by A. Sparrow
The guitarist plugged into his amp and turned it on, slamming a chord that approximated the key that the others were playing. He detuned a bit, turned up the volume and joined in the jam, playing a screaming line that entwined perfectly with Sari’s vocal and Mal’s horn.
At seven fifty-five, the birdie howled like a jet plane coming in for a landing, drowning out every bit of music, rattling the building from floor to rafters. People cowered and covered their ears.
At seven fifty-six, the fog in the bell jar cleared.
Chapter 23: Implosion.
Like gasoline sprayed on a brushfire in a windstorm, the over-amplified electric guitar fed the birdie’s already surging wail, ramping it up an ever steepening arc of sound and energy.
Vida’s sound man scrambled to his board. The guitarist unplugged his amp to no avail. The howl persisted, driving spikes through Aerie’s eardrums. She tucked her bass under her elbows and slapped her hands over her ears.
The glass jar turned clear as a tarn, revealing a swirling gray blur within. This was no mere smoke. It moved with purpose, rippling an invisible musculature, forming lobes that lapped and tugged at the interior of the jar.
Aghast, Aerie laid down her bass and stumbled out of the corner, colliding with Sari behind a logjam of stunned people. She latched onto her shoulder to keep from falling. Sari pulled free, her eyes naked with fear. She pulled free and elbowed her way into the stunned crowd.
Eleni and Mal pressed against the wall, clutching their instruments to their chests. Ron alone, remained in the corner, strumming his guitar and grinning, as if this were all part of the show.
Someone cut the power. Lights blinked out, and with the darkness came a silence as abrupt as a guillotine. The dim emergency lighting flickered on. A klaxon sounded.
The bell jar imploded with a hollow crunch. Billows of dust mushroomed to the rafters, unveiling an expanding blur that absorbed the glass shards into its swirl, grinding the pieces to bits that formed a glittering column, ejecting them from the top of the vortex in every direction, peppering the retreating crowd with grit the consistency of beach sand. Screams rocked the room. A trickle meandered down Aerie’s forehead and into her eye. A swipe of her hand came back bloody.
The audience scrambled for the stairs and fire escape, tripping and tumbling over the fallen, fighting to evacuate the loft. A group of the bold and the curious huddled in the center of the room, faces flecked with blood, entranced, Aaron’s neighbor among them.
Where the bell jar had stood, the blur pulsed and swirled, refusing to dissipate. A cranium-like dome bulged at its top, wisps dangling, peeling off and stretching outward, curling at the tips like tentacles. A vortex continued to spin at its core.
Someone gasped. “It’s alive!”
Mal dashed forward and poked at the spinning thing with his bamboo sax. It lashed out and knocked the instrument out of his grip. It spiraled across the hardwood, avoiding Ron, who brandished his guitar at it like a club, before darting out of the corner, making straight for the crowd of gawkers.
Eleni skipped out to intercept it, waving her fiddle and bow. “Shoo! Shoo!”
The thing surged and enveloped her arms, ripping the fiddle from her grip, snapping the bow, curling the horse hair. A shower of wood chips spewed out of the vortex. Eleni pulled away and collapsed onto the floor, the sleeves of her blouse shredded.
Aerie ran to her aide as the thing circled back, spiraling in place, etching curlicues in the varnish, leaving a trail of black soot in its wake. Mal and Ron followed it warily back into the corner.
“Don’t go near it, guys! It bites!” said Eleni. She held her hands palms up, as if pleading. Tiny drops of blood beaded and wept down her abraded forearms.
Aerie skidded to Eleni’s side on her knees. “Oh my God. What did it do to you?”
“I’m okay,” said Eleni. “Just stings. Like a bad rug burn.”
“I don’t know what kind of rugs you got or what you do on them,” said Ron. “That looks like road rash to me.”
Aerie removed a string of silk scarves from Eleni’s waist and unknotted them. “How about we wrap your arms in these? Stanch the bleeding?”
Eleni ignored her, her attention drawn to the thing as it hopped onto a window ledge, sucking up the dust accumulated on the sills, sliding against the windows, splattering them with fine grit. It sounded like a sleet storm.
“We gotta get that thing confined,” said Mal. He grabbed Aerie’s nylon bass case and stalked after it.
“Idiot. You think a zipper’s gonna hold it?” said Ron.
“You got a better idea?” said Mal, un-dissuaded. He followed the swirl along the wall with the unzipped case.
Ron replacing his guitar for an electric bass from one of Vida’s stands. “I’ll knock it off the wall and smash the fucker.”
“Guys. I really think you should leave that thing alone,” said Eleni.
As they approached, the thing, bloated with dust, floated off the window ledge like an aerial jellyfish. Mal waited until it had touched down and then pounced, tossing the nylon case over it. It struggled like a cat in a sack as Mal slid the zipper home. Black smoke sifted through the seams. The fabric turned to soot and crumbled.
Mal dropped the case and backed away. The creature poured through a gap and regathered itself into a spinning spindle, darkened by specks of disintegrated nylon. It glided across the floor, dodging frantic people, arcing towards the exit.
Ron ran after it, electric bass hefted over his shoulder.
Let it go, Ron!” said Eleni. “Don’t touch it!”
Aerie followed after him, pounding down the stairs, Mal on her heels.
Chapter 24: Nexus
Donnie glowered at his baked potato, the only thing on the menu that sounded the least bit appetizing. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the family-style platter heaped with ribs, steaks and chicken, along with some sautéed greens and a bowl of onion rings to grease the sluices.
The odors wafting from it made his stomach knot. He scraped the sour cream off his potato with the side of his fork, picking off the chives with the tines. He never should have agreed to go out with them. He would have been better off lying around the hotel room for another day.
Jerry had driven him and the interns out to a steak house in Watkins Glen. Mac, alone at the house with Mrs. Swain, first recommended it, then insisted that they go here, and then that they go now, that he and Mrs. Swain had things under control at the house.
Under control. There was no reason they all couldn’t have stayed. There were plenty of leftovers in the fridge. Mac knew that Donnie’s stomach couldn’t handle anything as heavy as a steak just yet. And Rand kept throwing broad hints about his hankering for pizza. But here they were, at some glorified diner, and he was trying his best to abide through dinner, though he had no interest in anything other than his Pepsi.
The others had started up a conversation with some folks the next table over who had come up from Virginia for some sort of vintage racing event at the nearby speedway. They had themselves some nice southerner to southerner bonding of the sort that happens so often when compatriots meet in the icy north. But after the initial pleasantries, Donnie let the others carry the conversation and retreated inside his head, trying to make sense of his disquiet.
Usually Donnie could feel the presence of the occult. Admittedly, much of his business hinged on simple psychological disturbances, for which divine intervention was less critical than emotional support. But when the occult was involved, he could tell. It settled over everything like a pall, tingeing the personas affected with a distinctive warp. Donnie could just tell when he was dealing with the touch of the Fallen.
But this case gave him no such impression, just a vague feeling that the tables had turned, that they were working against the Lord. Never before had an infernal entity so thoroughly penetrated his cordon of protections. This could be a demon of a different order, a being with the power to subvert his senses, instill con
fusion.
The nature of this more potent foe remained unclear. Donnie’s prayers for guidance had thus far gone unanswered. He couldn’t help but wonder if Mac’s unsavory dealings had weakened his cause in the eyes of the Lord, sending him into battle naked, with God looking on indifferent or with disdain. He felt so forsaken, that he had lost the will to go on.
Mrs. Swain was plenty giddy about the silencing of the hell house. Donnie knew better, but he was willing to let her hang onto her misperception. He just wanted out.
“How’re them ribs, Rand?” said Jerry, reaching for a rack.
“Uh, okay. A little tough.”
“Woulda helped if they actually cooked them,” said Tammie.
“What’s the deal with the kale?” said Rand. “Who eats kale with barbecue anyhow? Collard greens, I can see.”
“Maybe collards don’t grow up here,” said Jerry. “Not sure how Mac could recommend this place.”
“To get us out of the damned house,” said Donnie. “That’s how.”
“Huh?”
The waitress came over with a pitcher of water, looking concerned. “And how is everything?”
“Oh, just great!” said Tammie.
“Wonderful,” said Jerry. She smiled nervously, refilled their glasses.
The woman from the next table leaned over and whispered. “If y’all come back to this town, I recommend you try Savard’s. The wait staff’s a bit weird, but the food’s much better.”
“Oh yeah,” said of her companions. “The prime rib, especially.”
“Much obliged,” said Don. “But I don’t think we’ll be coming back anytime soon.”
“Why not?” said Jerry. “It’s a shorter drive than Ithaca.”
“Because we’re going back to Georgia,” said Donnie. “After the consecration tomorrow, I say we call it a job. Tammie and I will fly back tomorrow night. You and Rand can drive back the next morning.”
“But Donnie, we just got here,” said Jerry, his face flushing.
“Well, yes … but why stick around when we’re essentially done? We did our due diligence.”
“Due diligence? You shitting me? Due diligence? What have we done? Light a few candles, mutter a few prayers? How can you say we’re done? We’ve done squat. The battle’s just getting started.”
“Been quiet, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah, but … you know as well as I do, they could just be lying low, hoping we go away.” Jerry squinted his eyes at him. “That tummy bug mess with your head or something? I never heard you talk like this.”
“Listen, I think it’s pretty clear that Mac brought us up here to impress his lady friend. Whatever past due obligations we had with him, I believe are paid in full.”
Jerry looked mortified. “This ain’t just some dog-and-pony show, Donnie. There’s major shit going on here. If you’d’ve gone out in the woods with us you would’ve seen. We found some serious spoor.”
“I don’t doubt you, Jerry. But whatever’s happening out in those woods is exogenous to what’s going on in the house. You know my policy about exogenous threats.”
“But it’s the goings-on at the house that are drawing them in,” said Jerry.
“You can’t know that for sure,” said Donnie. “So there’re creepy-crawlies out in those woods. So what? There isn’t a forest on earth that hasn’t got issues with spirits. Since time immemorial—”
Jerry’s gaze bore in on him. “You’re afraid, aren’t you? This thing kicked your butt and now you want to run back to Georgia with your tail between your legs.”
“Not at all,” said Donnie. “I just realize my limits. And this stuff with Mac … what’s he’s doing … it’s not right. I want nothing more to do with it.”
A calm swept over Jerry’s face. He clasped a meaty hand over Donnie’s shoulder. “Donnie, Donnie, Donnie. Stuff like this … this is why we got into this business in the first place. Not ‘cause of thirteen-year olds whose parents think they got the devil because they won’t unload the dishwasher. We got a freaking pack of praf diavols out there. This is the big-time.”
Donnie took a long and deep breath. “Tell you what. Tammie and I are flying back tomorrow, that’s a given. That okay with you Tam?”
She nodded vigorously. “Oh yeah.”
“But you and Rand can stick around … a couple more days if you want. I’ll leave you the manuals. Get Mac to help you with the rites if you need a hand. I just gotta get out of here, Jer. Heal up. Get my bearings back. It’s just the way it is.”
Jerry tipped his brow. “Deal. I wish you were sticking around, but … I understand. I’ve never known you to run from—”
“Run? I’m not running.”
“Donnie. I didn’t mean it that way. Me and Rand’ll man the fort. You just need to be prepared to send up the heavy artillery if need be. That’s all I ask.”
“You mean … the fire?”
“If necessary.”
“You’d have to make a good case for it.”
Jerry scrunched his mouth to one side. “Don’t you worry. I got a feeling this place … this Connecticut Hill … might be a nexus.”
Donnie crinkled his eyes. “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.”
“I’ve been doing my research Donnie and the data is sure startin’ to point that way.”
“What data? Sprites?”
“Not just sprites. Wolves. I found stories of packs mauling people long after they went extinct everywhere else in the state. And you know what else? That little town we passed on the way here. Alpine Junction? It’s on the “America’s Most Haunted” list. People see orbs, mists, shadows. Folks even come here looking for Bigfoot.”
“Oh, Jerry,” Donnie scoffed. “That’s such a hodge-podge. I mean, I’m surprised you didn’t mention vampires. There’s no rhyme or reason. It’s all … random.”
“It ain’t the individual things that’re important. It’s the accumulation. Don’t you see Donnie? Weird stuff happens; one person’ll blame it on a ghost; someone else will call it a chupacabra. But it’s all from the same source. The place is a nexus. Like that warehouse district in Athens, only … more so.”
Donnie stared at the stack of rib and chicken bones accumulating on the platter. Something about their arrangement struck him as obscene.
“This is gonna sound dumb,” said Rand. “But I looked on a map and we ain’t anywhere near Connecticut. Why do they call that place Connecticut Hill?”
“It’s just an Indian name, Rand,” said Tammie. “Probably means land between the rivers, or something. Like all those Indian names.”
“No Indians up here named it, that’s for sure,” said Jerry. “Connecticut’s a Mohegan name, but we’re in Iroquois country. What happened was this place used to be part of Connecticut. After the Revolutionary War, Connecticut got a hold of some of this territory and made land grants to veterans as a way of keeping a toehold on the frontier. You gotta remember, this was all frontier back then.”
“Those veterans kind of got the short end of a stick, didn’t they?” said Rand.
“You got that right. It would have been a hard life in any hill country so cold, so rocky, never mind … a nexus.”
That stack of bones was really starting to get to Don. He had dealt with an osteomancer once, a blind woman from West Georgia accused of spreading cancer curses through her divination. Something about the inadvertence of the osteomancy taking shape before him made it seem all the more dangerous.
He knocked over the pile with his fist and pushed his chair back from the table. He shot up to his feet, pulse whooshing in his ears, his stomach all quivery again.
“What’d you do that for?” said Jerry. “You feel alright, Donnie? Where you going?”
“I need some air.”
“But we’re not ready to leave just yet. I was planning to order dessert.”
“Eat,” said Donnie. “I’m going outside. I told you. I need some air.”
He made his way to the door, fearful that h
e wouldn’t make it outside before he keeled over. The door swung open, and he took in a lungful of crystalline wind, redolent with forest. This was a dryer air mass than what had swept into the open window on the ride over, less of a strain to breathe, almost therapeutic in its astringency. He rounded around the corner of the restaurant into the back lot. A blast of wind met him, spattering his face with sand and leaves before swirling away.
“Lord, help me.” He couldn’t haul his ass back to Georgia soon enough.
Chapter 25: Aftermath
Aerie found Ron crouched on the sidewalk, staring down at what looked like a strip of inlaid marble cutting across the sidewalk. The track circled around a light post and out across the pavement, angling up the hill towards the Ithaca Reservoir.
Mal came up behind them. “This is shit, man. What are we gonna tell Aaron?”
Aerie knelt and ran her finger through a smudge in the asphalt. It felt greasy and flaky, with bits of grit embedded. “That thing … that was no machine, Mal.”
“I realize that.” Mal turned his gaze up the steep hill behind them. “You know, up at Cornell, they’ve got a shop that sells glassware and reagents. I’ve got friends still in grad school up there. Maybe, we can chip in and buy another bell jar.”
“I don’t think it’s the jar he cares about,” said Aerie. “It’s … that thing.”
“I ain’t chipping in for nothing,” said Ron. “Why don’t we just snag one? You still have access to those labs?”
A police car came barreling down Aurora and pulled up askew in front of Mayer’s. A cop bolted out and stormed up the stairs. More sirens approached, heralding an ambulance and a fire truck, and then another cop car to join the growing collection of emergency vehicles. Ron stood up, hands riffling through his pockets. He pulled out the keys to the van and tossed them to Aerie.
“What’s this for?” said Aerie.
“In case something happens,” said Ron.
“Why? What’s gonna happen?”
“Who knows,” he said. “I got a bad feeling about Julius … about the door money we ain’t gonna get no more … and … those cops.”