Krewe of Hunters, Volume 1: Phantom Evil ; Heart of Evil ; Sacred Evil ; The Evil Inside

by Heather Graham

  She knew the children. They remained in her room.

  “That’s them, isn’t it?” Whitney asked her.

  “Yes.”

  Whitney was quiet for a minute. “Jenna is certain that you—that you managed to release people from the basement when you found the skeleton of Nathaniel Petti under the floor. I wonder why the children can’t move on. Their bodies were discovered long ago—they were buried with their parents.”

  “I don’t know, I think they’re trying to tell me what happened. But I’m not sure if they mix up what happened to them with what happened to Regina. They want me to know something, and they just haven’t managed to do it yet.”

  “Why do you look so perplexed?” Whitney asked her.

  Angela turned to Whitney. She grimaced and decided that they had agreed just to say whatever they were thinking—if one of them was slightly unhinged, certainly, they all were.

  “I saw another face in the room. When I was drying off after my shower, I looked in the mirror—and there it was. A woman’s face. I was hoping that maybe I’d see who she might be while we were here.”

  “Why, was she scary?” Whitney asked. “I’d love to really see the way you do. There’s something special about you—it seems that specters want to be seen by you.”

  “Sure, it’s endless fun. They tap on the shoulder, scare me to death and disappear!” Angela said. She looked at the model of the house again, and then down the aisle at the extension of the exhibit. She felt that she should be seeing something here and now, but she didn’t. She glanced at her watch. “Time to meet up to head back, so it seems. Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” she said, starting ahead. Then she stopped suddenly, looking at the last bit of the exhibit, around the corner before the exit. “Oh!” she said.

  Angela walked around to join her.

  On the wall, a black silhouette against white, was a simple scene of a hanging. Because of sound systems throughout, they could hear the sound of a rope scraping against a scaffold. The man at the end of the rope was Madden C. Newton; it was a giant cutout from a sketch they had seen earlier.

  A sign above read: The Wages of Sin And Wicked Evil!

  Madden C. Newton had deserved his death; in Angela’s mind, he had deserved far worse.

  But there was something about the silhouette on the wall and the sound piping through that was unnerving. As she stared at the wall, she almost expected the image to turn to her; she thought that she would see his eyes, the terrible eyes that she had seen in her dream.

  In her mind, she could almost hear the children screaming again….

  The children had found a certain justice; their killer had been caught, tried and executed. Yet they remained behind.

  And the other woman, the one who had stared at her in the mirror…

  She had looked through all the pictures. There was no image of that woman here.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, and she left Whitney still staring at the wall, and hurried to the exit.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  When Jackson arrived with Will and Jenna at Café du Monde, Jake Mallory was already at one of the outside tables, his long legs stretched before him. It wasn’t busy, but there were people coming and going. A musician played out on the street, doing a decent rendition of a Billy Joel tune. Tourists walked by him, some dropping money in his open guitar case. Across the street, in front of Jackson Square, a girl painted in silver portrayed a statue, much to the amusement of a number of children gathered before her.

  Cars moved along on Decatur Street, occasionally horns sounded with impatience.

  Jake stood and waved, seeing Jackson. They came over to join him around the small circular table. Jake dragged another chair over so they would have room when Angela and Whitney arrived, and then plopped down again. A waiter was quickly there, and they ordered their cups of café au lait or iced tea or coffee, along with two orders of beignets.

  “Well, this will be my third. I’m imagining that I’ll be a bit wired tonight,” Jake said.

  “How did it go? You were back quickly,” Jackson said. The weather was still pleasant. It would hold another month, maybe, and then the dead heat of summer would set in.

  “Badly,” Jake said. “Someone there was onto me.”

  “Oh?” Jackson said.

  “I knocked at the church door, just like yesterday. A young woman answered—another young one. I don’t know how young. Too bad she wasn’t obviously underage and pregnant; I could have called the cops. I started out saying that I’d been in the day before, and that I was interested in the church. And before I knew it, a fellow in something like a friar’s cape came out and told me that he knew my kind, I had Satan in my soul, and I wasn’t for his church. I tried to argue with him, but I had the feeling he was armed beneath his cape—and I wasn’t. So I got out.”

  “That’s an interesting development,” Jackson said.

  “They may not have ‘made’ Jake,” Jenna suggested. “It might all be over the fact that Gabby Taylor disappeared. I mean, they may not know anything about who he is—but they may be suspicious of him because soon after he showed up, she disappeared.”

  “True,” Jackson said. He slid his sunglasses down his nose; he could see that Angela and Whitney were walking down St. Ann Street toward Decatur; they would be with them any minute. He smiled, watching the two. So striking in their different ways, Angela a snow princess, and Whitney exotic with her honey skin and dark hair. They paused at the light, talking to one another, and he was pleased to see that they might have been friends since childhood, they seemed so comfortable together.

  They were a team. A good team, he decided. For a minute, he felt an edge of fear. It was impossible not to remember his last team. Good people, also. Three of them dead.

  They had to be vigilant at all times. They had to have one another’s backs at all times, and they had to learn to trust one another, and no one else. Of course, no one came into this without knowing the risks. And still, he knew that he was responsible, and he wouldn’t relive the past.

  “Jackson?”

  He started and looked at Will.

  “Yes?”

  “How are we ever going to get closer to Blake Conroy? Or, for that matter, what can we do about Martin DuPre and the Church of Christ Arisen?” Will asked. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to do nothing. We could at least confront the senator with what we know and get the slimy bastard out of politics.”

  “We will, we will, all in good time,” Jackson assured them.

  He stood as the two women arrived, and they weaved their way through the other chairs and tables to reach them. As they sat, Whitney said, “Oh, that feels good. We’ve been walking for hours now!”

  “How was the exhibit?” Jackson asked.

  “Interesting,” Angela said.

  The waiter reappeared with their beignets and drinks, and took drinks orders from Angela and Whitney.

  “Did you gain anything from the museum this time—anything we hadn’t known?” Jenna asked, blowing at some of the sweet powdery sugar from the beignet that had fallen on her skirt.

  “Well, we gained a really creepy look at a picture of Newton’s hanging,” Whitney said.

  “And we learned that no one knows what happened to his body,” Angela said. “It was left hanging for days.”

  “Very much like the pirate days. Hang the fellow, and gibbet him!” Jake said.

  “I’m glad that’s outlawed,” Whitney said emphatically.

  Angela seemed thoughtful and pensive. “Anything else?” he asked.

  “They have an interesting model of the house as it was in the 1860s. And some photographs from the time or newspaper reprints of the photographs,” Angela said. He looked at her, hoping there was more. “I think it will help us, when we’re working in the house in the future. How was your day?”

  “Productive,” he told her. “We have an alibi for the chauffeur.”

  “Can we really have an ali
bi for anyone?”

  “Unless he was in on it with the senator, and the senator did throw his wife over the balcony,” Jackson said.

  “I still don’t understand why David Holloway would call us in to investigate what happened if he had been guilty in any way,” Jenna said. She dusted her skirt again. “My Lord, these things are delicious, but that sugar is everywhere.”

  “Blow on it,” Will teased. “It’s just an illusion. It will vanish in the air.”

  “Sugar doesn’t really vanish,” Jenna argued.

  “And dust motes are in the air whether we see them or not,” Will told her.

  “Oh, good God, you’re not going to pull a rabbit out of my ear now or anything, are you?” Jenna asked.

  “No, no rabbit. I can produce a few other things if you like,” Will told her. “I’ve worked many a horrible magic show with lights and projectors. It’s far easier than you might imagine to create the illusion of magic.” To prove his point, he reached into the air, and suddenly, there was a handkerchief in his hands.

  He was good, Jackson thought.

  Angela jerked forward suddenly in her chair, staring at Will.

  “It’s just a handkerchief. Clean, even,” Will said.

  She grimaced, shaking her head. “What if…what if Regina Holloway didn’t commit suicide—exactly. What if she saw something that got into her mind, that made her run out on the balcony?”

  “You’re saying that the ghosts did kill her?” Whitney asked, confused.

  “No…I’m saying, what if…well, we’ve been talking about the Church of Christ Arisen. They use brainwashing techniques, really. So…oh, God, I’m not even really sure of what I’m saying. What if she was told over and over again about the ghosts, made to think that they weren’t only real, but that they were vindictive. And what if some kind of illusion was used on her?”

  “It’s a good theory, but she didn’t go over that balcony of her own accord—unless she managed to hurtle her own weight backwards,” Jackson said. “But…”

  “Maybe,” Jake suggested, “she was lured out to the balcony by that kind of trickery, except she was starting to catch on, or she saw something…and then she had to be helped.”

  The waiter arrived with the two cups of café au lait for Angela and Whitney.

  They all fell silent until Jackson had paid, and the waiter went away.

  “That adds another element of the possible to the scenario,” Jackson said. “I’ve seen people do amazing things to others by the power of suggestion. Let’s face it, the house is big and old, and has an unbelievable history, and…maybe Regina even had a touch of the sixth sense herself.”

  “The ghosts in the bedroom never harmed Regina,” she said with absolute certainty.

  “I didn’t say that,” Jackson assured her. “Here’s the thing, though. Perhaps she was inundated with tales about the house—true tales, actually. It would take a staunch soul not to be a little afraid that there might be ghosts lurking there. And someone would know about the children who were murdered, and that Regina had just lost a child. It would have been easy to prey on her mind with subtle suggestion.”

  “And then something was done to convince her that there was the ghost of a child in the room. And that ghost lured her to the balcony,” Angela said. “But how could someone have created an entire image in her mind that would do what they wanted it to?”

  “Illusion,” Will said. “Smoke and mirrors—and projectors.”

  “But there’s nothing in the house. The police haven’t found anything, and we haven’t found anything at all,” Jake said.

  “We’ve actually found a lot in the house,” Whitney corrected.

  Jake stared at her. “There’s something else in the basement,” she said. “We’ve seen it. We’ve all seen it on the screens. And it’s real. It’s something,” she said with determination.

  “Back to the basement then,” Jackson said, rising. “Everyone finished?”

  * * *

  Three hours later, filthy and exhausted, they stood together in the basement. They’d tried digging.

  They’d all expected Angela to be some kind of a divining rod, but she just didn’t have a sense of where another body could be. They had found nothing, though they had broken up a great deal of concrete.

  The basement wasn’t giving away any of its secrets.

  Now resting on shovels or picks, they continued to watch her movements. Except for Jackson, who was sitting on the stairs at a slight remove.

  “This isn’t working,” he noted.

  “Angela, nothing?” Whitney asked.

  She had to laugh. “Whitney, I wouldn’t stand here as everyone dug and destroyed the flooring if I had something to say!”

  “I know that there is something down here!” Whitney said.

  No one argued with her.

  “Maybe we need to give it a rest,” Jake said. “We’ll all be going to bed with Bengay on our shoulders and backs if we don’t quit for a while.”

  “I guess,” Whitney said, defeated for the time. “All right, well, I’m going to take a shower and go to bed.”

  “Sounds like a remarkable plan,” Will agreed.

  “I’m in on that one,” Jenna said. “Maybe I’ll dream up a solution.” She smiled at Angela. “Or maybe you will.”

  Angela lifted her hands. “I’ll try, guys. But…”

  “But it doesn’t work that way,” Will said softly, putting a hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right, the answers will come.”

  Jackson stood suddenly. “Well, I’m for the shower, a night’s sleep, and then I think I’ll try a different angle.”

  “What’s that?” Jenna asked him.

  “The attic,” he told her. “Jake, I’m going to put you on the computer, following links for me. There’s something fishy about Gabby Taylor, the Church of Christ Arisen and, of course, Martin DuPre. Check out social networking sites, too—they probably have some social networking going, particularly since they’re targeting kids—Twitter or Facebook, or something. Andy Devereaux should have sent me some info by now, and following it up on a few of the federal sites can give us some more information that might be pertinent. For tonight, let’s call it quits.”

  He started up the stairs for the kitchen. The others began to follow him, but Angela suddenly found herself unwilling to go. “Wait!” she said.

  They all looked back. “I think—I think that Whitney is right.”

  “Okay?” Jackson said.

  “The shadow…the shadow that everyone sees…it’s not like…well, it’s not like a ghost or an image or remnant, revenant…that we usually see or feel. It is something evil,” Angela said. “Yes, we’ve all said that it’s different, but I mean really evil!”

  “All right,” Jackson said. “Agreed. I saw the film and I trust you all. But where does that lead us right now?”

  “I think we’re looking for Madden C. Newton,” she said.

  “But he was hanged,” Will said. “I thought we were looking for more victims.”

  “Hanged, but no one knows what happened to his body,” Angela said. “I think that his body is here. It makes sense. When did we see it coming after me? When it appeared that other souls were finally able to leave. The victims might have been waiting for one another, and Newton tried to keep them here, but the power of that kind of light is too strong. He couldn’t. But maybe he’s still trapped here, and that’s the shadow of evil?”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Whitney said.

  “Where?” Jackson asked. “We’ve been digging for hours.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, frustrated.

  Jackson walked back down the stairs and came over to her. He smiled, setting his hands on her shoulders, then wiping at a smudge on her cheek. “Why don’t we sleep on it and get back to it tomorrow. Right now, I think we should just all clean up and order pizza. We’ll see what we can find in the meantime on the film.”

  She nodded. Frustration filled her; she
felt as if they were so close. But when she looked into his eyes, she knew that he was right. And she also knew that she wouldn’t go through the night alone, worrying about that shadow of evil. She would be with him.

  “Come on,” he said gently.

  He took her hand and they headed up the stairs to the kitchen. The others followed. “Shower,” Will said.

  “Shower,” Jenna agreed.

  “Long bath,” Whitney said.

  “Oh, yeah. Long, long bath,” Jake said.

  “I’ll call the pizza place down the street and order three pies, a meat, a veggie and a cheese?” she asked.

  “Sounds like a plan,” Jake said.

  “I’ll ask for delivery in an hour?” she asked.

  “Say, an hour and a half,” Jackson said.

  They parted to head to their respective rooms.

  “An hour and a half for delivery?” Angela said to Jackson.

  “Well, you know me. I don’t last that long,” he teased.

  They made it through the doorway into his chosen room before they started taking one another’s clothing off, with little concern for subtlety. Jackson kissed Angela’s lips while they were half in and half out of their shirts, and then pressed his lips against her collarbone.

  She pressed her mouth against his shoulder. “Oh, ick!”

  “Ick!” he protested.

  “Spiderweb. I think I ate it.”

  “Oh, come on, a little web won’t kill you,” he murmured in return, sliding his feet out of his shoes. He wrenched his way out of his tailored shirt, finding her mouth and heading in toward the bathroom as he did so. His dirty shirt fell to the floor along with hers. Their lips were still locked as he angled her toward the bathroom door, and into the handsomely restored room. He opened the large shower-stall door while she wiggled out of her sandals and sent her shirt and jeans down to the tile, grabbed him by the waistband and slid her fingers beneath his belt line, rubbing her fingertips along his abdomen as she worked his belt buckle. He shoved off his jeans, drew her to him and kissed her again, feeling the length of her body naked against him, and relishing the feeling while his sex rose swiftly to the arousal of her touch. The water steamed down, and they drew one another in and beneath it. The hot thunder of the pulsing water was deliciously sweet, and he just held her beneath it, his erection growing against her lower belly. They both reached for the soap. It fell to the floor, and they laughed breathlessly as they both reached to retrieve it, only to rise in one body locked once again. He came up the master, and stood her still while he lathered her, her skin becoming flush and slick beneath his ministrations. He pressed his lips to her breast, followed with the soap down her torso, and carefully knelt beneath the rampant spray, soaping her midriff, abdomen, navel, and down to her sex and between her legs, following the trail of the soap with his lips and the caress of his tongue. She gripped hard onto his shoulders, saying words incoherently against the force of the spray and nearly collapsing against him.