Paradise Lost Boxed Set

by R. E. Vance

  “Maybe, but what about those holes?” He pointed to the ground in front of her window. There were several holes—each about two inches wide—leading up from the curb.

  “I don’t know of any Other with spikes as feet. And I know them all, Conner.”

  Conner nodded. “But that’s you. These guys have a completely different theory. A wrong one … but that won’t matter once this plays on the news.”

  He was right: wrong theories said enough times became an alternative fact; and once they were out there, it took a hell of a lot of reasoning and proof to reverse the damage the lies did.

  “OK,” I said. “What about the dad? You said he came out before checking on the girl? Why?”

  Conner nodded. “That was the weird part. He said he saw a shadow of someone walking outside, but when he went to investigate there was no one there. Just the van driving off.”

  “What’s weird about that?”

  “The shadow wasn’t opposite a window,” Conner said. “It was by the bedroom door, no light to cast it. But he was half asleep. People dream up all kinds of stuff when they’re half asleep.”

  “That’s true. Most of the time. Still, I’d like to get a look inside. Just to be sure.”

  ↔

  We got back in my Road Runner and drove behind the bowling alley, where we waited for several hours for the police to finish what they were doing. I told Conner what I needed him to do, but not why. He resisted at first, but in the end he agreed, citing Miral as the reason.

  At around 3 a.m., the last of the cops left after having taped up the entire area. I guess with the house empty, they decided there was no point in leaving anyone behind. That said, you could bet your bottom dollar that the Compound itself was on high alert—extra security at the gates and every one of Memnock Securities’ systems set to their most sensitive settings.

  Not that this affected us. Conner and I got out of the Road Runner and crawled under the tape and then into the Logans’ house through the girl’s window. The first thing to greet us was a sign over the bed that read Sarah’s Room in big, sparkly letters. So that was the little girl’s name. It was dark and exactly what you would expect from a little girl’s room except for one thing: she was obsessed with pirates. There were pictures of ships and pirate hooks and pictures of people with eye-patches everywhere. Dolls had eye patches and toy swashbuckler swords. Captain Jack Sparrow hung on her wall, and her bed sheet had a manga image of a motley crew with the words Monkey D. Luffy written on it.

  I gestured for Conner to sit on a chair near her room and he dutifully lifted his feet up. Then I laid down on Sarah’s bed, my legs folded up so that I fit in its tiny frame … and waited.

  We stayed like that for an hour at least, until what I was waiting for finally happened. It started with a shadow moving along the wall. Only thing about this shadow was there was no light source to cast it. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d mistake him for a crinkle in your sheets or a trick of light—but I knew better. I threw my hand out, grabbed the top of his head and yanked him up onto the bed, twisting around so that he was under me. He silently struggled, but I held him tight.

  Up-close the monster looked like a disembodied shadow, his wide-open eyes the color of the pillow case his head laid on. For all intents and purposes, this creature was a shadow. A tangible, very real shadow that could perform all kinds of mischief.

  I pulled out my flashlight and shined it to the side of his head. The creature looked at the light with abject fear on his face.

  “What the—?” Conner started.

  “Conner, meet the monster-under-your-bed … monster-under-your-bed, meet your worst nightmare. Me.”

  The monster gulped.

  “These things are real?” Conner said.

  “Unfortunately.” I shined the light so that the monster-under-your-bed saw it. Then, in a nonchalant voice like I had all the time in the world, I said, “Did you know that the average human will eat eight spiders in their lifetime? Seems the little critters crawl into our mouths when we’re asleep, thinking they’re in some warm, moist cave. Then snap—” I shut my mouth and swallowed. “Same is true here. The average human also has a monster living under their bed. The military knows all about these guys, but we didn’t do anything about it. Want to know why? ’Cause like the spider, they are mostly harmless. Besides, how much harm could a creature like you do when a flashlight is as deadly to you as a shotgun?”

  I hovered the flashlight over the creature’s head. It gulped visibly, which to a creature like this meant that a golf-ball-size shadow travelled down his neck.

  “My associate and I are going to ask you a few questions and we expect your one-hundred-percent cooperation. Cooperate and we’ll go easy on you. Don’t cooperate and …” I let the beam of the flashlight approach the edge of his shadowed face.

  The monster nodded.

  “Where’s the girl?”

  “I don’t know,” it said … well, actually wrote on the pillow. Monsters-under-your-bed can’t talk, and instead rely on manipulating their shadowy umbra to communicate. This monster opened its mouth wide, and the letters I don’t know scrolled on the white pillow case on which it lay. Talking to shadows is creepy.

  “Really?” I turned off the light and put the unlit lens on his forehead. “Nothing I can do to jog that memory of yours?”

  “Jean,” Conner said in a cautionary tone.

  “What? Do you honestly think anyone’s going to miss a monster like him? Besides,” I said, turning back to the shadow, “I’ve never seen one of your kind bleed before. If humans bleed red and angels bleed light … what do you bleed? Drips of darkness? Like oil drained from a carburetor?” I felt an old darkness of my own coming out when I spoke. An anger that I hadn’t felt since my days in the Army when I was known as the Scourge of Others. There was a part of me that really wanted to turn on the flashlight and see what he bled. And that part of me was something that I’d spent years suppressing, burying deep within me. It was coming out.

  I remembered what Miral told Conner about how I may be lost. Again.

  I don’t know! scrolled across the open space of his mouth—this time he added I SWEAR! in all caps, and I could feel him shivering in fear under me.

  “What do you know?”

  They came.

  “Who?”

  I don’t know.

  “What did they look like?”

  The monster gulped again and said, I don’t know. I didn’t recognize their kind. They’re not like any Other I’ve ever seen before.

  “OK,” I said, getting off the bed, still holding the flashlight on him. “Show me.”

  ↔

  Amongst the few talents that monsters-under-your-bed have is the ability to manipulate their bodies into shapes and sizes that defy the realm of possibility. And they do it without magic. Not a second of time was burnt, which was incredible given what he was showing us.

  The first creature he cast—if I can use such a word to describe the weirdest game of shadow puppets I’ve ever played—was that of no Other I’d ever seen before. And I knew most of them. When I was in the Army we were given cards with Others on them: DGOKT (pronounced “docked”). I had them all and I memorized every one. I obsessed over those cards, flipping through them until there wasn’t a single (known) Other I couldn’t tell you about from sight. What the monster cast wasn’t in the cards. Not by a long shot.

  The creature looked more like a ball with spikes. Monster-under-your-bed showed it roll in (I guess that explained the holes in the garden) and then transform into what looked like a standing turtle, its back plate covered in the same spikes that were there when it was a ball. It stood over little Sarah. She stirred and it put its hand over her face and a puff of smoke came out of its wrist.

  It was sedating her.

  Then it carried her over to the window where another creature waited, its head sticking through the window. Except it wasn’t its head. Or rather, I should say, it w
asn’t only its head. Sure, there were two eyes, a nose and a mouth—but it also had a giant hand coming out of the crown of its head. The spiked creature gave Sarah to the head-hand and the creatures both left.

  Next, the monster-under-your-bed shadow-puppeted his attempts to wake the parents. But a creature that is all shadow and no voice can’t just jump up on the bed and yell, “They took your Sarah! Wake up!” Monsters-under-your-bed have to rely on making the sleeper feel uncomfortable. It is that certain je ne sais quoi feeling you get that you’re being watched when there’s no one around. It takes a while to rouse someone from bed when all you’ve got is a feeling. Not that the little monster didn’t try. We could see from the way it frantically moved around the room that it desperately wanted her parents to wake up.

  So this being was her friend. And what’s more, he had nothing to do with her disappearance.

  “OK,” I said. “Can you give us anything, anything at all as to where they went? Who they were?”

  Shadowy words appeared on the wall: They put her in a van.

  “OK.”

  The van was covered in red dirt.

  “The south of the island is bone dry with plenty of red dirt going around. All that tells me is that they did some off-roading down there.” I cocked a thumb farther south.

  “We could send out a helicopter or some flying harpies to scan the area and look for a van,” Conner suggested.

  “That’s not a bad idea … but there’s about forty square miles and they had plenty of time to find cover.”

  You don’t understand. They were covered in red dirt and then there’s this, the monster-under-your-bed scrolled, then transformed into a tiny arrow no bigger than the cursor on your computer. The arrow travelled down the wall. He went slowly so that we didn’t lose him, then stopped right in front of a tiny bead on the floor.

  “Did they leave that behind?”

  The monster-under-your-bed instantly pantomimed a mini-image of the spiked turtle monster, then rolled onto its back, which up-close showed that it too was covered in dirt and shrubs and all kinds of stuff you find outside—probably collected from all its rolling around in ball form. A shadowy version of the tiny bead fell from its shell.

  Except when I picked up the real thing, I realized something: it wasn’t a bead, at all.

  “Holy crap … I know where they took her.”

  ↔

  As we headed for the window, the monster-under-your-bed formed four words on the glass pane in front of us:

  She is my friend.

  His face appeared and he was crying: teardrops of white tore little rips in his cheek, exposing the glass on which he rested. That night I learned that tears erase shadows.

  The only friend I have in the world. Please bring my friend back. Please.

  “We’ll try,” I said and climbed out the window.

  Occultists and Their Trained Abominations

  The Tree. Yet another theory as to why the majority of Others wound up in Paradise Lot.

  You see, the south of Paradise Lot is almost entirely hard rock, covered in sunbaked dirt and the kind of poisonous critters you find in a desert. The only plant life is tiny, dried out shrubs that, although abundant, grow no more than a foot off the ground.

  Then there’s the Tree. A single sycamore-like tree grows in the middle of the desert, standing twenty feet high, with a canopy that stretches forty feet wide. The Tree is central to many theories as to why the Others were drawn to Paradise Lot. After all, it shouldn’t exist—just like the Others.

  Some have theorized that it is the original Yule Tree from the humans’ Christmas traditions, others that it is the Yggdrasil—an immense mythical tree that connects the nine worlds in Norse cosmology. But the obvious and most popular theory is that it is the Tree from the Garden of Eden, and the south of Paradise Lot is scorched earth because when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree, amongst their many, many punishments was that the land was to be guarded by an angel with a huge sword of friggin’ fire. Take that less literally and more metaphorically and you can interpret it to mean that a once vibrant and lush land was turned into a desert, everything burned to a cinder except, of course, the Tree of Life and Death.

  Whatever you believe, I’ve been to the Tree and it is just that: a tree. Still, one cannot deny there’s something special about it—despite very little rain and no underground streams anyone is aware of, it thrives. More than thrives. It actually bears fruit.

  Pomegranates.

  And that little bead on Sarah’s bedroom floor was one of the fruit-seeds from a pomegranate. That, plus the red dirt that was everywhere—and, well, I wasn’t a detective, but I wasn’t an idiot, either. There was only one place on the island where one would accidently trek in both.

  If we were lucky, we’d get there and the weird Others would still be mulling about. If we were really lucky, they’d be holding her in some shack near the tree, preforming whatever ritual they were into. And if we were extremely lucky, maybe we could save the girl right then and there. It still wouldn’t stop the world from crying “Other foul,” but it would go a long way toward damage control.

  But then again … there were fifty shades of unlucky that could be waiting for us that I didn’t want to think about.

  I floored my Road Runner, willing it to go faster than it ever had before. Conner was on the phone, describing to Michael in detail what we discovered.

  “Enough with the chit-chat,” I said. “And tell that brute to get down here.”

  As if in answer to my command, a large moonlit shadow flew over our car and I saw that Michael was above us, phone in hand.

  We sped down the road, Michael soaring above. “Why is he keeping pace with us?” I growled. “Go on ahead!”

  Conner held up a finger, nodded and pulled out his police pad and jotted something down. “Affirmative,” he said, clicked his phone off.

  With that, Michael shot forth with a mini–sonic boom that rattled our car so much that I nearly lost control. “Holy …” I remembered Michael’s super hearing and downgraded what I was going to say to “… sugar. I didn’t think he could move that fast.” I slammed down on the Road Runner’s pedal. I was already flooring it, so we didn’t go any faster, but it felt good to stomp on something.

  Conner reviewed his notes and said, “Michael says there’s a side road to the Tree.”

  “What’s wrong with the main road?”

  “Could be guarded.”

  “And the side road won’t be?”

  Conner smiled. “Not this one.”

  ↔

  Without much warning he told me to swing to the left. I did so without hesitation and suddenly we were zooming down a dirt road, the smooth highway rumble replaced by a thousand little stones catching in my tires’ threads and ping!ing off my car’s bottom cascade.

  “Are you sure this is what he meant?”

  “Yeah, head to that hill. It should be on the other side.”

  “OK,” I said. “But there’s something we really should be considering.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Michael’s probably already there.”

  “So? We’re his backup,” Conner said, checking his sidearm before holstering it.

  “Exactly. We’re his backup. Are we really heading into a situation in which Michael requires back up?”

  Conner finally got it and his eyes widened. “Shit, you’re right. Let’s hope we’re just here to bag and tag what he finds.”

  “Amen, brother,” I pointed my old Plymouth 1969 Road Runner at the hill and whispered a silent prayer to the GoneGods that these were, indeed, merely cowboy antics.

  ↔

  We drove around to the back of the hill where a small metal gate sat locked with a keypad combination. Waaay too fancy tech for what looked like an abandoned mine. Conner jumped out and ran to the lock, typing in the number that Michael had given him.

  “What’s this?” I asked, rolling down my window.

  “An Army throu
ghway. Think of it as a parking lot … for tanks. It was abandoned a few years back.”

  “When the Others came?”

  Conner hit the last number and jiggled the lock loose. “Actually, when the war stopped … not that it really ever did. The Army moved out most of its equipment, abandoned what was no longer useful and moved on. I guess they figured it was best to be on the other side of the bridge, rather than water-locked with the Others.” He swung the gate wide open and got into the car. “Either way, it’s got several exits. Like a gopher hole. Number 9 will take us out near the Tree.”

  We drove off the unkempt dirt road into a descending tunnel that was surprisingly well kept. I rolled the car onto the ramp. About twenty meters down was a large metal door. On its face was a triangle with three circles at each point: Memnock Securities’ logo. Conner jumped out again and typed in another code. The door rolled open and we continued down the tunnel.

  Seems Mr. Cain built more than home security systems. He was also a military contractor as well. Made sense. The military was always outsourcing tech from private companies. Usually it was done on the tender system where several companies bid. Win that bid and you and your company were set for life.

  And Mr. Cain was at the center of it all, it seemed. Which meant that if I took the job, I’d also be at the center of it all. Extrapolate that a year or two down the line and Mr. Cain’s offer—as big a number as it was—was only the tip of the iceberg.

  I shook my head and shivered.

  “What?” Conner asked.

  “Nothing. Any word from Michael?”

  “No, nothing.” He held up his phone. “No signal down here anyway.”

  “Not surprising. These tunnels are made from reinforced iron and lead. Perfect for keeping most magic out, but plays hell on cellphone reception.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been in one of these before.”