The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  No good. I slumped to the carpet, spent.

  I left the earpiece in my pocket. My friends didn’t need to listen to me die. That wasn’t the memory I wanted to leave them with. I just hoped the smoke would kill me before the fire did.

  Fuck it, I thought, bitter. At least I saved the world.

  Something moved in the hallway. A plank of burning wood, shoved aside. I rubbed my streaming eyes as I struggled to focus.

  Caitlin strode through the flames, untouched, her white leather greatcoat billowing behind her. I thought I was hallucinating until she scooped me up in her arms.

  “You stupid man,” she whispered, cradling my head against her breast. “Hold on tight.”

  She took a few steps back and ran, leaping for the window, smashing through. For a brief, shining moment we hung suspended over the abyss, trailed by a frozen rain of glass. It felt like we could fly.

  Then I fell, clutched in Caitlin’s arms.

  44.

  My memories of the night were hazy. I remembered Caitlin bundling me into the back seat of her car, a ride that turned into a gurney slide under too-bright lights, an oxygen mask over my face. Then nothing.

  I spent about a week at Desert Springs Hospital, most of it on a respirator. They bandaged my ribs, set my broken nose, and patched up a dozen other cuts and scrapes I didn’t even remember getting. A chubby doctor came by once a day to check my charts and tell me how lucky I was to be alive. He didn’t know the half of it.

  I was worried about being connected to the Silverlode fire, but I didn’t need to be. Hospitals have to report knife and gunshot wounds to the cops. Smoke inhalation, not so much. The official story was that I’d been rescued from a house fire out in the burbs, and nobody challenged it.

  Tuesday was my discharge day. I woke from a nap to find Bentley sitting at my bedside, reading an Agatha Christie novel.

  “I hear they’re letting you go,” he said, slipping in a bookmark and resting the paperback on his knee.

  “About damn time, too. That’s the problem with hospitals. They kill you with boredom.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, on the grainy television mounted high on the wall, I saw Lauren Carmichael’s face. Grabbing the remote, I unmuted the TV and raised the volume.

  “—tragedy for this great community,” she said, flashbulbs popping around her. “Despite the loss of a classic civic landmark, we can only be thankful that the fire was quickly contained, thanks to the hard work of the Las Vegas Fire Department, and that no one was seriously hurt.”

  “She’s giving a press conference?” I said.

  Bentley glared at the screen. “It’s been repeating all morning. Everybody loves a catastrophe.”

  Lauren stared into the camera. I knew it was only a recording, but somehow I could still feel her eyes drilling into mine.

  “To the arsonist responsible for this senseless act of destruction, I will say only this. We will find you. And we will bring you to justice.”

  “Not if I find you first,” I muttered.

  “What’s next for Carmichael-Sterling Nevada?” one reporter called from the audience.

  Lauren put on a million-dollar smile. “What’s next? Progress. The tragedy at the Silverlode in no way hinders our primary goal, the completion of the Enclave Resort and Casino. We intend to put a new face on Las Vegas. New life, new jobs, new capital and growth. Make no mistake: the Enclave will rise.”

  I muted the television.

  “So what’s next for Daniel Faust?” Bentley asked.

  “Funny. Normally I’d say, ‘The same thing I did last month and the month before that.’ You know me, I’ve never been too purpose-driven. Still…”

  “Yes?”

  “Feels like maybe I should be,” I said. “Don’t know. Just feels like I’m missing out on something. Used to be happy just coasting by. Maybe that’s not enough anymore.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” Bentley said. He patted my shoulder. We both turned, feeling the silhouette in the doorway before we saw it.

  “Am I interrupting?” Caitlin asked.

  “Not at all,” Bentley said, pushing himself up from the chair. “I have to get back to the bookstore. Come by when you can, Daniel. We should have dinner.”

  He paused in the doorway, talking to Caitlin in a low whisper. She nodded, lightly touching his arm. He gave me a wave and strolled out of sight.

  “My hero,” I said, smiling at her. “What was that about?”

  “He thanked me. Wasn’t expecting that. Also wanted to ask about the Box.”

  My stomach clenched. “We have to get back in there somehow. If Lauren gets her hands on that thing—”

  “Relax,” she said, walking over to stand by my bedside. She rested her hand on my chest. “It’s taken care of. We made a generous campaign donation to a certain public representative. As a result, the city contracted with Blue Valley Waste Management to handle the cleanup and salvage operation at the Silverlode.”

  “And?”

  “And the management at Blue Valley is on Nicky Agnelli’s payroll. Nicky’s very, very eager to curry favor with my prince and make up for his mischief, as you might imagine. The Box will be retrieved and returned to its proper home.” She stroked my forehead. “We can talk shop later. How are you?”

  “Alive, thanks to you.”

  She smiled, shaking her head.

  “You saved me too. Now then, I understand you’re a free man, so why don’t we get you out of that gown and into something a bit more stylish?”

  My papers signed and stamped, an intern rolled me to the hospital doors in a wheelchair. After days in bed, the last thing I wanted to do was sit down one minute longer. Caitlin left us at the curb, and pulled up in her Audi a moment later.

  A plastic bag filled with my belongings, plus a stack of papers and a prescription for a low-grade painkiller, rested on my lap as she pulled out of the parking lot.

  “Where to?” she asked.

  “This alley up on the right. That’ll do.”

  She idled the engine, and I got out of the car. It felt good to stretch my legs and breathe the clean desert air. I reached into the plastic bag and set the six soul-traps, one at a time, on the Audi’s hood.

  “Seems like I should be doing this in a park or a cemetery or someplace serene,” I said, fiddling with the latch on the first pouch. “Seems like I should have something profound to say, to send you off with. But I don’t. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry some crazy fucks murdered you for no good reason. I’m sorry I wasn’t good enough to save you. Just…go.”

  A cloud of faint, glimmering light, like a spray of diamonds, drifted up from the pouch’s open mouth. It rose, taken by a gust of wind, and vanished. The next four pouches went the same way, their prisoners released to the open sky. Only one remained. Stacy.

  “Don’t even think,” Caitlin said as I got back in the car, “that I’m not going down there with you.”

  #

  Stacy waited for us in the dark. Her misshapen wraith hovered on the far side of the line of enchanted dust, her mouth wide in a perpetual cry of terror. Finally, after all the chaos, all the bloodshed, I’d set things right. Finally, the job was done.

  “Okay,” I said to her, holding up the pouch. “This should set you free. It’s okay, Stacy. You’re going to a better place.”

  “Um, Daniel?” Caitlin said beside me.

  “Yeah?”

  She shook her head. “You do know she’s going to hell, right?”

  I froze, my fingers tight on the pouch’s ties. “What?”

  “Far be it from me to read off the litany of her sins, but the girl was hardly a beacon of virtue.”

  “She was a victim,” I said, my jaw clenched.

  “That she was.” Caitlin nodded. “I’m not happy about it either, Daniel, and it’s not fair, but neither is it subject to appeal.”

  I never had a chance of saving her. It was a sucker’s game all along. I turned on Caitlin, furious.
<
br />   “This is bullshit. Kaufman abused her—”

  “If you don’t like how the universe works, take it up with the architects. I just work here. If it’s any consolation, this has nothing to do with what she did with Kaufman. Her downward spiral took place long, long before she ever met him. You don’t know the girl, Daniel. You don’t know anything about her. You never did.”

  She was right. I only knew Stacy through her grandfather’s love, and love is blind. I had never thought to question if the picture he painted, this pristine, innocent girl, was even real. I thought I liked the idea of being the crusading hero out to avenge the fallen damsel. I liked it a little too much.

  I’m the bad guy, I had told Tony Vance right before he took the high dive. I should have paid better attention.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Caitlin. “I just thought…never mind.”

  I looked at the pouch. At Stacy’s hovering form, trapped between worlds.

  “I can’t open this. I can’t damn her.”

  “It’s your choice,” Caitlin said, “but think on this. Life goes on. She may not be…happy where she goes, but situations change. There’s a spark of hope even in the blackest darkness, the hope that someday, somehow, things can get better. If you leave her like this, that hope is gone. She will spend her eternity frozen. Stagnant. Hopeless.”

  I had thought I was Stacy’s savior. Turned out I was her executioner. Opening the pouch and sending her to hell, that’d be on my head. That was the kind of blood you couldn’t scrub clean. Leaving her like this, though…I didn’t have the right to do that to her. More than anything, I knew the value of a spark of hope.

  “She deserves a fighting chance,” I said, staring down at the pouch in my hands, “same as anybody.”

  Caitlin moved close, touching my shoulder. “Then set her free.”

  I opened the pouch.

  “Goodbye,” I whispered as motes of light flew toward Stacy’s wraith, joining with her, her body restored in a soft white glow. For a brief moment I saw her there, perfected, whole once more. She opened her mouth as if to say something, starting to smile.

  Then she vanished in a blast of acrid air, leaving nothing behind but the faint stench of sulfur.

  The empty pouch slipped from my numb fingertips. Caitlin pulled me close, holding me in silence.

  After a moment, she said, “I think we should go celebrate.”

  “I’m not sure what there is to celebrate.”

  She pulled back, smiling at me, and blinked away a bit of moisture in her eyes.

  “Us,” she said simply. “Us, and today, and tonight, and tomorrow.”

  She was right.

  I’d won some; I’d lost some. More important, I’d survived. I had choices to make, a life to live. And I had Caitlin.

  “You know what?” I said. “Those sound like some pretty good reasons.”

  I offered her my arm. She slipped hers around mine, walking beside me as we turned back up the winding storm tunnel, back to the waiting light of day.

  “How do you feel about sushi?” she asked.

  “After a week of hospital food, I’d eat my own shoe and like it. Sushi sounds great.”

  “I know just the place. I’ll call ahead when we get to the car. You’re going to love it, trust me…”

  This was crazy, Caitlin and me, and I knew our troubles were just getting started. We had a long hard road ahead of us and no maps to guide the way. Still, I wouldn’t have given it up for the world.

  Trust her? Yeah, I did.

  Heaven help me, I did.

  Epilogue

  The first thing Artie Kaufman felt was cold. Wet, clammy cold like a New England rain, the kind that sinks into your bones and stays there.

  The second thing he felt, when he moved his hand, was the leather cuff.

  He blinked, head groggy and pounding like the hangover after a three-day bender. He tried to rub his eyes, only to feel his wrist jerk taut against the buckled leather strap that bound it. The rusted metal chair felt like a block of ice against his naked back and legs.

  “Hey,” he said, voice edged with a note of fear, “what the fuck? Is this some kind of joke?”

  Why couldn’t he remember how he’d gotten here? Last night was a blur. He’d been rooking that dipshit fanboy at his weekly poker game, then…what? Okay, Artie, no more tequila before bed. You’re getting too old to party like a college kid.

  He tugged against the straps that bound his wrists and ankles. Ahead of him was darkness—no, not darkness. A wall of black glass. He craned his neck to try to figure out where he was. The grimy tile floor looked weirdly familiar, like that truck stop bathroom where he shot most of his movies, but the rest of the room was different. Like a doctor’s office at a hospital or a clinic, but everything rusted and falling apart.

  “Guys?” he called out. “C’mon, this isn’t funny. You’re starting to freak me out. Hello?”

  “Hello, Artie,” Stacy said, walking out where he could see her.

  He didn’t know where she’d gotten the dress, some kind of renaissance fair thing in crimson and faded white. A bracelet of twined daffodils draped from her wrist, but the once bright flowers were just dried husks. A withered rose, its petals curled and rotten, adorned her blond hair.

  Oh thank God, Artie thought. “Hey, baby girl, a little help here? I think the guys are playing a prank on me.”

  “You’re confused. I was confused at first, too. Then I met a pretty lady who explained everything to me. She gave me two messages to deliver to you.”

  “Stacy,” Artie snapped, “I don’t have time for this shit, okay—”

  “The first message, which she said you’d understand, is that she’s one of Caitlin’s sisters. She’s going to make sure you stay properly entertained until Caitlin comes back to deal with you personally.”

  Caitlin.

  The memories hit him like a fist to the face. The chase through the house. The contract. The fire. Caitlin. No tears now, Artie. This is just a taste of what’s to come. He stared at Stacy with bulging eyes, horror dawning.

  “The second message,” Stacy said, “is ‘Welcome to hell.’”

  Artie flailed at the cuffs, frantic, jerking against the steel chair.

  “I was trying to get my life together when you found me,” Stacy said. “Did you know that? I did a lot of things I wasn’t proud of back home, with some bad people. I ran to Vegas to try to get away from all that. I wanted a new start. I found you instead.”

  Artie ignored her, consumed with his own terror. “Come on, come on, untie me. Let’s get out of here—”

  “There was a pretty good chance I’d have done it. Given time, given help. I could have made something of myself. I could have been a better person. I wanted to be. But it turned out that wanting wasn’t good enough.”

  He shook his head wildly at her. “Are you listening, you stupid bitch? Untie me right fucking now!”

  “I’ll never see my grandfather again,” Stacy said. “Never see anyone I cared about, anyone I loved. Never see the sun. Not for all eternity. I know that I’m responsible for the choices I made, for the crimes I committed. But you, Artie? You’re the reason I’m here.”

  She pulled a cart, wobbling on one broken wheel, around to the front of the chair so he could see it. Surgical tools, half of them rusted and dull, lined a silver tray.

  “Bitch,” Artie whispered, too terrified to put any force behind the word, “what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Do you remember what you told me when you first met me?”

  He forced a smile, head bobbing like a puppet. “Yeah! Yeah! I said you had star quality! I meant it, baby girl, meant every word of it!”

  “The pretty lady I met, she said the exact same thing. She said it wasn’t fair how this all happened, but she had a way I could make things a little bit better for myself. She said Caitlin asked for a very special favor, just for me. Isn’t that nice?”

  Stacy’s hand hovered over the tray.
After a moment’s indecision she picked up a scalpel, its dark, pitted surface caked with decay.

  “What is this?” Artie squirmed helplessly in the chair. “What, you want revenge? Is that what this is all about? You think that’s gonna make you feel better?”

  Movement caught his eye, beyond the wall of blackened glass. Outlines of figures in the dark, seated, watching intently.

  An audience?

  “No,” Stacy said with a wistful sigh. “No, Artie, you don’t understand. Revenge won’t make me feel better. Besides, you aren’t worth it. This isn’t about you at all.”

  She touched the edge of the scalpel to his cheek.

  “This is my audition.”

  ###

  Join the newsletter to learn more about Craig Schaefer's books:

  http://www.craigschaeferbooks.com/mailing-list/

  Find more books by Craig Schaefer:

  http://www.craigschaeferbooks.com/books/

  BLACKJACK

  THE CHRONICLES OF

  VINCENT BLACK, VAMPIRE ASSASSIN

  Black Edition

  Kristopher Norris

  Copyright © 2013 Kristopher Norris

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 4371144

  ISBN-13: 978-1491056127

  To My Beautiful Daughter Gaia.

  All I do is for her.

  Forever...For Always...Papa Loves You

  (But, you can't read this book 'til you are all grown up....