The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  If something looks like a trap and smells like a trap, it’s a trap, but we’d be safe as long as we hid inside Spengler’s armored nook. Staying put offered our best chance of making it to dawn in one piece. On the other hand, if I was wrong, an innocent girl was standing in the line of fire with no idea what kind of horror was heading her way.

  Another smile, another ring of the doorbell.

  “Shit,” I said, drawing my deck of cards from my hip pocket. “We have to risk it. Bring a gun. We grab her off the porch, we drag her back to the safe room, we stop for absolutely nothing, got it?”

  “Got it,” Spengler said, grabbing one of the bulky pistols from the wall rack and checking the clip.

  I shuffled my cards as we jogged through the house. The glossy cardboard crackled under my fingertips, pregnant with raw energy and eager to play. I stood back from the front door and nodded to Spengler. He clutched his gun behind his back, reaching for the doorknob with his other hand.

  He hauled open the door, reached out and grabbed Candi by her wrist, and roughly yanked her inside. I ran up and slammed the door behind her.

  “No time to explain,” he said. “I’m sorry, but you’ve gotta come with us, I’ll tell you everything in a second—”

  Reaching for the lock, I caught a glimpse of Candi’s face in the corner of my eye. Her real face. Heart sinking, I turned.

  “Spengler.”

  “C’mon honey, don’t argue, it’ll all make sense in a minute—”

  “Spengler,” I said more firmly.

  “—I’m not going to hurt you, you know me, you can trust me—”

  “Spengler!”

  He looked at me, clutching Candi in his arms, startled.

  “What?”

  I pointed. “Look at her. Take a deep breath, clear your mind, and really look at her.”

  The thing in Spengler’s arms was nothing but a life-size mannequin, carved from jointed wood like an artist’s posing model, with a crudely painted face. It wore Candi’s clothes. A gash in the sweater where her heart would have been, stained with fresh blood, told me what had happened to the real girl.

  “Shit,” Spengler said, and then the mannequin turned its head toward me.

  I didn’t have time to shield myself. Its puppet-head lolled back and its mouth opened wide. Golden sigils glittered inside its maw, a glyph-spell primed and ready to fire. A Trojan horse.

  The pulse of magic blasted through the room with the force of a flashbang grenade. Spengler fell backward, the mannequin clinging to him like a lamprey as he desperately rubbed at his eyes, reeling. My muscles didn’t want to obey me. Chimes in impossible keys rang in my ears in the aftershock. Behind me, a boot kicked the front door in, slamming it into me and sending me sprawling to the carpet. Cards flew from my outstretched hand.

  “I told you arts and crafts were kinda my thing, right?” Meadow Brand asked, standing over me. “We didn’t buy your reporter routine for a second, by the way. Half an hour after you left my office we had a full dossier on you. Weren’t sure you’d put the pieces together, but I figured I should bring out the big guns just to be safe.”

  Behind her, other forms filed into the room, hazy in my light-flooded vision.

  “Silly locals,” Lauren Carmichael said, “always having to throw their weight around. You made a mistake, Mr. Faust. You should have sided with us.”

  “Candi—” Spengler said, finally pushing the mannequin away and crawling back on the carpet. His pistol lay abandoned a few feet away. The mannequin twitched. “Those are her clothes. What did you do to her?”

  My vision cleared. Tony hovered by the door, looking nervous, and Sheldon Kaufman stood at Lauren’s shoulder like the grim reaper come to call. A pair of cards still nestled in my palm. I could take two of these bastards down, if I used them just right, but then I’d have to deal with the other two. I held my move and kept the cards out of sight.

  Lauren looked down at him. “Your whore is dead, Mr. Spengler. Necessary for Ms. Brand’s little jest to work, I’m afraid, but no great loss to society. You may or may not join her in the next few minutes, depending on how cooperative you are.”

  “Fuck you!” Spengler screamed, lunging for the gun. He grabbed it and swung it up, aiming for Lauren’s head. Suddenly he shrieked as his wrist snapped backward, as if twisted in the gears of some horrible invisible machine. Bones cracked like dry twigs. The gun fell from his convulsing fingers, too far away for me to reach.

  This all ends tonight, I’d told Caitlin. Somehow this wasn’t the ending I’d been hoping for.

  26.

  “Remember me, lover-boy?” Meadow asked Spengler with a satisfied smile. Clutching his destroyed wrist and biting back another scream, he looked up at her with sudden recognition.

  “You—” was all he managed to say, his breath strained.

  “We knew he’d gotten to the Box just ahead of our people,” Meadow explained, looking down at me, “but not how he was shipping it or where it would be. Your friend and I met at an airport bar in Atlanta the night he came back from Saudi Arabia, thanks to a carefully planned coincidence. He was waiting for a connecting flight. I was waiting for him. We got tipsy, and then I let him ‘convince’ me to bring him up to my hotel room. Such a pick-up artist.”

  She showed me the poppet in her hand. Just a tiny wax doll, wrapped in colored threads, a clump of real hair pinned to its head. Just a wax doll with a snapped-off wrist.

  “I would have settled for a little hair and a drop of spittle,” she said to Spengler, “but by sunrise I had samples of all your vital fluids, didn’t I? Makes the poppet so much stronger.”

  I bent my knee back, getting ready to jump up and make a move. Sheldon’s gaze darted towards me.

  “I’d stay down if I were you,” Sheldon advised. Tony just hovered by the broken door, looking like there were a thousand other places he’d rather be.

  Lauren circled the room, pausing to admire one of the paintings.

  “Is this an original Matisse?” she said, glancing over her shoulder at Spengler. “You have exquisite taste.”

  He held his wrist, rocking forward and back, groaning. “Why are you doing this? What do you want?”

  “Simple,” she said, “we want the Etruscan Box. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t opposed to the idea of paying for it, but your little auction has three weeks to go, and our timetable is a bit tighter than that. Where is it, please?”

  “Screw you. I’m not telling you anyth—”

  Spengler’s words erupted in a piercing shriek as his leg snapped at the knee, doubling inward, his toes pressing against his hip. Jagged bone jutted from a tear in his kimono, and blood soaked the beige carpet in a spreading ring. Meadow smiled serenely as she slowly ground the wax doll’s leg to mush under her fingertips.

  “It’s in his safe room!” I shouted. “I’ll show you, just leave him alone!”

  “Damn it, Dan,” Spengler whimpered, tears flooding down his cheeks as he writhed on the carpet. “Don’t tell them shit.”

  “It’s not worth it. I’m sorry, it’s not worth you dying over it.” I looked to Lauren. “His safe room is in the study, behind a bookshelf. We left the door open. The box is in a crate against the back wall.”

  Lauren smiled. “Now you see? That’s what I like. Reasonable and succinct. Ms. Brand?”

  Meadow shrugged and dropped the poppet to the floor, discarded.

  Then she stomped on it.

  Spengler died in a spray of blood and splintered bone. I howled like an animal, scrambling to my feet and hurling one of my palmed cards. It whipped through the air, crackling with pale blue lightning, and sliced into Meadow’s face. I turned just as Sheldon lunged forward. He threw a punch from five feet away. A shockwave lanced from the end of his fist, streaking toward me and slamming me in the jaw with the force of a phantom heavyweight. The accountant spun his fists in a graceful circle. They trailed shimmering patterns like twin heat mirages.

  “Forsaken Hand
style,” he said. “Learned it in China.”

  He spun on his heel and lashed out with his foot. I was ready this time. I flipped my other card in the air and cast a shield charm, the jack of diamonds hovering in the path of his oncoming blow. The spells clashed with a grating squeal and a shower of black sparks. Sheldon fell back and clutched his foot like he’d just rammed his toes into a brick wall.

  I dove for the fallen cards. Lauren uttered a litany of sibilant words under her breath, a chant that became a literal serpentine hiss as she blazed toward me, leaving the impression of glossy green scales in her wake. A blinding pain seared my neck. My muscles seized up with agonizing cramps that left me convulsing on my back.

  Lauren cradled an ornate hairpin in her fingertips. One end was adorned with a cluster of pearls, and the other glistened with a drop of my blood. A warm, wet trickle ran down my neck.

  “Sheldon, Tony, please retrieve the Box,” she said, crouching over me. Meadow whimpered in the corner, clutching her face, blood leaking out between her fingers.

  Lauren showed me the pin, wiping it clean with a silk handkerchief before fixing it in her auburn hair.

  “A paralytic of my own design, Mr. Faust. No worries, the effects are only temporary. Now, my preferred flavor of venom, on the other hand…”

  Her hands, glowing with amber light, came down on my chest like a pair of defibrillator pads. Indescribable pain erupted along my spine, a blowtorch charring muscle and bone. I raised every psychic shield I knew, used every trick my frantic mind could muster, but she forced her energy inside me one writhing inch at a time. Finally, it ended. She pulled away with a gasp of pleasure. Something squirmed in my guts, feral and sick.

  She took a bundle of hand towels from Spengler’s bathroom and tended to Meadow, gently pulling her hands away and pressing the cloth to her wounds.

  “Fucker,” Meadow spat, her words slurred. “My face, what he did to my fucking face—”

  “I know, I know,” Lauren said. “It’s all right.”

  Tony and Sheldon trundled up the hall, lugging the crate. My vision blurred, my head pounding and stomach churning like the world’s worst hangover. I wanted to throw up, but my stomach seized, trying to keep the sickness in.

  “Get it in the van,” Lauren told them, helping Meadow to her feet.

  “Want me to finish him?” Sheldon asked.

  “No. Meadow’s losing too much blood. We need to get her to a hospital. He’ll be dead in an hour anyway.”

  “An hour?” Sheldon said with a casual laugh as they hauled the crate out the door. “You’re losing your touch.”

  An engine revved in the driveway, then silence. I lay on the blood-soaked carpet next to Spengler’s mutilated corpse and willed my limbs back to life. Slowly, a finger curled. Then a fist.

  I pushed myself up on my knees. My guts twisted. Wave after wave of brutal nausea washed over me, and my throat and stomach tightened in response, my own body working against me.

  What did she DO to me? I thought, feeling cut off from the currents of magic. My soul lagged behind my skin, body and spirit out of sync, crumbling around the edges.

  First things first. I got to my feet, leaning against the wall as I took a few hesitant steps. So far, so good. I stumbled out onto Spengler’s porch, weaving like a drunk on a five-day bender. Streetlights bloomed in the dark, burning white phosphorus trails across my vision as I staggered toward my car. No telling if the neighbors had heard Spengler’s screams. I had to get away before the cops showed up. It took five tries to get my keys in the ignition.

  The car lurched onto the street, jolted forward, stopped, then jolted again. I didn’t have enough coordination to work the pedals, couldn’t even remember what they were for. Lauren’s venom wriggled through my intestines like an eel covered in razor blades, knotting and slicing and twisting.

  I pulled over to the side of the road, tires scraping the curb. My phone fell out of my hands as I tried to dial, bouncing onto the passenger side floor. I groped for it blindly. My fingers fumbled against the call screen.

  “Daniel?” Mama Margaux said. Her Creole-tinged voice sounded a million miles away. Everything did. Sound, sight, touch, my senses eroding eroding into a winter wasteland of pain.

  “Mama. I’m fucked up. Don’t know…some kind of curse. Never seen it before.”

  “Slowly, Daniel, slowly,” she said, on alert. “Where are you? I’ll come and get you.”

  “Car. Outside Spengler’s house. Spengler’s dead. She put something inside me. Get Bentley. Something inside me. It’s killing me.”

  “You just sit there! Sit and breathe. I’m coming—”

  The phone slipped from my numb fingers, falling to my lap. She kept talking. I was gone.

  #

  I knew the room from a thousand nightmares. Every scrap of peeling powder-blue wallpaper, the cheap twin beds, and the plastic toy chest with its broken lid—all marked in my mind as indelibly as a backhand slap.

  “Dan,” my brother whispered from his bed, “I think Dad’s gonna kill us.”

  He was eight. I was twelve.

  “I think that’s what happened to Mom,” Teddy whispered when I didn’t answer him.

  I was twelve years old, and I kept a butcher knife under my mattress. It lay there untouched, night after night, a sinister artifact that called my name in the dark.

  “I know,” I said, answering in two voices. Adult and child as one.

  I lay on my back, small again, so very small, staring up at the ceiling.

  “Teddy,” I said, reciting the words from memory, “you know I’ll always protect you, right? We’re brothers. You can count on me.”

  That was the blackest lie I ever told, though I believed it at the time. Footsteps tromped up the stairs, rough and irregular, and my breath caught in my throat.

  This isn’t real, my mind screamed, it’s a memory, a nightmare, I’m not there anymore.

  Teddy whimpered and hid under the covers. I just watched the door. The knob jiggled and the door flew open, slamming against the wall. My father stood silhouetted in the doorway, a bear of a man with frazzled hair and a bloated gut.

  “Why the fuck was this door locked?” he shouted. It wasn’t locked. It couldn’t have been. He’d gone on a rampage the summer before and drilled out every lock in the house, breaking half the knobs in the process. “There are no locked doors in this house! There are no secrets in this fucking house!”

  He charged across the room, ripping the covers away from Teddy’s bed, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck.

  “What are you doing under there? Are you talking to the neighbors about me? Do you have a radio? Do you have a radio!”

  In my father’s world, radios were spies and electrical lines mocked him in the middle of the night. In my father’s world, holding an eight-year-old by the neck while backhanding him hard enough to split his lip and loosen his teeth was rational behavior.

  He’s going to kill him, I remembered thinking. He won’t stop this time.

  I jumped from my bed and ran at him, throwing myself on his back. He flung me off like I was weightless, then turned and threw a punch. I lived the blossoming agony all over again, the cartilage in my nose crunching, breaking under his fist.

  you’re not really here you’re not really here you’re not really here

  He went back to beating Teddy, turning his back on me, my brother’s panicked cries drowning out my pain and painting my world blood red.

  I reached under the mattress and pulled out the butcher knife.

  27.

  I writhed on a cold metal table, clawing my way up from the vision like a drowning man reaching for sunlight, naked and soaked in sweat. Flickers of candlelight danced in my vision. My sweat-drenched skin was marked in swirling white paint. Droning, sing-song chanting all around me.

  “Hold him down!” a voice echoed, distorted and far away.

  “We need to do something about his fever!”

  “—working on
it,” a third voice snapped. “I don’t understand the—”

  Silence.

  A clock ticked on the office wall, counting away meaningless minutes. I sat in a chair too big for me, looking up at a kindly man in a shabby suit on the other side of the desk. A wall of folders lay between us, each stuffed with a rumpled rainbow of papers and memos.

  “—I don’t understand,” I said.

  “It’s a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo, but the important thing is that you aren’t going to juvenile hall. After the hearing, and reviewing your assessments, the judge thinks you’d be better off in an environment, um, better suited to someone with your challenges. A place where you can get the help you need.”

  “I’m not the one who needs help!”

  “Daniel,” the man said, “come now. You stabbed your father seven times with a butcher knife. He lost a kidney and four feet of intestine. He nearly died.”

  “He should have. I was trying to kill him.”

  My father had looked so smug the day of the hearing, showing up with his hair slicked back and trousers pressed, wearing a suit I didn’t even know he owned. He spun a hell of a story. In his version, he tried to stop me from beating Teddy, and I retaliated by stabbing him. I got the broken nose when he defended himself. What else could he do? The kid was nuts. When it was my turn to talk, I was enraged and scared and about as eloquent as your average twelve-year-old, with a public-aid lawyer who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. It didn’t help that Teddy sided with my father. He saw which way the wind was blowing, and he was too afraid to stand against it. I never blamed him for that. Never once.

  The lawyer talked like he was reading out of a travel brochure. “Once you complete your course of therapy, you’ll spend some time in a halfway house, learning valuable life skills—”

  “What about my brother?” I demanded. “I don’t care about any of that. What about my brother?”

  “What about him?” He looked puzzled. “He’s back at home, with your father.”