“No,” I said, clicking the article, “but I was there when they died.”
“…home of porn director Arthur James Kaufman, who successfully won out against obscenity charges in Georgia in 2011. One victim has been confirmed as Detective Carl Holt, a thirteen-year veteran of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s homicide division. Holt was decorated last year for valorous…”
Memories of last night hit me like a fist. It had been easy not to think during the cleanup. Making sure I didn’t leave a trail for the cops was a more pressing concern than thinking about how Kaufman screamed until his throat gave out, or remembering the smell when Caitlin peeled open his—
I dropped the phone and ran to the bathroom, falling on my knees in front of the toilet, heaving until nothing came up but a trickle of bile.
Bentley was still on the line when I stumbled back to my desk. “It’s complicated,” I told him.
“…robbery may be a motive, but first responders reported seeing what they described as a ‘satanic shrine’ hidden in Kaufman’s bedroom…”
“What happened to it, Daniel?” Bentley demanded.
“It?”
Her.
“Kaufman’s demon,” he said. “It got loose, didn’t it?”
I dug in my mini-fridge, looking for something to get the taste out of my mouth. I took out a small bottle of ginger ale, cracked it open, and chugged half of it.
“I think she left.”
“Left?”
“Went back to hell,” I said. “Sounded like she had some serious fun and games planned for those two. Listen, can we discuss this later? I’m not up for it now.”
“We’ll need to discuss it. I’m not sure if you understand how serious—”
“Serious as a heart attack,” I told him. “Believe me. But right now I’m trying to keep my stomach from climbing up my throat, so I’d be grateful for a change of subject.”
“Fine. I’ll bring you up to date. We had our little research party last night, trying to learn anything we could about this ‘hound’ that the cambion ranted about.”
“And?”
“Nothing,” Bentley said. “Found plenty of material on hellhounds, gloomhounds and the Hounds of Gnar’peth, none of which you’d want to encounter in a dark alley, but nothing that could ride herd over an entire community of half-demons. Spengler even brought over some of the rarer volumes from his personal collection, but we came up empty. Either it was merely a quirk of this cambion’s insane mind, or someone is using ‘hound’ as a title or a pseudonym.”
“It was worth checking.”
“We had an unfortunate confirmation that this wasn’t a one-time affair. Jennifer was attacked outside her home. Don’t worry, she’s fine. It turns out cambion aren’t immune to military-strength pepper spray. It was your friend from the other night—”
“The toe-eater?” I said, remembering his odd fixation.
“—the very one, along with a woman in rags. He’s made allies.”
“Just what we need, more problems. Hey, you and Corman don’t own a camcorder or anything like that, do you?” I picked up the lozenge of black plastic, turning it in my fingertips. “I’ve got a ‘duo pro’ memory card here and I need to see what’s on it.”
“We still have our Handycam from our anniversary vacation last year, but I’m not sure what it uses. You’re welcome to take a look at it.”
“Perfect, I have to bring back the Black Eye anyway. Hopefully I’ll never have to wear the damn thing again.”
The answer to the secret of Stacy’s death, and her tormented half-life, lay on that card. I didn’t want to watch it. God, I didn’t want to watch it. If I was going to put things right, though, the only way forward was down.
16.
Three hours later I came back home with a Sony camcorder in one hand and a grocery bag in the other. Bentley and Corman had laid down nearly a thousand bucks for the thing and used it exactly once, on a trip to Niagara Falls. The bag held a Chinese takeout dinner and a bottle of Jack Daniels. I’d been drinking too much lately, but no fucking way was I watching this thing sober.
I poured three fingers of Jack into a plastic cup and broke out the chopsticks, digging into my sweet-and-sour pork while reading the camera manual. It looked like I could just load the memory card into the camera, then use a cable to transfer its contents onto my laptop. Simple enough.
I rigged the cables and moved the file, a movie clip with a string of random numbers for a title, onto my laptop. The icon sat there, anonymous and innocent, waiting for me to click it. Two more drinks and I was almost ready. Seemed funny how I’d just seen a man torn to pieces right next to me but this seemed so much worse. Maybe because one of them deserved it, and one was a dumb, innocent kid from Minnesota who never asked to go out like this.
I launched the movie.
Instead of his usual handheld style, Artie had put the camera on a tripod for Stacy’s final performance. She stood in the same grimy bathroom where he’d shot their other movies, staring into the lens, sniffling.
“I want to go home,” she said in a halting whisper.
“We talked about this,” his voice echoed from behind the camera. He sounded distracted, an edge of tension in his voice I hadn’t heard before.
“I don’t care. I just want to go home. Please let me go home.”
“One more,” he said. “Do one more for me, and you can go home. I’ll buy you a plane ticket.”
Her eyes, red from crying, widened. “You mean it?”
“I promise. We can go to the airport as soon as we’re done here, if you do a good job for me. You can be with your granddad for dinner tonight. Wouldn’t you like that?”
She caught a tear as it rolled down her cheek, brushing it away with the back of her hand. “Yes. Thank you. Thank you.”
“Do you love me, Stacy?”
“I love you,” she said, her voice breaking.
“Good. Now take off your clothes.”
She undressed, her hands shaking, and he stepped out from behind the camera. My stomach muscles tightened, bracing for a punch that never came. Instead he held her, almost gently, and whispered in her ear as he stroked her hair. She nodded, sinking to her knees before him on the dirty tile floor, and he used her one last time.
Then he drowned her in the toilet.
My fingers flinched against the keyboard, wanting to skip this, to fast forward through her death spasms as she kicked and thrashed, but I held back. My teeth clenched. I hoped she’d somehow fight him off, escape, even though I already knew how this movie ended. He held her head down until her body finally went limp, standing motionless over her like a clockwork executioner.
Then Artie hauled her up by her hair, dropping Stacy to the floor and rolling her onto her back with his shoe. Open eyes stared towards the camera, stared at me, a plea for help that never came.
He walked out of the camera’s sight and came back with a leather pouch in his fist. He straddled Stacy’s corpse and crouched down, chanting in a sibilant whisper. I cranked the laptop’s speakers until my room filled with a static hum. The words were foreign, Eastern-sounding. Chinese? I couldn’t be sure. His burly shoulder blocked part of the view, but he waved the bag slowly over Stacy’s face before putting the opening to her lips.
A faint glimmer of light, like a silver mist, drifted from her bloodless lips to the pouch. He tugged the drawstring taut, still chanting, rising and walking off camera as a few final driblets of light leaked from her mouth and boiled away like water vapor.
“A soul-trap,” I said to the screen, “but you screwed it up, you impatient amateur bastard. You stole half of what she is, and the rest is stumbling around in the dark like a wounded animal. Where did you put the pouch? Show me where you put it.”
He wandered in and out of frame, ignoring the dead girl at his feet, his phone to his ear.
“Hey, bro, it’s done,” he said. “What? I don’t know. It doesn’t…it doesn’t feel like anything
. I don’t know, I just expected it’d be…cooler. Just feel kinda numb, I guess. Maybe I need to do it again.”
You’ll never get that chance, I thought. The one thing I did right.
“Yeah, I did it just like you told me. I’ll bring you the bag. So am I in?” He stopped, grinned, and did a little fist-pump. “All right, awesome! Totally worth it, bro. We’re gonna be kings. Yeah, all right, tell Mom I said hi.”
Hanging up the phone, he looked toward the camera, as if realizing it was still recording. Something flickered across his face. A moment of doubt? Guilt? He reached out and turned the camera off.
In the darkness of my apartment, I stared at my reflection in the black void of my laptop screen. I drank my whiskey in silence.
I’d heard of soul-traps, knew the theory, but I’d never seen one in action before tonight. This was the realm of truly hardcore black magic, the kind that takes decades to master. Unlike Artie, his brother knew what he was doing. But why was he doing it at all? Stacy’s murder wasn’t some random thrill killing; it was part of a plan, and any plan that would make a slug like Artie into a “king” had bad news written all over it.
One thing was clear: Stacy’s half-souled wraith wasn’t going anywhere until I got my hands on that pouch and used it to put her back together again. I decided to pay a visit to Artie’s mysterious brother and see if he wanted to do this the easy way or the hard way.
I hoped he’d choose the hard way.
#
A tenor saxophone purred under the clink of glasses and low, seductive laughter. I sat in a leather-backed chair, cigar smoke swirling through the hazy air, and tried to remember how I got there.
The nightclub was a swath of mahogany and scarlet, elegant and baroque, the kind of place you see in photographs of prewar Berlin. All around me lovers talked, drank, shared cigarettes in the dark. Everyone but me, sitting alone in front of an empty stage.
“A drink for you, sir.”
A prim man with a white jacket and a towel draped over his arm, his lip adorned with a pencil-thin mustache, set a tall glass of something amber and smoky on the small table beside me.
“I didn’t order this,” I said. I didn’t think I’d ordered it. I couldn’t remember.
“Compliments of the lady, sir.”
“The lady?”
“The lady on stage,” he said with a flourish and stepped to the side. I looked up to the stage. Caitlin smiled back at me, draped in a scarlet dress that matched her flowing curls. She cradled her fingers around a standing microphone like a 1940s radio starlet in the footlights.
I’m dreaming, I realized. Normally that would be enough to jolt me awake, but instead I sank deeper into my chair as she began to sing, an invisible band striking up a slow, torch-song melody.
“You flew to the clouds but your ghost’s in my bed
The scent of you bringing back words we both said
In the dark, in the dark o’ my love…”
I leaned forward in my chair, watching her sing, drinking her in. The lilt of a violin caressed the air, notes flowing on a breeze of hopeful melancholy.
“Every life that collides, every scar left behind
Of long memories and longer goodbyes
You’re gone but you linger, my love…”
I thought about Roxy and the night she left, throwing her things into a suitcase like she was trying to stone it to death while I paced the room and railed against the inevitable.
“Roxy, will you—stop. Will you at least talk to me?”
The nightclub suddenly gone, I stood in the memory of my own apartment and watched myself on the other side of the bed, torn between misery and rage.
“We did talk,” Roxy said, not looking at me, rummaging through the drawers and throwing clothes in the suitcase as fast as she could pull them out. “We’ve been doing nothing but talking. You don’t listen.”
“So that’s it. After all we’ve been through together, just like that, we’re through?”
She paused, frozen over the suitcase, then nodded as she slammed it shut and reached for the zipper. “Yeah. We’re through.”
“She broke your heart,” Caitlin said, standing beside me.
I shook my head as the voices of the memories faded, silently acting out their desperate pantomime.
“I broke hers,” I said, “or we both did. It gets hazier the more I think about it. It’s easy to tell stories about the people we leave behind, turn them into monsters in our heads, you know, so the loss doesn’t hurt so much. Truth is, we both said some things we shouldn’t have, we dug the knives in deep, and she packed a bag and got on the next bus for Reno.”
“Something to be said for a clean break,” Caitlin mused, watching the silent argument.
“Nothing clean about it. People go, but they stay,” I said, tapping my forehead, “up here. The hard part’s learning to move on, to let it all go instead of wallowing in regrets. I’ve imagined a thousand different ways this night could have played out, a thousand ways I could have kept her from walking out that door, but you know what? It doesn’t matter. This is what happened. This is what’s real. The more I accept it, the less it hurts.”
“You can’t live in your dreams,” Caitlin said, “though it is a fascinating way to learn about people.”
Dream-Roxy stomped out the door, lugging her suitcase behind her. Dream-Me sat on the edge of his bed, face buried in his hands. I looked at Caitlin with dawning horror.
“You’re really here,” I said. “I’m not making this up. You’re here. In my dream. In my head.”
“Problem?” she asked with a smile.
The world caved in. A brutal weight squeezed the breath from my lungs, raw panic overtaking me like a knife in my heart, like an arachnophobe dropped into a vat of spiders.
“No,” I gasped, shaking my head, “you can’t be here—”
“Daniel,” she said, taking hold of my shoulders. “Daniel, I did not come here to hurt you. You don’t need to be afraid. Daniel!”
A swirling vortex engulfed us, the dream dissolving in raw chaos. I couldn’t hear, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but shake my head and struggle in her arms.
“Show me,” she said sharply in my ear, “show me what you’re afraid of.”
So I did.
17.
I knew the room in a heartbeat. The cheap clapboard walls, the dingy garage-sale furniture, and the teenager tied to a chair with a burlap sack over his head. A sea of upturned and unwashed faces watched with reverent awe, sitting cross-legged on the floor or sprawled out on beanbag chairs. Someone in the back strummed a Peter, Paul and Mary song on an acoustic guitar.
A strange calmness washed over me. Standing in the echo of my past, I could almost pretend it was a show or a movie I was watching, instead of something that happened to me.
A tall man stood beside the chair. His hand rested on the boy’s shoulder. He dressed like a seventies folk musician, with a string vest, a fuzzy goatee and a lazy, bloodshot smile that never left his lips.
“The angels are with us, children,” he said. “The angels will guide us and ease our path to spiritual ascension. Come now, angel. Come and speak unto us, that we may hear your wisdom.”
The sound that erupted from under the burlap hood was anything but human. The bound figure twisted and squirmed, joints popping and body contorting as he struggled to escape the ropes.
“Chilkat gamun!” the boy howled, his words distorted and leaping in pitch. “Chilkat gamun rabadai!”
Onlookers gasped as the chair lifted from the ground, slowly spinning, hovering an inch over the pea-green rug as the torrent of arcane words grew louder, more furious.
“Be at peace!” the man said, holding up his hands to calm them. “The angel greets us, but he bears a message of warning. Some of you have not been doing all you can for the family. Some of you have not been sharing freely of your hearts, your minds, and your labor. He says to look inside yourselves, to question if your devotion is
true!”
Caitlin leaned against the wall and folded her arms, one eyebrow raised.
“That ‘angel’,” she said pointedly, “is a fledgling demon of the Choir of Wrath. It’s speaking in gutter flensetongue, and it’s promising that man a number of sexual mutilations involving battery acid.”
I felt tired. Old hurts and old angers helped to smother my panic, leaving me numb in the balance.
“We called him the Shepherd,” I said.
“The Up With People reject?” she asked.
“I was seventeen and on the run. Hungry and desperate. When he found me, I was using some crude misdirection charms to hustle a tourist. People like me, people with a spark of raw magical ability and no real training, were like catnip to him.”
“A cult.” Caitlin’s nose twitched with disdain. “So he’d get one of you possessed, claim he was translating angel-speak, and give your marching orders. What’d he do if he got a demon who spoke English?”
“Square it ahead of time. I don’t know what he offered them, but they’d say whatever he wanted them to. Usually that his spiritual powers would be a lot stronger if his bed wasn’t empty that night.”
She peered around the room. “Which one is you?”
I pointed.”I’m the one tied to the chair.”
The chair fell to the carpet with a thud and Dream-Me slumped against the ropes, unconscious under the hood. The onlookers applauded, hugging one another, some with tears of wonder in their eyes.
“I had the bare essentials for learning sorcery,” I said, “talent and insatiable curiosity. He only wanted the talent. He tried to starve the curiosity out of me, tried to torture it out of me with ‘ritual penance,’ tried…other things, but it just made me fight harder. I knew I needed to escape.
“That’s when he decided that being a host for the ‘angels’ wasn’t to be shared among all of us any longer, that instead I’d been specially chosen to be their one and only vessel. And instead of once a week, they had so much to tell us that they needed to come every single night.”
Caitlin stared at me, horrified.
The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels Page 232