by Hults, Matt
Mallory glared at him. “No way,” she said. “Not cool. Definitely not cool! If I get caught—”
“Don’t wet yourself,” the boy laughed. “This stuff is like high-end caffeine tablets. It’s nothing hardcore.”
She turned to Derrick for assistance, arguing that if her dad came home and found them all hyped up on “mood-enhancers” it would be the end of any pool parties for the remainder of her life.
“You said the kid was gone,” Derrick replied. “And your dad’s at the movies. He won’t be back till after twelve at the earliest.”
Chris nodded. “Yeah, we can blaze out of here by then. He’ll never know.”
Mallory fell silent, not certain how to reply. She didn’t want to disappoint Derrick, who obviously didn’t think the situation was anything serious, but she didn’t want to lose her father’s trust, either. Then, while her mouth fumbled to find a reply to Chris’s last statement, she suddenly had a brainstorm.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “I know the perfect place to hang out, somewhere we won’t be seen or bothered by anyone. There’s an old barn in the back woods, behind the neighborhood. It must have a dirt road or a driveway that connects to it off one of the county roads. We could go there.”
The group glanced to one another for reactions, and all seemed to like the idea of exploring an abandoned farm.
“Cool, let’s do it,” Adam proclaimed, clearly eager to sample Troy’s goods.
“Sounds like fun,” Lisa added.
Derrick’s friends looked annoyed by the idea of having to relocate again, but they both obeyed when he told them to pack up their shit and get moving.
They all waited for Elsa to collect her clothes then left the yard together, hurrying back through the house and out the front door. In the foyer again, Mallory started to set the alarm—which Lori had carelessly left off—when she suddenly realized they were one person short.
She glanced back into the house while the others continued out to the cars. “Hey, Tim, come on, we’re going to go check out the old barn.”
When he didn’t reply, she walked to the bathroom but found the room empty.
“Are you coming or what?” Becky called from the front door.
“Tim’s gone,” Mallory answered, rejoining her friend. “He must’ve left when we were out at the pool.”
“So?”
“He didn’t even say goodbye. I think he’s mad because of Derrick.”
Becky shrugged. “Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now, right? Make it up to him later. Let’s go.
“Yeah, I guess.”
Exiting the house, she closed the door and locked it with her key, wishing that she’d had at least once more chance to thank Tim for inviting her to the fair. She cringed with another stab of guilt, realizing now that she’d just been setting him up for a fall by going.
She tried not to think about it. Instead, she hurried down the front steps and rounded the Mercedes, eventually settling down into the front seat next to Derrick.
* * *
Lori listened to the action upstairs.
The sound of footsteps trailed from one end of the house to the other, accompanied by the muffled noises of half a dozen voices.
She didn’t budge.
Overhead, she caught the clearer sound of a girl calling out to someone named Tim—Tim Fleming?—mentioning something about a barn.
Lori remained silent, not daring to speak.
It could be a trick. Maybe the girl was really … that thing.
After a moment of calm, the girl’s footsteps trailed to the front of the house and then came the sound of the front door closing.
Lori remained motionless.
Higher up the wall, she caught the subtle sound of insect legs scuttling over the cinderblock wall, a June bug or some other sizable beetle that had entered through the window frame.
Bugs! her brain wailed. Oh, God, please no, not bugs!
She stuffed a fist in her mouth, knowing that to scream at the bug or to lash out in hope of squashing it would call attention to her location, the same way calling out to the girl moments ago would have done.
Outside, a car engine came to life. Then another.
Don’t move. He’s out there. He wants you to cry for help.
She listened to car doors closing.
Suddenly, something dropped onto her face, something hard and smooth, about the size of a gumball. Half a dozen prickly legs gripped the skin of her cheek.
Covering the fading whir of the departing car engines, Lori screamed.
CHAPTER 33
Melissa trailed behind Frank when they left the empty ranch house, glad to trade the oppressive silence of its vacant rooms for the noise of crickets singing in the shrubs.
She found the night sky a blank chalkboard, lacking even the slightest hint of the starlight she’d observed earlier. A wind blew across the front yard, blustering her hair. The scent of ionized air carried on its back was the sure forewarning of a storm.
Together, she and Frank had searched the large home from top to bottom, but even their combined efforts failed to locate clues to the identity of her attackers. Against Frank’s recommendation, Melissa planned to use his cell phone to call for backup and request a forensics crew to process the new crime scene. Upon their arrival, she would make sure they scoured every inch of the dwelling for any indications of what had happened.
“I wish you’d reconsider,” Frank said.
She didn’t reply.
The two of them crossed the turnaround driveway in silence, Frank walking beside her without even a glance, preoccupied with his car keys. While he went to retrieve his phone from the Chevy, Melissa stopped at her own vehicle in search of some painkillers.
She dropped into the driver’s seat before she realized the dome light hadn’t come on when she opened the door. Groaning, she dug out her keys and tried the ignition. No response.
“Perfect!”
“The electromagnetic pulse probably fried your engine’s circuitry,” Frank remarked, having returned to her side. He handed her his phone. “Just like it toasted your cell phone.”
She looked up at him from the driver seat. “And I suppose the killer ghost is to blame?”
“In its natural state, the entity is a being of pure energy. At least that’s the theory. If it’s true, then such a creature could conceivably control other electrical forces. That’s how I believe Kane passed through doors sealed with state-of-the-art electronic locks and how he disrupted security cameras to hide his activity; the entity was helping him. But that same energy registers on devices like TriField meters, meaning we can use its own powers against it, as a method of detection; hence the equipment in my truck.”
“Very sci-fi,” she replied.
Lines of frustration marred Frank’s face.
She got out of the car. “Look, I’m sorry. I owe you my life, so I don’t mean to make light of your beliefs. At the same time, it’s not easy for me to immediately agree with your theory of what’s been happening. I just can’t.”
He fashioning a weak smile. “Five years ago I would’ve said the same thing. But”—he tapped his eye patch—“that was before this monster nearly killed me.”
“You mean, before Kane nearly killed you.”
Frank shook his head, and the added flicker of lightning on the horizon behind him enhanced the already uneasy ambience of her night.
“Have you ever read anything about human sacrifices?” he asked.
She cringed. “Why would I want to?”
“Because it has everything to do with your investigation.”
Melissa studied him for a moment, pondering a retort. In the end she simply crossed her arms and leaned against her car. “You’ve got five minutes.”
Frank nodded. “Then I’ll keep it short. What we’re dealing with, Detective, is a creature that can harness the life energy of its victims and use it to manipulate the environment. Humans have done the same in the pas
t. Ancient cultures used sacrifices as a way to tap that power and use it in funerary practices, supposedly to re-animate the dead. Aztecs and Mayans believed the gods they worshiped required human energy as food, nourishment they provided in exchange for a prosperous existence. For those people, blood offerings played a crucial part in their lives.”
Melissa checked her watch. “Does this little anthropology lesson have a point?”
Frank walked to the passenger side of his Blazer. He reached through the open window and picked up a manila folder off the seat.
“Kane was also sacrificing people, but it wasn’t part of any ancient religious practice or deity worship. I think the entity was teaching him how to manipulate the life energy of their victims, using it as fuel for their magic, just like the Mayans and the Egyptians once did. Look at this.”
He held out the folder.
Melissa only stared at him. “Magic?”
Frank nodded. “Don’t underestimate its legitimacy. If this thing has been around for as long as I understand, there’s no telling what sort of knowledge it might possess, or how many ages it’s been since the world has seen this kind of power.”
“Magic?” she repeated.
Frank flipped open the folder and pulled out a black and white printout of an autopsy photograph, holding it up for her to see. The charred, reassembled remains of a headless woman lay spread across an exam table like a filleted fish on a cutting board.
“Jesus,” she whispered.
“I got this from a friend up north. They identified the girl using medical records after she was reported missing by her parents. Her name is Penelope Styles. As you can see, her head and hands are missing and her ribcage is almost obliterated. The investigators are waiting on DNA tests for an official ID confirmation, but the body shows evidence of a healed break on the collar bone, which matches the girl’s medical history. She died in that gas station explosion a few nights ago. According to the chief examiner, however, it wasn’t the fire that killed her.”
He offered her the file again and this time she took it.
“What was the cause of death?”
Frank’s expression remained stoic. “Someone removed her heart.”
Melissa met his gaze, then flipped to the autopsy report and confirmed his statement.
“A beating human heart is the most powerful of all sacrifices,” Frank said. “Dozens of cultures have practiced heart removal throughout history, and I’ve come to suspect that’s no coincidence.”
She closed the file and handed it back. “No, it sounds more like a shared trait of humanity’s brutal social evolution.”
“Is it?” Frank asked. “Or does it prove that these creatures have been plaguing the world for centuries, appearing throughout history and selecting certain people to train in their ways? You wanted to know what Kane’s victims had in common. Well, I’d say it’s a good bet each of them shared unusually strong life forces. That’s why Kane went to such extremes tracking down certain people, why he killed so many of them at once. He wanted all that energy released at the same time, feeding the entity, powering their enchantments.”
Melissa saw where he was going. “The wounds you described that were cut into his body, the writing on that stone …”
“All part of some spell,” Frank replied.
“But what spell?” she pressed. “And why would it need Kane?”
“It wants a body,” he replied. “A living, breathing body. Why it chose Kane, I can’t say. Maybe he fit some supernatural criteria only the entity understands. Whatever the reason, their overall goal was to bond together, to merge the entity’s power and consciousness with Kane’s physical form.”
“How could you know that?”
“From the writing in Kane’s basement,” he replied. “The FBI’s linguistics experts originally told me it was gibberish, but over the years I’ve shown samples of it to various anthropologists all over the world. Most of the characters show similarities to dozens of ancient languages—Incan, Hopi, Aramaic, Norse, Bahasa; the list goes on and on. It refers to a creature known as the Vermorca, a man-god raised from the dead, and the two symbols they found repeated over and over again stood for unity and flesh.”
Melissa sighed. “This is bullshit, Frank. Do you even hear what’s coming out of your mouth? The whole idea of it is just … just … incomprehensible.”
“What part don’t you understand?”
Melissa laughed. She knew she should drop the subject, let it go, but Frank’s level of conviction infuriated her, and now she wanted to prove him wrong. “All right, answer me this: if your entity-thing has been around for so long, since the time of Christ—”
“Before Christ.”
“Whatever. If it’s as powerful as you say, being able to cast magic spells and make bodies out of anything it wants, then why now? Why didn’t this thing come after you five years ago, when you busted Kane? You’re the one who tracked him down and put an end to his crimes, you’re the one who ruined his plans. In all this time, why hasn’t this thing killed you? Seems sort of convenient that it would just up and vanish the second Kane got captured. The way you describe it, you’d think it would’ve come looking for revenge.”
Frank’s one eye broke from her gaze and his posture sagged. With a heavy, miserable breath he seemed to age an additional twenty years before her eyes.
“Now, there’s a question I’ve asked myself more than once over the years,” he said, “and every time I do, I wonder if it would have really made a difference.”
“What does that mean?” she asked in a softer tone.
Frank looked at the ground and cleared his throat, perhaps buying more time before needing to answer. “I’m fifty-seven years old and I need to sleep with the lights on. Sometimes I wet myself in my sleep from the nightmares I have of Kane’s basement, of seeing my friends slaughtered. And when I’m alone, it takes me almost an hour to work up the courage just to take the garbage out. You can imagine how hard it was for me to come all the way out here tonight. I don’t have any family left, my friends stopped visiting when I was reluctant to leave my home, and I haven’t been with a woman since this whole mess started. Believe me, Detective, sometimes it seems like I’m already dead.”
Frank’s revelation of how his experiences had affected him left Melissa speechless. She found herself unable to meet the humility in his eyes. Instead, she turned and stared at the glowing windows of the ranch house.
“Up until now, I believed the entity to be a transient being,” Frank resumed, “going from one person to the next, abandoning its devotee whenever it desired. That’s what had me scared half-crazy for so long, thinking it could show up at any time, which is why I invested in all this elaborate sensory equipment after I retired. You may not have noticed it, but I have an EMF reader in every corner of my apartment. I needed the peace of mind. But now, with all this taking place after Kane’s death, I’m starting to think that the entity didn’t come after me simply because it couldn’t. If Kane and this monster were performing some sort of union spell, something to blend them together, and if we hurt Kane badly enough before it was finished, the entity could’ve been trapped inside his half-dead body. That might explain all the thrashing around I told you about, all the incoherent ranting; it was the entity realizing it had bonded with a dying body, too weakened from casting the original spell to free itself. It was stuck.”
The wind hustled a gathering of dried leaves across the driveway, producing a sound like scuffling feet. Melissa and Frank spun to face the noise, but relaxed when they realized what it had been.
Frank faced her. “We can defeat it, Melissa. I’m prepared this time, everything from holy water to plastic explosives with remote detonators.”
“Explosives,” Melissa echoed.
Frank smirked. “When you deal with bad guys all your life you learn where they shop.”
She looked away again. Despite what a dedicated detective he’d been in the past, Melissa had the disheartenin
g feeling that Frank’s original bout with Kane had left mental wounds that might never heal.
In the distance she saw lights approaching, heard the wavering sound of far-off sirens. Behind them, several fingers of lightning reach over the horizon and gripped the cloudy sky. No thunder rumbled in the air.
Not yet.
CHAPTER 34
BJ dashed through the back lawn of another yard, not sure who the yard belonged to or how far he’d come from his own house. His only certainty came from the driving urgency to get away, even if it meant fleeing into the unknown.
High overhead, thick clouds closed out the heavens, blocking the starlight and limiting visibility to only a few feet. Obstacles exploded out of the night in his path, then faded away in his wake as fast as they’d appeared. He didn’t stop.
The cool grass cushioned the bare soles of his feet, but the roughed patches of dirt still retained a noticeable degree of warmth leftover from the day. Skyward, the wind bent the treetops, each pulsating gust stronger than the last. All around him the looming branches whispered a warning to remain quiet.
Shhh, Shhh, Shhhhhhh.
When he wasn’t looking for what obstacle would jump out at him next—bush, flowerbed, birdbath—he searched for a lit house where he might be able to find help. So far, all the buildings ahead appeared to be abandoned. Set against the white painted walls, their blackened window glass looked cold and uninviting.
He’d entered another yard—the grass reached slightly higher here, tickling his ankles—when the heart-stopping sound of a snapping twig caused him to skid to a stop and take cover behind a low shrub.
Holding back his burning breath, trying not to let out the wail of fear that squirmed inside his throat like a living animal, BJ hunkered down and forced himself to remain motionless.
At first, all went silent—all except for the wind and the trees. Soon, a stealthily hidden swarm of crickets began to sing, followed by the distant barking of a dog somewhere on the other side of the neighborhood; its heavy woofs seemed muffled by the umbrella of sooty clouds above.