What the hell was that? I wondered.
I had no sooner completed the thought when a longer, more powerful jolt rose up from the ground beneath me and enveloped me in its grasp. It was as if I’d grabbed hold of a high-tension electrical cable, the power coursing through me like a living thing. The current had its way with me, spreading my arms out to either side and throwing my head and body backward until I was almost folded in two.
It went on for who knows how long and then snapped off as quickly as if someone had thrown a light switch.
I collapsed to the ground, my heart beating wildly and my blood coursing through my veins.
When I got up again, everything had changed.
The world around me was sharper, clearer, as if I’d been walking around with gauze in front of my eyes for my entire life and now it had been stripped away.
In those first few seconds before my eyes burned themselves out, I saw it all.
I saw it all and was afraid.
31
NOW
“Who?” Dmitri asked.
“Scream,” I repeated, still in shock at what I was seeing. I took a moment to fill him in on my history with the ghost of the man on the screen in front of us.
Turned out that Scream’s real name was Thomas Matthews. He’d been an auto mechanic in Chicago before he was found dead on the floor of his shop. As in the rest of the killings, the autopsy had not turned up a discernible cause of death, but it did make note of the strange discoloration of the man’s skin.
“This guy has been following you around for how long?” Dmitri asked me.
I did some mental math. “Almost a year now, I’d guess.”
A quick check told us that Matthews had died fifteen months ago, according to the police reports. Which meant it hadn’t taken him long to track me down.
But why? What did he want from me?
A new line of thought occurred to me.
“Dmitri, can you check the Matthews file and tell me if he had any children?”
“Just a sec … Yeah, looks like he had one. A daughter named Abigail.” He hesitated a moment as he continued reading. “Huh,” he said finally, “says here she went missing several weeks before her father’s death. Apparently there was some question at the time as to whether or not he was involved.”
I opened my mouth to ask another question, but Denise beat me to it.
“Is there a photograph?”
Dmitri hunted around for a few minutes but came up empty. “I can send a remote spider into the Chicago PD’s network, hunt for the original file, but that’s going to take a while.”
“Do it,” I said absently, my thoughts churning. I was willing to bet my left hand that Whisper was the ghost of Matthews’s daughter, Abigail. Now all I needed to do was find out what they had to do with the killer and what the killer, in turn, had to do with my daughter, Elizabeth.
I turned to Denise. “You said you recognized some of the others? From where?”
It was strange watching her eyes moving absently in their sockets and knowing that it was because I was currently using her sight. It didn’t seem to bother her, at least not at the moment as she said, “Our scrying session. There might be more, too. It’s hard to be certain of the faces when I only saw them for a few moments.”
I assured her that was fine and that it was enough that they looked familiar. It proved that the first part of our session hadn’t been as big a failure as I’d thought. We’d made a connection, just as we’d hoped, but we’d somehow connected with the victims rather than the killer.
I wondered why. What did they have to do with the tissue sample we’d been using as our focus?
My head was pounding, a combination of the link I’d been maintaining with Denise and all the new facts I was trying to assimilate. I wasn’t going to be able to keep this up for much longer.
I knew the answers were here, somewhere, but I just couldn’t get past my own fatigue to put them together. I said as much to the others as I let the connection between Denise and me go dead once more. It had been a long day, one full of surprising revelations. I was mentally and physically worn-out and needed to get some sleep before tackling things any further. We agreed to call it a night and to regroup again the next day. Denise even volunteered to drive me home, and I gladly took her up on it. As for Dmitri, he promised to keep digging through the files, looking for more information that might link all of the victims together.
We said our good-byes to him and left Murphy’s behind. Denise took my arm and led me up the road to where she had parked her car.
I pictured her driving something small and sporty, maybe a Saturn or a Mazda. The throaty roar that sounded from beneath the hood when she fired it up told me I had been way off.
Despite my exhaustion, I couldn’t help but smile. “You drive a muscle car?” I asked, incredulously. I never would have imagined it.
“Traded in my old clunker for this beauty,” she said. Knowing I couldn’t see it, she didn’t stop there. “It’s a 2008 Charger, with a 6.1 liter Hemi V8. 425 horsepower and 420 pounds per foot of torque.”
Her infatuation with muscle cars was an entirely unexpected side to her, and I almost laughed aloud at hearing it.
I say almost, because she chose that moment to stomp on the gas and we shot away from the curb like a rocket on full thrust. It was all I could do to keep my heart in my throat and to hang on for dear life.
Still shy about having people, including my new friends, know where I lived, I had her drop me off at a house a few doors up from mine and then waited for her to drive off before making my way down the rest of the block.
As I walked, I considered what I’d learned.
At first, none of it made any sense. Why the hell had Stanton kept all this from me? But after I thought about it for a time, I gradually came to understand. Stanton had been in the doghouse professionally since the case that had first brought us together a few years ago. He was an exceptional cop, but one not prone to political moves, so in the eyes of the power-hungry personalities that ran the department, his rising star had gradually begun to dim and eventually burn out. If he wanted to advance beyond detective, he needed to make a name for himself, and the only way to do that was with a big case.
A multistate killing spree was just the thing.
Stanton hoped to break the Reaper case on his own, and he was using me to do it!
Now all of his nagging little phone calls and nightly check-ins made sense. He was keeping tabs on me, just in case I stumbled on something that could help him break the case wide open and let him catch the killer before the cops assigned to the task force could.
It was a pretty decent plan, actually. Without any way of knowing it, Stanton had actually chosen the person most likely to solve the case for him. With Dmitri’s and Denise’s help, and the information we’d put together to date, we were probably several steps closer to the killer than the task force.
I reached my front gate and pushed it open. Maybe it was my preoccupation with trying to figure out Stanton’s angle in all this. Maybe it was simply my exhaustion finally catching up with me. Whatever it was, it kept me from noticing the things I should have, and so I entered my house with absolutely no warning of what I was walking into.
I closed the door behind me and stepped forward before my vision had fully returned. I hadn’t gone two steps before something struck me across the shins and I fell forward, only to strike something else. As I lay there in pain, my vision finally cleared enough for me to see that I had tripped over the coatrack that usually stood to the right of the door but had fallen on an end table. Both of them had been strewn across the floor like inanimate land mines.
I fought my way free and regained my feet, keeping one hand against the wall to help avoid losing my balance a second time, and took a good look around my living room.
My place had been trashed.
The antique end tables that had stood on either side of the couch were in pieces in the middle o
f the floor. The cast-iron lamps that had sat atop them were twisted into odd, pretzel-like shapes that would have horrified my ex-wife had she been there to see them, especially considering the insane price she’d paid for them at a craft fair in Kennebunkport years ago. There was something black and bulky that seemed to be growing out of my kitchen sink, and it drew me like a magnet. As I got closer, I realized it was half of my flat-screen television; the other half was scattered into a thousand pieces all over the kitchen floor.
But it was the condition of the den at the back of the house that really knocked me for a loop. My books and papers, years of research and notes on Elizabeth’s abduction, lay scattered about, and it would take me hours to sort through them, even with Whisper’s help.
A sudden prickling along the base of my spine caused me to turn and look back along the hallway to the front door. It was open, despite the fact that I was certain I had closed it behind me.
Even worse, a crowd of ghosts had gathered there, staring down the hall at me.
I had a split second to think Oh shit, and then my attention was torn away from them as something rushed at me out of the darkness of the bedroom to my right.
I tried to backpedal, to get away from whatever it was, but the destruction around me tripped me up. Expecting several feet of open space, I was surprised when my heels jammed up against something solid and I went over backward unexpectedly.
The fall saved my life. The strike aimed at my throat grazed the surface of my neck instead, drawing a thin line of blood rather than the hot gush of life-sustaining fluid that my attacker had apparently been going for.
Even as I hit the floor, I was scrambling to get out of the way while trying to get a sense of what it was I was up against. I had a momentary flash of a man-sized target tossing my stereo cabinet at me as I rolled frantically to the side.
My attacker followed in a heartbeat, throwing himself on top of me, using his weight to try to pin me to the floor. He was broadshouldered, I could tell that from the ease with which he held me down, and he weighed a ton, as if his entire body was one mass of solid muscle. I fought back frantically, knowing that if I didn’t dislodge him quickly I was dead meat.
I twisted and turned, bucking up and down as I did so, trying to slip out from underneath him. I kept waiting for the knife he’d used to cut me earlier to plunge into my flesh, but it never came. Maybe he’d lost it in the struggle. I didn’t have much time to relish the idea, however, for, rather than stab me, he chose that moment to bring his forehead down in a swift blow to my own that had me seeing stars.
The impact stunned me for a moment and that was all he needed to open a big gash down one cheek.
So much for him losing that knife.
I needed help and I needed it quickly.
“Scream!” I shouted at the top of my lungs.
My shout surprised my attacker, made him ease up slightly, allowing me to slip partially free. With one arm loose I began to hammer at him with my fist while simultaneously trying to work my way up into a sitting position where I might have some better leverage.
The intruder reared back and slammed a punch of his own into my face, jerking it to the side, and so I happened to be looking at the wall right at the moment that Scream ran through it.
The ghost moved with all the grace of an avalanche, but it was good enough for me as those powerful legs propelled him across the room in our direction.
The guy on top of me never saw him coming. As the intruder reared up to deliver another strike, Scream barreled straight into him.
But rather than pass through my attacker as I expected him to do, as Marshall’s ghost had done to me the night before, the two of them collided with a vicious smack that sent them both tumbling across the debris-strewn floor.
The killer was apparently more, or less, than human.
Scream’s touch bore out the truth of that thought. A half second later, it stripped the illusion from the creature in front of me, revealing its true nature. Gone was the shadowy image of a human attacker. In its place was something straight out of one of my nightmares. A wide, circular mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth sat in the center of a featureless expanse of flesh. Slight indentations marked where its eyes should be, and, instead of a nose, it had two small slits in the center of its face. The hands I thought had been holding knives were in fact four-fingered appendages that ended in viciously curved claws.
That mouth opened and a howl like a buzz saw gone berserk erupted from it.
Scream disappeared as swiftly as he had come, but I knew he was still around, for I felt his strength flow into me before I even asked for it. I jumped to my feet, searching for something to use as a weapon. The leg of what had once been my kitchen table lay nearby, and I snatched it up, brandishing it like a club. If I had been facing the creature with just my own abilities, the table leg probably wouldn’t have done much good, but with Scream’s supernatural strength added to my own, I was ready to bash the creature into next week.
Unfortunately, the creature was a far better fighter than I was. I took a swing with my improvised weapon, extended myself too far, and spun back around just in time to get smacked in the side of the head with a blow that knocked me clean off my feet and left me unconscious on the floor.
32
NOW
Denise had driven only a few blocks when she noticed that Hunt had forgotten his satchel. It was sitting on the rear seat, right where he’d put it when he’d gotten into the car. For a moment she wondered if he’d left it there on purpose, an excuse to see her again, and then realized how ridiculous she sounded. Hunt was a grown man, not some lovesick teenager.
And isn’t that too bad, a voice said in the back of her mind.
Denise snorted. Okay, so yes, she did find Hunt sort of attractive, she could admit that to herself, but now certainly wasn’t the time to make anything of it. Not when there was a bloodthirsty killer running around loose and the two of them were up to their necks in trying to stop it.
Since she’d only gone a couple of blocks, she decided to turn around and go back. He’d want to know the information and photographs in the satchel hadn’t been lost.
And it gives you a chance to see him again.
Shut up! she told herself, but there was a hint of a smile on her face as she said it. Sometimes you just couldn’t argue with yourself.
It wasn’t hard for her to locate the right house; if the boarded-up windows hadn’t given it away, the general atmosphere of doom and gloom that hung about the place certainly would have. Pulling up out front, she realized something was wrong when she saw the shattered remains of the gate hanging in front of the property.
That’s not good.
She threw the car into park and got out, eying the gate while trying to watch the house at the same time. The boarded-up windows didn’t surprise her; Hunt had mentioned them the night they’d talked in her home. The feeling of impending dread that seemed to envelop the house was new, however.
Denise had the sudden sense that she wasn’t alone.
She spun around, her hands coming up ready to protect herself, but there was no one there.
A little jumpy tonight, aren’t we? she asked herself and then brushed it off as a bad case of nerves, more than likely caused by what they had learned earlier.
She considered calling out, announcing her presence, but then decided against it. No sense calling attention to herself if those who’d come calling were still hanging around inside, now was there?
Denise continued forward.
Halfway to the front door she found the remains of what looked like a moat. An honest to God moat! It was in ruins now, but there was enough broken PVC pipe and pooled water to allow her to figure out that that’s what it had been.
What the hell was it for? she wondered.
She knew there were plenty of supernatural creatures rumored to be unable to cross running water, including witches, and wondered if that was what this was all about. Had Hunt erected t
he fence and then installed the moat in an attempt to keep something out?
A glance at the ruins of the gate and the wet remains of the moat reminded her of how successful he’d apparently been and that increased her anxiety over Hunt’s well-being another notch.
For the second time in less than ten minutes she wondered if he was okay.
You certainly aren’t going to find out sitting around out here, she told herself. Get your ass in gear.
When she reached the front door, she hesitated. Every window in the house had been covered with sheets of plywood and nailed shut. She wondered if that was due to paranoia on Hunt’s part or if it was designed to allow him to make the most of his unusual ability to see in the dark. The door itself stood partially open and through it she could see evidence of a struggle: a coatrack and end table that had apparently stood in the foyer now lay on their sides in the middle of the floor, the delicate wooden table in pieces.
But it was her concern over the power of Hunt’s threshold that caused her to delay, even if only for a few brief moments. As the old saying goes, a home is a man’s castle, and that was especially true when it came to supernatural entities, she knew. If a house has been lived in for any length of time, it begins to exert a protective energy around those who live inside, a type of mystical shield, if you will, that is designed for one specific purpose: to keep out the bad guys. That shield was centered in the main entrance of the dwelling. For a practitioner of the Arts like herself, the power of a threshold could be strengthened, enhanced so much that it could be used as an offensive weapon should some mystical creepy-crawly try to breach its protections.
Denise wasn’t certain just how much Hunt knew about the supernatural world around him. From what she’d seen so far, not much, but it still paid to be careful.
Eyes to See Page 17
