Shepherd's Warning

by Cailyn Lloyd

  Take the Milwaukee offer.

  A serious threat exists there.

  Thus he felt compelled to take the position.

  The why remained a mystery, and this latest premonition was another in a series of clues that added up to…

  Nothing.

  A reality in his world; some choices he made on faith. The answers would come. He couldn’t rush them, couldn’t force the process. He had to be mindful and wait for the universe to reveal the details.

  Shepherd clenched and loosened his jaw and fists, trying to dispel the tension, seeking calm.

  In the modern era, knowledge traveled at light-speed. To be beholden to this ancient discipline was frustrating, to be fed information in such small doses aggravating.

  Patience, Doctor, he chided himself. Patience.

  He trusted his instincts and premonitions. They were compelling, reliable, had saved his life on many occasions. He recalled a last-minute decision years ago to walk off Alitalia Flight 404. The airliner crashed outside Zurich that night, killing all on board.

  He needed to be here. There was a reason. That he didn’t fully understand the reason was irrelevant.

  Time would reveal the secret.

  Still, an unease lingered. What was summoning him back to the old ways?

  * * *

  He spent the next two days tearing out an upstairs wall and joining two large bedrooms into one large work area. After replacing the old wiring and repairing the walls, he painted the room slate blue and laid carpeting with a thick pad over the old maple floor.

  A few days later, three moving pods were delivered by two young men, lanky fellows with long hair and ill-fitting jeans who insisted upon calling him Doc, much to his dismay. A warm sunny day, they unload the pods onto the driveway. He had them unpack and set up the sound system first, and now Beethoven thundered from a half dozen speakers. He wandered around, directing the movers, and alternated between conducting an imaginary orchestra and hurling an imaginary ball on a phantom cricket pitch. Perhaps they thought he was crazy. He didn’t care.

  As they set the last of three large crates in the garage, the kid with Tyler on his name tag said, “Yo, Doc? You want us to open these?”

  There were several crates with US Customs and Border Protection stamps which he had guided through the port of entry at Newark with a number of sophisticated hacks. The items within weren’t stolen; they were old and rare and would have raised questions had they been subject to inspection.

  “No. Leave them there for now. I need that desk next, upstairs in the study.”

  The movers struggled with the oak pieces: two large pedestals, a hutch with thirty-odd nooks, a return, and a thick oak slab for the top. The office was quiet and clean with the scent of new carpet. It was here that he pursued his true passion, the modern alchemy of technology. He smiled at his fib to the banker. He didn’t want to stand out. An older gentleman who was behind the times was seldom noticed. Besides, he knew the dangers of an online presence, so he had no legitimate online accounts other than an .edu address at the university.

  When the movers finished, he tipped them well, happy to see them leave.

  With his gear here, he finished assembling his workspace: servers, an array of laptops, external hard drives, everything hard-wired to various routers. There was no wireless. He trusted no one and assumed hackers and electronic miscreants were everywhere in a city this size.

  After testing his gear, he sat down and tapped into the dark web with the Tor browser using an anonymized email and IP address. He spent an hour probing the firewall of a company in St. Louis before breaking in, utilizing a small glitch in their security coding while Mozart played quietly in the background. He collected several screen captures and wrote his findings in an email to the security officer of the company. He then spent an hour checking out his usual hacking haunts and message boards, looking for new ideas and techniques.

  Shepherd poured a glass of fine old Tawny Port and sipped while he slipped into his pajamas and relaxed.

  In bed, he laid back and closed his eyes. Those three letters, B F E, danced on his eyelids in cartoonish animation. Farther in the distance, he saw the vague figure of a woman. He could discern no features beyond her blonde hair.

  Those letters and that woman represented some grave threat.

  Indeed, they were the reason he came.

  Five

  The following afternoon, the sun blazed down from a clear azure sky. Cicadas buzzed in the indolent heat, and small white butterflies flitted over the tops of the longer field grass at the edges of the lawn, field grass that had been chopped down and mown in front of the house. The stubble was coarse and rough on the feet. A real lawn would have to wait until next year.

  Laura stepped outside with Leah and a handful of toys. Leah ignored the toys and played in the grass, picking up leaves and tossing them into the breeze. Dana had driven back to Illinois to meet with her adviser before the fall semester began, so Laura was spending the day with Leah. Laura sat in a lawn chair, watching the roofers work, jumping up to intercept Leah whenever she tried to shove something into her mouth. Leah then ambled to the drive, picked up small stones and bits of gravel, examined them, and tossed them aside. She was curly blonde, pudgy—still carrying some baby fat—and looked more like Jacob than her mother, Rachel.

  Any thought of Rachel set off an inevitable rush of pain and anger directed at a woman Laura had grown to hate for her part in Jacob’s death. A pointless and unavoidable mental cascade of thoughts followed.

  If Jacob hadn’t dated that woman. If they hadn’t moved in together. If Rachel hadn’t run off…

  But those things did happen and Jacob slid into depression, started drinking, and rolled his car three times in a drunken stupor.

  If he hadn’t met Rachel, he would still be alive.

  But he was gone, and she couldn’t get him back. There were so many clichés about burying a child—Laura knew and hated every one of them. The words to describe her pain didn’t exist. With Rachel gone and Jacob dead, Leah had become their responsibility. Rachel didn’t want her, and neither did her parents, thus proving the adage about apples and trees. Leah was the only consolation she had, the only piece of Jacob that remained.

  Jim Mayhew climbed down from the roof, disturbing her gloomy reverie.

  “How’s it going, Mrs. MacKenzie?”

  “Call me Laura. Overwhelmed pretty much covers it.”

  Jim Mayhew was near fifty, rather tall with thinning black hair swept back to conceal a circle of shiny scalp. Lucas had found him on Yelp, and Jim, along with his teenage helpers, Alex and Jordan, became quick favorites on the worksite as an affable hardworking bunch. Jim was curious and enthusiastic. Laura liked him. He grabbed a lunch pail from his truck and walked over.

  “You know, my wife says this place is haunted,” Jim said.

  “I’ve heard that rumor.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Anything to it?”

  “Not that we’ve noticed.”

  “That’s what I told her. It’s old and kinda scary looking, but it doesn’t feel, well, you know—haunted.”

  “You believe in ghosts?”

  He shrugged. “Sure. Why not?” He opened his lunch box and snickered. “Look here, she sent a note.”

  Laura peeked. Beneath a ghost sketch she had written: Be careful Jim!

  He smiled and shooed away a couple of bees buzzing nearby.

  Laura turned and saw Nate walking around the corner and along the front wall of the house. Ashley followed, videotaping every aspect of the inspection. Some days, all this filming, blogging, and scrutiny felt like an intrusion. She would be glad when they finished. She turned back to Jim. “They bothering you at all?”

  His face tightened. “Hmm, not much.”

  After lunch, Jim and his long-haired assistants hammered, tossed shingles, and cursed as classic rock played from a construction radio.

  When Leah grew cranky and rubbed her eyes, Laura scoope
d her up and carried her to the trailer. She changed her diaper and lay with her on the bed for a few minutes, talking grandma-talk in a soothing voice, enjoying this intimacy until Leah dozed off.

  Satisfied she would sleep, Laura grabbed the video monitor and her iPad and walked back to her chair in the drive. The noise in the house was deafening and the racket from the roof seemed minor in comparison. Besides, the warmth of the sun felt wonderful.

  She poked around on her iPad on the Ancestry website, trying to open an account. Laura was too tired to concentrate. On the roof, the guys fell into a routine that seemed automatic, almost trance-like. Everything fell away as she watched them work—her surroundings, the bird calls, the sun beating down, the sound of the nail gun: snap snap.

  With the iPad in her lap, lulled by the hypnotic nature of the work nailing shakes, she leaned back and dozed off. The sounds of the roofing work insinuated themselves into her light sleep and she dreamt of skeletons. A crew of skeletons working on the house, their bones clicking with the rhythmic snap of the nail gun. A dark cloud then covered the sun, turning day to night. The cloud grew and swirled and engulfed the house which was lifted and carried away in a violent whirlwind.

  Laura awoke with a start. She checked the video monitor. Leah was still asleep.

  The roofers had finished the south end and started up the central section of the roof, a more complex span of gables and valleys, and moved stepwise across the roof. Jordan laid metal in the valleys while Alex ran back and forth, laying out cedar shakes in rows. Jim then finished nailing each row. Laura watched, fascinated by their efficiency. Evidently, Alex wasn’t fast enough—Jim kept running out of shakes to nail.

  Sounding exasperated, Jim yelled to Alex, “Go prep the ridge for the vent.”

  “Okay, boss man.”

  “Jordan! You’re up!”

  Jordan ran bundles of cedar with indefatigable energy. Jim nailed them as fast as Jordan could lay them straight along chalk lines while Alex worked on the ridge, using a power saw to open the apex of the roof for the vent that would allow heat to escape from the attic.

  A grey cloud rose from the opening just feet from where Alex was working. Laura squinted, the sun nearly in her eyes.

  Bees!

  Bees rose from the gap in the roof like a cloud of smoke. Angry bees swarming toward Alex. Evidently, he’d disturbed a nest in the attic.

  Laura stood and yelled, “Alex! Look out!”

  Alex saw them and back-pedaled, windmilling away from the cloud, the nail gun slipping from his hand.

  He flung his arms out, as if someone pushed him hard to the right. Lost his balance, the momentum carrying him backwards. He disappeared over the ridge to the other side of the roof as the nail gun skittered down the roof toward Jim, gaining speed on the steep pitch. Jim jumped aside but lost his balance, crashed to the shingles and slid head-first toward the eaves. Lunged for one of the roofing jacks, missed it and fell ten feet to the stubbly grass below, landing hard.

  He didn’t move, appeared to be unconscious.

  Laura ran over, knelt, and shook him. “Jim! Jim! Are you okay?”

  As Jim came to, screaming erupted from behind the house.

  Above, Jordan yelled, “Holy shit! Alex fell!”

  He checked his arms and legs and slowly got to his feet. Nothing appeared to be broken. Limping from a sprained ankle, Jim followed Laura around the house, down the slope to the back. She could hear Alex screaming but couldn’t see him in the tall field grass. She pushed toward the sound until he found Alex lying on his back, screaming in agony. She nearly gagged.

  His right shin had snapped, the bone protruding through a tear in his jeans. A piece of rusty metal protruded from his t-shirt along his left flank, part of some farm implement forgotten in the grass.

  Jim pushed in next to her and shouted, “Jesus! Jordan! Call 911! Hurry!”

  Laura knelt and tried to comfort Alex to no avail; he continued to scream in pain. A moment later, he passed out. Laura looked closer at the rusty piece of metal poking through Alex’s bloodied shirt. It looked like a flesh wound but turned her stomach anyway.

  She heard movement in the grass, glanced up as Jordan approached. For a microsecond, she thought she saw a man wearing a cap sitting on the chimney.

  An eyeblink and he vanished.

  Laura doubted her vision, nevertheless felt spindly skeletal fingers sliding down her spine.

  What the hell was that?

  She tried to avoid the question, but an answer came anyway.

  Ghost.

  Six

  Tom Wolff sat atop the north chimney gazing over the countryside. His view had an oddly truncated appearance, extending only two or three miles in any direction. Nothing was visible beyond the low banks of clouds there. The edges just fell away. He couldn’t walk to the boundary—not that he wanted to. He belonged here and had no desire to leave. This was his place. Always had been.

  Time was meaningless beyond the nebulous passage of days and nights. He didn’t know the day, month, or year. Temperature had no effect on him. As if surrounded by a protective bubble, he was impervious to rain, sleet, and snow. He had a vague theory about his existence, that fate had superimposed him on the world like a shadow in some dimension beyond four. But it wasn’t heaven. No siree.

  By chance, he had discovered he could occasionally breach those four dimensions with a thought or a gesture. While the thought or gesture didn’t necessarily result in a specific action, a crack opened into the living world. Leaves rustled, dust scattered, floorboards rattled, a door closed. It was just such a gesture, a little nudge, that sent that kid flying off the roof. The movement lacked focus and, as Tom discovered today, was something over which he had limited control. He only meant to scare the kid, but had seriously miscalculated the outcome and screwed up with distressing results. Worse, he felt no remorse. He wanted to, but he didn’t seem able to feel any emotion at all.

  As he looked down, he locked eyes with the blonde woman. She blinked in such a way he felt certain she had seen him!

  Was that possible?

  He didn’t know, so he slipped from sight, down the roof, wandering into the woods.

  Tom felt compelled to discourage living people from visiting, from wanting to stay, from living here. This was Elizabeth’s house, and he was waiting for her return. That was the job. Take care of the place until Elizabeth and the boys came home. It had been easier before these intruders arrived. The yard and driveway had been overgrown with vegetation, the house virtually invisible. Now anyone could see it.

  Then he wondered: what if Elizabeth had sent these people to ready the house for her arrival? He didn’t know. It was a quandary and he didn’t know what to do.

  For now, he would lay low. Play a waiting game.

  Until Elizabeth returned.

  Seven

  Desperate for a few hours away from the construction noise, Laura and Dana took an afternoon off and drove to an antique auction in Auburn. The auction hall was once a railway station, a holdover from an era when Chicago and North Western streamliners still ran through town. Inside, a podium at the far end faced rows and rows of cheap green folding chairs, the rest of the long terminal packed with antiques, collectibles, and junk masquerading as heirlooms. A large crowd filled the seats, and dozens of people stood around the edges holding their numbers tight to their chests. The room was warm and stuffy and smelled of old wood and dust.

  Leah fidgeted and Dana looked bored, but Laura wanted to stay, waiting for an oak wall phone to hit the block. She loved the thrill and atmosphere of the auction, more so with real money to spend. She had already purchased several lamps, boxes of wood utensils to hang in the kitchen, and a beautiful oak hutch and buffet to match the table set she had refinished in Illinois. With the renovations near complete, her time had come. From choosing paint colors and furnishings to finding pieces and decor that complimented the architecture, Laura had spent hours scouring eBay, Etsy, and other sites for suitable
items. She preferred a hands-on approach so the auction would be far more exciting.

  The house wasn’t finished, but it was habitable. The electricians and plumbers had come and gone. The glazier remained, busy fixing windows, and the heating crew were just finishing the furnace and air conditioning. As it stood, they had places to sleep and half a kitchen. Enough for now.

  The auctioneer was hawking a wooden box of photo albums. “Yes sir, many fine old postcards and photographs in this box. Come on now, who’ll give me five dollars, come on, give me five dollars…”

  “Three,” said a man quietly with a flick of his number.

  From the lack of interest, Laura assumed the contents were junk. Such stuff didn’t interest her.

  “…okay I got three. Come on, give me four, give me four...a steal at this price...”

  Laura suddenly felt queasy, and the room seemed to cant sideways—

  Take the box

  “…okay I got six. Come on now, give me seven...”

  Laura bit her lip, certain she had blacked out for a moment. She glanced around, but no one seemed to have noticed. A nameless compulsion to win the box possessed her.

  The auctioneer rambled on, “…I got six, I got six. Who’ll give me seven? Come on, give me seven...”

  Laura stood and yelled, “Twenty!”

  The dingy auction hall went quiet. The auctioneer stopped in mid-sentence and stared at Laura. “Lady, the last bid was six.”

  “So? I said twenty.” Laura defiantly stood her ground.

  The auctioneer shook his head. “All right, I got twenty, I got twenty. Who’ll give me twenty-five? Come on, give me twenty-five...”

  “Yep!” A tall bearded man in the corner flashed his number.

  “All right, I got twenty-five—”

  “Forty!” yelled another man.

  “Fifty!” came a shout from the back.

  The auction ran amok, bids shouted faster than the auctioneer could acknowledge them. Within seconds, the call reached one hundred and eighty-five dollars.