The Whittier Trilogy

by Michael W. Layne

  The night manager suddenly turned pale as if he had just recalled something important. He said he was worried that the bear might have attacked someone else, and he asked Trent and Christina if they had seen an old man wandering around outside. The night manager recalled that one of their regulars, an old, native guy, had a bit more to drink than usual the night before and that he might have even been smoking a little something extra mixed in with his normal pipe tobacco.

  “Didn’t see him,” Trent said. “But I’m sure he’s okay.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” the hotel manager said. “That guy was born here, and his dad before him grew up here, too. You know, he was just a young man when the soldiers first cleared this place. If anyone knows how to take care of himself around here, I guess it’s him.”

  Just as the sun was starting to peek its way through the clouds, Trent and Christina stumbled to Trent’s car, and drove the half of a mile to the front doors of The Towers. Trent had borrowed some clothes from the manager who was close to his size, so at least he wasn’t naked anymore. Christina, although moving slowly, had her wound cleaned and bandaged, and had also been advised to visit the hospital in Anchorage right away.

  Trent sent a silent thank you to his cousin once again for being so prepared as he popped open the trunk and removed the crowbar. He retrieved his clothes from the plastic bag that was still where he had thrown it from the seventh floor window the night before and changed back into his bulky suit with no thought as to whether anyone was watching him or not.

  Fully dressed, he walked with Christina up to the front doors of The Towers where they could hear a loud buzzing of voices coming from inside. Trent wedged the crowbar in between one of the links of the chain that was securing the door, got some leverage, and jammed down hard until one of the links popped open. He removed the chain, and within seconds, the residents of Whittier hurried out, dressed for work, looking only slightly confused as if trying to shake off hangovers they couldn’t quite remember having earned.

  Many of the residents nodded to Trent and Christina as they walked past, but none of them confronted or spoke to them. Halfway through the crowd of people, the giant man stumbled through the door and passed them without a glance. His hair was freshly combed even though his beard was as scraggly as ever.

  “Do you think this will all happen again next month?” Trent said.

  “Most of the people who live here have been dealing with this for a long time, Trent. I don’t think it’s going to stop just because the Elder is gone.”

  “What about the residents from last night. The ones I had to…?”

  “Whittier takes care of itself,” she said. “With the old man gone, I imagine we’ll wash this away with an accident—probably blame the same bear that attacked us last night just to keep things consistent. If not that, well there’re plenty of ways for people to die in Alaska. We’ll figure something out.”

  Trent looked at his hands. They were still stained in blood—some combination of the old man’s, Christina’s, and his own. Even if the residents covered up what happened, Trent couldn’t forget what he had done last night or what he had become. He had only been in Whittier for a single night and had turned more into an animal than most of the townspeople. He had also learned what it was like to taste pure fear and to face the dark unknown—two experiences that would be invaluable for perfecting his stage show when he returned home.

  The events of the night, however, left Trent with more questions than answers about the people of Whittier and what really happened to them under the light of the full moon each month. With everything he had seen last night, he didn’t know where to begin dividing fact from fiction regarding his experiences in the strange town. If he believed the stories to which the townspeople subscribed, he suspected that the mighty grizzly had finally exacted revenge for its ancestors after all these years by taking the life of the old man known as the Elder. In doing so, maybe the old man had inadvertently ended the torment of the town’s residents at last.

  Even with the old man gone, Trent wondered if Christina was right about the possessions continuing. He hoped that this wouldn’t be the case, but his logical mind agreed with her, still holding to his increasingly thin belief that everything could be explained as a group hallucination induced by the stresses of living in such an insular environment all year round.

  Even if the people of Whittier changed into animals again next month, Trent suspected that the truth behind what was really going on would forever remain a mystery, even to him.

  As he and Christina continued to wait, the last of the residents finally left the building, and Christina entered the lobby. Trent followed and let the door close behind them as they calmly stood in the same hallway where the horror had begun the night before.

  Now the building was quiet and still and felt more like a deserted prison than a haunted apartment building.

  They went to the elevators and hit the up button, and Trent turned to Christina.

  “I know it’s not much, but I’m sorry about Alice,” he said.

  Christina looked at Trent, her eyes moist.

  “There’s nothing to say, Trent. Alice and I had our problems, obviously, or I never would have done what I did with you in the first place. But back there in the barracks, even though she fought like a true animal, I think a part of her was present, and that she knew what she was doing when she saved our lives.”

  Trent just nodded as the elevator door opened and closed again. They were both still standing in the lobby.

  “Would it be okay if I used your phone when we get upstairs? I need to let my cousin know that I’ll be home in a few hours…And that I’m bringing someone back with me.”

  Christina grinned.

  “Trent…I really do like you, but the last thing I need right now is to jump into something new.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “But either way, I was fine driving the half mile from the Inn to here, but there’s no way I can make it all the way back to Anchorage with this broken arm. So, instead of looking at it like jumping into a relationship with me, how about just helping me get back to my cousin’s house for now? Plus, you need to go the hospital more than I do. And you could probably stand at least one night away from this crazy town. Right?”

  Christina laughed, then winced.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, holding her as if she were suddenly fragile.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Just felt a twinge in my stomach.”

  “Your wound?”

  “Feels like something else, but I’m okay. Let’s get upstairs; you can call your cousin, and I’ll get washed up and think about things. Maybe we could go to the hospital and get ourselves taken care of. I could probably stay for a quick dinner or something, if your cousin could give me a ride back tonight…or maybe in the morning. And I’ve got something I want to give you. Something to remember me by.”

  “I have something I want to give you, too,” he said with a raised eyebrow.

  Christina laughed.

  “You can’t be horny after a night like that, Trent.”

  He blushed.

  “Well…maybe just a little.”

  “Oh god. I don’t think I’d be able to survive a relationship with you,” she said.

  Trent hit the up button again, and the door immediately opened.

  “I think you’re plenty tough enough to survive me,” he said as he absently rubbed his shoulder through his suit jacket. “The real question is, am I sturdy enough to live through a relationship with you?”

  They stepped into the elevator, and Trent hit the button for the twelfth floor.

  Christina looked up at him and gave him a wicked grin as the elevator door closed and the car began to ascend.

  “Well, if you ever decide to return to Whittier some day,” she said, “maybe you’ll get a chance to find out.”

  ###

  HUNTED UNDER VEGAS

  A Trent Walker Supernatural Thriller

&nb
sp; BOOK 2

  By Michael W. Layne

  Copyright © 2014 by Michael W. Layne

  “No one who…conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.”

  Sigmund Freud

  Las Vegas

  Population: 596,424

  Miles of Underground Storm Drain Tunnels: 300 (est.)

  People Living in Tunnels Under Las Vegas: Over 1000 (est.)

  Chapter 1

  TRENT WALKER HATED performing exorcisms.

  But he had bills to pay, just like everyone else.

  Sometimes that involved performing tricks at birthday parties, and sometimes it required casting demons out of people—or at least convincing clients that he had the power to do so.

  Trent was a mentalist, and he often persuaded people to believe that he had special powers by combining traditional magic tricks, psychology, and memorization feats along with anything else he could think of to give himself an edge over his audience, including his attire.

  But right now, even in his work suit, Trent looked completely out of place as he sat, at midnight, in the room of a thirteen-year-old Mormon boy who was apparently possessed by an evil spirit.

  At just over six feet two inches, dressed in a loose-fitting, baggy black suit that was his trademark uniform, and wearing a maroon shirt and tie, Trent looked more like a funeral director than an exorcist who had been summoned to help solve the problems of this nice family.

  The only thing about Trent that even hinted at his association with mysticism was a pendant hanging from around his neck. It was only a round piece of silver with a small hole for the chain to go through, but it was polished on one side to such a luster that Trent could clearly see his face and his tussled shock of black hair when he held it up as a mirror.

  A woman he met in Alaska last month had given it to him when they had parted, claiming that it would help him to remember her. As it was turning out, his real problem was that he was having a hard time forgetting her. Even as he looked down at the young boy tied to the bed in front of him, thrashing around like a lunatic, Trent had to concentrate with some difficulty on pushing Christina from his mind.

  Just a month ago, he and Christina had confronted an entire town full of people who believed that they physically transformed into wild animals on the rise of every full moon—that they were possessed by animal spirits in search of vengeance for their wrongful slaughter. Compared to that horrific experience, the poor performance from the kid in front of him, even though he was doing a pretty good job of frothing at the mouth, seemed utterly ridiculous.

  If Trent were getting paid even a dime under the 500 dollars that the boy’s parents were shelling out, he would never have accepted a gig like this simply based on principle alone.

  But as it was, this job was only a hop, skip, and a jump away from his next engagement. After the exorcism, first thing in the morning, he would be on his way to one of his favorite places in the world—Las Vegas. His agent had booked him for a week in one of the smaller hotels just off the strip. It wasn’t exactly prime time, but Trent never balked at working Vegas.

  Last time he’d been there he had totally killed it, and the crowds had loved him.

  And Trent loved Nevada—its weather, the people watching, and the overall vibe of its most famous town. Even though he only rarely took part in the gambling there, he loved the fact that people in Las Vegas would bet on anything, no matter how outlandish the wager might be.

  But before he escaped to Sin City, he had to finish the task at hand.

  It did not escape Trent’s notice that he was in the middle of Mormon country, and he wasn’t certain why the family hadn’t just contacted their local congregation or ward about casting out the alleged demon from their son. His only guess was that they didn’t want a black mark on their family’s name, since reputation and remaining in good standing with the church was very important to the typical Mormon family in this part of Utah.

  But, for whatever reason, the mother and father had contacted Trent after a friend of theirs had recently attended one of his shows. From that first phone call, Trent knew that this family was strong in their faith but that they also really needed his help.

  Aethan was the name of the boy who was possessed, and his younger brother had died from cancer just a week ago. It was just after his brother’s death that a spirit, at first thought to have malevolent intentions, supposedly possessed young Aethan. Later, the family had considered that the unwelcome spirit might have belonged to their recently deceased child who was refusing to leave his family and pass on to the afterlife.

  Trent had first been introduced to Aethan the day before in this very room and had watched stoically as the boy had ranted and drooled and spat, with his nostrils flared wide—all the while cursing at his mother and at Trent as he shouted nonsensical, garbled words.

  Within minutes of meeting the kid, Trent had decided to take the job for one good reason.

  Despite being a mentalist and having lived through a few situations recently that would have converted even the most doubtful of men, Trent remained a skeptic of all things supernatural. Since Trent didn’t believe in demonic possession, he knew that the boy could not, therefore, be possessed. All he had to do was determine what was really going on with Aethan and then figure out a way to give the family what they really wanted—a return to normalcy with their son back to acting the way he used to before his affliction.

  Given that the boy was not actually possessed by evil spirits, that left only a few other options to explain Aethan’s behavior. He was either mentally ill, suffering from a physical illness that brought about psychological symptoms, or…he was simply faking it.

  Trent suspected the latter.

  Chapter 2

  TRENT BEGAN BY burning some twigs of sage and by chanting in what he knew to be Latin, but what he suspected the family thought was some kind of ancient magical tongue.

  The mom stood just outside the door where Trent had asked her to stay, along with the father. Both parents looked like they were restraining themselves from asking him a flurry of questions, but Trent had explained that once he started the exorcism, neither he nor the child were to be disturbed.

  To help set the stage, Trent told them that he wasn’t sure their son was possessed by an actual demon. He assured them, however, that he could clearly sense a congealment of dark, negative energy pooled inside the young boy—energy that Trent promised to wash away with his ceremony.

  What he didn’t tell the parents was that for the exorcism to be successful, two things would be critically important.

  First, the parents had to at least somewhat buy into Trent’s abilities and the backstory he was weaving around the possession.

  Secondly, Trent would have to figure out a way to snap the boy out of his performance and to have him start behaving like a normal kid again.

  As he waved the smoking sage over the boy’s body, Trent catalogued again the details of Aethan’s room.

  The first thing he had registered the day before was that Aethan was a traditional Mormon name, and from looking around the house on his way up to the boy’s room, he saw plenty of other indicators to tell him that this was indeed a fairly traditional Mormon family.

  Otherwise, the room itself was typical of a young boy about to become a full-fledged teenager. Some posters dotted the walls, mostly from popularized, secular action movies. There were even a couple of comic books sticking out from under the boy’s bed. Trent recognized one of the comics from the visible portion of its banner as being on the topic of zombies—a subject that had been secularized over the last several years.

  In contrast, a Mormon Bible sat on Aethan’s nightstand. The book had obviously been moved and dusted only recently. Before that, Trent imagined that it had hardly been touched, as was indicated by the now visible and noticeably less dusty area that previously had been covered by the bo
ok.

  Trent also noticed a few crumbs on the boy’s desk in the corner of his room from what looked like recently eaten food. And there were two very small crumbs lodged in the corner of the boy’s mouth. If Aethan was either possessed or suffering from some type of mental illness, his affliction certainly wasn’t affecting his appetite. And Trent was pretty sure that demons, if they did exist, didn’t give their victims snack breaks.

  Maybe the kid was acting out his grief over his brother’s death and had landed on the idea of being possessed as a way to deal with his suffering. Or maybe there was some deep psychological trauma going on inside the boy that Trent was nowhere skilled enough to diagnose.

  For all Trent knew, Aethan may have subconsciously believed that by pretending to be possessed by the spirit of his younger brother, he could somehow keep his brother from leaving them.

  But that was a long shot, and Trent decided to proceed with the more simple assumption that the boy was just faking his condition for some reason. Maybe he just wanted the attention that his brother had probably garnered throughout most of his young life as a sick child and that he was still receiving from his parents even in death.

  And in a Mormon home like this one, Trent was certain that he did receive quite a bit of attention. But after keeping up the ruse for a little while, the kid probably realized it was too late to just drop things and to admit he had been pretending the whole time.

  In the end, Aethan had most likely found himself stuck in his own deception.

  Trent looked down at the boy. Even though Aethan looked like he wanted to rip Trent’s face off with his teeth, Trent suspected that secretly, he was happy to see Trent as his potential savior, about to offer him a way out of the predicament in which he had trapped himself.

  Despite this, Trent had no intentions of making this process easy for the kid. As far as Trent was concerned, it was never too early to learn a lesson or two about consequences in the real world.