Jericho: A Novel

by Alex Gordon

  He took deep, slow breaths to steady himself as he scanned the room for something, anything, that would make this disaster worthwhile. It looked a large space, maybe ten feet by thirty, with a low, beamed ceiling and plank floor and windows on three sides. Walls of rough tongue-in-groove. No furniture, no sinister altars or statues. No lighting of any sort. Just a shell.

  He edged along the wall to the far end, which was windowless and cast in shadow, saw nothing until he stood in the darkness himself. Only then did he spot the small pile in the near corner.

  “Bingo.” Garvin adjusted his camera and headed toward the arrangement of bones. Then he stopped, straightening so quickly that his shoulder cramped. Took a step back, and studied the floor. One section appeared lighter than the rest, faded by sun and age.

  But that fade line is pretty damn straight. Garvin bent as low as he dared, brushed his hand across the floor until he felt it. A narrow groove, almost invisible to the eye, engineered to blend with the edges of the boards.

  It’s a fucking trapdoor. He brought up the camera with a shaking hand. One photo, another, the light of the flash bringing the difference between the color of the door and the rest of the flooring into sharper relief.

  Garvin’s heart stuttered, then pounded, as adrenaline kicked in. The pain in his shoulder eased. His mind raced. He had to get that door open. He hoped like hell that there were steps or a ladder leading down to whatever lay beneath, but he knew that he would leap into the darkness if he had to.

  What’s down there? He swallowed hard. Who’s down there? An image flashed in his mind. A heartbreaking face, half-hidden behind a wave of ebony hair.

  Garvin stepped around the trapdoor, searched for a latch or handle. Then he paused. Raised his head and sniffed. His senses were on the alert now—he picked up smells that he had missed before. The herbal sharpness of incense. The rank saltiness of sweat.

  Then he heard it. The clicking, growing louder, getting closer.

  You should have run when you had the chance, Dave-O.

  Garvin tensed. It was the voice in his head again, yes.

  You should have paid attention to your surroundings.

  Except that it wasn’t his own voice.

  He turned toward the door just as it swung closed. Heard the dead bolt slide into place.

  You never pay attention.

  Shadows flitted across the floorboards, converging in the middle of the room. Like steam escaping through cracks in a pipe, darkness streamed out from between the planks, tumbling into round shapes that massed around Garvin.

  Then the shapes formed hands that scrabbled at his clothes and pinched his skin. Nails scratched, leaving bloody, burning tracks in their wake, like wasps stinging over and over.

  Garvin tried to run, but pain knifed through him and he stumbled. He swung his backpack at the things, but the weight knocked him off-balance and he careened into them instead. Arms wrapped around him, squeezing the air from his lungs, crushing and twisting his injured shoulder. Faces pressed close, black and bristly with eyes like a thousand mirrors and round mouths rimmed with teeth.

  Then came the buzzing. It filled his ears and rattled his bones until his whole body vibrated.

  Blackness closed in. The roar in his ears drowned out his cries. The stench enveloped him, filled his nose and flowed into his mouth and down his throat, thick as syrup, as the room spun faster and faster and the walls curved and the floor opened and narrowed into a tunnel that led down, down, down into the dark.

  A white-clad arm reached out to him.

  “Don’t fight it, Mr. Garvin. It will all be over soon.” A beat of silence. “Blood, is it?”

  And that last word, that clawed his ears, and drew one last, silent scream.

  “Needles?”

  CHAPTER 2

  Gideon, Illinois

  Lauren Reardon loaded the last box onto the flatbed of the pickup truck, then closed the tailgate, shaking it to make sure that the latch caught. Kept her eyes fixed on the gray plastic trim, the spots of rust that marred the white-painted metal, the gouges and the dents.

  But no matter how she tried to distract herself, she still heard it. A distant gibber, like radio station interference, a program in some unknown language. She tried to block the sounds by thinking of something pleasant, a memory from her youth. Lying in the backseat of the old Forester, her father driving and her mother wrestling with a paper map. Late at night, returning home from a day trip to Portland or Vancouver, British Columbia, her father scanning stations in search of his favorite classic rock. That AM-radio crackle and wobble.

  It worked, for a little while. Then the muttering worked its way back, as it always did.

  “Mistress Mullin?” A few seconds, then a hesitant throat-clearing. “Mistress?”

  Lauren turned. “Sorry, Fred.” She forced a smile. “You’d think that after six months, I’d be used to the Mullin part.” But she doubted she ever would. Reardon was still her legal name, and so it would remain. To change it would open the door to questions about her father’s past, about what drove him to leave behind his life as Matthew Mullin of Gideon, Illinois, to become John Reardon of Seattle, Washington. No. That can of worms needed to remain well-sealed.

  She looked up to find Fred Parkinson nodding as though he read her thoughts.

  “You didn’t need to help us pack.” He stood head and shoulders above her, a bear of a man in a faded Harley-Davidson T-shirt and cargo shorts. “I know you must have more important things to do now.”

  “I’m glad to help.” Lauren rubbed a dirt smudge from her hand. Not as if I have any other job. She thought of the thick envelope from Billings-Abernathy waiting for her in her room back at the Waycross place, the release she still needed to sign, the forms for where to send the balance of her retirement account and her personal effects. The myriad pieces of paper that marked the end of a career.

  “I wanted to talk to you before we left.” Parkinson stood up straighter. “I just wanted to say—”

  “It’s all right.”

  “—that we wouldn’t be going if we didn’t have to.” He pointed at the other houses on the dead-end street, half of which stood vacant, FOR SALE signs fading in the sun. “But there ain’t nothing here. I mean, there’s the hardware store, and the diner, and Rocky’s taken over Lolly’s garage and wants to start fixing tractors and stuff.” He shook his head. “But it ain’t enough.”

  Lauren nodded. She had heard the same thing from others these past months. How many does it make? Fourteen families? Fifteen, now. At this rate, Gideon would be a ghost town by the end of the year. In every sense of the word. “You’re headed down to Bloomington.”

  “Yes, Mistress.” Parkinson jerked his chin toward his house, a yellow split-level, now with its own FOR SALE sign centered on the lawn. “Rayanne’s folks are from there. Her uncle owns a machine shop, had an opening for a setup man.”

  Lauren turned to see Rayanne Parkinson in the front window, watching them, a lanky former biker chick with a toddler in her arms and two older children pressed close, one on either side. “Well, I want you to know that there’s a place for you here if you ever decide to come back.”

  “Yes, Mistress. Thank you, Mistress.” Parkinson started to back away. Then he stopped, and stuck out his hand. “Never thanked you for all you’ve done for us, this past winter and everything since.”

  “You’re welcome.” Lauren hesitated, then held out her hand. Felt the man’s rough, calloused grip and through it the static electric shocks of his embarrassment and nerves and anger—

  —keeping the kids inside—it’s an insult—Mistress Mullin saved our lives but Rayanne thinks the magic will rub off on them and then we’ll have to stay—

  —and slowly extricated herself, biting her tongue to keep from blurting out that she understood, that it was all right. Everyone in Gideon knew that she could sense strong emotion with a touch, that she could hear thoughts and memories that were most definitely none of her business. So
she simply nodded and watched Parkinson’s shoulders sag in relief, and let him think he had escaped with his privacy intact.

  Then she waited out on the sidewalk as Parkinson locked up the house and he and Rayanne and the children got into the truck, and asked the Lady to keep them safe as they pulled out of the driveway and headed down the street. Parkinson honked the horn and waved. Even the two eldest kids twisted around in the jump seat and looked. But Rayanne kept her hands inside the truck and her eyes fixed on the road ahead.

  Lauren waited until the truck turned onto Main Street and disappeared from view. Then she walked down the cracked asphalt, eyeing each vacant house in turn, on the lookout for signs of squatters or vandals, human or animal. Knew even as she checked that she needn’t have bothered. Her wards protected them and besides, nobody came to Gideon anymore, for reasons fair or foul.

  Gideon, Illinois—population . . . ? Less than a hundred, now that the Parkinsons had gone. Add to that the half of the town that had been lost that past winter. A freak storm, according to the outside world. Temperatures dropped so quickly that those caught outdoors succumbed to shock, hypothermia. Then came the snows, the loss of power, the fires caused by heaters and wood flames and asphyxiation due to gas leaks. A litany of accident and misfortune, all spelled out in the official report.

  So many lost. So much death.

  Lauren turned onto Main Street, following it as it looped around Gideon’s town square. There had once been a gazebo in the center, a memorial to those lost in another disaster, the Fire of 1871. Dismantled during the blizzard, the news reports said, for use as firewood.

  She shaded her eyes against the noonday sun and surveyed the area, instead of hurrying past like she usually did. A ring of hydrangeas now stood in place of the gazebo, softball-size pink and white blooms bobbing in the light breeze. There had been rosebushes once, but they had been destroyed along with the gazebo.

  The laughter and shouts as they built the pyre, the half-dead of Gideon. Those gray faces, all humanity stripped away.

  And in their midst, Nicholas Blaine, astride a mortal horse driven mad by pain and dark magic, urging them on.

  Yes, a storm had struck Gideon that past December, just not the sort that most folks were familiar with.

  But we’re over that now. Nicholas Blaine had been defeated, sent back into the wilderness to suffer whatever punishment awaited him. The evil he had inflicted upon Gideon, the weight of his influence, had been lifted.

  So now, half a year later, why did it feel as though he had won?

  Lauren headed toward the small cluster of buildings that constituted Gideon’s business district. A few vehicles lined the street, customers of the hardware store, the new bookkeeper. The diner’s parking lot was half-full thanks to the workmen Rocky had hired to upgrade the garage. Anyone passing through would think Gideon a typical small town, busy enough, if not bustling.

  But it was a lie. Simple economics, the need for jobs, schools, a chance at a better life, hurt them more than Blaine ever did. So people are leaving. And Gideon needed people. More specifically, the town needed certain types of people. People who could keep away the dark.

  Gideon needs witches. And as Mistress of Gideon, Lauren knew it was her responsibility to keep the ones who still lived there from leaving. Not doing a very good job of that, am I?

  She kept walking, through the town and up the short hill, where the road turned rough and Main Street changed into Old Main Road. A half-mile farther she stepped off onto a footpath that led into the woods. She concentrated on who she was going to visit and what she wanted to say, because thinking drowned out the voices in her head.

  THE RIVER CONSTANCE flowed gently beneath its leafy canopy, the water bright and sparkling, clean and cold as the snowmelt that had fed her months before. She had been called the Ann once, after Ann Cateman, Gideon’s first Mistress. But after it came to light how the Catemans had conspired with Blaine over the years, well, no one wanted to be reminded of them anymore.

  But folks remembered Connie Petersbury kindly, and it comforted them to know that a woman who had been through so much, who had lost everything that awful winter—including her life—could be memorialized. That, in a way, she would always be part of Gideon.

  Little do they know. Lauren smiled as she rounded the river’s widest bend and sat at her usual place, a broad, flat rock that jutted out over the water. She pulled off her running shoes and socks and immersed her feet up past her ankles, shivering as the chilly water lapped over her skin. Dug through the pockets of her shorts for peanuts, which she tossed into the nearby shrubbery; a few moments later, a pair of crows wheeled overhead and cawed, then swooped in after them.

  Lauren kicked water into the air, watched the drops flash back rainbows. Eventually she felt the change in the air, the softest of breezes.

  “Heard you comin’.” Connie Petersbury sat on the rock next to hers. Temperature and weather no longer affected her, so she could change her clothes to suit her mood. Today she wore denim shorts and a sleeveless red blouse, and had managed to work her short salt-and-pepper bob into two stubby pigtails. She pointed to the crows, still squabbling in the brush. “No way you can sneak up on anyone, the way your friends follow you around.”

  “They follow me for the peanuts.”

  “They follow you ’cause you’re you.”

  Lauren shrugged. Then she looked up at the sun through the trees, savored the warmth on her face. “Just saw the Parkinsons off.”

  Connie tsked. “Surprised Fred lasted here as long as he did. Rayanne started crabbing at him about leaving five minutes after they met.” She wrinkled her nose. “He’s no loss. Stuff they flushed down the toilet while they packed shocked me, and you would think I’d be past shocking by this point.” She met Lauren’s gaze with a slow headshake. “Folks have no secrets from their septic tank. Something I’ve come to learn over the last few months. Unfortunately.”

  “I didn’t know you could sense things like that.”

  “Anywhere that water goes, I can go. You know that.”

  Lauren felt her face heat, only this time the sun had nothing to do with it. She sensed Connie’s pointed stare, and kept her eyes fixed on the river.

  After a time, Connie sighed. “It’s been . . . odd, lately. I feel other things, too, you know? Things that aren’t me. Places. Like when you go outside on a windy day and catch a whiff of someone else’s fire, or cookout. Except I ain’t smelling. It’s feeling, like I said.” She made a vague motion toward the trees. “Something’s wrong out there, somewhere. I don’t know what it is. But it’s wrong.” She tapped Lauren’s hand with her finger, her touch like drops of water, cool and light. “You feel it, too. That’s why you’re here.”

  Lauren started to speak, then stopped. She had come to see Connie because she could tell her things that she could tell no one else, but now that she was here, the words stuck in her throat. “I’m Mistress of Gideon,” she said, eventually.

  “Yes. You are.”

  “Virginia told me yesterday she’s been enjoying the break.”

  “That’s what she told you, huh?”

  “You think she’s lying?”

  “I think you’re both still adjusting. Ginny Waycross can’t accept that there’s anyone knows more than her. You can’t accept that you know anything.” The sunlight flickered across Connie’s face, like tiny prisms. “I think it’s worse for you than it was for any of us. We were born in it, but you came into it so late. First thirty-some years of your life, nothing. And now?” She waited. Eventually, one eyebrow arched.

  “I’m hearing things, people, beings.” Lauren forced the words, and they tumbled like rocks down a mountainside. “I think it’s talking. It’s like a recording in my head. It never stops.”

  “What do they say?”

  “I can’t understand it. I don’t even know if they’re real words.”

  “When did it start?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  �
��Have you told Ginny?”

  “No. I don’t know what I’m hearing. I don’t know where it comes from.”

  “But there’s a reason you’re hearing it. You have to figure it out.”

  Lauren nodded. She had come here for respite, but she should have known she would find none. She pulled her feet out of the water, shook off the drops, put her socks and shoes back on. Stood up on the rock and leapt to the opposite bank. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Start by walking around here, like you been doing for the last few weeks.” Connie stood, and you would have had to look carefully to see that she hovered just above the river’s surface. “Do you want me to walk with you? I can, as long as we stay close to the river.”

  “No. I’ll be okay.”

  “I wish I could help. But I can only do so much. It’s not my world anymore.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve started down the path. You’re going to have to follow it through to the end. That’s what we do.”

  “I know.” Lauren picked out a trail through the knee-high grass and resumed her hike.

  The crows escorted her for a time, keeping one step ahead of her as they swooped from branch to branch. But soon even they vanished, leaving her alone.

  She trudged past maple, oak, and ash, heavy with the lush foliage of early summer, a thousand shades of green. She had first walked these narrow trails in winter, when all was brown and bare and the barrier between this world and the next so thin that time and space lost all meaning.

  But everything’s back to normal now. At least, as normal as a place like Gideon could be. She paused to rub her ears, then listened. The mutterings sounded softer now, lower in pitch. She took one step forward, another.

  Silence.

  She held out her hands, fingers spread, and turned in a slow circle—anyone who saw her would think she walked in her sleep. When she turned to face the way she had come, the voices in her head resumed. When she turned in the direction she had been walking, they stopped once more.