by Harper Lin
“How could I be related to such a geek?” I asked.
“I ask myself that all the time,” Bea snapped back. “Now stop making me angry. Would you like to walk?”
“Yes, I’d like to get there tonight,” I teased back. “Tell you what. Let me out to walk, and I’ll let you know what’s going on since I’ll get there before you.”
Bea was getting more and more annoyed with me as we drove. But I could hear my aunt giggling in the back seat. Finally, we made it to Niles’s house.
“I don’t think we should park in the driveway or on the street,” Bea said.
“You’re right, honey. Let’s cruise around and see what we can find.”
As luck would have it, just two blocks down, someone was having a party.
“Hey, just pull up there behind those cars. No one will notice us,” I said.
With the car safely camouflaged in the long line of cars along the street, we all piled out, cats included, and began to walk toward the house.
“A car’s coming.” I pointed ahead.
Quickly, we dashed into the tall brush that flanked the sides of the road. Within seconds, the car whizzed by.
“I think we’d better stay hidden,” my aunt suggested. “After Jake’s interview and the allegations made, I don’t think it would be good for anyone to see us sneaking around the property of the murder victim.”
Bea and I agreed. So I instructed the cats to lead the way since they could see so much better than we could. Before long, we could see the house looming ahead of us.
Aunt Astrid snapped on her flashlight, confident no one could see us either from the road or from the neighboring houses.
“How many acres did he own?” I asked.
“Ten,” Bea answered. “But I don’t think he probably ventured out in the farther corners very much at his age.”
“You don’t think so?” Aunt Astrid pointed with her flashlight. “Then what is that?”
Ahead of us about thirty feet was a makeshift stone altar with weird trinkets scattered all around it. It was partially hidden by wild vegetation.
“Oh snap,” I whispered.
The cats did not go to investigate the platform. In fact, they proceeded past it rather quickly, looking at it suspiciously as if something might suddenly move.
There were two crystal balls on a giant flat rock that was balancing on a smaller flat rock. A brass sound bowl was also there.
“Is this anything used in The Sequence of Ursaken?”
“It’s hard to tell,” my aunt said as she approached the site. “It looks like it could fit several different ceremonies. But here is a sure sign of a rookie.” She pointed to the top of the altar. “A pentagram.”
“You’re kidding!” Bea huffed. From FBI profilers to teenagers looking to upset their parents, the pentagram had been used to indicate satanic rituals and properties. The truth was that a much more elaborate star diagram was used to summon the prince of darkness. Whatever Niles was hoping to bring forth could have been anybody’s guess. But the chances were pretty slim of anything using this poorly designed pentagram to punch a hole into this world.
“I’m seeing an overlap, though,” Aunt Astrid said as she moved her arms as if she were swimming underwater. “This was hidden.”
“What do you mean?” Bea asked.
“I’m sure the police looked over the property after they found Niles. Unless they are hiding this fact from the public, I’d have to say this was camouflaged.” My aunt continued to push things aside like curtains. Just as she was about to turn around, both crystal balls started to glow.
“What’s causing that?” I asked. Just because we were witches and familiar with crystal balls didn’t mean we didn’t freak out when they started to glow without any provocation.
“I don’t sense anything,” Bea replied. “And I mean literally. I don’t sense anything.”
I listened and didn’t hear any bugs or nighttime birds. The only rustling was the cats carefully skulking through the brush toward the house.
This had happened to me once before. All the normal sounds of life stopped, and it was as though I were in a bubble. It was quiet like that, only I didn’t feel as if I were in a bubble. I felt as though the rest of the earth had vanished and left us as the only things left alive on this tiny square of property.
“Let’s get closer to the house,” Aunt Astrid suggested.
“How are you guys doing?” I asked the cats.
They skittered ahead a couple paces then stopped and looked around. After a sniff of the air, they looked at each other but said nothing.
“Treacle? You sense something?”
He turned around and looked at me.
“Something is in the ground.”
“What?”
“Something is in the ground.”
“Do you mean like the ground is cursed or…”
“No. There is something in it. Something that isn’t happy.”
I repeated that to Aunt Astrid and Bea. We all looked down at the ground. I don’t know why. What were we expecting to see? My first thought was mounds of dirt moving up and down as if it were breathing. Maybe a gruesome hand digging its way out from an unmarked grave or something to that effect. All I saw was grass and weeds and strange stones and lawn ornaments leading up to the house.
“Should we go back?”
“Let’s just get a little closer,” Aunt Astrid whispered. “I want to look inside the house. Just one quick peek.”
We all agreed to keep going, but I was getting a strange feeling, as if the back end of the property were closing in on us. I kept looking back over my shoulder, expecting there to be a huge wall of bushes coming closer and closer while beyond the wall would be pitch blackness. But each time, I just saw the same scenery we had passed and the nighttime sky with plenty of stars and clouds hanging silently in heaven. The crystal balls were glowing a sickly color, as if they were cataract eyes staring ahead blindly.
They seemed to follow as we made our way closer to the house. Finally, we reached what I’d say was the actual backyard. There were a lot more lawn decorations and concrete benches. But it was obvious from the overgrowth that Niles hadn’t hired a landscaper to maintain his property.
I had looked out the kitchen window at the estate sale, and I remembered there being some kind of pond near the back of the house. But the windows were so dirty I couldn’t make out exactly where it was or see the vegetation growing around it.
Bea gasped. “What is that?”
Aunt Astrid shined the light where Bea was pointing. All along the base of several strange rocks were what looked like bloody pieces of flesh.
“Oh my gosh.” I moaned. “We’re too late. Someone else has been killed here. And from the looks of it, they were dismembered too.”
Aunt Astrid slowly crept up to the bloody red thing and inhaled deeply.
“Strawberries,” she muttered.
“What?” Bea and I said in unison.
“This isn’t bloody body parts. It is a fungus called Bleeding Tooth. Or if you want to get technical, hydnellum peckii. It smells like fresh strawberries but is deadly poisonous.”
“Who would have such a thing growing in their yard?” Bea shivered.
“The same kind of person who would have those creepy plants and those creepy plants.” I directed Aunt Astrid’s light to what looked like a bed of Venus flytrap types of sprouts and some purple hanging vegetation that looked like tentacles.
“You know what this is?” I stood straight up proudly. “This is an H.P. Lovecraft garden.”
“A what?” Now it was Bea and Aunt Astrid’s turn to sound off in unison.
“You know the author H.P. Lovecraft? He wrote all those stories about monsters so ugly they couldn’t be described and creatures with thousands of tentacles and eyes and stuff.”
Both of them looked at me as if I had just admitted to licking toads.
“Anyway, I saw in a magazine. If you wanted to move away f
rom a traditional flower garden, you could have an H.P. Lovecraft garden. It included Venus flytraps, weird-looking orchids, poisonous white oleander… things like this that are flowers but they look like tentacles.”
Still, my family looked at me as though I’d sprouted a third eye in the middle of my forehead.
“I’m not saying it’s what I’d want. I’m just saying it’s a thing.”
“What kind of magazines are you reading?” Bea asked.
“The kind that help when we are trespassing on a crime scene,” I replied.
“Did you read anything about strange footprints?” Aunt Astrid interrupted our tiff by elbowing us both and pointing her flashlight beam at the ground to the left of us.
They were thick, muddy footprints that were slightly larger than a normal man’s feet.
“Was there anything like this in Jake’s file?” I looked at Bea.
“I don’t remember seeing anything like this.” She pointed. “But look where they are coming from.”
“That can’t be,” I whispered.
“I’m seeing it, but I don’t believe it,” Aunt Astrid said as she kept shining her light on the footprints, which looked as if they came out of the slimy, overgrown, dilapidated pond that sat pitifully neglected in the middle of the yard.
“It’s an optical illusion,” I said. “The other footsteps got washed away. As simple as that.” I couldn’t imagine a man submerging himself in that scummy water for any amount of time in order to ambush Niles Freudenfur. Stagnant, sitting water was a cornucopia of mosquito eggs and scorpion flies and tadpoles, and those were just the critters you could see. That didn’t count the world of bacteria that was invisible to the naked eye. No. Even in a full hazmat body suit, there would be some skin exposed that could absorb some kind of creepy crawly.
“No one in their right mind would go in that water.” I shivered at the thought.
We were all stumped as we tried to figure how these footprints got there when we heard a sound that was not of this earth.
The cats, who had been sneaking around and doing their own investigating, darted back to us. I had never heard a sound like that before.
“Aunt Astrid,” I whispered, “tell me you know what that sound is.”
She just shook her head.
“Bea, can you tell where it’s coming from?”
There was no answer.
“Bea?” I took Aunt Astrid’s hand with the flashlight and shined it toward my cousin. She was standing there crying. Her entire body was shaking.
“There’s nothing there,” she whimpered. “Nothing at all. Just void.”
“We’ve got to get her out of here,” I said.
“Yes.” Aunt Astrid took Bea’s hand.
“Treacle. Can you guys lead us out of here?”
“We can’t go back the way we came.”
“Why not?”
“It isn’t there.”
“What do you mean, ‘It isn’t there’?”
“We have to go around to the front of the house. There is no other way.”
“Fine. You lead. We’ll follow.”
I grabbed my aunt’s other hand as she pulled Bea behind her.
The scream was an angry, guttural sound as if it were being ripped from the lungs of a creature. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t an animal. At least not any kind of animal I’d ever heard before. It vibrated down to my core, making me tremble too. But I didn’t let go of Aunt Astrid.
The cats were moving faster and faster until we wove our way around the house. The shrubs and trees and foliage reached out as if they were trying to trip us. I knew that wasn’t really happening. I knew that because we were all panicked we were losing our footing. It was too dark to see anything, so our other senses were heightened. We heard the screams. Whatever it was behind us was gaining.
“I see the street!” I shouted, pointing.
I heard Bea crying. Aunt Astrid wasn’t making a sound. I could only hear my own panting in my ears as we hurried to the safety of the road.
When we finally reached it, we slowed down to catch our breath.
“Don’t stop!” Treacle, Peanut Butter, and Marshmallow all cried. “Keep moving! We aren’t safe yet!”
“But we’re away from the house. We’re on the street,” I gasped.
“Run!”
Without letting go of Aunt Astrid’s hand, I pulled them along.
“We have to hurry! We aren’t safe yet!”
It felt as if it were taking forever. Bea’s car was still where we left it at the end of the line of cars. Finally, I could hear music and people talking where the party was coming from. But as I started to slow down and listen, I realized it wasn’t a normal party. The voices spoke quickly and in a sort of hissing chant. We couldn’t see them, but we heard them.
“There they are.”
“They are liars.”
“Get them quickly.”
“It will get them.”
“Golem will get them.”
“Get them.”
“Get the liars.”
“Golem. Golem. Golem.”
We were nowhere out of the woods yet.
“Bea, can you drive?” She looked at me with wild eyes. “Bea! Drive the car!”
She nodded, wiping her eyes and letting go of her mother’s hand. She dashed to the driver’s side and climbed in. All the cats jumped in the back seat. I practically shoved Aunt Astrid in as if she were the victim of a kidnapping. When I was finally in the front seat, I slammed the door, pressed the lock, and looked at my cousin.
“Punch it, Bea!”
We peeled out of there at about five miles an hour, made sure to signal getting onto the road, and stopped for two seconds at the stop sign at the corner.
Still, we made it. Slowly but surely, we made it off Niles’s property and in one piece.
Aunt Astrid finally spoke. “What was making that noise?”
“Nothing,” Bea answered. “It was pure nothing making that noise.”
13
Treasure Chest Estate Sales
The next day, none of us were in good shape for work at the café. It was a magic hangover without the benefit of enjoying the magic.
“What did we do last night?” I grumbled as I rubbed my temples. “I feel like something the cat dragged in.”
“He did drag you in,” Bea joked, wincing at her own headache. “I saw poor Treacle leading you in by the cuff of your shirt.”
Aunt Astrid came from the kitchen, carrying a fizzing glass of Alka-Seltzer.
“Hello, honey.” She patted me on the back as she scooted tenderly behind her favorite table and took a seat. Before the fizzing in her glass totally stopped, she drank the concoction down.
“What do you think made that noise last night?” I asked.
“Which noise?” Bea said. “The screaming banshee noise or the hundreds of vulgar taunts coming from the party noise?”
“That wasn’t from the party. It only seemed like it was from that party,” Aunt Astrid whispered with squinted eyes. It was obvious her head was hurting too.
“If other people are hearing this stuff, you’d think the police would have been called a couple dozen times,” Bea said. “I know for a fact that Jake hasn’t heard anything about disturbances over there. In fact, the only reason anyone called the cops for a wellness check on Niles was because no one had seen or heard from him in a couple weeks.”
“How is Jake?” Aunt Astrid asked, tilting her head to the right. “I do hope he knows that I don’t blame him for doing his job.”
“He’s pretty broken up about it. He hates that he’s got to keep you on the list because you don’t have an alibi.” Bea pouted. “But he knows the truth, Mom.”
“I know he does.”
“Does anyone think it would be a good idea to pay a visit to Dolores Eversol?” I pounded my fist into my palm.
“Now Cath, you know I’d never want you to physically hurt anyone,” Aunt Astrid said. “I appreciate your
desire to avenge me, but getting yourself thrown in jail won’t do any of us any good.”
“I wasn’t talking about getting physical. I can’t throw a punch. I just thought maybe we could go over there and hurl insults at her house. Maybe be really, really sarcastic at her.”
“That sounds like fun.” Bea nodded.
“No. We don’t even know if she’s the one who told Jake anything. Just let her alone. She’s obviously a lost soul.” My aunt rubbed her temple.
“Hey, can we make a group decision on something?” I asked seriously. “If we have to travel to any suspicious location where there could be bodily, mental, or spiritual harm done to one or all of us, can I drive? Can we all agree on that?”
“I got us out of there. My cousin thinks she’s an Andretti and this is Indianapolis,” she said to the customer in front of her who had ordered a coffee.
The bald man, who’d been in the café a few times before, smiled at her. Of course he did. All the fellows smiled at Bea.
“I’m just saying that from now on, I should be the designated driver.”
“But your car is so small,” Bea complained.
“How much room do you need to escape with your life, hmm? Want to tell me that? I’d like to know.”
“We made it without so much as a scratch.”
“This time.” I bumped her with my hip as I grabbed two giant oatmeal cookies and one sugar cookie for the next customer.
Once the counter was empty, we got more serious.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I didn’t pick up on any animals in the area at all except the cats. That’s pretty rare. In fact, I’d say that never happens.”
“I didn’t feel anything either,” Bea said. “It was the most terrifying feeling of my life because it was like a black hole. There was no aura, no soul or essence. It was just a void.”
“Yet we all heard that scream,” Aunt Astrid said. “And we all heard the weird voices. They seemed to be coming from the party. The scream was definitely coming from the property.”
“That book you bought at the estate sale… did Niles mark anything from it? The diary. Did you finish reading it? Does it say anything that might help us figure out exactly what we are dealing with?” Bea wiped off the counter as she spoke.