by J. S. Bailey
“What did you do to him?” Randy croaked. Mia decided to risk being spotted and peered all the way around the corner. She nearly swore out loud when she saw he’d been pinned to the ceiling by an invisible force, like what the crazy man had done to her during her late-night walk the other evening in Autumn Ridge.
“I gave Phil a choice,” Vance said without looking up at Randy. “He’s choosing death over possession, but I know he’s tempted to take the offer. He can’t bear the thought of his wife and child losing him.”
“I suppose you’re going to give me that same offer?” Randy asked through clenched teeth.
“I would, but you’re too steadfast in your ways. You’d never turn on your principles, which is why I’m going to kill you.”
Randy glared at Vance with eyes like daggers. “Then what are you waiting for?”
Vance smiled. “Your audience.”
Mia decided it might be best to stay back for a bit. Witnessing torture and murder and the like just wasn’t on her list of favorite pastimes. Well, she did plan to witness at least one death tonight, but not this one.
She turned to go find refuge in another part of the cave while she waited for Bobby and his gang to arrive, because surely that’s what he’d do once he realized his buddy wasn’t coming back. Following their tracks through the snow should have been easy enough.
She took six steps back toward the cave entrance and froze as a flashlight beam pointed right into her eyes. She held up an instinctive hand and blinked, then smiled at the one who’d taken her by surprise.
“Bobby Roland,” she said in a low voice so Vance wouldn’t be as likely to hear. “It’s so nice to meet you again.”
MOMENTARILY FORGETTING he was running from a man with a gun, Bobby glared at the woman who could only be Mia. She was petite with black hair starkly contrasting with her pale skin. She wore a short black skirt over black and white striped leggings and a thin denim jacket over a black Panic! at the Disco t-shirt.
Bobby had known people like her in high school. They were more likely to hang out at Hot Topic than control people with their minds.
He knew without a doubt he had seen her somewhere before.
“Turn my premonitions back on,” Bobby said. “Before someone gets killed.”
Carly hovered near his side, and he couldn’t bring himself to turn around to see if Kaori and Matt still accompanied him. After all, he hadn’t heard their footsteps.
Mia raised an eyebrow that wasn’t nearly as black as her hair. “Is that supposed to concern me?”
A sudden noise behind him made him turn anyway. A disheveled-looking Thane burst into the cavern holding a handgun out in front of him. His eyes widened with glee at the sight of Bobby, but before he could pull the trigger, Mia said, “Put the gun down and don’t move.”
Thane lowered the gun to his side but didn’t let it go.
Bobby noted that neither Kaori nor Matt had entered the cave. Perhaps the cry he’d heard hadn’t been as imaginary as he’d hoped.
He swallowed, looking between Thane and Mia, Mia and Thane, wondering what would happen next. If Mia didn’t want Thane to shoot Bobby, did she want to kill Bobby instead? What was he to her, anyway?
“This has all been very interesting,” Mia said. “Of course, I have to thank you for it all, Bobby.”
Something did not compute. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “If you want to kill me, just get it over with. I hope you enjoy the world burning.”
“You’re so silly,” Mia said. “I’d hoped to make everything more dramatic. I kept trying to delay things just so I could get it all right, but I guess nobody’s perfect.”
Bobby still didn’t understand.
Mia tilted her head to one side. “Good lord, don’t you recognize me?”
“I—I’m not very good with faces.” Bobby’s cheeks warmed from embarrassment. What had he missed here?
“Okay,” Mia said, “I’ll give you a hint. Nursing home?”
“You mean Arbor Villa?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake. I was visiting my uncle in the nursing home last week. You came in trying to find a Nathaniel Bagdasarian who apparently had ceased to exist in the minds of the staff. I snuck out of the room and followed you when you went around asking about him, and I heard you say his name to one of the residents. It was a mystery I couldn’t pass up, so I went and found him myself.”
Oh, crap, Bobby thought as realization set in.
Meanwhile Thane’s eyes had grown as round as saucers.
“I’m a good person,” Mia explained matter-of-factly. “Usually I just tell people to go donate their savings to the poor, but this was a little bit different. I found out all about you, Bobby, and knew that this time I’d have to do something a little more drastic. I strung him along for a while. I got him to think I was just a freeloader after his parents’ money. That was the beauty of it. And you know what? He’s deserved every second of it.”
“You told my parents not to kill Bobby during dinner and made me forget you told them,” Thane said in disbelief.
“Now he gets it. I’m glad we finally met up again, Bobby. I really wanted you to see this.” Mia looked past Bobby at Thane, who hadn’t budged. “Thane?” she said, then paused a beat. “Blow your brains out.”
A surge of panic flooded Bobby’s veins as a wide-eyed Thane lifted the barrel of the gun to his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Carly let out a scream, and Bobby’s stomach lurched as Thane collapsed to the stone floor in a lifeless heap, blood and gray matter sprayed on the craggy ceiling and walls.
Mia beamed as if the sight of such gore was no more consequential than bug guts on a windshield. “Oh, by the way, you will perceive your premonitions again, Bobby. I thought they might get in the way of my plan if you kept having them, so I told you not to notice if you had any.”
No sooner had she uttered those words when images of one additional death filled Bobby’s head. Without thinking, he dashed down a narrow passage and came face to face with a middle-aged stranger wearing a plaid shirt and jeans, standing with crossed arms in the center of a wide room.
A red aura burned through Bobby’s mind like fire at the sight of him. The man wasn’t possessed—this was something else.
Something worse.
A weak moan diverted Bobby’s attention away from the man. Bobby’s heart stuttered at the sight of Randy pinned to the ceiling and Phil tied up off to one side.
“Well, well, Mia,” the man said, and Bobby was startled to find that Mia had followed him. “It seems you didn’t back down after all.”
Mia stepped up beside Bobby, shoulders squared. “I’m not afraid of you. If you wanted to hurt me, you would have done it back at the cottage.”
“I see. I suppose your lack of fear is why you were spying on me from back in the corridor out of harm’s way.”
Mia’s face paled.
“This is what I could do to you,” the man said. “If you’re not careful.”
Without warning, Randy dropped from the ceiling headfirst and landed with a sickening slap on the floor twelve feet below him, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle.
He did not move.
Bobby fought back tears as he regarded his fallen friend. Randy’s eyes appeared glazed and unseeing, and he knew there was nothing he could do to help him.
The man emitting the red aura stepped in between Bobby and Randy. “Little Bobby Roland,” he said. “It’s fascinating finally getting to see you in person.”
KAORI KNELT beside Matt where he’d fallen in the snow. The flashlight beam illuminated blood—too much of it. It was a miracle that Thane hadn’t shot her, too, when she’d fallen back to help her predecessor. He must have been too focused on Bobby, his main obsession, to pay her much attention.
“Keep going,” Matt said through clenched teeth. Scattered snowflakes collected in his gray hair. The bullet seemed to have entered his back and passed all the way through his chest, narrowly miss
ing his heart, but Kaori still didn’t think his prospects looked too good. “Bobby’s going to need your help.”
“But you’re hurt,” Kaori said thickly, unable to hold back her emotions.
“So I’ve noticed.” Matt cringed. “You get going before Bobby gets hurt, too. The world needs the two of you.”
Leave him, the Spirit whispered.
Hating herself for it, Kaori stood. “I’ll come back for you.”
Matt made no reply as snowflakes danced across his sallow skin. Kaori forced herself to tear her gaze away from him, and she continued to trudge through the woods, following the various sets of footprints that led to what might be her doom.
Within minutes, she heard a gunshot, and minutes after that, she came to a cave. She sent up a silent prayer for safety and crept inside.
The sight of gore instantly assaulted her eyes. She cast her gaze down and sidestepped a body, which thankfully didn’t belong to Bobby. A gun lay on the floor beside him.
Was this Thane? If so, who had shot him?
Voices echoed through the cave ahead of her, and before she could make out what they were saying, Carly darted into view, looking enraged.
“What happened?” Kaori hissed.
“She—Mia—made Thane kill himself.” Carly glared over her shoulder. “And something’s happening back there. I didn’t get close enough to get a good look.”
Kaori felt only minimal relief about Thane’s demise. “Mia made Thane do this to himself? Whose side is she on?”
“I don’t know, but she followed Bobby when he went that way. I don’t trust her one little bit.”
Kaori just nodded. She tiptoed in the direction that Carly had indicated, and Carly followed her, their footsteps making soft splashing sounds on the damp floor.
As soon as Kaori stepped into a hand-hewn passageway, a red aura that could mean only one thing assaulted her senses.
“Stay back,” she whispered to Carly. “There’s a demon back there.”
Carly swallowed. “Someone’s possessed?”
“No. I’m picking up a red aura. That means—”
“You’re going to die!” said the apparition of Kaori’s grandmother, which had just joined them wearing an expression most gleeful.
“What’s happening?” Carly whispered. “Are you okay?”
“I’ve got to keep going.” Ignoring the apparition’s words, Kaori faced the wider cavern partly visible at the end of the passage. “I’ve got to stop it.”
CARLY LET Kaori go ahead of her since Kaori was better equipped to deal what lay before them.
I hope that demon kills Mia, she thought savagely. No one that powerful deserves to live.
A small voice inside her head said that she shouldn’t be thinking that way; that Mia might have indeed saved their lives, but she could never, ever consider Mia a “good person” like the woman claimed. Good people didn’t force their wills upon others.
Evil people deserved to be wiped from the face of the Earth.
But wouldn’t that be a soul lost? the voice asked her.
“I don’t care,” Carly muttered. “It would be worth it for everyone else.”
She pressed onward.
BOBBY KNEW the man standing before him was a demon minus a host. A demon could easily manifest itself in a human shape; Randy had admitted as much to him last summer when he’d been trying to solve the mystery surrounding Thane.
He also had the idea that the demon couldn’t hurt him directly, assuming Caleb was still hanging around like an invisible shield—but it could hurt Phil and Carly, who weren’t under that kind of protection.
“You’re the one living in accord with Thane,” Bobby said.
The demon rolled its eyes. “He called me ‘Father.’ I suppose I was, in a way. I made him the man he became.”
“Don’t you even care that he’s dead?”
The thing shrugged. “He was imperfect. Though I can cause you pain, I can’t touch you, Bobby, and I couldn’t touch Randy before you, so I needed someone else to do it for me. I can still do that. In fact, I can do that right now.”
As Bobby watched in horror, the demon’s human form turned into some kind of horrifying flapping thing that soared past his head. He wheeled around just in time to see Kaori and an irate Carly enter the larger cavern, and before Bobby could scream out a warning, it hit Carly in her chest.
He thought it would knock Carly down. Instead, Carly’s body absorbed it as if it were less substantial than air.
At once, the red aura changed to black, and Carly sent a scathing look in Bobby’s direction.
“I never cared for you,” she said in a tone dripping acid. “You’re just too stupid. I only hang out with you because I get bored and need something to do.”
Mia, who’d been standing dumbly off to one side for the past few minutes, let out a whimper.
Bobby ignored her. If Mia didn’t want to be witness to any of this, she shouldn’t have involved herself with Thane in the first place.
“In the name of God the Father, and in Jesus Christ his Son, and in the Holy Spirit, be gone from her!” Bobby cried as Not-Carly stood in front of him laughing.
“Bobby, stop!” Kaori said. “We need to take her to a safer place than this. And you have to get it to name itself first!”
Crap—in the heat of the moment, he’d forgotten about that. But he wasn’t about to waste time by dragging Carly back to Autumn Ridge. He could cleanse her just as easily here. “In the name of God the Father,” he said, “and in Jesus Christ his Son, and in the Holy Spirit, I command you to state your—”
Not-Carly dashed past him into a tunnel he hadn’t noticed before. He and Kaori tore after her, and Bobby immediately regretted this decision. Apparently this was an old mining tunnel that had been dug out of the side of the original cave—ancient timbers held up the ceiling here, and Carly kicked each one as she ran past as if to bring the whole tunnel down upon them.
“Subdue her,” Kaori panted as she ran beside him. “I can help. We need to get her out of here before we do the cleansing.”
“We?”
“If we do it together, we can get it done faster.”
Ahead of them, Carly was laughing—it echoed eerily through the tunnel like something straight from the darkest pit of hell. “We’ll do it together,” Bobby said. “But we’re doing it here.”
Kaori’s jaw clenched. “If that’s what you want, then. But let’s get her out of the tunnel and back into the cave first. I don’t like the look of these timbers.”
Bobby nodded. Ahead of him in the tunnel he could see the dim outline of what looked like a large box sitting on the ground with the lid propped open. Creeping forward with caution since Carly had disappeared from view, he shone the flashlight into the box and frowned.
“It’s hardly time to be looking for treasure,” Kaori whispered.
“No, look. This is weird.”
Kaori leaned over, and her frown grew deeper than Bobby’s as she regarded its contents. “Holy water and a rosary? I wouldn’t expect to find these in an old mine.”
“Me neither.” Bobby eased the lid closed and silently read the inscription, which seemed to be in Latin. “Hey, do you understand this?”
Kaori’s eyes roved over the letters. “Hic monstrum est, Dec. 1856. Here is the monster? That’s a strange thing to say.”
Bobby imagined an 1800s miner wrangling a black, flapping thing into the box and snapping the lid closed. “I think someone let the monster out.”
Kaori’s gaze went out of focus for a moment. “People seem to be good at that, don’t they? Now let’s find Carly.”
Bobby started off down the tunnel again, and Kaori kept close to his side. Carly’s laughter had ceased—he didn’t know what to make of that.
The tunnel air grew mustier as they proceeded farther into its depths. Rusted tracks on the floor showed where ore carts had once transported the miners’ findings to the outside world. Long ago someone exploring the
cave must have found some glimmering jewel and took it upon himself to dig for more, hollowing out this passageway over time before finally abandoning it.
The things people would do in the pursuit of wealth.
“This seems to go back fairly far,” Kaori said, shining her light down the passage, which gradually curved right out of sight. “We really should have taken Carly out of here. There could be a vertical shaft, or—”
“Shh,” Bobby whispered, drawing to a stop. “I thought I heard something.”
He strained his ears but could only hear the distant drip-drip of falling water. He shivered, waited a minute more, and continued onward, keeping an eye out for any signs of Carly and the being that had possessed her.
Anger and fear for his friend kept him moving. Carly had done nothing to deserve this. Perhaps it was right for her to look for another line of work.
They came upon a junction in the tunnel where the tracks split off into a newer-looking passage on the right. Bobby paused to determine which way to go but found his thoughts wandering back to the metal box and its mysterious inscription.
Here is the monster.
Maybe, during the mine’s heyday, one of the miners had started acting strangely. Perhaps he had grown violent and volatile, much to the concern of his comrades. Some of them might have guessed correctly what had gone wrong with their friend and drove out his tormentor using primitive means, trapping it inside a box with the only accoutrements of religion they had on hand and praying they would keep it imprisoned.
Until someone, years later, came along and opened it like Pandora.
“I can see the end of this tunnel,” Kaori said. “We should go right.”
“Okay.” Bobby took one step toward the other tunnel and tripped over a stone jutting from the floor. His flashlight slipped from his hand, and as he scrambled to pick it up, Not-Carly appeared before him swinging an ancient shovel at his head.
The force of it hitting his temple knocked him to the ground. As he struggled to right himself, Kaori launched herself at Carly and pinned her against the tunnel wall.