Watching the Night

[Cybermancer]

As I look into the mirror and spot a new white hair in my sideburns, I realize that I’ve been at this a long time. There are scars to prove it. While my knee is mostly healed now, it still gives me trouble some mornings or if I put my weight on it just the wrong way. There are older scars as well. Some are visible where my flesh has been ripped or torn, stabbed or pierced.

Then there are the invisible scars. Many of them bear the names of loved ones lost. Just a few short years ago I lost my best friend and brother-in-law in a fight I can’t detail here without risking a renewal of the violence that took him.

It’s a dangerous life to lead, standing in the twilight between our world and the evils that plague mankind. The monsters we face have sharp fangs and gnashy claws with which to slay us. Yet those beasts are gentle compared to those that rend the mind.

They can be defeated however. Some of them bleed. Others can be banished. And because they underestimate us, many of them can be tricked.

Arrogance is not their only weakness. Most of them have some vulnerability or another that can be exploited, even by ordinary people such as myself. Those of you with particular talents gain additional advantages against them. Some of you can detect them. Some of you can banish them. Some of you can kill them. Some of you are just very good at ignoring them.

I think the greatest common strength we here at Lazlo possess is the ability to share our experiences and knowledge of them. It is with that thought and intent in mind that I have decided to start sharing the experiences of my siblings, friends and colleagues from before the time I became active here at Lazlo.

It may be possible that encountering the supernatural was inevitable for my siblings and I. My father was Jonathan Knight and an engineer born in Canada but studied at Columbia University. So far as I know he was just an ordinary man, if quite clever and decent at math. However, it was studying at Columbia where he met my mother, Catherine. They were both boarders at my god-father’s townhouse. Obviously, that’s where they met him as well.

My mother was studying to become a doctor of medicine. She was also quite the skeptic when it came to all things supernatural. So far as I know, she never had any supernatural encounters her entire life. At least none she recognized as such. Her mother (my grandmother) was another story.

I only got to meet my grandmother on a few occasions. I think my mother was somewhat ashamed of her. That’s because she was institutionalized for being insane. Criminally so, I’m afraid. She was implicated in a number of deaths of people she claimed to be monsters. She also claimed to have ‘the gift of sight’ which she inherited from her mother and her mother’s mother, going back as far as the family records went. A gift that my older sister Christina would inherit.

As if that were not enough, my god-father was a practitioner of magic. Something he never told my parents but would eventually be revealed to my siblings and I in the fullness of time. I will get into that more later.

My sister was not the only one of us with gifts. Her fraternal twin, Brian, was an exceptional athlete with a few relatively unique abilities that tend to manifest when confronted with the paranormal. Our youngest brother, Alex has a few abilities that have led to us referring to him as a machine empath. Not only is he naturally gifted as an engineer and a mechanic that makes me jealous, he can imbue some of his creations with abilities I cannot duplicate or even understand.

Only I lack any psychic ability. I’m completely mind blind, as my sister likes to say. What I do possess is an exceptional mathematical ability that manifested almost simultaneously with my ability to speak. I have used that ability to pursue multiple degrees ranging from engineering and computer sciences to bio-chemistry and physics. Not abilities that immediately lend themselves to ghost hunting, or at least most wouldn’t think so.

All of our abilities started to manifest before any of us started school. Growing up in a large rural house on the outskirts of a medium city in Ontario Canada, the supernatural seemed to be drawn to the four of us. In those youthful carefree days, it all seemed fanciful and wonderful. Perhaps we lived charmed lives or perhaps something was looking out for us all.

Whatever the case, it was wholly mundane circumstances that would end that idyllic seeming childhood. The summer after I turned twelve, our family was visiting my godfather in New York. Dr. Austin James was a confirmed bachelor but enjoyed having us children over. He was taking the four of for a tour of central park while my parents went out for a drive.

Unfortunately, they went driving somewhere they ought not to have. Two very ordinary criminals pulled them from their car and shot them dead. Those criminals would eventually be caught by the police and spent the next twenty-five years of their lives behind bars. Today, they are free again.

Having very few living relatives, my parents had arranged for our godfather to care for us should anything ever happen to them. That was how we all came to live in New York and how I wound up attending Columbia like my parents before me.

As we grew into adulthood, our encounters with the supernatural continued although the tone of those experiences began to take a far more dangerous and sinister edge. While we would each of us pursue our own individual ways in the world, we discovered that we could not avoid that which crosses between worlds.

That is why we would eventually decide to come together and pool our resources to form a detective agency. By day we would solve conventional cases to pay the bills and by night we would battle the things that come from the darkness.

It has worked incredibly well for us.

I’ll go into more detail at a later date. For now, my daughter is waking up and requires my attention.

I can only hope our efforts have made the world a little safer for her and that she will enjoy some of the idyllic times we once shared.

[Cybermancer]

First of all, despite the subtitle in the subject line above, the woman involved was not an actual witch. Instead she was a practitioner of magic who had made a pact with an extra-dimensional being of some power. At the time of this encounter I had yet to meet any true practitioners of witchcraft or Wicca so in my mind at the time she was a witch. I was younger and less enlightened and have since grown. With that disclaimer out of the way, I will continue to relate the file.

It’s not the oldest story I could relate about my adventures with my siblings. It’s not even the first file we dealt with after forming our detective agency. Still, it’s over a decade old and as much as we’d learned before experiencing these events, we have learned even more since.

The file started in our own home town in Canada. Recent attacks on the homeless and other street people suggested that a vampire or perhaps a small pack of the blood suckers had begun stalking the streets.

Coinciding with this was a rash of other supernatural activity. At first it did not seem related to the vampire attacks. Just a coincidental uptick in general supernatural activity including hauntings and possessions. They seemed random as we could discern no link between them initially.

Our investigations led down two different paths initially. Down one path lay rumours of a ‘witch’ having recently moved into a neighborhood not far from the home where I had grown up. The other path led us to a few inconclusive encounters with vampires.

Vampires were something of a specialty of my god-father’s. In his youth he’d been plagued by a French vampire and her minions. Ironically the association had started with her as his patron, encouraging him in his mystic studies and supporting him in campaigns to route out supernatural evil where ever it could be found. Eventually however she tried to turn him. He escaped with his life and her ashes.

Vampires have a rather odd tendency to fixate on mortals. Sometimes it is mortals who remind them of someone they knew while they were still alive. Other times it a mortal who has somehow thwarted them. It seems they cannot abide being bested by beings they consider to be lesser by nature. Other times however, there is no discernable cause for this fixation and even the creatures themselves seem at a loss to explain it.

When eventually we did uncover a connection between the vampires and the witch, we initially believed that she might be their thrall. When we confronted her about the vampires, she appeared to have a break down and then offered to help us take them down. What she actually did was send us all to an ambush laid by the vampires we had thought to save her from.

Fortunately, my god-father’s experience saved us and we escaped the ambush. The details are unimportant. As I am reporting this incident years after the event, there seems to be little point in trying to build up any false sense of drama.

Now both sides knew what the score was and we knew that the witch and the vampires would be coming for us very soon. So we retreated to our house during the day to prepare a proper welcome. Fortunately, most precautions were already in place. My god-father had spent years setting up magical protections. Those precautions had been augmented by my brother Alex and I in recent years. Mostly we had to add some last minute touches and come up with a plan of action.

As soon as the sun went down, they started their campaign of terror against us.

First the fog rolled in. It was meant to blind us and instill a fear of the unknown. We weren’t as blind as they would have liked though we couldn’t see as well as we would have liked. Nor were we especially afraid as this tactic was fairly well known.

Next came the insects, bats and rats. They didn’t keep this one up very long though. At the best of times this is a nuisance or terror ploy but for a prepared group it’s pretty laughable. We live in an age of pesticides which we deployed via an array of aerosols on the grounds. Thus the next morning would find the grounds littered with insect bodies. Slightly annoying but easily encountered. The rats and bats were as easily dispatched.

Two ploys by the enemy and two relative victories for us. This raised our morale and angered them.

Next came the dogs. Probably every dog in the community was summoned. Even our own faithful hounds seemed ready to turn on us. This too was expected. Our dogs were secured in cages they could not escape from and then sedated. Even if we had been caught unawares, their collars were specially equipped in a way that would allow us to incapacitate them easily and humanely. The neighborhood dogs were likewise dispatched using the same aerosol dispensers (but different chemicals) that had killed the insects. Naturally we didn’t kill the canines, rather left them sedated so they could be returned unharmed to their families the next day.

Another failed ploy to stick in their craw.

When the wolves came, we thought they were finally making their real move. So we activated our sprinkler system connected tanks filled with holy water. All that happened was that they got wet.

Our first misstep because we didn’t know that they were working with a small group of werewolves. That actually seemed to fly in the face of what we thought we knew about vampires. So the possibility hadn’t even occurred to us.
Thankfully we had encountered werewolves before and had defenses prepared against the possibility of a werewolf attack. So while we hadn’t prepared for it on this specific instance, we had some general defenses in place that held them up for a bit.

Not for long though. They eventually gained entry into the house and headed right to the basement where our freshest scents suggested we had retreated to. Right through a hallway rigged with silver ball claymores and remote firing gun positions. It had been set up for the vampires but was just as effective against the werewolves. Maybe even more so.

All of this however was merely the enemy probing our defenses. The main enemy push was yet to come.

[Cybermancer]

Now that the holidays are over, I find I have a little spare time now with which to finish this.

It was the witch that disabled the magic that was keeping the vampires at bay. Austin observed her actions and chanting on remote cameras I had set up and hidden on the grounds. We were all certain that she would be sent in next as we were still going on the theory that she was subordinate to the vampires.

However, it soon became clear that it was her giving them directions. They followed the route that the wolves had taken but were more cautious. The ability to turn to mist prevented harm from many of our defenses.

It was a situation I had prepared for. As they entered one particular section of hallway in the basement, concealed armored doors slammed into place, trapping them in an air and water tight chamber. They tried desperately to escape, clawing desperately at the doors, walls, floor and ceiling. Given time, their escape would have been inevitable. The sprinklers engaged and the undead melted away as they were doused with holy water. My friend was an ordained minister, so we had a ready supply.

That left the witch.

I'll be honest, I was surprised when she decided to brave to the house of murder we had set up for home invaders (my brother Brian is a huge fan of Home Alone). Maybe she guessed that her minions had expended most of our traps and defenses.

Unfortunately, she had guessed correctly. And furthermore, many of our defenses were set against supernatural beings specifically, not humans. Not even humans who used magic. It wasn't that we hadn't anticipated it, but we never anticipated that such an assault would come along with so many supernatural minions.

Still, she had expended some portion of her power getting those minions past our defenses. She had to expend still more to past the chambers where the vampires had met their end.

She carried on ever deeper into our lair, until she came out in the storm drains, where we had made our exit before the sun had even gone down.

We were in a van, monitoring and controlling the situation some distance away.

By the time she was realizing that we weren't there, we had arrived at her lair.

Things are tricky when you're dealing with people. Most supernatural beings leave precious little trace of their existence. As frustrating as that my be when it comes to proving their existence, it keeps legal issues relatively tidy. This witch however, had a current, legal identity. We could not just kill her and be done with it.

Her demon familiar was another story however. The true power behind the scenes and the master manipulator. Smart as it was, it had not anticipated our arrival nor the need to prepare the lair against invasion. At least not to any appreciable level.

Again, a blow by blow account of the battle wouldn't serve any purpose so I will skip. Suffice it to say, it was driven from the mortal coil. Most of the work was done by my siblings and myself. Dr. James was left in reserve.

When we finally engaged the witch, we used less than lethal options while my god father focused on countering what magic she had left to her. Our entire strategy worked around sapping her magical reserves and resources until she was depleted.

After that, she was just an old woman. An old woman with evidence of multiple murders found in her home. And old woman we had on video illegally entering our home. Meanwhile she had no evidence of our entry into her home. And anything she said about the subject made her sound quite crazy.

We attended her trial and gave testimony where we could. She was found to be criminally insane. She spent the rest of her life sedated, in a government institution.

Maybe it's just a happy coincidence that the drugs she was put on also greatly impair an individual's ability to focus and also cast magic incantations. Or maybe our government knows more about these things than they let on.

[Wintercross]

Hello, I am new to the site, but have followed the community from a distance for some time.

Thank you for sharing the details of your experience.

I find the strategies used by this 'witch' and her cohorts interesting, shall have to make notes for future reference...

I am particularly impressed with the trap you laid for the vampires.

Happy to see that others are still active and alive...

[Cybermancer]

There are many who are alive and active. Many don't know about this site. Some are concerned about various risks that one entails by posting here. Others simply don't have the time to post here as they have jobs and lives that take their precious time. Whatever else this board is, it can be a large consumer of time.

So far as the particulars of this case, there are I think, three main lessons or take aways.

1. Sap the enemy resources whenever possible. When it comes to paranormal abilities, they probably have more than you do so this can get tricky. If you can tax their paranormal resources by forcing them to overcome non-paranormal obstacles, so much the better.

2. Conserve your own resources. Especially any paranormal abilities available to you. Those are the abilities that may turn the tide against an enemy at a critical point.

3. Be prepared. Both for specific threats and general threats. We faced things that we didn't expect but our general level of preparedness saved us.

Anyway Wintercross, I hope you take the time to relate your own stories and what you've learned.