Free Watcher of the Dark: A Jeremiah Hunt Supernatual Thriller (The Jeremiah Hunt Chronicle) by Joseph Nassise Page B

whispered, “Shhh. Ancient Chinese secret.”
    The silence that followed told me he’d missed the joke entirely.
    “Oh for heaven’s sake, Perkins, lighten up. It’s no secret, I was just kidding. Come in and sit down. I’ll tell you if you really want to know.”
    I didn’t think he was going to do it, but his curiosity must have gotten the better of him for he hesitated only a moment before doing as I’d asked. He closed the door behind him, and my eyesight returned at the same moment the darkness did.
    I glanced at the table, called out a combo, and sank the shot without much effort. College had been expensive, and I’d hustled a lot of pool in my younger days to help pay the bills. Once learned, some skills just don’t ever leave you. I could throw a mean game of darts too.
    My prowess at nine-ball was lost on my audience though; I might be able to see in the dark, but that didn’t mean he could. With a sigh I put the cue down on the table and said, “Light switch is there by your left hand…”
    It took a moment of fumbling for him to find it and by then I had my sunglasses on, covering my eyes. The glasses weren’t strong enough to preserve my vision once the lights came back on, but they weren’t for me anyway. I’d learned long ago that the milky whiteness of my eyeballs and the scar tissue that surrounded them made a lot of people uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to chase Perkins away before we had the chance to talk.
    I pulled a stool out from under the bar that ran the length of the wall next to the pool table and settled onto it. A moment later I heard him do the same.
    I knew I was going to have to give some in order to get some, so I figured it was time to lay some cards on the table and see what happened.
    “I know it’s hard to believe, but once upon a time I was a professor at Harvard University…”
    I gave him the abbreviated version, hitting only the highlights and ignoring the long, deep valleys between. My daughter’s disappearance. The botched police investigation that followed. My own, increasingly desperate, attempts to figure out what had happened to Elizabeth, followed by my long fall from grace. The loss of my job. The loss of my wife. And finally that fateful meeting with the Preacher in the park.
    “The ritual was supposed to let me see the unseen, which, from my perspective, meant my missing daughter, but apparently I didn’t read the fine print well enough,” I said with a bitter little laugh. Even after all this time, I was still angry at myself for not thinking through the bargain that had been placed in front of me. I’d read Faust ; I knew a devil’s deal when I saw one. And yet when the devil in question, the Preacher, had offered another deal in New Orleans, I’d jumped at that one too.
    Apparently I’m not as smart as I think I am.
    “The ritual stole my normal sight and replaced it with the ability to see the true face of things, from the ghosts that drift among us to the darker, hungrier things that move in the shadows. And just to be certain that I wouldn’t miss out on any of the horrors lurking out there, it gave me the ability to see in the dark as clearly as most people see in the light.”
    Perkins hadn’t said a word since I’d started my little soliloquy, and since I couldn’t see the expression on his face, I had no idea what he was thinking. Still, I’d come this far and there was little to be gained by stopping now.
    “So how’d you get mixed up in all this?” I asked. I thought it was a fairly innocuous question, more of an icebreaker kind of thing than anything else, but I felt his tension level shoot up just the same.
    “What do you mean ‘all this’?” he asked.
    I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere by playing coy, so I just decided to lay it out there. “You know what I mean,” I told him. “All this—Fuentes and Rivera and what’s-her-name, you know, Demon Lady?”
    I thought I heard him choke on that last one, but pretended