Posted 6:29 PM by Alfred

DARK - part 5 (see links at left for previous chapters)

Libraries had certainly fucking changed in the last ten years. The last time Rion Dark had done research in a public library there had been no computers in sight, and now they were everywhere he looked. He eventually found what he was looking for, though. The big green books. Annual records of any magazine or newspaper articles. Dark decided to start at 1975. Wasn't like he had any pressing engagements or anything, he had time to start a long ways back. He looked up Chan and got about a page worth of names, a few Roberts. The Roberts only led to some asshole from Kentucky that had discovered a revolutionary way to give a horse an enema. Year by year, he kept going, looking for the elusive Robbie Chan.

By the time he got to 1993, he had just about given up. He didn't even know if that was the guy's real name, what he was even looking for, anything really. All he had was that fucking name. He decided to keep going for the fuck of it. What did he have to do anyway, get back to the lake and stone-skipping practice?

Then he hit something.

It was a picture of an Asian man in his mid sixties, standing on a beach with a young girl wearing a bikini. The man was clothed in shorts and aloha shirt. The picture was from Westways Magazine, February 1993 issue, in an article about Robbie Chan, a transplanted Californian business man now living in the Kahala district of Honolulu, Hawaii, and the amazing house he had built on his beach front property. Typical puff piece. The picture was a small one on the second page of the article. The caption read: "Robbie enjoys dipping his feet in the sand and spending time with island locals."

The girl in the picture, who looked about seventeen, bore an exact resemblance to the one he had been watching dance in his dreams the moment that Tony had woken him the other night.

Dark could feel a cold sweat seeping from his brow. At first he didn't recognize the feeling, because Dark rarely if ever broke a sweat. The man was a cool customer under almost any circumstances.

Dark was not a cool customer at the present moment, however. The girl in the picture was the one from his dream, there was no doubt. He remembered every curve and line in her face, her body, her hair. He realized he was popping a boner.

Shaking his head to clear the cobwebs, Dark checked if anyone was looking his way, then tore the page from the book. He would have to follow up on this later. He needed some time to chill out and digest the theological and philosophical ramifications of his little kodak moment here.

He thought he'd seen an Arby's on the way to the library. Nothing like a roast beef with horsey sauce to help you mull over arcane messages from the great beyond. The saliva generated by the Arby's urge momentarily broke him from the mild shock he had settled into, and Dark subtly slithered out the front door of the library.

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