Transmission: A Supernatural Thriller

by Ambrose Ibsen

  The news inspired a low chuckle in Mara. It grew until her whole body shook, and peaked in the higher register, sounding like something more befitting a schoolgirl.

  Probably she was happy that her friend was found and was entertaining the thought of being reunited with her after a ten year separation. It must've been a joyous laugh. A laugh indicative of great relief.

  Why, then, could Reggie only sense insidiousness in it?

  He grasped the wheel and gave the LeSabre more gas.

  THIRTY

  Dylan paced in a circle, mashing his hands together. “We never should have come. I mean, what the fuck is that out there? She doesn't look dead. Not in the least. And yet, who could live that way, underground, for ten years? No one. Not unless they were a witch, Kenji. Not unless they were, like, a real-life freakin' horror film. This... this is all bullshit. What if she gets up out of there? We shouldn't have ever done this. I regret the day I chose to help you clean up that audio. I regret the day I drove us out here. I wish I'd never done it...”

  Kenji's eyes were locked onto the book. He slammed his fist into the desk, sending up a cloud of dust, but never stopped reading as he muttered, “Shut up.” His gaze worked over the page line by line, letter by letter. The gears were turning. Though it was slow-going, the archaic prose was gradually translated into something he could make sense of. Now and then he stumbled, and would have to reference the dictionary he'd brought. He flipped through the dictionary's pages so hard that they tore in the corners.

  It didn't matter.

  Nothing else in the world mattered.

  All he wanted was to know what secrets the book held. If this strange matter was to be tied up in some way, then it was the book that held the key.

  The more he read however, the more he could feel the blood draining from his face. Things were falling into place. The pieces were being arranged in the proper order and he needed only to connect them. As he made sense of the text, reading and sometimes re-reading certain sentences to make certain that their content was fully understood, he felt his grip on sanity loosening. There was simply no way that a rational mind could embrace the heretical, nightmarish ideas proposed in this section of the book; and yet, after all he'd witnessed that night, he found himself with precious little choice but to entertain them.

  Finally, when he reached the bottom of the page, he let his arms go limp. Sitting dazedly in the folding chair, he looked up vacantly towards the ceiling. “Oh, my God...”

  This got Dylan's attention. He stopped marching around the shack and stationed himself beside the desk. “What now?” he demanded. “What's happened? Did you find something?”

  Kenji couldn't answer at once. His mouth was suddenly dry as stone and his tongue didn't seem to want to move. His limbs were sapped of strength and he barely remained upright on the chair, slumping forward so that his upper body rested against the desk. He felt his guts roiling, felt his entire digestive system coiling and rebelling for what he'd read.

  He had enough energy left for one thing, however. With a whimper, he reached out and batted the large, silver tome off of the desk. It landed on the floor with a metallic thud.

  Then, with no little difficulty, Kenji hoisted himself out of the chair and looked through the window. He could see the field outside, could see the borders of the hole they'd dug. Their shovels were still scattered about.

  “What's going on with you?” asked Dylan. He peered nervously through the window. “Is Reggie back with the cops?”

  Kenji's breath fogged up the glass as he finally spoke. “Do you remember,” he began, “how I mentioned the 'Dark One' before the séance?”

  Dylan nodded. “Yeah, what about it?”

  Kenji had some trouble in continuing but soldiered on regardless. He still couldn't believe the words coming out of his mouth as he sought to convey what he'd read in the accursed Carte de Umbra Lungi.

  No, that wasn't quite right.

  He didn't want to believe them.

  But, after all that had happened, he knew them to be true.

  “I found a ritual in that book. A ritual that a previous owner of the book seems to have referenced with frequency. The Dark One is mentioned constantly... and this ritual is meant for summoning it into the world.” He gulped, but his throat only seized up and a groan wormed its way out from his deepest reaches. He supported himself against the wall. “You know how it works?”

  The look of frightened bewilderment on Dylan's face said all. He shook his head.

  “In order to bring the Dark One into the world, a willing participant must be b-buried for a period of ten years. Buried underground, as the dead are buried. When the right preparations are made, however, the body never really dies. They are preserved in a state between life and death, wherein they may mingle with the world of the dead... create a strong connection with it. This takes a decade. In that time, the soul of the buried individual encounters all sorts of things as it straddles the border between life and death. It is in this way that the Dark One is called upon. The longer the individual remains underground in the trance state, the more powerful the connection becomes, until one day, after ten years, the person gets dug up.”

  Dylan took Kenji by the shoulders and shook him. “And?” The white rims of his glasses slid down the bridge of his nose.

  His legs failed him. Kenji toppled over and fell onto his ass. “When you come back from that space between the world of the living and the dead... when you've lived as the dead have lived but are unearthed, you come back to life.” He grit his teeth. “And you bring it back with you.”

  “What... what does that mean, exactly?” asked Dylan, dropping to one knee. “What do you bring back with you?”

  Slowly, Kenji turned and gazed at the book on the floor. The Carte de Umbra Lungi sat in a dusty niche beside the desk. “You bring the Dark One with you. The book says... it says it walks out of the grave with you, hand-in-hand. After ten years of s-stewing in the ground and forming that connection, you literally haul it into the world with you.”

  The laugh that left Dylan's lips wavered on the borders of tearfulness. “You serious?” he asked. “That's not right, though. There was only one person in that grave, Kenji. We all saw it. Just one body. And, you know, she's dead in there. I mean, of course she is. She has to be! Body looks real good for a dead woman, but she's dead, right?” He massaged his temples and whimpered, trying again and again to convince himself that the old book was nothing but fiction. “We all saw her, for God's sake. She wasn't breathing, wasn't moving or anything. I know what I said earlier, but goddammit, I was scared. Agnes is definitely dead, though... she has to be dead. I'm... I'm trying to look at this rationally, man. That stuff you're talking about is impossible. N-no one can live that long in a trance.”

  Kenji wiped his eyes. They were sore and hot. He felt like crying, despair coursing through him till he was completely overwhelmed. “Are you really so sure? What if... what if it's like those monks we watched on TV? People have managed all sorts of feats while meditating for long stretches of time.” He shook his head. Even in that moment it sounded ludicrous to him. “No... that shit isn't real. And neither is any of this. You're right. Agnes died while trying to complete the ridiculous ritual in this book. Who do you think helped her out? Someone had to have buried her. Someone had to have had a hand in it. Think one of her Hungarian buddies may have helped her do it?”

  “Who knows,” replied Dylan. “But what I do know is that someone's probably looking for her. She had that friend, Mara, that put out the missing person's announcement. Probably wanted to find her, to know if she'd actually risen from the grave like they expected. Wouldn't be surprised if she knew more than she was letting on, or if she were actively looking for Agnes as we speak.”

  Talking through things in this way helped Kenji calm down somewhat, but there were still a few things he struggled with. “What about the video? And the song? Agnes' voice is what led us here. She f
ed us the coordinates in the hope of being uncovered. Why?”

  “Simple. The transmission was a plan-B. If she was buried but her accomplices in the ritual somehow forgot where she was, or died before they could unearth her, then Agnes wanted someone else to do it. The people following her directions would have no idea what they were getting themselves into.” Dylan gulped. “We didn't know what the hell we were getting into. We thought we were helping a spirit who'd been wronged. In all actuality, Agnes probably wanted to manipulate us so that she could get her way even if her friends failed to dig her up.”

  Kenji furrowed his brow. “But how did she transmit her message? How did she imprint upon the media? Is she... is she really a witch, then? Do you think she actually has... had powers of some kind?” The more he ruminated on the question, the worse the pounding in his temples became. It appeared Agnes was indeed capable of projecting her voice and image onto media in some supernatural way.

  This being the case, was it so impossible to think that she might pull off the summoning ritual; that she might have somehow stayed alive underground for all those years?

  Dylan was grasping at straws. He motioned to the radio, to the space above their heads. “Look, man. I don't know. No one knows exactly how spirits tap into technology and manifest. They project their energy in some way that interferes with radio waves and such. Maybe Agnes had a radio and she used it to tap into the grid. Or the power lines outside this place. All of that stuff is connected in some way, you know? The whole world is connected through technology, through energy. If Agnes tapped into that network of connections from all the way out here, it's entirely possible that her energies were projected elsewhere, to places they didn't belong.”

  “Like that song, or the documentary.”

  Dylan nodded solemnly.

  It was clear that the two of them would never have full answers to these questions. It was simple enough for Kenji that, somehow, Agnes Pasztor had injected herself into bits of media in the hopes of luring some do-gooder to the shack. Once there, the chances that she might be unearthed and that her ritual would be completed rose exponentially. On the day of her burial ten years ago she'd inserted hints into a song and documentary, had invaded them like a virus entering a cell.

  Gaining his feet, Kenji walked to the door of the shack and paused. “There's really only one thing for us to find out, then.” His voice was low, his tone bereft of humor. He sounded like a broken man, standing before the closed wooden door and reaching shakily for the knob.

  “Where are you going?” asked Dylan, rushing towards him.

  Kenji opened the door and stepped into the cold night, barely avoiding Dylan's grasp. “I'm going to see whether she's really dead or not.”

  Dylan couldn't even argue, but instead remained in the doorway, knees knocking against one another. “K-Kenji,” he pleaded, “come back here. We've g-gotta wait for Reggie.”

  But Kenji was already starting across the field. His heart quaked in his chest, skipping into palpitations as he approached the lip of the aperture. The clouds parted in the sky above, allowing the moonlight to wash over the grass and rendering it a sea of swaying, frost-bitten green.

  It was just as he'd expected.

  Kenji stood beside the grave, staring down at it for a long while. His eyes swelled with tears. He ignored Dylan's repeated cries to return to the shack and instead stared into the coffin that sat a few feet away in the icy ground.

  The empty coffin.

  There were footprints in the freshly-dug soil where someone had walked off in the direction of the main road only minutes ago. In some places, the blades of grass that'd been tread upon still shifted for the weight that'd been placed on them. He narrowed his teary gaze and scanned the dark fields, looking out towards the road and beyond.

  There was no sign of anyone.

  “D-do you know what we've done?” Kenji muttered too softly to be heard.

  Dylan finally mustered up the courage to pursue him, and when he arrived at Kenji's side a single glance into the empty grave was enough to send him into a panicked sprint towards the Honda. “W-what?” He stumbled, fell onto his knees and then clawed his way across the cold field till he took hold of the Honda's front bumper and pawed his way up its length. “W-where... where did...?”

  Kenji staggered away from the grave, joined Dylan at the car. “Do you know what we've done?” he repeated, this time baring his teeth and quaking with equal parts anger and terror. “We set her free, Dylan. We played her game. All this time, we were just following her lead. But not because she was a victim. This was what she wanted all along.”

  Dylan fumbled with the door to the Honda, eventually flopping into the driver's seat. “Kenji, come on. We... we gotta catch up to Reggie. We have to let him know what just happened before he drags the cops into this. A bunch of police are about to storm this place where we just dug up a body, but there's no fucking body anymore. Do you think Agnes is... is still here? Think she's going to come after us?” He shook his head. “You know, screw this. It doesn't matter. We're getting the fuck away from this place.”

  Kenji thrust himself into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut. Agnes' whereabouts were less important to him at that moment than they should have been. They needed to warn Reggie that their “corpse” had walked off, needed to regroup and decide what this meant before the authorities got involved. “Drive,” he said, holding onto the dash as the rickety beater screamed in reverse down the gravel drive. “I hope we can catch him.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  “This place,” said Mara, face turned towards the dark scenery outside the window, “is so remote, isn't it?” She took a deep breath, fogging up the glass slightly. A little grin worked its way across her lips. “It is easy to lose one's self in a place like this. Everything blends together, does it not? Even particular destinations in places like this are hard to pinpoint, when some years have passed.”

  Reggie was approaching eighty miles per hour. He tried not to glance over at his passenger, tried not to listen to what she had to say. Nevertheless, he couldn't get past the feeling that she was dropping veiled hints to him, that she was teasing him with details that she shouldn't have known.

  “Where did you find her?” she asked, though the tone she used was anything but calmly inquisitive. It was very clearly a demand for information.

  Reggie pursed his lips, letting the question hang in the air for a while before finally giving an awkward laugh. “You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

  Apparently displeased by this response, Mara's face was dressed in a deep-set scowl. She peered through the window once again in her periphery. “Once, about ten years ago, I visited this area with Agnes. It was a very nice spot. Just the two of us came. It was not long after the other immigrants had kicked the two of us out of that house, in fact.”

  Reggie's shoulders stiffened. Both of them had been kicked out of the house the immigrants had shared? Mara hadn't mentioned that before. Previously, her narrative had only mentioned Agnes' being shunned. He listened closely as the woman went on, the tiny hairs on his ears pricking up all the while.

  “I'd long lost track of the place where we stopped that day, a decade ago. I suppose that's where you found her, isn't it?” She turned to him, her face veiled in shadow but her eyes reflecting the greenish light coming off of the clock on the dash. “Will you take me to see Agnes?”

  The request sent a shudder through him so that he could barely keep the car straight. His arms were tired from all of the digging, from white-knuckling the wheel. “N-no,” he said with all the gentleness he could summon. “I'm driving to the police station.”

  With each passing mile marker Reggie was feeling increasingly suspicious of the strange woman who now filled his passenger seat. Mara said nothing for several minutes, simply sighing and leaning back. Then, just as Reggie's nerves were beginning to recover, she began to speak once more. “It's funny how many buildings have gone up i
n this area over the past ten years. It changed the landscape. Made me lose my way whenever I came out to look for my dear friend. Somehow, though, you found her. You knew where to look. Even though she was hidden, even though the landscape has changed, you managed to discover where she was. How is that?”

  Reggie's heart thundered in his chest. Mara knew more than she was letting on. There was no longer any doubt in his mind. His eyes darted over to her hunched form once, twice, before he finally found the nerve to ask her the question on his mind outright. “Did... did you know Agnes Pasztor was buried outside that shack? Did you know it all this time, Mara?”

  The corners of Mara's lips curled into a wicked smile. “Let me ask you this,” she began. “Do you think that Agnes buried herself?” She cackled for a time, relishing the look of surprise on his face. “Back then, there was no shack. That was probably what threw me off of the trail. I'd even marked the spot in stones... built a monument of sorts, but that was probably cleared away when the shack was built.” She sighed. “A shame, isn't it? I could have taken care of this sooner had things just stayed the same. We picked this area because of its remoteness. We never expected anyone to come out here and build on that land.” She shrugged dramatically. “The best-laid plans sometimes fall through, don't they? Alas.”

  Reggie had broken into a cold sweat. “What y-you did to her... was murder,” he spat. The car was weaving in its lane. His vision was going double and he could scarcely focus on the way ahead for all of the sweat pooling in his eyes. He could hardly believe what he was hearing, and would have thrown the woman out of the car at once if only he'd been able to stop. But it was only a few more miles before they made it to the highway, and a short distance beyond that before they arrived at the police station. What was Mara's reason for admitting all of this? Was she confessing out of guilt?

  No, the wicked smile on her lips spoke of anything but guilt.