Blood Creek Beast

by Jay Barnson

  “It’s getting late. Tomorrow. Actually, in two days. Tomorrow, we’ve got a mission.”

  “Seriously? A mission? From who? What are we doing?”

  He turned back toward the trailer. “Something really boring.”

  “Liar!”

  He laughed. “Actually, I’m not. I’m sneaking into a satellite office of the Coven to replace a recording device I’ve hidden there. I’ve done it a few times. It’s how I found out when they were going to test you. But I could always use a hand, especially one who can pose as a cat. Are you game?”

  Jessabelle grinned. “I can totally do that.”

  “I thought so.”

  The next morning, Leon gently shook Jessabelle awake before the sun had come up. Jessabelle looked around and said, “It it time to go? I can be ready in five minutes.”

  The light from the hallway spilled onto his grim face. “We have a complication.”

  Her muscles tensed. “They found us?”

  “What? Oh, no.” He shook his head emphatically. “That would be a serious problem. No, do you remember Josie Ankrum?”

  “The nice lady who helped rescue me from the Coven and bought me new clothes? She ain’t easy to forget.”

  He nodded slowly. “She just contacted me. Her husband has gone missing. She wants our help to find out what happened to him.”

  “What? How? What are we supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know. Sniff around for clues as a cat, maybe? Get dressed, and we’ll talk on the way.”

  He left her bedroom, closing the door behind him. She threw on a set of clothes—jeans, t-shirt, socks, and running shoes, all provided by Josie—plus her watch. When she left the bedroom, Leon was already starting the car. She jumped in, and he tossed a protein bar in her lap before she buckled her seatbelt.

  “Eat up,” Leon said. “It might be a long day.”

  As they drove out into the sunrise, he explained. “On Sundays, the cleaning crew at this satellite office arrives sometime between eight-thirty and eleven in the morning. They take about one hour. That’s my window of opportunity to replace the recorder. If the Coven is responsible for Burke’s disappearance, we need to find out as quickly as possible.”

  Jessabelle nodded. “Are we going on the mission anyway?”

  “I’d rather not. Josie is desperate, and we owe her. But the answer to her question may very well be on that recorder, and the sooner we find out, the better. Do you think you can help her out, at least until I get back?”

  Jessabelle shrugged. “I can try.”

  “That’ll have to do. Just poke around and see if you can find something. Josie’s a very capable woman, but she’s not a super-witch like some of the Coven. Burke has been missing all night, so she’s at wits end.”

  He was quiet for several minutes. Jessabelle was good at noting body language and sensing people’s feelings, but not so good at interpreting them. Including her own. After several minutes of silence, she asked, “Would Josie turn us in if the Coven has Burke?”

  After a beat, Leon nodded. “Yes. And she should. I wouldn’t blame her. This is not their fight.”

  Jessabelle stared through the windshield at the sunlight creeping over the road between the trees. At length, she said, “It shouldn’t be ours, either.”

  Leon grunted in agreement and continued along the twisty mountain roads. Twenty minutes later, they turned onto a short stretch of crumbling asphalt that took them to a tiny village called Narbin. A house visible from the main road advertised eggs and live chickens on a hand-painted sign. A barn nearby acted like a billboard, bearing painted words on the side advertising some pawn shop. Barbed wire surrounded the barn, and a zigzag fence marked the outer part of the field. She’d once been told that the zig-zag fences were from the old days, where assayers would measure property by those sections of the fence cut and angled to the right specifications. She didn’t know if she believed those stories or not, but they made a certain kind of sense.

  Most of the houses in the community were hand-built, not the prefabricated mobile homes that were so common around the state. Leon parked outside a surprisingly large white house with brick-red trim, leaving the engine running. Little dream-catchers and wind chimes hanging on the porch swayed in the faint stirrings of a warm morning breeze. Leon knocked on the door. Jessabelle stood off to the side, wondering what to do with her hands. One nice thing about being a cat most of the time was that it absolved you of most need to worry about social graces. Just do what came naturally as a cat, and you’d be fine.

  Leon knocked a second time. After ten seconds, Josie appeared at the door. Her eyes were bloodshot and set above dark, puffy circles. “It’s about time,” she said.

  “You hear anything more?” Leon asked. “Anyone contact you?”

  “You mean like a ransom or ultimatum?” Josie shook her head. “No. Nothing at all.”

  “I can’t stay,” Leon said. “Jessabelle will be here to help you out until I get back.”

  Josie’s face fell, and she looked like she aged five years in an instant. “Look here, I ain’t got time to babysit this girl!”

  “That’s not why she’s here. She has skills and can help you. I gotta go and make sure it wasn’t the Coven.”

  The fury in Josie’s face grew, but then she glanced over at Jessabelle and sighed. With forced evenness, she asked, “How long?”

  “A few hours. I’ll be back this afternoon. But I’ve got to go now.”

  Josie closed her eyes and tilted her head, lips pursed together. “Damn it, Leon. When I really need you...” She held up her hand as he began to protest. “I know. You’re right. I ain’t gotta like it though. Go. If nothing else, having another person around will keep me from going insane.”

  Before Jessabelle could get too studious in her examination of her own feet, Josie invited her inside. With a mumbled repeat of his promise to be back soon, Leon hurried back to his car. He was already backing out as Josie shut the door behind Jessabelle.

  All the lights in the house were on. Thick draperies covering the windows had been pulled back, filling the house with light—and growing heat. The furnishings were sturdy and old, bearing ancient dings and dents along their solid wooden frames. Most of the decorations seemed to be Native American or mountain-folk crafts.

  Josie looked Jessabelle up and down, and then said, “Well, come on. Can I make you some tea or something?”

  Jessabelle almost agreed by reflex. Instead, she stuck out her chin and said, “You ain’t supposed to babysit me. I’m here to help, remember?”

  Josie chortled, something between a grunt and a laugh. She closed her eyes and bent her head, shaking it slightly. After a moment, she looked at Jessabelle. “Honestly, I don’t know if anyone can do anything. Leon was right to go after the most likely possibility. I knew the risks helping him out, but...” She sighed. “Okay, let’s see what you can do.”

  Jessabelle shrugged. “I reckon I may as well try. Your husband’s name is Burke?”

  Josie nodded. “Burke disappeared last night. We don’t sleep in the same bed no more on account of his snoring can wake the dead. I love him dearly, but the man saws enough logs to deforest the county. So I stay in the guest room. Now, around two in the morning, I wake up, because the upstairs is quiet, and a light is coming from the bedroom. I reckon he woke up. But then I searched the house for him, and I ain’t seen him. House was still locked up tight ‘n all. I checked with the neighbors right before contacting Leon. Nobody saw or heard anything.”

  “Have you checked the roof?” Jessabelle asked.

  “No. I don’t think he’d be up there.” Josie’s tone sounded only partly condescending, but mostly confused.

  Jessabelle said, “It’s just... we had a thing not long ago. People getting snatched away.” She didn’t want to explain the snallygaster to Josie. If a snallygaster had taken Josie’s husband, then the man was long dead by now, anyway. “It ain’t important.”

  “I’ll take yo
u upstairs. Might as well start there.”

  The stairs made comfortable creaks as they climbed. If someone was awake and alert, they’d hear anyone coming up or down by the creaks. The walls of the hallway bore the fake wood paneling that was popular back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and was adorned with pictures of family members and framed paintings of landscapes. “We normally keep all the windows covered in the summertime, to keep the house cool,” Josie explained. The upstairs was a little warmer, but not yet uncomfortable. “I opened everything up this morning when I looked around. I didn’t see anything.” At the top of the stairs, Josie opened the door to the master bedroom. “Sorry about the mess,” she said.

  The mess she complained about couldn’t compare to Jessabelle’s own bedroom. She felt a pain of loss, wondering if she would ever see her bedroom again. One more thing Thadeus and his minions had taken from her. Josie’s bedroom was cluttered, with stacks of magazines by the side of the bed for late-night reading. The bed was unmade. Most horizontal surfaces were covered with knickknacks. A master bathroom adjoined the bedroom, with an assortment of toiletries and medications on the counter. A walk-in closet neighbored it, with men’s clothes and shoes taking up the left side of the closet and women’s’ attire on the right. One pair of shoes hadn’t been put away in the closet and sat askew on the floor beside the bed.

  To Josie, maybe that constituted a mess.

  In the closet, the row of shoes left two empty slots. One was closest to the wall, and the other was in the middle of the row. Jessabelle pointed. “What shoes are missing right there?”

  Josie waved to the discarded shoes near the bed. “That’s them. He normally keeps his slippers there, too. Huh. They ain’t there. I guess he left the bedroom.”

  “Why?” Jessabelle asked.

  “He might go downstairs and watch TV. More often he’ll get himself a late-night snack. That’s part of the reason for his being twice the man I married twenty-five years back.”

  Jessabelle thought of her own late-night snack habits, especially after transforming. “Did he leave any dishes out?”

  Josie shrugged. “Not that I noticed. Maybe he went down for peaches or something, but I looked down there.”

  “Down where?”

  “The basement. He likes peaches. We got a whole mess of ‘em sliced and canned down there. I get on his case about it, but they’re last year’s batch and really good peaches. I done searched down there already, though. It ain’t that big of a basement, and he ain’t down there.”

  “Let’s look again. Maybe I’ll be able to see something,” Jessabelle said.

  Half of the unfinished basement was devoted to a workshop, and the other half was packed with shelving and food. Josie pointed to the corner. “Peaches are in that corner. The one with all the jars pulled to the front in hopes I won’t notice the empty space behind them.”

  Jessabelle wasn’t sure what she’d hoped to see. Footprints in the dust? A missing slipper? Signs of a struggle? A detailed note explaining his plan to run off in the middle of the night? The shelves looked perfectly ordinary. Perhaps Jessabelle-the-cat might detect more, but she wanted to make sure of what she was doing before changing forms. Even if Josie knew Jessabelle’s secret, she still felt uncomfortable transforming in front of people.

  She made her way to the corner of the room, scanning the rows of jars, when she felt the hairs on the back of her neck tickle. It was a strange sensation, not caused by any draft of cold air. It just felt strange.

  With a shock, she recognized the feeling. She’d felt it a few weeks ago, up Blood Creek where it emerged from a shallow pool. This was too good to be true. Josie and her husband had a portal to another world in their basement, next to the canned peaches.

  Jessabelle froze, terror and hope mingling in a thrill through her body. Jack had reported Thadeus saying something about a one-way portal in Morgantown. Would this portal be a one-way trip to Around the Bend? Would it be impossible to come back? Did she care? Would she be able to find her way back to Blood Creek—the other Blood Creek—on the other side? Her mother had signed her away to the Coven. Jack, Jenny, and Grandmother Annabelle were on the other side, somewhere. And over there, she wouldn’t have the Coven hunting her down.

  “You see something, Jessabelle?” Josie asked.

  “Stay here. Whatever you do, don’t follow me,” she answered.

  “Follow? Where?”

  Jessabelle concentrated. It was unlikely, but far from impossible, to go through the crossroads on accident. They’d done it the first time they’d gone to Around the Bend, but then they had a witch’s spell on them that made it easy. Since then, she’d gone through three more times, making her the most experienced of her friends. She was a seasoned crossroads traveler. It sort of made her one of the world’s greatest experts on the subject, didn’t it?

  She took a deep breath, and pushed forward, directly toward the cement wall. She concentrated on going somewhere. That focus, the intent to flee or to seek another place, helped guide one through whatever eye of the needle one needed to go through to walk the path. Maybe witches or those who could see the path could do it differently, but focus was how she did it.

  Even so, she half expected to hit her head on solid concrete. Instead, she found herself plunged into near-absolute darkness.

  Wherever she was, it was colder than the Ankrum’s basement. The dusty air smelled and tasted stale. It was a place that hadn’t been exposed to fresh air or sunshine in a very long time. Without light, she stumbled, and panic rose inside her that she might never find the way out.

  This was a dungeon, a prison with no exits. What was lost here stayed lost.

  A voice floated out of the darkness. “Hello? Who’s there?” The male voice quivered, terrified and hopeful.

  “Burke?”

  “Yes! Yes, that’s me! Thank the Lord! I’ve been here for days!”

  She shook her head, but realized that nobody could see her. “No, it ain’t been days, just part of one day. Are you okay? Can you move?”

  “Yes. I’m hurt, but I don’t know how bad. I tripped over something. I think it was a skeleton. I don’t know how bad I’m hurt. I’m so cold...”

  Jessabelle heard the panic in his voice. She hoped she didn’t have a similar sound to her own. Would she be able to get either of them out of here? “Can you follow my voice? Can you come to me?”

  “I can try, yeah. The sounds echo in here something fierce, but just try to talk normal.”

  Jessabelle didn’t know what to say. She heard him shuffling, crawling in the darkness, and she needed to guide him. She wanted to go to him instead, but moving from this spot might take her away from the portal. So, she said whatever came to her mind.

  “My name’s Jessabelle. My friend Leon and I came because your wife sent him a message to come help.”

  “Leon’s here?”

  “Not right now. He’ll be back in a few hours.”

  “How did you know how to find me? I don’t even know where this is or how I got here. I must have fallen, but I don’t remember.”

  Jessabelle looked around, trying to see some glimmer of light. Ghost images flickered in her vision as her imagination tried to make sense of pure darkness. “My grandma calls this place ‘Round the Bend.’ I been here before. Well, I ain’t been to this place, specifically. I don’t know where this is. It’s like a whole ‘nother world.”

  “Is it all like this?”

  “No, no, it’s just a regular place. We mostly just saw trees and stuff.”

  “I hate it.”

  “I have friends here. I want to come back. But, I don’t know how to get out of this particular place. When we get you back home, maybe I can come back with a flashlight or something.”

  There was no response, but she heard the sounds of breathing and someone struggling to pull himself across the floor.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes. I’m just... Keep talking. Please.”

  The air grew
more oppressive around her. She couldn’t imagine being trapped here a single hour, let alone half a day. Not knowing if anyone would ever find out what had happened to you, let alone coming to rescue you. She shuddered. “I shouldn’t be too far from the entrance. We just gotta find it. You can’t really see it anyway, so we have to feel it out once you get to me.”

  Burke Ankrum sounded closer now. He moved slowly. Then he stopped. She heard nothing but his labored breathing, but it seemed farther than he’d sounded a moment ago. Sounds were strange down here.

  “Jessabelle?” he asked.

  “Oh, sorry. I don’t usually talk much. Um, what can I say? Oh, besides my grandma, my cousin is here. Her name is Jenny. She’s really amazing. And then there’s Jack. He’s a boy who lives in my town. We didn’t really know each other until a few weeks ago. That’s kind of funny. He’s...”

  She felt an icy hand touch and then grab her wrist, and she almost shrieked in terror.

  “My leg really hurts,” Burke said. “I can’t really walk. Where is the way out?”

  “It’s close. Somewhere behind me. Let’s find it.”

  Holding Burke’s freezing hand, she turned and held her free hand in front of her, trying to catch the feeling she’d experienced minutes before. She felt nothing. Could it be a one-way door? Was she trapped here, just like Burke?

  Before she could drive herself into a panic, she caught a sensation. The crossroads! “It’s here, I think! We’re almost there!”

  He groaned. This could be difficult.

  “I need you to come with me, and you need to concentrate. Think about home. Think about your wife, and crawl this way. Come on.”

  “So tired,” he said.

  “Just a little farther! You can do it! We’re almost there!”

  He crawled next to her, shivering. She wrapped her arm around his and said, “Let’s crawl forward together. We can do this. Think about... Think about peaches! Those peaches on the shelf. You like the peaches, don’t you?”