by Ron Ripley
“I have a number for you now,” Shane said. “I’m betting you won’t have it changed. Too much effort. Too many people you’d have to reach out to. I’m not sure if I know exactly where you are, but I will. Soon enough. Lisbeth’s even told me about a place.”
“Liar!” Harlan hissed. “She’s dead!”
Shane laughed. A sound reminiscent of steel being dragged through broken glass.
“That, she is,” Shane agreed. “It doesn’t mean she can’t answer questions. Or tell me things she’d rather not.”
Harlan snatched up the receiver and screamed into it, “You lie!”
“Think of it,” Shane said, his voice dropping to a whisper, forcing Harlan to press the phone to his ear. “Me, with a captive who knows far too much. Think of the damage I did when I didn’t know who you were. Consider what I’ll be able to do now. All of those places I can destroy. All of your plans shattered.”
“You can’t,” Harlan seethed. “I won’t let you. We’ll stop you. I will come to your house and gut you like a fish!”
“Good luck with that, Harlan,” Shane said.
Harlan heard someone else speak in the background, and he knew it was Frank Benedict.
“What does Frank think of this little plan of yours?” Harlan demanded. “You can tell him I’ll be going after his cousin. The little one who lives in Delaware.”
Shane chuckled, the sound abrasive. “Funny thing about that. Turns out our Frank is a little more devious than even I thought. He doesn’t have any family. Pleasant lies and falsehoods spread to ease the minds of others. His family died years ago. You don’t have any leverage there.”
“I’m going to kill you,” Harlan promised.
“There’s always the chance that you could,” Shane said, his voice suddenly pleasant. “But here’s a question. Do you know this sound?”
There was a soft, metallic click on the other end.
Harlan straightened up in his chair.
He did know the sound.
“Are you going to torture them?” Harlan asked, a grin spreading across his face.
“God, no,” Shane said with a chuckle. “These two are professionals. Anyone can see that.”
The soft, muffled cough of a suppressor traveled across the phone lines. A thump, the unmistakable sound of a body hitting the floor, followed.
“That would be the female,” Shane said. “Whoever she was. And you always kill the females first. Do you know why, Harlan?”
Harlan couldn’t answer. He was too surprised. Shane’s action was a shock, unexpected. Far more brutal than Harlan had believed the man was capable of.
“Harlan!” Shane snapped.
“What?” Harlan spat back.
“Do you know why you kill the females first?” Shane asked.
“Why?” Harlan asked, genuinely curious.
“Because they’re the most dangerous,” Shane explained. “They’ve worked the hardest.”
Harlan shook his head. He wanted to say something witty, a cutting statement that would remind Shane of where he stood in the natural order of things.
Nothing came to mind.
“Now,” Shane said, “if you’ll excuse me, I have to speak with your other employee.”
Harlan heard Shane walk away from the phone, and then the distinctive sound of a pistol being cocked.
Chapter 22: Playing the Hand
David and Blanche stood in the kitchen of Borgin Keep. She held the flashlight while he double checked the knots on the plastic bags. They had gathered up the severed limbs and secured the torso of the intruder.
David didn’t feel well. For the first time, what he had seen had sickened him. He was nearing retirement age, and according to the records kept by the Watchers, he would be able to enjoy a significant pension. The idea of sitting in a small house down in the Florida Keys and whiling away the hours made him smile. David had waded in blood for the organization, and he deserved retirement.
“What are you grinning about?” Blanche asked.
David chuckled. “I’m going to put in for retirement.”
She laughed and shook her head. “You said that every day for a month last year after we had to scrape that family out of the oven in Rhode Island. You’ll be fine by the end of the summer.”
“No,” he disagreed. “Not this time. This was different. This was one person doing it to another. Something wrong about it, Blanche.”
Blanche opened her mouth to answer, but not a sound came out. Her eyes widened, and a hand protruded from between her teeth. A second one appeared a heartbeat later.
Horrified, David watched as her mouth was spread apart. A single, dead eye peered out at him, blinked and a voice other than Blanche’s let out a callous laugh.
David stumbled back, leaving the bags on the floor. Blanche sagged, held up only by the ghost behind her. He watched her eyes roll up into her head, only the whites showing between the lids. Her arms hung limply from their sockets, her stance bowlegged.
A face peeked around her head, a madman’s smile, crazed hair.
David had never seen the ghost before.
And he never wanted to see him again.
“Hello,” the ghost said, moving Blanche’s mouth to mimic his own. “How are you doing today? This evening? This year? Hm?”
David shook his head, edging towards the door.
“You want to leave, do you?” the dead man asked.
David nodded.
The iron ring on his finger itched, and for the first time, David was afraid that it wouldn’t be enough.
“Then you should leave,” the dead man said. The grin vanished. “You should leave now before I change my mind. Before anyone here changes their mind.”
David didn’t hesitate.
He turned on his heel and sprinted out of the kitchen. Blanche was left twitching, hanging like a broken toy on the dead man’s hands. The bags of body parts were on the kitchen floor. Thoughts of retirement were discarded.
David wanted nothing more than to die in his own bed, and at his own time.
The laughter of the Keep’s dead chased him back to the truck.
Chapter 23: A Bad Time of It
In Harlan’s seventy-four years of life he had not suffered worse weeks.
None in recent memory compared to the past seven days.
He was in his office, alone, a fresh cup of coffee on the desk. Steam curled up from the dark green ceramic. Ms. Coleman, who was worth her weight in gold, had quietly brought the beverage in.
She had closed the door behind her, leaving him in a vacuum of silence. From the short time in Abigail’s former office, Harlan had come to appreciate the secretary’s intuitive nature.
Ms. Coleman would ensure that Harlan remained undisturbed for however long he decided. This, he knew, was a good thing.
New England would suffer if he didn’t manage his anger.
Shane Ryan and Frank Benedict were quickly becoming problems that Harlan didn’t want to have. He had misjudged the way they would react, and it had cost him. His best observation team had been killed. With the two of them dead, he couldn’t risk sending in the cleaning crew to rid the house of trace evidence. Harlan would have to reach out to an arsonist and hope a fire could rid him of that portion of the problem.
Then he had received the phone call from David, a man that Harlan had trained and mentored. Someone he trusted with the delicate ambassadorship between the Watchers and Borgin Keep.
The dead were acting up. One of them had killed David’s partner, a woman whose name escaped Harlan, and chased David from the premises.
And David had put in his request for retirement at the end of the phone call.
After informing Harlan of Abigail’s continued existence.
Harlan snarled at the idea of her alive. She had mismanaged the Shane Ryan affair from the start. With her still breathing, she may have antagonized the ghosts in Borgin, which meant there would be more incidents near the Keep. And more incidents translate
d to more police activity.
More police activity meant more inquiries, which the Watchers strongly discouraged.
Miserable, Harlan thought, picking up his coffee and taking a sip of the hot liquid. Wretched.
He considered the insertion of another team into Borgin, then shook his head. His people were brave. They all believed in the end goal of the Watchers, of finding the One who would crush death for them.
But they were not zealots. They would not throw their lives away cheaply.
No, Borgin would have to wait.
Harlan would focus on Shane, and how he might bring the man to task for his actions. With a smile on his lips, Harlan wondered if he might be able to get an arsonist close enough to 125 Berkley Street, and whether or not the dead might be able to stop him.
Chuckling, Harlan reached out, picked up the phone, and dialed a number in Nashua.
Chapter 24: A Disturbing History
“It isn’t good,” Frank said.
He had a thick packet of papers in his hands and he looked at Shane with an earnest expression. His milky white eye caught and absorbed the evening light.
Shane sighed. “When is it over?”
Frank shrugged, leaned forward and held the papers out. Shane took them, the sheaf felt heavy. There were at least fifty pages. Maybe sixty.
And all of it was about Borgin Keep.
“The place has been a nightmare since the beginning,” Frank said, settling back into his chair.
“How so?” Shane asked, putting the papers down on his lap. He lit a cigarette.
“It started with deaths during the construction,” Frank explained. “Some of the workers left, but more were hired. The owner, Emmanuel Borgin, evidently had the only jobs in town. Or anywhere, for that matter.”
“So no matter how many died,” Shane said, glancing down at the papers, “others just kept coming in.”
Frank nodded.
“Do we have a total number of deaths there?” Shane asked.
“Confirmed, we have twenty-nine,” Frank said.
Shane felt a surge of depression wash over him. “And unconfirmed?”
“Rumor has it,” Frank said, “that the death toll reaches over two hundred.”
“Damn,” Shane murmured. He flipped through the pages until he found a picture of the building. “Hell, it’s a castle.”
Frank nodded. “Evidently Mr. Borgin had a thing for medieval Europe. Some architects were told they were building an exact replica. Dungeons and all.”
“Some architects?” Shane asked. “Did he use more than one?”
“Definitely,” Frank confirmed. “No one knows how many though. Some people said there were architects in Europe that he conferred with. One page I found said that there are as many levels below ground as there are above.”
Shane tapped his foot on the floor, an uncomfortable feeling settled over him.
“Frank,” he said after a brief pause, “was there anything in this that talked about changing rooms?”
Frank looked surprised as he nodded. “How did you know?”
“Just a guess,” Shane answered.
“Um, yeah. There are diaries from a couple of his household staff who said the house seemed to change from night to night. They knew better,” Frank continued, “than to wander out of their rooms after hours. It seemed to be safe in the walls, but that was it.”
“Servants’ passages,” Shane murmured.
“Yeah.”
“What did old Emmanuel die of?” Shane asked.
“No one knows,” Frank answered. “Seems like he disappeared and that was it. The police and his lawyers went in, looked for him, and couldn’t find anything. Not a trace. Everything he owned was still there.”
“Did they ever find any evidence of multiple subfloors?” Shane asked.
Frank shook his head. “A regular basement, that was it.”
“So,” Shane said, letting cigarette smoke out through his nostrils, “things got weird after he vanished?”
“You can say that,” Frank said. “Again, there are no firm numbers here. If we take police records, we’ve got about one abandoned car a year near the building. Occasionally a person will be found with the car, but that’s only once in a great while. Most of the cops think that people just like to dump their cars there. Usually the vehicles are stripped of any identification; plates, vehicle ID numbers. All of it. And when they can find the owner, they’re usually all well and good.”
“Usually?” Shane asked.
“Usually,” Frank said. “But not always. Sometimes the owners are found, insane. Wandering around the road, or in the woods, talking about Borgin Keep, and the ghosts, and about barely getting out.”
“Are any of them still alive?” Shane asked.
“What?” Frank said, confused.
“Any of the people who were found, are any of them still alive?” Shane said.
“I don’t know,” Frank said. “I didn’t even think about it. Why?”
“Because it may do us some good to talk to someone who’s been in there,” Shane stated.
Frank nodded. “I’ll see what I can dig up. It may be tough getting in to see them.”
“We’ll get it done,” Shane said. He looked down at the papers.
Frank stood up, he turned to leave, hesitated and asked, “How are you doing?”
“I’ve got a lot of hate in me,” Shane replied. “They killed Mason and his wife.”
Frank nodded.
“I want to do a whole lot worse.”
“Me too,” Frank admitted. Without another word, he left the study. Shane picked up the sheaf of papers and began to read.
Chapter 25: Immolation
He enjoyed fire.
To him there was nothing more beautiful, or purer than flame. When he had first discovered matches at the age of six, it had been an awakening. The world had opened for him as he watched the flames consume first one page, then another of his father’s Bible. Later, when he turned seven, he had stood and observed how fire had devoured his father’s flesh, the man’s screams trapped behind a barrier of duct tape.
As always, the memory brought a smile to the arsonist’s face, and he felt serene as he finished the preparations for 126 Berkley Street. He set the rudimentary timer, and snuck through the darkness to an elm tree which grew on the sidewalk.
His next task, 125 Berkley Street, waited for him. It was a great and beautiful brick building. The arsonist smiled for he knew everything burned.
When he was certain that no one was peering out at him, he made his way across the street, careful to avoid the street lamps which held back the night. The arsonist enjoyed nighttime, the fires burned brighter. The sound of wood popping and glass shattering would carry so much further.
He would light up the night sky, and if he set the fire properly, it would burn for hours.
The arsonist had plied his trade, his passion, up and down the East Coast for almost a decade. He had eventually come into contact with Harlan, and Harlan had paid him to start fires.
To burn down homes and buildings. Sometimes Harlan even let him set the fires when there were people in them.
The arsonist shuddered with delight. He had never forgotten the heady scent of his father, taped down and roasting in bed.
With a happy sigh the arsonist made it to his next target, sneaking onto the property. The thick grass was damp, rain glistening on the blades. There had been a heavy down pour earlier in the day, which would make the blaze a little more difficult to light.
A little, but nothing he couldn’t handle. Buildings always burned, that he had learned.
He traveled along the side of the house, ducking beneath all of the windows, regardless as to whether the blinds were closed or not. To be caught would ruin the fun.
He finally reached the far side of the house and he was pleasantly surprised to find that there were no lights there. Not a single motion sensor, no glaring security light. He was alone in darkness, allowed
to play with fire.
The arsonist hummed the tune to ‘Camptown Ladies’ as he slid his backpack off and sat down on the cool grass. He removed his tools and went about the delicate art of arson. Each action performed was necessary. He didn’t waste time or effort on anything unessential. The arsonist was many things, but unprofessional was not one of them. He knew each step needed to be done correctly, and he remembered what one of his many psychologists had told him.
Do it right the first time.
The statement was pure and simple, a verbal twin to fire.
The arsonist repeated the phrase to himself, and leaned over to set the accelerant against the side of the house. An uncomfortable chill wrapped around him and he shivered, a frown creasing his forehead.
He had checked the weather for the evening when he had made his plans. Everything was important when it was time to burn a building down. He couldn’t have his hands shaking from the cold while he tried to set the fire.
The arsonist sat back, considered whether or not he should find his gloves and put them on, and rubbed at an itch on the back of his neck.
“What are you doing?” a voice asked.
He let out a squeak of surprise and nearly fell over as he twisted around, looking for the speaker.
When he didn’t see anyone, the arsonist tried to get his heart to slow down.
“I asked you a question,” the voice stated, coming from a dark clump of trees off to the right.
The arsonist realized the voice belonged to a little girl and his heartbeat calmed down.
“Why don’t you come out where I can see you?” he asked, his voice light and pleasant.
“I can see you fine from where I am,” she said. “You shouldn’t answer a question with a question though. It’s rude.”
“Well,” the arsonist said, straining to see her among the trees. “I’m trying to fix a little part of the wall. Is this your house?”
“There’s nothing wrong with the wall,” the girl stated. “And no, it isn’t my house. But I live here.”
“Oh,” the arsonist said. He slipped his hand into his backpack, found the grip of the pistol he kept for emergencies and removed it casually. “Do you like living here?”