"Is anyone out…" Dana paused, and in a whisper spoke to the group. "I can feel the spirits. They are all around us, clamoring to speak to us. I sense a great urgency among them. Everyone concentrate on reaching out to Father Castelli. Let him know we wish to speak to him. Casey, would you please read the letters off the board once contact is made?"
"Can you hear me, Father?" she continued.
Beneath his fingers, Sam felt the planchette move again. He eased up on the pressure, until his fingers were barely touching it. He wanted to make sure that he wasn’t causing it to move. He saw the rest of the group leaning forward eagerly to watch the proceedings and this time he kept his eyes open like the rest of them.
"Father? Are you there, Father Castelli?"
The planchette began making slow lazy circles around the board and Sam felt a slight tingle in his fingertips, as if a mild current was passing through his flesh. The planchette began to move quicker and then abruptly slid across the board to the top left hand side, centering itself over the word "YES".
The group gasped collectively.
"Who are you?" Dana asked aloud.
The planchette swirled aimlessly for a moment and then dropped to the double row of letters in the center of the board.
"M," read Casey, and then "A…T…T…H…E…W." The planchette paused and so did Casey. After a moment, as if to signal the start of a new word, it continued. "C…A…S…T…E…L…L…I."
"This is Father Castelli?" Dana asked, just to be certain.
The planchette immediately moved back to the YES.
Dana said, "The contact is strengthening now. The spirits have broken through the barrier and their message will be clearer to us."
Before Dana could ask her next question, however, the planchette began spinning aimlessly around the board for a moment before moving on to spell another new word.
"B…E…W…A…R" Casey called out in response, her voice shaking slightly.
Stupid spirit can’t even spell, Sam thought to himself.
As if she’d heard him, Dana said, "Often a spirit will misspell something, it’s a pretty common occurrence, especially if the subject has been dead a long time."
"Is that your message?" she asked the board. "Beware?"
YES.
"Beware of what?" she asked.
A cool, whispery chill ran lightly up Sam’s spine.
The planchette was moving faster, as if guided by an unseen hand filled with urgency. Casey called out the letters in a voice filled with excitement. "E..V..I..L.-.E..V..I..L.-.E..V..I..L.. It’s repeating the word "evil" over and over again."
The planchette came to rest in the center of the board. Sam shifted his position slightly to get more comfortable.
"Don’t remove your hands, Sam! You’ll break the contact," said Dana.
Her warning was unnecessary, however. Sam was too engrossed in what was happening to even consider it.
Dana went on. "What is evil? Can you tell us what evil we are to beware of, Father Castelli?" Her voice was a quiet whisper in the otherwise silent room.
Immediately: B..L..A..K..E..S..B..A..N..E.
"Bane?" someone asked.
This time it was Jake who answered, his voice low but steady, "It means a cause of death or ruin."
Another voice could be heard from the back of the room. "It says Blake. Do you think it means Hudson Blake?"
No one had an answer.
Dana decided to ask for clarification. "Can you tell us what that is, Father?"
The planchette fell still. Dana repeated her question twice, slower each time. After what seemed an age to Sam, the planchette moved again. This time it was different instead of the smooth, circular motions, it moved in fits and starts, spasmodically jerking across the board.
"B..E..W..A..R..I..T..C..A..N..S..E..," Casey called out for those who couldn’t see the pointer.
Sam stared down at the board. The planchette was still moving helter-skelter across its surface, jerking left and right like a puppet on a string. The tingling in his arms had become almost, but not quite, pain. He wanted to tear his hands away and break the contact, but something compelled him to keep them in place. He tried to reassure himself. Jake must be doing this, he thought. Jake’s just spelling out messages to scare everyone.
"Father Castelli? Are you still with us, Father?" Dana asked. A strange expression ran across her face then, part grimace, part bewilderment. "Who’s there?" she asked. "Do you wish to speak with us?"
Beneath his hands, Sam felt the planchette slow down, then move with deliberation.
He watched in shock as it spelled out a message directed specifically at him.
R.E.M.E.M.B.E.R.M.Y.W.A.R.N.I.N.G.S.A.M.M.Y.
Sam sat there, stunned. The others around him who could see the board gasped in surprise, then looked at him rather oddly, as if they had just discovered something mysterious in their midst.
The planchette began moving again.
GOODBYE, SAMMY, it read.
That whispery touch of fear turned into a fist clenched savagely around his spine.
Then, with the suddenness of a striking snake, the planchette spelled out another message.
FOOLS! NEITHER YOU NOR THE OLD ONE CAN STOP ME NOW! I WILL SLAUGHTER YOU LIKE THE CATTLE YOU ARE.
Seeing this message spelled out in front of him, Sam jumped, almost breaking the contact. After what happened next, he wished he had.
Dana moaned.
Sam looked at her and recoiled in shock. She was shaking fiercely, as if a high voltage current was running through her veins. Her teeth were chattering, and the sound quickly filled the room, making it seem as if a herd of skeletons were charging past. The hand on his spine squeezed tighter.
There’s no way Jake is causing her to do that, his inner voice said.
Everyone in the room was frozen in a state of shock.
No one moved to help her.
Over her shoulder, Sam was surprised to see Katelynn staring across the room in their direction, her face as pale as a ghost. He had been so engrossed he hadn’t even noticed that she’d arrived.
Beneath his fingers, Sam felt the planchette begin to move again with slow, deliberate speed.
In a voice shaking with fear, Casey read the message aloud.
"SAY GOODBYE TO DANA."
As if in response, Dana suddenly screamed. The sound of her cry broke the paralysis that had held everyone in its grip. Sam jumped away from the board as if it were alive. Jake grabbed Dana. She was still shaking, more violently now, her heels drumming in a frenzy on the floor.
"She’s having a fit!" someone yelled.
"Hit the lights!"
A moment later the room was filled with electric brilliance as someone complied with the request.
Sam recovered his wits and moved to help Jake. He held Dana’s feet steady. Someone else, he thought it might be Bill, pinned her arms.
Blood was flowing from her mouth, and Sam realized she’d clamped her teeth down on her tongue. Probably cut the damn thing nearly in half. He watched as Jake clenched the sides of her jaw at some hidden nerve point and forced her mouth open. Inside it was a mess; blood and saliva mixing into a crimson froth that kept them from seeing how much damage she’d done to herself. Trying to find a way to prevent her from tearing herself up further, Jake forced his wallet between her jaws and then let go of his hold. Her teeth immediately clamped down on the wallet’s leather surface like a spring-loaded vice.
Katelynn pushed her way over to them. "Someone call the infirmary and get someone up here quick," she told the crowd. She turned to Jake. "Is she going to be okay?"
"I don’t know. Does anyone know if she’s epileptic?" he asked.
No one did.
Another minute passed. The convulsions slowed and then stopped altogether. Dana lay in Jake’s arms, limp but still conscious.
Katelynn removed the wallet from her mouth and tried to reassure her. "Take it easy. You’ve had some kind of a seizure. Help is on
the way, just lie still."
Her gaze rolled around the room, wide and vacant, not really noticing any of them around her. Then she saw Jake. She stiffened in his arms, her eyes growing almost comically wide. Her left hand shot up and gripped the front of his shirt and pulled, dragging his face down close to her lips. She said something to him, but Sam was too far away to hear.
Jake blanched in response.
The mobile emergency team hustled into the room then, and everyone moved back to allow them some space to work in. Sam, Jake, and Katelynn backed away as well, noticing as they did so that the party had rapidly broken up around them. Only a few people were still in the apartment.
Katelynn stood at Sam’s side, her face pale. "What happened in there?" she asked.
"I’m not sure. We were using the Ouija board, and she suddenly went nuts, threw a fit of some kind." He shivered. Jake was moving that planchette, he kept telling himself. Just Jake, no one else.
That small voice spoke up again. Why don’t you ask him, it said, and he decided to do just that.
The medics loaded Dana onto a stretcher and then carried her down the stairs. Jake, Sam, and Katelynn followed the emergency team out of the building and watched as Dana was loaded into an ambulance outside. Lights flashing, the vehicle roared off toward the complex’s gates.
Jake turned to face Sam.
One glance into Jake’s eyes and Sam felt his fear grow. His blood ran cold and sluggish through his veins. He wrapped his arms around his chest in an unconscious attempt to warm himself.
Jake’s scared, he realized, recognizing the look in his friend’s eyes.
That frightened Sam more than anything that had happened that night. If Jake’s scared, he told himself, then I should be terrified. Abruptly, he realized that he was.
What Jake said next made things worse.
"Were you moving that thing, Sam?"
The question froze him where he stood. Numbly, Sam shook his head. He didn’t want to hear what he knew was coming next, but there was no escaping it.
"I wasn’t either, Sam. I swear it."
Next to them, Katelynn said, "If it wasn’t you, and it wasn’t Sam, then who…"
Jake could only shake his head in reply to her question.
But Sam thought he knew. There was only one person who called him Sammy. Gabriel. Something must have happened. He turned and began pushing his way back through the crowd, desperate to reach his car, his sudden fear so overwhelming that he didn’t bother telling his friends where he was headed.
The two of them stood there for a few minutes as the crowd dispersed, each of them lost in their own thoughts, until Katelynn broke the silence.
"What did she say to you, Jake?"
Jake hesitated, and then answered in a subdued tone. "She said that someone in the room was going to die soon."
In the distance, the ambulance siren shrieked like a banshee into the night’s darkness.
Chapter Twenty-three: Puzzle Pieces
Not wanting to be alone, the two of them walked over to The Hemingway, an all-night coffee house and Internet caf� on the other side of campus.
The caf� consisted of one long room filled with odds and ends of furniture; tables and chairs, mismatched sofas and loveseats, even a few booths from a now defunct diner, really anything the students could get their hands on. A small stage stood to the left of the bar, and throughout the night the poets and writers who typically haunted the place would get up to read selections of their works, while others listened attentively or carried on conversations amongst themselves in muted tones. The walls were fashioned of unfinished wood, decorated here and there with posted notices of poetic readings and fliers from a variety of political and artistic groups.
They took a seat in the back, away from most of the other tables, so that they could talk freely without being overheard. Katelynn was the first to broach the subject.
"What’s going on, Jake?"
"Damned if I know," he answered gruffly, still disconcerted both by what had happened at the party and by Sam’s odd behavior immediately thereafter
"Come on, Jake. I’m serious."
"So am I, Katelynn. I don’t have a clue. It’s bad enough that I find a corpse every time I turn around. Adding Ouija boards and communication with the dead does not make me feel any better. Never mind Sam’s rushing off like that." Jake poured himself another beer from the pitcher on the table before him. While he wouldn’t admit it, he was scared. Getting drunk seemed a good solution and he fully intended to put his plan into motion without delay. "What the heck were you doing at the party anyway? I thought you were studying tonight."
"I was. Something happened."
She took her time, explaining the dreams that she’d been having and her "attack" at the library. She told him about the odd sensation of looking through another’s eyes and about her increasing belief that what she was seeing was not imaginary but real.
Jake had had enough weirdness for one night, however. "Come on, Katelynn. You can’t really believe that."
"Why not?"
"Because its crazy, that’s why," he retorted sharply, but upon seeing her expression he decided to take another tact. "Look," he said more gently, "just think about this rationally for a minute, okay? You’ve been under a lot of stress, everyone has. This killer is making everyone nervous."
"So it’s making me see things, is that what you’re saying?"
"Yes. I told you yesterday afternoon about the body we found at Stonemoor and that night you dreamt about Hudson Blake. It bears to reason that your subconscious would twist what you learned earlier into your dreams at night as you slept."
"But something happened to him, just as I saw it in my dream."
Jake shook his head. "Not really. Think about it. In your dream you say you saw Hudson Blake, yet we didn’t discover Blake’s body at the estate, we found his butler’s. And tonight you saw Gabriel, but as far as we know he is perfectly all right. We don’t know that anything has happened to Blake � he’s just disappeared. It’s just your subconscious taking the things you know and twisting them up with your fear and your nervousness over the fact that the police haven’t caught the killer yet."
Katelynn wasn’t convinced. "How do you explain tonight then?" she challenged him.
"What about tonight?"
"How do you explain the Ouija Board or what happened to Dana."
Exasperated, Jake replied, "It could have been any number of things. Sam could have been moving that pointer purposely. He could have been lying when he said he wasn’t, just to pull our legs. Or it could have been moving on its own, a result of a build up in static electricity between Sam and me. Hell, there are a thousand reasons it could have been moving around. And the least likely one is that we were really speaking to the dead. It was simply coincidence that Dana suffered an epileptic attack when she did. It was probably brought on by all of the excitement of the party."
"So what happened to Sam? Why did he rush off like that?"
"I don’t know. Maybe he just freaked out over Dana’s fit." Finding the pitcher empty, Jake half turned in his seat, searching for the waitress.
"Come on Jake. Doesn’t that all sound just a bit too pat to you?"
Without stopping his attempts to signal a waitress, Jake answered, "Nope. It certainly sounds far more reasonable than that garbage you’re spouting."
Katelynn had had enough. Whether it was her fear or her annoyance at how much Jake had drunk in such a short time, she was less tolerant than usual. Having Jake brush her off so cavalierly infuriated her. She slid out of the booth, grabbed Jake by the chin, and turned his head to face her. "Do you know what a shithead is, Jake?" she asked, and then continued without giving him time to answer. "I’ll tell you. A shithead is someone who can’t see the truth even when its right there in front of him. Thanks for your help. I guess I’ll figure it out on my own."
Jake could only stare. Just what the hell is wrong with everyone tonight? His beer-ad
dled mind just couldn’t put two and two together.
Without another word, Katelynn turned and stormed across the room, disappearing out the door.
For a moment Jake considered following, but quickly decided against it. She probably wouldn’t talk to him and if she felt like being a bitch then it was best if he just left her alone. She’d cool down after awhile.
And then maybe she’d talk some sense. He went back to trying to signal a waitress and did his best to forget about what had been happening for the last several days.
It was more than he wanted to think about at the moment.
Chapter Twenty-four: The Last of a Noble Race
Something terrible had happened to Gabriel.
Sam was certain of it and as he sped through the streets his fear grew with every mile passing beneath his wheels.
Sam could see the flashing blue lights as soon as he turned onto the long, tree-lined drive that led to the main building of the complex. His heart froze at the sight. As he drove closer he made out the forms of the individual police cars that were parked haphazardly in the small cul-de-sac that fronted the building. An ambulance was also there, its rear doors thrown wide, its red strobes mingling in eerie symphony with the blues.
Sam jerked the car to a stop, jumped out, and was running toward the front door even before his engine had grown silent. A uniformed officer saw him at the last minute and tried to prevent him from entering, but Sam ducked beneath the man’s outstretched arms and pushed through the glass door.
The main lobby was full of residents, most of them from the third floor, each in an assortment of pajamas. Uniformed officers were milling here and there amongst the patients. It seemed to Sam as if the police were trying to interview some of patients, but for what reason he couldn’t guess. Most of them were senile and would prove little or no use in whatever investigation they were conducting.
The confusion in the room had brought him up short just inside the door, and when he realized he was no longer moving, Sam cast an anxious glance back over his shoulder. He was relieved to see that the officer he’d snuck past was still outside, prevented from following him by a sudden swarm of spectators who were likewise trying to get inside.
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