by Mark Lukens
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
EVIL SPIRITS
ANCIENT ENEMY 4
by
MARK LUKENS
Evil Spirits: Ancient Enemy 4 copyright © 2018 by Mark Lukens
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reprinted without written permission from the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (or in any other form), business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by: Damonza.com
Special thanks to: Jet, Ann, Kelli, Kat, and Mary Ann – your help is so valuable to me and appreciated more than you know.
OTHER BOOKS BY MARK LUKENS:
ANCIENT ENEMY – www.amazon.com/dp/B00FD4SP8M
DARKWIND: ANCIENT ENEMY 2 – www.amazon.com/dp/B01K42JBGW
HOPE’S END: ANCIENT ENEMY 3 – www.amazon.com/dp/B07G1MS6RK
SIGHTINGS – www.amazon.com/dp/B00VAI31KW
DEVIL’S ISLAND – www.amazon.com/dp/B06WWJC6VD
WHAT LIES BELOW – www.amazon.com/dp/B0143LADEY
THE EXORCIST’S APPRENTICE – www.amazon.com/dp/B00YYF1E5C
NIGHT TERRORS – www.amazon.com/dp/B00M66IU3U
DESCENDANTS OF MAGIC – www.amazon.com/dp/B00FWYYYYC
THE SUMMONING – www.amazon.com/dp/B00HNEOHKU
THE DARWIN EFFECT – www.amazon.com/dp/B01G4A8ZYC
GHOST TOWN – www.amazon.com/dp/B00LEZRF7G
THE VAMPIRE GAME – www.amazon.com/dp/B07C2M72X9
FOLLOWED – www.amazon.com/dp/B078WYGMJN
A DARK COLLECTION: 12 SCARY STORIES – www.amazon.com/dp/B00JENAGLC
RAZORBLADE DREAMS: HORROR STORIES – www.amazon.com/dp/B076B7W252
CHAPTER 1
Stella
Dig Site – Costa Rica
Stella saw him in the jungle hiding among the brush and palm fronds. For just a moment he’d been standing there, and now he was gone.
Maria came over. She’d been painstakingly brushing dirt away from a partially exposed femur buried centuries ago down in the pit. “Are you okay?”
Stella looked at Maria, then back at the edge of the clearing where the jungle began. They were working on excavating a massive grave, an ancient burial ground, the edges of it roped off. Small tents were set up at the other side of the clearing where supplies and gear were kept: toolboxes, plastic cases for artifacts, coolers of food and drinks, even two cots. The site of this burial ground was a natural clearing in the jungle, a dead spot where vegetation refused to grow; the edge of the jungle ended neatly all around them beyond the dig site. Maria had discovered this burial ground a year ago from information she had gotten from members of a local tribe, and now the glacial process of excavating the buried rock walls and the bones had begun.
The burial ground was a mystery. It was similar to another mass grave found a few years earlier south of this site, closer to the border of Panama. Hundreds of people had been buried in that mass grave: men, women, and children of all ages, all of them dumped into the pit with no ceremony. They were all apparently killed the same way—a clean round hole in the forehead. Was it from a spear? A hammer and metal chisel? A wooden dowel? It was definitely some kind of blunt force trauma to the head. But one thing was certain, those deaths weren’t natural in any way—those people had been purposely killed. Murdered? Maybe. Sacrificed in some long-forgotten religious ritual? That could also be possible.
Another interesting comparison Stella had realized was that the skeletons at this dig were similar to other sites in South America where entire villages of people had been found buried in gigantic graves, their bodies piled together. One of the most famous finds was near the Nazca Plains where the mysterious geoglyphs and lines in the desert were discovered in the early 1930s. There were mass graves at those sites, but there were also individual graves, people buried alone and ceremonially with their possessions. Even though the individuals had been buried in ceremony, many were missing their heads, or some of them had those neat round holes in the foreheads of their skulls about the size of a quarter, like something had been rammed through their heads and into their brains.
Of course there could be other reasons for the slaughter of the people found in these mass graves, Stella knew that. She knew far more mysteries and horrifying things existed in the world; she had seen those horrifying things.
“Yeah,” Stella finally answered Maria as she stood at the edge of the dig. “I’m okay.” She even tried a smile, but she didn’t feel like she was pulling it off, not judging from the concerned expression still on Maria’s face.
“Did you see something?”
Stella gave a slight shrug, still smiling. “I thought I saw something in the trees.”
“Like what?”
Stella knew as well as Maria the dangers in the jungle, most notably jaguars. But there were other dangers like robbers. Not treasure robbers, but robbers who would threaten them for whatever they carried on them and whatever supplies they had in their tents and vehicles. Stella always carried a gun now; Cole had made her take the gun with her when she started volunteering on this dig.
Maria’s eyes darted to the edge of the jungle, which was a wall of green vegetation thirty feet away. The vegetation from the jungle only crept into the clearing a little bit, like an invisible barrier held it back in every direction around the burial ground, like the dirt of this clearing wouldn’t support life of any kind, an infertile ground.
“Was it an animal?” Maria asked, still studying the jungle. She wasn’t going to let this go.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” But that was a lie. She was sure she’d seen a man standing among the palms and brush.
“Was it a jaguar?” Maria asked.
“No,” Stella said. “I’m sure it wasn’t a jaguar.”
Maria relaxed just a little.
“It’s nothing,” Stella said, but she could still feel a crawling sensation tightening her skin, a chill dancing along her flesh, a heaviness on her chest, making it difficult to breathe, the feeling of dread weighing her down.
“You’re sur
e?” Maria asked.
Stella nodded.
Maria went back to the pit, climbing back down the ladder into the gigantic hole that had been carefully dug over the last eight months. There were only three other people at the dig site, two men and a woman, all college students from Maria’s archaeology class at the university. Maria had kept this crew small and sworn to secrecy. This was going to be a big discovery for her, with book deals and speaking tours coming in her near future.
Stella had offered to volunteer with Maria at the university two years ago. She and Cole had been in Costa Rica the last seven years, and only in the last two years had Stella felt comfortable enough to volunteer and rekindle her passion for archaeology. Cole hadn’t been happy about her volunteering to help at the dig site, afraid of her being alone in the jungle or with only a few college students around, but in the end he had relented—he knew how much this meant to her, how normal it made her feel again. But he still made her take the gun with her.
She and Cole had healed quite a bit during their last seven years together in Costa Rica. They had flown down here from Arizona seven years ago after the horrors they had experienced in the cabin in Colorado and then in the ghost town in Arizona. They were still traumatized when they’d gotten here, hardly able to believe the Ancient Enemy was really gone. Cole drank a lot then. He slept during the day and stayed up all night, like he was on watch, her personal sentinel.
Cole had contacts everywhere in Central America, and he had used up all of the favors that were owed him, but now they had new IDs (Cole was Travis Hartwell and she was Melissa Burrows), and they had plenty of cash. The rent and food were cheap in Costa Rica, and they probably had enough money to last the rest of their lives.
For the first few months they were here they ate, drank, rested, and healed. Cole mourned the loss of his brother Trevor and Stella the loss of her friends at the dig site in New Mexico. She also missed David.
But this was a new life now. She couldn’t go back to her old life, back to being Stella Weaver, an archaeologist working out of Arizona State University. She had contacted Alice a few times when they first got down here, and Alice had let her know that she and Cole were still persons of interest, and that the murders had never been solved—many were calling them the “Dig Site Murders.” The press blamed the murders on a serial killer or a group of killers. Some suspected a cult. It was a modern-day mystery how a string of grisly murders had occurred in two states over the span of a few days and then suddenly stopped.
Some days it felt good to be somewhere new, to be someone new, to pretend that none of those horrors had happened. She wanted to go back home sometimes, but she was afraid the places familiar to her would always be tainted by what had happened—nothing would ever be the same again. She wished she could totally delude herself with the fantasy of a new life and forget every remnant of her old one, but there were two things holding that fantasy back: one was David, she still kept in contact with him every few months or so; the other was her love of archaeology, her passion for it. And she yearned to be in the field again, unearthing ancient cities and civilizations. And finally, two years ago, Cole had given in and she’d begun volunteering with Professor Maria Soto.
In these last two years Stella had begun to feel almost normal again. The beaches of Costa Rica were beautiful, the jungle and mountains breathtaking; it was like being on a never-ending tropical vacation. And she could almost allow herself to dive fully into the fantasy of a brand new life.
But then the nightmares had come back.
And Cole understood because he still had the nightmares too. They had fewer nightmares now than they used to, but they were still there. When they had first come down here, Stella would often wake up, choking back a scream. She would sit bolt-upright in bed and see Cole sitting in a chair with his gun in his hand, watching over her as she slept.
The first few weeks they were down here, the nightmares had been the worst. She and Cole had awakened in a panic, clawing at the air, screaming, punching and kicking at the other (they had both suffered a few nosebleeds and black eyes from their frenzied awakenings, trapped for a moment in that netherworld between sleep and full consciousness, fighting anything close to them). But as the years passed, the nightmares weren’t as frequent or as horrible.
She loved Cole. She was sure of that now. And she was sure he loved her. He could have left her so many times. He could have left her and David right after the cabin in Colorado, abandoning them as he drove away on the snowmobile. He could have left them at the Mountainside Inn or at the Navajo Reservation. Maybe he had stayed because he knew David was the only one who could protect them, but after it was all over, after David had sent the Ancient Enemy back to its own world in the ghost town, Cole could have left then. But he chose to take her down to Costa Rica with him. He had taken a risk. He was still a wanted criminal (and she was still a person of interest, according to Alice), so there was always the danger that she could talk. He could have left her here in Costa Rica at any time. He could have disappeared into the underworld of fake names and identities, and she never would have found him. No, he had stayed even though it probably would have been so much easier for him to leave.
After that first year here in Costa Rica, after they had fully grieved and healed and grown stronger, life had gotten somewhat normal again, somewhat pleasurable. They went to bars and restaurants at night and the beach the next day. She had even learned to surf. They bought food when they needed it, fresh fruit in the morning, grilled meat and salads at night, wine and tequila and cold bottles of beer. Cole still drank, but not as much as he used to. He looked healthier now, lean and muscular, tanned and energetic. He was seven years older now, but it seemed like he’d barely aged at all. Except for his eyes. They still looked old and haunted, his eyelids drooping slightly. Her eyes were the same. Even though she, like Cole, looked healthier and happier in the mirror, there was still that haunted look in her eyes, that same look she’d seen so long ago in the bathroom mirror of the gas station in Cody’s Pass, Colorado.
She’d done well to push those memories far back into her subconscious. They only surfaced in her nightmares from time to time.
As blissful as this tropical paradise was, Stella still began to yearn for more these last few years, her passion for archaeology coming back with a vengeance. She asked Cole to drive her miles away into the capital city of San Jose where she could finds books on archaeology and the local history and culture. The more famous Mayan ruins were far to the north, but there were still ruins here in Costa Rica; there were still mysteries to be solved and ancient cultures to be unearthed. She longed for a big discovery, like the one she had been a part of in New Mexico, where Jake had found the ancient Anasazi city hidden inside a cave along with the tablets of Anasazi writing. That discovery had been huge in the archaeological world, a piece of the puzzle to the mysterious past of the Anasazi, but of course all of it had been overshadowed by the mutilated bodies of the archaeologists found there—that’s all most people ever thought about; the archaeological discoveries there were always an afterthought.
And after Stella began volunteering with Dr. Maria Soto and her students, she poured herself into her work. It felt so good to be out in the field again, the tools in her hands. It was both familiar and new at the same time, familiar because this was what she had always done since high school, but new because she’d always worked in the southwestern United States and not the jungle.
Yes, it had been wonderful, but today it had all been shattered when she thought she had seen the man standing in the jungle watching her. It was devastating; it was like all the hard work she’d done had been swept away within minutes. She felt like the victim of panic attacks who had worked for years to get past them only to have one attack set back years of work. She was devastated, depressed, but most of all she was afraid now.
She hadn’t seen the man in the jungle too clearly, but she didn’t need to. She could tell who he was in an instant, she coul
d tell who he was by the way he stood, the silhouette of his tall and lean body.
But maybe no one had been there in the jungle. Maybe it had just been her imagination.
“You sure you’re okay?” Maria asked one more time from the edge of the big pit. Even the three students had stopped working, all of their eyes on her.
“Actually, I don’t think I’m feeling too well,” Stella told Maria. “I think I need to go home.”
Maria nodded like she understood, but her eyes flicked to the wall of jungle for just a second.
Stella grabbed her pack and walked to her Toyota 4x4 truck parked next to the other two vehicles near the tents. Her truck was parked facing the narrow trail through the jungle that led back to the main roads.
She told herself that it was just her imagination. There had been no one standing in the jungle. It couldn’t have been him . . .
CHAPTER 2
Cole
Costa Rica
Cole was playing a card game in the cantina with a few of the locals when Stella rushed inside. He was surprised to see her back from the dig so early, but what bothered him even more was the expression on her face. She was scared.
He caught her glance from across the room, her blue eyes locked on to his dark ones for just a moment, and then she marched to the bar. She hadn’t even stopped at their house; she was still wearing her “work” clothes: khaki shorts, a pale blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, her hiking boots and a thick pair of socks. Her blond hair was pulled back into a tight bun, but a few stray locks of hair were hanging down in her face.
Cole’s hand dropped down to his gun in his ankle holster on instinct when he saw her, like his subconscious had recognized a danger before his conscious mind could. He had to stop himself from pulling his gun out. Even after seven years of living down here he didn’t go anywhere without his gun. It was that look on Stella’s face that had thrown him back into the past, back to the terror they had experienced together; it was her expression that had caused his instant reaction of panic.