by Aiden James
The
Raven Mocker
by
Aiden James
Acclaim for Aiden James:
“Aiden James has written a deeply psychological, gripping tale that keeps the readers hooked from page one.”
—Bookfinds review for THE FORGOTTEN EDEN
“Not only is Aiden James a storyteller par excellence, but his material for his story is riveting.”
—Huntress Reviews
“The hook to this excellent suspense thriller is the twists that will keep readers wondering what is going on as nothing is quite what it seems. Adding to the excitement is that the audience will wonder whether the terror is an evil supernatural creature or an amoral human…Aiden James provides a dark thriller that grips fans from the opening.”
—Harriet Klausner, Amazon’s #1 book reviewer for THE FORGOTTEN EDEN
“Aiden James writing style flows very easily and I found that CADES COVE snowballed into a very gripping tale. Clearly the strengths in the piece were as the spirit's interaction became prevalent with the family… The Indian lore and ceremonies and the flashbacks to Allie Mae's (earthly) demise were very powerful. I think those aspects separated the work from what we've seen before in horror and ghost tales.”
—Evelyn Klebert, author of A GHOST OF A CHANCE and DRAGONFLIES
“Aiden James is insanely talented!”
—J.R. Rain, author of MOON DANCE and THE BODY DEPARTED
BOOKS BY AIDEN JAMES
Cades Cove
The Raven Mocker
The Forgotten Eden
The Devil’s Paradise
Solomon
Deadly Night
The Raven Mocker by Aiden James
Published by Aiden James at Amazon Kindle
Copyright © 2010 by Aiden James
www.aidenjamesfiction.com
Cover Art: R.C. Rutter, [email protected]
All rights reserved.
Amazon Kindle Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Amazon Kindle and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
“There are no haunted places, only haunted people.”
—Robert Baker & Joe Nickell
“It’s best to leave the ‘dead and buried’ undisturbed. Pray they stay at peace, sleeping in the bosom of The Great Spirit.”
—Evelyn “Two Doves Rising” Sherman
The Raven Mocker
Chapter One
A sudden gust carried snow flurries into the anthropology department’s long corridor before the main entrance closed, the security latch re-locking itself. The entire building sat deserted, as did much of the University of Tennessee’s Knoxville campus. Most everyone, faculty included, had left earlier that afternoon for the start of winter break. Everyone, except Eddie Krantz and his fiancé Cynthia Towner.
“We’ll be in here fifteen to twenty minutes, tops,” said Eddie, removing his scarf and brushing a thin layer of snowflakes from his coat.
Blond and handsome with serene blue eyes, he cracked a tense smile in hopes she would remain patient. Just as anxious to begin their trip to Miami Beach, it was imperative he complete the last minute task given to him by Dr. Walter Pollack. As a first-year archaeology intern, he could ill afford displeasing the professor. Let the boss down just once, and kiss any chance of better projects goodbye.
“What does he want you to do again?” she asked, her tone impatient.
Cynthia removed her knitted cap and earmuffs. Her flowing dark brown hair no longer confined, it smartly framed her delicate features and emerald eyes within a soft oval face.
She followed him upstairs to the second floor, to a small lab at the end of the dimly lit hall. The echoed clicks from their shoes accentuated the building’s emptiness.
“He needs me to double-check the tag numbers against the journal entries on some bones we removed from Cades Cove last month,” he replied, unlocking the lab’s door with a security card.
He pushed the door open and flicked on the overhead fluorescent light, allowing her to enter first before closing the door behind them. Spartanly furnished, the small room contained just two tables and a stool, along with a small wooden cabinet and stainless-steel sink.
On the table closest to the sink lay what looked like a complete human skeleton. The aged bones, darker than what one might normally expect to find, were covered with unusual grooves and the hands and feet grotesquely elongated in comparison to the rest of the skeleton. The overall massive size also unusual, the lower legs and feet lined up in neat rows next to the rest of the skeleton, indicating whoever the bones belonged to stood much taller than the six and a half foot table length.
“Wow… so this is what you were talking about last month, after your team finished that dig, right?”
Unlike some females he’d dated, Cynthia seemed intrigued by the remains, especially the apparent deformities. That’s one of the things that endeared her to him. Nearly finished with her undergraduate studies in microbiology, she currently planned to attend med school within the next three years. It just depended on when he finished his graduate work.
He nodded in response, watching her fascination and pleased that the ticking-timer for him to hurry had been paused. Still, he knew he needed to take care of Dr. Pollack’s directive quickly. He moved over to the cabinet and opened it. The professor’s journal sat on the top shelf. Eddie grabbed the journal and returned to the table, opening to the ledger pages for this particular specimen.
The only skeleton left to confirm, two-dozen others had already been verified and taken elsewhere for safekeeping. Like them, this one would be moved to a cold storage unit set up in the basement of an abandoned dormitory near the McClung Museum. Eddie had been charged with verifying the bones, carefully wrapping the skeleton, and then placing it inside a steel travel case that waited beneath the table. Another of the professor’s assistants would be here tomorrow morning to pick it up and take it to the storage unit. He set out in earnest, while Cynthia continued to study the remains.
Suddenly, she frowned.
“What do these belong to?” She pointed to a pile of sharp jagged teeth located near the bottom edge of the table. More than a dozen in total, each tooth curved slightly along its two to three-inch length.
“Some animal, Cyn,” he replied, curt, barely looking up from the ledger. When he felt the heat from her glare, he looked up again, his smile apologetic. “Our preliminary findings were that the teeth belonged to some kind of big cat no longer around here.”
“You mean extinct? And that would make it prehistoric, right?” she persisted, waiting for an answer that didn’t come. Meanwhile her gaze followed the skeleton’s length, settling on its skull. “It’s got a head bigger than Shaq’s.” She shot him a wry smile, to which he responded with another brief glance.
“Do you remember anything else I told you about, before the Indian activists closed the site?” he asked, not immediately catching her allusion to the star basketball player.
He regretted his smugness that slipped through unchecked. But hoping this time she’d let him finish his task uninterrupted, he tried to ignore the sting from his latest barb on her face, her lower lip quivering, likely in sullen anger. Well here’s something not so endearing. Jesus, she better learn to not be so da
mned sensitive if she’s ever going to amount to anything in the medical field.
“This is the most unusual specimen recovered from the dig,” he continued. “Dr. Pollack’s really excited about the skull, since the cranial capacity is bigger than modern man, even rivaling that of Cro-Magnum. Remember now?”
She nodded weakly that she did, and then looked back at the bones. The skull’s lower jaw curved to a point, a very unusual feature for any human, and the entire skull lacked teeth, except for several worn molars. Where the incisors and canines should be were only empty sockets.
“Where are its teeth?”
Her sarcastic tone needled him. He looked up again from the ledger, this time sharply.
Did she really need to go there?
“Well,” he began, frowning as he watched her gaze shift from the animal teeth to the skull and jawbone. “We might’ve lost them when we separated this skeleton from the girl’s remains I also told you about.”
The look on his face not so apologetic, imploring her silently to please let him finish the rest of his verification undisturbed. After all, he lacked just half a page and then it was on to packing up the bones and getting the hell out of here.
“The murdered girl from the early nineteen-hundreds who was reburied right after Thanksgiving?”
He confirmed this with a nod.
“Did you ever read the story about that?” She waited for his response, which was simply a negative headshake.
“It was in both the Knoxville and school papers, as well as the TV news,” she said. “The girl’s remains were reburied in one of the churchyards in Cades Cove and the service was a Scottish-Native American ceremony….”
She didn’t go on when his only response a tepid grunt. To get his attention, she picked up a handful of the animal teeth. When he still ignored her she moved over to the skull and placed the teeth inside several of the empty sockets. A slight gasp escaped her mouth when all but one fit perfectly, and the other just slightly loose. She added one of the longer teeth to a matching socket when he noticed what she was doing.
“Stop that!”
She withdrew her hand, wounded by his rebuke.
He glared at her for a moment, and seemed poised to say something else. But instead, he turned his attention to the skull, prepared to carefully remove the sharp canines from the skull’s mouth. He hesitated, pulling his hand back.
My God, that’s creepy!
“This is really going to be bad if you jammed them in there,” he told her, determined to find a distraction from thinking about how the teeth looked so…so natural in the skull. For some crazy reason, the teeth made the thing look alive, like if his hand ventured too close, he might lose a finger or two. “Dr. Pollack told us this past week that advanced carbon dating proves this one is the oldest human remains ever found in North America. He’ll have my ass in a sling if I can’t get the teeth out.”
“I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to mess anything up.”
This time, she did look like she’d cry. He wondered if the thing creeped her out too.
“It’s okay, Cyn,” he assured her, forcing himself to sound compassionate while he gently removed the first tooth. The thing looked less sinister, and he moved on to the rest of the teeth. “Just give me a few more minutes, and I’ll hurry to get this finished.”
Cynthia moved over to the lone stool in the room, pulling it over to the door while she waited for him, tapping her feet lightly to let him know the ‘timer’ was back, full on. Aside from her usual impatience, maybe she shared the same mental picture of what the skull might look like if all of the curved, sharp teeth were in place. Given its gangly height and other apparent deformities, the skeleton already appeared alien, despite the obvious human characteristics. Definitely predatory. Thank God it’s dead.
“Okay, that should do it!” he announced a few minutes later.
Eddie removed the protective case from beneath the table and carefully placed the bones inside and closed it, sliding the journal into a sealed sleeve along the steel container’s side. Only the teeth remained, to be cataloged and removed tomorrow by another assistant. After he locked the case, he turned his attention back to her.
The fact she didn’t reciprocate his radiant smile wasn’t an immediate cause for concern, since he had a fifteen-hour car ride to work on fixing that. Neither one wanted to hang out in the lab any longer than necessary. Ready to begin enjoying a much deserved Christmas holiday break, he almost skipped down the stairs to the main floor with his girl in tow close behind him.
On the way downstairs a loud thud startled them both, followed by the sound of a door handle jiggling. The latter noise most disturbing as it echoed eerily from upstairs, like someone desperately wanted out of a locked lab. He jogged back up the stairs to take a look. The noises stopped. Nothing seemed out of place...but the air had become much colder, revealing his misty chilled breaths. As he walked back to the lab they’d just visited, a peculiar sensation of being watched grew strong, until the tender hairs along the back of his neck sprang to life.
The door slightly ajar, he assumed he left it that way. He pushed it open and stepped inside, turning on the light. Everything as he left it, the case sat on the floor, closed and locked. But it felt even colder in here.
How’d this place turn into such a frigging icebox, and so fast?
“Ed?” Cynthia’s worried voice echoed weirdly from the edge of the hallway, near the stairs.
“I’ll be right there!”
His own nervousness surprised him. Normally not one to let his weaker emotions govern his behavior…but now his eyes also played tricks.
As he turned off the lab’s overhead lights and prepared to close the door, he could’ve sworn something moved toward him in the dimness…something darker than the deep shadows of the windowless room. The ink-like form reached him just as he pulled the door shut. For a moment he simply stared at the closed door, expecting something else crazy to happen.
There was no way in hell he’d venture inside the room a third time. He hurried to rejoin his fiancé at the end of the hall, casting several glances over his shoulder along the way. Anxious to leave, he led her out of the building. Despite December’s wintry chill outside, the air seemed warmer than it did on the second floor. They ran over to his Mazda and jumped inside, and the car swerved out of the parking lot before either one had their seatbelts fastened.
He couldn’t vouch for Cynthia, but that strange feeling of being watched by someone or something unseen stayed with him until the University’s campus was no longer visible in the rearview mirror.
There had to be a logical reason for all of this—just had to be. It’s what he kept telling himself all the way to Miami Beach.
Chapter Two
The Delta 747 jerked suddenly and then dipped, as flight 1409 approached the eastern edge of Denver’s metro sprawl. Ruth Gaurni’er tightened her grip on the left arm of her seat, gazing anxiously out her window, thankful no one seemed to notice her surprised gasp. Nearly a decade since her last trip to Denver, she’d forgotten the turbulent winds the region is well known for.
She sighed, her nervousness hidden behind gentle brown eyes. Only the fine lines around her mouth as she pursed her lips gave evidence that her teeth were clinched tight. A handsome woman in her early sixties, she rarely looked her age. Even more so this afternoon, dressed in a sharp burgundy pantsuit with her hair freshly accented the day before with enough brunette shade to lesson the light grey that normally defined her look.
Her seatbelt secured in accordance with the advisory light above her seat, she quietly opened her carry-on bag. Call it superstition, or perhaps a compulsory need to make sure the jewels were still there. Either way, she couldn’t stop herself from checking. They remained safely wrapped in protective tissue inside the rectangular box that had been their home for much of the past 40 years.
“It’s time, David,” she whispered to no one in particular, relaxing her jaw as she unwrapped the larges
t gem.
Being the only passenger sitting in her row allowed ample opportunity to feed her obsession, to check one last time before the plane’s descent into Denver International Airport. She raised her head above the seats to check on the stewardess’s location, who was busy collecting empty glasses and paper trash in the plane’s coach section. At least another minute in relative privacy, she uncovered the clear oblong diamond resting inside the box.
A flawless gem nearly two inches in length, and half that in width, Ruth couldn’t remember the exact carat weight from its last valuation, shortly after her husband, Peter, passed away twenty years ago. But enough to push the stone’s value to well over two hundred thousand dollars—a conservative estimate, since the Atlanta-based appraiser told her at the time how the smooth surface and near pristine condition of the jewel added an undetermined amount to its value. Not to mention the non-faceted stone had been polished without any obvious tool marks. She squinted, crinkling her nose while studying it, as often amazed something so wondrous found its way into her family’s otherwise sordid legacy.
The remaining three jewels in the box were similarly shaped and also non-faceted, though not near as large. These consisted of a smaller yellow diamond and two sapphires, one a brilliant blue while the other a deeper purple hue.
Ruth smiled sadly as she considered their inestimable value and cost to her family, since the jewels once belonged to a larger collection of her grandfather’s. The immense wealth had come with a far greater price than the gemstones could ever repay. Anyone unfortunate enough to live under the unmerciful control of William Hobbs Sr., the lecherous old codger who survived far longer than a judicious God should ever allow, could never be compensated for the endless tyranny that reigned on for decades through his male descendents.