Threshold

by King, R. L.

  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 spri
nging to his crinkled 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?”

  “Let’s not find out,” Jason said. The fact that his sister seemed to share Alastair Stone’s catlike curiosity about things strange and paranormal bothered him, especially considering their budding relationship as master and apprentice.

  “Don’t worry,” Stone said with a raised eyebrow. “I have no intention of letting this little beastie out of its cage. I—” He stopped, his attention focusing back on the construct.

  Something new was happening in there: the faintly glowing ball flung itself against the cube’s “walls,” and an almost inaudible buzz or hum emanated from within. None of the trio had ever heard it make any kind of noise before. As they watched, its urgency increased, along with the speed at which it caromed off the inner boundaries of its tiny prison.

  “It’s like it knows it’s dying soon...” Verity said in a near whisper.

  It appeared she was correct. The little ball continued darting around madly, gaining brightness as it did. Its sickly, red-purple glow increased, as did its size. Where it had before been small enough to move around inside the cage, it now seemed to be growing too large to be confined by it.

  “Is it gonna break out?” Jason asked, leaning in.

  “I don’t think so,” Stone said, but nonetheless he sat up a bit straighter, as if preparing himself for action if necessary.

  The glowing ball grew both larger and brighter, until it strained against the edges of the construct. After a few seconds, the cube itself began to move, rattling on the table. This went on, increasing in its intensity, for about thirty seconds. The tension and desperation of the thing inside became nearly palpable.

  And then, with no warning, the ball disappeared. There was no flash of light, no psychic scream, nothing. It simply ceased to exist. The cage settled back and stopped rattling, its crystals going dark.

  Stone let his breath out. “Well, that’s done, then,” he said, getting up to switch on the light. “And now we know about how long the big ones can hang around after they’ve been evicted.”

  “That’s useful, I guess,” Jason said. “If we’re planning to capture another one.” He looked up at Stone. “Are we planning to capture another one?”

  By mutual unspoken agreement, the three of them hadn’t talked much in the last two weeks about what had occurred at the underground torture chamber in San Francisco that had served as the headquarters for this area’s contingent of the Evil. They were a little surprised that they hadn’t had to. For the first few days after they’d gotten together with some Forgotten friends at a Palo Alto restaurant, they had spent a lot of time looking over their shoulders, as if expecting to be jumped at any moment by Dead Men Walking gangers or worse.

  But it seemed Stone’s hypothesis had been correct: the death of the area’s top-tier Evil, which had been possessing former talk-show host Gordon Lucas—and which had just met its final demise on the kitchen table—had thrown the rest of the local Evil into enough disarray that they apparently weren’t in a position to mount a revenge plan.

  Stone shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose we’ll have to at some point—either that, or find others who can help us.” He indicated the cage. “In any case, if we do plan to capture another one, I’ll have to build another one of these, which won’t be easy. This one’s dead now, and the materials to build it weren’t easy to get hold of.”

  Jason nodded. He knew Stone had been struggling with this. The trouble with the Evil, and what made them so insidious and difficult to fight, was the near impossibility of discerning whether they were possessing a given human unless they gave themselves away by doing something wildly out of character and usually violent. There were Forgotten—the strange, usually homeless, and mostly mentally unstable individuals who had manifested various paranormal abilities around the same time the Evil had arrived—who could identify Evil-possessed individuals, but the logistics of getting the two in proximity to each other often confounded matters even more.

  Worse, since the Evil preferred to possess people in positions of power, it was dangerous to reveal anything to the authorities without taking a risk. There was also the fact that those authorities who weren’t possessed by the Evil didn’t look too kindly on tales of extradimensional entities who fed on human (preferably negative) emotion.

  Stone had discovered how to build magical items that reacted to the presence of the Evil—the now-inert construct on the table was his first and only specimen at this point—but they also required close proximity to get any kind of useful reading and even then they weren’t all that precise. The bottom line was that the Evil were a problem that had to be dealt with, but only after much thought and careful examination of the possible ramifications. Once that particular genie was out of the bottle, there would be no putting it back in.

  In the meantime, the three of them had been trying to return to a normal life—or at least the closest thing you could get to a normal life when talking about a classically trained mage who taught collegiate-level Occult Studies on the side; a seventeen-year-old girl who was not only a fledgling mage, but also a Forgotten and the only known individual capable of ejecting the Evil from its human hosts without killing them; and her bemused and protective older brother, who recently discovered that he had the ability to serve as a willing “magical battery,” providing the energy that allowed a mage to cast powerful spells without causing injury or psychic drain to either party. Jason couldn’t decide if the whole thing sounded like the premise for a bad sitcom or the punch line to a very weird joke.

  In any case, Stone had wasted no time getting Verity started on her magical studies. This amounted to spending large chunks of time with her in the family room of the house he’d rented to replace the one that had been destroyed in an assassination attempt by his Evil-possessed housekeeper, quizzing her on the books o
f magical theory he’d given her to read, and instructing her on the basics of actually casting simple spells. Jason’s ears still rang from her shriek of delight a week ago, when she’d managed to levitate a pencil two inches off the table for a grand total of five seconds.

  Jason himself struggled to find his place in this odd little team, especially now that Verity showed signs of actually being able to do real magic. Sure, his ability to help Stone cast spells more easily was useful, but not nearly as useful as being able to throw lightning bolts or levitate onto roofs. He didn’t even have a job now, which frustrated him even more. He stared at the little cage on the table and sighed. Nothing to be done about it at the moment, he knew. But he was going to have to do something, and soon.

  The phone rang. Stone got up and disappeared into the other room to answer it, while Verity picked up the cage. “Wonder if he’ll bother building another one of these things,” she said, examining it. “We could start our very own Evil zoo!”

  Stone returned a couple of minutes later, pausing in the doorway. He held on to it as if it was the only thing keeping him upright. His eyes were haunted, his expression one of someone who’d just been broadsided by shock.

  Jason looked up. “Al? What’s going on? Something wrong?”

  Instead of replying, Stone went back out to the liquor cabinet, poured himself a shot, and sank into the nearest chair. Jason and Verity trailed him, concerned. It was only then that he looked at them as if he were actually seeing them.

  “That…was a friend from back East,” he said, his voice dull and colorless. “She was calling to tell me that another friend has been…murdered.”

  Verity’s stared. “Murdered?”