Читать книгу Demon Dancer - Alexander Valdez - Страница 11

Chapter 6

Shadow Demons / Mayhem

Dad had arrived home from work now, and I paced behind him, quietly waiting for the time when I was sure he had wound down sufficiently from the day. Then I would get the information I needed to finish telling my friends in the morning.

“You have to finish telling me the story of the elegant man at the wedding dance,” I asked. He sat me down and began his tale of an event that would become a part of my life even into adulthood.

As my father spoke, I stared intently at his eyes for any hint of deceit or fabrication on his part. His eyes took on a look of trepidation as he spoke, and I have to admit, that gave me cause for concern, now believing everything he told me. It was as though he were unloading something he had kept close to the vest his entire life thus far. This made me feel a chill as he continued.

“This strange guest to the ball moved with grace as he flowed across the floor when he danced with any young woman who had sought him out for a dance,” my dad went on, seemingly still enchanted with this mysterious man he witnessed so many years ago.

“The stranger had his eyes on the new bride. Soon it seemed her eyes were fixed on him, and she was becoming intoxicated by his very visage. Newly married, she felt a shame in her heart, but it was becoming harder to deny the warmth rising up inside her as the stranger’s eyes fixated on her. She immediately excused herself from her wedding party’s table and slipped off to the ladies’ powder room.”

My father then said that he and his friends who had never taken their eyes off the stranger no longer caught sight of him among the crowd. They had started to focus on the dessert table, salivating over the cakes and other goodies, when they noticed the stranger was now gone from view.

“Where did he go?” they asked one another.

A few minutes passed, then all hell broke loose. The groom was missing his new bride, and he also became aware of the fact that the stranger was nowhere to be found. The groom called his male friends together, asking each of them if they had seen the new bride. No one had. It wasn’t long before the only activity at the celebration was to find the new bride. My father said he heard the tone of reason soon turned to a sound of anguish and deadly concern.

All the rooms had been searched with no success, and then the group moved outside where they found a young group of urchins lurking in the bushes. They questioned the young boys out of sheer desperation as if maybe they had seen something. My dad said that if there had been any dogs around, they would have questioned them too. That was how intense the evening had become. Sheer panic was starting to rule the night.

At that moment, a young lady ran out to where the men were congregating. She was holding a bracelet corsage that belonged to the young bride. The group ran back in, following the young lady who would lead them to where the corsage was found. My father and his friends now felt that they had license to be a part of the group, so in they went. In all the confusion, the kids went unnoticed, and since they had been questioned, they felt it was okay.

Helping themselves to the hors d’oeuvres as they ran through the dance hall, they really felt special in having a sense of purpose for the greater good.

It turned out that the room where the last clue was found was the ladies’ powder room. The corsage was dropped right outside the open window. That had to be the way out for any getaway. The stranger was nowhere to be found, and it soon become apparent that he was the bride’s abductor. Or maybe the rogue lover.

The newly wedded groom was inconsolable as he yelled for his beloved Elena.

So long he had waited for the virginal prize, one that he had ached for all those previous years, now to have it ripped away when it was finally his for the taking. Talk about having the blues in more ways than one.

As my father recanted this tale, he ended with a notion that would haunt me in the years to come. He told me, “Son, that person that I saw leap over the side of the bridge resembled the same person I had seen forty years earlier.”

Now I was really feeling a fear I couldn’t explain. How can that be possible? I thought to myself.

On that night of my father’s experience on the bridge, a young girl was abducted from a party at another dance hall across town. She was there with her parents and had gone to the ladies’ room. The night was described in the morning paper with a chilling detail that hit my father cold. One attendee at the dance was interviewed by the police; he stated that a man who was no longer in the crowd remained unaccounted for. The descriptions from some of the partygoers all agreed that he was a very handsome, mustached man dressed all in black. He wore a beautiful black fedora made of silk.

I was now relaying all the new information to my friends as we made our way to the river and up the bank to the dance hall. They were all spellbound by now and hanging on my every word. My friend Tommy asked if the dance hall before us was the site of the event my father had spoken about. I said no to the expressions of disappointment they communicated between them. With all the building materials laid out on the ground, we commenced on constructing the ladder.