The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  “Tell me about the ring,” I said and tried not to shrink under the sudden, ferocious weight of Caitlin’s glare. I held up a hand. “Nicky’s seer babbled about a ring Lauren has, something she uses as a tool. She’s also got the ability to bind demons with nothing but her own willpower, which is supposed to be impossible. I put two and two together.”

  “You shouldn’t have. I told you, that knowledge is worth—”

  “My life, right, I know what you said. But that was then and this is now. Cait…I trust you. Can you trust me?”

  She stared at me for a long moment, her gaze softening, then finally shook her head with a sigh of resignation. “All right. But this goes no further. I mean that. It stays with you and it dies with you. If word of what she possesses leaked, there would be a bloodbath like you’ve never imagined.”

  I leaned closer to her, blinking. “What exactly are we talking about here?”

  “Ever read the 1,001 Arabian Nights? Do you know the legend of King Solomon’s temple?”

  “Sure. Solomon was commissioned by angels to build a temple for storing the Ark of the Covenant. He was offered any payment he could imagine, but he only asked for wisdom. To reward his humility, he was granted magic powers and a ring that could…” My voice trailed off as I realized what she was saying. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “A ring that could command demons,” Caitlin said.

  “But that’s just a legend, isn’t it?”

  “Legends take on lives of their own,” she said. “Did it actually belong to Solomon? I don’t think so. The first reports about it in hell’s archives date back to Emperor Constantine’s day, far too late. No idea who made it or how, and it has the most damnable habit of slipping in and out of history before we can get our claws on it. The bottom line is, it’s here, it works, and Lauren Carmichael has it.”

  “If word got out to the occult underground,” I said, shaking my head. “Christ, it’s the ultimate prize. We’d have hex-slingers flying in from the other side of the world to take a shot at getting their hands on that thing. Mages would be killing each other in the streets. A bloodbath doesn’t begin to describe it.”

  She nodded. “Now add to that what my people would do in the name of survival. That ring is perhaps the greatest weapon ever placed in humanity’s grasp. We have no defense against it, no refuge from enslavement at its owner’s hands. Imagine how frightening that is for us. We don’t respond well to being frightened, Daniel. Not well at all.”

  “It’s a goddamned weapon of mass destruction is what it is. A nuke in a signet ring.” I shook my head. “I hate to say it, but you’re right. Nobody can know about this. What really worries me is that Carmichael’s playing a long game. She’s not drunk on power. The ring’s just another tool to her, a means to an end.”

  “There are few things more dangerous than a zealot with discipline,” Caitlin mused, sipping her ginger ale.

  #

  My hands clenched against the wheel of our rental car as I pulled into the visitor parking lot past a polished granite sign reading Napa State Hospital. It looked like a college campus with a splash of barbed wire.

  “You all right?” Caitlin asked as we walked toward the entrance. I hadn’t realized my tension was showing.

  “When I was a kid,” I started to say, then shook my head. “I just don’t like places like this.”

  Inside, it could have been any hospital in the world, with attentive orderlies and wide, clean halls. Still, a sense of lingering sadness clung to the bricks, the strange sick smell of frustration and mental decay. I wasn’t sure if it was the weight of over a century of madness, festering and breeding in the shadows, or just my own personal demons reminding me they were never far away.

  We’d called ahead. I thought we might have to pull some kind of a scam, talk our way past the front desk or worse, break in under cover of night, but Dr. Planck was on the “approved for visitors” list. All we had to do was ask. There was still the chance that he’d refuse to see us, but something told me he’d want an audience.

  The visitor center reminded me of a nicer county jail. Warm colors, sunny windows, and the constant reminder that your every move was being watched. Caitlin stored her handbag in a locker, along with my wallet and keys, and we walked through a metal detector. We waited in pensive silence until an orderly brought Planck in to see us.

  Draped in a beige gown, his snowy-white hair cascading over his bloodshot eyes, Eugene Planck was a dead man walking. His heavily lined face turned curiously toward us as he hobbled over to the table. At first I thought they’d brought us the wrong patient. According to what Caitlin had dug up, he should have been in his fifties, but this man had to have been pushing eighty. Caitlin and I shared a glance, thinking the same thing: he looked like someone had sucked years of his life out through his pores, leaving nothing but a withered husk behind.

  “Dr. Planck,” I said, rising to my feet. “Thank you for seeing us.”

  He favored us with a tired smile, sitting down on the other side of the table. “Nobody’s called me doctor in a very long time,” he rasped. His voice was raw and his words forced their way out on a strangled wheeze. I remembered what Caitlin had told me about his first suicide attempt—guzzling down acid to burn the parasite in his stomach. “Nobody’s come to visit me, either. A rare surprise.”

  I rested my palms on the table, casting a quick look at the orderly loitering by the door and keeping my voice low.

  “I’ll lay it on the line for you, Doctor. We need to know everything you can tell us about Lauren Carmichael and the expedition to Nepal.”

  A pained look crossed his face and he shook his head. “Oh, no, it was so long ago. So very long ago. I’m sure I can’t remember.”

  He was a lousy liar, but I didn’t blame him. The haunted look in his eyes told me to go easy.

  “Please,” I said. “I know you’ve seen some bad stuff. I know it left scars. You don’t want to go back there, and I don’t want to make you. Thing is, she’s hurting people, innocent people. She’s gotta be stopped.”

  He laughed, a wheezing choke that turned into a wet, hacking cough. He put his hand to his mouth, catching his breath.

  “You’ll just end up like me,” he said.

  “You tried to stop her?”

  “Didn’t try hard enough,” Eugene said, his gaze going distant. “If I’d known, if I’d known what she was capable of…no. I still would have been too late. I was delusional and in love.”

  “She was your student,” Caitlin said, and he nodded.

  “It happens on every campus, I suppose. Usually lecherous old professors and nubile coeds looking for an easy A. Lauren and I, though, that was different. She was brilliant, the brightest student I’d ever had, and the most ambitious. I tutored her late into the night, and soon she was sharing my bed.”

  “So she was using you,” Caitlin said.

  “No, no,” he said. “Well, not entirely. She did have feelings for me. I have proof of that.”

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “Because she let me live.”

  “Doctor,” I said, “what happened in Nepal?”

  He sighed. “You don’t understand. I can’t talk about it. She won’t let me.”

  “She’s not here. We are. We can protect you.”

  He laughed again, giving me an incredulous lopsided smile. “You can’t protect me, son. No one can. She’s inside of me. She buried a monster in my guts, and it listens to every word I say. I have to keep her secrets for her.”

  “Please, try,” I said. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

  Eugene sighed. He smoothed down the front of his hospital gown, pulling it tight across his emaciated stomach.

  “We went to Nepal in nineteen—” he started to say, then let out a pained groan. His stomach bulged. Under the gown, flesh stretched and rippled as something fat and wormlike writhed in his abdomen. He fell silent and it slithered back into the depths
of his body, its warning delivered.

  My breath caught in my throat. I remembered the feeling of Lauren’s snake-curse all too well.

  “You can see it. Good. These fellows,” he said, giving a nod of his head to the orderly at the door, “they can’t see a thing. They just say I’m hallucinating. I’m sorry. I’d help you if I could, I really would. I just can’t. This…this is what Lauren Carmichael did to me. She showed me horrors and then she took away my voice. I’ve been waiting twenty years just to scream.”

  Caitlin drummed her fingernails on the table, her brow furrowed.

  “If there’s one thing I know,” she said, “it’s that every contract has a loophole. You can’t speak of what happened in Nepal. Fine. I think we can accommodate that.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t write it down either, or draw pictures. I tried once. Oh, that went badly.”

  “No, I’m envisioning something a bit more elegant than that,” she said, then looked to me. “Dreamwalk. He can just remember it for us.”

  I guess I didn’t have to wonder anymore whether Caitlin’s appearance in my dreams was real or a flight of fantasy. “Is it safe?”

  “Not remotely. And it doesn’t work on the unwilling. He has to open himself to me, give permission.”

  “Wait, I didn’t give permission and you did it to me,” I said.

  She chuckled, brushing the back of my hand with her fingernails. “Not in words, but you sent an invitation and left your front door wide open. Don’t you dare deny it.”

  “So there’s a way?” Eugene said, sudden urgency rasping in his acid-scarred throat. “There’s really a way?”

  “You could die,” Caitlin said, matter-of-factly. “You aren’t trained in the occult arts, and you don’t know how to manage the energies involved. If anything goes wrong, the process could induce a brain embolism or leave you a vegetable.”

  He shook his head firmly. “I don’t care. I don’t care what happens to me. I want to tell my story. I want my voice back.”

  35.

  We needed to stay close for the dreamwalk to work, and a sleepover at the mental hospital wasn’t in the cards. We drove until we found a Motel 6 a couple of miles down the road and rented the room at the end. Caitlin went out again to do some shopping, leaving me with orders to lie in bed, watch the grainy television, and try to relax. We all needed to be asleep for this to work, but nothing’s harder than getting sleepy on command. The more I tried to rest the less tired I felt, and the sunlight streaming in around the thick curtains didn’t help.

  Caitlin came back an hour later with a plastic bag from a local grocery store and a sack of cheeseburgers from Wendy’s. “Let’s get some red meat in your stomach,” she said cheerfully. “That’ll help.”

  I got up and ambled to the table by the window. “Don’t suppose you got me a Coke with that?”

  “Yes,” she said, rolling her eyes, “you should absolutely have caffeine right now.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “You can, however, wash it down with a few shots of this,” she said, digging in the grocery bag and setting a bottle of Nyquil on the table.

  I groaned, shaking my head. “Seriously?”

  “Short of knocking over a pharmacy to get the really good stuff, I know of no better aid in the pursuit of short-term unconsciousness.”

  I sat next to her, my fingertips brushing her thigh. “I’m sure I could think of an idea or two.”

  “That,” she said with a smile, “is exactly what you said when I came back to the motel. You’re a bit disoriented.”

  “Huh? You just came back now.”

  Caitlin whistled tunelessly and spun her finger, gesturing for me to turn around. I looked over my shoulder. Our bodies, naked and entwined on sweat-soaked sheets, slept peacefully in the double bed.

  “We’re already asleep,” I said flatly.

  “Mm-hmm. Your short-term memories are muddled. It happens.”

  I pointed at the bed. “But I missed the good part!”

  “I think,” she said, touching my shoulder as she rose from her chair, “an encore can be arranged. Come now. Let’s find the good Dr. Planck. It shouldn’t be hard. I can feel him yearning for us. He wants to be heard.”

  I looked around the motel room, concentrating. I couldn’t hear the echoes of Planck’s soul, not like Caitlin, but I knew a message needed a medium.

  “Let’s try this.” I turned on the television set.

  Sunlight filtered through the canopy of a lush tropical jungle, woodshrikes chittering in the branches. I didn’t recognize Eugene at first. The man on the television screen, frowning as he studied a crumbling stone slab under a magnifying glass, was young and vibrant. So was the girl beside him, dressed in an explorer’s khakis, her eyes wide and bright.

  “Lauren,” Caitlin hissed.

  The stone might have been a doorway, submerged into the loam by tremors and time, choked by centuries of vines and weeds. Something about it, the shape of it, the curious lean of the arch and the glistening sheen of the rock, set my teeth on edge.

  “This is all wrong,” Planck said on the screen, echoing my thoughts exactly. “These symbols aren’t Hindu, and this style is far too old to date from the Maurya Empire. I can’t even read this part; it’s not Sanskrit or any of the Prakrit languages. This temple shouldn’t be here.”

  Lauren traced a twisting symbol with her finger, following the ragged cut. “We should go in! Come on, where’s your sense of adventure? There could be anything inside!”

  Planck shook his head, taking a step back.

  “Not without the entire team, and not without the right tools to clear the passage without risking any damage to the walls. Not a scratch. You know my motto.”

  Lauren sighed, but she favored him with the smile of an indulgent lover. “‘Proper archeology takes its proper time,’” she recited.

  “She didn’t listen,” Planck said from behind us. He stood in the corner of the room, young again, watching the screen with a look of abject misery. “She went back under the cover of the stars with a machete and sheer stubbornness. The next morning, she had a new ring on her finger, an old pewter thing that looked like something her grandmother might wear. That’s when things started to change.”

  A young Indian trembled on a cot in an army-surplus tent, his terrified eyes bulging and his lips flecked with white foam. We stood next to Planck, the motel room suddenly gone. Oppressive summer heat baked into my bones and sucked the breath from my lungs.

  “Snakebite,” a stout man with an Australian accent told Eugene, “third bloody case this week. Been seeing ’em all over the camp, bold brown bastards with a nasty bite. The porters are finding ’em in their bedsheets. They’re about to take a hike, and I don’t blame ’em a damn bit.”

  “Where are they all coming from? The site was clear when we struck camp.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, mate. They’re saying this place is cursed.”

  The outside light slipped away as we plunged into nightfall. Insects droned in the jasmine-scented dark. Eugene opened the tent flap and stepped outside.

  Lauren stood with her back to him, facing the jungle, the temple ruin. Whispering.

  “Who are you talking to?” he asked cautiously.

  “My new friends,” she said, turning to face him with a jubilant smile.

  “Lauren,” Eugene said, hesitant, “nobody’s out here but us.”

  “They’re on their way. You’ll see them. Not everyone will. Certain sacrifices have to be made for progress. But you? You’re special.”

  She leaned in to kiss his cheek and froze. The trees stopped their swaying, the insects silenced, the world gone rigid and still. Eugene shook his head at us.

  “I didn’t understand what she meant. More porters died. Snakebite. One of our other interns went missing. We found her body the next morning in the brush, savaged by a pack of feral beasts. Then I sent my assistant on a run to the nearest village to buy food and medical supp
lies.”

  The world shifted around us again, canvas flaps dropping over the sky and a card table laden with maps boiling up from the dirt. The Australian paced the tent, wild-eyed, barely able to control himself.

  “Just take it slow,” Eugene told him. “One thing at a time.”

  “We can’t leave,” the Australian said, squeezing his hands at his sides. “I’m telling you, I took the road out of camp and drove for fifteen minutes through the jungle. Ended up coming back into camp. I didn’t turn, not once. Did it again. Ended up back in camp. I spent eight hours driving the same five miles of road. I’m telling you, Doctor, something is keeping us penned in here. It’s killing us off one by one, and it won’t let us go!”

  “It’s impossible. The jungle must have confused you. It’s easy to get turned around—”

  The Australian slammed his fist against the table. “We’re going to die here. You know why. That bird of yours. You’ve heard the whispers. You know what people’ve seen, what that girl’s been doing at night. You just don’t want to believe it. We’re all going to die here, and it’ll be your damn fault.”

  Eugene’s shoulders shook. I stepped closer and saw the tears on his cheeks.

  “He’s right,” he told us. “It was my fault.”

  “No,” Caitlin said. “It was hers.”

  Night again, and we followed Eugene out of the tent. Half the camp lay barren now, the wind blowing ragged tent flaps wide. Fat brown snakes coiled on empty cots. They hissed lazily as we walked by. In the distance, a man’s shrill scream pierced the night and, just as suddenly, fell silent.

  At the edge of the clearing stood a small pavilion built from the scavenged bits and pieces of half a dozen tents. The pavilion was sprawling and shapeless, and a faint droning sound echoed from inside like a tuneless chant in a long-dead tongue. An oriental rug lined the floor at the entrance, caked with sand and dirt. As we followed Eugene inside, we heard the clinking of glasses and faint, conversational laughter.