The Bad Box

by Harvey Click

  Stonebrenner grinned and said, “I’m your lord and master.”

  Fear and anger kneaded her innocent face into something less pretty, and she started yelling for her husband and ordering Stonebrenner out of her house.

  He grinned and transfixed her with his eyes. She stopped yelling then and stared at him with a different expression, something like religious awe.

  She was a spirited woman with strong resistance, but his eyes were stronger, and he realized that even though his ordeal in the tomb had weakened his body, it had significantly strengthened his will power. A sorcerer’s greatest tool is the power of his will, and all the rituals and disciplines of his training are whetstones to hone it. What greater discipline can there be than 40 years locked in a box? It occurred to him that by now he might very well be the most powerful man on earth, more powerful even than Charles Newman.

  Eric Beers had returned with a mop and bucket and was staring gape-mouthed at his wife.

  “Get to work,” Stonebrenner said, and the young man started mopping.

  “Put down your glass of water and come here,” he told the wife, and when she did he touched her temples very gently. He liked her, liked her fight, and he didn’t want to burn all of it out of her. She knelt and was sick for a minute, adding her vomit to the puddle her husband was mopping up, but she didn’t pass out, and after a minute she was able to stand with Stonebrenner’s help.

  “Good,” he said. “Now have a drink of water and rinse out your mouth.”

  He held the glass to her lips and she drank. He set the glass on the coffee table and kissed her, pressing his tongue into her mouth.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Kathy.”

  He unbuttoned her pink sundress, removed it, and pulled off her pink panties. Her body was nice, only a faint trace of stretch marks on her softly rounded belly, her breasts still shapely with pretty nipples the same color as her freckles.

  Eric Beers was leaning on his mop staring at them, his lips curled in an impotent snarl, and Stonebrenner told him to get back to work. He led Kathy to the sofa and told her to lie face down over the arm of it. A bit of her fight came back when he entered her, and he pressed her face against the sofa cushion while she struggled and moaned.

  The thoughts that he glimpsed in her mind now were sexual, memories of her first fumbling high-school dates with Eric, his wet lips pressed nervously against hers, his rough farm-boy hands slipping awkwardly into her brassiere, but behind the clumsiness of their youth Stonebrenner glimpsed something else, a strange and mysterious emotion called love.

  He thought about the gnosis of love. In his whole long life he had always been too busy and too driven to explore its mysteries. His monkish dispassion hadn’t saved him 40 years ago, but this time the power of love would be his ally against Charles Newman, and he believed that love would prevail. His love must be for Angel, of course, but this too was a form of love, and it had its undeniable pleasures.

  When he was about to finish, he grabbed her hair, yanked her face up off the sofa cushion, and slapped her hard to put some fight back into her, and she howled with indignation as he ejaculated.

  Eric Beers was staring at them again, his lips twitching with anger, and Stonebrenner told him to take his mop bucket out of the room. Kathy was still lying over the sofa and sobbing softly as he zipped his trousers and went outside to the van where Hamelin was waiting.

  “Drive back to town,” he said. “If there are still any body parts in the apartment, clear them out. Then bring Angel here. She’ll be very sick and you’ll have to help her to the car. Bring whatever essentials you’ll need because we’ll be staying here from now on.”

  The drooling poet cursed under his breath but backed out of the driveway to do what he was told. Stonebrenner returned to the house, where Eric Beers was helping his wife get dressed.

  When her sundress was buttoned he sat with her on the sofa and kissed her forehead.

  “It’s all right, Kathy,” he said. “Everything is all right.”

  Her eyes were open, but she seemed to be staring at nothing.

  “I told you to get that bucket out of here,” Stonebrenner said. “This is my oak floor, and I don’t want a wet bucket sitting on it.”

  He climbed the wide stairs to the second story, and then climbed the narrow spiral stairs that led to the belvedere. He looked out of a cobwebbed window, as he had looked for countless hours so many years ago. He cleared his mind and made every sense alert.

  He couldn’t detect Charles Newman in any direction he turned, but that meant nothing. He hadn’t been able to detect him 40 years ago either.

  Chapter Forty

  Stonebrenner eased Angel’s wheelchair down the basement steps. The jostling made her head reel, and she was trying not to vomit. It was embarrassing to throw up in front of Baby, and she always tried to wait until he was out of the room.

  He had allowed her only two days to recover from her first treatment. The second procedure, performed just hours after she had arrived at his house yesterday afternoon, made her even sicker than the first one because this time he had administered three treatments all at once. He had cut three deep incisions on her back, one for each kidney and another for her pancreas, and had filled them with three different poisonous concoctions. All three sites burned with fires that shot like blazing bullets all the way through her body.

  Her groin also burned, because there was a sutured wound where her penis used to be. There was still a plastic tube stuck in her urethra to help her pee, but Baby said it probably could be removed in a day or two.

  Angel wondered if he was speeding up the treatment program so it would be finished before his enemy could find them. She tried not to harbor such suspicions because she needed to trust her physician, her teacher, her fiancé. Even if he was rushing things, she was willing to take the risk if it meant having a chance to help him in his fight against Charles Newman.

  At the bottom of the steps, she forced herself to lift her head and sit upright in the chair, wanting to appear alert and interested. He had promised to show her his treasures, but nothing she could see looked valuable, just a large basement with stone walls, a furnace, a hot water heater, shelves and cobwebs. He pushed her chair to the far end, but there was nothing to see here, not even shelves, only a dead spider stuck on a dirty wall.

  “Watch closely,” he said. “Down here where no one can possibly see us, I’ll show you how I crafted the lock that keeps our enemy from being able to set foot on this property.”

  He stretched his arms in front of himself and began weaving his hands around in a strange way, as if caressing an invisible object. Angel thought she wasn’t seeing clearly, the bad light and her illness making it appear that first one hand and then the other would flicker out of view for a moment—vanish completely and then reappear.

  But it wasn’t her eyes: his hands really were disappearing; they seemed to be dipping in and out of some strange convolution of nothingness in the basement air.

  “There,” he said when he was done. “You see, I keep my lock hidden in a parallelism, where no one can possibly find it.”

  “Parallelism?” she asked weakly.

  “Yes, a parallel domain. There are many kingdoms, more than one could count. To craft my lock I make use of a nexus where another domain intersects ours.”

  “I feel so dizzy.”

  “I’m aware this isn’t the ideal time to teach you,” he whispered sternly, “but lift up your head and pay attention. There’s much you need to learn in a very short time. Two of us are stronger than one, but not if one of us is ignorant.

  “The lock that I just showed you protects this house, the yard, and the barn against Charles Newman. Many years ago, even when I still trusted him, I collected bits of his hair and nails whenever I had an opportunity. They contain his DNA, of course, and so I was able to craft the lock specifically for him. You and I may come here, even the mailman may come, but Newman is irrevocably lock
ed out. He may be able to wander around in my fields, but he won’t be able to enter my house or my immediate property.”

  “Then you’re safe,” she said.

  “Here I’m safe. But until I find him and kill him I’m a prisoner because I can’t safely leave this property.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. Newman is a traveler, so he could be anywhere. He likes Europe, but he could be in Tibet or Africa searching for potions and spells and talismans. Or he could be much nearer. I’ve put out my feelers for him, but he seems to have woven a veil around himself so dense I can’t penetrate it. But wherever he is, I’m certain he’s coming closer. By now he knows I’m out of the grave, and he wants to put me back in.

  “But let’s turn to a pleasanter subject. Let me show you a much simpler and cruder lock. To open this one, all you need to do is push hard on these two stones at the same time.”

  Baby pressed two stones, and part of the basement wall groaned inward, making a doorway into darkness. He wheeled her chair through it, and the air inside was cool, damp, and musty. He pushed the stone doorway shut behind them, switched on a flashlight and handed it to her.

  “Aim it down the stairs,” he said.

  The flashlight shook in her hands, and Angel saw steps hewn out of solid rock. Baby eased the wheelchair down step by step until they came to a stone floor. The trembling circle of light showed walls of rough stone and stalactites hanging from a low ceiling. They were in a long, narrow cavern, and Angel felt an ugly thrill of terror. Her time in the box had made her deeply claustrophobic, and she very badly wanted out of this tight place.

  “These are natural limestone caverns,” he said, his hoarse voice echoing. “The room we’re in is the largest chamber. They extend under the property for a little ways, out toward the woods. Fifty years ago I hired contractors to build the stairs down from the basement and build the door in the basement wall, and I paid them very well to keep their mouths shut. They dynamited the only other entrance and sealed all the cracks and crevices with concrete to keep the caverns watertight. The only openings are a few waterproof shafts to keep the air fresh. No one else can get in. We’re always safe here.”

  He pushed her chair farther into the cavern, where it widened a bit. This part was set up as a laboratory, wooden tables cluttered with flasks and retorts, wooden cupboards wherever they could fit into the recesses of the walls. He lit a kerosene lantern on a table and opened a steel trunk nestled in an alcove in the wall. He reached into it and scooped up a handful of gold coins.

  “We’ll never worry about bills,” he said, grinning like a skull with long yellow teeth.

  He shut the trunk and opened a cupboard, its shelves lined with jars and beakers. He removed a small jar and held it carefully, as if it were a priceless vase.

  “Dried venom from an extinct snake,” he said proudly. “This is one of the ingredients that’s making your pancreas hurt so badly right now. Once this irreplaceable powder is gone there will be no more Longevitals, unless science catches up.”

  He replaced the jar carefully and pointed to others. “I have specimens of eight extinct insects, and I ground some of their precious carcasses to treat your kidneys. I have dried leaves from the Egyptian Sekem tree, which hasn’t been seen for centuries, though it’s rumored that some Sufi adepts possess living specimens. My Angel, the contents of these shelves are priceless. Who wouldn’t torture his own mother for such treasures?”

  Baby shut the cupboard and pulled a dull metal box from a cranny in the wall.

  “This contains one of our vulnerabilities—Hermesium. It’s a metal invented by alchemists, and it’s deadly to Longevitals. The screws Charles Newman used to seal my coffin were made of it. You must never handle it without rubber gloves—the poison may leach through your skin.”

  He opened another cupboard and showed Angel another treasure. She had never seen him like this, so filled with enthusiasm. For a while his excitement nearly made her forget how sick she was, but her scalp itched and whenever she scratched it a clump of hair came out in her hand. It had been falling out since the first treatment, and soon she would be bald.

  Baby had thrown away her beautiful red hair, and she wondered if he wanted her to look as terrible as possible. Maybe it was because he wanted to love her spirit rather than her body—he had talked many times about the marriage of spirits.

  “There’s so much to teach you,” he said. “Today we’ll work on the etymology of the ancient words. I know very little about computers, but they make a useful analogy. Each word your name-bringers collected was like an intricate digital download. When you breathed the seven words into my mouth, you were reinstalling seven operating programs to restore me from the spell Newman had planted in me, a spell no doubt similar to a computer virus.”

  Angel tried to concentrate on his teaching, wanting to learn the skills she would need to help him, but the poison he had given her yesterday turned his words into a dizzy delirium, a sour spew of sickness.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Late Friday afternoon Ben and Sarah were lying in his bed—their bed now—enjoying the soft afterglow of lovemaking when his cellphone rang. He saw that it was Ed Hardin and picked up, even though Sarah grumbled and made a face.

  “Well, Ben, it cost me three of the best bottles from my cellar, but I learned some interesting news from Gerald McClosky. Stonebrenner is back, his son supposedly.”

  “What do you mean ‘supposedly’?”

  “Well, this supposed son’s signature is identical to his father’s, for one thing. I’ve learned some other things too.”

  “What things?”

  “I don’t want to tell you over the phone. You already think I’m a crazy old coot with my ghost stories, and this stuff will sound just plain nuts if I can’t show you the evidence I’ve dug up. Why don’t you and Sarah come up here for the weekend?”

  Sarah was running her fingernails over Ben’s chest. He didn’t want to go to Mount Vernon for the weekend; he was having too much fun here.

  “I don’t need to see any evidence,” Ben said. “I already know you’re nuts. I’m trained to see things like that.”

  “Let’s just say I’ve collected a hell of a lot of folklore over the years, and the last few days, since that cemetery was vandalized, I’ve been looking through my files and piecing some of the stories together like a quilt. And believe me, it’s a pretty crazy quilt I’ve come up with.”

  “I smell another book in the works. Guess I better get started on the intro.”

  “Maybe so. But I’ll tell you something, Ben, I’m pretty sure this supposed son of Stonebrenner is old Isaac himself.”

  “Yeah? He’d be pretty old, wouldn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he was probably in his mid-fifties when he disappeared, which would put him in his 90s now. McClosky said he doesn’t look that old, but he does look awful. He said he looks like something that crawled out of a grave—I believe those were his exact words.”

  “So he’s the son and he’s sick. Not a very good ghost story.”

  “It’s not that simple, Ben. Poor old McClosky seems to be in a bit of financial embarrassment, so I offered him a little loan, and in return he let me examine a drawing made by Isaac and one made by the son. Now, you know I collect art and I know something about recognizing forgery. These drawings were done by the same man, Ben.”

  Ben wasn’t paying much attention. Sarah had gotten out of bed and was slipping on a very small pair of light blue panties. Then she slipped on a white T-shirt that didn’t quite cover the panties, stepped into a pair of sandals, and left the room.

  “You’ve read too many Sherlock Holmes stories, Ed. Besides, who cares if it’s the old man or his son?”

  “Ben, I’m sure this has something to do with the Dietrick case. I have evidence.”

  “Yeah? What evidence?”

  Ben didn’t want to think about the Dietrick case right now. He and Sarah had been trying to put it out of their
minds.

  “I told you, I can’t explain this over the phone. If you want to know how all this fits together, you’ll have to come here and see for yourself. I want you to look at the materials I’ve found and then make up your own mind. Bring some guns and we’ll do some shooting. Does Sarah know how to shoot?”

  “Better than you. I’ll ask her what she wants to do and get back.”

  Ben hung up, got dressed, and went downstairs. Sarah was in the kitchen peeling asparagus; chicken breasts were sautéing on the stove. He stood behind her, held her close, and smelled her hair. To hell with the Dietrick house, with Darnell and Angel, to hell with everything except the smell of Sarah’s hair.

  The past few days had been happy, maybe even happier than the days when he had gotten to know Isabel. Wednesday after his appointments they had hiked through the valleys and caves of Hocking Hills. They had rented a cabin for the night, and since he had no appointments Thursday they had rented horses. Sarah hadn’t ridden one since her childhood in Iowa, and he could still see the smile on her face as she rode her brown mare through the hilly forest trails.

  But maybe the best times had been spent right here, hours of laughter and lovemaking and secret-sharing. The ugly situation out there beyond the long driveway had left them alone, and they had begun to believe that Darnell was dead and the danger was past. Why bring back that darkness now?

  “So wha’d he want?” Sarah asked.

  “He wants us to come up to Mount Vernon and listen to his silly stories. Ed loves to have people listen to his stories.”

  “What’s this old man and son stuff?”

  Ben told her. At first Sarah seemed to take it no more seriously than he did, but by the time dinner was on the table, he could see she was stewing over it. She had been smiling like a little girl for several days, but now her frown was back. He wished he hadn’t told her.

  She chewed her chicken breast slowly with her brow furrowed. “When we were leaving that horrible house, you said you didn’t think what happened there was just our imagination,” she said. “Well then, what was it?”