She would have asked him if he was sure they were in the right place, but the police cars spoke for themselves. She even recognized Mark’s car, but it was empty. All the officers had to be inside.
She walked around the car and grabbed Jeremiah’s hand, trying to steady herself. He gave it a squeeze and together they started forward.
“Careful on these steps,” he warned, as he began testing the bottom one before putting his weight fully on it. It groaned but it held.
She followed him up the stairs, putting her feet where he had. Earlier in the car her heart had been pounding in excitement and now it was pounding in fear. She could feel sweat start to bead on her forehead and her stomach twisted, cramping harder.
This is not a good place, she thought.
They made it up onto the porch and then crossed to the door which was gaping open and sagging slightly on its hinges.
“Hello?” Jeremiah called, clearly as unwilling to cross over the threshold as she was.
Hello.
Cindy jerked. “Did you hear that?” she asked. It had been faint, but close, like someone whispering in her ear.
Jeremiah shook his head, but he looked worried.
“Jeremiah?” she heard Mark call from inside a few seconds later.
She felt a bit of relief. At least he was here and okay, not swallowed up by the horrid house. She wiped the sweat off her forehead. The place was really getting to her. She had never liked desolate, abandoned places and this one was by far the creepiest she had ever seen.
She heard footsteps echoing inside and then saw a light bobbing up and down in the gloom. “Glad you could make it,” she heard Mark say.
A second later she saw him, holding a flashlight, and crossing a dusty, cobweb filled entryway toward them. He paused slightly when he saw her and glanced at Jeremiah.
“No pastors?”
“No pastors,” Jeremiah affirmed.
Mark let loose with a string of profanity unlike any she’d ever heard from him. They stepped back and made room for Mark to join them on the porch. She instantly noticed that he was drenched in sweat and his pupils were dilated.
“It’s not good in there,” he said tersely.
“You asked for religious expert opinions. Here we are,” Jeremiah said.
Mark wiped his forehead on his shirt sleeve. “Creepy house,” he muttered under his breath.
“What is going on here?” Cindy asked.
“I don’t know, that’s why I called,” Mark admitted. He stared at her intently. “There’s something...occult about all of this. Six months ago I wouldn’t have let you anywhere near that basement, but a lot has changed. If you can’t handle it, though, just say so.”
Cindy swallowed hard. It was a test of the new her and she didn’t want to fail. Nothing in her wanted to go into that house, but she didn’t want to let Jeremiah or herself down. “I’m okay,” she said, grateful that her voice at least sounded steady.
Jeremiah didn’t want Cindy to have to put on a brave face and go see whatever the detective had called them out to see. He wanted to shield her from whatever horror waited. But he respected her resolve and he knew that he should let her go if that was what she had wanted. He tried to calm himself down. This was just another homicide, even if it was in a creepy house. It had been a crazy morning, how much worse could it get?
Mark turned and led the way into the house. They followed close behind, Cindy still holding onto his hand. He could hear floorboards creaking above him and he glanced up.
“I’ve got officers sweeping the rest of the house,” Mark said as if sensing his sudden concern.
He led the way to the kitchen. Toward the back of it a door gaped open and he could see the start of a staircase heading down.
“Most California houses don’t have basements,” Cindy said.
“Yeah, well this isn’t most California houses,” Mark said grimly. “Stay close.”
There was no electricity so they descended the stairs with only Mark’s flashlight to guide them. Jeremiah kept swiveling his head, feeling like he was hearing soft noises, whispers that he couldn’t quite pin down.
As they neared the bottom of the stairs Jeremiah could see more light and at last he could tell that it was coming from electric lanterns that had been set up to cast light on the scene. The lanterns looked powerful, but their light seemed to be swallowed up almost instantly by darkness. There were deep shadows everywhere and the light couldn’t do enough to keep them at bay.
He felt Cindy clutch his hand tighter and he could hear her breathing. It was shallow, frightened sounding. When they made it down to the basement floor he felt a sick wrenching sensation in his gut. He could smell something, powerful, pungent. It wasn’t blood, but he couldn’t identify the smell. It gave him the overwhelming feeling of danger and he silently cursed himself for having left his gun in his office at the synagogue. He hadn’t wanted to risk one of the church pastors seeing him carrying it.
“Something bad happened here,” Cindy whispered, and he was inclined to agree with her.
Mark walked a bit farther and they followed until they could see what it was he was shining his flashlight on. He felt Cindy jerk to a stop and gasp. She started to shake as he just stared at the body on the ground.
It was a young woman, probably about twenty, if that. She had ritualistic markings all over her body. She was dead, eyes fixed and staring in a terror that communicated itself to him. There were no signs of physical trauma to the body, though, no obvious causes of death. Her arms were straight out at her sides, wrists bound by ropes which were secured at the other ends by a stake in the ground. Her legs were also bound and angled away from each other. Her entire body had been positioned and laid out in exact lines on top of the bloody pentagram she was staked out on top of.
“I was wrong,” Jeremiah said softly to himself. “This is crazier.”
2
Cindy wanted out of that basement badly. The hair on her neck and arms was all standing on end, and the sick feeling inside her stomach that she’d had outside the house intensified tenfold. This whole place was unnatural. Evil. The dark, the cold, and a faint, unpleasant odor all urged her to leave this place and never look back.
“What killed her?” Jeremiah asked softly.
The devil, Cindy thought, but managed not to say out loud.
“We won’t know until the coroner can examine her. As you can tell there are no obvious signs of injury. It could be we’re looking at poison or something like that.”
Cindy didn’t believe it. She should. She knew she should. It was logical, it made sense. The problem was, nothing else about what she was seeing and feeling made any sense. Her stomach cramped even harder, causing her to involuntarily bend over slightly which just brought her that much closer to the body.
Jeremiah stepped forward, and it took all of her strength to let go of his hand. Slowly he knelt down next to the body, head moving back and forth as he took in all the details.
An upside down pentagram was drawn in what looked like marker on the woman’s forehead. That was the only symbol that she recognized.
“Some of these symbols are Hebrew. Others are from long dead cultures,” Jeremiah said.
“How come you recognize some of the older ones?” Mark asked.
Jeremiah grimaced. “I had an...associate...who preferred using archaic means of communication.”
“I knew both your careers would come in handy,” Mark said quietly.
Cindy couldn’t pry her eyes off the woman’s body. Underneath the fear that she was feeling there was another emotion stirring. Anger. Someone had done something terrible to this woman, and it was clear she had died in terror.
Suddenly she felt a chill dance down her spine and she spun around, sure that she had heard a footstep behind her in the dark. There was no one there. At least, no one that she could see. The sick feeling in her gut intensified and she realized that she had started shaking uncontrollably.
“C
an we get out of here?” She barely managed to get the words out around the sudden tightness in her throat. She couldn’t breathe and it was almost as though she could feel fingers closing around her neck, squeezing, cutting off more and more of her air.
She took a step back toward the stairs as she heard her own breaths coming as ragged gasps. Her head was starting to swim, and she knew that she had to get out of there.
Something doesn’t want us here, the thought came unbidden into her mind.
She saw Mark twist around suddenly as though he, too, heard something. His hand was on the gun under his jacket, and when he turned back the dim light reflected off the sweat that was coating his forehead.
Cindy took another step toward the stairs, hoping that it would make her feel better. Instead of the pressure on her throat easing up it only seemed to get worse. Her fingertips were tingling and her gasping breaths sounded thunderously loud in the dark.
Mark jerked around again, this time half-pulling his gun from his holster. She could hear Jeremiah muttering something to himself in Hebrew as he continued to stare at the body.
The room was beginning to swim before her eyes, and Cindy realized she was about to collapse. She tried to say something, to warn Jeremiah and Mark. They weren’t alone, she could feel it. Something was watching them, and it didn’t want them there.
Leave.
The words hung in the air, the faintest whisper of sound.
Cindy turned and grabbed the handrail. She hauled herself up five quick steps before the world began to tilt in front of her. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. Her legs wouldn’t do what she told them to do, and without knowing how it had happened she found herself tumbling backward.
She landed hard on her back on the cement floor, her feet caught up on the first step. She tried to grab her throat, but her arms wouldn’t move. She tried to yell for help, but not even a whisper escaped her lips. She had lost feeling in her legs and everything was going black when she felt arms around her.
Jeremiah. She knew it was him even though she couldn’t see him in the gathering darkness. He would protect her. She was safe. Still she knew that she had to do what she could to stay conscious.
A moment later she could feel herself being bounced around as they raced up the stairs. She could hear them creaking and groaning and for one terrible moment she thought they were going to crash through them. The wood held, though, and soon they were running through the house, then out onto the porch, then they were by the car.
She heard someone shouting, but she didn’t think it was Jeremiah. The pressure on her throat was beginning to ease up and relief surged through her. They were out of the hideous house. Everything was going to be fine.
Someone came over and after a moment she realized it was a paramedic. She hadn’t realized there were any there at the house. Jeremiah put her down on the ground, and the other man bent over her and began to examine her.
After looking her over he said, “You’re having an allergic reaction to something.”
She remembered the strange smell that had been in the basement and wondered if it could be connected.
“Are you allergic to anything that you know of?” he continued.
She shook her head, not sure if she could speak yet. He asked a couple of more questions and then gave her some medication. Faster than she would have thought possible she was able to start breathing freely again. With Jeremiah’s help she sat up slowly, just in time to see the medical examiner bringing the body out of the house.
Mark exchanged a few words with both him and the paramedic before he came over.
“You doing okay?” he asked, worry evident in his tone.
“Yes,” Cindy managed to say.
“You had us worried. I wonder what you were allergic to?”
She shook her head. She didn’t know, but she hoped to never encounter whatever it was again.
“You might want to see a doctor and have the whole battery of allergy tests,” he suggested.
It was probably a good idea. She shuddered to think what might have happened if she had been alone when the attack happened. Then again, there was no way she would have been alone in that house. Still, whatever was in it that had triggered the reaction could be something she might encounter elsewhere.
“It’s a heck of a thing,” Mark said, looking distracted.
“Where’s Liam?” Cindy asked, realizing she hadn’t seen Mark’s partner.
“On vacation, lucky son-of-a-gun. Wish I was. In all my years I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”
“Nor have I,” Jeremiah offered.
“You said she had a mixture of symbols on her. What do the symbols mean?” Mark asked. “I mean, obviously pentagrams are Satanic.”
Jeremiah shook his head slowly. “That one in particular was symbolic of evil because it was upside down and that would seem to be the intent of it. Regular ones with the single point facing upward aren’t Satanic.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“The normal pentagram is a Christian symbol representing the five wounds of Christ: head, both hands, and both feet. The upside down version didn’t become a negative thing until more modern times when occultists and Satanists used it to represent something contrary.”
Cindy had heard something like that before, though she couldn’t remember where.
“So, point up okay, point down bad?” Mark asked. “That makes no sense.”
“It’s the inversion, the opposite. Like the difference between a cross and an upside down cross,” Cindy said. She guessed even that was a corrupted symbol, though. Legend had it that the Apostle Peter had been crucified upside down because he didn’t consider himself worthy to be killed in the same manner as Christ. Even an act of humility could be corrupted by those with evil intentions.
Jeremiah was still worried about Cindy. When she had fallen off the stairs it had scared him, and when he realized she wasn’t breathing right he had felt a kind of powerlessness he never wanted to feel again.
There was something deeply wrong with the house and particularly the basement. He had been doing his best to try and block it out, even though his imagination had been working overtime. He could have sworn he’d heard noises, whispers, most inaudible but a few startlingly clear.
He had told himself that it was nothing, merely an old building and the suggestion of what had happened in it. The fact that both Mark and Cindy had been radiating their own fear hadn’t helped any so he’d been trying to ignore that, too. Which was why he hadn’t realized Cindy was in trouble earlier.
“If you get me photographs from the coroner of the symbols, I’ll see what I can do to translate them for you,” he said. He didn’t want to admit it, but even though he’d known exactly what the Hebrew meant at the time he’d been staring at the body, he couldn’t remember what it was. That also scared him. He’d never had problems with recall like that before. He wondered if the shock of Cindy falling had been great enough to cause him to forget or if there was something more at work. What he did know was that he was grateful to be out of that basement, and he wished that he’d never answered the phone when Mark had called that morning.
“I’ll see that you get the pictures as soon as possible,” Mark said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this whole mess, and we need to get to the bottom of it fast. I’m sorry I pulled you two into this.”
Jeremiah just nodded. It wouldn’t do any good to echo the man’s sentiment.
An officer approached Mark and Jeremiah noted that the man was pale. “We finished checking the rest of the house,” he told the detective.
“And?” Mark asked tersely.
“We didn’t find anything. It appears to be completely abandoned. No furniture, no signs of habitation. There were thick coats of dust on everything.”
“Any chance there was a nice clear fingerprint in one of those layers of dust?” Mark asked.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Of course. Why shou
ld any of this be easy?” Mark grumbled.
Jeremiah could tell the other man was still frightened, and he didn’t blame him. He wouldn’t want to be in his shoes right now. This investigation was going to turn ugly and both of them knew it. Given the nature of the crime and the way the body had looked, if the press got wind of it, then things would just get crazier.
Nobody needed that. Especially not this close to Halloween. It even had the potential to make national news which was a kind of nightmare none of them needed to live through.
Deep in his gut he felt that old, familiar urge to disappear. Attention was the last thing someone like him wanted. Nosy reporters and a national stage was one of the worst things that could happen. If it did explode into big news there’d be no way he’d be able to stay out of it. The very fact that he’d been here would send the reporters his way and they’d dig into his life, Cindy’s life, everything.
“What’s wrong?” Mark asked sharply. “Are you hurt?” He was staring down at Jeremiah’s right hand.
Jeremiah glanced down and saw blood drops seeping out between his fingers. He’d clenched his fists so tight thinking about what might be coming that he’d dug his fingernails hard enough into his palm to make it bleed.
“It’s nothing,” he said, forcing himself to relax his hands.
Mark looked like he was about to argue, but just then another police officer called him over to look at something in the dirt. Jeremiah suspected it was probably some sort of tire track or shoe imprint. Whatever it was, he was grateful for the reprieve.
He looked at Cindy. The color had finally come back into her cheeks.
“We should take you to the hospital or a doctor to get checked out. We need to know what it is you’re allergic to,” he said.
“I just want to get out of here,” she said, “but I’d rather go back to work or home.”
He didn’t argue with her even though he was worried. Too many strange things had happened in that basement that he couldn’t explain. He wanted answers, but, even more than that, he wanted reassurances about Cindy’s health and information on how to avoid another emergency.
I Will Fear No Evil Page 2