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Jay bolted awake during the darkest moment of the night, during those early hours when a sleeper's dreams most often turned dark. He did not wake to any noise trespassing in his home. Nothing in the waking world penetrated his slumbering senses to rouse him. Rather, the unsettling sense of danger germinated in his dreamscape, rising until a strand of mumbled words garbled in a language like none he had ever heard shouted in his sleeping ear and took control of his tongue.
“Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”
Jay gasped for breath. Sweat broke upon his brow.
Kelly jumped awake beside him. “Are you alright, Jay? You've had a terrible nightmare. You were shouting some terrible language I couldn't understand.”
Jay rubbed at his aching head. “I don't know what I was dreaming.”
“You've had a lot of stress,” Kelly reclined back into her pillow. “You'll sleep better after tonight.”
Jay leaned back into his blankets. His ears strained, but heard nothing. Yet something had changed in his country home. He swore that the home had been darker when he had first closed his eyes for sleep. The night was shrouded by clouds, so that there had been no moonlight nor starlight to seep through the curtains. But Jay perceived a new illumination seeping into his room, a soft light floating down the hall that cast new shadows upon his walls.
Jay listened to the dark, hoping to hear Anderson pounding at his computer keyboard, telling him that the light was but the glow of his son's monitor.
Only the house remained silent.
Kelly was the light sleeper. If anything lurked about the property, any possum trapped in the cellar, any deer nibbling in the tomato garden, Kelly would have heard it in her sleep well before Jay. And she slept soundly at his side, her rising chest betraying no agitation.
Yet Jay could not find his wife's peace no matter how he tried. That soft illumination floating in the hall intensified in his imagination. That light would not allow him sleep, and so Jay stepped out of his bed determined to locate the source of the interloping light.
The light drew Jay down the hall to the stairs. The illumination rose upwards from the kitchen, cast in a pallor nothing like that thrown by the downstair's fluorescent lighting. His eyes squinted in the light as he stepped down into the kitchen. All of the switches told him the lights were off. Only the flashing numbers on the microwave's display indicated any electricity hummed in the room.
Jay gasped as he saw the paraffin lantern he had brought from the Turner estate burning at the center of the kitchen table. He shook his head. That lantern could not have been burning. He had found no fuel in the lantern's base. A wick had not even remained in the lamp to hold a flame. But the lantern burned regardless, filling the kitchen with a wavering, pale gray light that floated like smoke upon the walls.
The lantern was cold to Jay's touch as he held it closer to his eye. The source of that light, whatever it might have been, threw no heat. Jay peered down into the lamp and saw a strange, blue flame dancing within the center of that lamp's glass mosaic, a flame held by no wick, a flame that floated within the center of that lantern and fed upon no apparent source of fuel.
“There has to be a latch somewhere.”
Jay returned the lantern to the table and pulled open a cabinet drawer to scavenge for a screwdriver. The lantern had to possess a hidden mechanism, a place for batteries that he had failed to notice. The lantern had to have a trick. There was no reason for the hairs to stand on his forearms. There was no reason for sweat to begin beading upon his brow. There was no reason for the way his fingers trembled.
“Is that you Kelly?”
Jay heard a shambling step. He heard a dragging of feet. Jay held his breath and listened to the footsteps seeping into the kitchen. Perhaps Kelly's knee painfully flared in her sleep to send her downstairs in search of aspirin. Such occasions were not rare, and such times made her gait heavy and stiff. But the shambling steps Jay heard originated outside of the country home. Had Kelly descended the steps on the opposite side of the hall to go through the living room before exiting the front door? Did her dreams send her sleepwalking out of the comforts of bed and the security of the house? He could not remember a time when his wife had walked in her sleep.
“What is it Jay?”
Jay had turned to see Kelly take the last step into the kitchen a moment before the large, kitchen bay window overlooking the Logans' country lane exploded inward upon the tile.
Jay's mind swooned as Kelly screamed. The paraffin lantern's light intensified to glaring brilliance and cast cutting, deep shadows upon the terror that shuffled upon the Logan homestead.
“Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”
Jay's thoughts shuddered and stammered to a stop as a bulbous hand with swollen knuckles stretched through the broken window. It was a dead hand, a hand covered by skin as thin as wrapping paper. Jay recognized that hand though his mind refused to believe it could have become animate.
“Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”
Jay could not scream an answer to those terrible words the ghastly trespasser shouted into the kitchen. The words clutched his heart and squeezed chill through the blood. He could not move to his wife's side as he heard Kelly collapse onto the kitchen floor.
“Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”
A second hand pushed through the broken window and held horror within its fingers. Jay backed against his kitchen wall as the paraffin lantern's glow fell upon the horrible orb the thing at the window shoved into the room. Tendrils of muscle and nerve trailed from the orb. Jay turned away from that orb a moment before that hand turned it directly upon him. He knew what that hand held a moment before a green pupil dilated in the lantern light before focusing upon Jay Logan. How often had he looked upon that green eye?
The hand held Gus Holcombe's final, good eye.
“Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”
The dismembered eye glared upon Jay as a face leaned through the broken window, a face that sported two empty, black sockets where its own eyes should have resided. Jay shook as he looked upon the black, Hamburg hat, the navy blue Ascot, the water-stained vest. A golden locket now dangled, like an antique pocketwatch, from the charcoal coat, and something in that ghoul's grin told Jay that Gus had pilfered that piece from the Turner home, that Gus paid a terrible price for the crime. The dead still claimed their possessions, and Jay knew the paraffin lantern's light had summoned the thing in the window in order to be returned home.
“Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”
The words echoed and pounded in Jay's mind, stringing together as a calling. The words spoken by the dead summoned the living to action.
And before fear swamped his system, before he he slipped into terrible nightmare, Jay Logan realized he would be unable to resist the dead's command.
Guarded Keepsakes Page 8
