by R. L. King
“Hmm.” That was a surprise. From the sound of what Griffith had described, the students were performing some kind of ritual—but generally those required a circle, if even a rudimentary one. “You’re sure? No candles, odd bits of dirt on the floor, nothing?”
“Nothing. I’m certain. And even if I’d missed it, the crime-scene people wouldn’t have. I’ve seen the reports. They didn’t find anything except a few bloody footprints that matched the kids’ shoes.” The microwave dinged, and she got up to retrieve her dinner.
“Did any of them say anything?” Stone asked when she returned. “Did they speak at all?”
“Not then. They didn’t say anything to me or Liam when we broke ’em up and cuffed ’em. Apparently they talked later when they were questioned, but they didn’t say anything about the murders.”
“What did they say?”
“According to the reports, they continued to sound like they were out of it. Of course we suspected drugs, but their drug tests all came back clean except for Jazmin, who tested positive for marijuana. That wasn’t anything unusual, though.”
Stone sighed. So far this was all fascinating, but it wasn’t tying together. Clearly, something must have happened during the camping trip, but when? If the only time they’d been out of each other’s sight had been during brief bathroom breaks, then how had all of them been affected?
“When you finish your dinner, could I see the video you took of the scene?”
“Yeah, sure. Hold on. I’ll get it now.” She got up again and hurried out of the room, returning a few moments later with a laptop computer. She opened a couple of folders and slid it across the coffee table to him. “It’s the file called “kevin.wmv,” she told him. “I didn’t want to have something called ‘chant’ on there, in case the kids went looking.”
Stone leaned down and clicked on the file, maximized it so it filled the whole screen, turned up the volume, and hit Play.
The video image that popped up was jerky and a bit blurry, but the chilling scene wasn’t hard to make out. As Griffith had described, it showed the seven students, four boys and three girls, standing in a circle, holding hands, and swaying slightly from side to side. The sound caught them in mid-chant, all of them repeating the same words in a droning monotone. Stone had to admit that whoever had done the transcription had done a good job; the words sounded very much like what had been written in the police report:
Falaa arglish panandar thron harithra broov zinboth ahn…
Falaa arglish panandar thron harithra broov zinboth ahn…
The video went on for about thirty seconds, and then the image tilted crazily as Griffith lowered her hand and abruptly ceased recording. Stone restarted it and watched it twice more as she forked up noodles from her microwaved container.
“So,” she said when he sat back. “What do you make of it?”
“I…don’t know yet.”
“But it’s supernatural, right? I was right to let Mom and Reverend Blodgett know?”
“Oh, absolutely, Ms. Griffith. Without a doubt.”
“Might as well call me Dez. Everybody else does.”
“Dez, then. And yes, you were right to let them know.”
She indicated the laptop. “Do you understand that language?”
“No…but it does sound vaguely similar to a couple of others I’ve encountered in my studies. May I have a copy of that video? I’d like to send it to a couple of friends of mine for analysis. They’re a lot better with languages than I am.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What friends? I told you, if it gets out that I’m passing around confidential information—”
“Don’t worry. They’re in England, and their discretion is above reproach. I’d like to send one to Reverend Blodgett too, if you haven’t already done.”
“What’s he going to do with it?”
“That’s one of his areas of interest, and since he’s relatively local, he might have a better chance of getting somewhere with it.”
She sighed and nodded. “I’ll put it on a couple of thumb drives for you. I guess if I can’t trust a minister, I can’t trust anybody. And if I can’t trust you, we’re probably all screwed. Pardon my French.”
“Quite all right.”
“So what’s our next step?”
Stone didn’t bother to correct her use of “our”—he wasn’t sure yet whether he wanted to involve her in his investigation as more than a source of information. “Well…that depends on how far you want to go with this. There are several angles I’d like to investigate, but some of them will go much more easily if I have your help to grease the proverbial wheels.”
“I’m involved as much as you want me to be,” she said, but Stone couldn’t miss her hesitation. “Tell me what you want to do.”
“I’ll list them in order of my likelihood of being able to do them, shall I? First, I want to see the campground and the trail where they went hiking.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem. I can take you up there. Tomorrow, if you want. I can be off duty for a couple of days—they wanted me to take some time off to get my head straight. I said I didn’t need it, but nobody will argue if I change my mind. I don’t think the state troopers are investigating that area up there anymore, and we’re not likely to run into any of the tabloid people.”
“Good. The next two are harder, though, and ideally I’d like to do both of them before we go to the campground. Is it possible for me to chat with the teachers?”
Her eyes widened. “Mr. Warby and Mrs. Burford?” She let out a loud blast of air. “You’re right—that’s tougher. Mrs. Burford pretty much went into seclusion after the police questioned her. Her husband won’t let anybody near her except for official stuff.”
“What about Mr. Warby?”
She shrugged. “You can ask him. I can tell you where he lives. But the media people—both the legitimate ones and the tabloids—have been camped around his house. I think they’re gone now, but it’ll be tough to get him to talk to you.”
“Can you help with that? Do you know him?”
“Yeah, I do. He taught my son Kevin’s English class last year. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Brilliant. I appreciate it.” Score one for small-town connections.
“And what’s the other one? I’m afraid I already know, though.”
“It would be an immense help if I could chat with at least one of the students.”
She nodded, confirming that was what she’d expected. “I don’t see how anybody can manage that one. They’re being held under observation in the security wing of Maple Ridge Hospital in Shawdale, twenty miles or so away from here. It’s a mental-health facility, but they also house suspects until it can be determined if they’re mentally competent to stand trial. Getting you in there will take more clout than I’ve got.”
“And there isn’t anyone higher up on the food chain you can leverage?”
“Nope. I’ve got a good reputation on the force, but not good enough to get anybody to put this case at risk by arranging unauthorized meetings with suspects.”
Stone was afraid of that. This wasn’t a case where his magic would be of any help, nor even his non-magical credentials. Why would the authorities ever allow an Occult Studies professor, even one from a prestigious university like Stanford, anywhere near these kids? And even if against all odds they did, they’d never permit him to speak to them alone. The whole conversation would be observed and recorded from every angle.
Unless…
“Hmm. All right. Let’s put that on the back burner for the time being. I’ve got an idea, but I want to let it bake for a little while. So tomorrow we can try to chat with Mr. Warby, and then you’ll take me up to the campground?”
“Yeah. We can do that.”
“Thank you.” Stone stood. “If you could get me those copies of the video, I’ll see to getting them shipped out first thing in the morning. And in the meantime, I suppose I should try to find a place to stay. You say Shawdale
is larger?”
“Yeah. But I also said it’s twenty miles away.” She stood too, and once again appeared to be turning something over in her mind. She looked him up and down and sighed. “I’m probably crazy to do this, but like I said, Reverend Blodgett trusts you. I’ve got a guest room—how about if you stay here, for a couple of days at least?”
He shot her a surprised glance. He had not expected that. “Are you sure? I must say it would make things a lot more convenient, but—”
“I’m sure,” she said firmly. “I know what kinds of things you can do—if you wanted to put me in danger, I couldn’t exactly stop you. You’re not intending to do that, right?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, then, it’s settled. As long as you don’t mind sleeping with a bunch of boxes. We mostly use the room for storage except when my parents come to visit once a year.”
“I would happily sleep on the floor if it meant not having to drive twenty miles each way every day. Thank you.”
“No problem. Believe me, you’re helping me more than I’m helping you. I don’t know why I’ve got a feeling that if we don’t deal with this soon something horrible’s going to happen, but I do.”
6
Stone got an early start the next morning, heading out as soon as Treadley’s tiny FedEx office opened to ship the two thumb drives Dez Griffith had given him. It would have been easier to simply email the files to them, but he didn’t have his own laptop and he didn’t want to risk asking Dez to send them from hers. He’d already written notes the previous night: one to Eddie Monkton and Arthur Ward, explaining the situation and asking them to investigate the chant’s odd language, and the other to Reverend Blodgett with the same request. He thought about asking Dez for a third copy to send to Stefan Kolinsky, but the man didn’t even have a telephone, so the odds he had a computer weren’t good.
He was still halfway convinced that the problems stemmed from another renegade dimensional rift—so far, each of those he’d encountered before had behaved somewhat differently, so it wasn’t out of the question that another one would as well. It still didn’t explain how the kids might have found it, however, if they barely left each other’s sight the whole weekend.
He wondered if that were really true, though. Teenagers were crafty creatures, and he could easily imagine a group of them sneaking off by themselves after the teachers were fast asleep for a few activities not included on the official trip plan. One of them had gone to the convenience store a mile away—maybe the others went with her, and the owner hadn’t seen them.
Dez was waiting for him when he returned. “I called Mr. Warby,” she said. “I got his wife, and she wasn’t too happy to put him on the line. But I explained to her that I had somebody who wanted to ask him some questions and it would help the investigation. I didn’t say which investigation, and fortunately she didn’t ask. We can go over there at ten, but she said we couldn’t stay long. Apparently he’s not as freaked out as Muriel Burford, but he’s not doing too well.” She shook her head. “I hope you’ve got some idea how you’re going to spin this, though. I advise not telling him what you do.”
“Yes, I got that bit. I’ll—figure something out.”
Neil Warby’s house looked a lot like Dez Griffith’s: white, two stories, set back from the street behind a yard dotted with trees. As he watched the scenery roll by from the passenger seat of Dez’s Jeep SUV, Stone was struck by how peaceful the town looked, like something out of a New England picture postcard. Except for the black sashes he spotted tied around some of the trees along the road, anyway.
He wondered how many years it would take Treadley to recover from this tragedy. It always frustrated him when the supernatural world bled over into the mundane one, especially when it caused damage. He wished on occasion that he and the other mages could share the secrets with the mundanes, so at least they’d understand what was happening to them, but that was out of the question. It might be a little patronizing (okay, more than a little) to keep the non-magical world in the dark about such things, but would it be kinder to give them a peek behind the veil when there was no chance they could affect the events? Mages had been debating this topic for centuries before Stone was born, and they’d probably still be doing it after he was dead.
“Okay,” Dez said as she parked the Jeep in front of the house. “I don’t see anybody hanging around, but you never know who’s watching. If you can use that spell of yours to make it so nobody notices you until we get in, that would be great.”
“Of course.” Stone cast the disregarding spell on himself, then got out and followed her to the front door. He wondered what he would look like to observers; the spell never produced the same results, because it relied on the viewer’s mind to fill in what an “unobtrusive person” would look like.
The door was answered not by Neil Warby, but by a tired-looking woman who had to be his wife. “Hello, Dez,” she said. “Please come in.” From her tone, it was clear to Stone that she hadn’t agreed to this meeting with enthusiasm.
Stone took a moment to observe both her and the surroundings as they entered the house. Her pale green aura looked thin and wrung-out, flickering close to her body with faint flashes of red pinpricking here and there. She wore sweatpants and an Emerson High T-shirt, and her hair was uncombed. Around her, the house showed evidence of neglect on top of its normal, lived-in clutter. At least the Warbys didn’t have any children of their own—Dez had told him that on their way over.
Dez gave Mrs. Warby a hard hug. “How are you holding up, Lisa?”
The woman shook her head, but she did return the hug. “I’d like to say good, but I can’t. At least those horrible reporters have mostly stopped coming around.” She eyed Stone with curiosity. “I don’t think I know you.”
“I’m terribly sorry to intrude, Mrs. Warby,” Stone said gently. “My name is Alastair Stone.”
“You’re not a reporter, are you?”
“No. I’ve got no connection to the media at all.”
Her shoulders slumped in relief. “Thank God. I’ve had it with those people.” To Dez, she said, “I caught one of them looking in our living-room window the day before yesterday. I called it in, but they were gone before the police got here.”
“I saw the complaint. I’m so sorry.”
“I’ll be glad when this whole thing’s over—and it’s not even as bad for us as it is for those poor kids’ families. What’s left of them, anyway,” she added bitterly. She turned away, then stopped. “I’m sorry—I’ve forgotten my manners. Can I get either of you anything?”
“We’re fine, Lisa,” Dez said. “Do you think Neil is up to talking to us for a few minutes?”
She sighed. “I don’t know—he just woke up a little while ago. I don’t know if he—”
“I’ll talk to them,” said a voice from the dim hallway ahead.
If Stone were asked to choose a single word to describe Neil Warby, it would have been “defeated.” Even though the teacher was probably only in his late thirties, his slumped posture, unkempt hair, unshaven face, and wrinkled clothes made him look at least ten years older. His expression, haunted and lost, matched his aura, which was in even worse shape than his wife’s.
“Neil—” his wife began.
“No, it’s okay. We’ll go in my office. Will you bring us some iced tea or something in a little bit?”
“Of course.”
Warby led them back down the hall in a shuffling, sock-clad trudge. He looked like a man who didn’t give a damn where he went or how fast he got there. “In here,” he said, pushing a door open and standing aside so Stone and Dez could enter.
The office was as cluttered as the rest of the house. Bookshelves lined two of the walls, with a large desk under a window with closed blinds on a third and an old, comfortable-looking plaid sofa on the fourth. On the wall above the couch were several framed photos of groups of students—sports teams, smiling teenagers in caps and gowns, students involved in var
ious school-related activities. The faint aroma of unwashed clothes and beer hung in the air.
“Sit down,” Warby said, dropping heavily into his desk chair and indicating the couch. “I don’t know who this man is and why either of you are here, Dez, but I’ll be honest—I don’t care anymore. You have questions, I’ll answer them. It’s all I’ve been doing for the past several days. They’re all starting to run together.”
Dez shot Stone a quick glance, and he caught her meaning: as much as it might make them uncomfortable to do it, they might have an opportunity to take advantage of Warby’s despair and convince him to talk without having to reveal Stone’s reason for being here.
“We appreciate it, Neil,” she said gently. “This is Alastair Stone. He wants to ask you about the trip.”
Warby waved his hand in a “whatever” gesture. He was staring at a slim, open book on his desk.
After a moment, Stone realized it was a high-school yearbook. Warby had it open to a page showing a series of head shots, but Stone couldn’t read the captions from where he sat. “I’m sorry this has happened, Mr. Warby, and thank you for answering my questions.”
“Just get on with it, please. I want to help, but I’m tired.”
“Of course. Officer Griffith here tells me you and Mrs. Burford took the students up to…what was the name of the campground again?”
“Nepauhauk. It’s named after the small lake near there.” Warby’s voice was devoid of any emotion or inflection; he continued staring down at the yearbook photos.
“I see.” Stone kept his voice even and gentle, the kind of persuasive tone he might employ when speaking to a frightened child. “I won’t waste your time asking you to describe the whole trip. I’m sure you’ve done that too many times already.”
“They keep asking,” he murmured. “I don’t know what else I can tell them. I don’t know what I could have done to stop those kids from—”
“Hold on,” Stone interrupted. “Mr. Warby, I don’t think anybody is blaming you for anything. It’s not your fault, what happened.”