob was pretty sure that this guy was no friend of his. Not after Jacob called him insane. Not to mention the whole breaking-in bit.
“Sure I am,” the guy agreed way too quickly. “Just don’t come complaining to me when one those horny lil’ pr- oh, fuck me! You’re not even carrying a gun, are you?”
Jacob felt a ridiculous urge to hide his hands behind his back. With his stick in one hand and his flashlight in the other, waving it around has he had been, searching the room for the impossibly at large satyr-statues, it had probably been amazingly easy for the intruder to take a good look at him and know that he’d been lying through his ass about his weapon.
Instead of taking the chance to attack him and make his escape, the wounded man simply laid there, the thunderous look on his face indicating his genuine displeasure at the fact that Jacob was not actually carrying a gun. Which was... odd.
The reason why, however, became painfully obvious when, five seconds later, Jacob felt something viciously grab his leg; he looked down. A very much alive, five foot tall, half-goat stone-thing was hugging his left leg, doing some sort of spastic and weird gymnastic with its body wrapped around Jacob’s calf.
As if it’d somehow felt the presence of eyes on him, the thing looked up to stare at Jacob. The same empty eyes that had given him goosebumps before were now filled with a red mass that seemed to glow in the dark. Like liquid lava that refused to spill outside of its eye sockets.
The thing grinned a toothy smile at the night watchman and without a care in the world, went on with its jerking movements.
“I think it really, really likes you...” the man on the floor said. “And if you don’t put a stop to it, he’ll soon want to move up in life, if you catch me drift.” The sarcasm in his voice was painfully evident.
Reacting on pure instinct and disgust, Jacob shrieked and brought his club down on the frigging stone satyr humping the hell out of his leg. In equal amounts awe and horror, he watched as the baton smashed the thing right on the side of its head, shattering one of the twisted horns. The satyr was not pleased.
Accustomed to seeing them with their mouths mostly closed or slightly opened in satiric snarls, Jacob would’ve never guessed the nasty set of teeth that the stone statue was hiding inside. Sharp too. “Sonofabitch!” Jacob yelled out as he felt the needle like set of jaws closing around his calf muscle and pressing in. Hard.
The second swing of the club was much more effective. Jacob watched in satisfaction as the recently ripped off head of the satyr flew straight in to the nearest wall and smashed in to a thousand pieces, leaving a football size indentation.
“Nice,” the injured man on the floor commented. A lazy smile slid across his face right before his body began to sag, slowly tipping sideways, like a puppet without strings.
Jacob raced to his side and put a hand on the guy’s shoulder, struggling to keep him mostly seated. Staring at the wounded man, panic mixed with the adrenaline rushing in his veins and he found himself shouting. “Hey, mister! Wake up!” Jacob yelled, the gentle shake he’d planed for quickly becoming a bone-crushing hold. “Please, wake the fuck up!”
There were fucking marble stones coming to life in the museum... his museum! Other than bad movies, where... how the fuck did something like that happened?
“Easy on the goods, ’mm awake,” the man said, jerking up and trying to escape Jacob’s bruising grip.
“Awake? Buddy, you passed out cold.” Jacob hadn’t meant for it to sound accusing, but shit, he was scared as hell. “Maybe you should just lay down an--”
“Nah,” the man said, trying to look around. Beads of sweat were popping out all over his forehead like mushrooms in the dark. “Just had a little disagreement with gravity... Did you get it?”
Jacob nodded; his head bobbing up and down at the same time his frantic eyes searched the rest of the room. It was dizzying exercise that he was having a hard time stopping. “Are there more of those things? What are those things?”
“Relax... that was the last of them-- for now, at least,” the man said, pushing a bloody hand against the floor, trying to get up. The wet palm slipped and he cursed again.
Jacob gave the stranger a helping hand up, flashlight forgotten on the floor as they both stood, illuminating their shoes. The minute he brushed the man’s side, Jacob recoiled at the slick, wet feeling, almost loosing his grip on the man.
The stranger hissed in pain and tried to push him away, but the effort was weak and pointless. There was little that he could do to stop Jacob from pushing the leather jacket aside and see the mess underneath.
“Just... lemme take a look,” Jacob pleaded, not really waiting for an answer or permission.
Under the top layered shirt, a button down that had seen better days, was a dark green t-shirt. The material was sliced through, practically shredded. All around the torn remains it was soaked through, dark and wet, with a blackish liquid lazily oozing from somewhere alongside the waistband of guy’s jeans.
“Oh, shit! That looks bad,” Jacob said, slamming his eyes shut. There was something deeply instilled at his core that made him gag every time he saw large quantities of blood on the wrong side of a person. This time was no exception. “That looks really bad,” he said, when his stomach settled somewhat, his fingers tugging some of the material where it stuck to the wound.
“Doesn’t feel all that good either, buddy,” the stranger said, sucking in a rushed breath. “Stop poking it!”
“Jacob... I’m Jacob,” he found himself mumbling, like introductions were the most important thing to get out in the open when a museum intruder was bleeding to death on his hands. “I gotta call 911.”
Caught off guard by the sight of that much blood and the sticky, disgusting feeling of the stuff all over his hands, Jacob almost jumped when he felt one of the stranger’s arms lift to drape around his shoulders, like they were the best buddies in the world.
Jacob could feel the weight of the man, pressing harder and harder on him until he was the only thing keeping the stranger from falling down. He smelled of leather and copper, like his whole body was a worn and used up weapon. The arm that was over him was solid, not over muscled, but tense, like corded rope. Efficient.
Even the vulnerability, with which he pressed his weight harder and harder into Jacob was deceptive and felt planned.
“I really, really wish you wouldn’t do that, Jacob,” the man said, quietly, his words raising all the alarms inside Jacob’s head. Alarms he didn’t even knew he had.
The feeling of the tip of a gun pressed against the soft surface of Jacob’s belly was unmistakable. The guy might be shaking all over, but Jacob doubted that he would miss at that distance.
Jacob tried to gulp and failed, his mouth too dry to produce enough spit to do the job. Stupid, stupid him had trusted a fucking intruder, just because the man was injured. And, ok, because statues were coming to life and running all around the place.
“Look... I swear I won’t tell anyone that you were here... I’l-I’ll make up some sort of story... explain the vandalized art... just, please mister, don’t shoot me,” he begged.
“The damn statues will be up and as good as new in no time... that’s why we need to hurry.”
Jacob was so confused by what the man was saying that he almost forgot about the gun. The scattered debris of both the satyr, whose head he’d broken, as well as broken pieces from the other four, whom, Jacob guessed, had been smashed by the intruder, lay all about. “The blown-to-smithereens statues will be as good as new as in...” Jacob stuttered, trying to figure this out, “... you want to superglue them together?”
The man actually chuckled, this time with some actual humor behind it. “As in, until I destroy the source of their power, they’ll keep coming back to life and killing people... like the old guy who worked here before you.”
“Mr. Jenkins?” Jacob blinked. “Mr. Jenkins died of a heart attack,” he offered feebly. More and more he was starting to regret taking this job. He was one step away from regretting moving to this town all together. “They told me Mr. Jenkins died of a heart att-“ he said, voice dissolving into a whisper.
“I’m sure he did,” the wounded man agreed, “sometime in between seeing these little bastards running around and one of them getting the old man’s insides splattered all over that Atlas statue’s outsides over there.”
The pressure of the gun eased up, even though the man’s grip was still tight on his shoulders. Jacob figured the stranger wanted him to believe in his words, not in the persuasive strength of his bullets. It didn’t help much.
Jacob looked at the innocent looking statue of the Titan that stood in one of the corners. He’d thought those stains were from mold...
“The satyrs killed him? Why would they do that?” Jacob asked, feeling slightly weirded out by the nonsense coming out of his mouth. He should be asking how... HOW the fuck something like that happens, not WHY... Maybe this all just one very bad drea-
“Don’t know... don’t really care. But we have to take care of them before we become the next item on their ‘to do list’.”
“You need a hospital... I should... I should call someone,” Jacob stuttered. Never mind the fact that he actually believed the gibberish that this guy was feeding him. He did not want to fight magically-alive-stone-satyrs, whose horns were sharp enough to gut his predecessor, anymore than he wanted to have his teeth pulled out with pliers.
“I don’t think they’re gonna allow us to do that,” the man said, his head jerking in the direction of the door.
Jacob followed his gaze and gulped. In front of their only exit, stood five satyrs lined up, whole, hale and pissed. With their nostrils flaring and hoofed feet stomping on the grey stone floor, they looked like bulls, getting ready to strike.
“How the hell...” Jacob paused. A fear, unlike any he'd ever known, constricted his chest. “W-what the fuck do we do?” He whispered through the corner of his mouth. Just how much of what he was saying the satyrs could actually understand, he wasn’t sure, so he made a mental note to keep his voice down, just in case.
The things were made of marble and, therefore, shouldn’t even have working ears, let alone understand a single word of English, given that satyrs were traditionally Greek and all that... in all seriousness, logic had flew out the window the minute he’d walked in that room, so who was he to start questioning it now?
Jacob felt the edges of hysteria closing in, mostly when one of the satyrs decided to flash his wicked teeth at him. Never mind fighting-- the need for flight was becoming rapidly overwhelming. “Maybe we could go out the window?”
The guy gave him a pointed look and for some reason, Jacob actually felt embarrassed, like somehow he was being measured and had fallen short of whatever expectations and goals had been set there. Which was all kinds of ridiculous. Except for the fact that they were on the fifth floor... and there were iron bars on all the windows... and yeah, the guy might have a point.
“You need to find my duffel,” the wounded man said, letting go of the tight grip he was keeping on Jacob and sagging back against the wall. He slid down, until he was back on his ass, landing with a pained grunt and a half-bitten ‘motherfucker’. Even in the semi-darkness, Jacob could see the trail of red that he’d left on the grey wall.
“Your duffel?”
“Green bag, long zipper, heavy,” the man said with a hint of sarcasm in his breathy voice. “I need something that’s inside.”
“What about them?” Jacob whispered, nodding toward the satyrs. After what he’d seen of them so far, he had no desire to turn his back on those eerie little creeps, with their sharp teeth glinting occasionally when they sneered at their intended prey.
The overnight guard couldn’t decide what was worse, the sounds their tiny hoofed feet made when they scurried about the room unseen, or this current scenario; the continuous back and forth communication that came off as a high pitched whistling between them and the staring. From their position at the door, they smirked, nodding, gesturing, actually cackling; it was as if they shared some private joke and Jacob got the distinct impression that the punch line was on Jacob and the stranger by his side. “Why aren’t they moving?”
“I think they’re waiting for something... or someone,” the stranger said, sounding lost inside his own head. His body remained still, but the man’s eyes were quietly and thoroughly searching the room, studying what was left of the marble sculpture and the others around it. “Either way, we should get a move on before whatever it is they’re waiting to happen, happens.”
“Yeah... yeah, we should,” Jacob agreed absent-mindedly. His eyes were glued to the little bastards, mesmerized by the details of the living sculptures, amazed by the fact that he could actually see the muscles moving underneath the stone, how the fur seemed to come to life every time they moved even though he frigging knew that they were all nothing but carefully chiseled, white stone. The one whose guts were hanging out had actually draped them around his neck, like some sort of gorish scarf.
The man on the floor kicked Jacob’s foot in annoyance. “Dude... my duffel!”
Jacob jumped to life, the guy’s voice inspiring obedience. And then he remembered that he was the night watchman there, and that the guy ordering him around was an intruder who should be grateful that Jacob hadn’t called the cops on him yet. Not that this was something that Jacob would want to explain to the authorities. “Stop ordering me around... I don’t even know your frigging name!”
The stranger gave him an odd look; his head tilting sideways like a pigeon studying a peculiar looking piece of corn. “Name’s Morrison, if that’s so important to you,” he finally said, indulgency all over his tone of voice, “... now could you please get my fucking duffel so that I can stop us both from being turned in to shish kabob? Or do you want my phone number too?”
Jacob felt himself blushing. This was why he hadn’t joined the military like his father wanted. He tended to get... sidetracked when he panicked. Reluctantly, he turned his back on Morrison, picked up his discarded flashlight and started to search the room.
The low-pitched sounds of the shifting satyrs were enough to raise the fine hair at the back of his neck -heck! of his whole damn body- but he refused to acknowledge them.
Jacob couldn’t begin to guess at what sort of miracle working wonder that guy might possibly have inside his duffel that would take care of five snarling satyrs and an unknown and mysterious power course, but Jacob was willing to give it a try. His bleeding leg was starting to sting as a bitch and he really didn’t wanted to get another taste of those nasty teeth.
“Where the hell did you leave it?” Jacob asked after a short while. The room wasn’t that big to start with, and he’d already checked everywhere.
The sound of crashing stone and pained grunts reached his ears. Morrison was busy, clubbing the satyrs left and right with his gun. The little bastards were on the move again.
“They threw it -guh!-near the window!” Morrison managed to squeeze out.
Jacob had no idea how the guy was able to fight those things. From what he could see, they didn’t move all that fast, but the one tiny bite that Jacob had in his leg had him limping... that guy was seriously hurt. By all laws and thresholds of human torment, he should be withering in pain on the floor.
Instead, the guy was moving like there was nothing wrong with him, swinging the butt of his gun with the precision of a Swiss clock, kicking hard enough to break stone. It was like a dance. Not one movement wasted, not one strike without consequences. There was no way that guy wasn’t a professional... something.
And then there was the fact that he was using his gun to smack the things, instead of just shooting them. He could understand the reasoning of not wanting the added noise before, when there was the matter of attracting Jacob’s awareness to his presence by shooting the hell of the place, but now... and it wasn’t like the alarms would be going off either, because with the amount of ruckus and destruction those little guys were causing and the amount of display, sealed glass that they’d broken already, if the alarms were functioning they would’ve gone off by now. Which meant they were off.
Jacob was sure that the intruder had taken care of those first, like any other burglar worth its salt would. Which meant that he wasn’t firing the gun because he probably had no bull- sonofabitch!
His foot hit something soft and Jacob looked down. He smiled when he finally spotted the green fabric of the bag he’d been looking for, hidden beneath one of the stands. Thoughts of being tricked by empty guns fled his mind as he turned to give Morrison the good news. “Found i--!”
Jacob froze in place.
The dust of the broken pieces of at least three of the stone satyrs was still settling all over the other statues and showcases making the place look like some sort of secret tomb straight out of the Indiana Jones movies. The faint blue light, filtering in from the hallway, partially illuminated the frozen statues of gods and goddess, giving each an eerily defined light and dark side. All that was missing now was some well thought of epic music and a surprise villain.
Well, maybe not the villain. Morrison wasn’t alone anymore.
The central piece of the satyrs’ replica was no longer in its rightful place. The naked lady that had always elicited such feelings of pity and protectiveness from Jacob whenever he walked by, was now standing over Morrison, looming over the fallen man, both of them speaking in hushed tones.
Jacob felt like an intruder in a private viewing of some weird plotted movie, the little hired extra that wanted to mesh with the lead actors.
The two remaining satyrs had their backs to him, each standing guard on either side of the woman. The three of them stood towering over Morrison, who was slumped back on the floor. No one was paying any attention to Jacob’s movements across the room.
On the wall behind Morrison, the big engraved mirror gave Jacob a perfect view of the stone woman’s face. She was oddly... beautiful. It scared the crap out of him.
“I’ve been waiting for one of you to come,” the stone-woman said. “Never expected that it would be you, though. My very own celebrity snack... what a pleasant surprise!”
Jacob's eyes widened - had she actually licked her lips?
“You should watch what you eat, lady... a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips,” Morrison answered with a snarl. “At least, that’s what my friend JACOB always says.”
Jacob jumped up at the out-of-nowhere mention of his name, hiding more carefully behind the statue that he was keeping between himself and the others. He couldn’t see anything but the soles of the boots on Morrison’s feet. How could the other man see him? Maybe it was some other Jacob...
“Funny... your daddy was funny too,” the woman said, her tone icy and dark. “I met him, once... did he ever tell you? No, I suppose he didn’t... there was a lot that man kept to himself. Guess it helps to be able to get inside people’s heads to learn all about someone’s dirty secrets, doesn’t it?”
She snapped two stone fingers at the satyrs nearest to her, the gesture curt and sharp, eliciting immediate action from the stone beings even though no verbal order had been given.
Jacob watched in wonder as a fine dust came out as a result of the friction between her fingers. Wait... did she say ‘inside people’s heads’? Fuck! What if she could find out about him just because he was thinking?
The thing was, he kind of needed to think if he wanted to survive this. Guess this whole thing kind of threw a whole new spin on the ‘I think, therefore I... ‘m screwed’ saying.
Despite the fact that they were a third of the man’s height, each of the satyrs had grabbed one of Morrison’s arms, forcefully pushing him to his knees and dragging the man to the center of the room.
Jacob could’ve made a dash for the door there and then. Mind reader or not, all three statues had their backs to him and the path out was clear and open. But running away meant much more than surviving, Jacob knew that. If he did managed to live to tell this weird tale to anyone, he would still have to deal with the fact that he would be leaving the other man to the mercy of these creatures.
It seemed insanely displaced, but by some weird chance, this was it. The one decision that would define what kind of man Jacob was: a coward or a hero.
The night watchman sighed in resignation, his decision easy to make when the satyrs threw the man unceremoniously to the stone floor and he cried out in pain. No one deserved to be left alone sounding like that.
Besides, heroes had short lives, but cowards lived miserably forever.
“You know, it wasn’t so much the fact that your father killed my family, as it was the fact that he thought himself so much better than us,” the woman went on, following the group until she was next to fallen man. The satyrs moved the stranger around like he was nothing more than a simple rag doll, arranging him to stand perfectly centered on the rock formation in the sculpture. The woman followed his every move, taunting him with words, while the satyrs busied themselves taking off Morrison’s heavy jacket and threadbare over-shirt.
“I mean, here was a man prepared to sacrifice his own son, to kill his own flesh and blood, and still he thought himself righteous enough to decide whether my family should live or die,” she whispered in Morrison’s ear. “How’s brother dearest, by the way?”
From his hidden spot, Jacob could see the green tinge to Morrison’s countenance at the statue’s words. Whatever she was throwing in to his face, it wasn’t as insane and far-fetched as it sounded. Geesh... and he thought his family had problems.
“So, the cat is out of the BAG,” Morrison finally spoke, his voice sounding more and more breathy. Uncomfortable as his position looked, pressed down against the sharp and uneven rocks, Jacob could see that the man was looking straight at him. “This whole thing is about avenging your psycho family, who, by the way, was as bat shit crazy as you? What did mommy gave you guys for brunch? WEED?”
The stone-woman’s answer was lost in the giant ding!dong! that sounded inside Jacob’s head. It finally clicked. Morrison was trying to catch his attention, talking to him without the statues realizing it, telling him what to do with the bag in his hands.
Making sure that he was well hidden from all the drama taking place at center stage, Jacob hunched down and, thanking the heavens above for the fact that the duffel’s zipper was already opened, quietly searched inside for... weed? Really?
“I hear he’s dead,” the stone-woman went on, the sound of tearing clothes peppering her vicious words. “Did your brother finally find out about his plans and killed daddy like he did with mommy? Or was it you?”
Jacob wisely chose to not look at what was happening. It was eerie enough to realize that Morrison had been arranged exactly in the same position that the frightened women on the center of sculpture had been before, let alone the barely hidden satisfaction with which she spoke. It was like she’d been trapped in that place of terror for such a long time that it was now a joy for her to see someone else in her place.
And speaking of eerie... the stuff Morrison carried inside his bag was chilling. Total psycho grade.
From weapons to knives to --frigging flamethrowers!--, the guy was a walking, talking arsenal. When his fingers brushed against some rough fabric with something crunchy inside, Jacob was sure he’d found the right item.
“What do you want bitch? Not happy with that thick and ugly stone skin you were born with, wanted BRONZE perhaps? Or maybe a nice, fresh CUP of coffee too to go along with those delusional cookies? No?”
Jacob’s eyes widened. He’d heard that right, right? It was getting harder and harder to tell the difference between Morrison’s pained gasps and the words he voiced louder for Jacob’s benefit. The urge to just grab the flamethrower and stop whatever it was the crazy stone woman was planning to do to Morrison was building up. Where on earth was he going to find a bronze cup?
When it clicked where he was, Jacob felt like kicking himself in the netherlands. This was the fucking GREEK exhibition. The only place where he would find more stuff made out of bronze was in the Bronze Age room.
On the other hand, this was a museum. There wasn’t a single thing in there that Jacob could move without having to break a thick glass or two. Which would be noisy as hell and certain to draw the crazies’ attention on him.
Irony was an unsympathetic bitch. So many choices and not a single viable one in sight. Would it have killed those bastards to have actually broken one of the exhibition stands that had something in it that he could use, instead of all others around?
And then Jacob’s eyes landed on the trashcan. The nice, tall, engraved, bronze trashcan.
“Funny you should mention the skin thing,” the woman said, producing a dagger from out of nowhere. “I do like yours... its all... smooth and freckly.” The look of unmitigated evil on her voice made Jacob swallow in fear. "It will look very nice on me."
“Hunting yourself a bit of man-skin, hum? Let me guess, you wanted to play GI-Joes and daddy insisted on dolls?”
The woman smirked, her stone fingers incredibly nimble as she cut a square of skin out of Morrison’s arm and ate it with a smack of her stone lips. Almost instantly, a patch of brand new, pink skin materialized on her forearm.
“Argh! Y--ou bitch... I’m gonna KILL ya! You’re gonna BURN THAT SHIT NOW!” Morrison yelled, looking straight at Jacob. There was no misinterpreting it now.
Jacob wasted no time, especially when the satyrs and the woman’s attention turned from Morrison to him. There were several bags of smelly herbs and who knew what else inside the stranger’s bag and, with no way of knowing which one Morrison wanted him to burn, Jacob just threw them all inside the trashcan.
Fishing the lighter from his jacket’s pocket, Jacob smiled. At least now, when his girlfriend started to pick on him because of his ‘filthy and disgusting smoking habits’ he would be able to tell her all about that one time when his habits actually saved his life. Or maybe not- she might think he was just crazy... or high. Possibly both.
Either way, there was an odd pleasure and satisfaction when Jacob dropped his lit lighter inside the trashcan and, in those scarce seconds before the bags of weed caught on fire, saw the looks on the statutes’ faces. Gone were the sneers and jeers of impending victory. They now looked like they just couldn’t believe he’d done that.
The blatant panic and that sheer disbelief were enough for Jacob to know that, crazy as this looked, it was the right thing to do. They had won.
The satyrs, who’d remained silent up to that point, let out a high pitch screech that managed to crack the glass on the thicker exhibition glasses, just before erupting in flames of an odd blue color and turning to dust.
The stone-woman, or whatever the hell she was, turned a murderous gaze from Jacob to Morrison, who lay helplessly beneath her. Jacob was too far away, she must’ve realized, but she could still try to exact her vengeance on the closer man.
Morrison stared defiantly, unflinching as she lifted the dagger in her hands high above her head, ready to plunge it deep inside his exposed chest.
Too far away to do little more than stare with his heart frozen in place, Jacob barely noticed when the gunshot exploded in the otherwise quiet room.
The marble stone that the fierce woman was made of burst into a thousand pieces, right before she herself was consumed by the same blue flames that had ended the satyrs. She was looking straight at Jacob, just before vanishing in to dust. The malevolent look in her white eyes would be enough to be giving him nightmares until his old age.
“Told you I wasn’t food, you BITCH!” Morrison hissed out. The gun in is hands, the fucking weapon that Jacob was certain had no bullets in it, now freshly fired, tumbled to the floor as Morrison’s arms lost the strength to keep it up and his eyes rolled inwards.
From the looks of it, Morrison’s body had just been waiting for the ‘all clear’ on the menace side to concede to the need to conk out.
The guy was a mess of blood, cuts and bruises. There was no way that Jacob was not calling 911 now. It would be hard enough to explain the half destroyed room. A dead body? No chance in hell he was risking that!
Racing to the guy’s side, Jacob was almost afraid to touch him. Morrison looked too still, not appearing to even be breathing at all, which would’ve kind of sucked. This was the end, right? Heroes got battered, but they always ended up surviving to get the girl in the end. So, ok, the girl was the bad guy here and none of them really wanted to end up with her, but there had to be some sort of justice to the fact that he and Morrison had just ended one evil bitch... some sort of reward.
Only, from the look of things, Jacob was starting to fear that, the minute he took his two fingers off Morrison’s neck pulse to go call for help, the guy’s heart would stop beating.
“Freeze! Step away from him!”
Jacob almost jumped in the air. After half the statues in the exhibition having come to life, he wouldn’t be surprised if he looked back and found out that the commanding, thunderous voice belonged to Zeus himself.
Instead of a trident, Jacob found himself facing a bright light and two black holes of a shogun’s double barrel, all pointed at him.
There was only one group of people that Jacob knew who went around stomping in to places and ordering people around to ‘freeze’, like they were some kind of instant refrigerator unit.
“Oh, thank God,” Jacob breathed out, happy that, for once, the cops had showed up without being called. “I’m the security guard here. You need to call for back up, we need to get this guy to a hospital.”
The shotgun never wavered from his face.
The guy holding it was nothing short of a giant. Or at least he looked like one, standing over the two of them, looming, furious, taking in the mess around them. He was also not dressed as a cop and alone. Didn’t cops always work in pairs? Oh... crap.
He looked young, but the way his eyes searched the room, first for menaces, then for exits and only at the end, focusing on the two remaining men, spoke of years of experience. And the way his eyes grew wide and then softened into concern and barely contained panic as he took in the scattered puddles of blood and their source... oh, man! These guys knew each other! These guys knew each other well, enough to care for one another.
“Look, I can explain-“ Jacob tried, thinking that, with no other culprit around, the giant was bound to assume that he had been the one hurting his friend.
“Go easy on the guy, Jimmy,” the wounded man said, his eyes still closed but evidently knowing exactly who was in the room. “He just saved our collective bacons.”
The concern on the other guy’s face quickly evolved into annoyance, even as he moved with effortless grace to kneel by Morrison’s side, taking in the tattered clothes and bleeding wounds. “I thought you were just going to ‘take a look around’?”
Morrison twitched on the floor, not so much in embarrassment at the grilling tone that the other guy was using, but just trying to ease his injured body into a more comfortable position. “I looked... they looked back. Shit happened,” he said with a shrug, like that was a common occurrence in his life. “Get me out of here, will’ya?”
It wasn’t a request, Jacob understood, and it had been directed to the new guy, not him. In fact, it was like the two of them had completely forgotten that he was even in the room and that he was still the museum’s guard.
The fact that he wasn’t even being considered in the equation should’ve clued him in on what was about to happen.
“Sorry dude... but you’ll thank us for this later,” the giant -Jim- said, actually looking sympathetically at him. Be that as it may, Jacob only had time to think ‘oh shit!’ before the butt of the shotgun descended on his head and everything went black.
When the cops shook him awake some fifteen minutes later, Jacob didn’t even had to open his mouth to explain what had happen. They had just taken in the messed up room, the destroyed sculpture and the blood all over and promptly declared Jacob as one hell of a night guard, who’d managed to chase away what was obviously a failed robbery.
And Jacob never told them that the fault lay with five horny little bastards and that Jim Morrison had helped him save the day. Who would believe him anyway?
The end.
And for those curious about it, here's Poelenburgh's painting 'The dance of the Satyrs'