I shrugged. “Hey, for all I know, there could be a zombie problem brewing here.”
“Do you think that’s possible?”
“I’ve heard of cases regarding traditional zombies, the ones raised from the dead by voodoo priests, but we won’t know anything until we examine the graves.”
The door opened and a large black man in a dark blue suit and tie came out to greet us. His expression was friendly, his smile warm. “I’m Dennis Jackson,” he said in a manner that was much more welcoming than his assistant’s. “Deputy Cantrell said she was going to hire you to look into our … containment problem, as you put it.”
“Alec Harbinger,” I said, shaking his hand, “and this is my assistant Felicity Lake.” While they shook, I asked him, “Can you take us to the graves and show us exactly where you found the corpses?”
“Yes, of course,” Jackson said. “We’ll take the buggy up there. The graves in question are all the way at the north end of the cemetery.” He beckoned us to follow him and went through the heavy wooden door, out into the sunny parking lot.
Outside, he led us around the back of the building to where a six-seater dark green golf buggy was parked. “We use this to take some of our older visitors to the graves of their loved ones.”
“That’s very considerate of you,” I said, climbing into the seat behind Jackson, letting Felicity ride shotgun. I wanted to use the crystal shard as we drove, to check the level of magical energy in the cemetery. The crystal glowed when it detected magic, and the stronger the magic was, the brighter the crystal glowed. I didn’t want it to distract Jackson when he should be keeping his eyes on the road.
“We like to take care of our future residents,” he said. “Old or young, everyone in Dearmont ends up here eventually.” He laughed heartily.
Well, he was a cheery soul. That kind of attitude was probably mandatory in a job that brought you into contact with the bereaved every day. Having a positive outlook was probably the only way to stay sane.
We set off at a speed of maybe ten miles per hour, the buggy’s battery making a low hum as we drove smoothly along the asphalt paths that stretched between the rows of gravestones. I took the crystal out of the pouch and held it in my hand. The triangular shard wasn’t glowing at all.
While Felicity and Jackson chatted about how hot the day was and how lovely the cemetery looked, I held the crystal at various angles and positions, looking for a telltale blue glow.
Nothing.
Whatever magic had made those three people vacate their graves, it must be more local to where the graves were situated.
“—Isn’t that right, Mr. Harbinger?” Jackson asked, finishing a sentence I hadn’t heard.
“Sorry? I didn’t catch that.”
“I was just saying that our jobs are very similar, yours and mine. We deal with areas of life that most people don’t want to think about. In my case it’s death, and in yours, it’s monsters.”
“That’s true,” I said. “The difference is that the monsters fight back. The dead don’t … usually.”
“No,” Jackson said, his tone becoming more serious. “Usually they stay where we bury them.” He paused for a few moments and asked, “Do you have any idea what’s going on here?”
“Not yet. That’s why I want to see those graves.”
He nodded and continued driving us north along an avenue flanked with gravestones, mausoleums, and trees. When we finally stopped and he killed the golf buggy’s electric engine, we were at the northern boundary wall. Beyond the brick wall, the woods stretched into the distance, gloomy beneath the canopy of branches and leaves despite the brightness of the day.
Jackson got out of the buggy. “This is where we laid Mrs. Cantrell, Mr. White, and Mr. Jones to rest.” He indicated three gravestones that stood next to each other but were nowhere near any of the other graves in the cemetery.
“Is this a new section?” I asked. “They’re the only three graves here.”
Jackson nodded. “The cemetery was built a long time ago, and as you can see, we’re butting up against the north wall here. We’re filling up fast, so this place here is where we’re putting a new line of graves. It’ll reach all the way to the east and west along the wall but when we fill all the space, I don’t know what we’re going to do. Probably have to re-open the old South Cemetery. That place is full and has been for almost a hundred years, but there’s plenty of room for expansion into the surrounding land. The government won’t let us expand north into those woods beyond the wall, so they’re going to have to let us move back to the old South Cemetery or there won’t be room for any more graves. We’ll be piling the dead on top of each other just because the government wants to save a few trees.”
I looked at the three graves huddled together by the wall. The earth in front of the gravestones was dark where it had recently been dug up to re-inter the bodies.
I held up the crystal shard. It glowed blue, but so faintly that it could almost be mistaken for sunlight reflecting off its surface. I moved south, to the graves on the other side of the path. The light in the crystal died completely. I walked north to the graves by the wall. The blue glow intensified. When I reached Mary Cantrell’s grave, the blue light emitted by the crystal was unmistakable. It wasn’t exactly bright—I’d seen crystal shards glow much brighter—but it was definitely detecting magic in the area. I walked over to Ben White’s and Ethan Jones’s graves and got the same reading.
“Looks like you got a positive reading in that thing,” Jackson said, watching me.
I walked away from the graves, keeping close to the wall. The glow remained the same.
Returning to where Jackson and Felicity stood, I put the crystal shard back into the pouch and into my pocket. I said to Jackson, “I’m sure I can fix this problem for you. It shouldn’t happen again.”
He raised an eyebrow and looked at me dubiously. “Are you sure? You didn’t do anything. Don’t you want to see where we found the corpses?”
I shook my head. “There’s no need. You can be sure that this won’t happen again.”
Felicity frowned at me but she remained silent. I’d explain everything to her when we got back to the Land Rover, but not in front of Jackson. “You can take us back to the parking lot now,” I said, “and we’ll be on our way.”
He pointed to the pocket in my jeans where I had put the crystal shard. “Did that crystal fix the problem?”
“Not exactly. The crystal detects magical energy. As you saw, it glowed up here by the wall, but not farther south in the cemetery.”
Jackson frowned at me now, his expression matching Felicity’s. “Meaning?”
“Meaning the energy is coming from the woods north of the wall. I can deal with that for you. It won’t happen again.”
“Okay,” he said slowly. “If you say so. This is your area of expertise, I guess.”
“It is,” I replied. “You won’t have any more residents trying to escape their graves.”
Jackson shrugged his big shoulders. “All right. I’ll get my guys to keep an eye on this area, just the same.”
“Of course.”
We were about to get into the buggy when a voice shouted, “Mr. Harbinger!” I looked along the path to see a wiry man with shoulder-length fair hair running up the path toward us. He wore glasses and had to keep brushing his hair away from the lenses as he ran. When he reached us, he was out of breath, red in the face, and sweating. “I’m glad I caught up with you,” he panted.
Now it was my turn to frown. “Do I know you?”
“No, but I know you. Well, I know of you. It’s my job to know about everyone in town. Well, not really, my main job is at the store. I own the games store in town. Wesley Jones.” He held out a bony hand.
I shook it. His name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it for a second. Then I remembered; Wesley Jones was the local reporter who wrote articles about coffee mornings, the Dearmont parades, and, more recently, the death of George Robinson.<
br />
“I have to ask you,” he said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his forefinger, “do you know anything about the murder at the Robinson place? I mean, the police are baffled by it. Do you think there’s a supernatural element to the case that the police are overlooking?”
“No,” I said calmly. “I don’t. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m on a case right now and….”
“It involves my father, right?” he said. “Ethan Jones, the guy whose grave you’ve been looking at over there, he’s my dad.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.
“I knew there was something odd going on when I came to visit his grave this morning,” Jones said. “The earth was disturbed and the deputy was just leaving. Is it vandalism, Mr. Harbinger? Witchcraft? Satanism? Those are the things you deal with, right? Well, probably not vandalism.”
“Not vandalism,” I said. “That’s a police matter. Mr. Jones, I really have to go.”
“Call me Wesley.”
“Wesley, I have to go. It was nice meeting you.” I climbed into the back of the golf buggy. Jackson and Felicity got in and we set off down the path, the electric motor humming softly. I looked back at Wesley. He was standing at his father’s grave, staring down at the recently-dug earth there. I could have told him that there was nothing out of the ordinary happening here but he was probably too smart to believe that. I was just thankful he’d arrived this morning when Amy had been leaving. Any earlier, and he might have found his father lying in the cold morning sunlight.
Jackson dropped us off by the Land Rover and thanked us for coming. He still seemed unconvinced that the problem would be solved but he had no other choice than to accept my word for it.
When we were in the Land Rover, Felicity asked, “Why did you tell him it won’t happen again?”
“Because it won’t. You saw the crystal; it was detecting energy in the woods north of the wall. There’s nothing special about those three graves; they just happen to be the only graves close enough to the north wall to be affected by the magical energy in that location.”
“Okay, I understand that, but where is the magical energy coming from?”
I pointed to the north end of the cemetery. “Those woods north of town are where I buried that box.”
“The hieroglyph box?” Since we didn’t know the actual name of the gold and silver box, we called it “the hieroglyph box” for the sake of convenience.
I nodded. “It’s leaking magic and the leaked energy is raising those people from their graves. That’s why I told Jackson it won’t happen again. All we have to do is move the box farther north so the energy doesn’t reach the graves.”
Felicity nodded, her brows furrowing as she became lost in thought. “This will make my research much easier. I should be able to find the box in the Society’s database now I know what its purpose is.”
“Yeah,” I said, starting the Land Rover’s engine. “Its purpose is clear; the box raises the dead.”
4
An hour later, we were walking through the woods toward the spot where I’d buried the hieroglyph box. The woods were shady and cool as Felicity and I trudged through the undergrowth, but the relative comfort of the air temperature was offset by swarms of tiny insects that buzzed around us. They were annoying enough for me to swipe at them with the shovel in my hands but all that did was disperse them for a few seconds before they came back with a vengeance, biting my neck and face. They didn’t seem to bother Felicity much. She flicked her hand at them a couple of times but otherwise didn’t seem bothered by the tiny terrors.
The place where the box was buried was unmarked. I didn’t want a random hiker investigating the area and finding the box. So instead of leaving a physical mark on the ground, I’d recorded the exact longitude and latitude of the box’s location on my phone.
“It’s here,” I told Felicity, when my phone’s GPS told me we were at the right spot. I put the phone in my pocket and began to dig.
Felicity sat on a fallen branch and watched me. She’d been quiet during the short walk from the road but now that I saw her face, I could tell she wanted to say something but was trying to find the best way to say it.
“What’s up?” I asked her.
“I was just thinking about London,” she said. “Do I really have to go with you?”
“What, you don’t like my company anymore?” I dumped a shovelful of dirt onto the ground.
“It isn’t that, Alec. It’s just that if I go back there, I’m going to have to face Jason.”
“You’ve been avoiding him, huh?” I thrust the blade of the shovel into the soft earth.
She nodded slowly. “Yes, I suppose I have. He wants me to choose between going back to England and being with him, or staying here and us splitting up. I love it here and I love my job, but I thought Jason was the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with, so it isn’t an easy decision. I thought that by avoiding the issue, I’d be able to put off making that decision, but if I go back to London, I’d have to see him face-to-face and give him an answer.”
“You really should come with me,” I said. “I don’t know why my father wants me to go to headquarters but it must be something important, and I’d like you to be there.” I grinned, trying to lighten the mood. “I’ve gotten used to you. And you make great coffee.”
She shot me an exasperated look. “Oh well, at least I’m good for something, even if it is only making the drinks.”
“You’re good for a lot of things,” I said, digging deeper into the earth beneath the tree. “I’d like you to come to England with me because I value your input.”
“Oh,” she said, taken aback. “Thank you, Alec.”
“And I may need cinnamon rolls or apple bakes while I’m there, and you’re the best baker I know.” I shoveled deeper, inwardly cursing myself. I couldn’t just compliment Felicity and leave it at that, could I? I always had offset the compliment with a joke and ruin it.
The tip of the shovel contacted the heavy cloth I had wrapped the hieroglyph box in before I’d buried it. I bent down and scraped the remaining dirt away with my hands, lifting the cloth-covered box out of the hole. I unwrapped it and looked at its shiny gold and silver surface etched with perfect, tiny hieroglyphs. If it had just been a decorative piece, it could be the centerpiece of any ancient Egyptian museum exhibit.
But it wasn’t decorative; it was dangerous. The box contained such a powerful magical energy that it had caused three corpses to climb out of their graves. And that was just a tiny fraction of its power. Who knew what would happen if the box were activated in the proper manner?
I had to bury this thing far away from here, in a place where it couldn’t cause any more trouble. These woods were huge, covering miles of territory to the north before reaching another town, so there were plenty of places to hide the box where it would be isolated, its power unable to affect anyone.
Felicity leaned in close to my shoulder and stared at the box. “I know it might be an evil artifact that could destroy the world,” she said, “but it’s beautiful.”
“Destroy the world?” I asked her. “Where did you get that idea?”
“It has to be important, Alec, otherwise why would you have mailed it to yourself from Paris and why would someone be trying to kill you for it? In fact, you said they were trying to kill you simply so you couldn’t use the box’s power against them. Doesn’t that alone mean it must be super powerful?”
“Yeah, I guess so. But as for mailing it to myself, I can’t remember why I did it. Hell, I can’t even remember doing it at all.” I turned the box in my hand, sunlight reflecting off its surfaces. “If only we could decipher these hieroglyphs.”
“I’m still working on it,” she said, looking into my eyes. “There’s a set of the photos of the box next to my computer in the office and another set next to my computer at home. The symbols on the surfaces are in some sort of code and without a key, I can’t break the code.”
I was aware of Felicity’s closeness, the heat of her body, the fragrance of her perfume. I wondered if my desire to take her to London with me was more than just professional. Maybe I wanted her to have to confront Jason so she would split up with him. With him out of the way….
I pushed the thought from my mind. The poor girl was distraught about the ultimatum her boyfriend had given her and here I was seeing it as an opportunity for myself. I needed to get a grip and focus on the task at hand.
Rewrapping the box, I said, “Let’s find a better resting place for this thing.”
We began the hike back to the road where I’d left the Land Rover. When we emerged from the woods and onto the road, I was surprised to see Amy Cantrell’s police cruiser parked behind my Land Rover. When she saw us coming out of the trees, Amy got out of her car and waved us over.
“Dennis Jackson called me and said you’d fixed the problem,” she said. “Is that right?”
“Yeah, it won’t happen again,” I told her.
She nodded, looking as unsure about my claim as Jackson had. “So what was it that made those people come back to life?”
“There was a magical item buried in the woods near the north wall of the cemetery. It was leaking energy and that energy animated the corpses.” I looked into her green eyes and said, “They didn’t come back to life exactly. The magic just made them move. What you said at the office about your mother being lost and confused, that isn’t true. She wasn’t actually brought back to life.”
“Okay,” Amy said. “Well, that’s a comfort, I suppose. So what are you going to do with the magical item? Is that it, there?” She nodded at the cloth-wrapped box in my hand.
“Yeah, this is it. I’m going to put it somewhere where it won’t cause any more trouble.”
“Can I see it?”
I didn’t see any harm in letting her see the box, so I unwrapped it and held it up to show her.
“Wow, that’s pretty. You say it’s magical; what does it do?”
“It raises the dead.”
The Harbinger PI Box Set Page 18