by Brian Harmon
“Fine,” huffed the fat man. He turned and knelt beside the woman. “Hear that?” he asked her. “My partner here is bored with you. Looks like this’ll be the last time we can play together.” He reached down and grasped her jaw, forcing her to look up at him. “Last chance to tell us what we want to hear.”
The woman refused to look at him. Her gaze remained distant.
“It doesn’t have to end here,” he said. “It’s not too late to stop the pain. Just tell us the price of the spell.”
I thought for a second that I’d misheard. Did he say “spell?” As in a magic spell?
“You’re wasting time,” growled the tall man. “You’ve been wasting time all week. Just kill the bitch already.”
But the fat man wasn’t listening. “We already have the book,” he reasoned. “We know the dance. We even have the prayer. You won’t prevent us from unlocking the door. The only thing you’ve done is buy some time. That’s all. Is it really worth all this pain, just to buy a couple extra days?”
The book… It was clearly important to whatever was going on. But what was all this other stuff he was talking about? The dance? The prayer? What door? What was this guy talking about?
“Hurry it up,” groaned the tall man. “I’m getting a bitch of a headache.”
The woman wasn’t talking.
The fat man sighed. “I’m disappointed. It didn’t have to be this way.” He leaned over her and twisted her head so that she was looking directly at him. “This is your choice.”
The woman whimpered. Clearly, she knew what was coming.
Suddenly, her bloody eyes flashed open and her body stiffened. Her cracked lips peeled back from her teeth in a horrid, guttural scream. The chains rattled as she jerked them tight, her hands clenched in shaking fists.
I could see why the blood vessels in her eyes had burst. They were practically bulging out of her head. The cords in her neck were standing out. Her whole body was rigid with pain. She looked as if she were going mad. I couldn’t imagine the agony that she must be feeling.
I didn’t want to watch. But I didn’t dare take my eyes off these men for fear that when I did look again, they’d be standing right in front of me, looking back at me.
“You’ve made our jobs extra difficult,” the fat man told her when he let go of her and leaned back. The woman went limp again, gasping for breath. “That bothers me. It makes me angry. I don’t handle being angry very well.” He leaned over her again. “A lot more people are going to get hurt now. Just because of you. Think about that.”
Again, her body went rigid. Again, she screamed.
When she relaxed again, the fat man said, “This is it. This is the last time. The pain won’t stop again. Tell me the price, before it’s too late.”
The woman’s bloody gaze drifted to me. Our eyes met from across the room, through the crack in the closet door. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t read them, and her voice didn’t reach me. If she had something profound to say to me, I didn’t hear it.
“What a waste,” said the fat man.
This time, when the woman started screaming, it was a long, long time before she stopped. I couldn’t bear to watch any more. I closed my eyes tightly. I covered my ears, too, but it didn’t help. The woman’s screams were the most awful thing I’d ever heard. It wasn’t like the screams you hear in movies. It was deep and guttural and came in short, loud bursts separated by rapid gasps of air.
The screaming didn’t fade. At some point it just became strangled. It seemed to me that she’d finally ruptured something deep inside her and was finally choking to death on her own blood.
Only when it was finally over and the room at last fell silent again, did I dare to peek.
She wasn’t moving. Blood was oozing from her mouth and nose and…other places…
“Can we go get dinner now?” asked the tall man.
I shouldn’t have been shocked by his utter lack of sympathy, but the idea that this man could speak so casually and sound so bored after the horrors I’d just witnessed, much less that he could actually be hungry! It was astounding to me.
“Sure,” replied the fat man as he stood up and wiped his bloody hand with a handkerchief.
I listened to them walk back up the stairs, their footfalls passing right over my head.
Doors slammed shut upstairs.
I was alone with the dead woman.
I never knew I could be so afraid. I sat there. Sat here, in this closet, trembling, clutching my ears, trying to forget that poor woman’s awful screams, desperately willing myself not to scream.
But I can’t give in to fear. I have a job to do. I don’t understand why it’s my job. I don’t know why God would choose me for such a terrible duty, but it’s my job. I have to do it. For everyone’s sake.
I have to tell my story. I have to tell you my story.
I reached into my bag and withdrew my paper and pen. At first, my hand wouldn’t stop shaking enough to begin. I closed my eyes. I pushed aside the horrible things I’d witnessed. I thought about you. In my dream, I saw you finding the dartboard. I know you’ll find these pages.
I began by wondering what’s going on in your world, and the rest came easily enough.
Too easy.
The men are almost certainly gone by now. I need to leave before they return. It’s too risky to try and sneak back up the stairs. I’m going to leave through the basement window instead.
Wish me luck.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Oh my God…” breathed Holly.
Eric lowered the letter and looked at the empty wardrobe where Hector had hidden from the gray agents. He’d been through a lot of horrific experiences since that first, maddening dream two years ago, but cowering in that tiny, dark space as two madmen casually tortured a woman to death? He couldn’t begin to imagine what something like that would do to a person.
And he was only a twelve-year-old boy!
He turned and looked out across the room. Despite all the evidence that Hector was real and telling the truth about the things he witnessed in 1962, he wanted desperately to believe that this terrifying account was only a fabrication. But when he looked closer, he couldn’t help but see the signs, if only in his horrid imagination. The stains on the floor. Blood? Urine? The chemicals used to clean it all up? He found that he could see the holes in the wall where something had once been bolted to the concrete. A chain? And those scratches and chips in the wall and floor beneath those holes… Was that where the poor woman had struggled to free herself from her shackles? Was that where the metal links had struck and ground against the concrete in her futile desperation to escape?
It was his imagination. That was all. He was looking for evidence and his mind was giving it to him. There was no proof that those atrocities actually happened here.
But the truth was that he didn’t need any evidence to convince him that agents were capable of that kind of cruelty. He knew first hand that they were. And he had no doubt that he was staring at the place where a woman once died an agonizing death.
Did the gray agents clean up their own mess, he wondered. Or did the nameless organization send someone to clean up after them?
And was that the only time such a horrible event took place in this house?
He realized that Holly was still clinging to his arm. When he looked down at her, he saw that she was weeping. “Hey… You okay?”
She wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand and nodded. But even as she did this, her pretty features twisted into a miserable grimace and she began to sob. She clutched his arm harder and pressed her face against his shoulder.
He stood there, startled and motionless, feeling a little bit like a man with one foot on a land mine, with no idea how he came to be in this situation or what the hell he was supposed to do at this point.
“I’m sorry!” she sobbed. “I just…” But the tears came rushing back again before she could say more.
“You’re fine,” he assured h
er, hoping he didn’t sound as uncomfortable as he felt.
This wasn’t like Holly. She was a remarkably strong young woman. She’d been through a lot. She was orphaned at only nine when her single mother died in a car accident. At twelve, she ran away from her foster family when she realized the father in that household was a monster. She lived on the streets, using her special abilities to avoid trouble and take advantage of kind strangers until she was found and adopted by Delphinium Thorngood and her coven. And even that life ended abruptly for her when the “magic man” attacked their home and murdered the man they called “Grandpa.”
Even throughout all of that, she remained sweet, optimistic and joyful. She was a sensitive soul who was certainly not immune to tears when they were appropriate. (She cried like a baby during almost every Pixar movie she ever watched.) But she wasn’t prone to sobbing uncontrollably like this.
Was something bothering her? Was there something she wasn’t telling him? Not that it was necessarily any of his business, but it was his polo sleeve she was sobbing into.
After another minute or two, she finally got ahold of herself and began to wipe at her tears again. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s just…that poor woman… How could anyone be so cruel?”
He didn’t have an answer for her. He didn’t know. These agents were barely human. They were cold-blooded and ruthless. He’d suspected more than once that many of them manifested their strange powers by mutilating their own souls in some way.
That was if they even had souls to begin with. Sometimes he wondered.
She let go of his arm and wiped at her eyes again. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I just… I can’t imagine how terrified she must’ve been. How much she suffered… The way he described her…” Her voice cracked again and she pressed her hands to her eyes, trying to hold back another wave of tears.
He understood what she meant. Hector described the fat agent torturing her with his bizarre power, but that didn’t explain the bruises he described all over her body, the strong smell of blood. They must’ve beaten her physically as well. They must’ve tortured her mercilessly. Had they also raped her?
Did she suffer for days? Weeks? Or had she been here for months or even years before the agents finally put her out of her misery?
It was revolting.
Wiping at her nose, she said, “I think she was…” She sniffled and tried to compose herself. “It sounded like she might’ve been a witch.”
“They were asking her about a spell,” he recalled, nodding. “Do you have any idea what they were talking about?”
“The fat agent wanted her to tell him the price,” she recalled.
“The price of what? You guys don’t buy your spells. Do you?”
She actually laughed a little at this. Just a little. “Not exactly, no.” She fanned herself with her hands and took a deep breath. “Some kinds of magic require you to give something in order for it to work. Sort of like a sacrifice. It has a price, in other words.”
He nodded. He’d heard of that sort of thing before. The idea that all magic had a cost. It wasn’t an uncommon device in books. “And that other stuff? The prayer and the dance?”
Holly considered it for a moment. “There’re different kinds of witches out there. The rules can change pretty drastically from one coven to the next. Or so I’ve heard. I’ve never actually met anyone from another coven. That I know of. Maybe it’s like an incantation.”
“Like ‘hocus pocus’?”
“Something like that. Sometimes you speak it. Sometimes it’s more about your body movements.”
“A prayer or a dance.” He nodded. “I get it.”
“Yeah. I guess whatever they were trying to do required both. And a price.” She scrunched up her features. “Wow. That sounds like a really complicated spell…”
“They mentioned a doorway, too.”
But she shook her head. “I’m not sure about that.”
Eric’s cell phone chimed at him.
A PORTAL
He nodded. “Like in 1881.”
The gray agents were recruiting high school kids and searching for a spell to open some kind of doorway. That definitely seemed to support the theory that they were trying to recreate the events that devastated the town more than a century ago.
EXCEPT WE DON’T REALLY KNOW HOW MUCH OF WHAT HAPPENED IN 1881 WAS PLANNED
That was true. They had no way of knowing what the true goals were that night. He’d always assumed that they failed. After all, they never succeeded in summoning the jinn into this world. They only trapped it in that old schoolhouse, where it stayed until Eric and Aiden set it free twelve months ago. There was no way of knowing whether they thought they could actually control the monster or if it was their intention all along to simply let it rampage freely. Maybe the fire was an unintended consequence of their actions and the reason they abandoned the project.
The problem with evil, nameless organizations filled with sociopathic lunatics was that you simply never knew what they might be thinking when they plotted to open gates to various hells.
He knew for sure that agents were involved in 1881. The only reason he’d been able to send it back where it came from was that there was another agent in the building to sacrifice.
The price.
The agent last year had no name. Not one that he shared, anyway. He claimed that his superiors strongly discouraged giving it out. (Which made sense, given that they were evil and all.) Eric merely named him for his cheerful choice of attire; specifically, his bright, pink shirt.
It was Pink Shirt who manipulated him and Aiden into leading him to the unseen schoolhouse. It was Pink Shirt who told him that the unimaginable thing slumbering in the basement was a jinn. It was Pink Shirt who showed him what really caused the fire in 1881.
But if he remembered correctly, Pink Shirt only came to those conclusions as he explored those burned-out hallways. It hadn’t seemed as though he already knew what his predecessors had been up to.
Pink Shirt might’ve just stumbled across the whole thing by chance. He was obsessed with the nameless organization’s many fantastic secrets. He had nothing to do with 1881 or 1962 because, like Eric, he wasn’t born yet.
It seemed to him that no one knew that the jinn was trapped there, which reinforced his theory that the old agents must’ve simply assumed that the summoning had failed.
He skimmed over the letter again. The woman never gave the agents their price. According to Hector, she chose to take it to her probably-shallow grave. “Would they have been able to cast a spell without the price?” he asked.
But Holly didn’t respond. When he turned to look at her, he found her looking very intently around the room.
“What’s wrong?”
She crossed her arms and hugged herself as if from a sudden chill. “Something’s still not right here.”
Eric looked down at his cell phone again.
ALL I FEEL IS THAT SAME WONKY ENERGY
“Any theories?” he asked.
IF A WITCH REALLY DIED IN THAT ROOM, THEN MAYBE WHAT I’M FEELING IS A BAD MIX OF SPIRITUAL AND MAGICAL ENERGY
It made sense, he supposed. As much sense as everything else, anyway.
“I’ve been feeling it since we arrived,” Holly explained. “I thought it was that bad energy Isabelle was talking about, but it’s not. I feel like it keeps moving around, following us.” She shivered. “Spying on us.”
Eric looked down at the pages in his hand again. “Hector said he saw me in this house in his dream. He also said there was a ‘dark shadow’ stalking me.”
She nodded. “There is something here. It is dark.” She turned and walked around the room.
“Is it dangerous?”
She stopped and cocked her head, listening to the silent room. “I’m not sure.” She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the atmosphere around her. Then she rubbed her hands together in front of
her face and whispered, “Reveal.” With her eyes still closed, she lowered her hands, pursed her lips and gently blew. Impossibly, Eric saw her breath clearly. It looked as if she were standing out in the snow on a cold, winter day, instead of in a stuffy basement in early June. It disappeared within a few inches of her face, but it was there. And immediately the temperature began to drop around them.
This was new. He had no idea she could do things like this. He thought her divining trick with the water and her thrust was the limit of her magical powers.
Holly opened her eyes and stared into the corner of the room. “There.”
When he followed her gaze, he saw that she was right. There was something in the corner of the room, a faint haze that was slowly taking form, like a blurry image gradually coming into focus. For a moment, he couldn’t tell what he was looking at. Then he stepped back, startled, as it suddenly came together.
She was exactly as Hector had described her. Thin and ragged, naked, bloodied, with bruises all over her body, but especially upon her wrists, where the shackles had held her. She stared back at them with bloody eyes and an expression of endless horror.
Eric stood there, staring at the gruesome apparition, trying to grasp the entire picture. Had she been here all these years, haunting this awful house where she died in indescribable agony? Why? What could possibly hold a spirit prisoner in a place like this?
“Hello,” said Holly. “Don’t be afraid. We’re not here to hurt you.”
The woman cocked her head as if confused by these words.
“We’re here to make the bad guys go away.” Her voice wavered. Tears welled up in her eyes again. “What happened to you was terrible. It breaks my heart.”
The woman walked toward her, one bruised hand stretched out to her. But she stopped short of touching her.
“This is Eric. He can help you. He helps people all the time. He helped me once.” Her voice cracked as she said this, her emotions were overwhelming her again. “He saved my life. He saved my family.” Heavy tears spilled down her cheeks. “Maybe he can save you, too.”
