Celia Goldman is a hunter of the Hermit Creed.
Overview[]
Celia Goldman, a court stenographer, heard the voices a few weeks after beginning a new job in Atlanta, Georgia. Working in criminal court, she'd long before developed the detachment necessary to record the most gruesome of details passively. But the details of one case wouldn't be silent on her stenography machine. The police woman's testimony of watching her partner retch blood until he died, of the upscale condo development with desiccated bodies hidden behind the walls, of the 12-year-old child supposedly responsible - it all made her blood run cold. But she never stopped typing and recording. In fact, her typing grew frantic and the words stopped making sense. Instead of the details of cross-examination, she bashed out "EVIL WITHIN" "MADNESS AWAITS THE" "THE JACKALS" and countless other sentence fragments. No one noticed until she collapsed, her fingers still typing madly at a keyboard that was no longer there. Somewhere in the haze of that breakdown, Celia caught a glimpse of a rotting corpse in judges' robes calling for order.
Celia spent over a year in and out of psychiatric hospitals on a variety of drugs, trying to shake the schizophrenia that manifested whenever she was in a crowd. On the advice of her doctors, she moved to a small town and avoided crowds. It helped, but not that much. Rushes of voices and visions of things still haunted her. It only started to make sense when she met Ibrahim Nasir.
A local black Muslim organizer, Nasir hardly seemed like an ideal confidant to white, middle-class, Jewish Celia, but that's how things turned out. Nasir showed up on her doorstep and told her he had seen the things, too; that he had seen the things, too; that he had actually been in the courtroom when she was "revealed," but that he was still "blind" at the time. When he finally awoke to the truth, he remembered her and tracked her down. The judge, he said, was a beast who needed to be stopped. She recognized the truth in his words despite - or perhaps because of - the voices screaming in her head and the cramps in her hands. After Nasir left, Celia wrote for 24 hours straight, venting the voices onto every scrap of paper she could find.
Celia and Nasir have corresponded by email and other remote means ever since. Nasir calls himself an organizer and has gathered a few other chosen in the Atlanta area. Most are African-American, and Nasir uses the Muslim Federation as a cover or many of their activities. Celia exists on periphery of this group, acting as an occasional advisor and aid. She spends much of her time scanning the news looking for evidence of monstrous activity. She takes meticulous notes and then faxes them to Nasir. She used connections at court to find out details of the judge-monster's life; Nasir used her information to destroy the creature in a back alley in College Park. Celia's voices fell silent for a full week after that.
Last year, Nasir sent Celia a series of hand-written journal entries from a prisoner on trial for murder. The journal revealed that the prisoner - who never identified himself - was chosen and fighting hidden monsters. Celia read the first journal over a dozen times before realizing she had to share it with everyone in the group At 3 AM, she faxed it to numbers that she misdialed in her exhaustion, and it went through. She sent out the other journal entries she had received as well, and each number tone that sounded was different than what she had entered. Not could her machine seem to store the numbers that were actually dialed. But with each page, the voices diminished a little and Celia though her life might return to normal.
The voices came back, however, and they warn of darker things still to come.
References[]
- HTR: Hunter Book: Hermit, p. 103
- HTR: Hunter: First Contact, p. 118, 123