The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  The second level was furnished like the loft apartment of a Hollywood celebrity. Silk curtains hung from the wall, giving the illusion of windows. Fifteen red plush sofas and chairs stood atop several hundred square feet of thick gold-colored carpet. Ornate marble statues and gold-trimmed light fixtures were everywhere he looked. Crystal vases filled with scented, artificial flowers helped hide the sensation of being submerged in earth. The whole thing was far too gaudy for David’s liking but, in this setting, it was nothing short of magical.

  Echo smiled. “It’s amazing the things you can afford when you don’t have to pay for them.”

  “You stole these things?” Bethany asked.

  Echo shrugged. “Listen up, everyone. Watch where I’m pointing. Down that hallway you’ll find the library on the right and the media center on the left. I have a few large televisions so you should not have to fight about what you watch. There’s obviously no cable or satellite but there is an extensive library of movies and video games. If you follow the other hallway over here you’ll find the apartments. There are fifty-three living quarters on this level. On the lower level is the gym, the pool and the greenhouses. Feel free to visit them. Your rooms have already been assigned. Look for your name on the door and make yourself at home. I did not have time to arrange for much clothing but make do for now. The room at the very end of the hallway is mine. Steer clear of that one, please. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to send a message to Wisdom. He’ll want to know we made it here safely, and that Garnet and Jared didn’t make the jump.”

  With that, Echo smiled and walked away, heading toward a second set of stairs leading to a level above them.

  “Wait. Aren’t you going to tell us what’s going on?” David suddenly realized that everyone was looking at him. He wished he had the ability to turn invisible. “I mean, uh, what were those things? Why were they after us and why are you helping us?”

  Echo turned around and walked away. Over her shoulder she said: “Maybe we’ll talk after supper. Let’s meet back here in four hours. I’ll have the chef prepare a meal for us.”

  Todd and Bethany exchanged a look. “Chef? She has servants down here?”

  Most of the Anomalies went to look for their rooms immediately. For several minutes, David and his four classmates kept to the living room area. Todd rummaged through a stack of newspapers from various parts of the world that had been left on a large oak desk. Jessica and Amy sat on one of the couches, engaged in a quiet conversation. Bethany leaned back in one of the chairs, eyes closed. The expression on her face was far from peaceful.

  “Am I the only one with a serious case of not liking this?” David asked as he sat down on a loveseat near Jessica and Amy.

  No one responded.

  “What exactly do you guys know about Wisdom? To start with, how did you all meet him?”

  “Why should we tell you?” Jessica asked. She pulled her legs up on the couch, crossed them and leaned back against the cushions.

  “Try not to be such a worthless prat, Jessica,” Bethany said. “It’s unbecoming. And you can stop looking at me like that. Amelia Ryerson may have put you in charge of our little escape, but that was only because you’ve got a lot of power in that frail little body of yours. Don’t go letting yourself believe you’re some sort of leader. I can still take you down a peg or two.”

  Jessica raised her lips in a smirk. “Any time you think you’re ready, old woman.”

  A ball of crunched up newspaper sailed through the air and hit Jessica in the side of the head.

  “Knock it off, you two,” Todd said. He walked over to sit on the coffee table in front of David. “Wisdom found me in Alaska. My parents work for an oil company up there. At least they did until I accidentally blew up an oil container at the plant. I was dropping by so I could walk home with Dad after school. The school was pretty close to the plant and all. My dad and me, we were pretty close. Kind of like best friends.”

  “Why don’t you be a little more melodramatic, Todd,” Jessica said.

  Amy put a hand on Jessica’s knee. “Don’t be mean. Say you’re sorry.”

  “Sorry.” Jessica turned red in the face and clenched her lips.

  David looked over at the two girls and shook his head. There were some strange power dynamics in that relationship.

  “Go on, Todd.” Bethany came over and sat beside David on the loveseat.

  Todd nodded and looked down at his fingers. “Well one day – it was a Tuesday, I think – I was walking by this truck they were filling with petrol and I noticed the driver. His name was Emilio Lee. He was this neighborhood bully a few years older than me. Got a job at the plant right after school. He used to beat me after school. Nothing sinister, really, just the typical ‘give me your lunch money’ crap. My dad told me to take it if I couldn’t stand up to him. You see, I was never much of a fighter. Didn’t have the guts for it. But what I did have was a good imagination. That day as I walked by the truck, I saw his face and I thought – no I wished – dozens of little demons would crawl out of the ground and set him on fire. I imagined him burning in hell.”

  David started to nod. It all seemed disturbingly familiar.

  Todd continued. “Well, the next thing I know, the truck just explodes. Fifteen people, including yours truly, were sent to the hospital for burns. Two, including Emilio, died. I was far enough away that I didn’t get burned too badly. I was out in a few days. By that time, Mom and Dad had been laid off. The company had to repair the damage. It …” Todd let out a deep breath and stood up. He stretched his arms behind his back and started pacing in a circle. “It wasn’t just the truck. A few pipelines were compromised, too. Millions in damage, from what the TV said.

  “When I got out of the hospital, there was a letter from Mr. Wisdom. He offered me a job in Toronto. He did not go into much detail at that time, but I was looking for an escape.”

  “How did Wisdom find you?” David asked. “Did you, like, send a resume or something?”

  Todd stared at David. The way he blinked his eyes showed contempt very clearly. “No, I didn’t send a resume. He found me the same way he found you, the same way he found everyone. He felt me using my EFHB.”

  “EFHB?”

  “Extraordinary Functions of the Human Body,” Bethany said. “We’ve already covered this, so try to keep up, dear. If we ever get back to taking classes, you’ll learn more about them.”

  “What do you mean ‘if’?” Jessica uncrossed her legs and leaned forward.

  “Well,” Bethany said, her eyes narrowing and her lips twitching. She looked uncertain. “I just thought, I don’t know, maybe things are going to change after this. Nothing like this has ever happened. People died. Maybe Wisdom won’t want to continue.”

  “Wisdom will need us more than ever now,” Jessica said. “Things progressed faster than expected, that’s all.”

  David felt his head buzzing. “Do you mean you guys know what’s going on here?”

  Bethany opened her mouth to speak but Jessica held up her hand. “Don’t say anything. He’s not ready.”

  “Damn it!” David said. “Teleporting around the world to escape an exploding building and flying guys that want to kill me makes me ready. Now tell me what the hell is going on!”

  Silence.

  “We don’t know everything,” Amy said.

  “Don’t you dare say another word, Amy!” Jessica whirled to face Amy so quickly David thought she was going to hit the other girl.

  “Jessica, he’s right,” Todd said. “We should tell him what little we know.”

  The four of them looked at each other for some time. Their eyes darted to each other, holding a silent vote. When the tension reached a point where David felt it painful to breathe, Jessica lowered her head and said: “Whatever. Tell him.”

  Amy put a comforting hand on Jessica’s shoulder. The other girl pushed it away.

  “I’ll tell you a little story,” Bethany said. “I’ll start with how Wisdom found me.
I was living in England – Liverpool, actually. Life was brilliant. Then, I made the dim-witted blunder of going with my friend Tanya to this psychic fair.

  “Any who, I got this reading from this funny-looking woman all dressed in black. Her hair was all wild-like. She looked like a bad actress trying to pretend she was a psychic. There was even a crystal ball standing on the middle of the table.

  “So I sat down in this metal chair, ungodly uncomfortable. She told me her name – can’t remember it now for the life of me – and pulled out a deck of tarot cards. She told me to shuffle them while focusing on a question. So I did. I felt this strange sort of buzzing in my head like I was getting a headache. My body went numb and my head started to sway. The woman reached over and took hold of my hands. ‘That’s good enough,’ she says. Turns out I’d been shuffling them for a couple of minutes.

  “She laid out the cards and said “I see a tall, dark man in your future’. I burst out laughing. I mean, it was such a campy thing to say. Like something out of an old Roger Corman movie or something. The psychic lady – I think her name was Sue or Mary-Sue, something like that – she just smiled like she was used to that sort of reaction. Then, quick as I can snap, she wasn’t smiling anymore. Her head flew back and I could feel this wind. It blew back her hair but didn’t touch the cards at all. Other people felt it, though. I could tell because all around me the noise just dropped off. It was actually quiet, except for the beating of my heart in my head and the words of Suzette. That was her name. Suzette.

  “‘The Dark Man will lead you into a battle against powerful demons,’ she said. ‘Many people will die. You may be one of them.’ So by this point I’m kind of getting freaked out. I’m not sure I want to stay and hear the rest of it. But I can’t seem to move my muscles to get up. The wind grew stronger and so did the buzzing in my head but I could still hear her perfectly. ‘But you are not like other people,’ she says. ‘You have more in common with the demons.’

  “Then the crystal ball shattered. Well, as soon as she stopped screaming, she pushed the money back in my hand and told me to get out. A few days later I got a letter from Wisdom.

  “You see, Wisdom can sense things. Amy was right. We don’t know everything. One thing we don’t know is exactly what he is. I mean, it is possible he’s just somebody like us, someone who has EFHBs. But sometimes I feel he is something else. I can’t put my finger on it but I don’t think he’s really human.”

  “He’s partly human,” Amy said. “But he’s partly something else, too.”

  David whistled. “Do you think he’s related to those winged things?”

  Bethany bit her fingernails for a moment then shook her head. “No. I don’t think so. I can still remember how those things felt in my head, kind of wet and slippery, like snakes in black water. Wisdom is something else. There is something very hard and very fiery about him. What I do know is what we’ve been taught in class.

  “Ms. Ryerson taught us that humans aren’t the only people on earth. Now I am not talking about UFOs or people from Mars. There are civilizations on Earth that have been here for thousands of years that do their best to keep away from mankind. They’ve gotten very good at it over the years. Partly they hide out of fear. There are not as many of them as there are of us. The bigger the world gets, the harder it is for them to hide in one sense, but in another it gets a lot easier. They can’t hide out in the woods and country graveyards anymore, so instead they hide in high-rises and sewer systems.”

  “What are you talking about?” David asked. “Vampires?”

  Jessica scoffed. “Newbie.”

  Bethany shook her head. “Not vampires. I don’t think those are real. But then again, maybe that is something else that’s being hidden from us until we’re ready. We were never told their names, only that they had an ancient civilization that thrived all over the planet 1200 years ago until their culture destroyed itself in an idea-war. Truth is, if Echo was telling the truth about how old these caves are, they were probably the ones that built them.”

  “What does that have to do with Wisdom?”

  Bethany looked into David’s eyes. “Ms. Ryerson said these people are getting tired of hiding in the shadows. They are making deals with a group of humans, some sort of cult that’s doing experiments on humans. They are planning a war. We’re being trained to stop them.”

  David put his hands on his head, scratching idly. “So is that what we are? The result of some cult doing experiments on humans?”

  Bethany looked over to Jessica.

  “Don’t look at me,” the little girl said. “You started it. You might as well finish it.”

  Bethany bit her fingernails again, speaking through her fingers. “No, we’re not that. We’re something else. Something evil.”

  David lowered his head. “Evil? As in not the good guys?”

  She nodded. “As in pretty far from the good guys. I don’t know anything more specific. Wisdom always said he would tell us before the big day, before the battles began. Seems he was a little late there.”

  David jumped off the sofa. “I’m not a monster!” He walked in the direction of the living quarters. “No matter what you say, I’m not evil!”

  When he left the room, Jessica crossed her legs and smiled.

  “I told you he wasn’t ready for it. Newbies never are.”

  Todd got up from the coffee table. “Jessica, I’m not sure I’m ready for the truth. Even after everything we’ve seen and done in the classes, it’s never easy to learn you have a little demon inside you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  David brushed past a group of teenage girls. He was barely aware of the tears streaming down his face. Teeth clenched and red-faced, he headed down a hallway lined with living quarters and looked for his room. While the mottled walls were unevenly carved out of stone, the doors and frames were constructed of polished wood. Many of the doors were open to luxurious apartments. Thick slate-grey carpet covered the dirt floor. Electric sconces shaped like nymphs supported the illusion that they were in a hotel rather than an old cave dwelling. Anomalies, young and old, gathered in small groups along the hallway. It seemed no one wanted to be alone.

  He found his assigned room halfway down the hall. He stepped inside, quickly closing the door behind him. He leaned his forehead against the cool wood until the pounding in his head stopped. Then he turned around and looked for a place to collapse.

  His quarters were luxurious. There were two dark green couches in the front room. Deep umber and rust-colored pillows were thrown in a carefully constructed chaos on the furniture. Pillows filled the corners as well. Past that was a round room with a bed twice the size of a normal king-sized mattress.

  “I’m not a monster.” The words fell out of his lips before he realized he was still thinking about that. “Bethany has to be wrong. It’s probably just genetic mutation or something.” The only problem was the evidence piling up around him. He wasn’t the only one who had hurt people. Todd had killed two people because he could not control what he was. Did that make him a monster?

  ‘No,’ he thought. ‘But I can’t pretend I’m like Todd. He killed by accident. I went out of my way to kill. Maybe not the first time, but I knew what I was doing the last two times.’

  He shook his head. That was not quite right. The second time he killed someone he didn’t really know what he was doing.

  ‘But I hoped.’ He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes.

  ***

  The second time he killed with his power was not long after the prom. People were still reeling from the strange explosion that had killed Ramona and Paedrag. At first, the police suspected a car bomb. They questioned David and a few others several times but soon admitted they couldn’t find any evidence of foul play.

  Many people came to him in the weeks after, offering condolences. He nodded, even cried a few occasionally. Most of the time, the tears were even real. Most of the time.

  Then he started to play with the buzzin
g in his head. He knew it was somehow connected to the explosion. He realized he had to control it or someone else was going to get hurt.

  That next someone was Dunstan Joyce.

  It was lunchtime.

  David sat with a few friends playing cards. He heard laughter and raised voices. The whole cafeteria turned to look over at Dunstan. He stood on top of a lunch table while two Goths in black makeup with purple hair shouted at him. Dunstan and his friends were laughing.

  “Must be going into all that gay stuff again,” David’s friend Mark said.

  David rolled his eyes. Dunstan was always going around telling anyone who would stop long enough to hear that homosexuals were going to burn in hell.

  “God,” David said. “I just wish he would shut up. Or die or something.”

  Then the laughter stopped. It was replaced by a scream. Dunstan clawed at his own throat, as if trying to scratch out whatever was in there preventing him from breathing. A flurry of people rushed to him but nothing worked. The thing was, David felt a part of his mind drift across the room, tightening around Dunstan’s throat. He couldn’t draw that part of him back. And the scary part was he didn’t really want to.

  ***

  He slept through the night and woke the next morning with a headache. He opened his eyes and shut them quickly. Even the dim, recessed lighting around the room was too much. He rolled onto his side as the nausea took hold.

  ‘Damn migraine.’ Slowly he threw off the covers and sat up. ‘No wonder, really. After all that crap yesterday, I guess my mind is going through a required meltdown.’ Keeping his eyes closed to fight dizziness, he reached out for something to steady himself. His fingers touched stone and a jolt of electricity shot up his arm. He screamed and opened his eyes.

  He was no longer in the bedroom. Instead, he was on a rooftop looking down on a city. It wasn’t a city he recognized. Figures moved below him in a rush. Unfamiliar scents streamed around him: spiced meats and flowers, perfumes and sweat. He looked above and saw nothing but darkness and dry earth.