All in Bad Time

by Yvonne Montgomery

  "Brenna is at the left corner going up. After her are Noreen, and then me. Eve."

  The silence was broken by another burst of thunder.

  Max sighed. "These 'holders' are on the map from the packet you found in the tunnel?"

  "In the safe room off the tunnel." Eve felt a twinge in her back where the icy paralysis had happened that afternoon. She moved her shoulders in an effort to stem the discomfort. "Brenna was asleep and I had the flashlight on for a minute. Caught the flash of metal and went to look. It was a drawer about four inches by four inches and the packet was in it."

  "So you said before." Max frowned in thought. "Did it look as though anyone had been in that room, or could have put the packet in that drawer?"

  Eve shook her head, not understanding what he meant. "It's a hidden tunnel, a hidden room. Who would've gone down there?"

  "As it happened we did." Neal was standing in the kitchen doorway. His jacket had rain beaded on it and his hair was wet.

  Andrea rushed to him, and ignoring his jacket, threw her arms around him. "Am I glad to see you. Are you okay?"

  Neal kissed her soundly and pulled back to search her face. "Sure. Why wouldn't I be?" He took the towel Aura Lee handed him and wiped his face and hair.

  "We've been scaring ourselves while waiting for you." Noreen said in a querulous voice. "A time-honored practice here at Wisdom Court."

  "Maybe so," said Rose from her chair at the table, "but this time we've got a little extra oomph in our source. Come sit down, Neal, and we'll get your take on this."

  While he discarded his jacket and finished drying off, the others cut and served the pie. Dink showed his skill at piling whipping cream on each piece and dumped it into the coffee as well.

  "Okay," Neal said finally after a large bite of pumpkin, "what's the big deal?" He peered down at the map Eve slid in front of him. "That's Wisdom Court for sure, and in plenty of detail."

  Rose handed him the magnifying glass as Eve explained what she'd found. "The question is," she summed up, "if this map has been hidden in the tunnel for however many years, how can we explain our names being written on it?"

  Neal stopped chewing. "There's no way. Caldicott died what, seven months ago? Before that she was too frail to climb into those tunnels, although," he said in a lower, preoccupied voice, "She could've accessed them from the pantry. And there were the stairs. But she didn't have the strength to go all the way to that room and pull out the map for last-minute adjustments."

  Eve had pulled the map back in front of her and was sliding the magnifying glass her way. "I want to look at the legend again."

  "Aura Lee would've known if she sneaked off into the tunnels, right?" He looked to her for confirmation.

  "She hadn't even met Andrea when she died!" exclaimed Kerry. "Or Brenna, let alone Dink. Eve just got here. There's no way Caldicott had anything to do with this."

  "Wait a minute. There's a tiny line just under the drawing of Wisdom Court. The farmhouse, I mean." Eve picked up the glass again and looked through it. For a perilous journey, persons of strength hold the directions for the seeker to keep her from losing her way. Eve looked up, her hand shaking. "Have you heard of holding the directions?"

  Aura Lee nodded. "It has a ceremonial meaning. The concern is for a person undertaking a vision quest. She goes out searching for identity and purpose in her life, and she encounters dangers along the way. Trusted people are given tokens to keep on her behalf. Each token represents a direction, like on a compass. The person holding it chants for the seeker and keeps it as a beacon for her. All of the beacons work together to guide the seeker. It's considered an honor to be asked." Carefully she flicked a lighter and lit the row of candles arranged on the sideboard.

  Eve grasped her cup to warm her hands. "Apparently we've all been honored, then, because we've been asked."

  "Who else has something to share tonight?" Rose asked abruptly.

  Brenna raised her head. She'd been staring down at the table, rubbing around the edges of the bump on her forehead. "I've been trying to. Remember how I asked if I could photograph our trip into the tunnels?"

  Neal nodded.

  "Well, I finally looked at what I recorded." She leaned against Dink's shoulder. "I've been a little out of it. Anyway, I want to show you what I found. I've turned up the contrast as much as I can so you can catch the details." She typed in a command and turned her open laptop around for them.

  The picture was grainy and in so much shadow it appeared to be shot in black and white. Brenna had been behind the others as they started out from the hidden room below Eve's apartment. The banter between Andrea and Neal, and then Eve's comments along with Kerry's and Max's additions lasted as the group went forward through the narrow corridors. When Eve and Brenna stayed behind, however, the tenor changed.

  The sound was obscured as they sat on the stones in the first room they'd found. Eve stretched her legs and Brenna said something, the only sound now an electronic buzz. A figure moved behind Eve, easing across the rock face out of the frame.

  "What was that?" Rose was leaning toward the screen. "Did I actually see that?"

  "Yes, hold on." The camera angle jutted upward, reflecting Brenna's fall in the cave. A figure hanging from the ceiling stared down, and reached across Brenna toward Eve, malevolence in its shadowed features. The edges of it began to break up and, with a quick leap, it skittered away across the rocks, flowing over the uneven surface and disappearing into a crack between two large stones. The laptop screen went dark.

  "By the Goddess." Aura Lee's face was frozen with fear. "You didn't see that at the time?"

  "No. Remember, I'd fallen, too, and it was the camera that looked up. I'd landed on my side and was trying to get up."

  Max looked at the empty screen. "Were there any other shots of that creature?"

  Brenna nodded and typed another command. "After I hit my head on that filthy stone, I dropped my phone. I set this in slow motion. Take a look."

  A jumble of rocks and wood supports were blocked as a shadow figure moved toward the camera and then away as the camera itself jerked as if kicked. In the light they saw the outline of a man with long arms and legs. His hands cast grotesque shadows on the smooth wall directly behind him. Eve bent over Brenna as the shadow reached for her. A screeching sound filled the air and he backed up to the wall and was slowly absorbed into the stone.

  Chapter 24

  The room was hushed but for the wind whipping at the house. Eve felt the beat of her heart, was aware of pain in her knee, but shock had blasted away every thought in her head. As she waited for what would happen next, an idea trickled into her mind: they formed a tableau, a group of motionless people representing a scene for the amusement of an unseen audience. Did they symbolize amazement? Horror? People overwhelmed by the ongoing assault of paranormal events? Who was the audience?

  A second later Elizabeth sighed, and the spell was broken. "What did we just see?"

  "And was it real?" asked Noreen. She appeared even more wizened than usual, her skin gray against the contrast of her black sweater.

  Rose was holding her arms in an attempt warm herself. "That's one of the most frightening things I've ever seen."

  "How could it happen?" Aura Lee's face was creased in bewilderment. "How? A person who can melt into a rock? Who can move across a rock like a shadow?" She shuddered.

  "What if it is a shadow?" Eve winced at the pain in her knee, trying to erase the aching with her fingertips. "I didn't see anyone else in that tunnel, but so much was going on and the flashlight was fitful, to say the least. If the camera captured the shadow of someone who stood watching us, then..."

  "That's pretty scary." Kerry hunched her shoulders. "But what I saw couldn't be just a man and his shadow. The way it moved—God!—the way it hung from the ceiling of the tunnel." She leaned into Max, seeking his warmth. "It was an other. Something outside my understanding."

  Elizabeth's eyes widened. "An Outside Man," she whispered
. Shivering, she looked over both shoulders, expecting something to jump out at her. "My auntie told us about a tribe in the Aleutians that banished men who did evil things—murder, rape—stuff like that. No one would accept them and they existed alone on the fringes, stealing food and other things. Children were warned to stay in at night so they couldn't be stolen."

  "Like the bogeyman?" Brenna asked in a small voice.

  "Uh-huh, but the Outside Man sounded scarier to me. Auntie said over time they became more than men, worse than men, and did steal children to eat them or turn them to evil."

  Neal zeroed in on Brenna. "I assume you've inspected your camera."

  Brenna nodded. "I tested it this afternoon and everything checked out fine. There wasn't much light down in the tunnel, but it recorded what you saw. It looked like a man, or the shadow of a man who could sink into his background."

  "Dios, it looked like one of those special effects movies," Dolores said with feeling. "To think of someone like this sliding around under the house will drive away sleep tonight."

  "Thanks, Dolores." Kerry rubbed her face with a scrubbing motion. "The longer all this goes on, the weirder it gets. Where the hell would something like that come from?"

  "That's one question. The other is to what end?" Max tapped a pencil on the edge of the table. "Every culture has its bogeyman, some of them bone-chilling, but even after the research we've done on every paranormal manifestation you can imagine, I can tell you we haven't come across anything like what we saw in Brenna's recording."

  "Could it be that man in England who's looking for the talisman?" Andrea asked. "Could he have refined remote viewing to include travel to the place he's been observing?"

  He shook his head. "I don't know how to answer that."

  Aura Lee looked down at her hands. "What about magic?"

  Rose raised a brow. "What about it?"

  "Oh, you know what I mean." Aura Lee pursed her lips in irritation. "Cottie's journal said the reason the evil earl wanted the talisman was to create spells that would further the Nazi cause. What if he continued working toward that without the talisman? What if he practiced black magic, the kind I've barely found out about because it's evil?"

  Brenna was holding tightly onto Dink's hand. "So you're saying it's possible that what my camera picked up was something sent by this mad Englishman's coven to spy on us?"

  Dink frowned at her as he mulled over the idea. "That's quite a leap, isn't it? Don't get me wrong," he added hurriedly, "Bren told me about her grandmother's ghost and all that, and I'm not saying I don't believe her, but how skilled are these people? How crazy are they, too?"

  The lights went back on.

  Like sleepwalkers abruptly awakened they blinked and looked around at each other in light that suddenly felt too bright.

  Neal ran his hand across his beard in a bewildered gesture. "Has anybody seen anything else like this shadow figure since the tunnel fell in?"

  Rose shook her head. "We've been spared that, I suspect."

  "Maybe not," Kerry said suddenly. "The figure I saw out in the courtyard. You know, the one we thought might be Neal?" She turned to Max, eyes wide. "What if that was the same creature?"

  "What was it doing?" Neal asked.

  Kerry leaned against Max's shoulder. "It was moving around the fountain, but what bothered me was how it moved. It sort of slid over the courtyard bricks, moving faster here and there, almost gliding."

  Neal frowned. "Is that how I move?"

  "No, of course not, but Andrea was getting upset, so we all said it could be you." Kerry shot an annoyed glance at Andrea. "See how mistakes are made?"

  "Bite me." Andrea picked up one of her pencils and tapped it against her sketchbook.

  Absentmindedly Neal patted her on the shoulder. "Andrea said something happened in the library this afternoon."

  Max glanced across the table at Eve. "I came in at the end. She's the one to ask."

  Haltingly, Eve told them about the icy pain she'd felt along her spine, then Noreen's collapse as she'd tried to come to her aid. "Max went to help her and something grabbed onto my arm. Hard. It tried to pull me down to the end of the table and I had the strongest feeling that whatever it was doing it wanted the packet. I'd fallen on it." She paused and took a breath. "I don't know exactly how it happened. I thought of the figure in the hidden room, the one with red eyes, and how I drove it away by screaming and cursing it."

  "Oh, mercy, do you think they're related?" Noreen exclaimed.

  "I don't know." Eve frowned as she considered the idea. "Maybe. But today I focused on recreating the dark. I imagined how the open trapdoor looked and I closed it in my mind. And I visualized the hand on my arm, letting it hold me more and more tightly." She paused and then shrugged helplessly. "I just imagined peeling those fingers off my arm, one by one, and because I was angry, I saw myself folding them back as far as I could push them. When I heard his scream in my head, I knew I'd done it."

  Elizabeth slumped in her chair. "Are you saying it actually happened? The invisible hand got its fingers bent back?"

  Eve closed her eyes and sighed. "The hand let go of my arm." She pushed her left sleeve up and someone gasped. Deep purple bruises on her bicep looked like nothing so much as fingers wrapped around her arm.

  "Oh, Eve." Rose came around the table and knelt beside her. "I have some arnica and we can make a poultice with it." She glanced up into her face. "Is it terribly painful?"

  "Not too bad." Eve pulled her sleeve back down. "I've been more freaked out emotionally than feeling a lot of pain."

  Rose steadied herself with the table as she stood up. "I can understand that." She noticed Dolores staring at her hands. "What is it, Dolores?"

  When she looked up at Eve, tears spilled from her eyes. "You are hurting, jita, and that makes me sad, but if I am honest, what I also think is a question scaring me so much."

  Beside her Elizabeth reached for her hand. "What question, honey?"

  Dolores seemed to shrink into herself. "This Outside Man, if he was here at Wisdom Court... when he comes again, how angry will he be because his fingers are bent?"

  On her way back to her chair, Rose patted Dolores on the shoulder. "All will be well."

  Eve straightened in her chair. "I hope he's royally pissed off. And frightened, because I made him let go." She glanced at Max. "We may be mixing up things that don't belong together, the Outside Man, the red-eyed creature in the hidden room." She looked at them with serious eyes. "What we need to worry about now is the map with our names on the little holder labels."

  "If we're the direction holders, who's our vision seeker?" Kerry shot a look at Max. "Is it one of us or is some one trying to come here?"

  Max shrugged. "You're good at asking questions, luv, but I don't have the answers. I feel we're moving toward a confrontation, but I don't know with whom. I've been attempting to contact Charlie, but he hasn't responded for the last few days. I'm worried about him, but afraid to further try contacting him to avoid alerting others around him."

  Eve felt her nerves tighten. "Do you think he's in danger?"

  Max's eyes were kind. "I don't feel he is, but I can't be totally confident I'm right."

  Rose spoke softly from the end of the table. "Look at Andrea."

  They turned toward her and saw her hand was wielding a pencil swiftly over her sketchpad.

  "Her eyes are closed," Brenna whispered. "How can she see what she's drawing?"

  Noreen cleared her throat. "She may not be the one sketching this picture."

  Eve was watching closely, barely breathing as the lines on the paper began to take shape.

  "She's drawing a face." Kerry leaned over the table a little to get a clearer view. "She's amazing."

  Rose saw that Neal was stone still, his eyes dark with pain. "What is it?"

  "She hates the loss of control." His voice was gravelly. "I hate her having to go through this again."

  "It's coming together, the image, I mean." Dolore
s looked up from the page and stared at Eve. "I think it's you." She turned toward Rose. "Why would she draw a portrait of Eve?"

  "Wait." Noreen narrowed her eyes as she saw the letters forming under the picture of Eve's face. "I suspect you have an answer to your question, Kerry." She waved her small hand at the sketchpad.

  Kerry peered at it and looked across the table at Eve. "It's you. You're the one."

  Eve felt her stomach roil. "What?"

  "Says it right here. Look." Eve got up to limp around the table. On the sketchpad in front of Andrea her own face stared up at her, unsmiling, eyes steady. Under it were the words, Vision Seeker.

  Time Out of Time

  "Words from the grave, words from the grave." Severn muttered hoarsely, over and over. He struggled through the worn pages in front of him, pushing them with his good hand. He had to find a weapon against the woman. There had to be something he could use to stem her power. To end her.

  Had she been playing with him this whole time? His face burned as the thought ripped through him. She had shown herself the fearful victim. He'd followed her signatures thinking her helpless. How had she so thoroughly hidden her true nature? Were all her powers greater than his? He howled inwardly with rage.

  Somewhere here were the spells his father had used to sway his English cronies to the side of Hitler. And somehow he'd kept himself out of prison as post-war revelations of his efforts to sabotage the British fight against Germany began to be known. He had to have used the old ways to save his corrupt hide.

  There. He pulled the volume to him, eyes closing in agony as a fresh wave of pain crackled along his nerves. His fingers... his useless claw of a hand, maimed forever by a whore of a woman who laughed at his spells, who mocked his careful efforts. Growling with rage he leaned over the pages.

  Blood of retribution summon.

  Hatred writhes, and insult taunts.

  Justice hereby swears destruction,

  Past transgression looms and haunts.

  Sharpen knives to razor edge,