The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  Magicians are not, as a rule, healthy people. We’ve all got our hang-ups, be it booze, sex, drugs, you name it. A sorcerer with no obvious vices is inevitably hiding something really nasty in her closet. The fact is, they’re all just substitutions for our one true addiction. Learning magic, real magic, changes you forever. We play games with the machinery of the universe, witness unimaginable beauty and terror, brush against power undreamed of by most humans. Once that door’s been opened and we see the world as it really is, the idea of losing it is the most terrifying thing imaginable.

  Wearing the Black Eye feels like gouging out your own eyeballs and stabbing your eardrums with a spike. You know, intellectually, that your senses will flood back the second you take it off, but your animal brain still flails like you’re a fish out of water, drowning on the dock. When Bentley and Corman found the Eye, its previous owner wasn’t using it to escape detection. He was using it as a torture device.

  I didn’t see any other options if I wanted to stay under Nicky’s radar. Even still, I left the Eye wrapped, shoving the wadded ball of silk into the pocket of my slacks as I hunted for a clean shirt. I could endure it, I told myself, as long as I kept wearing it to a minimum. It helped to think about Stacy’s wraith, suffering in the dark beneath the city streets. I could take it. I could take it for her sake, and when I found out who was responsible for our mutual pain, I would exact payment in full.

  Paolo had told me to meet him at the Love Connection at ten. That gave me enough time to swing by Budget and rent a car. It would feed my cover story, in case Kaufman was paranoid enough to check, and at the very least he wouldn’t see my real license plates. I lightened Jud’s envelope a little and paid extra to get the keys for a cherry-red Mustang convertible. I had a story to sell.

  Paolo was waiting for me out front and hopped into the passenger seat when I pulled up. He let out a long, low whistle.

  “Somebody’s moving up in the world,” he said, tossing me an envelope. I thumbed through it. Driver’s license, social security card, a couple of grocery store discount cards, even an expired video rental membership. The cherry on top was a spread of rumpled business cards, artificially aged to look like they’d been carried around in somebody’s wallet for a year or two, and some bogus receipts Paolo had crafted to my specifications.

  “I’m not,” I said, tapping the envelope, “but Peter Greyson is. You set it up how I wanted?”

  “You got the platinum package. That ID is bulletproof. You know you owe me big time, man. Prices on quality paper are going up all the time. Feds closed all the old, easy loopholes after 9/11. Well, almost all of ’em.”

  I’d bought a nice leather wallet on my way over, and I quickly stocked it with the goodies from Paolo’s envelope.

  “You’re an artist.”

  “I know,” he said with a grin. “So what’s the plan?”

  “Just get me in, and I’ll do the rest. I’m about to become Artie Kaufman’s new best friend.”

  #

  Artie lived in Henderson, a half hour’s drive southeast of Vegas. His house was nestled on a quiet suburban cul-de-sac, the looping road lined with perfect lawns and scallop-roofed houses with a vaguely Spanish style. He had money, that was for sure. A white windowless van sat parked in his driveway, probably for toting his camera equipment. Not surprisingly, there was no company logo on the sides.

  “I wonder if his neighbors know what he does for a living,” I said, pulling up behind the van.

  “Probably not something that comes up at the Sunday potluck dinners,” Paolo said. “Hey, remember what I said. This guy’s dangerous.”

  “That makes two of us,” I told him, taking the Black Eye from my pocket and putting it on. I squeezed my eyes shut, leaned back, and gripped the wheel with both hands, riding a sudden wave of panic and vertigo.

  “Hey. Hey, you okay?” Paolo frowned.

  “Fine,” I lied, taking deep breaths and counting to ten in my head. “Just peachy. Stomach’s a little upset, that’s all.”

  I felt anything but dangerous getting out of the car and walking up the paved path to Artie Kaufman’s front door. I was powerless and about to stroll into the den of a rapist, blackmailer, and possible murderer with no weapons but my wits. For that matter, I had doubts about my wits.

  I didn’t know what to expect when the front door swung open. Artie’s movies were shot with a handheld camera, so I’d never seen him above the waist, and I’d seen far too much below it for my liking. Finding a California-tanned bodybuilder in a muscle shirt and a bleach-blond perm didn’t surprise me, though. He carried a mixture of unearned arrogance and frat-boy wealth like a badge of honor. I realized, as he pumped Paolo’s hand and gave him a wolfish smile, that I’d want to punch him in the face even if I didn’t know what he did for a living.

  “Paolo! How the hell are ya, bro? Been too long, way too fuckin’ long.”

  “Hey Artie,” Paolo said, looking pained, “this is my buddy…”

  He paused, looking at me, and my stomach dropped as Artie quirked an eyebrow. He forgot my cover name. I stepped up and beamed, projecting a confidence I wasn’t remotely feeling.

  “Greyson! Peter Greyson, and I gotta say, sir, this is one hell of an honor. I’m a huge fan, huge, huge fan, and when Paolo told me he knew you, well I just had to meet the artist himself.”

  Artie grinned, nearly crushing my hand in his. I made a mental note to steer Paolo away from discussing his and “Peter’s” friendship. Great forger, lousy at improv.

  “C’mon in, both of you!” Artie said, ushering us inside. “I’ve always got time for a fan. I was just finishing up a conference call with…well, let’s just say they’re the biggest distributor in L.A. and they want to buy me out. I’m like, ‘Guys, please, my movies top all the sales charts, what do I need you for?’ They just don’t get it.”

  Behind Artie’s back, Paolo gave me a tiny no fuckin’ way eye roll and a shake of his head.

  “Hey,” I said, reciting the ad copy from his website, “you’re the most dangerous man in porn. They ought to respect that.”

  “Damn right!” Artie grinned at me. “Let me show you around.”

  Artie’s house screamed new money. It was styled in art deco and as pristine as an art museum. We followed him down a curving hallway, the ivory walls lit by cubic skylights, even the sun harnessed to show off his wealth. The hall opened up into a living room bigger than my apartment, where black leather sofas squatted on a sea of snow shag carpet, angled artfully around a mammoth flatscreen set into the wall and flanked by five-foot speaker stacks.

  Paolo’s shaking head stuck with me, and it jibed with my research. Second Circle Studios was a tiny player in the porn game, a one-man operation catering to a very specific kind of fetishist. Whatever Artie earned on his videos, it couldn’t be netting the kind of cash needed to buy a place like this. What else was he involved in?

  I looked behind him, to the woman strolling toward us on black stiletto heels, and all my thoughts fell away like the losing tickets from a gambler’s hand.

  She was beautiful, any fool could see that. A pale angel with a body built for daydreams, her scarlet hair worn in a twist over one shoulder. She wore a French maid’s outfit barely a step removed from lingerie, her long legs sheathed in black fishnet, garter fastenings on display a quarter inch below the flare of her ruffled skirt. Any fool could see that.

  Not just any fool could see the molten glow she gave off when my eyes slipped out of focus, or feel her presence in the room like someone pressing a diamond against my sinuses. Whoever she was, she was so ripe with occult energy that even the Black Eye couldn’t entirely keep her from my muffled senses.

  She looked at me. Her gaze slid down to where the talisman lay hidden under my shirt, cold pewter pressed against my skin. A reptilian smile played on her painted lips.

  “Do you require service?” she asked Artie, her voice tinged with a Scottish burr.

  “Yeah, yeah, beers for me and m
y new friends here.”

  She turned to leave. Paolo rubbed his eyes, making sure they were working right. “Goddamn,” he said, “did she come with the house?”

  “She’s all right,” Artie said, turning on the flatscreen and filling the room with the sounds of ESPN. “Trust me, man, in my line of work, especially when you’re as pro as I am? Chicks are falling all over themselves just to get near me.”

  Somehow I doubted that. We sat down, watching last week’s basketball highlights, while I tried to center myself and figure out what had just happened. My magic was worthless with my soul still trapped in the Eye’s straitjacket. Just trying to stretch out my senses pushed me to the edge of panic. I counted my breaths and pretended to care about the show, making small talk I could barely hear over the roaring of blood in my ears.

  Keep it on, I told myself over and over again. Just until we leave. Just in case Nicky and Kaufman are connected. Count your breaths and don’t blow this.

  The woman returned with a tray and three long-necked bottles of beer, so cold that little volcanoes of frost vapor spilled from their open mouths. I don’t drink beer, but I supposed Peter Greyson would, so I took it with a nod of thanks and pretended my heart wasn’t pounding against my rib cage. Her fingertips brushed mine as she stepped away, a tiny spark jumping between us and stinging my skin. I wanted more.

  “So, Peter,” Artie said, “Paolo tells me you’re a bit of a collector.”

  I smiled. He couldn’t wait to get right down to business. Even knowing the risks involved, talking to a perfect stranger on a casual acquaintance’s say-so, he could barely hold himself back. I figured some natural suspicion would set in sooner or later, but I’d come prepared to deal with that.

  “I am,” I said. “I like to think of myself as a connoisseur of rare erotica. Real erotica.”

  10.

  “Real?” Artie asked. “Like none of that airbrushed Playboy shit, right?”

  I’d rehearsed my lines all night, having conversations with my mirror. Learning how to sell myself as Artie’s kind of scum. The words curdled on my tongue, but I smiled when I said them.

  “Real,” I said, “as in the reality of men, and the reality of women, and their places in the world. Like your films. And…others.”

  Artie moved closer to the edge of the sofa.

  “That’s a bold statement.”

  “I’m not some beta male who’s going to tuck his tail between his legs because he has to be politically correct to get laid,” I said with an indifferent shrug. Artie laughed, walking over to sit next to me, clinking his bottle against mine. Paolo just tried to make himself invisible, keeping his eyes on the TV.

  “I hear that, bro. This is why I love my fans, you know? You really get how the world works. No pretense, no bullshit.”

  “How it should work,” I said, lifting my bottle in salute.

  “Right, right. So, uh, you mentioned ‘other’ films.”

  I grinned. “So I did. Mind if I use your bathroom?”

  “Yeah, sure, just up that hall on the left, far end.”

  As I stood up I dipped my fingers into my pocket, quietly sliding out my wallet and letting it tumble to the sofa as I rose. It would look like it fell out by accident. I was counting on Artie’s curiosity to do the rest.

  I had two aims, and giving him a chance to rifle through “Peter’s” business cards was the first. The second was recon. If Artie drowned Stacy, he would have kept the recording. Evidence of a capital crime or not, he wouldn’t be able to part with a treasure like that.

  The idea of killing Artie sounded good to me. The idea of sending him to prison for the rest of his life and getting some public justice for Stacy sounded even better.

  Out of sight of the living room, I poked my head into every doorway. He had a spacious home gym, a couple of guest bedrooms that looked like they’d never been used, and then I hit pay dirt. Artie’s bedroom was just down the hall from the bath, his king-sized bed buried under a swamp of garish red satin sheets and a pair of samurai swords mounted to the wall. Classy. I searched his drawers as fast as I could, sliding my hand under his clothes and feeling for anything out of place, like maybe an unmarked DVD case.

  I came up empty, but a more thorough search would have taken too long and I didn’t want to leave anything out of place. The last thing I wanted was for him to come looking for me and blow the entire scam on the spot. I pulled open the door to his walk-in closet, resolving to go back empty-handed if I didn’t find any evidence.

  It wasn’t a closet. It was a magician’s shrine.

  Books and candles weighed down the wraparound shelves, along with a smattering of wooden beads, tiny brass idols, and eclectic trinkets from half a dozen ancient cultures. The entire unfocused mess screamed “talented amateur,” the kind of sorcerer who knows just enough to be a danger to himself and others.

  Artie’s actresses had their own shelf. A publicity photo of each one lay pinned under magnetic stones, their glossy eyes and mouths stitched over with mortician’s thread. I smelled the residue of an anointing oil, something like ginger root and gunpowder. A binding spell, crude but effective.

  No wonder they don’t run away or press charges against you. They can’t.

  I didn’t see a portrait for Stacy, but an indentation in the dust showed where it used to sit. He cleaned up fast. Another missing picture was more worrisome: Artie’s maid. She wasn’t on his shelf of enslaved starlets, so who was she?

  Looking over his books, the answer came to me, dragging a razor blade of ice across the back of my neck. The collection included the Grimoirum Verum, Crowley’s private translation of the Goetia, even a rare first-edition printing of The Five Insights with the censored ninth chapter intact. Artie’s books of black magic shared a singular, insane purpose. I knew what the woman was now, why she was powerful enough to glow through the Black Eye’s muffling shroud, and the revelation scared the hell out of me.

  “You stupid, stupid son of a bitch,” I breathed. “You conjured a demon.”

  Rule number four of magic, the one that any responsible teacher drums into their students’ heads until it’s as second nature as breathing, is you do not fuck with demons. Yes, I’m aware of the irony of a man named Faust arguing against trafficking with the powers of hell, but I’ve learned from hard experience.

  Summoning a demon is easy. Getting them to do what you want, on the other hand, requires a contract and a binding ritual. Imagine facing a trial lawyer so ferocious he makes Clarence Darrow look like a first-year law student. Imagine that this lawyer has had literally centuries of courtroom experience and is incredibly pissed at you for yanking him across dimensions without permission. That’s what you’re up against when you bargain with a demon. And if you leave the slightest loophole in your contract, the tiniest escape clause, you’ll probably be torn to pieces and dragged down to hell, where things will get really unpleasant.

  So, of course, Kaufman summoned one up, dressed her in a skimpy outfit, and made her serve beer. The stupid bastard was juggling with nitroglycerin and didn’t even know it. I would have laughed, except that if he gave the word, his pet demon would rip my spine out and use my skull for a bowling ball. On top of that, he probably had a “defend me at all costs” clause in his contract. Getting physical with Kaufman would make my life nasty, painful, and short. Before I took him down, no matter how I did it, I needed to get his demon out of the way.

  I turned around and found myself standing face to face with her.

  She stood in the closet doorway, watching. She stared at me like an entomologist studying a rare and exotic insect, or a rare and exotic insect studying its next meal. I had one chance to talk my way out of this, one chance to explain my invasion of her master’s shrine. One sentence between life and death.

  “So, uh,” I said, “you come here often?”

  It was not my shining moment.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  “Are you going to tell on m
e?”

  “If he asks me a direct question,” she said slowly, as if considering her words, “I am bound to answer truthfully.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  She didn’t answer. The hint of amusement crinkled at the corners of her eyes. I got the picture.

  “He assumes you’ll just tell him what he needs to know, doesn’t he? Because he thinks he owns you.”

  “I am…forbidden to speak ill of my master,” she said, the line sounding like she read it from a cue card. The look on her face told me what she really thought. I knew I was pushing my luck, but it was time to roll the dice.

  “Too bad,” I said, “because I think he’s a dumbass of mythical proportions. In fact, I believe generations from now, bards and poets will compose epic verse to commemorate his staggering idiocy. Are you sure you can neither confirm nor deny these allegations?”

  She smiled, flashing pearly teeth a little too sharp to be human.

  “I am forbidden to speak ill of my master. And you need to go back before he thinks to ask me where you went.”

  I could take a hint. I eased sideways past her, almost close enough to touch, and paused. “Will you tell me your use-name?”

  A use-name is an alias of sorts in occult circles. True names have the power to conjure and bind, but we have to call each other something or else the entire supernatural world would be reduced to “hey, you” and “that guy over there.”

  “Caitlleanabruaudi,” she said, or something similar to it, but my mind suddenly felt fuzzy and some of the syllables sounded like they could only be pronounced by a mouth with two tongues. There are some sounds, and some languages, that are so alien to our nature that the human brain naturally rebels at them. You’d think we’d take that as a hint.

  “Caitlin?” I managed to stammer, the rest slipping away from me.

  “Caitlin,” she echoed. A sliver of tongue flicked across her pomegranate lips, as if tasting the name and coming away satisfied. “Yes. You may call me that. Now go.”