by Lee Isserow
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presents
The Roving Death
A Freelancers Novel
By
Lee Isserow
Copyright © 2017 Lee Isserow
All rights reserved.
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Other books in The Freelancer series
The Spirit Box
The Prince of Darkness
Spirited Words
Snake's Kin
Other books in The Circle
Shadowmancer
The Roving Death
Chapter 1
They would not rise with the sun
Night had fallen on London, the street lamps flickering to life reluctantly, cycling lazily through from dull red hues to orange glares. The lights in the windows of houses and apartments flicking on one by one, silhouetting those within. High in the skies above, a heavy blanket of cloud was settling over the city, harbouring thick, heavy rain that was just biding its time, waiting patiently to pelt down on the unsuspecting populace below.
In Highgate village, a quiet suburb in the north of the capital, the Miller family were preparing for dinner. Deep in the confines of their large house, right at the top of a gated community, Lily Miller, the youngest child, was laying the table. Steve Miller, her older brother, was laying down place mats and plates. Their father, Rob Miller, was helping his wife pull various roasting tins from the oven, and relocating the contents of saucepans to serving dishes. His assistance was much to the consternation and irritation of Mary Miller, for Rob got in her way just as much as he actually helped.
As the Miller family sat down to eat what would turn out to be their final meal together, the rain began to fall, crashing down mercilessly on the roof, slashing against the windows. The downpour was so loud, they almost didn't hear the three identically spaced knocks on the door.
The four glanced to one another, none of them certain that there had even been a knock. After all, the rain that continued to pummel their house from seemingly every angle made it sound like there was a constant barrage of taps, cracks and rat-a-tats all around them. When they did not hear any further indication of anyone at the door―specifically listening out for a ring of the bell―they resumed their last supper, passing dishes around and filling up their plates with ravenous anticipation of the culinary delights awaiting them.
Before any of them could dig in, the knocking came again, louder this time. Three―hard―knocks.
There was no denying it, someone was at the door, standing out in the harsh storm, right on their doorstep. It was not late, not late enough to consider it overly suspicious at least, and although it was a curious event, Rob Miller excused himself from the table and rose to his feet to see who might be visiting amidst such terrible weather.
Lily Miller toyed with the food on her plate, beginning to surreptitiously slice up a juicy lamb cutlet, only to be rewarded with a stern “Ahem,” from her mother. She laid the cutlery back down on her plate, having been reminded by the simple sound that it was rude to start eating without all family members present and correct.
Steve craned his neck to the direction of the front door, not that he could hear―let alone see―anything happening beyond. The dining room was at the rear of the house: the kitchen, a living room and a corridor staunchly standing in the way of his view. The three family members sat around the table heard the whining creak of the front door opening, each of them remembering how Rob had promised time and time again that he was going to fix the creak with a simple spray of WD40. A promise that Rob Miller would never have the chance to keep.
Each of the Millers was all too aware that their food was getting colder with every passing moment, and after what seemed like an eternity, they heard the faint sound of the front door close, and waited impatiently for their patriarch to walk back through their unnecessarily labyrinthine home. As he stepped into the dining room, eyebrows arched and heads cocked. For he was not alone.
Rob Miller held the door open for his guest to walk ahead of him. A young girl of no more than seven or eight, in a filthy night dress that was soaked through. Her skin was sickly and pallid, looking almost diaphanous in the white glow of the energy saving bulbs that lit the room. Her hair was thin and frail, blonder than blonde, a messy and dull alabaster mop atop her head. And her eyes were like no eyes any of the Miller family had seen before. The whites rippled and wrinkled, pruned like skin in a bath. The irises monochromatic, as if all the colour and vibrancy had been sapped from them, and the pupils were almost a centimetre in diameter, as if they were struggling to take in all the light they could, to enable sight.
“Who's this?” Mary Miller asked, curious at the visitor that appeared to be joining their dinner. Those would turn out to be the last words Mary Miller ever spoke.
The girl walked towards the table, circled around it. As she came close to each of the diners in turn, the questions, queries and confusion fled from their minds. A calm silence wafted over their thoughts, all objections muted, as she took a seat at the head of the table.
Rob Miller stepped over to a cabinet, fetching cutlery and an additional plate for their mysterious guest, and placed it all out in front of her. Mary gave her a generous helping of every dish, piled her plate high, as the tiny visitor began to dig into the tasty morsels meant for the family. Lily and Steve watched in silence as the girl devoured everything on her plate, caring not for the spills of juices and sauces on her clothes, let alone the mess on her face.
When her plate was emptied, she reached across to the plates in front of the Millers, and proceeded to shovel food into her mouth with a ravenous hunger that seemed as though it might never be sated.
When the dishes and plates were empty, the nameless, silent, uninvited caller sat upright in her chair, and straightened her back, as something coalesced in her gut.
As the Millers watched, it seemed as though the young child's belly was becoming distended before their very eyes, expanding and swelling to the size of a football.
She showed no signs of discomfort on her face. She showed no emotions at all. The young girl closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, deeper than any breath she had ever taken before she had the impulse to knock on the Miller's door. A breath that filled her being through and through, that latched on to the tumescent mass in her gut, and wrenched it out as she exhaled.
It wasn't so much an exhale as a long, silent belch. Her lips vibrated rapidly as the gust of air bellowed forth from deep in her core. A smell of sulphur filled the air, and as her belly began to deflate, a thick, black fog tore its way up her gullet, that seared the flesh as it launched out of her mouth, dissipating across the table to each of the Millers in turn.
As the gaseous expulsion made its way to the family members, they found themselves compelled to inhale deeply. One by one, they became woozy, light-headed, and collapsed face first into the plates laid out in front of them.
The rain lashing down on London eased up. The dark fog in the Miller's dining room cleared and silence reigned over the room. Sat at the head of the table was a terrified little girl with four motionless bodies in front of her.
“Where's my mummy?” the little girl asked, forcing the words through her scratched and scarred throat. “Hello?” She poked at Rob Miller with a tiny finger. “Do you know my daddy?”
Rob Miller did not know her daddy. None of the Millers knew much of anything any longer. They were unconscious, present in body, but not in mind.
“Wake up!” the girl said, as she grabbed hold of Mary Miller's arm and shook it vigorously with all her might. Thick black t
ears began to fork down her cheeks, leaving a slick snail-trail behind them,
That would prove to be her last action, along with her last words. Her last breath expelled in a fruitless attempt to wake a woman that would not wake until the time was right.
The girl collapsed, her head bounced off the table with a loud thud. The Millers and their guest lay there, dormant, as the night ran its course.
*
The dawn chorus sung out, and seemed to mock the Millers, for they would not rise with the sun that day. The only movement in the house was subtle rolls of their bodies to the left or right, soft and silent expulsions of various gasses through their noses and mouths as the day wore on. Something was changing within each of the Millers, something was growing deep inside them.
*
As the sun began to set, the front door to the Millers' house creaked open, a high pitched whine filling the air as it arced, never to be oiled, as promised time and time again.
One by one, the family members exited, the sauces and juices of a dinner uneaten the previous night caked on their faces. Their skin was pallid, the colour sapped from their irises, their pupils wide and hungry for light.
Each of them splintered off in a different direction, walking with no precise destination intended. They would walk until they found exactly what they were looking for. Each of them with the same single objective in mind.
To spread, far and wide.
Chapter 2
Not one death, but many
Rafe Clarke was on a stakeout, his eyes peeled on the windows of a house for signs of malfeasance.
If this were any stakeout previous, on any night in the past, at this stage―close to three hours in―he might have been close to boredom. But this was neither another stakeout, nor another night, and Rafe was no longer a solo freelancer.
“This is the wrong address,” Ana grumbled, spitting out a long, rumbling sigh. She rested her elbow against the window and started to rap her knuckles on the glass.
“It isn't,” Rafe replied with a chuckle. His new partner had a lot to learn about stakeouts.
“It is.”
“Isn't.”
“It's been two hours!” she whined, “We should just knock on the door and ask.”
“It's been almost three hours, and you don't quite get this whole 'staking out' thing.”
“You don't seem to get that sometimes knocking on a door can save you a lot of time 'staking' things out.”
“What do you want to say? 'Hello, I'm just going door to door, asking if the portrait of your ancestor is haunted by a spectralacrum?'”
“No, you don't say that, because nobody knows what a spookycrumb is!”
“Spectralacrum,” he corrected, trying to hold back a wide smile that very much wanted to come out. Ana had been providing some much needed lightness and frivolity to what used to be a dry and joyless occupation.
“Saying it a second time doesn't make it a word.”
“We've been through this, it's a spirit that pretends to be a lost loved one.”
“Yeah, I know what it is, I read the damn book.”
“Gustav's Spirits and Utherworldly Spectres? It's two thousand pages long...”
“Okay, I skimmed it.”
“You at least read the chapter about spectralacrums, right?”
“That seemed like the most important part, but still, skimmed it. I'm not clamouring to know their genealogy, or backstory, just how to put them back in their box.”
“It's a hell of a back story.”
“You say that about every critter.”
“Spectralacrums aren't critters...”
A shrill scream pierced the air, tearing through the jovial banter the two had naturally fallen into since they started working together.
Without a word exchanged, they burst out of the car and tore up the path, Ana casting as she ran towards the door, sealing and flinging a sigil at it that tore the locks apart into their individual components, sending them flying across the hallway as they entered the house.
The two freelancers thundered through the hallway into the living room, where an elderly couple were screaming―his wail louder and higher pitched than hers.
Their eyes were fixed on a painting on the wall, an ethereal, gossamer apparition hanging in the air in front of it.
“Grandma. . ?” the old woman whimpered.
“That ain't your grandma, grandma,” Rafe grunted, reaching to his belt with a quick casting, pulling a four inch long pink petalite crystal from a leather holster.
“Who are you calling grandma?!” the elderly lady spat at him in disgust, as she turned to Rafe and registered more anger at the word, than surprise at the presence of two strangers in her house. “I'm thirty two!”
Ana glanced over to the couple with a cocked eyebrow, then looked over to the spirit, then back to the couple. “Oh, I get it, that's what it meant by 'sucks the life out'. I totally thought it was a euphemism. Like it was a sexy-sex ghost.”
“Not the time. . .” Rafe grumbled, flinging the crystal at the painting. As it hit the canvas it shattered momentarily, then seemed to be absorbed into the paint, a pink mist exploded out from the painting towards the creature. The rosy hue appeared to latch on to the spirit, crawling up the milky white mist that made up the phantasm's body, it crystallised its ghostly form, and turned it a dull, glassy cerise, its skin the same texture as the petalite.
It fell from the air, landed on the ground with a crash―cracks forming across its body that healed almost instantly.
Binding the creature's body to the physical plane seemed to piss it off in no uncertain terms. The spectralacrum turned to Rafe and bore the sharp shards of crystalline teeth that lined its mouth. A guttural growl rippled from deep in its body as it laid its thin, tendril-like arms on the floor, and pushed off, throwing itself through the air towards him, whipping out ruby claws destined for Rafe's eyes.
He struggled to cast as the thing came for him. It was so close, coming at such a speed, there was no chance of sealing his sigil in time.
A blinding bolt of light caught the glassy spectre in mid air, and ploughed it into the far wall, its body cracking against it under the force of the blast. Ana eyed Rafe up with a wry smile, as she threw another bolt of solid light at the fiend, shattering it all over again.
“Why do you always have to make these things scary automagickally-healing glass?” she asked, firing off another blast at the solid spectre. “It's like you want to give angry ghosts terrifying sharp claws...”
“Biding them stops them dissipating,” he huffed, as he approached the crystal creature.
“Rather than just grabbing it and sticking it in a box? I will never understand you magick-types.”
“Hit it again,” he instructed, knowing full well that her magick was significantly more powerful that what little he had left.
She raised her eyebrows, putting her arms down by her side in protest. Rafe's gaze was fixed on the creature, all too aware that the spectralacrum was quickly recovering from being shattered.
When no blast came, he turned to her, and caught her stony stare. “Please,” he said. “Please hit the damn thing again, so it doesn't rip me to shreds in approximately eight sec―” A burst of light rocketed past him, taking the last word from his lips. It was so close that he could see the individual sparks that made up the torrent of light, like a billion miniature fireworks flying just inches from his face.
“Well, that was unnecessarily dangerous,” he muttered.
“Oh please, this thing's more dangerous than I am, I only take my claws out for special occasions.”
Rafe didn't have a witty retort, and simply sighed as he turned to the glazed spectre, the weakened thing trying to put itself back together.
“Are you ready to try a mind meld again?” he said, indicating to the creature's head.
“Really? On a schmeckle-numb? Does this thing even have a mind?”
“'Mind' is a figurative at the best of tim
es. Hit it again and give it a go.” He gestured to the bound spirit, and smiled reassuringly, ignoring the sceptical stare Ana was shooting him.
“Fine,” she mumbled, casting another blast of solid light that shattered the spectre against the wall one more time, before taking a deep breath and approaching it. She threw the middle finger of her right hand up in front of her, first and third finger half-cocked, thumb out as wide as could be to the side and pinkie touching her palm. Spinning her hand in a circle, she whispered the words “Dazodisa a el,” under her breath, laying the tips of all of her fingers on the creature's glassy skin.
Shadows crawled across her vision. And despite having her eyes wide open in a well lit room, soon all she could see was darkness.
*
In an instant, Ana knew the vile, hideous monster as well as she knew herself.
The spectralacrum was born of darkness, born of death. Not one death, but many. The seeds of its creation within the painting were sown by the use of burned bones for the blacks, cochineal beetles and murex snails crushed for the reds and purples, sealed by the use of tumeric-stained urine for the yellows.
Its birth was an accidental magick performed by a magickian who did not know they had such power in their blood as to parthenogenesise the base form of an incorporeal entity.
The death in the creation of the painting was only the beginning of the creature's potential. Every death that had occurred in the proximity of the painting gave it strength, power, and as it was passed down through generations it gained the might to cause those deaths itself.
And it caused them with great, unabashed glee. Took such joy in the kill, that it terrified Ana to the bone.
*
Rafe watched Ana as she invaded the spectralacrum's mind, eyes primed for any sign that she was in too deep, or that the creature might be taking advantage of the connection and seeding itself in her head―not that he had told her there was the possibility of that happening. Rafe had no desire to cause Ana to freak out over the slight possibility of losing herself to the mind that she was invading.