by Scott Thomas
Now she was dead.
“Sam?” Wainwright asked hesitantly. “You there?”
“I’m here,” Sam assured him.
Wainwright lowered his voice, as if he were afraid someone might overhear. “Look, I know you think I’m a piece of shit. That interview last year, it wasn’t exactly above board. I get it—that’s on me. But I swear it was supposed to be good for all of us. It wasn’t supposed to be . . . whatever this is. Whatever started after we got back from Kansas.”
Sam felt the world fall away from his feet, leaving him floating in empty space. “What do you mean?”
A sharp breath from the other end of the line.
“What’s happening to you?” Sam asked.
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s probably just my imagination but . . .”
“But what, Wainwright? Damn it, tell me!”
Another pause. Then, “I’ve seen things. Usually just out of sight, you know? Sometimes at night, moving in the shadows. At first I thought it was my eyes playing tricks on me, until the other night. After I found out about Kate. I was alone in my apartment, and I had been crying, and . . . I heard someone laugh. Right behind me. Like, like a chuckle, you know? Raspy. Like an old woman. It was right there behind me and it was damn well enjoying seeing me in pain.”
Sam’s flesh prickled at the thought, icy fingers tracing his spine.
“I couldn’t turn around,” Wainwright continued. “I tried, but I was terrified, Sam. Something told me that whatever was behind me, I didn’t want to see it. There was another chuckle, and then it reached out and tapped me on the shoulder. Just one finger, tapping me. Asking me to turn around. I closed my eyes and muttered something under my breath.”
“Muttered what?”
“A prayer, I guess. I don’t know; I tried to wish it away. I knew that if I turned around, if I did see it, I would go crazy. I knew I would be looking at something that shouldn’t exist. Something . . . unnatural. I must have stood there for at least ten minutes.” Wainwright’s words were slower, his voice steady. “Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. So I took a breath and spun around. And there was nothing there. Absolutely nothing. I was alone, like I had been all day.” He gave an embarrassed laugh. “God, it sounds so silly when I say it out loud. You must think I’ve lost it, mate.”
He’s not messing with you, Sam told himself. He’s scared. Really scared.
As Sam leaned back in the patio chair, Daniel’s house seemed to loom over him, blank windows reflecting the sun and sky, taking on the appearance of multiple eyes, like those of a spider, motionless, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. He hadn’t noticed it before, but the two-story structure had an attic window, perched slightly higher than the rest, a single pane that gave the house the illusion of a third story.
“Sam?” Wainwright called from almost a thousand miles away. “Sam, are you there?”
Wainwright met them at LaGuardia Airport. He did his best to fake a smile. “It’s good to see you,” he said. Sam knew that he meant it.
That uncanny, rubbery look to Wainwright’s flesh was still there, but his hair was greasy and flat. What had seemed like purple streaks in his eyes when they’d first met were now gone.
It was one o’clock by the time they drove into the city. Harsh rays of sunlight cut through the towering black forms of skyscrapers. Even though it was only April, it was a scorcher of a day, the heat shimmering off the asphalt in spectral waves. New York City smelled like a foul, musky beast, the very sidewalk sweating in the blazing sun.
They rode mostly in silence through the heavy traffic. Half an hour later, they pulled into a parking garage on the Upper East Side. Wainwright called it an apartment, but in reality it was the entire top floor of a fifteen-story building overlooking central Manhattan. Multiple walls had been taken down to create an expansive loft with floor-to-ceiling windows. In the distance, sunlight glinted off the surface of the reservoir in Central Park. It was exactly the kind of bachelor pad one might expect from Wainwright—hardwood floors stained black, stainless-steel appliances, monochromatic furniture. The few punches of color were from pieces of framed artwork by unknown artists and vintage grindhouse movie posters. Dividing the loft were bookshelves packed with vinyl records, tattered paperbacks, and countless Blu-ray discs of obscure genre movies.
Wainwright did not say a word as he hurried across his loft to the kitchen. Rising up on his toes, he fished a bottle of whiskey from a high cabinet above the refrigerator. Ice clinked as he dropped a handful of cubes into a tumbler. He unscrewed the cap and clumsily sloshed three fingers of hooch into the glass. He took a long, desperate sip.
Sam glanced around at the impeccably clean space, so different from all of their homes, free of filthy plates, empty bottles, and stacks of printer paper, the detritus Sam had found almost comforting during the past months.
Seeming to sense Sam’s thoughts, Wainwright motioned to the room with his tumbler of scotch. “Cleaning lady. Comes twice a week.”
He gulped down the rest of his drink, sucking the alcohol from the ice cubes. He held up the glass.
“Anybody?” he asked.
Moore raised her slender hand.
Aw, what the hell, Sam thought, holding up a hand.
Daniel sank down into a white leather chair without a word. He rubbed his sweaty hands across the legs of his khakis. He may have been thinner by comparison to last year, but the summer heat was still no friend of his. Sam watched him closely. This new, gaunt Daniel made him uneasy—the way the skin hung loosely from his cheekbones, the droop of his shoulders, the sag of his oversized clothes. It was like his skeleton was shedding everything from its bony frame, like a thing of complete yet ghastly simplicity existed within him. It yearned to be free of the weight it carried.
After Wainwright had poured two more drinks and handed them to Sam and Moore, he leaned over the granite kitchen counter and glanced around at his guests with darting eyes.
“Something is happening, right?”
Their silence confirmed it.
Wainwright whistled shrilly over his glass, sucked down the whiskey in a single gulp, and quickly tipped the bottle for a refill.
“I knew it; I bloody knew it,” he muttered. “It followed us. Whatever was in that house, it followed every one of us.”
“Just take it easy.” Sam sipped at the whiskey. He really didn’t feel like drinking; he’d had too little food and sleep in the past few days. But he welcomed the alcohol’s promise of reprieve. He just wanted to numb his nerves a bit.
“Take it easy? Take it easy?” Wainwright stepped out from behind the kitchen counter. “Why the hell should I take it easy?”
“Because whatever it is, it hasn’t hurt us,” Moore said. Her tone was steady yet unusually soft. She was approaching Wainwright with a gentleness none of them had seen from her before. “It’s messing with our heads, but that’s all.”
Wainwright’s mouth turned down in disgust. “Hasn’t hurt . . . ? What about Kate? She’s dead, for Christ’s sake!”
“Kate killed herself,” Moore explained. “It didn’t do it. She did.”
“But it made her do it!”
“Okay, okay,” Sam said calmly. “All we’re saying is that if it wanted to shove us down the stairs or push us in front of a bus or just beat the hell out of us, it would have done it. But it hasn’t. It hasn’t touched us.”
Wainwright’s brown eyes reddened as they filled with tears.
“I could have helped her,” he said, his throat suddenly thick with mucus. His entire body began to tremble. The ice rattled in his tumbler. Tears flooded down his cheeks in a great deluge that stunned them all. He set the tumbler down on the counter with a loud smack, covered his face with his hands, and sobbed.
Sam went to Wainwright and hugged him tight. The young man buried his head in Sam’s shoulder and wept.
“I loved her,” he said, his voice muffled and shaky.
> “I know.”
“She didn’t deserve this,” Wainwright whispered.
“None of us deserve this.”
They all turned to the sound of the voice. It was Daniel, now sitting on the edge of his chair, his hands on his knees.
“None of us deserve this,” he repeated.
Wainwright wiped his palms across his wet face. He seemed embarrassed by the show of emotion. He took a series of deep breaths, retreating further into himself with each one.
He was once more in control.
“What do you think it is, Sam?” he asked, his voice level.
He’s not the expert on Kill Creek anymore. He’s just as in the dark as we are. The thought made Sam feel even more helpless.
“I don’t know.” Sam shrugged. “Only thing I do know is that it was at Kill Creek when we arrived, but it didn’t stay there when we left.”
He put his glass to his lips and gave it a steep tip, but no whiskey touched his mouth. It was gone. He had finished his drink without knowing it.
“We’re going up to find Sebastian,” he explained, his words steady and clear. “If this is happening to us, it must be happening to him too.”
“Then what?” Wainwright asked. There was judgment in his voice, as if he were setting Sam up for something.
“We make sure Sebastian is okay, and then we think of a plan. Together.”
“Won’t work.”
“And why’s that?”
“You said it yourself. We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” Wainwright said.
They watched as Wainwright crossed to one of the bookshelves and ran a finger over the tops of the paperbacks that filled it, stopping on a book near the middle. He pulled it free and tossed it to Sam.
Pages fluttered like the wings of an injured bird. Sam reached out and caught the book. He looked down at it, his thumb running over the cover. At this point, Sam knew it well. It was Wainwright’s copy of Phantoms of the Prairie: A True Story of Supernatural Terror, by Dr. Malcolm Adudel.
“We’re all familiar with this,” Sam reminded Wainwright. “There’s nothing in here that comes close to what we’re experiencing.”
Wainwright motioned to the book. “Turn to the last page. The author’s info.”
Sam did as he was told, tucking his thumb behind the back cover and opening the book to the final page. He read the words aloud:
About the Author
Dr. Malcolm Adudel holds a PhD in parapsychology from the University of Southern California. He is one of the world’s leading experts on psychical research and the author of over forty books on the supernatural.
He currently resides in New York City.
Sam lowered the loosely bound paperback. “Adudel lives here. In New York.”
“Yes,” Wainwright said. From his pocket, he fished out a folded strip of paper. “And I know where.”
The brownstone was just across the river, in Brooklyn. Wainwright found a metered parking spot on Washington Avenue, and the four of them climbed out to the shriek of a city bus coming to a stop half a block north. They trudged down the busy sidewalk, past an eclectic mix of stores and restaurants, before coming to a sharp angle that marked the beginning of Adudel’s street. They moved down a quiet line of redbrick apartment buildings and brownstones, all of which had seen better days. Great shadows fell on the row of buildings, dark stalks of weeds bursting through the cracked, buckled sidewalk.
On the far corner, a group of kids, the oldest no more than fourteen, sat on a stoop, their voices melding into an odd echo of indiscernible words. At the sight of the approaching adults, they stopped talking, eyeing the intruders suspiciously.
Sam nodded at the boys, but they only stared blankly at him. He glanced back at the others, slowing so they could catch up. Moore and Wainwright were close behind. Daniel, as usual, was hanging back by himself.
He’s been so quiet, Sam realized. On the plane to New York, Daniel had kept to himself, his face expressionless.
When they neared the center of the block, Sam asked Wainwright, “What’s the address again?”
Wainwright unfolded the slip of paper on which he had jotted down the street number. “Twenty-six forty-six.”
Sam shielded his eyes from the glow of the sunny blue sky with his hand and searched the metal numbers affixed to the buildings. “There it is,” he said, pointing two doors down.
The name printed on a metal strip above the buzzer was “DeLaud.”
It took Moore only a few seconds to solve it. “It’s an anagram,” she told the others, “for Adudel.”
Sam nodded and pressed the button. From somewhere above, they heard the faint chime of a doorbell. He glanced over to the street corner. The kids were gone from the stoop. The street was eerily vacant.
A voice crackled through a dented speaker. “Yes?”
Sam hunched over and spoke loudly into the intercom, “Dr. Adudel?”
There was no response, only the buzz of static.
“We need to talk to you.”
Still nothing from the other side.
Moore abruptly pushed Sam aside. She pressed her lips up close to the intercom as if she expected Adudel to feel her hot breath on the other side. “It’s about Kill Creek,” she said impatiently. “Open the goddamn door.”
A long moment passed, the four of them fidgeting nervously on the front steps. Then a loud buzz signaled the front door unlocking. Even Moore jumped at the sound.
The short hallway led to more stairs. They called out, but there was no answer. Light spilled down from a skylight above, giving the act of climbing the steps a sense of literal ascension, as if they were all being lifted from the darkness below. Harsh atonal music tromped through the air, an odd mixture of instruments—a tribal drum, a synthesizer, a trumpet. It made for an ominous fanfare as they reached the top of the stairs.
What the hell are we walking into? Moore wondered. We know nothing about this man. And here we are, in his home.
Another hallway stood before them, its walls paneled in rich walnut below, bloodred fabric above. In stark contrast, the cocoon-like tunnel opened to a brilliant, sunlit room. Even from where she stood, Moore could see that the walls were white and pristine, adorned with countless black-and-white photos in ebony frames.
“Dr. Adudel?” Sam called out as he took a few hesitant steps down the hall.
Moore stepped up beside Sam. She reached out and touched his hand.
“I don’t like this,” she said, not caring if he found the comment weak. It was the truth.
“Neither do I,” Sam said.
“Hello?” a voice drifted down from the white room. “Please, come in. I’m in the room at the end of the hall, yes?”
His words were tinged with the hint of an accent, something vaguely Eastern European.
Moore followed Sam down the red hall. The others were close behind them. The light at the end of the hall grew brighter as they moved slowly closer.
They entered the white room, the group squinting, the intense sunshine momentarily blinding them. Moore could make out a human shape sitting across the room. She blinked, and the form came into focus. It was a man, late sixties, thin patches of silver hair dotting his otherwise bald head. He wore pressed tan slacks and a plaid dress shirt, tucked in with a brown leather belt. His tiny eyes stared out from behind oversized frames, the lenses of his glasses so thick, it seemed as if he were peering up from the bottom of a deceptively deep pond. Leaning against his chair was a wooden cane with a silver handle in the shape of a lion’s head. He offered them a strange, crooked smile but no greeting, his mouth half-open, expectantly.
“Dr. Adudel,” Moore said.
The man nodded curtly but still said nothing. He looked from guest to guest, as if he were absorbing the sight of long-forgotten friends.
Wainwright stepped forward. “We’re sorry to just crash on you like this. Unannounced, I mean.”
“No bother,” Adudel said. His head continued to twitch slight
ly, silently accepting them. He looked a bit like a rooster pecking the air in anticipation of feed.
Moore quickly scanned the numerous framed photographs on the walls. Most of them appeared to be of Adudel on his globe-trotting adventures into the unknown. As a younger man, he proudly sported a thick head of hair but insisted on those absurdly large frames, like two magnifying glasses over his eyes. There was Adudel at a séance, the hint of ectoplasm streaming from the medium’s fingertips; in an ancient stone cellar, mysterious orbs flitting about him like fairies; with the tribesmen of an Amazonian village, beaming proudly at his own courage among these so-called savages; leading a student team into the abandoned room of an empty house, one hand on his cane, the other raised to let the resident spirits know he meant no harm; standing with Rachel Finch at the house on Kill Creek, her hair tied tight in a bun; Adudel alone before the Finch House, dwarfed by the building behind him, the structure looming even from a distance.
This particular photograph gave Moore pause. She leaned in toward it, inspecting the finer details of the print. Something about the picture troubled her. It took her a moment to place it, and then she realized it was Adudel himself. The ghost-chaser was not smiling. He was not standing tall and confidently like in his other photos. Quite the contrary. Adudel looked scared, shaken to his very core.
Because this is real, Moore thought. This is not a delusion. This is not coincidence. Even Adudel knew there was something real at Kill Creek. And now it’s after us.
Sam watched as the doctor grasped his cane by the handle and gave its tip a solid thump against the wood floor. It had the desired effect, causing the entire group to turn suddenly toward him.
“Now isn’t this an interesting surprise?” he said. He spoke in an odd staccato rhythm, dragging out the last word of every sentence. His beady eyes darted randomly from person to person. They never seemed to blink, always open behind those massive lenses.
Sam stepped forward and offered a hand. “Thank you for seeing us. I’m—”
“Oh, I know who you are.”
Adudel reached out and grasped Sam’s hand, not in a traditional handshake but with his fingers over the palm, his thumb slipping around the back of the hand, forcing Sam’s fingers to close over his.