by King, R. L.
“Thank you, Mr. Wheeler,” Stone said. “We’re grateful for your help.”
“Wow,” Lopez said. “That happened fast.”
They were on the freeway headed toward Ventura in Lopez’s truck. Stone had to chuckle. “Never underestimate the pathological curiosity of university professors when dealing with their subjects of interest,” he said. “Trust me on that.”
Dr. Matthew Garcia, once informed of a possible new specimen of Chumash rock writing, had nearly fallen over himself to invite the strangers to his home to discuss it. Even Wheeler had been surprised. “I guess it’s a good thing Wheeler didn’t connect you with the guy the police were questioning,” Lopez said. “He might have been a little less willing to set up a meeting.”
Garcia’s home wasn’t far from Downtown, a small green Victorian-style place on an older street. The door was answered by a plump, smiling woman in a housedress. “He’s expecting you,” she said, motioning them in and leading them down a narrow hall to a sitting area.
Dr. Matthew Garcia didn’t rise when they came in; they could see from the folded wheelchair nearby that it wasn’t a breach of etiquette. He looked to be in his mid-seventies, his thin body hinting at a more powerful frame in his youth. His eyes sparkled with anticipation. “Gentlemen. Come in,” he urged, waving them toward a sofa. “Mrs. Teller, please bring our friends some refreshments.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Garcia,” Stone said, walking over to shake the old man’s hand.
“You must be Dr. Stone,” he said. “And this is Sergeant Lopez?” He chuckled. “I hope I’m not coming across as too overeager, but if what Wheeler tells me is true, I am very excited to see what you have to show me. When you get to be my age, you can get away with a little impatience,” he added, eyes twinkling.
Stone liked the man immediately. “Quite all right. We’re eager to hear what you might be able to tell us about them.” He pulled the printouts from the briefcase and handed them over.
Garcia took them with the care and anticipation of a child being handed a coveted but fragile new toy. He shifted the lamp next to his chair for better light, and immediately lowered his head to begin studying them.
Minutes passed in silence. Mrs. Teller returned with a tray bearing glasses of iced tea and some cookies; she placed it on the coffee table without a word, smiled, and departed. Lopez took a glass and a cookie, but Stone didn’t move, his gaze still locked on Garcia.
Once, Lopez tapped Stone on the arm and made a wiggle-fingered gesture with both hands around his own head, followed by a questioning glance at Garcia. Stone, picking up his meaning, did a magical scan of the professor and then shook his head. Lopez looked relieved.
A full fifteen minutes passed before Garcia came up for air. For a second he looked startled to see that Stone and Lopez were still in the room, then he shook his head briefly. “Well…”
Stone leaned forward, waiting.
Another several seconds went by. “Well,” Garcia said again. “This is...interesting. Interesting indeed. And very, very strange.” He focused on Stone. “Where did you say these images came from?”
“We can’t say right now, sir,” Lopez said. “It’s related to an ongoing investigation.”
“That’s a pity.” Garcia shook his head. “I would give a great deal to be able to see these in person, if there’s any chance of that.”
“Can you tell us about them, Dr. Garcia?” Stone asked gently. “Can you read them?”
“I can read about half of what’s here,” Garcia said. “Enough to give me the basic idea of the meaning. But that’s why it’s strange. These were clearly produced by one or more members of one of the Chumash tribes, but—”
“But—?” Lopez asked.
“But,” Garcia continued, “This is all wrong for the Chumash.” He pointed at the first sheet, showing the leftmost tablet. “This appears to be some sort of—invocation. The first one here refers to a great wrong done to their people, and mentions something about frustration at their own people for failing to seek vengeance.”
He slid that one to the back and pulled up printout showing the rightmost tablet. “These aren’t in order. The two on the left and right appear to be sort of a—well, they seem to be explaining what they’re doing, or perhaps justifying it. They call themselves something like “They Who Do What is Necessary.”
He shuffled through the pages until he found one showing the middle, larger tablet. “This one is the actual invocation. They call upon—” he paused, squinting at the page “—something called ‘He of Many Masks,’ or ‘He of Many Faces’—something like that. The pictographs are nonstandard, so I’m guessing a bit there.” He looked up at Stone, and his eyes were very serious. “They call this ‘He of Many Faces’ and exhort him to seek vengeance upon the blood of those who have wronged them, for all of time. Blood and—” he squinted again “—something about entrails.”
A chill ran through Stone. “This—He of Many Faces,’” he said softly. “Have you heard of him? Is he a Chumash deity, or some other supernatural being?”
Garcia shook his head. “No. Not that I’m aware of. That’s what’s so odd about this. You see, Dr. Stone, I don’t know how much you know about the Chumash—”
“Almost nothing,” Stone admitted.
“Well,” he continued, “They were a very peaceful group. They weren’t aggressive with other tribes in the area—mainly they were hunters, fishermen, and lived in harmony with each other and their surroundings.” He shifted the papers again and held up the one showing a good shot of the skull-topped mound of bones. “This is not a Chumash construction. They wouldn’t desecrate the bones of their people—or even their enemies—like this.” Pointing at the base of the bone pile, he said, “It’s hard to tell what this is on this printout: are these rocks?”
“They’re some kind of beads,” Lopez said. “Made out of shells, maybe, or polished stones.”
Garcia nodded. “The Chumash people often buried their dead with ceremonial beads made from shells, so that part fits. But this is not a Chumash burial site. It looks as if the bones were brought here from somewhere else, and arranged for a particular purpose.”
“Do you know what the purpose might be?” Stone asked.
“No. If it were another, more warlike tribe, I might suggest that it was some sort of medicine ceremony, with a focus of vengeance. The invocation on the tablet certainly suggests that they were trying to seek the favor of some sort of supernatural being and ask it to do their will by destroying their foes. I might almost say that the bones were part of a sacrifice. But none of that fits with the Chumash ways. They certainly never did human sacrifices. They were far too peaceful for something so brutal.” He stared off into space for a moment, then started almost as if waking from a trance. “Oh!” he said, shuffling the papers. He pointed at one of the pictographs on the center tablet. “Very sorry, I misspoke before. See this here? This means ‘blood,’ all right, but not in the sense of what we have in our veins.”
“What, then?” Lopez asked.
“Family,” Garcia said, looking at each of them in turn. “Kin. Descendants.” He took a deep breath, his excitement at what he was looking at warring with a clear disturbance about the subject matter. “In light of that, gentlemen, I would say that this is not only an invocation—it’s a curse.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“You want to stop for something to eat?” Lopez asked, glancing over.
Stone didn’t reply. He’d been silent for the entire trip back to Oak View, his thousand-yard stare fixed on a point somewhere outside the truck’s passenger window.
Lopez raised his voice a bit. “Hey! Earth calling Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme.”
Stone started. “Sorry. Just—thinking.”
“Yeah, I figured that. Either that or you were ignoring me. What about?”
He sighed,
running his hand through his hair. “What Dr. Garcia said.”
“You mean the part about the curse? And you want to stop somewhere? I don’t have much in the house, so it’s either stop or order pizza again.”
Stone shrugged. “Whatever you like.” His gaze shifted back out the window. “And yes, the part about the curse.”
“You think it’s relevant somehow? I mean, come on—I can believe in magic now, because I’ve seen you do it and you saved my ass with it today. I can even believe that there’s some kind of supernatural force that’s taking over people and committing murders. But ancient Indian curses coming true? That stretches even my pretty flexible level of disbelief.” He pulled the truck into the parking lot of a barbecue joint.
Stone didn’t respond further until they’d found a seat in the back of the restaurant and placed their orders. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Some of it fits surprisingly well.”
“How so?”
“Do you remember what the professor called the entity they were trying to invoke?”
Lopez thought. “I don’t remember, exactly...You with the Face or something like that, wasn’t it?”
Stone raised an eyebrow. “He called it ‘He of Many Masks’ or ‘He of Many Faces.’”
“So?”
“So,” Stone said, “Doesn’t that sound like a fairly accurate description of an extradimensional entity that can possess anyone it likes?”
Lopez stared at him. “Day-um,” he said. “Shit, you’re right.”
Stone’s mental wheels were turning again. “Stan—is there any way we could find out if the victims thus far were related in any way? Or at least if they had longtime ties to the area?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Easiest way would be to check with Pete Casner and have him ask the families. I don’t think he’s going to be very forgiving if we start bothering the families of murder victims with questions about their ancestry.”
“Can you do it without arousing too much suspicion?”
“Hell, at this point I can just tell him I’m working with you. I’ll just spin it that you’re a friend of Jason’s, since he already knows that, and that I’m keeping an eye on you to make sure you don’t do anything that’ll get you in trouble.”
“Lovely,” Stone said archly. “Now I’ve got a minder.”
“Speaking of Jason,” Lopez said, frowning, “You had any brainwaves yet about where he might be? Do you still think he’s alive?”
“I do think he’s alive,” Stone said with a sigh. “No new ideas, though, unfortunately. I was very much hoping that out little trip this morning would lead us to where he was being held.”
“You sure it wouldn’t have, somewhere? I mean, we had to get out of there pretty fast. What if he was there somewhere and we missed him?”
Stone didn’t answer right away. The waitress came over with their orders and he sipped his Guinness thoughtfully, staring into its dark depths. There was something here he wasn’t putting together. Something about Jason. “Bear with me a moment,” he said. “Sometimes I think better when I bounce ideas off others, so you’re the elected sounding board.”
“Bounce away,” Lopez said. “Listening is one of the first things they teach you in cop school. That, and how to hold your gun by the right end.”
Stone nodded, once again lost in his own thoughts and not really hearing Lopez’s words. “Let’s assume,” he said, “that Jason’s alive, and this He of Many Faces—or one of his minions—is the one who has him.” He took a deep breath. “With that assumed, let’s look at our facts.”
Lopez pulled out his notebook and pen, deftly managing his pulled-pork sandwich with his off hand. “Go for it.”
“First,” Stone said, “we know he saw something shortly before he disappeared—something he thought I would find interesting. That almost certainly means something supernatural.”
Lopez jotted that down.
“Next, we know he was in the vicinity of the first murder, probably shortly after it occurred. The murder site was on the logical route he would take walking home from the party, and I detected traces of his aura at the scene.”
Lopez nodded, still scribbling.
“We don’t know for sure,” Stone continued, “but I can be reasonably certain that he didn’t have anything to do with the murder.”
“How do you know that?” Lopez asked. “I mean, aside from the obvious fact that Jason isn’t a murderer.”
“Well, there’s that, of course, but there’s also the fact that the bits of his aura I could pick up near the murder site were not at the site per se, and didn’t become nervous until a short distance down the road away from it. What it suggests to me is that he might have encountered the murderer—who was likely possessed at the time—after the murder had already been committed. And also that, aside from whatever bit of supernatural oddness he saw, he didn’t connect it with a crime…” He paused, his gaze suddenly going unfocused. “Of course!”
“What?” Lopez demanded, pen poised over his notebook.
“I know what he must have seen now!” Stone leaned forward. “The night I was—with Lindsey—when I awoke to find her trying to stab me, I saw an odd light in her eyes. Sort of a yellowish-orange glow. The boy who strangled me probably had it too, but I wasn’t in any position to see it. If he saw that—especially if it was coupled with that odd tone of voice the possession victims get—he certainly would have found it strange enough to warrant a call to me.”
“That makes sense,” Lopez said. “But why would it let him go, then? Why not just kill him?”
“My theory is, whoever it possessed and forced to commit the murder wasn’t big or strong enough to overpower Jason. He’s very difficult to possess—I’ve taught him a few mental techniques—and it would have been awkward to simply vacate the other body and hop into Jason in any case.”
“So—they just let him go and then grabbed him later?”
“They’ve proven they can keep track of people,” Stone said, nodding. “If he got back to his room at three or four in the morning, he probably passed out and woke up some time later. That’s when he called me.”
“Okay,” Lopez said. “So far, so good. But then did he leave the room and go somewhere else?”
“I don’t know,” Stone said. “Let’s go back to the facts. I am very good at tracking rituals. I performed one when I first got to Ojai, as soon as I moved into the house, since the motel room wasn’t large enough to cast the circle.” He paused, waiting for Lopez to ask, but the cop just made a ‘go on’ gesture. “I used something of Jason’s as a tether, which makes it even more likely that if he was out there to find, I’d find him. Even if he was out of range of the spell, there would still be sort of an astral marker showing me the way to where he was. But all I got was faint flashes of his aura.”
“What’s that mean?”
“For one thing, it means he wasn’t dead when I did the ritual,” Stone said. “The fact that I got traces, and even a brief response from him to my call, indicates that he was within the range of the spell, but very difficult to track.”
“How can that happen?”
“Usually it means the ritual subject is behind wards, or otherwise magically hidden,” Stone said.
“So you think these things can do wards?” Lopez asked. “You mean like the ones you put on my house?”
Stone shrugged. “I have no idea what these things can do.” He sighed loudly, frustrated. “Damn it, there’s something I should be seeing here, and I’m missing it. I know it!”
“Well,” Lopez said, “Let’s think about the chain of events. You say Jason called you early on Saturday morning. Do you know he called from the motel? Do you know he got back there?”
“No,” Stone said. “But it’s a reasonable assumption. If he left the party sometime around two a.m. and didn’t call me until seven,
then where else would he have been in between? If he passed out somewhere along the way, then Faces or his minions would have had plenty of time to hop into a new body that could deal with him.”
“Okay,” Lopez agreed, nodding. “So he got back to the room and passed out, like you said. Then he woke up and called you. After that, he either had to stay there or go somewhere, right?”
Stone nodded. “I’d guess he probably waited at least a while in the room, since he wanted me to call him and the motel was the only way I had to reach him. Unless he popped out for breakfast or something. But judging by the amount he apparently had to drink, I’m doubting he would be interested in anything more than perhaps a cup of coffee. When I’m that hung over, the last thing I want is anything to eat.”
“So, do you think somebody came to his room?” Lopez asked. “If one of those things came there and talked to him in that same weird voice, don’t you think it would have freaked him out? He’s sharp enough he wouldn’t have gone with anybody like that. You said these things aren’t very good at pretending to be people. So if they—” He stopped, staring at Stone. “What?”
The mage had stopped in the act of raising his glass. Once again, his eyes had gone strange. “Bloody hell, that’s it,” he whispered. “Stan, you’re brilliant! That’s how they did it! Oh, you bastards.” He leaped up with such force that his chair nearly fell over, a wild look in his eyes. “Come on,” he ordered, flinging a handful of cash onto the table. “We have to go!”
“Go where?” Lopez demanded, looking around. The restaurant’s few other diners were eyeing Stone as if expecting him to pull out a gun and start shooting up the place.
“If I’m right—to find Jason.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Are you sure about this?” Lopez asked. “This, what you’re asking, is skating on pretty thin ice, legality-wise. If you’re wrong—”
