by Cailyn Lloyd
She heard a noise in the back hall.
Jesus! Enough of this! She wasn’t afraid, just angry. She flipped the light on and peered down the hallway.
Empty.
She walked down the hall to the furnace room. Also empty.
The root cellar?
Empty.
She turned to leave and saw the pile of brick, dust, debris, and broken timbers on the floor. She peered up at the ragged hole in the ceiling, into the brick room where they had discovered the book and the coins.
The book!
Damn it! Laura had forgotten about the book. Like the album, she was convinced it was a link to the things happening in the house. She angrily assumed Lucas was keeping any information about it from her. Damn him anyway! Only anger did no good. Sweet, sexy, serious; none of it opened a dialogue. In frustration, she kicked the pile, scattering debris and a few bricks. Kicked it again, resentful at the sad state of their relationship.
Looking down, she noticed a dark rounded object protruding slightly from the pile. The shape was vaguely familiar. She knelt for a closer look, then tugged at the object. At first, it resisted. She moved a couple of bricks, the pile shifted slightly, and she was able to pull it free.
A bone.
She wasn’t a doctor, but it looked like a human arm bone, the humerus. She held it for a second, transfixed, then dropped it in revulsion.
Curious, she pushed the timbers aside and picked at the bricks, pulling them away one by one, then she sorted through the dust with a stick. Found another chunk of bone.
She slowly pulled the stack apart, pushing bone fragments right with the stick and stacking the bricks on the left. There were lots of broken bone pieces in the pile, some she recognized, some not. The long bones were broken and there were fragments suggestive of a skull and a few teeth. Laura pulled her phone from her pocket and snapped several photos for Reverend Drew.
A shiver ran down her spine. Didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to solve this mystery. The room was a tomb of some sort and it took little imagination to ascribe everything that had happened since to Lucas and Nate forcing it open. Evidently, they had never figured that out.
No matter. She was going to bed and giving this stuff to the reverend tomorrow, and if he decided she needed help, she was accepting the offer. As a concession to her anxiety, she decided to sleep in the guest room with Dana.
Forty-Four
Shepherd stared at the words for so long, they faded to a blur. In anger, he slammed his fist on the keyboard and kicked the wastebasket. He couldn’t believe this was happening and yet, the book, the clues, and the evidence suddenly formed a coherent whole.
A picture of frightening clarity.
Something he had done long ago had returned to haunt him. Five hundred years ago, to be exact. The answer was written on the last page, though his sense of dread had been rising through the previous dozen pages.
The text had evolved from a diary, to healing folklore and magic, and finally, to a grimoire, a text of magic, spells, and invocations—witchcraft. And not just any witchcraft. The woman had matured from practicing harmless magic to malignant evil; became skilled, dangerous, and feared. He intuited the answer before he read the actual words, but the absolute proof he’d been seeking now lay before him.
The book belonged to a woman named Anna Flecher, and the story began in England with a friend, Edward MacCoinnich. Edward was a baron with substantial landholdings, in favor with King Henry VII and a cousin to the King’s wife, Elizabeth of York. His marriage was arranged, as was common with the rich and powerful in that era, to the daughter of another wealthy landowner, William Flecher.
Over the next decade, Edward had a compelling run of luck, with his land holdings and farms, in his business ventures, and in his personal life. Deals broke his way with uncanny regularity. Opponents and competitors suffered from ill-timed accidents and other misfortunes. In battle, he was invariably victorious. His luck became legendary, and it was oft whispered he had sold his soul to the devil.
The truth was darker. He had married a monster.
At first, Edward had no idea his wife was the architect of his great fortune. Had no idea she practiced the black arts. A rumor then circulated that Anna wasn’t really William Flecher’s daughter but a mistress. William had grown tired or wary of her. Rumors varied but her skill as a sorcerer was unrivaled and people feared her.
Armed with the truth, Edward confronted Anna. She laughed and, in an arrogant tirade, boasted of her skill in sorcery and claimed credit for his every success. She treated him dismissively and boasted she was too powerful to be stopped by anyone. He was merely a respectable figurehead, useful only as a front for her malign ends. He was to play along and stay out of her way or die badly. She brooked no arguments.
Afraid for his life, Edward chained Anna to a beam in the root cellar of his house and placed guards outside the door, intending to have her tried and executed.
With a powerful spell, she murdered his father, then escaped the locked room. As her actions grew more audacious, Edward realized he needed to act before he too became a victim of her magic. She was crazy with power—so arrogant she believed herself invincible. In that, Edward saw her weakness. She believed he was too frightened to act after his father’s death. He wanted to kill her but feared her spirit would return to exact revenge. She had become that dangerous.
At a jousting tournament, Edward, in obvious fear of his life, cornered Shepherd and explained the situation.
Shepherd knew of Anna Flecher. An underground community of practitioners in the dark arts, sorcery, and magic existed and her name had surfaced more frequently as her acts and schemes grew more brazen. In this, they saw her as a dangerous and growing threat. Eventually, reckless practitioners like Anna Flecher fomented a backlash, inciting witch-hunts and trials. Dozens of eccentric innocents, women mostly, were arrested and burned at the stake.
Shepherd agreed to help, but he was adamant on one issue—he would not be an accomplice to murder. He would ensure Anna and her evil spirit were safely interred and would never bother Edward again.
His instructions were specific. She couldn’t be buried. She needed to be interred in a brick or stone tomb fully sealed with mortar. Shepherd would create a powerful field aura around the mausoleum to prevent Anna from haunting Edward and her enemies from beyond the grave. A Celtic cross, cast in fine metal by Shepherd, held the field in place. The idea sounded ridiculous in the twenty-first century, but in 1516, it was a method widely employed to contain evil spirits and entities.
One that hadn’t worked, he realized.
Somehow, Anna had continued to wreak havoc all these years later from the brick tomb the MacKenzies had opened. Before him were the words explaining everything.
Edward hadn’t killed Anna.
Edward had buried her alive. Adding insult to this grievous fate, Edward had tossed in three gold coins for the toll to cross the River Styx. In essence, he had sent Anna straight to hell. Meted out a cruel punishment without realizing he had given her the opportunity to cast a final invocation that haunted his descendants still. The MacKenzie house in Lost Arrow was Edward’s house; the same house where Edward interred Anna Flecher five hundred years before in the north of England. How it arrived there, he couldn’t imagine, but it implied powers greater than his.
His invocation had sealed her fate, led to her death. As powerful as she had become, Anna had to know Shepherd had a hand in her murder and likely harbored a dangerous enmity toward him. It wouldn’t matter that he hadn’t known Edward buried her alive. Anna wouldn’t care.
Her anger had to be immense. She had evolved beyond death into a dangerous force and he worried about the retributions her angry spirit might be planning. He also felt a pang of regret. He had trusted Edward, and Edward had deceived him. He never would’ve participated in such a gruesome murder.
Instead, with that knowledge, he would have acted differently, and Anna would be eternally dead and forgo
tten. It wasn’t possible to make amends now, but he could prevent further deaths by confronting and destroying her.
He was disturbed it taken so long to make these connections but sadly, he knew the reason why.
Age.
Five hundred years had passed. It was hard enough to remember details from forty or fifty years ago. Five hundred years? It was incredible he remembered it at all! Advancing age added to his forgetfulness. Nevertheless, this was a disastrous lapse. He had been translating the book for weeks and only now had it come to him, though in reality, there had been few clues until deep into the book. She never mentioned Edward by name. Her name appeared nowhere in the narrative. When he suspected, he rushed to the end and recognized the awful truth.
He recalled that Edward had died badly years later, attacked and eaten by wild boars during a fox hunt. He’d assumed that simple bad luck had befallen him, but now he wondered. Edward had several sons by his second wife. Over the years, MacCoinnich had evolved to MacKenzie. Everything fit perfectly.
The problem was his, he knew it; only he could fix it.
Anxiety tickled his insides. Somehow, this woman, or her invocation, had persevered for five hundred years and remained dangerous. He worried about her intentions and plans for retribution. His skills were rusty and hadn’t been seriously tested in a hundred years. Confronting Anna would require considerable thought, planning, and bravado. Meanwhile, he needed to convince Lucas MacKenzie that he and his family was in grave danger and needed to leave the house.
Now.
Forty-Five
Lucas lay naked on the bed in the dark bedroom of the small apartment, enjoying the afterglow of lovemaking. Next to him, Murphy inhaled deeply upon a cigarette, the embers glowing brightly, then fading to a soft glow.
He fondled her bare stomach.
“Good, huh?”
“Yeah.”
In the distance, a train whistle called to the woods and the darkness, over the rumbling music of steel on steel and the pulsations of the diesel engine. It was otherwise quiet.
“Are you staying over?” Murphy asked.
“Yeah. That okay?”
“Sure. There won’t be trouble with wifey?”
The question disturbed the tranquility of the moment. He had forgotten about Laura, and while Murphy was neither bright nor sophisticated, she was wild in bed and filled a void in his life. The nature of that void was a complex combination of factors, his lack of purpose and direction, his brother’s injury, Jacob’s death, the disintegration of his marriage, and the feeling he wasn’t entirely well. There were moments when he blacked out, periods of time he couldn’t account for.
“She don’t seem so bad. I met her, you know.”
Lucas turned toward Murphy, leaning his head on a crooked arm.
“Where?”
“At a party. She’s kinda spooky, though.”
“What do you mean?”
Murphy inhaled on her cigarette. Outside, a modified car roared up the street. “It’s hard to explain. There’s this woman in town, her name is Sally. She has this gift; she knows stuff before it happens, you know, like ESP?”
Lucas nodded.
Murphy shifted to her side, propped her head on her hand. “Anyway, Sally and your wife started talking, and all the sudden, the whole place went weird. Dude, it gave me the creeps. They were talking about your house—some guy disappeared there a long time ago. They never found him and never figured out what happened.”
She touched Lucas’s arm. “Well, things were weird, and Sally was talking, then your wife says, in a creepy voice, ‘I know what really happened’. It was like a seance.”
Lucas was in a daze. This was further proof he was no longer safe under the same roof as Laura. He took the cigarette from Murphy and inhaled deeply.
Time to act.
Forty-Six
Laura drifted between sleep and wakefulness, chasing a phantom—the fading figure of Anna Flecher. If she could see her face, she would understand, but Laura couldn’t catch her. She disappeared behind a basement door.
She woke and listened to Dana snore softly next to her. Maybe Anna Flecher was the least of her worries. Her marriage seemed lost. Lucas had withdrawn so far in pain that they could no longer have a civil conversation. She recognized her part in their troubles but feared he was seeing someone else. Perhaps if she threatened to leave, he would come to his senses, but Laura saw the futility of coercion. To plead or threaten now was nothing but desperate. An anxious thread ran through her mind, worries about being alone, trying to start over.
A lot had happened in three days. Meeting Sally at Brenda’s. The trip to the cemetery and discovering Elizabeth there. Anna Flecher—the inexplicable name that kept appearing. The tarot cards and Janice Foster’s illness, the older cemetery, the album, and finally the bones and the implications they created. All in three days. Far too quickly to make any sense of it.
As a supernatural story, it sounded patently absurd in the age of computers, the internet, and smart phones. All the ghosts and goblins of the medieval era were dead, along with most of the ancient superstitions. Maybe Reverend Drew was right. Maybe she needed help and counseling to see through the clutter in her head, to see it was all nonsense—or some harmless old lady who didn’t want to leave their house.
In the primitive regions of her brain however, in the realm of dreams, fears, and superstitions, Laura felt something was wrong with the house that couldn’t be proven or disproven by science alone. That what she’d experienced was real and every bit as dangerous as it appeared. Laura believed this to be true, and though she’d ignored her feelings in the past, she intended to follow her instincts this time, heed the warnings and get out.
Decision made. She would see Reverend Drew to show him the evidence, which seemed painfully thin, and inform him of her decision. A stop at Sally’s to satisfy her curiosity about the other night—
It seems we have something in common.
—then she was coming home to pack. She wouldn’t threaten Lucas. She was leaving without a word. If he wanted her, he would come find her. Laura showered, plucked Leah from her crib, and walked down to the kitchen. She fired up the Keurig and made breakfast for Leah. As she sat at the table with her coffee, Dana wandered in, still in pajamas, looking sleepy.
“Morning, Mom.”
“Morning, Dana.” Laura looked over the top of her coffee cup. “Sleep okay?”
“Like the dead.”
“I think I’m going to move out of the house for a while.”
“Something I said?” Dana popped a cup into the Keurig.
“I’m serious. There’s something wrong with this place. You haven’t been here long enough to feel it. I don’t feel safe here.”
“Aren’t you going to wait to see what the reverend does?” Dana sat across from Laura, looking concerned. “Or consider a little therapy?”
“That could take weeks or months, in either case.”
“What about Dad?”
Laura, pensive for a moment, said, “Things aren’t going well between your father and me right now.”
“What? What’s going on?”
“We’re barely talking.” She paused. “I think he’s seeing someone else.”
Dana slammed her hand onto the table. “No way, Mom! Dad wouldn’t—” Dana sharpened her gaze at Laura. “Seriously? Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not sure.” Laura held her cup defensively.
“So you’re just assuming he’s cheating?” Her disapproval was palpable.
“Yes. Even if he isn’t, I can’t talk to him anymore. Maybe we just need a break.”
“And where are you going?”
“Your house?”
Dana raised her eyebrows. “I’m not getting in the middle of this.”
“I don’t want you to.”
They discussed the issue for a few more minutes, but Laura refused to be dissuaded from what Dana evidently considered a rash decision. Laura grabbed her phon
e and punched in Sally’s number.
“Hi, Sally, this is Laura MacKenzie. Could I stop over today?”
“Sure, Laura. When?”
“In an hour or two. I have to stop and see the reverend first.”
“That’ll be fine.”
Laura grabbed her fur-lined parka and looked to Dana. “Sally’s home. I’m going to stop there after I see Reverend Drew. Would you mind watching Leah for a few hours?”
“Sure. I always have a good time with this little lady.”
As Laura was walking out the door, her phone rang. It was Ashley. Laura hesitated, then stepped back inside and tapped the green icon.
“Laura?” Her voice was soft, almost haunted.
“Ashley?”
“Yeah…how have you been?”
“Okay, I guess.” Hesitant, Laura didn’t know what to say. Ashley’s parting words still hurt.
“Laura, thanks for the letter. I should’ve answered sooner.” A moment of silence. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean what I said when I left.”
Ashley sounded miserable. Laura softened. “I hoped you didn’t mean it. I just didn’t understand. How are you doing?”
“I’m hanging in there.”
“And Nate?”
“Nothing’s changed.” She started crying softly.
Try as she might, Laura couldn’t stop herself from crying too. God, she missed Ashley. “You need some support, lady. Do you want me to come down?”
“Actually, would it be okay if I come back for a few days?”
“Of course. It’s your house too.” As she spoke, Laura felt torn by the decision to leave and a desire to mend her friendship with Ashley. “Just so you know, things have gotten weird here.”
“Mrs Moskopf?”
“And some. I was planning on leaving in a few days.”
“And it’s still okay that I come?”
