As Officer Lin promised, the heads were all there. The entire interior of the room was marble. Or, no. Zach peered closer. Polished granite. Directly in the center of the room was a square granite pedestal with nothing on it except for long rivulets of a dark liquid substance. The heads were placed at various points around the room, around a granite-inlaid circle in the floor. Inside the circle was some sort of hand-drawn design.
“Is that blood?” Zach asked as he studied the drawing.
“Think so,” Officer Lin said. He pointed over to the corner, still in the circle where a bowl sat, the blood dripping over the side like a messy bowl of soup. As Zach drew closer to the edge of the circle to get a closer look, he could just make out the sound of… something. He tried to ignore it.
“Well, all nine are here,” Glenda said.
Zach turned his attention to the severed heads, each one placed equally around the circle. “The number nine seems to carry some sort of significance,” he said. Nine paintings, nine generals, nine heads… Too much of a coincidence.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and say we got some sort of ritualistic or religious cause behind this,” Glenda said.
Zach couldn’t argue. That’s what it looked like to him too. The signs were there. Some kind of witchcraft or voodoo, maybe, even if he didn’t believe in that kind of stuff.
Yet that uneasy feeling that built in Zach’s stomach was stronger here, almost like he stood before a dark, yawning doorway where he couldn’t see what was inside.
Zach stepped inside the circle, careful not to smear the blood drawing until someone could get a photograph of it. But once inside, he put his hand to his ear. Zach let out a cry of pain. “Oh fuck!”
“What?” Glenda moved closer to him. “What is it?”
It was loud. His head hurt from the screaming sound of it, and he stumbled backward.
Outside the circle, the scream drew back to a whine again. Zach leaned against the granite wall. “Fuck me,” he said, both hands cupping his ears. Even with his hands over his ears, he could still hear it.
“What’s wrong with you?” Glenda stood close to him, bent down with her hand on his shoulder. The expression on her face was one of genuine concern. “Buddy. Zach! You okay?”
He pulled at his ear with his pinky like he wanted to shake out the ring in his ears. The sound was still there, though much quieter, and he wasn’t sure if it was damage to his own hearing or if it was coming from inside the circle. “Don’t you guys hear that?”
Both Glenda and Officer Lin looked to Zach. They both frowned. “I don’t hear anything,” Glenda said.
“Me either,” Officer Lin said.
“It’s there.” He pointed to the circle. “You mean to tell me that you don’t hear that?”
“I seriously don’t hear anything.”
Zach stared at the both of them like they were both messing with him. “It was ear splitting.”
“Maybe you need to get your ears checked, buddy,” Glenda said. She still registered concern in her expression. They goaded each other like siblings, and they cared for one another pretty much the same way. “Might be some tinnitus.”
But it wasn’t. Zach was sure of it. It was a sound coming from this room, from somewhere in the center of the room. He pushed up off the wall. “We done here?” He wanted out of there.
Glenda nodded, and she turned to Lin. “I assume you’ll get us copies of all the pictures. And, uh…” She seemed to look at each of the nine heads. “Your ME will pair these all up with their rightful owners?”
“Of course,” he said.
Zach was already heading toward the door of the ritual room when he heard a whisper, a woman’s voice. He stopped and turned to find Glenda behind him. “What?” he asked.
She frowned. “Huh?”
“Did you say something?”
Glenda’s brow furrowed. “What’s gotten into you?”
Zach’s attention was drawn to the center of the circle. He wasn’t sure how he missed it before. A wink of light. He moved past Glenda back into the room, even despite everything in him that told him he needed to get the hell out of there.
The whisper came again: It’s happening.
“What’s happening?”
Glenda’s mouth hung open with a question, and she squinted at Zach. “I’m hoping you’ll tell me.” She put her hands on her hips, her suit jacket flared out at the sides. “You’re really starting to weird me out here, Zach.”
But Zach ignored her. In that moment, Zach saw something, a shimmery, watery kind of…thing in the center of the room. It took on a shape, a vaguely humanoid shape. More importantly, he could feel it, whatever it was. It washed over him like hit with water. The scent he caught before, the sweet odor of flowery fields and clear skies was stronger.
Then the room groaned. The walls creaked.
A woman. He could just barely make her out, as if he was seeing her through glass blocks. No, it was the woman from before, the one he glimpsed in the window of the house.
“Are you seeing this?” Zach asked. He didn’t turn back to look at Glenda.
“What?” Glenda asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”
The image grew clearer. “She’s right there,” Zach said. He pointed to the center of the circle.
He was forcibly turned around to face Glenda. She had both hands on his shoulders. “Do I have to slap you to snap out of it?”
Zach looked back over his shoulder to the center of the circle. The woman was gone, and so was the flash of light he’d seen before. He shook his head and faced Glenda again. “I’m fine.”
“Okay.” She moved so that she was in his field of vision. “You sure?”
Zach nodded. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Okay. Let’s get out of here and get to a hotel room to drop our stuff off.”
“We should go to the police station…”
“No, I think that can wait for a bit. They still have work to do here anyway. Let’s go take some time. This is a big one. There’s lots to handle here.”
“I can handle it just fine.”
“I know,” Glenda said. “But I’m your superior.” She got behind him and shoved him toward the door.
“Technically, you’re not my superior,” he said as she moved him out.
“I’ll punch you in the back of the head,” she said.
Zach managed a little laugh. “Okay, okay, boss.” And, as curious as he was about what exactly had just happened to him, he was still very happy to be leaving that room.
When they reached the top of the stairs again on the second floor of the house, Glenda’s phone rang. “Quantico,” she said when she glanced at the number. She answered. The expression on her face twisted Zach’s gut. “We got another one,” Glenda said after she hung up the phone.
“We’re not done with this one,” Zach said. The expression on Glenda’s face shut him up, though.
“Same thing. Nine dead, heads chopped off. This time in Seattle.”
La Jolla, CA
Alvina Johnson spent the morning in her garden. Usually she tended to the roses, and she spent some of her time that morning doing exactly that. But she wasn’t as attentive to her task in the usual ways. Not today. Instead, she kept watch of the activities next door.
The police.
Such an unusual occurrence in this neighborhood. Though, if she had to be totally honest with herself, not entirely unexpected at that particular household. The biggest on the cul-de-sac.
Alvina was a distant cousin to the New York Johnsons. (Yes, those Johnsons.) She was bred to live in a neighborhood like this, and she had for 47 years when she moved out west from her Connecticut home with her husband, Rupert North, dead going on nine years now, God rest his soul. She fought to keep her name in the marriage, an scandalous act at the time, but with a family name such as hers, keeping the name was a smart move, she considered.
But the neighbors, the owners of that large house on the hill, theirs w
asn’t a name that Alvina was familiar with. They had to be nouveau riche. New money. She felt it in her bones from the day they moved in. Nothing good was going to come of them living there.
So, the police outside their house, it was a moment of I told you so! She’d expected it, and she’d said as much to Iris Monahan (Yes, those Monahans) the day they moved in. Even though they’d managed to keep quiet up there on the hill for a good twenty years—the house had sat empty for many years before that—she knew their day would come. And here it was, just as she predicted. They were involved in something illegal, something even more scandalous than a blushing bride wishing to keep her God-given family name.
Instead of working the dirt as she usually did—as she often enjoyed doing, an activity that allowed her to soothe her arthritic fingers in the cool dirt as if touching the earth somehow pulled out the pain from her joints—today she watched the police do their work. They were there for most of the day, and, when her hips ached and her knees popped, Alvina moved to a chair beneath the covered porch in the front of her house. She had a sip of a refreshing beverage—a mint julep, heavy on the mint, heavy on the bourbon whiskey, not too sweet—that her house man, Guy, brought out to her in a pitcher that beaded sweat to run down to the silver tray. There, she watched and sipped until the two detectives came over to ask her opinion on the matters as they occurred next door.
She offered them a glass of her mint julep, which they both turned down as per their duty. Of course, she would’ve have poured them each one if they’d said yes, but her opinion of them would’ve been much less as no one should be allowed to drink on the job. Cocktails were meant for after the work was done.
They spent a solid twenty-five minutes asking her about the happenings in the neighborhood as if she was someone who knew every time a car drove by. She didn’t. There was much more to do in her life than sit and watch the comings and goings of the people in her neighborhood (even if she was among the oldest there and she had every right to know what was happening). Instead, she used this occasion as an opportunity to find out what exactly had happened.
Murders, to think! Eleven of them, in fact.
“I knew it,” Alvina said, and that clearly piqued the interest of both detectives.
“What did you know exactly, Ms. Johnson?” the attractive young man asked.
“That they were trouble. Cars in their drive at odd hours, and strange goings on. That’s what I knew,” she said. “Tragic, most surely, but it is not entirely unexpected.”
“And did you see any cars there last night?”
Alvina shook her head. “No. No more than usual.” She lifted her chin and regarded the young man. “Not that I make it any of my business, you know. I do have more important things to do with my time than stare out my windows.”
The young man smiled a kind of knowing smile, a smile that Alvina didn’t like. A smile of judgment. She cleared her throat and smoothed her sweater. “If that will be all, detectives, I have matters to attend to.”
But they had more questions, and she answered their incessant questions as politely and as succinctly as she could before sending them on their way through the wrought-iron gate at the end of her drive and across the street to bother the Pattersons. (Lord knows where that name comes from. It was not one she was familiar with, and they were more evidence that the neighborhood was losing its luster.) Then, she had Guy refresh her drink and sipped quickly yet gingerly from the glass to calm her nerves.
To think! A common man passing judgment upon her. She remembered a time when people of his low-born status knew their place and addressed her and her family with the respect they deserved. Young people these days have lost so much, their manners chief among those losses. Tragic to think. Finally, she stood to retire indoors for a late lunch.
Later, she’d fallen asleep in the drawing room, a room that overlooked the side yard of her now-deceased neighbors. It had fallen quiet over there, and in the evening hours with no lights on, the property took on an even more sinister quality. It made her nervous to even peer over at the darkened windows as if at any moment, she might see a spirit or a twisted figure staring back at her across the side yard. It unnerved her so that she finally struggled out of her divan and made her way to the sitting room at the back of the house. Guy was in the kitchen, preparing her dinner, and she was somewhat comforted by the familiar sounds of his snick-snick-snick as he cut vegetables and cooked meat. She informed him that she would take her dinner on the back veranda and went to the conservatory to catch her shows.
When dinner came around, she moved outdoors to the table. She ate alone by candlelight in a rose-colored hurricane glass cover, looking out over the canyon and the ocean a ways beyond. It was windy, and there was an odd sound that she was certain she heard, a kind of whine, almost like a tea kettle about to go off in a distant kitchen.
She set her fork down and stared out over the dimming canyon. The sound seemed to echo from all sides. Finally, she stood up and walked over to the railing to stare out into the darkness to, perhaps, pinpoint the direction the sound traveled from.
The wind blew up in such a way that the flower sitting on the table nearly toppled. A breeze coming off the ocean was usually to be expected, but this was different. And there was a scent too, a faint, sweet smell of flowers that she couldn’t quite place, a flower that she didn’t recognize. Certainly not any flower she had growing in her garden.
A voice caused her to startle and turn.
“Izh-tak nul fatoum,” the voice said. “Izh-tak nul de Morrigun.”
A figure. In the shadows. “Guy? Is that you?” she asked. Her own voice trembled.
The figure moved quickly. Too quick for her to even scream. A pale hand covered her face and an arm cradled her backward. The creature whispered to her.
It touched her, those whispers, caressed her mind so that she could understand what it was saying. Prepare for the coming. Prepare to be received by Morgauna.
She relaxed into the creatures embrace. She was chosen. That’s what the creature was saying. She was hand-picked.
“Yes,” she whispered.
And it was done. That simple. She stood tall and stretched her back. Once old, now made new. The air smelled different. The sounds came from all sides. She was certain she could hear a conversation spoken miles away.
Not since she was a young girl had she felt so much power.
A sound in the doorway caused her to whip around. A male carrying a tray that he dropped when he saw her. A low grumble issues from her throat, and she crouched low while the male scrambled away. But he was too slow, her new power too quick. He was overtaken in a single leap and brought to bear.
He, too, would experience the strength of Morgauna.
He, too, would wait with her until the time came to relish in the queen’s return.
Five
Lufkin, TX – March 2010
The morning before that night, the night Liam’s family was murdered, was when Becky learned the truth about Liam.
Becky was Liam’s step mother. There’d always been a distance between them for that reason alone. They weren’t blood born. He was not of her womb, so he never quite built that connection with her that he should have, even though she’d been married to his father for going on eleven years. A gap existed between them, an awkwardness that could never quite be put down. It manifested when they had an argument. When Becky told him to do something, Liam always reacted with an inclination toward defiance. That was opposed to when his father told him to do something, and he immediately complied. His father had a way about him, a gentleness that could sometimes manifest as a sternness. When his father fixed him with a look, Liam knew immediately to do as he was told. His father wasn’t a violent man—not until that night, anyway—but his quiet strength was enough to compel him into action.
Becky, on the other hand, was just trying to fit in and gain his trust, and Liam made sure she was kept on that level since day one. She was an imposter parent. He�
�d written her off years ago since he first laid eyes on her when he was five years old. And it hadn’t changed in his sixteenth year either.
There’s been an ongoing argument between them, one that had brewed for years. A rule had been established—or so Liam thought—that Becky would always knock first before coming into his room. She was a step parent. In Liam’s mind, that meant she didn’t have the same rights as a regular parent to simply barge into a room—his room especially—like it was her own. The operative word: his room, not hers. And a knock was the polite thing to do. Wasn’t polite and neighborly a source of pride in this part of the country? The least Becky could do was be polite and neighborly to her sixteen-year-old step son.
But that particular morning, the morning before Liam’s world changed inalterably, came after Liam had opened a bottle of Smirnoff Twist of Green Apple vodka with Brian Grazinski from his high school. They spent the night getting drunk, albeit quietly in his room with giggles covered by their hands and the music playing real low, low enough that it didn’t wake Becky and his father asleep down the hall. He was proud that they were pulling it off, that his parents were none the wiser he was drinking alcohol in his bedroom with a boy—a boy that, to be honest, he had quite the crush on, even though he’d never said such a thing out loud to anyone, not even to himself.
In his mind, Brian was perfect. He played lacrosse and ran track in the spring. He was thin and wiry, and God did he have great legs that filled out a pair of running shorts nicely. When other guys in his class were checking out the tits on cheerleaders, Liam had eyes for Brian Grazinski.
Side-eyes, that is. He never let on to anyone, not even his close friends, that he might even remotely be attracted to other guys. In Lufkin, TX, square on the buckle of the Bible belt, gay guys weren’t so welcome. There was a story, an urban legend, that filtered through his high school about a guy in some unnamed year before the current school year who hit on some football players. The story goes that they found the guy dead several days later, tied to a fence post after being beaten and raped with bottles shattered in his rectum. Liam researched it in the library, quietly doing internet searches that he quickly hid the second anybody even drew close to where he was sitting. The closest story he could find was a guy up in Laramie, Wyoming who this had happened to, a guy named Matthew Sheppard. Maybe some homophobic football player made the story up as happening in their small town as a way to build some sort of street cred. Still, it was enough to keep Liam’s mouth shut about his attraction to other guys. It put his stomach in knots just thinking about what could happen if people found out about him.
The Stone (Lockstone Book 1) Page 5