Alastair Stone Chronicles Box Set: Alastair Stone Chronicles, Books 1 through 4

by R. L. King

  She moved around the back of the building to let herself in with her key, pausing as lights appeared in the small alley that ran the length of the block behind Hillerman’s. She waited as they approached to reveal a golf cart driven by a chubby young man in a guard’s uniform and a heavy down coat. She waved.

  “Evenin’, Ms. Pearsall,” the man said with a jaunty return wave and a grin. “Here to fix up the display?”

  “That I am, Dwight.”

  “Can’t wait to see what you come up with. I’ll be around if you need anything—just give me a call on the radio, okay?”

  “I’ll do that,” she assured him, and he rolled off with another wave.

  Dwight Carsey and his fellow private security guard, Kurt Moreno, cruised around the entire downtown area overnight, once every hour or so, just to make sure nobody was bothering any of the businesses. All the owners chipped a little into a fund to pay them, since Woodwich didn’t technically have a police department. Because Woodwich also technically didn’t have crime (beyond rare broken window or graffiti tagging incidents), Dwight and Kurt usually just spent most of their evenings watching porn and smoking the occasional joint in the back room of the Alpine Chalet Motel two blocks over. Still, Eleanor was glad that they were available should she need them. They always made it a point to check up on her at least once on nights when she was doing her displays, which she found charming even if it was unnecessary.

  She slipped inside the store, closed the door behind her, and turned the deadbolt. Even though she didn’t lock her home door like most of Woodwich’s residents, she still didn’t believe in tempting those who might be teetering on the edge of a little midnight acquisition when she was responsible for other people’s property.

  The back door opened into a combination storeroom and receiving area; it was full of boxes of merchandise, signage, and display materials, all neatly stacked on shelves or hanging on racks. Eleanor wasted no time getting started: she grabbed a cart and began piling the items she’d need on it.

  In less than ten minutes she was walking through the large public area of the single-story store, traversing the dimly lit aisles like she was in her own home. She wished Crowley were here—at least he’d be a little company. The squeaking of one of the cart’s wheels was the only sound in the wide-open space. To anyone who wasn’t used to it, the place would have seemed ominous in the scant light, with the shadowy racks of clothing and looming mannequins, but Eleanor felt at home here. The dark didn’t frighten her; she’d seen far worse things during her fifty-four years on Earth than a few overgrown naked Barbies.

  She was taping up a plastic drop cloth to obscure the left-side display window from the street when she first heard the sound.

  Stopping with one side of the cloth in place, she listened. She’d definitely heard something, but couldn’t identify it over all the rustling the plastic had been making. She held very still, willing whatever it was to repeat itself.

  It didn’t. The store was once again as quiet as it always was this late at night.

  Eleanor sighed. It wasn’t like her to hear things that weren’t there—maybe the interrupted sleep from the nightmares was getting to her more than she’d thought. She turned back to her task, and soon had the cloth draped so anyone looking in from outside (not that anyone was, or was likely to be) couldn’t see what she was doing. She stepped back out of the window and moved to the cart, intending to hustle a nude Santa Claus into position so she could dress him in his new back-to-nature finery.

  There it was again.

  This time she heard it clearly, far off in a back corner of the store.

  A footstep.

  She froze. She was certain she’d locked the back door, and no one had had a chance to slip in behind her. She hadn’t checked the front, but Mr. Hillerman and his staff were always conscientious about locking up.

  “H-hello?” she called. “Is someone in here?” Maybe not the best approach, but it wasn’t like she’d been doing anything to hide her presence. If somebody was in the store, they knew she was here too.

  No answer. The dark, cavernous space remained resolutely silent.

  Eleanor rubbed the back of her neck. She was hearing things. That had to be it. It was the dream—it was making her jump at shadows. Still, she wished she’d picked up a couple of her “special items” from the bowl on her mantelpiece at home. She didn’t exactly feel vulnerable without them, but having them with her would have made her a lot more comfortable.

  Just get the display done and go home. Taking a deep breath to center herself, she gathered up an armload of clothing and Santa, climbed back into the window, and began arranging him into the proper position. Her only concession to caution was that she faced back into the store while she did this, instead of toward the window.

  Once she had Santa posed, she threw a voluminous brown “robe” (a bedsheet she’d cut a head-hole in) over his head and belted it with a golden rope she’d borrowed the other day from one of the curtain displays and squirreled away with her other supplies. She finished the look with a braided wreath of twigs, placed on his head like a crown. Standing back, she admired her handiwork. Santa indeed looked very much like a jolly wood-sprite.

  Far off in the back of the store, on the opposite side from the one where she’d heard the footstep, something small fell off a shelf and hit the ground with a tiny whoomp.

  Eleanor stopped again, her body stock-still, a chill skittering down her spine. She forced herself to attempt to be rational: if something was in here, what could it be? An animal? Maybe another homeless person who had somehow gotten in and was using the store as a place to sleep? A drifter from out of town who’d taken advantage of a normally locked door to slip in and hide until after closing time? None of those were inherently dangerous, but she wasn’t crazy about the idea of being in here alone with any of them.

  She had two choices: ignore the sounds and continue with her work, or do something about them. The “something” could be anything from investigating the situation herself, to leaving the store, to using the radio to call Dwight and Kurt and ask them to come check things out. She didn’t like either of the latter two options: the first because it would mean leaving a job undone for the first time in her ten years of doing displays, and the second because it felt like admitting defeat. Again, she berated herself for not bringing the items from the bowl on the mantel with her—

  Someone giggled.

  It was a soft sound, barely audible even in the silence, but it was definitely a giggle. It sounded like a small child, but it had a certain wrongness to it. Not a happy giggle, but a creepy one.

  Eleanor’s breath quickened. “All right,” she whispered. “That’s it.” She’d never get anything done while constantly on edge waiting for the next unexpected sound. Retreating wasn’t an option, since she didn’t plan to leave the display undone. Investigating things herself was just stupid: if there was an intruder, she was at a definite disadvantage in her current state. That left the radio—which was in the office off to the left side of the store near the restrooms. She’d have to walk through most of the store’s open area, uncomfortably close to where she’d heard some of the noises, to get to it.

  She stepped carefully out of the window and looked around. Luck was with her this time: near the front of the store was a display for the fireplace. She spotted a rack of implements and hefted an iron poker. That might not stop a determined intruder, but it would certainly make him think twice. And if it was a child playing a trick on her—well, she could put the fear of God into him until she could contact his parents and give them an earful about the proper way to raise children.

  Though her hand holding the poker shook as she crossed the store, nothing accosted her and no more strange sounds were forthcoming. By the time she reached the door to the office, she began to think she had just been hearing things, and felt almost embarrassed about disturbing Dwight and Kurt for a false alarm. Almost, but not quite enough not to do it. Besides, she ra
tionalized, they were probably bored, and would relish the opportunity to make themselves useful.

  The office door wasn’t locked; she pushed it open, reached around to flip on the light. After verifying that no one lurked there, she slipped inside and closed and locked the door. Keeping a close eye on it, she switched on the radio. It crackled for a moment, then settled in to a low hum. She keyed the mic. “Dwight? Kurt? Are you there?”

  There was a brief pause, and then Dwight’s reassuringly tinny voice emerged from the ancient speaker. “Is that you, Ms. Pearsall?”

  “It’s me,” Eleanor replied. She felt a lot better hearing another human voice.

  “Something up?”

  She paused. “There might be. I’m—I know it sounds silly, but I’m hearing noises in here. Like maybe somebody, or an animal or something, got inside the store.”

  Dwight’s voice sounded accommodating, but not too concerned. “We’ll come by right away to check it out, Ms. Pearsall. Probably just a possum or a cat or something got in. Don’t you worry, just sit tight in the office and we’ll be there pronto. Five minutes, max.”

  “Thank you, Dwight. I appreciate it. I hate to take you away from the warm—”

  “No problem, Ms. P. Just sit tight.” The line went dead with a couple of final crackles.

  Eleanor replaced the mic in its cradle and slumped into a nearby chair. She was surprised at the relief that washed over her at the thought that someone else would be here soon to help her get this sorted out. The more she thought about it, she was sure it had to be a cat or other small animal.

  But cats don’t giggle, said a little voice in the back of her mind.

  She waited in silence, willing herself not to sneak glances at her watch or at the clock on the wall. She didn’t hear any other noises outside, but she didn’t think the little sounds she’d heard would be loud enough to be audible through the closed office door. It was hard not to imagine something furtively sneaking up, waiting for her to open the door so it could pounce—

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she whispered. In truth, she had no idea why this frightened her as much as it did. She’d dealt with far worse, at night and alone. Again, she decided it must be the nightmare and lack of good sleep playing hell with her nerves. That was all.

  “Ms. Pearsall?” A faint voice filtered through the door. “You there?”

  She leaped out of the chair and hurried over to open the door. She had rarely been so happy to see anyone as she was to watch Dwight’s portly, flashlight-wielding form approaching through the dry-goods department, followed by his taller and thinner partner, Kurt.

  “I’m here,” she called. “Thank you so much for coming.”

  “No trouble at all,” he said. “Now let’s check out this sound. Where’d you hear it again?”

  She told them the approximate locations of the three different sounds she’d heard (or thought she’d heard) and they set off in two different directions with their flashlights blazing. She remained at the front of the store, near her display, and watched the lights bobbing around, up one aisle and down another, until at last both young men reconvened near the store’s front door.

  Dwight sighed and shook his head. “We didn’t see anything, Ms. Pearsall. No sign that anybody’s here or anybody’s been here.”

  She stared at him. Would it be possible for an intruder to hide well enough to fool two security guards—even if they were, admittedly, not among the highest on the professionalism scale? “You looked under the spinning clothes racks? Behind the furniture—?”

  Kurt, who hadn’t spoken yet, nodded. “Not that many places for somebody to hide in here,” he said. He was a lanky young man with a shock of unruly dark hair, a dusting of pimples across his forehead, and a bad case of jug-ear.

  “And you checked the back room?”

  Dwight nodded. “When we came in. We locked the door behind us, and looked around back there to make sure nobody was tryin’ to make a break for it.”

  “We even checked the johns,” Kurt added. “Nobody in here but you, Ms. Pearsall.”

  Eleanor sighed, embarrassed now. “I’m sorry, guys. I really didn’t mean to drag you all the way out here for in the cold for—”

  Dwight grinned, waving off her apology. “It’s fine. Really. You know this is the dullest job in the known universe, right? Anything that lets us get out and pretend to do something useful is cool with us.”

  “Bonus if we don’t have to do anything dangerous,” Kurt added with his own rather goofy grin. Eleanor noticed that both of them had the definite whiff of the heathen weed hovering around their persons.

  “Well—all right, then,” she said, conceding. “But don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”

  “Not a problem,” Dwight said. He nodded toward the window. “That your display? Santa looks—different.”

  “Just something new I’m trying,” she said, turning back to look at her work. “You just wait till it’s finished.”

  “You know,” Kurt said in a conversational tone, “It’s really a shame you didn’t decide to join us.”

  Eleanor was about to say something else about her display when oddness of the guard’s words sunk in. She turned around, convinced that whatever he had said, she’d misheard it. “What did—”

  Methodically and without any change of expression, Dwight pulled a long-bladed kitchen knife from behind him and buried it in Eleanor’s gut.

  She didn’t even have time to scream. Kurt, as if he had been expecting Dwight to stab her, moved forward and clamped one hand over her mouth while the other grabbed one of her wildly flailing arms and locked it behind her back. Dwight had not yet pulled the knife out; instead, he took a tight grip on its handle and sliced downward, its sharp blade encountering only minimal resistance against the soft organs it cut through. Blood sprayed out in all directions, covering Dwight’s uniform shirt, his face, his hands.

  Eleanor, desperate with panic and incoherent with pain, could do nothing but flop back and forth in ever more feeble attempts to pull herself free of Kurt’s grasp, but she accomplished nothing more than to worsen her already grave situation. Her blood, her intestines, and her life essence flowed out of her, and she knew, even amid all the pain, that she was powerless to stop it.

  She saw and heard two things before unconsciousness and then death mercifully took her: the first was Dwight’s face, slack-jawed and transported with near-rapturous pleasure; the second was the far-off sound of giggling, accompanied by the mental image of a dark forest clearing ringed by trees.

  The next morning at sunrise, a lone figure shuffled along Main Street, pausing to poke hopefully into various trash receptacles with a long pole. He moved with a swaying, methodical gait, still feeling a little out of it after his previous night of drinking. Mostly he paid attention to the sidewalk and the trashcans, but something made him look up as he passed Hillerman’s Department Store. Perhaps he remembered in some back corner of his mind that there would be something to see in the window this morning.

  What he saw, however, made him stagger backward and almost fall into the street, his big green backpack dropping to the snowy sidewalk beside him.

  The left-side display window at Hillerman’s, the place where Santa and his woodland elves were intended to frolic while ringing in the holiday season, showed an entirely different scene. Santa, still in his brown robe and wreath of twigs, held a bloodstained knife menacingly above his head. Below him, spread out on a sheet-covered table, lay the form of a middle-aged woman, her body covered with slashes and cuts, her arms and legs spread out and tied to the legs of the table like some kind of ritual sacrifice. Her mouth gaped wide in a silent scream of terror, and Santa leered over her with a red-streaked face and gore-strewn beard. Around the table, the elves, still in their green and red traditional garb, looked on with macabre glee. Dried and clotted blood streaked the window itself, providing a grisly frame for the scene.

  “Oh, God...” Ted whispered, tears springing to his crinkle
d eyes. “Oh, God, Miz Pearsall...why didn’t you listen to me and be careful...?”

  He sagged to the ground; he was still there when the early-morning sale-seekers arrived soon after, eager to discover what Eleanor had done to surprise them with the display this year.

  PART 1: DISCOVERIES

  CHAPTER ONE

  Considering the impact he’d made on the world in his many years of international celebrity and profligate philanthropy, the demise of the last remaining bit of what had once been Gordon Lucas was altogether anticlimactic.

  The event was witnessed by only three “mourners,” seated around a small table. In the center of the table rested a construct of crystals and wires, fashioned into a roughly cubical shape about the size of a child’s building block. They weren’t watching the construct, though, but rather what was inside it. The reddish-purple, glowing globule had been dimming for the past couple of weeks, and at this point it was barely discernible except in a dim room such as the one they now occupied.

  “I don’t think it’ll be long now,” Alastair Stone murmured. He’d spent most of his spare time studying the construct and gathering what little data he could from the thing inside. Though the nature of the cage made precise measurement difficult, he’d managed to put together several pages of notes.

  “You don’t think it’s gonna—you know—explode or anything, when it goes?” Jason Thayer asked, a little nervously. Even after all he’d been through in the previous few weeks, he was still more than a bit uncomfortable around this sort of thing. He liked his life to be predictable, which was really quite amusing, given his current situation and companions.

  “It’s rattling around like crazy in there,” said Verity Thayer. “You can tell it wants out bad.” Her voice, unlike her brother’s, held curiosity and interest. She leaned in with her elbows propped on the table, her eyes never leaving the little glowing thing inside the construct. “I wonder what would happen if we let it out now,” she mused. “Would it get stronger again after it hopped into somebody else? Or did we permanently drain its power by keeping it prisoner for so long?”