“Why are you telling me all of this?” he asked, breathless.
“You did good work,” replied Mara, the smile fading suddenly. Her eyes narrowed in ferocious intensity and from beneath her shawl she drew what appeared to be a long blade. Glancing over at him, she allowed the polished knife to catch a flicker of moonlight. “You've driven far enough. I thank you for your help in the matter.”
THIRTY-TWO
The Honda groaned. Its engine could scarcely handle the stress of bolting down the road at more than ninety miles an hour. The suspension creaked and popped with every bump, and the tires squealed at every course adjustment. Dylan was leaning over the wheel, foot glued to the accelerator and gaze fixed on the distance ahead. They hadn't passed a single car in the ten minutes since they'd sped off from the shack. There was no sign of Reggie's LeSabre to be found.
Kenji stared ahead. Reggie had driven off quickly and had a considerable head start. There was no way they could hope to catch up with him. Still, he thought it strange that they hadn't crossed his path yet. By now, he wagered, Reggie should have been returning to the shack with a fleet of cop cars in tow. There were no blues and reds on the dark horizon, however. The further they went, the more his gut tensed up over the thought that Reggie hadn't made it to the station as intended.
Did Agnes get to him first? Did she catch up with him on his way to the station? Or... was it the Dark One?
Something captured their attention in the distance. Red taillights.
“Is that the LeSabre?” asked Kenji, pointing to the red glow.
Dylan tensed. “I hope not. Look.”
In the next instant, Kenji understood what he meant.
The car ahead of them was upside down in the middle of the street. Smoke rose from the thing and there was no sign of movement from within. Dylan swerved onto the shoulder and parked, but before he even got out to have a closer look, there could be no doubt that it was the LeSabre. “Holy shit,” he muttered, pacing from the Honda towards the wreck. “R-reggie?” he called out.
There was no reply, except for the shuffling of Kenji's feet as he followed behind. The car had seemingly rolled, at great speed, coming to rest between the lanes. The green finish on its exterior was worn away where it had made contact with the road and the smells of smoke and oil were prominent in the chill air. From somewhere within the fuming heap Kenji could hear a steady dripping. It might've been gas or anything else; standing so close to the thing he feared it might burst into flame at any moment.
Dylan pushed forward, rounding the corner of the ruined vehicle and kneeling down to have a look at the driver's seat. In an instant he'd recoiled and scrambled away from the car on hands and knees, cutting himself on shards of the busted windshield. He seemed to want to say something as Kenji came up from behind. His eyes were wide, but his mouth had lost the ability to produce words.
Kenji looked inside.
The interior of the car was painted in blood. The source of that blood was outstretched across the front seats and slumped partially against the dash. Two lifeless eyes stared back at them from the cracked driver's side window.
Reggie.
The life was gone from those eyes, and it was evident from the very first that it wasn't the crash that'd done him in. His jacket and the clothes underneath were soaked in clotted crimson, owing to the enormous gash that spanned across his throat. Someone had cut him from ear to ear. The rest wasn't hard to fathom. Driving at high speed, he'd probably been attacked and then lost control of the LeSabre, rolling the thing. One of Reggie's hands still clutched the wheel with steely firmness, while the other hand was tangled in what looked to be a blood-soaked blanket or shawl.
There was no sign of any passenger. Stumbling around the car, Kenji looked for traces of the assassin, but found none. “Who did this?” he squeaked, pulling Dylan up off of the ground. “Who?”
Dylan rifled through his pockets in search of his phone. “You know who it was, goddammit. You know exactly who it fucking was.” His phone was still back at the shack, however. He'd left it in the grass after casting it down in frustration. “Dude,” he continued, grabbing hold of Kenji's collar with his bloody fist. “Do you have your phone? We need to call this in. Get someone out here... some police.”
Kenji pulled his phone out and started looking for a reception. All around them the fields were bathed in shadow. What lurked there, in the tall grass, was impossible to say, but the two of them had more than a few terrified guesses. With only the light emanating from the headlights to go by, the pair huddled beside one another, tapping repeatedly at the phone's screen and trying to find a signal.
The darkness seemed to move, to close in around them. The moon was gone, had been swallowed up by a tangle of black clouds. While pacing around the road, his nostrils stinging for the smell of gasoline, Kenji felt an incredible hopelessness weighing him down. Fear and fatigue disappeared, replaced by a burden of despair that he couldn't crawl out from. It would crush him, would eclipse all else and hang over him till the end of his days.
They'd done something terrible, something unspeakable in helping Agnes. And it had all happened because he hadn't been able to let go of his curiosity. Now a good man was dead. This, of course, was only the start. There was no telling what would happen next, what the long-term consequences of their actions might be.
It was a seeming miracle when, suddenly, Kenji's phone picked up a weak reception. Without a moment's hesitation, he pounded in 9-1-1 and sat down on the cold asphalt. When he'd spoken to the dispatcher and given her their current location at mile marker 14, he hung up the phone and began to dry heave.
THIRTY-THREE
The light of the desk lamp hurt his eyes. Kenji rolled onto his back and covered his face with a pillow, taking in deep, steady breaths. He could smell the fabric softener his parents had bought him in bulk before the semester's start. It smelled like lavender. From the other bed in the dorm room, Dylan could be heard to groan in his sleep. His body was wrapped tightly in several layers. Even though the heater belched warm air into the room, Dylan hadn't been able to rid himself of a constant cold since their return from Akeley.
The aftermath had been hell.
Kenji didn't want to remember it again. He'd tried, and failed, countless times over the past two weeks to blot out the memories in his head. No matter what he did he couldn't stop reliving that final night, however.
Staring into the pillowcase, Kenji breathed in the lavender scent and thought, for an instant, that he could make out faint hints of gasoline in it.
Whenever his thoughts returned to that night, at the roadside where they'd waited for the cops to arrive, Kenji almost felt as though he were there all over again.
Waiting for about twenty minutes beside the ruined LeSabre, Kenji and Dylan had fallen into a catatonic state. Even as the fleet of cruisers and ambulances arrived, they barely reacted. The two were hauled away from the wreck, and watched blankly as Reggie's body was pulled from the driver's side door of the toppled car.
The questions had been the worst. The scene had been utterly baffling to the first responders. They didn't know what to make of this wreck. Why did the driver have his throat slashed? What were two UW-Madison students doing out in the-middle-of-nowhere, Minnesota at such an hour?
It was all the two of them could do to spill their guts. They told all, explained the unbelievable circumstances that'd led them to the shack, and even directed the cops to the site.
Not that the authorities believed a word of it. They searched the property extensively, but no sign of the reported body was ever found, and subsequent searches into the persona of “Agnes Pasztor” yielded nothing. The esoteric book, too; the Carte de Umbra Lungi, or Book of Long Shadows, had disappeared from the shack by the time Kenji and Dylan arrived with the police. This former detail wasn't especially surprising; being a Hungarian immigrant, it was entirely possible that documentation on Agnes was lacking.
Their
confessions landed them in a rural Minnesota jail for more than twenty-four hours. Though the responding officers did not believe the pair to have anything to do with the murder of native Minnesotan Reggie Cash, they had admitted to breaking and entering on private property. The shack belonged to a man living in St. Paul, and there was talk that he might sue the two of them for damages.
Thankfully, the owner of the shack and the land surrounding it was an understanding man. Middle-aged, he'd inherited the spot from his father and had never used it for anything; in fact, he'd more or less forgotten about it until the cops informed him of the damages. His father, just before his death eight years ago, had constructed the shack as a placeholder for what was to one day become a proper home in the country. The man had died before he could construct the house however, and with him had gone all the plans for anything more substantial on the property. The current owner, a Mr. Franklin, decided not to press charges and both Dylan and Kenji were released late the next afternoon.
And so the two of them made the solemn drive back to campus. Neither of them spoke the whole way home. Kenji ignored calls from his parents; he had no plans whatsoever to discuss what had happened in Akeley. Making the return journey in a single day, they'd gotten back to the dormitory late at night and had retired at once.
Things hadn't been the same since. They barely spoke to one another, barely left their rooms or ate. The place was still empty; they had about two weeks left before students would begin to return in anticipation of the new semester, and were consequently steeped in isolation.
Neither of them had had a desire to talk about all they'd gone through. In many ways, it felt to them like a terrible dream they hadn't been able to wake up from. The trauma was still too fresh. Kenji wondered if they'd ever be able to speak about it, if their friendship hadn't been ruined by the hideous things they'd uncovered in Akeley. Where usually traumatic experiences can bring friends together in the long-run, the strange case of Agnes Pasztor was a very different matter. The two of them had come down with a potent hopelessness in the days since those horrors had unfolded, and would never again look at life the same way. When classes resumed and they were forced, by circumstance, to participate in the activities that their status as students demanded of them, it was possible they would become acquainted once again with normalcy.
But Kenji doubted it.
After the things they'd unearthed, the strangeness they'd weathered, there could be no returning to the innocent baseline they'd once known. Kenji felt the change in himself; the events in Akeley had affected him on a cellular level, had completely changed his outlook on life. In many ways, he felt his capacity for joy utterly demolished. Here he was, a young man in his prime. He and Dylan should have been entering the best years of their lives. Instead, they lived a nightmare every time they closed their eyes.
Worse, perhaps, than the disorienting despair that plagued them was the distinct impression that they were being monitored at all times by something they couldn't see. This was a feeling that the two of them had gotten to know very well at the shack, but to experience it in their unpeopled dormitory at all hours of the day was particularly distressing. They didn't talk about it, but now and then the pair would exchange worried glances when the unseen presence waxed dominant, communicating in their gazes an acknowledgement of the oppressive, omnipresent thing they could not put a name to.
Wherever he went, especially during those times when the feeling of being watched was at is most intense, Kenji feared he might encounter Agnes. Though she never actually materialized, she seemed to lurk around every corner, to stand behind every door, so that Kenji's imagination was always on full tilt. He could never relax unless he sat with his back to a wall and closed his eyes. But then the memories would begin darting through his mind once again like a horror film that he simply couldn't switch off and he'd be administered a fresh dose of hopelessness.
There could be no escaping the truth of what had happened. He, Dylan and Reggie had been utilized as pawns in Agnes' game. The woman had been buried in the hopes of fulfilling a strange and dangerous ritual, and had reached out to the world so that she might be unearthed should her helper fail to locate her resting place. But what had happened once she'd been released from her tomb and entered once again the world of men? Had she truly brought something back with her from the other side? Now and then Kenji's thoughts would revisit that terrifying book filled with macabre illustrations. He remembered all too well the hideous visage of that which was dubbed repeatedly the “Dark One” in the pages of the Carte de Umbra Lungi, and tried to imagine what it might be like if such a thing were to truly emerge into the world.
Perhaps if he'd had a while longer to study the ancient tome he'd have learnt more. Perhaps that ancient book had even included instructions on how to reverse the hideous events that'd unfolded. Unfortunately, the book had vanished before he could take another look at it. And even if it hadn't disappeared, he probably wouldn't have been able to find the courage to lay eyes on it again.
What would Agnes do, now that she was among the living again? Kenji grappled with the thought again and again but never drew closer to an answer.
In the end, it never was his role to know the greater gist of Agnes' mission. He and the others had just been pawns after all. They'd done their part. Now all that remained was to sit and wait for they knew not what.
THIRTY-FOUR
Dylan tapped the remote against his thigh impatiently. “Doubt there will be anything good to watch, but it's worth a shot, I guess.” Retreating back into his nest of covers, he sat cross-legged on his bed and waited for the Netflix menu to load up on the TV.
Kenji stuck a Twizzler into his mouth and killed the lights, hoping that they'd find a movie worth streaming. It didn't have to be a work of art. Any old distraction would do. There was less than a week left before classes started, and already the dorm was showing sluggish signs of a return to normalcy. The day before had brought a few carloads of students back, and tomorrow morning Kenji felt sure there would be many more.
Things were still awfully quiet in the building, but the thought of things going back to normal there, of the halls and bathrooms becoming crowded again, was strangely comforting. Even if his own life never managed to get back to baseline, the hustle and bustle of a new semester would serve to keep his mind from wandering back to less pleasant things.
Kenji and Dylan had put some distance between themselves and the events in Akeley, but like a deep wound, the horror would not scab over. They were still haunted by nightmares, still felt paranoid whenever they wandered the halls. As students came back to campus, the two of them held out hope that their minds might eventually heal over those frightful memories.
Kenji had to constantly remind himself of how fortunate he and his roommate really were, in the grand scheme of things. They carried the dreadful memories of Agnes' apparent resurrection, of the remote shack and more, but at least they were still alive. Reggie hadn't been so lucky. He had to concede, even in those moments when his fear and paranoia swelled to incredible heights, that he and Dylan had been spared the worst of those unsightly terrors in Akeley.
This night, they'd rediscovered their appetites, and after going for days with minimal food and activity, they'd set out on a long walk in the cool evening, visiting a convenience store and hauling back all the junk food they could carry. Upon demolishing a few more pieces of licorice, Kenji cracked open a soda and a bag of potato chips. The food tasted glorious to him. The Mountain Dew he drank was like ambrosia, the snacks a virtual feast. Dylan, too, began to eat with gusto, and they played around on Netflix for some time, munching contentedly.
“A comedy. Definitely a comedy,” said Dylan from around a mouthful of cheap pastry. “I need something funny.” He straightened his glasses and shrugged off the blankets he wore just a bit, scanning the rows of comedy films on offer. “I think I saw a new Will Ferrell movie on here last time I checked...”
Dylan
often spent more time trying to find something worth watching on TV than on the actual feature itself. Their ritual involved perusing every last movie in any given category, disagreeing on them all, and then finally settling on something random. “Dude, just pick whatever. I don't care. I'm getting tired.”
Dylan fooled around for another twenty minutes, debating the merits of this movie and that, before finally turning on an old John Candy film. The opening credits began and Dylan watched pensively, one hand buried in a bag of Funyuns.
By this time, Kenji was bushed. Struggling to remain upright, he began nodding off. He laid out across his bed, facing the TV, but this only made it more difficult for him to keep his eyes open. He sipped lazily at his can of soda, but the caffeine didn't touch him. He was down for the count. Laughter and commotion on the screen came to his ears, but he didn't pay them any mind. Kenji drifted off into a light sleep as Dylan snickered at the film.
Kenji's mind grasped at the frayed edges of vague dreams. He dreamt of a swirling darkness, of long, cold country roads. The smell of soil entered the sensory equation. The taste of earth, too, overcame the aftertastes of candy and soda while he slept. Twitching, Kenji felt himself teetering on the very border between sleep and wakefulness. He was vaguely distressed by this; unable to move, unable to speak, he felt like he was frozen in place. Paralyzed. He could open his eyes, and in doing so he saw the television, saw his roommate looking towards him with wide, worried eyes.
Closing his eyes, there was only pitch black darkness. He felt the crushing weight all around him, smelled the cold, hard earth as it pressed in from every side.
He was having a nightmare, dreaming that he'd been buried in the ground.
Like Agnes.
Kenji thrashed as he awoke, falling out of bed and almost knocking Dylan over. Dylan hovered over him, his eyes still wide, his face pale. Wiping the sleep from his face, Kenji sat up on the floor and sucked in a deep breath. “Bad dream,” he muttered. “Just a bad dream.”
Transmission: A Supernatural Thriller Page 17