Blind Shadows: A Griffin & Price Novel

by James A. Moore

  Once upon a time, oh, so very long ago, Frank had died. And in his death throes, he had gifted her with a little something of himself.

  Beau Rider╤stud muffin number one╤put an arm around her waist and she leaned into him, watching as Derek Calhoun╤stud muffin number two╤bought her a caramel apple. In a few moments he would look back, see what Beau was doing, and the fireworks would likely start. The very notion made her all warm and fuzzy feeling.

  What few people understood was that the Blackbournes had connections to each other that went beyond the physical and slid straight into the metaphysical. It was both their blessing and their curse.

  Take, for instance, the direct lineage of Jolene herself. Really, when she got down to contemplating such things, that was the most important part of the equation. She understood the connections better than most. She had a certain...empathy for the blood relations that most of her kin seemed to not have.

  Once upon a time, her mother was born to one Abigail Elizabeth Crawford. Abigail was a woman of striking beauty by all the stories, but she was also a mite bit on the flighty side. Funny how people forgive that sort of thing when a woman has the right sort of looks. Sometimes it worked for men folk╤her cousin Micah, for example, tended to make women melt like butter when he smiled at them╤but for women, in Jolene’s experience, the right smile, the right expression and the right body would open an amazing number of doors and forgive tremendous sins. In her defense, her mother was her number one role model.

  Beau leaned in closer and she felt his warm breath blowing across her neck her pulse surged, and she shifted just a bit, letting him have slightly better access. Her hair half covered his face as his mouth sought to kiss her flesh.

  Derek was still in line and he was distracted by a couple of girls dressed in clown outfits and wearing little enough clothing to almost guarantee hypothermia if they didn’t keep moving. The good news for her plans was they were moving a lot and the best parts jiggled enough to keep Derek distracted, but not too distracted.

  As the story went with the family, it was Abigail and her sister Angeline who wound up wandering in the hills above Wellman, wandering around on Mooney’s Bluff, actually, where the family had a nice little mansion to call home.

  The two had wandered the woods many times, always careful to get back home before they could get themselves in trouble with the Moon-Eyes, because back in those days most people still acknowledged that the white-skinned critters were still roaming after dark.

  And then one day, well, one night, the two failed to reappear. The family went a little crazy looking for them, spent the night with their torches and dogs and guns calling for the girls and not finding them. Not until the next morning, when Angeline came wandering out of the woods, disheveled and half frozen from the cold October night she’d spent in the woods. She had no idea where her sister had gone, of course, and being as she was merely a young girl she was not expected to be strong enough to assist in any real way.

  Abigail was not found that following day. Nor for several days afterward. The weather turned sour and slowed down the attempts to find her. Just for kicks, Jolene had actually looked up the information about the odd incidents that happened in Wellman at that time. The information was there for anyone who wanted to look, and some of it could even be found online on a couple of sites that specialized in the strange and allegedly incredible. For seven days the weather was perfect in Wellman and in Brennert County. For seven nights the weather was perfect in Brennert, but not in the town of Wellman or up in the hills above the town. It wasn’t just rain, either, oh, to be sure there was a great deal of rain, as well as some nearly catastrophic thunderstorms and enough lightning to burn away half the trees in Crawford’s Hollow. But it was the other things that caught her attention and made her chuckle. Other things, like the claims that the ground along the bluff oozed blood in different spots, or that literally thousands of small, black frogs fell from the sky and covered Wellman’s streets. The frogs allegedly ate flesh, had too many legs and were blind. The one sketch she saw claimed that they had no eyes at all, merely bulging flesh where the eyes should have been. The frogs apparently melted into goo at the first light of the morning. Not a one of them was ever photographed or captured in a jar. There were other things, naturally, odd, screaming noises, thunder that roared down from the bluffs and echoed over all of Wellman and a dozen others. Nothing that could be verified of course.

  And then, a week after Abigail disappeared, she wandered into Wellman proper, naked as the day she was born and covered with welts, odd markings and half painted over in a black mud that looked like nothing that was local.

  Not too surprisingly, Abigail was never quite right after that. The doctors confirmed first that she had been raped, and later that she was pregnant. And who do you suppose took care of her after that? If you’d guess her family, you’d be wrong. No, Abigail had a suitor the entire time she was of an age where courtship could happen, a man who was several years older than her who took her as his wife, despite her pregnancy. That man was Virgil Blackbourne, who seemed to care not at all if she was pregnant, so long as she would be with him.

  They were wed, and later Abigail gave birth to a beautiful young daughter named Siobhan.

  That had been a hundred and fifty-seven years ago.

  Jolene smiled at that thought. If anyone knew how old her momma was, they’d shit themselves. Beau got a little more insistent and Jolene let him, but she kept her eyes on Derek. Derek was almost done scoping out Bouncy and Jiggles the clown girls. He ordered the apple and pulled his wallet. Almost time.

  Now, the thing about Siobhan and Abigail was this: Abigail was the mother, yes, but she was also a mental case. She never quite recovered from her week in the woods╤well, actually, her week in the lair of the Moon-Eyes. She spent a lot of time singing nonsense songs to herself and as little time as she could actually dealing with her daughter. That task fell to Virgil Blackbourne, who loved the girl as his own flesh. He raised her, cared for her, and schooled her in the ways of her other family, the pale people who feared even the faint light of the moon.

  And while that was all happening and everyone was all happy and cheerful like, Angeline quietly had her own child. Seemed she hadn’t quite gotten away unmolested either, but she was kept away from the public eye. Angeline was never as pretty as her sister, and she was young enough that the rape would have been considered scandalous. So they hid her pregnancy and hid her away, a dirty little secret.

  And when she gave birth, who do you suppose took that child and raised that homely little girl as his very own daughter?

  No one.

  But in due time Angeline’s girl grew old enough to have a child of her own and that child was Frank. The Crawfords didn’t want anything to do with Frank. In exchange for taking the shamefully homely boy off their hands, the Crawfords offered the Blackbournes a permanent right to dwell in the Hollow. As they were already squatting there, it seemed a perfect solution.

  Jolene felt Beau suck at the flesh of her neck like he was a vampire. She supposed he was trying for sexy and maybe it even worked a little, but what worked even better was when Derek turned around with her caramel apple in one hand and a big old Coke in his other hand, along with two beers in little plastic cups. The Coke was for her. The boys were supposed to drink the beers.

  As soon as Derek’s eyes started to track for her in the crowd, she pushed Beau hard and watched the college boy stagger away from her. “I said no!” She made sure to put the right edge of panic in her voice, because the best way to make sure that Derek did his part was to insinuate that Beau, who probably played a bit rough with his dates if she was reading him right, was trying to force matters. Just in case the point wasn’t made by that simple motion, Jolene made her eyes wide and put on her best frightened face as she covered her breasts with her arms and shook her head. Oh, that edge of betrayal on Beau’s face. And that little touch of anger, because he thought for sure he was going to get a
chance to get rough all over her ass.

  She looked to the crowd and spotted Derek already charging, the apple falling from his left hand, the tray of drinks from his right, his face already reddening, his eyes bulging. This was what he had feared, of course, that the girl who kept looking at him with a promise in her eyes might get stolen by Beau, the womanizer. But to make it worse, Beau had tried to force it.

  Frank was a sickly boy when he was born, but his aunt took care of him. When he fell sick at the age of four, Siobhan ran away with him. She was all of twelve at the time. She hid in the woods and cared for him for several days. And when she brought him back, Frank was much healthier, even if his skin had taken on an odd hue. After that the two of them were often inseparable. Frank tended to protect his aunt, tended to do whatever she asked, really. There was only one exception, one person who could call the boy to her side and have him respond immediately and that was his grandmother, his Meemaw, Abigail, who would sing to the boy every night and would tell him stories and keep him from getting into trouble.

  Right up until the time she died. After that, Frank answered only to Siobhan until he died.

  The thing was, no one really knew that outside of the family. Most people thought Frank was a younger man, just as most people had trouble believing Siobhan was old enough to be Jolene’s momma.

  The Blackbournes were a well-preserved people.

  Jolene stepped back and shook her head. “No means no!” her voice cracked and broke into a small sob as Derek charged. And then she stepped back a second time, watching the expression on Beau’s face. He couldn’t believe this. He’d been ready to make a move, had fully expected that she would be in the back of his little car or his SUV or wherever else he could find to give her a little poke and maybe slap her around a bit and instead she was backing away and calling attention to him, enough attention to cause embarrassment. She read all of that on his face as he started to look around, trying to see if her calls had caught the attention of the cops.

  Not that he should have worried. Jolene knew good and damned well that there weren’t any cops here. The sheriff had done his job and sent everyone up to Mooney’s Bluff.

  Beau had exactly enough time to see Derek, to do the mental math and realize that he was about to get fucked up by his best friend, enough time to know that he couldn’t get the hell out of the bigger boy’s way before he got slammed by the collegiate wide receiver nicknamed “Freight train.”

  He had enough time to know he’d been set up before Derek rammed into him and broke his jaw with a right hook.

  Jolene stepped back again, her eyes alight with pleasure. Beau tried to say something, to defend himself, but the first blow had already left him sluggish. The second blow knocked him into a complete stupor. Testosterone boiled through Derek in a thick enough stew that she could practically smell it coming off him like cologne.

  She suppressed the desire to lick her lips. The night was just getting interesting. Derek hit his best buddy one more time and stood up, panting. It was surprising how much effort went into beating a man down.

  Jolene ran to him and he put a protective arm around her, looking down at Beau and maybe wondering if their friendship could possibly survive this. Looking at the bloodied pulp of Beau’s lower mouth, his busted nose and the swelling along the left side of his once-pretty face, Jolene had her doubts.

  That was okay. She’d make Derek feel a little better, if only for a while. To the victor, the spoils.

  That was something her family was about to learn the hard way.

  Her mother always said that some plans required careful nurturing. Jolene agreed completely. What her mother didn’t understand was that Jolene already knew all about that philosophy. She’d been living it for most of her life.

  She’d been practicing for years and years and honing her skills.

  Just for tonight.

  ***

  The body spasmed one final time and the woman on the altar bleated out her last breath as she died. The power from the sacrifice spilled into Siobhan and all of those present, and from them flowed through the ground, through the very stones on which they stood, and then into the atmosphere.

  And from there, into the universe, the multiverse, calling to the One, the purpose for which Siobhan had been born. She was a fertile, passionate woman, a reflection of the One she called forth, the One who had been waiting patiently for this moment for untold eons.

  Around her they gathered, the pale ones, the malformed, the almost human, the nightmarish. They called their words of power, chanted their requests, begged to be noticed and pled to adore the One, the Great Mother, The Great Father, the Great.

  Some called the One female, others male. Siobhan knew better. The One was beyond gender, beyond comprehension by most.

  The One was coming.

  She called silently and pulled the next sacrifice forward. Keith Jamers had wanted her for as long as she had known him. Now he begged her as he had before, only this time he wanted to escape her, not have her.

  Too late, of course. Far too late.

  Her fingers peeled his flesh easily, carving the proper markings into him as he was held in place by her children. She had so many children and the time had come for them to meet the One, mother, father, creator, the very reason she existed. The One. The All.

  Many people had studied volumes of lore, had learned spoken commands through generations in order to do what came naturally to her. She did not need to study. The exact markings, the exact order needed for each sacrifice╤which was as complex an equation as the mathematical sum of the cosmos╤was written across her mind and soul. A marking, a word, a gesture, a nail in the right place. All of that changed now, was altered by the needs of the One.

  Still, she enjoyed listening to Jamers scream as the first nail ruptured his left eye. Oh, how he shivered and tried to thrash. The muscles of creatures strong enough to wrestle a mountain gorilla had to strain to keep him still as the pain lanced through him. He was even worse when she impaled his scrotum and then his right eye.

  The air shifted around her, around the children that surrounded her. And she felt her body moving, shifting through the realities, trying to coalesce at last in one dimension. She smiled at the notion of what Jamers would have thought if he could have seen her in all her glory.

  No time for that. Jamers shuddered and died and actually orgasmed as he passed. The little pervert must have liked the pain. Irrelevant.

  She gestured and two of her children rolled the man’s body aside. All around her the Moon-Eyes hummed and whistled their wind song to the One. And two of her children hauled a grossly overweight man onto the slab in front of her. The man screamed when he saw her, when he comprehended all that she was, and she smiled, his noises another part of the song of summoning.

  Her bloodied fingernail carved into his round, frightened face, peeling a trench in the shape of a sigil that had not been seen on the planet Earth in a thousand years or more. He would have been honored if he’d understood, but he was not capable of comprehending the glory coming forth upon the field of sacrifice.

  The One would be there soon.

  They would be together at last, as they were meant to be.

  The power pulsed through her and from her to her children, and from her children to the Heavens that would soon be rent asunder and offer themselves as womb to unspeakable powers.

  Hallelujah. Amen.

  ***

  “On the day we met I told you that some of the things waiting on the other side had powers almost beyond imagining,” Decamp said. “This drawing represents something that the beings we’ve encountered would have considered a god.”

  Charon turned the book and looked at the drawing more closely. “I can’t really tell what it’s supposed to be.”

  “Just a symbol really. Something to represent that which can’t be described. It’s not a specific entity. The drawing stands for any of the great old ones. The ones who wait on the other side in the outer
dark.”

  Charon said, “Whit said something about the walkers between shadows. That they waited and they watched.”

  “Did he? He was ahead of me then. When I came up against the Moon-Eyes in ╘86, their goal was to bring more of their race from the other side to here. I suppose they were trying to establish a beachhead from where they could go on to reclaim the Earth. I foolishly assumed that was still their plan and I didn’t consider another, more frightening possibility.”

  Charon said, “So you believe that the Moon-Eyes are trying to bring one of their gods to our world? Is that possible?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so before,” Decamp said. “I told you how the natural laws of this dimension make it extremely difficult for anything from another reality to cross over, and that would apply especially to something with a nature as unstable as a god. In legends they were usually only able to manifest themselves as avatars even when the conditions of our world were more favorable to them. They would appear as glowing spheres or pillars of flame or some such. Still, at one time they did physically inhabit this world, but in those days the old ones dictated the physical laws of this universe.”

  “Wait, are you saying they could alter the laws of physics?”

  “They could, and part of the thing that cast them out was the changing of those laws to what we know today as reality.”

  “So theoretically these old gods couldn’t exist in our conception of space time.”

  “Precisely. However, if someone created a sort of halfway house, a place where the physics of our universe didn’t apply...”

  “Oh my God, Carter! The Blackbourne house.”

  “Yes. All of this time the Blackbournes and their allies have been paving the way for the return of one of their gods.”

  “If they succeed can we fight something like that?”

  “We would have no hope at all. Fully manifested, such an entity could destroy us with a thought. Worse than that. Once it’s here, it can change things back to the way they were and bring its fellow old ones back as well.”