Book of Shadows

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  “What?” Garrett asked, tensing.

  “Sticky,” Landauer said with a grimace. “And unlocked.” He turned the knob, pushed the door open.

  They stared into the dark cave of the living room. Then, hands hovering beside their weapons, they stepped inside the door.

  The room was dark from the drawn drapes, and there was a musty and slightly foul odor. A few pieces of sagging furniture, with empty beer cans and newspaper sections scattered beside the sofa on the old and dusty carpet. The air was tainted with the faint, sweet odor of rotting food.

  There was a fireplace that looked like it was crumbling from the inside. Garrett was sure it was five kinds of fire hazard and he wouldn’t have lit it himself for any amount of money, but the still-pungent smell of wood smoke and the half-burned logs on the grate indicated it had been used recently.

  “Mr. McKenna?” Landauer called again loudly, pro forma. “This is the Boston Police Department. Are you in the house, sir?”

  No response.

  As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Garrett scanned the walls, covered in faded flowery wallpaper. His immediate guess was that McKenna had inherited his parents’ home; the décor was circa 1940 with a few seventies’ touches, and none of it or the furniture were a man’s choices.

  Garrett nudged Landauer and nodded up to the clock above the doorway to the kitchen. It was a round plastic battery-powered version and it was stopped, the thin red second hand frozen atop the longer hand with the big hands indicating 3:33. Landauer went strangely silent and just then Garrett realized the significance beyond the fact that no one had replaced the battery.

  333.

  Now Garrett stiffened, too.

  The men fanned out, moving slowly. Garrett glanced through pocket doors into a front parlor stacked with accumulated junk: greasy tools, a small disassembled engine on a side table, a dinner table overflowing with newspapers and boxes. There was a hall extending to the back: bathroom and bedroom probably, and a set of stairs to the second floor. The kitchen was to the right, with a closed swinging door.

  There was no sound and no feel of any presence besides their own in the house; they could both sense the emptiness, which diffused their tension somewhat. They both relaxed in the same moment, hands withdrawing from the vicinity of their firearms. They exchanged a glance in the dim room, then Landauer nodded toward the hall and moved into it, while Garrett pushed open the swinging kitchen door with the tip of his shoe.

  It was as dark and dank as the rest of the house, with a rank, neglected odor. Garrett smelled stale, uncirculated air, garbage not taken out for weeks, long-dirty dishes, alcohol-laced sweat . . .

  And something else. Something he didn’t want to think about, something naggingly familiar . . .

  He was distracted from the thought by the faint sound of Landauer’s footsteps clumping from the second floor above him.

  Garrett turned in the room, continuing his visual inventory. Dishes were piled in the sink, and the remnants of a meal were still on the table . . . several beer bottles, a fast-food bag, a petrifying half of some kind of burger in an open cardboard carton. There were two closed doors on the other side of the kitchen, one that led to the outside, and the other a solid door, probably to a cellar. (Garrett heard his father’s voice in his head: “Cella.”) Garrett glanced at the outside door, then moved toward the other. He reached for the doorknob . . . but hesitated before grasping the knob.

  There was a counter to his right with a dish towel crumpled by the sink, and he reached for the towel and wrapped it around the doorknob. The knob twisted under his hand, and the door opened onto a black chasm.

  Still using the towel, Garrett felt his hand along the wall beside him, searching for a light switch. He found the plate, but when he flicked it, there was only an empty click.

  The hair on the back of his neck suddenly rose, as if he were being watched from—not the cellar below, but right behind him. He twisted to look back at the door—

  There was no one.

  Garrett steadied himself against the wall in the dark and felt in his pocket for the Maglite on his key chain.

  He switched on the small, powerful beam and shone the light down into the darkness. The staircase plunged precipitously, with narrow steps of unfinished wood opening into a cavern of cellar.

  Garrett stood on the top step for a moment, and deliberately stopped his breath, listening . . . listening . . .

  Again, he had an overwhelming feeling of being watched from behind . . . but a glance over his shoulder revealed no one at his back.

  And there was no sound, no stirring, and more importantly no feeling of life below.

  Garrett relaxed a tad, and began the descent down the stairs, sweeping the small, concentrated beam of the Maglite ahead of him. The light picked up glimpses of the cellar: pale drapes of cobwebs on the ceiling beams . . . a peeling, noxious pipe that was surely asbestos . . . a malevolent old iron boiler the size of a refrigerator . . .

  There was a packed earth floor below, and sagging wood shelves with rotting junk hanging on the stone walls around him. The beam fell on another wall and Garrett froze . . . at the sight of the triple triangle sigil painted large on the plaster, and thick scrawls of other words. Then he shifted the beam lower . . . and what he caught in the light took his breath away like a savage punch.

  There was a crude narrow altar against the wall, draped in black cloth with fat black candles atop it and more triangle sigils painted just behind it. And in the center of the altar was a candleholder that he had only seen in a crude and disgusting sketch.

  A Hand of Glory. Erin Carmody’s hand, a wizened claw, clutched around a black taper candle.

  Garrett gasped, breathing in shallowly against the sudden recoil in his stomach.

  The smell of earth was around him; that root-cellar smell . . . and again, something else . . .

  Garrett shined the flashlight beam straight ahead. It took him a moment to register what he was seeing and then he staggered down the remaining few steps.

  A triangle was traced on the floor in some phosphorescent powder . . .

  And at the points of the triangle were three low stone pedestals, each holding a roundish basketball-sized lump that on some level Garrett recognized instantly, but was unable to admit to himself. But the smell was a dead giveaway.

  Dead being the operative word.

  The eyes were the next clue . . . filmed over, but unmistakable. The round lumps were human heads. Three heads, planted at three points of the triangle, long hair on two of them . . .

  Garrett choked out some guttural version of a cry . . . it sounded harsh and inadequate in the cellar.

  He barely had time to register details of the scene, the fat, burned-down candles surrounding each pedestal . . .

  And then an enormous rushing and a hideous growl came from behind and above him, and something was barreling down the stairs, thumping on the thin wood. Garrett barely had time to spin before it was on him, a snarling, frothing hulk of a creature, with the horrible reeking smell of madness, raving in lunacy, inarticulate, bestial sounds. It smacked into him and threw him to the floor. Garrett fell backward and hit his head with a sharp crack on something hard and cold, a stone surface. For a moment he saw stars.

  Then there was shrieking, and the huge foul thing was on top of him, mauling him, grappling, grasping his neck.

  Garrett gasped for breath even as the alien sounds chilled his blood. The bulk on top of him was a good seventy pounds more than his own weight and there was more than ordinary heaviness, the weight of crazy.

  Garrett suddenly went limp, made himself a dead weight, playing possum. His heart pounded out of control in his chest while he willed himself not to move . . . there was a horrible, suspended moment as his attacker paused, trying to gauge the change . . .

  Garrett shoved his hand down his own leg and grabbed for his Glock, freeing it. But just before he squeezed down on the trigger, he hesitated—and instead jerked his arm up fr
om between their bodies, up toward the ceiling, and slammed the metal weight of the weapon against his attacker’s head with a yell, hammering him over and over as the madman shrieked and screamed.

  The last thing Garrett felt was warm and sticky blood running down his fingers, his palm, his wrist, as the bulk on top of him finally, thankfully, collapsed into a dead faint, knocking Garrett’s breath out as it pressed him hard into the stale and stinking earth.

  What happened next was unclear.

  His attacker stirred on top of him and Garrett shot back to consciousness with a jolt of lifesaving adrenaline. He thrashed on the dirt cellar floor to reach the plastic handcuffs clipped to his belt, and in a frantic race against time, he freed his hands to grasp the wrists of the body on top of him and wrest him into the cuffs.

  Even as he did so, he was aware of something hideously, mortally askew. His attacker was reviving, starting to writhe and spit guttural obscenities, but the voice was horribly familiar, and the feel of the clothes he wore was terribly wrong; Garrett could sense the cut of a suit coat and matching trousers, and the size and shape of the man on top of him . . . too, too familiar.

  Garrett pushed with all his strength to roll the body off him, and simultaneously rolled hard to his right in the dirt to get himself free. He scrambled up to his feet as his attacker began to rage, his shrieks echoing off the cellar walls and ceiling.

  The cellar was black with just a splash of light from the beam of Garrett’s fallen Maglite.

  Garrett lunged and grabbed for the Mag.

  The rasping words of his attacker behind him chilled his blood: “Choronzon, acerbus et ingens! Te hoc ferto pectore flamman Choronzon—”

  With his heart in his throat, Garrett spun and trained the flashlight beam on the man who lay cursing him, his rants stripping his throat.

  The light illuminated a face hideously distorted by madness and hate. And even though Garrett had known what he would see, the sight chilled him as no other moment in his life.

  The frothing monster was Landauer.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  It was an eternity before the crime-scene van arrived, and the ambulance. Garrett was running down the dirt road as soon as he heard the sirens and the approach of vehicles, running and shouting. “Don’t touch anything!”

  He strode to meet Lingg as the crime-scene tech emerged from the van, followed by other HazMat-suited crew. “The place is booby-trapped,” Garrett rasped out. “I think there are psychotropic drugs painted on the doorknobs, maybe other places. Land touched them—I didn’t.”

  Lingg looked at him questioningly for a split second, but then nodded. “You stay, Detective,” he said, and his voice was kind. “Stay here.”

  Garrett was about to protest, but found his legs buckling underneath him. And as he braced himself against the side of the van, he saw something that turned his bowels to water.

  In the long grass beside the van were burned footprints.

  The EMTs carried a raving and cursing Landauer out in a strait-jacket. Garrett thought, half-consciously, that the shaken looks on the faces of the EMS guys must match his own.

  As they muscled Landauer into the ambulance, a dark Lexus pulled up into the dirt road. Garrett turned . . . and through his numbness felt dull surprise to see Dr. Frazer emerge from the car. He crossed the drive to stand with Garrett. “Malloy wants this handled in-house,” the psychiatrist said softly. “What happened?”

  “The doorknob,” Garrett said again. His voice shook. “He said it was sticky. Ten minutes later he was . . .” He looked toward the ambulance, where Landauer was still ranting, his voice by now bloody raw and hoarse from abuse, starting to fade, but barely. “Probably belladonna,” Garrett said bleakly. “I told the EMTs so they don’t give him anything that would react . . .” He slowed, and swallowed, trying to block out his partner’s invective. He was sickly glad the words were in Latin so he wouldn’t have to know what Land was saying.

  A tech slammed shut the doors, mercifully cutting off the hoarse shrieks. Garrett and Frazer watched as the ambulance pulled away.

  They joined Lingg at the crime-scene van and both suited up in white HazMat jumpsuits. “Don’t touch anything,” Lingg instructed the other men. “Even with gloves. Walls, doors, furniture—we have no idea what might be tainted.” He turned to Garrett and Frazer. “Probably whatever psychotropic it is was mixed with DMSO for rapid absorption into the skin.” He handed both of them helmets with respirators. “We don’t know how much might be airborne, either. Detective Garrett, we’ll follow your lead.”

  “Straight down to the cellar,” Garrett said through a dry mouth.

  Inside the house all walked gingerly, single file, careful not to brush against the doors or walls.

  The cellar door still stood open; the stairs plunged precipitously into darkness. Behind Garrett, Lingg switched on a halogen lamp and shined it down the stairs to illuminate the musty cavern below.

  The light was harsh, blue-white, and created stark shadows in the dingy basement. The painted triple triangle symbol was huge on the wall, and 333 was traced on the wall opposite, with more scrawls of text surrounding it. Garrett recognized some Latin words; others were unreadable. He flinched at the sight of the altar against the wall with its gruesome human candleholder, and turned his head away, though he knew there were worse sights in store.

  He reluctantly turned his gaze toward the triangle in the center of the cellar. It glowed with phosphorescence on the packed earth floor, the lines now smudged and blurred from Garrett’s scuffle with Landauer. Garrett focused on the three pedestals, one at each point of the triangle in the dirt.

  And he froze.

  The heads were gone.

  Garrett stared. Each stone shelf held three fat black candles—and a dark blotch, something dried and dark, but there was no sign of the heads.

  Garrett’s mind did a weird, nauseating flip. But I saw them. Not candles. Heads.

  “Their heads were there,” he croaked out. Lingg and Frazer looked toward him. “On the altars.”

  Lingg shined the lamp into the triangle. The stone pedestals were clearly bare, except for the candles and dark blotches on each.

  “I saw them,” Garrett insisted. “They were on the altars. Three heads.”

  Frazer and Lingg exchanged a wary glance. “Was there anyone else in the cellar with you?” Frazer asked, his voice maddeningly neutral.

  Garrett was reeling. “I don’t know, I . . .”

  His mind was racing, out of control. Was the killer here? Was he in the cellar with us? Did he take them out from under my nose?

  He had run, left Landauer and run . . .

  Garrett suppressed a shudder . . . and remembered the overpowering feeling of being watched when he stood under the cellar door. He spun to look up the stairs.

  No one in the doorway.

  But there was another dark smear centered above the door frame, and something in the center of the smear: a small blackish rounded lump that appeared to be nailed to the wall. Garrett turned to one of the techs beside him and took his light from him. He shined the light up the stairs, focusing on the lump.

  For a moment Garrett couldn’t make it out, then his stomach turned over. Beside him the tech squinted up toward the pool of light, and suddenly sucked in a breath. “Is that . . . Jesus.”

  It was a human eye nailed to the wall.

  The photos of the crime scene were strewn all over the conference table at Schroeder, and they were as bad as in Garrett’s memory: the triangle in the floor, with the stained pedestals; the sigils painted on the walls; the gruesome Hand of Glory; the eye nailed above the door.

  “What the hell happened down there?” Malloy raged as he paced the room. It was a quiet, tight-lipped rage, which made it all the more ominous. Frazer sat in an armchair in a corner of the room, silent, watching.

  Garrett was shaky from anxiety and exhaustion, and he had to fight to keep his voice steady. “Lingg thinks the perp mixed a psych
otropic with DMSO for—”

  “What the hell were you doing there to begin with?” Malloy’s voice ran over him.

  Garrett breathed in to keep his face from betraying his loathing of the man. “We got a partial plate from the homeless man who witnessed Amber Bright’s abduction. The plate matched a vehicle registered to John McKenna, a foreman from the Pine Street landfill where Erin Carmody’s body was dumped. McKenna stopped coming to work on June fourteenth without giving notice and with no further communication with his employers.” He paused, and was grateful that for the moment Malloy was silent, simply processing.

  “The eye nailed to the wall of the cellar is human, and this is a severed human hand.” Garrett pointed to the photo of the Hand of Glory with its burned-down black candle. “Officers are searching the scene for other human remains, but my guess is that we’re not going to find them.” He pointed to one of the photos of a stone pedestal. “Lingg confirmed that this is blood on each of the three altars.” Malloy recoiled at his use of the word.

  “The lab is running the DNA to check against Erin Carmody’s and Amber Bright’s, but it’s going to take days for the results.” Garrett took a breath. “My guess is that the killer was using their heads on these altars.”

  Malloy looked even more affronted. “Using the heads?”

  “I believe McKenna was taking his victims’ heads to use in a black magic practice called necromancy—”

  “McKenna?” The outrage was plain in the lieutenant’s voice.

  “Yes, McKenna,” Garrett said. “I believe we should be shifting our investigative focus to him. It’s possible that McKenna is dead, a third victim, but he doesn’t fit the victim profile: two teenage girls and a middle-aged man? It doesn’t add up. We’ll need HazMat to okay us to go back in and process this scene, but in the meantime, I’m going to be delving into McKenna’s personal life and employment history, and tracking him down from his last known whereabouts—”

  “Detective Garrett.” Malloy’s voice was sharp, and he held up a hand to stop him. Garrett fell silent. The lieutenant’s eyes bored into his face. “I understand that you claimed that there were human heads in the cellar. Yet no heads have been found at the scene.”