“This is going to be a badger. Badgers go into the dirt, and we all go into the dirt eventually. It’s the way of things.”
“Audrey?”
Audrey’s head pulled away from the girl to see Elliot waving at her by the car. She turned back to see the girl go back to work on her carving.
“Um, thank you for making the carving.”
“You’re welcome,” said the girl, not looking up. “Thank you for buying it.”
Audrey walked off the porch, now feeling a distinct sense of dread for the small owl still cradled in her hands.
CHAPTER 4
Temperance Methodist Church had stood in Newton for over one hundred years. It was a small church and had never had a large congregation, but along with being the oldest church in the county, it also had its own cemetery. Equally small, with only around three hundred graves, the most recent dating back a good twenty years, it had run out of room long ago. While the church itself sat on top of a modest hill, the graves lined the hillside, some at a slope that would have been considered too precarious by other cemetery standards. They worked with what they had. The road and parking lot took up one side, residences on the left and right, and a small area of woods to the back. While the church had long sought to acquire a portion of the woods to make more room for the cemetery, the owner of the property had no desire to sell. Deer were plentiful, even in those few acres, come hunting season.
Only a few yards past the graves and into the woods, sat a pond. It was barely the size of backyard swimming pool, probably only twenty feet across in normal weather. Perpetually stagnant, nothing lived in its waters, no wildlife ever drank from its edge. It gave off a foul odor, as if something rotted deep within it. All of the plant life surrounding the pond had taken on a gelatinous appearance, as if everything was covered in a thin film of mold.
The few people who knew of the pond stayed away from it, fully aware that something was wrong with it. Rumors ranged from it being cursed to it being filled with toxic sludge. In a way, both were true. The pond was a place where reality was a bit looser, where physics began to breakdown.
There were many places like this around world, but it was from this pond that the man in the suit chose to rise.
He rose head first, straight up, water beading right off of him. Completely dry, he was dressed in a black suit with a grey shirt and black tie. He wore a red rose on his lapel. There was a bit of stubble on his face, less than on his head where his hair was cropped quite short. Dark hair, there was noticeable grey at his chin and temples. He was of average build, but he surveyed the woods with dark eyes that made him seem far more imposing.
Stepping across the pond, his feet splashed across the surface of the water then through the plants. None of the muck clung to him, none of the water soaked through. Continuing through the woods, he came out at the bottom of the hill and looked around at the cemetery. He frowned and began his way up the hill.
Billy Vicks, and his brother Bobby, had been tending the grounds at Temperance Methodist Church for years. They probably would have seen to burials too, had there still been room to bury anyone. Billy had been married in the church, Bobby still looking to settle down. They knew every parishioner in the church, so they were more than a little shocked to a see an unknown man, fully decked out in his Sunday best, walking through the cemetery on a late Thursday afternoon.
Bobby shut off his lawnmower and shouted out to the stranger. “Can I help you?”
The man either hadn’t heard him or was ignoring him. Billy frowned and leaned his rake against the garbage can. He hoped this wasn’t one of those weirdos who liked to hang out in cemeteries. Billy couldn’t abide that kind of disrespect.
“You there, what’s your business here?” Billy called out.
“My business? Well that’s a complicated story, I’m afraid.”
The man finished climbing the hill and came to stand a few paces away from Billy. Bobby jogged over to his brother, confused by the stranger’s appearance. There was no car in the parking lot and he wasn’t one of the neighbors. Nobody would walk that far in a suit like that in the summer.
“You can’t just be wandering around here as you please,” said Billy. “This is a reverent place.”
“Isn’t that exactly what you do in a reverent place,” the man said with a smile. “You wander, seeking enlightenment. Silence and solitude among your dead. Is it not life-affirming?”
“What?” asked Bobby, confused.
“I don’t know what you’re babbling about, but if you’re not a member of the congregation, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Ah, flavors of faith. How remarkably petty and exclusionary. You do realize the dead no longer care about such things?”
“Listen here, fella…” began Billy, stepping forward.
“Listen? No, let me show you.”
The world dropped out, reality breaking away. It was replaced with a never-ending blackness, a void so complete that it ate away at Billy just for daring to exist. A cold so sharp it drove knives into his psyche. The emptiness imploded, entropy made manifest, and in the corners of nothingness Billy saw the futility of reason, emotion, and humanity.
On earth, Bobby clutched onto his brother Billy as he lay on the ground, shaking and drooling.
“What did you do to him?” screamed Bobby.
“I simply opened his mind,” replied the man in the suit.
Bobby tried to calm his brother, who was now pissing himself, his eyes rolling up into the back of his head. He had no idea what to do. He was going to have to run back to his truck to call for an ambulance. Laying Billy down as gently as he could, he sprinted to get his cell phone.
Running back, still on the phone, he realized the man was staring off into the distance, frowning. As if his brother didn’t matter. Bobby felt the urge to punch the guy out, but he didn’t want to end up like Billy. Instead he collapsed back down beside his brother, checking on him. He was still seizing.
Looking up, all Bobby could ask was, “Why?”
“Why?” said the man in the suit. “Because I wanted to.”
The air around the man shimmered, like a heat distortion, but more angular. It shifted, and the man vanished. Gone.
Bobby stared down at what was left of his brother and started crying.
CHAPTER 5
The french fries were perfect. Crispy golden brown on the outside, seasoned just right, and fluffy potato goodness inside. Audrey had to consider that they may have been the best fries she’d ever had. Swiping another through the homemade cheese sauce, she popped it in her mouth. Elliot had gotten the same, but he was too busy attacking his giant burger.
“This may be the best food we’ve had on the trip so far,” he said between mouthfuls.
She had to agree. Her grilled tofu dog had been served with peppers and onions, a delicacy even back in California. She had put sriracha sauce all over it, much to Elliot’s horror. She thought back to the antacid medication he took every night and allowed herself a small smile.
A slight breeze blew, threatening their napkins. It was a beautiful day and they had decided to sit out on the patio and soak in the sun. At mid-afternoon, they had the space all to themselves. If this weather kept up, she might have to persuade Elliot to find a motel with a pool that night.
“So when did you decide to become a vegetarian?” asked Elliot, pointing at her tofu dog.
“I never really liked meat,” she said. “Never liked the idea of it. But I didn’t have much choice about what I ate when I was bouncing around foster care. Not until I went to live with the Reynolds. That was the summer before my freshman year in high school. They let me be vegetarian.”
“So they were your parents through high school?”
Audrey slid another fry through her cheese sauce. “Parents? I guess you could call them that. They tried, best they could. I lived there with two other kids, I know I’ve told you about them. Duncan was a year older than me, Mandy was two years y
ounger. Mandy was their precious baby and Duncan fought with them constantly. I was a ghost.”
“I’m sorry,” said Elliot.
Audrey didn’t really want to go down that particular memory lane with her brother. It was more than just that the Reynolds ignored her, they didn’t understand her. They understood Duncan and his anger, his need to lash out. He didn’t trust anybody and made sure everyone knew it. Mandy, on the other hand, was a pampered little shit who sucked up to their foster parents at every available opportunity. She put on the shiny smile and was rewarded for it. Audrey just wanted to hide in her bedroom with her computer, conflict free.
Duncan had disappeared after he turned eighteen, not even bothering to graduate. Audrey had never seen him again. Mandy had fed off the Reynolds until the last possible moment before jumping ship. Last she heard, the young woman was much further south, down near Los Angeles. Audrey had graduated, got a job as a night stocker at an office supply warehouse, and moved into a studio apartment. She had gone back to visit the Reynolds once, but it had been an uncomfortable and tense hour. Never again.
“There had to be some good times with the Reynolds,” said Elliot.
Audrey shrugged. “I suppose. They took us on a few short day trips. The beach, amusement parks, the zoo. The one trip to see their friend at the university was weird.”
“University?”
“Yeah, I don’t remember which one. We met some woman there. The Reynolds seemed friendly enough with her, but formal, too. Maybe like they were a little scared of her? I don’t know. Professor Binici. She bought me a poster of the solar system.”
“That’s pretty cool.”
“The whole thing was weird. They were weird. It’s like they were desperate for us to be the picture book family. Day trips, family dinners, holiday photos, all of it. It was all so forced and fake.”
‘I don’t know, like you said, they tried. You lost your mom to a violent car wreck, the other two had just been abandoned.”
Audrey stared at him, wanted to scream, but knew he was right. Despite her foster parents bungling things, she always knew their hearts were in the right place. Even knowing that, she didn’t want to hear it.
Elliot pushed the remains of his burger aside. “You never talk about her, you know.”
“Who?”
“Your mom.”
“What’s to say? My mom was crazy and died in a wreck when I was seven.”
“Audrey…” tried Elliot.
“It turns out she kept a dad from me. She used to lock herself in her room all the time and she would babble all kinds of insanity to me. I remember that. I remember being scared of her half the time.”
“What would she say?”
Honestly, Audrey couldn’t fully recall. She knew the things her mom had said all had a vaguely religious connotation to them, something fanatical. She didn’t remember them ever going to church or to any type of service, but maybe Audrey was never present for these events. She just knew the words hadn’t made much sense to her young mind and she had not found any answers since. All of her mother’s possessions had been sold off to pay for her debts, those avenues of inquiry long gone.
Melissa Darrow had been insane. That’s what Audrey had told herself for years, what she had likely believed even as a child when her mother was alive. She had denied Audrey her father, and then died suddenly, casting her young daughter into foster care. Whether the last was ultimately for better or worse, given her Mother’s mental state, Audrey would never know.
“Audrey?”
She looked up at her brother, realizing she had drifted again. “Sorry, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Please?”
“Of course, I’m sorry.”
She dipped two more fries in her cooling cheese sauce. Her brother. She was going to have to learn to be more open, for him if anything. She was too used to being alone. She had very few friends of note, and her last relationship had been a year ago and it had only lasted a few months. She needed to be better for Elliot.
“So where are we headed next?” asked Audrey.
CHAPTER 6
Eldridge, Ohio had once been grand, and the city elders mourned the decline of their town as often as they deluded themselves that it would rise again. A part of the so-called “rust belt,” it had lost a great deal of industry jobs overseas in the 1980’s and never found anything to replace them. Two massive steel plants at the edge of town sat empty, constant reminders of what used to be.
Decades ago, the city had thrived. The streets and buildings had been well-tended, the schools over-flowing, and the businesses prosperous. Not any longer. Pot holes lined every roadway, no money available in the meager budget to fix them, and most of the expensive stoplights had been replaced with stop signs over time. Not that it mattered, the traffic had dwindled along with the population. There were as many vacant homes as there were vacant storefronts, many of them filthy and falling apart. The city would tear down condemned buildings where it could, but the offending structures numbered in the hundreds. Eldridge City Schools enrollment had dropped alarmingly over the years, parents shipping their children to neighboring districts or moving out of the county altogether. People had no money to spend, so more and more businesses closed every year. A majority of the downtown was boarded up, the restaurants, boutiques, salons, book stores, haberdasheries, coffee shops, and more all having closed their doors for good.
The Wiltshire Hotel had been one of the jewels of Eldridge, a four-story building with a finished basement and complete with kitchen, dining hall, lounge, and ballroom. While it only had thirty small rooms in the building, it had been considered the premiere accommodation in the city during its time, from its completion in the 1930’s through the 1960’s. Poor management had seen it fumble in the seventies, and by the time The Wiltshire was on its feet again a decade later, there was no one left to rent out a room.
Various entrepreneurs had attempted to purchase the building in hopes of revitalizing the property over the years, but nothing ever came of it. It was too old, too big, too run down. Its size was a factor for the city, too cost prohibitive to bother tearing down. So instead, it sat there empty, another dead dream of the past.
Or it had been empty, until recently.
* * *
Heather wasn’t sure what was happening. She could barely remember how she got into the building. Driving home from work at the office, she was cutting through town when she had pulled over for some reason. No reason. Right in front of the old hotel. Something had compelled her to get out of her car and wander to the side of the building. There was a utility door there, one she had found unlocked. Heather didn’t know why she had to go inside, but she did. Dust motes floated in the dying sunlight which provided just enough light for her to see the stairs. She took them, still wondering what she was doing.
The place was relatively untouched, except for the years of accumulated grime. There wasn’t any litter or graffiti. Hand-carved banisters made from fumed oak wrapped around the stairs, small chandeliers at every landing. Heather kept rising, her destination unknown. On the third floor she froze, listening. Sounds leaked out from one of the rooms, something that sounded like sobbing.
Was someone here? What was she doing here? For a moment, Heather was petrified with indecision. Everything inside her told her to run, to flee from the darkening hotel. Instead, she took another step up and continued to the fourth floor. Screaming in her mind, she left the sounds behind her.
At the final landing, the hallway turned left toward a room or right into some sort of antechamber. Compelled, she moved right, and the stench hit her. Putrid, it smelled like body odor with some kind of chemical on top. Against her will, she pushed open both of the double doors and stepped into madness.
It had been a ballroom once, long ago. Square, with high ceilings, and a stage for a band at the back. Now, it was filled with a dull, pulsing light that illuminated skeletal-like mechanical structures that held aloft dozens of people clad in w
hite. They laughed and wept, babbled and prayed. All of them were disfigured beyond recognition, all identically so. Scurrying about the metal lattice work as if it were a jungle gym, they watched as Heather walked beneath them, dripping blood and saliva on her. Even now, she still couldn’t scream.
On the stage stood two figures clad in black robes. Heather found herself on her knees before them. Tears burst from her eyes, the only expression of terror she could release.
“Another one, my beloved,” said the shorter of the two, her voice feminine.
“Another to be repurposed,” added the other cloaked individual.
“Perhaps,” said the woman, drawing back her hood. “Perhaps we should test the mettle of our first Invocated in this realm.”
Heather choked at the site of the woman. She looked like a demonic statute come to life. Her skin was more like an ivory shell, shifting plates over internal organs held together by visible connective tissue. The blackest water splashed down from her head and off her shoulders in place of hair, her red eyes burned in amusement.
“The Sigh of the Ovessa speaks wisely, as always,” said the man.
He gestured and one of the mutilated people crept forward. It had been a young woman once. Once, before most of its hair had been ripped out, its lips carved off, its nose cut off, its eyelids and ears shorn from its body. Once, before its fingers had been extended and the flesh whittled away so that the bones protruded from the ends in sharpened points. Once, before it was smeared with some type of viscous substance that clung to its body, some of its muscles greying and fungal, and then clad in white rags. Once, it had been the junkie’s sister Megan.
“You are going to run,” said the woman. “If you can make it outside, you are free. But you have only moments before this Invocated gives chase. I would be swift.”
Heather looked from the woman to the creature standing near her.
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