by Mae Clair
“I don’t have a boat.” He sounded glum. “Dad always took care of stuff like that. Mom doesn’t know the first thing about boats. Or fishing.”
“Maybe she’ll learn.”
“Do you fish?” He glanced at her hopefully.
“No.” It had been years. She had no intention of taking him fishing, or of getting involved and becoming friends with his mother. Getting involved was how people got hurt. How Madison ended up with a shattered mind and a life spent staring at four walls.
Jillian’s heart ratcheted faster, the sights and sounds of the city fading. Her hands grew clammy, her breath hissing quick and short through her lips. She tightened her fingers on Blizzard’s leash, barely aware when the dog whined and nudged against her.
Somehow, she managed to pull the city back into focus—the smell of bus exhaust, the raucous blare of a car horn. She blinked, the sting of light a telltale sign her pupils had dilated. She reached for the cord around her neck, but her glasses were missing. Foolishly, she’d left the tinted lenses at home.
“We should go back now.”
“Oh. Okay.” Elliott studied her queerly, but she couldn’t blame him. She had to be a sight—long blond hair hanging in a thick, waist-length braid, face pinched and pale, pupils obliterating the green of her eyes. He probably thought she was a freak.
She didn’t have the guts to tell him he was right.
“This way.” She gave Blizzard the lead, letting the husky guide her home.
* * * *
“How’s that?” Dante DeLuca darkened the pupils of the creature’s eyes then slid the drawing across the table. Far from his best work, especially when jotted on a paper napkin, but it should impress a twelve-year-old.
“Wow, I wish I could draw like that.” Elliott held the sketch closer. “You draw better than anyone I know, Dante.”
“He paints, too.” Tessa held out her hand. “Can I see?”
Dante watched as his cousin examined his work. She still had the same smattering of freckles across her nose as she’d had when they were kids, but her eyes—black as India ink—showed the wear of starting over after thirteen years of marriage. Tightening his fingers around his pencil, he tried not to think of the dickhead who’d left her for a fling with a twenty-year-old.
“I see you still like monsters.” Tessa’s mouth curved with the hint of a smile.
Dante traded the pencil for a fork and speared a piece of meatloaf. “It’s an alien. You know—outer space? E.T.?”
“Yeah, Mom. It’s got antennas.”
“I’m teasing, Elliott.” Tessa passed the napkin to her son. “Dante used to like to draw monsters when he was a little older than you.”
“Really?” Elliott’s eyes grew wide behind his glasses. “Would you draw me a monster sometime, Dante?”
“Sure. Any reason why?”
“I don’t know.” Squirming slightly, Elliott dropped his gaze to his plate.
They’d all but finished with dinner when Elliott started talking about space creatures and Dante got it in his head to do a sketch on the fly. Tessa had served dinner in the breakfast area off the kitchen, so it had been easy to snatch a pencil from the junk drawer by the refrigerator and reward her son—his cousin by blood—with a bug-eyed alien. Weird how family ties fit together.
Sucking on his bottom lip, Elliott pushed a clump of corn kernels into his mashed potatoes. “Monsters aren’t always bad. If they know you’re friendly, maybe they won’t spook you.”
“Do you get spooked?” Dante sensed something left unsaid.
Before Elliott could answer, Tessa stood, gathering her plate and silverware. “I don’t think you need to worry about monsters, but you need to finish eating if you want Dante to help set up your telescope.” She nodded toward Elliott. “It’s a school night. I don’t want you out late, even if it is for stargazing.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Elliott exhaled, the sound morose.
Dante waited until Tessa had crossed to the sink, then lowered his voice. “You can tell me about the monsters while we set up your telescope. After dinner.”
“Okay.” As if suddenly eager to finish, Elliott scooped corn and mashed potatoes into his mouth.
* * * *
“What’s its name again?” Dante stepped back from the telescope and gazed up at the moon with his naked eye. He could still see the crater, but without the beefed-up magnification that had made it seem inches away.
“Copernicus.” Elliott fiddled with the focusing knobs. “It’s called the Monarch of the Moon. Once you know where to look, it’s easy to find even without a telescope.”
After dinner, Dante had carried the telescope several blocks away, while Elliott had talked his ear off about impact craters, maria, rilles, and other lunar features Dante was clueless about. Elliott normally did his stargazing across the street, just off the walking trail, but Dante suggested the empty field below Hickory Chapel. There were fewer city lights at the south end of town, not to mention less traffic.
“The science teacher at my old school used to make drawings of what he saw on the moon.” Elliott continued fiddling with the magnification.
“You mean little green men?”
Elliott poked his head up long enough to roll his eyes.
At least the kid had a sense of humor. Dante hadn’t seen much of his cousin or her son since Tessa had followed her ex-husband to Maryland shortly after Elliott was born. Sure, there were holidays and visits when she came home, but he wasn’t exactly on speaking terms with his Aunt Imelda—Tessa’s mom—so even those occasions had been limited.
When Aunt Imelda was feeling kind, she referred to him as “a hippie nonconformist.” When she was in a snit—her standard attitude for most of his life—he became “a no-account bohemian living off a trust fund.” It probably didn’t help that he favored ragged jeans and usually wore his long hair tied in a ponytail. She’d been on the outs with his father for most of his life. No surprise she’d transferred the same ridiculous grudge to his son. Top that off with the stupid mistake he’d made about her late husband and there was no common ground between them.
Dante tilted his head to study the sky. “At least it’s not too cold, and we have a good viewing spot, huh?”
“I guess so.” Elliott glanced nervously over his shoulder.
Dante followed his gaze, looking past the steeple of Hickory Chapel to the hulking shapes jutting from the ground behind the old church. Many of the tombstones—thin black slabs in the darkness—dated back to the late 1700s when Hode’s Hill was a rustic village with a pinwheel of outlying farms. The chapel wasn’t used anymore, a boarded-up shell that encroaching weeds and ivy gradually claimed as their own. Many of the graves were untended, the descendants of those buried long ago passed from the Earth. Occasionally, there was talk of trying to preserve the place, but progress had been stalled for years. Several folktales had sprung up over the decades, all spooky stuff kids liked to tell at Halloween. Most of the stories were harmless campfire stuff.
Unless you happened to be the rare soul who’d inherited an affinity for the spirit world.
Dante recalled an old sketchbook filled with drawings he rarely examined. The memory of a long-ago Halloween night danced in his head, conjuring images of hideous creatures lurking behind trees and gravestones. He jerked his chin in the direction of the cemetery. “Is that where the monsters are?”
Elliott swallowed audibly. “I heard kids talking at school. Finn Carrigan said some boy cut through the cemetery when he was walking home. It was after dark, and he was never seen again. A monster got him.”
“Is Finn a friend of yours?”
Elliott shook his head. “I just overheard him talking about it.”
“Hmm.” He tried to appear neutral. Kids had no clue what really lurked in the cemetery, just made up stories because that had been the way of it for
generations. “Did he know who the boy was? The one who disappeared?”
Another shake of the head. “Rodney Townsend said it was a bad place, and not to go there. That monsters creep out of the graves after dark.”
“Not ghosts? Monsters?”
“Maybe both.”
“And maybe these boys knew you were listening and decided to put you on.”
Elliott flushed, the heightened color on his cheeks evident even in the dark. He jiggled the focusing knob but didn’t bend to look through the eyepiece. “Hickory Chapel is close to where Mom and I live. What if the monsters leave the graveyard? Our house and Jillian’s would be the first they’d find.”
“Jillian?”
“She lives next door, on the corner. She’s got a husky named Blizzard.”
“Oh.” Dante remembered seeing a blond-haired woman with a dog earlier that night. “I don’t think you have to worry about monsters or ghosts.” Just the jerk kids at school who are making it rough for you. “When I was a kid, I cut through the cemetery all the time.”
“Really?” Elliott gazed up, moonlight reflecting off his glasses.
“Sure. Sometimes even at night.”
Especially one Halloween night that had gone horribly wrong. He thought of the medallion beneath his shirt. A medal with an etching of the Archangel Michael that had once belonged to his father.
“Is that why you drew monsters?”
Dante gave a short laugh. It was amazing how the kid had glommed onto that bit of information from dinner. Time to change the subject and lock the memories in the past where they belonged.
“Hey.” He pointed to the moon. “What happened to the lunar mountain ranges you were going to show me? We can’t stay out long. Your mom will be waiting.”
“Yeah. Okay.” The reminder seemed to energize Elliott. He began fiddling with the magnification knobs, chattering about declination angles and optimum viewing time.
Dante only half heard, the boy’s earlier question pinging around inside his head.
“Is that why you drew monsters?”
Hunching his shoulders against the chill air, he recalled his father’s sudden death and the awakening of his spiritual sight.
No. I drew them because my monsters were real.
* * * *
The house was empty, too big. Dante should have stayed at his apartment in town, the small unit he rented near the senior center where his grandmother lived. But the sprawling two-story, inherited from his father, had been his home growing up. Most of his memories were bottled in these walls, not all of them good.
Visiting with Tessa and Elliott—especially Elliott—had him dredging awake memories of the days and months after his father had been killed. Salvador DeLuca’s death had been accidental, a mishap while on the job at Wickham, but the details had never been clear. Dante’s medical scientist father had enjoyed a lucrative career, the specifics of his work clouded in secrecy. After his death, Dante and his grandmother received a large wrongful death settlement, the bulk of it put in trust for him until he turned twenty-one.
Eight years later, he was still living off those funds and the wealth inherited from his father. Most of his time was spent painting or working at the gallery he’d established in the center of town, a place to showcase his work and that of other local artists. He freelanced on the side, most recently doing some conceptual drawings for Hode Development’s new senior living project. He had plenty to keep him occupied, but every now and then his mind drifted to the unseen creatures that lurked in Hickory Chapel Cemetery.
Like tonight.
Monsters.
There had been a moment when he’d thought Elliott had inherited his family’s spiritual sensitivity. Other than Dante, several of his ancestors had possessed the trait, including Dante’s father. Salvador once told him he had memories of his great-grandfather communicating with the dead through flickering lights and table rappings.
Despite the DeLuca affinity for the supernatural, Tessa’s mother, Imelda, wanted nothing to do with it. Part of the reason she and Dante didn’t speak. She hadn’t liked when her brother, Salvador, dabbled in otherworldly things, and had taken offense when Dante continued in that vein. He’d committed the cardinal sin by making the mistake of telling her he’d inadvertently once communicated with her dead husband. From that point on, she’d wanted nothing to do with him.
At least Tessa hadn’t written him off, but by then she’d been married, living elsewhere. It was best her son stayed neutral, having nothing to do with spirits, wraiths, and the nightmarish things that hovered out of eyesight.
Dante jogged up the staircase to the second floor, then down the hall past the master suite and the southern-facing room he’d converted to a studio. His old bedroom, the place he’d spent numerous nights scratching in a sketchbook as a teenager, was tucked at the end of the hall. He’d changed it up not long ago—fresh paint, new carpet and furniture—but a lot of his old drawing supplies were still stored in the walk-in closet.
Switching on the light and stepping inside, he eyed the arrangement of boxes stacked on the shelves. Some were labeled with dates, others stuffed wherever they would fit. An open box, shorter than the rest, contained a smattering of loose drawings and a sketchbook. Dante carried the box into the bedroom then dropped to a seat on the mattress. He settled the carton on his lap and shuffled the papers aside. Tucked underneath, the sketchbook kindled a stockpile of memories.
Halloween night. He, Spencer Wright, and Alex Price chucked hickory nuts at the old chapel just for something stupid to do. See who could pockmark the siding or loosen the boards on the windows. When they grew bored with the game, they smoked cigarettes. Guzzled a few beers and tried to psych each other out by pretending to hear noises in the dark.
Dante was effed up, his dad just a few months dead. Maybe that’s why he saw what the others didn’t. It was after midnight when they heard the eerie tolling of the church bell, all three freezing in place, wide-eyed stares sweeping to the bell tower.
The empty bell tower.
Nothing there, but the invisible bell continued to toll, a keening shrill almost human.
“Let’s get the hell out of here.” Spencer was the first to find his voice. Tossing his beer, he raced toward the hill that would spill him onto the street and safety. Alex stood rooted, jaw hanging open as he gaped at the derelict church.
The feeling of something malevolent swept through Dante. He pivoted, spurring Alex into motion. It was obvious his friend didn’t see the creatures, but they couldn’t have been more apparent to him.
Nightmarish things that lurked behind trees and gravestones, hideous abominations without name. Conglomerations of scales, bulging eyes, and fangs soiled with blood. Chains spooled behind them, each lumbering movement sending a rattling clank through yokes of corroded iron. Fetid breath scorched Dante’s face. Hot, reeking of brimstone.
The bell tolled again, warning of something horrible to come. In that split second, frozen with the creatures creeping among the tombstones, he understood what the knell signaled. Would never forget.
It was too late by the time headlights splintered the darkness. The squeal of tires and the tar-like stench of burning rubber filled the air. If Spencer had been a second earlier, a half second later, he wouldn’t have blundered into the street at that precise moment.
The sickening sound of three thousand-plus pounds of metal impacting flesh ripped through Dante. Alex barreled down the hillside, racing to the scene of the accident, but Dante couldn’t move.
The bell ceased its death knell. Creatures slithered into the Aether from which they’d come. Only a dog remained, a massive beast with red eyes and a coat as black as the grave. Unlike the monsters, the shadowy animal was not tethered by a chain.
The canine met Dante’s gaze briefly, then padded away, vanishing under the hickory tree at the rear of t
he church.
Dante didn’t need to walk down the hill to know Spencer was dead.
He flattened his hand on the cover of the sketchbook, all too familiar with what the book contained.
The monsters of Hickory Chapel Cemetery.
* * * *
“We coulda picked a better night for this.” Clive Porter tossed a fresh shovelful of dirt over his head, wincing when pain boomeranged across his lower back. “Moon’s too bright, and I’m spent. How deep do you think this mother’s buried? We gotta be over seven feet by now.”
“Quit whining.” Clive’s brother Warren sank his spade into the soil with a vengeful stab. “We got a hefty payday coming. That’s all that matters.”
“I don’t care about the cash. You said I could have a dog if I helped. A brown-and-white one, like when I was a kid.”
“You’ll get your dog when we get paid.”
“Promise?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
The edge of anger told Clive to back off. “Okay.” He sweated like a pig despite the cool autumn air. Probably shouldn’t have mounded all that salt on his fries during dinner at Colossal Burger. The extra ten pounds he carried around his gut slowed him down, while the creep-show feeling they were being watched made him want to hurry and get the hell out.
Rubbing the lizard tattoo on the back of his left hand, he listened for any unusual sliver of sound. When he was nineteen, a carnival fortune teller told him the lizard was his totem animal and would protect him from harm as long as he honored it. He’d gone out and had the tattoo inked the next day. He wasn’t black-cat-superstitious or shit like that but had a healthy respect for evil spirits. Odds were, digging up a body at two a.m. would stir up a few.
At least Hickory Chapel Cemetery was far enough from the roadway that they were unlikely to be spotted behind the church, even with the moon hovering coin-bright overhead. The part of him weirded out by defiling a grave didn’t mind the extra light.