The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  “Don’t worry, he will. He’ll fight until he tears his very soul in half. It’s what they all do. But don’t worry, sweetheart. If Dad does as told, I promise not to make your boyfriend smash his skull in like I did his mother.”

  Jessie went visibly tense in the boy’s hold.

  “Of course, maybe you’d prefer I put him out of his misery rather than leave him a drooling catatonic?”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  Ryan laughed. “While I would love to talk about family trees, it’s time to go. Like I said, I would love to slip inside of your daughter. Possessing a young lady like this could make for some pleasurable days ahead.”

  “Fine.” Lockman’s skin felt ready to peel away from the heat burning through him. “But when I see Dolan, I’ll make sure I find what he’s got that binds you. And when I do, you’ll be my bitch.”

  “Something tells me Mr. Dolan won’t give you the chance. He’s quite hot to have you visit.” He gave Jessie a shake. “Now drop it.”

  Lockman dropped the tire iron to the floor.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Kate opened the bottom drawer of her dresser. The drawer held mostly shirts and blouses she had grown tired of or grown out of. There was a time she could eat anything without a thought to her waistline. Age did cruel things to a metabolism. Even with her running, she could never get back to her old weight.

  But Craig? If anything, age had improved him. Taken off the too-slick coating of youth and left lines of character in his face. His body had somehow remained pretty close to what she remembered.

  Bastard.

  She reached into the drawer, rooting past the clothes to the small wood jewelry box she kept back there. The box held only one piece of jewelry. For some reason she thought it might be missing when she opened the box, but it lay waiting for her untouched. A simple silver chain with a silver pendant. The pendent itself looked like an ancient coin. One side of the quarter-sized disc was perfectly smooth. The opposite side had a collection of religious symbols engraved on it. A cross. The Star of David. A pentagram. And others she didn’t recognize.

  When he had given it to her, she thought it the strangest gift. She would never forget what he said when he placed the chain around her neck.

  This will protect you.

  Protect me from what? She’d asked.

  From the darker things.

  At the time she thought he meant it as a metaphor or something. Though he said it with the authority of someone who had seen darker things.

  Was that what this was all about now?

  She lifted the pendant from the box and clipped it around her neck. If there was ever a time to get superstitious, now seemed good. She tucked the pendant into her blouse, put the box back into the drawer. She closed the drawer then stood and looked at herself in the mirror. Somewhere inside the woman staring back at her was the woman she used to be. The woman Craig would recognize. The woman Kate had to leave behind because she had a responsibility to her daughter. And in the years since she had convinced herself that who she was now was superior to that younger self. Then Craig shows up out of the blue, and he had her wondering if she missed the old Kate.

  What difference did it make if she did? There was no going back.

  “Honey,” Alec called. “Can you come out here?”

  She curled her lip at her reflection. Why can’t you come in here? She rolled her eyes. Pettiness did not make for a good marriage. She would be the bigger person.

  “Coming.”

  She touched the pendant through her blouse. What am I doing?

  Tempting fate was what.

  She found Alec in the family room. A masked man stood behind him with a gun to the back of Alec’s head.

  She started to scream, but a gloved hand covered her mouth before the sound could escape. Something hard and narrow pressed against her skull. “Just relax.” A woman’s voice, muffled as if she wore a mask, too.

  Kate stared at Alec with wide eyes. He stared back. “Just do as they say.”

  She wanted to ask what they wanted, but the hand over her mouth kept her from voicing any questions.

  Darker things.

  The thought crossed her mind right before the hood whipped down over her head and trapped her in darkness.

  “Okay,” said the specter—as Lockman came to think of the thing that wore Ryan’s body. “Now turn around and walk.”

  “Let go of my daughter.”

  “Come on. I’m ready to take her. I don’t care what happens to her. If I thought I could otherwise motivate you to come along, I would have taken her already.”

  “Why not take me? Then you can march me right into Dolan’s place.”

  “I told you. A mortal mind can’t handle sharing a soul. It drives you mad.”

  Lockman shrugged. “So? You delivered me alive. That’s not good enough?”

  “Mr. Dolan was quite clear that no harm come to you.”

  “That’s good to know.” He looked Jessie in the eyes. “I’m sorry. I tried to keep you safe, but I have to think of the greater good.”

  The boy’s brow creased under his shaggy bangs.

  Jessie went still. Her lips parted slightly. “What?”

  Lockman returned his attention to the specter. “Go ahead. Take her if you want. I won’t give myself over to Dolan.”

  Not-Ryan smirked. “Nice bluff.”

  Lockman bent over and picked up the tire iron. “This look like a bluff?”

  “Don’t waste any more of my time.”

  “Take her.”

  “I will.”

  “Show me. I want to see what it looks like.”

  Jessie’s eyes watered. Her lip quivered.

  Lockman tried not to notice.

  “All right, then. I’ll call your bluff.” The specter stroked Jessie’s cheek. “Maybe I’ll have you fuck your own father. Wouldn’t that be nice and twisted?”

  Jessie screamed and elbowed Ryan in the gut.

  Lockman reached out and grabbed her arm, pulling her away from the specter. Then he swung the tire iron and knocked Ryan so hard on the skull, his head bounced off the wall before he crumbled to the floor. Lockman already started moving before Ryan’s body landed. He tugged Jessie along with him. He didn’t think the specter got knocked out along with its host.

  Sure enough, as they rounded the corner and started up the steps, a breathy howl chased after them.

  Halfway up the staircase, the specter, back to his green phosphorescent self, rose up through the stairs as if in an invisible elevator.

  Lockman and Jessie jerked to a halt.

  “You cannot outrun me.”

  Lockman growled and threw the tire iron at the thing. The metal rod flew end-over-end and passed right through the specter’s translucent torso.

  The specter laughed.

  “I don’t have to outrun you,” Lockman said. “You can’t possess me, and if you go near Jessie, I won’t cooperate.”

  The specter’s face distorted, the humanlike face replaced for a moment by something grotesque. There and gone so fast, Lockman couldn’t pick out details, but he was left with a subliminal unease.

  “If not for our coming ascension, I would rape your soul and your daughter.”

  “You’ve got a serious incest fetish, huh?”

  “Jokes will not save you. And it will not stop us.”

  “Stop who from what?”

  The specter smiled. “Those of us who deserve life will taste it again.” The glowing shape dissipated into what looked like a green storm cloud. The cloud broke apart into a mist. The mist swirled around them, blowing their hair, and then it streamed out of the stairway, chased by a freight train scream.

  Jessie covered her head and started rambling off movie titles again, half of which Lockman didn’t recognize.

  Lockman squinted through the whirling wind and stared in the direction of the specter’s retreat. “I don’t think he’s done with us.”

  Something smacked acro
ss his arm. He turned and Jessie punched him in the chest. When he didn’t react, she punched again.

  “You can be as mad as you want, but the fact is, you’re still alive and he’s gone for now.”

  “You prick. You righteous prick. What if he—”

  “I wasn’t going to let him.”

  “And Ryan. Oh my god.” She turned and trounced back down the stairs before Lockman could protest.

  He followed her down. “We don’t have time—”

  “Shut up.”

  He hung back while she went to Ryan and crouched at his side. She stroked his hair, revealing a smear of blood from the boy’s scalp.

  “Did you kill him?”

  “I can see he’s still breathing from here.” He took a step forward. “I know you’re upset, but we have to go.”

  “I’m not running around anymore with you. I’m tired of it.”

  “The whole reason I left was to avoid putting the people I care about in danger. That didn’t work. But I’m still not going to let you or Kate get hurt.”

  She glared at him over her shoulder. “I thought you didn’t have a choice. They made you leave.”

  He took a deep breath. “Half true. I could have taken Kate with me. My boss offered me to take someone. I told him there wasn’t anyone to take. He wasn’t supposed to know about Kate.”

  “But he did?”

  “He’s the one gave me up to the PI. He must have known about Kate, about you. And that you would lead Dolan’s men to my door. It’s backwards. He could have told Dolan and left you and Kate out of it, but I won’t know the details until I talk to him myself.”

  She shook her head and looked down at Ryan. “You think it’s true? You think he’ll wake up crazy?”

  “Probably.”

  “Don’t sugar coat it.”

  “Not one of my skills.”

  She snorted, barely hanging onto the stone face she’d put on. “I noticed.”

  “We have to go.”

  “I’m not going to leave him like this.”

  “We can call an ambulance on the way out. Jessie, we need to get back to your mom.”

  Her back went stiff. “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  She hung her head. “Finding you really messed things up, huh?”

  “I’ll fix it. I promise.”

  “Just you? Against…” She waved her hand toward the ceiling. “…all that.”

  “Behind all that is one man. I stop him, none of these things will have any reason to come after you or Kate.”

  “But they might still come after you?”

  “If I piss them off enough. Me and the supernatural never did get along very well.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “What do you think that thing meant about the ‘ascension?’ Sounds like something out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

  Lockman completed the left turn that took them into Kate’s neighborhood before answering. “Been mulling that myself.”

  “You don’t have a clue, huh?”

  “These things, supernatural beings, follow their own brand of rules. But they all have one thing in common. They were almost universally brought here, to our world or plane of existence, or whatever, by some malignant means.”

  “Like, what?” she asked with a laugh in her voice. “Sacrificing virgins?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.” He turned onto Kate’s street, slowed to give them a chance to finish the conversation. “Blood sacrifice is the most efficient way of summoning and controlling those forces. Not all of them can be controlled once they’re here, though. There are plenty of vampires out there, for example, some of them made by the vamps that were brought here initially.”

  “Brought here? Brought from where?”

  “Most people familiar with these things refer to it as another dimension or an alternate reality. If you talk to a physicist about it, he’ll get into all the different possible worlds parallel to ours. But I think most of the scientists are full of shit. This isn’t science, its mojo. Magic. Stuff people shouldn’t be messing with.”

  He pulled into Kate’s driveway and cut the engine. He watched Jessie try to process what he was telling her. He saw the next question rising in her face, knew what it was maybe before she did. The patterns were predictable. For those that got past the impossibility of the supernatural, the follow-up questions held pretty close to standard form.

  “How come we can’t conjure up some mojo of our own? If there’s a dark side, there has to be a light side, right?”

  “I told you these forces defied rational explanation. Believe me, people have tried to find the so-called light side for hundreds of years. There’s no such thing. Mojo is bad, period.”

  She shook her head. “Good and evil. Heaven and hell. Ying and Yang. Everything has an opposite. There has to be good magic.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s the opposite of zero?”

  “Not…zero. Nothing verses something.”

  “I didn’t say ‘nothing.’ I said ‘zero.’ The number. It has no opposite.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “I don’t make up the rules.”

  “No. You just buy into whatever they told you. Even though they are the ones that screwed you over.”

  “That thing that killed Ryan’s mom by making her smash her own head into the floor? How can there be any good in that?”

  “If there are demons, there are angels.”

  “Those are just names. Names mean nothing. Call them vampires because they feed on the blood of humans and burn in sunlight. But take away all the mortal literature, and what you’re left with is a vicious animal that doesn’t belong among us. I don’t care what you call it. It does not belong.”

  Jessie stared out her window, her slouched posture telling him she didn’t like what he said. He didn’t blame her. Knowing that mankind had managed to pull pure evil into our world to the exclusion of its opposite fucked with your head. It went against everything kids were raised to believe. God verses the devil. Good guys versus the bad. The truth: there were bad guys and there was everyone else.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said. “Your mom will be glad to see you.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Don’t doubt it. She loves you very much. It’s written all over her face.”

  She shifted in her seat, looked at him. “You don’t know my mom. All she cares about is turning me into a little automaton like her. Be a good girl who does what she’s told.”

  He shook his head. “For a thirteen year-old, you are both really smart and really stupid.”

  “Nice.”

  “I might not know Kate as well as I used to. But I know what’s at her core. That doesn’t change. She’s doing her best.”

  “What about you?”

  “Open ended question.”

  “What’s at your core? Are you doing your best?”

  “I could have done better.”

  She popped open her door. “Okay, let’s get this over with.”

  After her door shut, Lockman sat for a moment in the silence. I have a daughter, he thought as if he had only just discovered this.

  Then he remembered the fear and pain in her eyes when he told the specter to take her, pretending not to care.

  He got out of the car.

  Jessie stood halfway up the approach to the front porch. Night had settled thick and full, the sky darker here than it ever got in LA. “Are you coming?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I just don’t want to face the dragon lady alone. I need you to vouch for me.”

  “Not about that. About earlier. In Ryan’s basement. I should have never challenged that thing and put you at risk.”

  Her eyes shifted. She crossed her arms and shrugged. “No big. You were bluffing, right? You had it under control.”

  “I didn’t have anything under control. I gambled with your life. I won’t do that again, no matter what.”


  “What about the greater good?”

  “I’ve been burned by my own people. The greater good can go to hell.”

  She smiled, just barely. “Cool.”

  They stepped onto the porch together. He opened the door for her and let her walk in first.

  “Mom?” Jessie shouted once inside. “I’m home and ready for my grounding.”

  Lockman winced. “Probably not the best way to play this.”

  Instead of an angry or worried Kate marching into the room, the house was so quiet Lockman could hear the occasional snap and pop of it settling.

  “Oh shit,” Jessie whispered.

  “Maybe they stepped out for a moment.” He moved by her and into the kitchen. No sign of struggle. The light over the sink was left on. A couple lamps on in the family room. The TV playing with the volume low. “Kate?”

  “They were taken, weren’t they?” Jessie stood in the archway between the kitchen and the living room. Her skin looked pale except for the shadows under her eyes. Lockman realized she must have washed the rest of her makeup off. None of the black gunk marred her sweet, round face. If she could cast off the look of someone who had, literally, seen a ghost, she might have looked like a regular kid.

  “TV’s still on. Lights are all on. That sound like something they would do if they went out?”

  “My mom is an energy freak. No way she’d leave all those things on. Maybe Alec. But if she thought I was coming back with you…”

  Lockman nodded. No way Kate would have left this house until she knew her daughter was safe. “They were taken.”

  “There you go,” she said, her voice thick with tears, “sugar coating again.”

  He crossed the kitchen and, without thinking, took her in his arms and hugged her. “I’ll get them back.”

  She cried against him, whole body shaking. He held on. He knew they shouldn’t hang around, but he wouldn’t rush her. She’d been through enough.

  She pulled together quicker than he expected. “Thanks,” she said. “We have to go, don’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “What will happen to them?”

  “I don’t know. It depends on what Dolan has planned. So far, none of this makes sense.”