The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  I tossed back a swig from my glass and savored the spreading warmth in my chest. Perfectly mixed, as always.”I don’t want to talk about Roxy,” I said. It wasn’t the truth, but two weeks of heartache and a phone that didn’t ring had drilled one hard truth into my thick head: she wasn’t coming back. “I got a job. Let’s talk about that instead.”

  “Daniel?” Bentley arched a wispy eyebrow and cradled his glass of gin. I didn’t need an interpreter to read the concern in his tone. Bentley and Corman were the closest things I had to real fathers. I didn’t talk about the people who raised me; the cigarette burns on my back said enough.

  “A legit job. Mostly legit.”

  I sketched out the broad strokes, then went into detail once I got to the part about meeting the thing that used to be Stacy Pankow down in the storm drains.

  “The ancestors can whip up a fuss,” Mama Margaux mused, “but I’ve never seen anything like that. You sure it was the girl, not somethin’ else pretending to be her? Anything could be festering down there in the dark.”

  I shrugged. “I thought of that, but what’s the point? Why would anything capable of doing that kind of damage decide to pose as a random ghost and lurk around in a totally abandoned tunnel?”

  “The missing body parts.” Bentley leaned forward. “That detail demands consideration. Apparitions mirror their creators at the time of death, but the papers didn’t say that her actual body was mutilated.”

  “No, and neither did the guy living down there, who saw her body get dumped. I think he would have mentioned that.”

  “I heard a story once,” Corman said, his expression grave. “Back when I was a professional seer, in the sixties. Supposedly happened to a friend of a friend.” Corman looked spooked, and that wasn’t something I saw often. Bentley lightly touched his wrist, nodding for him to speak.

  “Story goes, this guy crossed the wrong people, so they set up a little surprise for him. Like me, astral projection was his specialty. Going into a trance and sending his soul out to snoop around. Well, one night, a couple of disembodied sorcerers were waiting, and they laid some Tibetan whammy on him. Ripped his soul to pieces. Guy died on the spot, cardiac arrest.

  “That was that, until a month later. His wife found the ghost of his arm in their bed. Just his arm, and it damn near choked the life out of her. His head showed up in my pal’s closet. Watching him in the night, through a tiny crack, with this insane hatred in his eyes. Then it just vanished into thin air. Next morning, he finds the family dog gutted on the floor, and all the food in the house had rotted overnight.”

  Amar emerged from the kitchen just long enough to bring two baskets of fresh-baked flatbread, a plate of creamy chicken curry, and another round of drinks. We all tore away chunks of the puffy bread and dug in.

  “What they figured,” Corman said, “was that he didn’t really die. His soul was in pieces, but something kept him from moving on. His mind was dislocated. Fragmented across space and time. The pain would be…inconceivable.”

  “Explaining why he attacked people he cared about,” I said, thinking of Stacy’s mad fury. “Like a fox with its leg caught in a bear trap. It doesn’t understand you’re trying to set it free; it’s still going to take a chunk out of any hand that gets close. So how did they fix him?”

  “They didn’t.” Corman tossed back a swig of whiskey. “He just stopped showing up one day, and that’s the end of the story. Either the tangled tatters of his spirit unraveled enough to let him move on, or the poor bastard’s still out there somewhere. Drifting endlessly through the astral. In screaming pieces.”

  The table fell silent. We were all well aware of the risks of our profession. Bentley and Corman taught me that the first magician was Prometheus, who stole the secret of fire for humanity and was repaid by having his liver eternally eaten by vultures. It’s a cautionary tale that every modern-day sorcerer knows. Still, it was sobering to be handed a concrete example of what can happen when you screw with the machinery of the universe.

  “I’m not letting that happen,” I said, tearing off another chunk of bread. “Whatever Stacy went through, she’s suffered enough. I’m fixing this.”

  “We’re with you,” Bentley said with a firm nod. “Where shall we start?”

  “Whether it was the cops or her boyfriend or somebody else, Stacy’s drowning was no accident, and it’s got the stink of magic all over it. I’m going after the boyfriend first. Even if his hands are clean, he’ll know better than anyone what she was into before she died. Do me a favor. Put out some feelers, see if anybody is new in town and making waves. Mama Margaux, are you still dating that guy in the coroner’s office?”

  “Antoine?” she said, arching her eyebrow. “Antoine needs to grow up and figure out what he wants. When he does that, we’ll talk.”

  “Well, if it wouldn’t put you out to ask, I’d love to know if the visitor logs show anybody viewing Stacy’s body except for her grandfather.”

  “Done and done,” Margaux said.

  We drank another couple of rounds. The hours got blurry and the breadbasket wore down to a few scattered crumbs, and eventually the conversation stalled. I pushed my chair back and stretched.

  “That’s it for me,” I said. “I want to get an early jump on this thing tomorrow. I’ll keep you all in the loop.”

  Bentley followed me to the vestibule, resting his frail hand on my shoulder.

  “Are you all right?” He looked me in the eye. “Really all right?”

  I thought about Roxy, and it took me a second to get the words out.

  “I thought she was the one. I mean, you always think that, but…I really believed it. Wedding bells, white picket fences, the real deal. Then one night the dream just died on me.” I paused, shaking my head. “I’m sad right now, and that’s okay. If I’m not sad I start getting angry, and I don’t want to be angry at her. I don’t want to twist it around in my head, change what we had into something ugly, you know? I owe her that much.”

  He stared at me for a moment, then pulled me into a wordless hug.

  Suddenly, I stood in the middle of Fremont Street, with only the haziest memory of saying goodbye and walking out the door. You leave the Tiger’s Garden the same way you arrive: vaguely, a passenger through an odd and liquid space.

  It was four in the morning. Most of the taxpayers and solid citizens had gone back to their hotels to sleep off the cheap beer, and the canopy’s neon light show was dead and cold. Fremont was back to its natural state, a litter-strewn wasteland inhabited only by those who had nowhere else to go. A brisk wind ruffled my hair. Fingers of the cold desert night.

  I had only walked half a block when I realized I was being followed. Someone clopped along behind me, maybe ten feet back, making a crude attempt to hide in the echo of my footsteps. I casually glanced into the darkened window of a tourist bar, but all the glass showed was a hazy, heavyset blob lurking at my back. Decision time.

  A panhandler would have come right up and started talking. This had to be the less pleasant kind of street rat, one dumb or stoned enough to take me for a mark. Probably hoping I’d lead him to my car so he could jack my wallet and my wheels at the same time. I deflated his hopes by stopping in my tracks and whirling around to face him.

  With long, stringy hair and cast-off tourist clothes caked with dirt and food stains, my stalker looked like he’d clawed his way out of a shallow grave. His bloodshot eyes widened as he pointed one yellowed, broken fingernail at me.

  “I saw you,” he said, sounding like he was having trouble finding his words. “You weren’t there, then you were. Came out of a door, but you didn’t. Poof. Magic.”

  I sighed. Like any big city, we have our share of people who end up on the streets because they can’t get a doctor’s help or the drugs they need to function. Schizophrenics occasionally have a knack for spotting wrinkles in the fabric of reality—for example, me, walking out of an Indian restaurant through a door that doesn’t actually exist. Of course, n
obody listens to them. I was looking for something soothing to say, thinking I’d slip him a couple of bucks and shoo him off, when he gave me a snaggletoothed smile.

  “I hear magicians taste like candy,” he said, his voice dropping into a growl.

  He shambled closer, and now I could see that his teeth weren’t just rotten. He had more teeth in his mouth than any human should, crowding each other out and bending jaggedly from diseased roots. Somewhere in the space of a heartbeat, his eyes melted to the color of runny egg yolks.

  This was not my night.

  5.

  As the derelict staggered toward me, I caught a whiff of sulfur on the wind. He giggled like he was laughing at some inside joke he couldn’t explain.

  “No rules,” he rambled. “Hound’s gone. Hound’s gone, no rules.”

  I dipped my fingers into my pocket, scooping out my deck of cards.

  He paused and broke into a singsong voice. “With the dog away, the cats will playyyy.”

  I didn’t want to be doing magic on Fremont Street. Dead of night or not, all it would take would be one asshole with a cell phone and a YouTube account and I’d be in for a world of pain. We didn’t have some austere high council regulating the world’s sorcerers and keeping the secrets of magic under their wise guardianship. What we did have was street justice and a collective burning desire to keep anyone from fucking up our action.

  Lesson one for any well-taught magician is the story of Prometheus. Lesson two is if you go around showing the world magic is real, if you’re lucky the worst thing that’ll happen is a corrective curb-stomping.

  I only saw two real options, since whatever this thing was, I didn’t want those teeth anywhere near me. I could run, hoping he wasn’t faster than he looked, or I could bluff my way out, hoping he didn’t know how badly I wanted to avoid a magical throwdown. I’d already run once tonight and my pride still stung, so the choice was obvious.

  I sighed with real exasperation and said, “Seriously, asshole?”

  He blinked. That apparently wasn’t the reaction he was expecting.

  “The door,” he said, waving his hand, “we all know the door, but we’re not allowed to eat. Never allowed to eat. It’s not fair. But now—”

  “Yeah, yeah, the hound’s gone, you said that already. So, what, you were just going to hang out here all night and jump the first magician who walked out the door? The door moves, dipshit.”

  I tried to be nonchalant, but my heart was pounding. This was bad news. The Tiger’s Garden was Switzerland for the occult underground: no matter what your beef was with anybody in the community, and we weren’t a big community, you left it at the door and you made nice. The unspoken rule was that the peace extended the length of Fremont; the idea of waiting outside the Garden and jumping a patron as they left wouldn’t even occur to one of us.

  I needed to know what we were dealing with, and if this thing—whatever it was—was a lone nut or if we needed to get ready for a real fight. I reached out with my psychic senses, probing at him with a feather touch, trying to glean anything I could.

  “Nobody can stop us.” His cracked lips spread into a grotesquely oversized grin. “No rules, we can take what we want. Eat what we want. Eat your toes. Toes are the tastiest.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “The misbegotten children of the abyss.” His chin jerked and nose wrinkled. “The inheritors of Lillith. The progeny of filth and regret.”

  His little rant lined up with what I felt in my gut. I sensed echoes of psychic distress and a wind of madness, halves of two different souls squeezed together with barbed wire and crammed into a malformed human body.

  “You’re a cambion,” I said.

  Cambion are what you get when a demon mates with a human. It generally isn’t consensual on the human’s part, and the relationship doesn’t end pretty. Cambion have one foot on earth and one foot in hell, born with the instinctive knowledge that they’ll never fit into either world. Not surprisingly, they aren’t known for being well-adjusted or sane. I knew there was a small clutch of cambion living on the outskirts of the city, but they’d always kept to themselves and stayed in the shadows.

  That is, with one major exception. I used to work for a cambion who was quite the charmer when he wanted to be. He was also the most dangerous man in Las Vegas. We weren’t exactly friends anymore.

  “I’m going to eat you now.” The cambion took another lurching step toward me.

  “What’s Nicky Agnelli going to say about that?”

  His foot froze in mid-step.

  “I don’t work for him,” the cambion said, but I could hear the uncertainty in his voice.

  “But you know his name. And I do work for him,” I lied. “As do my friends. Mr. Agnelli’s going to be very, very unhappy if he finds out you’ve been harassing us. Since I’m in a charitable mood, I’ll make you a deal. You walk away, right now, and I’ll forget this ever happened.”

  The cambion wavered. I stared him down, silent.

  “Fine,” he snapped, looking like a kid who had just been denied a lollipop. “But I’ll find you. One night, one night, you’ll wake up in the dark and I’ll be crouching at the foot of your bed. I’m going to eat your toes first.”

  “Turn around,” I said calmly. “Walk away.”

  He spat on the pavement and turned, grumbling under his breath as he shuffled up the quiet street. I waited until he disappeared into an alley, to pull out my phone and rattle off a quick text message to Bentley, Corman, and Margaux. You can’t get a connection in the Garden—it doesn’t seem to be anywhere a cell tower can reach—but they’d see it as soon as they stepped out the door.

  “Leave as a group and make sure you’re not followed. Psycho cambion on the street and he knows about the Garden. Put out the word, we need a meeting tomorrow night. Trouble brewing.”

  I hoped that the cambion’s “we” existed only in his head, that he was acting alone and I’d scared him into taking a permanent hike. Still, I wasn’t going to risk my friends’ lives without making damn sure of it. Now I had to deal with an unsolved murder, a soul-shattered ghost, and at least one rogue half-demon who wanted to eat me for dinner because apparently magicians’ toes taste like candy. At least I couldn’t complain about being bored.

  I watched my back all the way home and took a lot of unnecessary turns. Even still, in bed with the door locked and deadbolt latched, I kept my feet tucked under the covers.

  #

  The fingers of the desert sun stabbed around the edges of my curtains, shaking hands with my hangover. I pushed myself out of bed around nine. I grabbed a bottle of water and a half-empty pack of convenience store donuts from the mini-fridge, chasing them with three aspirins.

  “Breakfast of champions,” I muttered, trudging off to the bathroom to shower and make myself look presentable. The steam and spray woke me up, made me feel human again. My first priority was checking out Artie Kaufman. He’d gotten Jud’s granddaughter into the porn game, transformed her from Stacy Pankow to “Stacie Velour.” Didn’t necessarily mean he’d coerced her—plenty of sex workers do what they do out of personal choice—but something about the situation didn’t sit right with me.

  Fortunately, I had an expert guide in the wilderness. I drove out to the Love Connection, a hot pink storefront squeezed between a dance-aerobics studio and a boarded-up restaurant with a For Lease sign on the door. Foreclosures swallowed the street like a slow-spreading plague, leaving more shuttered shops than open ones.

  Still, Paolo was doing all right. You’ll never go broke selling sex. I found him with his feet up behind the counter, nursing a two-day growth of stubble and paging through a skin magazine like a law student poring over a textbook. I eased past a standing display of rainbow-colored vibrators and leaned against the counter.

  “You forgot the first rule of dealing.” I grinned as he jumped and dropped the magazine next to the vintage cash register. “Never get high on your own supply.”

  �
�Market research! Gotta know what’s trending,” he said, running his fingers through his tangled mop of hair. I glanced down at the cover.

  “Nuns in leather? Hey, I’m nobody to judge. How are the wards holding up?”

  Paolo ran a backroom paper operation peddling fake IDs to the underage spring break crowd. Seventy bucks and one hour could unlock all the pleasures of Vegas, and he would be happy to sell you all the party favors you wanted on the side. We met through a friend of a friend, and he turned into a semi-regular client.

  “Like Fort Knox,” he said. “Had a couple of cops in here last week, after some punk got caught with one of my licenses and tried to roll on me to stop them from calling his mommy and daddy. They didn’t even look at the door to the back room, like they couldn’t see it. They just poked around a little, apologized for wasting my time, and took off.”

  I looked to the back of the store, letting my vision slip slightly out of focus and narrowing my eyes. Honeycombs of ice-blue light glowed against the walls, the “don’t notice me” spell still holding strong.

  “When did I last reinforce it?” I asked. “Three months? Looks like it’s due for some patch-up work. Don’t want to risk it failing on you.”

  It’s a tiny grift, as grifts go. Wards like that don’t really decay—I’ve seen enchantments from the eighteenth century that were still chugging along, years after their creators were dust and bones—but Paolo doesn’t know that, so he slips me a hundred bucks every few months to wave my arms and chant in doggerel Latin for a couple of minutes.

  “We can talk about that later, though,” I said. “I’m actually here to shop today. I’m looking for anything directed by Daddy Warbucks, especially anything with this one girl in it. She went by the name Stacie Velour.”

  Paolo tilted his head. “Whoa. Seriously, man? That’s some hardcore sick shit. You always struck me as more of a Playboy kind of guy.”