Donn's Shadow

by Caryn Larrinaga

  I indicated the soundless monitor. On screen, Daphne was wearing a thick, brightly colored shawl and flipping over a tarot card. She smiled encouragingly at the tank-top clad teenager in front of her and said something, presumably explaining the meaning of the card.

  Kit shook her head. “No, we didn’t have enough time. ScreamTV wants this episode next week, which is cutting it crazy close. Luckily, everyone has existing footage for their own websites, so we’re just borrowing that.”

  “Do you have it all?”

  “Yeah, we’re all set. And Dad already recorded his voiceovers, so I’m just picking the shots to use. I’m hoping to have this part all buttoned up before we head out to the cabin tonight.”

  I settled back into my seat to watch Kit work for a while. This part of the job fascinated me; she’d watch a long chunk of uncut footage with no sound as she took notes in her sketchbook. Then, she’d go back through and grab sections of video and pull them into a different screen along with a recording of Yuri’s voiceover. Watching her tweak the clips to fit Yuri’s words was like watching someone work with a literal magic wand.

  It was relaxing, sitting there beside her open window, listening to the clicks of her mouse and the chirps of the birds outside. I’d just about nodded off when a sudden burst of laughter erupted from her mouth. Kit shook in her chair, cracking up at a close-up shot of Nick’s face. His lips pushed outward in a strange expression somewhere between a frown and a kiss as he nodded slowly at someone in his audience.

  “He thinks he looks serious,” she gasped between bouts of laughter. “But he just looks like he ate some bad sushi.”

  I leaned in toward the monitor but didn’t find it quite as funny as Kit did. Sure, it was an odd expression, but her reaction…

  “Did you stay up all night editing?” I’d thought she’d woken up just before I arrived with the coffee, but now I suspected she hadn’t gone to sleep at all. She was way too giddy to have gotten a solid eight hours.

  Her laughter subsided, and she wiped at the already-smudged liner beneath her eyes. “Not all night. I crashed for a couple hours after the party.”

  “Geez, Kit. You better take a nap before we leave tonight.”

  “I will, I will.” She waved a dismissive hand then clicked something on Nick’s video. “But first, you’ve gotta see this.”

  It started over from the beginning, this time with sound. A crowd of about fifty people clapped and cheered as Nick jogged out onto the stage, holding a microphone in one hand. Several women in the audience were crying, but not tears of sadness. They were closer to the tears of ecstasy teenagers produce when they get to see their favorite boy-band live in concert. This crowd adored him.

  After a few minutes of “welcome” and “thanks” and reminders about the merchandise table in the lobby, Nick got down to business. The house lights dimmed down to near blackness, and a single spotlight illuminated Nick on the stage. He closed his eyes and raised his free hand high in the air.

  “Spirits,” he called out. “I feel you with us tonight. Some of you are bound here, bound by the shackles of grief to the loved ones you’ve left behind. Help us help you. Help us move on, so you can move on as well.”

  He stood there in silence until it almost felt awkward. Then, he brought his hand down sharply to his forehead, resting his thumb and ring finger on his temples. “I hear you, Jonathan.”

  Someone in the audience gasped, and a second spotlight shone down on a middle-aged woman who clutched a blue shirt in her hands.

  “Is that her, Jonathan?” Nick asked.

  The woman nodded emphatically, and Nick contorted his face into that odd expression of concentration Kit had been laughing at before.

  She paused the video and grinned at me. “See?”

  “Is that what his shows are always like?” I asked. “Some kind of… mass séance?”

  “It’s called a crowd reading. This is one of his smaller ones, from the Afterlife Festival last year.”

  “This is small?” The crowd measured five times larger than the group of people who’d been at the séance I’d attended in Gabrielle’s attic, and that group of nine had seemed difficult to control. Everyone around the table was hoping to see a different spirit, and they were mentally calling out in every direction. How could Nick control a group of fifty people, each hoping he’d contact a different ghost?

  “Yeah, he usually does this in Las Vegas, in smaller venues. He’s had hundreds of people in the audience at once.”

  I stared at the paused screen, my face threatening to mirror Nick’s strange expression. Hundreds of people. I’d known Nick was famous, but I hadn’t connected his name recognition with this level of psychic ability. If he was powerful enough to control the emotions in a room that size and still connect with a spirit, Richard Franklin wouldn’t be able to resist showing up at our tiny séance tonight.

  The thought raced from my mind and into my stomach where it morphed into a tight little ball of anxiety. My presence at the cabin had stirred Richard up so much that he’d manifested as a near-deadly windstorm, and I barely had any power at all.

  With Nick there… how far would Richard be able to go?

  Chapter Seven

  “This place always reminds me of the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel,” I told Kit.

  She looked up from our equipment cases and squinted toward the cabin. The sun was setting behind it, casting it in an eerie silhouette, but it was still easy to make out the sagging roof—which now had two massive holes in it, the most recent courtesy of Richard Franklin’s atmokinetic ability to conjure storms and control the wind—and the way the two windows flanked the door made the building look like it had two angry eyes and a gaping, hungry mouth.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Kit said. “Gumdrops on the roof, gingerbread walls. How’d I never see it before?”

  I resisted the urge to push her over since she was holding Mark’s camera and I valued my life. “Ha, ha. Hilarious. I mean the way it lures people in.”

  Over the last several decades, the Franklin Cabin had never had any shortage of willing visitors. Partying teenagers, down-on-their-luck squatters, campers with a ghoulish desire to spend the night somewhere infamous… and now us. I knew the evil power this place held, the risks of being here after the sun had set and darkness swallowed these woods. And yet, here I was, about to enter the cabin for the third time.

  And hopefully the last.

  I clenched and loosened my fists a few times, trying to muster the courage to walk into the building. The last two times I’d been this close to the cabin, there’d been a body waiting for me. It was as though Richard Franklin liked to leave me gifts. I imagined him standing at the window, gleefully watching me, clapping his hands in excitement at the thought of me finding whatever little present he’d gotten me today.

  I shivered, then decided I was being ridiculous. Richard hadn’t left those bodies for me. They’d simply been there. I was just the person unlucky enough to stumble across them both times.

  Had it been luck? Looking back, it didn’t feel like “stumbling” at all. I remembered the way I’d been drawn to the dock on my first visit here, unable to resist sitting at the edge and peering down into the water until Tom Bishop’s body floated out beneath my feet. And then…

  I frowned, unable to remember if it’d been my idea to seek shelter in the bedroom where we found Brian Anderson’s body a week later. We’d been in the middle of a massive windstorm, and I’d never experienced anything so frantic and chaotic in my life. It had definitely been me who’d opened the door to the closet where his body had been concealed. I’d remember that moment until the day I died.

  “Play it safe,” I muttered to myself. “If you feel the urge to go somewhere, walk straight in the other direction.”

  Right now, I had the urge to run back to the van. Instead, I took a deep breath and followed Yuri into the cabin.

  Inside, the musty stench of rotting wood assaulted my nose. I pinch
ed my nostrils as I gazed around the large, open space that took up the front half of the building. Piles of leaves covered the floor, and a few large tree branches had even found their way into the cabin from the hole in the ceiling. This room had once been easily recognizable as a combination kitchen and living area, but someone had ripped out the cupboards and countertops, leaving behind only traces of glue and pressed wood along the walls.

  “Looters,” Yuri said, putting down his gear.

  I mulled that over while we set up a few folding tables to use as workspaces. “I don’t get it. How much can some old cupboards get you on eBay?”

  He smiled at me, his eyes twinkling behind his wire-framed glasses. “Do you remember the antique witching supplies Gabrielle used to sell?”

  Before Gabrielle’s crimes had come to light and she’d sold her home to Penelope to pay her legal fees, she kept rare occult objects in a long glass case where the Oracle Inn’s registration desk now stood. Her collection included little pewter cauldrons, silver knives, and rough stone mortar and pestle sets that she claimed belonged to psychics who had died in the Salem Witch Trials. According to Gabrielle, they were incredibly powerful objects.

  I nodded to Yuri.

  “There’s a big market for things like that,” he said. “Objects that have been used in rituals or that came from places of great power.”

  “Seriously? Someone would buy a chunk of a countertop just because it came from here?”

  He chuckled. “I agree with your skepticism. There are many, many other things I would rather spend my money on. But there are people in the paranormal community who believe psychic energy is like radiation. They think it seeps into the objects around us, powering them up like batteries. And they believe those batteries can be used by other people in their own rituals.”

  As always seemed to happen when Yuri explained something, his words became images in my mind. I imagined pale wisps of energy curling away from us like smoke rising from a cigarette. The strands crept up the walls and along the floor, disappearing into the wood. I blinked, and in the instant my eyes were closed, I remembered the grinning, maniacal face of Richard Franklin as he’d appeared to me the last time I’d been here, formed out of wind and dust. His energy wouldn’t twist away from him in thin threads; it would pour out of him in thick, noxious ropes and choke out any positive energy we could muster.

  Stop it, I chided myself, shaking my head. My confidence was already cracking around the edges. If I kept picturing Richard as some kind of all-powerful super villain, my resolve would shatter entirely.

  I forced myself to focus on what Yuri was trying to tell me. “Do you think it’s possible? Like, could somebody get a doorknob from the Amityville house and—I don’t know—use it in a séance?”

  “Oh yes, that’s very common. For example, you might use a person’s hairbrush to focus on their energy. But someone didn’t go to all the trouble of prying out the cupboards just to summon Richard Franklin’s spirit. With a poltergeist as present as he is, you don’t need a focus object at all.”

  I pursed my lips into a grim smile, not sure if I was happy or terrified that Yuri thought it’d be easy for us to get Richard Franklin to join us here tonight. “So why take something from here?”

  “In theory, to use his residual psychic energy to enhance your own powers.”

  “Wait… does that work?” I glared at him, suddenly angry. “Why didn’t we bring something to make me stronger, to make sure we can get rid of him?”

  “To answer your first question: it doesn’t work. There’s no way to pull energy back out of something. The people who sell these objects are preying on the weak and desperate, like the snake-oil salesmen of the past. And in answer to your second, we did bring something to make you stronger.” Yuri smiled and inclined his head toward the open front door, through which we could see Kit and Mark talking together by the van. “Four other people are on the way.”

  My muscles relaxed, and I unclenched the fists I hadn’t even realized I’d made. “Right,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Doubting our plan.” I forced what I hoped was a brave smile onto my face. “I know we’ll be strong enough to drive him out.”

  Then, because my brain kept trying to show me a mental image of Richard Franklin’s dark energy oozing out of the walls around us like sap, I left the cabin. Outside, Kit and Mark had unloaded the rest of the gear from the van. Our black equipment cases rested around them in several stacks, but their eyes were focused on a large, rectangular device in Kit’s hands.

  “Need help with the rest?” I asked when I reached them.

  “Uh, yeah,” Kit said, not looking up. “Just give me one sec to test this out.”

  I leaned over her shoulder to get a better look at the thing she was working on. It was a bigger, more complicated version of the field mixer we usually used, with more than double the number of microphone inputs and an intimidating array of controls. Unlike the rest of our scratched and battered equipment, the device in her hands gleamed in the light of the setting sun. Every button and knob was intact and there wasn’t a coffee spatter in sight.

  “New mixer,” Kit said. “We’ll have a lot more lavalieres running today, plus I want to set up an extra boom mic.”

  “Oh, cool. Where did you get it?” I asked.

  Kit’s head jerked up, and she narrowed her eyes at our cameraman. “Good question. Where did you get this, Mark?”

  He coughed and rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Um… I borrowed it.”

  “Uh huh.” Kit put the mixer on top of a pile of cases and folded her arms across her chest. “Appreciate the frugality, buddy, but where did you borrow it from?”

  He pursed his lips, staring at the ground. “Raziel’s crew,” he said at last.

  Kit’s eyes flashed. “Dammit, Mark. Now we owe them a favor!”

  Growling, she marched away from us into the cabin. Her loud, furious voice floated back out the door toward us, punctuated every so often by Yuri’s soothing tone.

  “Uh oh,” I said. “You said the secret word of the day.”

  Mark laughed. “I knew she’d flip out when she found out where it came from.”

  I cringed. “Sorry I asked. If I hadn’t brought it up, she’d have been too distracted by the shiny new toy to even wonder where you got it.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He ran a hand through his mop of curly hair then picked the field mixer back up. “In the end, she’ll be so excited about having more audio feeds that she’ll stop caring it came from The Evil One.”

  “I met him last night, and it was weird. The news and Kit’s stories about him paint him like a total villain. But then in person, he seems so nice, and if he’s willing to loan us his equipment…”

  “Yeah, he’s a cool guy. He was begging me to let him come with us to the cabin, but I figured Kit would freak out, so I told him no.”

  “Interesting. When did he ask you?”

  “Um…” Mark stared up at the darkening sky, crinkling his brow. “Man, it must have been pretty late. He asked me while I was on my way out, and we pretty much shut the party down. He’d already agreed to loan us the mixer, so I felt really bad turning him down.”

  “You were hanging out with him?” I asked, quirking an eyebrow.

  Mark blushed, which surprised me. “Yeah. I told you—he’s a cool guy.”

  If I ignored everything I’d seen and heard about Raziel and measured him only by my own interactions with him, I couldn’t disagree with Mark’s assessment. But it bothered me that Raziel had asked my cameraman if he could be part of the episode after I’d already told him no.

  A car horn beeped behind us, and I glanced over my shoulder to spot a red SUV pulling down the long driveway to the little clearing in front of the cabin. The car wound its way to us, and soon enough Stephen, Daphne, Nick, and Graham spilled out on to the gravel. Graham held a cat carrier in his hand, and I hurried forward to take it from him.
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  “How’d she do?” I asked, peering through the metal grate that kept Striker from dashing out into the woods. In the fading light, her mottled black fur blended into the maroon plastic of the carrier, so she was just a pair of angry yellow eyes glaring out at me from the darkness.

  “Good.” He pulled me close for a quick kiss then turned back to the car to grab a grocery sack full of kitty treats. “She didn’t yell too much once I started giving her these.”

  “Man, she has you trained.”

  Striker meowed in agreement.

  “Let’s get her inside before she figures a way out of there,” Graham said.

  I was anxious to do just that. It terrified me to have her here; she hadn’t accompanied me on any of my previous visits because I couldn’t fathom having her snatched away by a hawk or mauled by some wild animal. I’d brought her today because I didn’t dare attempt something this big without her by my side.

  In the cabin, Mark and Kit fitted Daphne and Nick with lavalier microphones in what used to be the kitchen. Stephen leaned against one of the stripped walls, watching as he worked his way through a bag of potato chips. I rested Striker’s carrier on a folding table beside him.

  “Sorry we’re late,” he told me.

  “It’s my fault,” Nick called. “I couldn’t find my phone.”

  Daphne rolled her eyes at her husband. “I told you, it’s probably in our car.”

  “It wasn’t there,” he said. “Or in your bag.”

  “Why would it be in my bag?”

  Nick shrugged. “That thing’s a black hole. Everything ends up there.”

  “Could a thousand dollars magically end up there so we can buy you a new phone?”

  “Ha, ha,” he said drily.

  I looked back and forth between them, trying to figure out if they were just bantering the way Kit and Mark did or if there was some genuine tension flaring up. Their tones weren’t as lighthearted as they’d been at the cocktail party.

  Daphne opened her mouth to say something else, but Kit cut her off.

  “Perfect, you guys. Those levels look awesome.” Kit glanced up from her borrowed mixer and gestured for Stephen to join her in the kitchen. “You’re up.”