Un-fur-tunate Murders

by Harper Lin

  When I woke up, I didn’t really think about it as it faded quickly, as dreams usually do. That was, until Bea arrived at work.

  Pectus Adsecula

  “So let me take a head count. One. Two. Great. Everyone survived the storm,” Aunt Astrid joked as Bea let herself in the back door of the café. “I slept like a log and feel refreshed. Even on this brisk November morning, I feel all warm inside.”

  “Survived the storm? Just barely.” Bea sighed. “I had the shortwave radio on most of the night in case a tornado touched down. I didn’t want to risk sleeping through the Wonder Falls emergency siren.”

  “Did you keep poor Jake up, too?” I asked. Jake, Bea’s husband, was a real trooper to put up with some of Bea’s quirks, like her vegan cooking and her health-conscious habits, not to mention the fact she was a witch, and so were the rest of us Greenstones.

  “He had no choice.” Bea raised her eyebrows. “Who else was I going to talk to? Peanut Butter just kept snuggling closer and closer to me every time the thunder rumbled. Poor thing was a nervous wreck.”

  I felt bad about that. Peanut Butter, Bea’s feline companion, was still just a baby compared to Aunt Astrid’s gigantic Maine Coon cat, Marshmallow, and my Treacle, who was a beautiful black alley cat, a rebel. Not much made him nervous, but when he got spooked, as he did yesterday, you can bet I paid attention.

  “So either of you guys know what that was that literally got into Tamara yesterday?”

  “The technical name for it is pectus adsecula. A soul parasite,” Aunt Astrid said while opening the blinds and letting the sun shine into the café.

  “That’s even grosser than the description you gave last night.” I balked. “Bea, you got anything you can whip up for a queasy stomach? This is really too much.”

  With wide eyes, Bea nodded and said she’d be making enough for the two of us. Aunt Astrid didn’t seem phased.

  “The funny thing is those creatures are usually only picked up if a person is passing through a mass of decomposing material.”

  Aunt Astrid pursed her lips and put her hand on her hip. She stared into the space in front of her, as she did often.

  With the gift of being able to see multiple dimensions within this one, she was never just daydreaming but rather scanning the layers of realms that coexisted all together yet separately.

  “Not dead things like we’re used to here. But rather those dead and dying things that are otherworldly. Take, for example, a cemetery. They’re loaded with this kind of energy. But because it is sacred ground and has been blessed, this type of decomposition doesn’t occur. People can go and visit their loved ones and emerge without any residue or contamination.” Aunt Astrid’s face became grave. “But take the Killing Fields in Cambodia or Dachau in Germany, or any place where mass graves have been found, where evil placed them there, you’ll find this kind of creature and even worse sometimes, writhing about in the ethereal debris.”

  I put my hand to my chest.

  “So those souls are just trapped there, rotting like that?”

  “Not the souls of all the dead. Most move on. But there are always those seeking revenge. Those that were also evil in life may choose to remain there. Until that evil is unearthed, as it was in both those examples, these kinds of parasites and the creatures make it their home.”

  “I can understand a place like Dachau.” Bea squinted at her mom then handed me a medium paper cup filled with the sweetest-smelling concoction yet. Quickly, I took a sip, and it instantly relieved my churning stomach. “But I don’t think there was ever a mass killing in Wonder Falls where a bunch of bodies were dumped.”

  Aunt Astrid shrugged.

  “I’ve never heard of anything either. But maybe someone should check out that route to Bourbonnais and see what there is to see,” I suggested. “Anyone up for a road trip later?”

  After a closing the cafe, it didn’t take long for Bea and me to load up my car with a couple of flashlights, our heavier coats since the temperature was dropping way down at night this time of year, and some black onyx stones for protection against evil entities of numerous variations. Aunt Astrid also rustled up a quick protection spell that we had hoped would do the trick.

  “So Tamara said she was heading to Bourbonnais and took County Line Road 63. I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever taken this road in my whole life. Can that be possible?” Bea asked as I drove.

  “I don’t see why not. Wonder Falls is a big place, and a good portion of it is wild forest. Who knows what country roads are winding around and through all that we don’t know about?” I was talking to hear myself make noise. Truthfully, I was starting to get a little anxious.

  We drove down the same route Tamara said she took and found the exit for the county line road. Surprisingly, it was a paved road. For some reason, I had envisioned a dirt road with manhole-sized potholes and craggily barren trees bowing down overhead.

  “Well, this doesn’t look too bad,” Bea said, to which I nodded.

  “Looks like a regular road to me.” I drove about twenty-five miles an hour as we both looked out the windows, searching for anything that looked like a mass grave. Needless to say we saw nothing of the sort.

  “What do you say we stop and walk around a bit?” Bea suggested. The more I drove, the more I was beginning to think that Tamara might have just had some kind of episode, driving in such bad weather. Perhaps she had a waking nightmare or even a hallucination.

  “I think that’s fine with me.” I slowed the car down and pulled over on the side of the road.

  I snapped my hazard lights on to make sure no one coming down this isolated road at seventy miles an hour would plow into my car. I left the headlights on and climbed out. Bea had the flashlights and handed one to me. We clicked them on, and with her on one side of the road and me on the other, we began to walk.

  “I see bushes.” I sighed. “Lots of trees.”

  “Me, too. And I can see my breath when I talk.” She withdrew an adorable red hat with a pom-pom on the top out of her coat pocket and pulled it over her head and ears. I was wearing my hood up and tied tightly around my chin.

  “I didn’t realize it was supposed to get so cold tonight. Good thing it stopped raining last night, or all of this might freeze,” I said, pulling a pair of leather gloves from my pockets and putting them on. The beam of my flashlight shook slightly as I shivered from the cold.

  The air smelled like wet grass and cold dirt. Earthy and sleepy as nature began its long hibernation and winter quickly approached. Technically, it was still fall, but the temperature said otherwise.

  “I don’t see anything. Do you?” Bea asked, swinging her flashlight in my direction.

  “Nope. Don’t see anything. Don’t hear anything.” But just then, I froze. I turned around and shined the flashlight into the bushes. The only sound I heard were my boots scraping on the asphalt. “Bea?”

  “Yeah?” She walked over to me, looking bored and let down that there wasn’t a repeat of the previous evening’s excitement. Her shoes on the road were also loud and the only sound I heard.

  “Listen.” I held my breath.

  “I don’t hear anything.” She shrugged.

  “Right? Not anything?”

  She stood still and shined her flashlight around.

  I strained to hear anything. Still holding my breath, I tried to hear a bird, the rustle of dry leaves, an airplane flying overhead, a car honking from the expressway, even just a hint of the wind. But there was nothing.

  Suddenly, it seemed as if every noise we made was amplified a thousand times.

  “What’s happened to everything?” Bea whispered, but even her voice sounded so loud I was terrified something would hear us.

  “I don’t know.” I practically just mouthed the words, not wanting to give away where we were to anything that might be out there.

  “Do you feel that?” Bea put her hand on my arm.

  “Feel what?”

  “Like we
’re being watched.” Bea’s lips and eyes were the only things that moved as she held her flashlight in one direction. I didn’t dare move, but yes, I, too, suddenly felt as though we were being watched. And not by just one pair of eyes.

  The trees, the bushes, the stones, the dirt, the grass, the leaves—everything was watching us. Everything around us seemed to have eyes. They were staring straight at us without blinking, and they were not pleased.

  “We should go,” Bea hissed.

  I didn’t need to be told twice. Quickly, with our backs to each other in order to watch from all directions, we got back to the car. For the split second we pulled apart so I could get behind the wheel and Bea could jump into the passenger seat, I was sure we were going to be ambushed by something.

  I yanked the door open, jumped in, and slammed the door shut, quickly slapping the lock in place. Bea must have felt the same way, because she was panting after she wrenched her door shut.

  With shaky fingers, I turned the car key. The engine roared to life. I threw the vehicle into drive, hit the gas, and whipped the car around to head back in the direction we had come.

  “I don’t want to go farther in, Bea.” I gasped. “I just don’t want to see where the road ends. Not tonight. Not at night at all.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” Bea had her hand on the dashboard as if it somehow helped the car move faster.

  Once we were back in town, I sped to the Brew-Ha-Ha and parked right in front. When we got out of the car, both Bea and I let out a collective sigh. We could hear birds, the traffic from the next block, and the wind rustling through dried flowers and the leaves in the trees. It was as if we were transported back to civilization.

  Bea unlocked the front door, and we stepped in. The café was nice and warm, even though it was closed and the light from our hidden bunker shined into the dining area, letting us know Aunt Astrid was still there.

  As we descended the stairs, I smelled something delicious.

  “Hey, girls,” Aunt Astrid called to us. “Come down here. I’ve found something neat.”

  “You have food,” I said. “That’s exactly what I needed.”

  “Yes, I’ve got vegetable soup in the crockpot and some crusty bread. So tell me. Did you guys see anything?”

  A shiver ran through my body as I relived the last twenty-five minutes of my life listening to Bea retell it. I ate the warm soup and dunked the bread in the orange tomato broth. There was something magical about soup that could calm the most frazzled nerves.

  “We don’t even know how to explain it,” I added after Bea described how we sped away from County Line Road 63. “There was nothing there, yet something was there, and it was powerful. Sucking all the sound out of the place. What kind of thing does that? No, wait. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. It’s probably some gross thing with twelve eyes and the mouth of a great white. If you know what it is, keep it to yourself.” I shook my head and shoveled in another hot spoonful of soup.

  “I don’t know what it could be.” Aunt Astrid took her regular seat on the lovely old-fashioned couch she had added to the bunker. We’d discovered this room after the first Brew-Ha-Ha had burned down. It was a great little getaway where Aunt Astrid kept some of her spell books and a supply of wine, water, soda pop, and comfy chairs to sit in even though I always preferred to sit on the floor. It just felt right. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  “There is definitely something out there, and it is able to hide when it wants to. When we first got there, we didn’t notice anything.” Bea filled a small bowl with soup and tore off a chunk of bread. She sat down next to her mother. “We didn’t notice anything odd. But we also were looking to see something. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know if there were sounds when we first got out of the car or not. I couldn’t say if things were normal at first and then something scared the entire area into a dead silence. I just don’t know.”

  I tore into the bread with my teeth. Aunt Astrid sat for a moment then grabbed a bowl of soup for herself. After a couple of thoughtful spoonfuls, she spoke.

  “We need to find out about that area.”

  “I’m not going back.” I grimaced and shook my head. “Nope. Not without an arsenal of witchy weapons and the bright sun just creeping over the horizon. Nighttime is not the right time to visit County Line Road 63.”

  “I can talk to Jake,” Bea offered. “Maybe he knows something.”

  “That is a good idea.” Aunt Astrid nodded then looked at me.

  “What?”

  “I’m thinking the library might be a good place for you to go.” My aunt knew I loved the library. “See if you can find out anything about that part of town on any old maps or if there is anything in the town records.”

  “That, I can do. The library has lots of people and is only open during the day. I’m good with that.”

  Evergrave Creek

  Wonder Falls Public Library was a divine old building that looked as if it belonged on a university campus. Its redbrick exterior and wide double doors almost made me feel as though I were entering a royal palace.

  The windows and doors were an Art Deco stained-glass design, very symmetrical and very beautiful. When you entered the building, the lobby floor was a green-and-white marble, complemented by the dark oak of the book return and checkout desks. To the right was the children’s wing. There was never a time I came to the library when I didn’t hear at least two kids talking or laughing or playing in there. Today was no different. But I was heading to the left, the grown-ups’ wing, where a massive circular desk in the same dark wood sat stoically in the midst of all the rows and rows of books and desks and computers and magazines.

  The woman sitting there was exactly what a librarian was supposed to look like. She was an older lady with black hair pulled back in a bun. Her modern take on horn-rimmed glasses rested on her nose, and a gaudy chain of silver hoops and orange glass beads ensured she wouldn’t set them down and forget where they were. Her sweater was buttoned all the way up to her throat on her thin frame.

  “Excuse me,” I whispered. She turned and smiled up at me, showcasing a huge silver hoop in her left nostril.

  “Can I help you?” Her voice was very low and sultry. Another curveball I didn’t see coming.

  “I’m wondering if the library has some old maps of Wonder Falls or any records of the town and the population over the years that I could take a look at.” I smiled.

  “Absolutely.” She stood up from the desk and only reached a height of about five feet, maybe even less. I followed her through the main area of the library to a small alcove with the words “Donated by William and Mary Madia” on a bronze commemorative plaque over the door.

  “This is our records room.” The librarian folded her hands in front of her, grinning excitedly. “We’ve got newspapers on microfiche that date back to the 1800s if you’re just looking for a glimpse at life here when the town was just a baby.” She chuckled. “We’ve also got an extensive database of every transaction of significance that helped build up our lovely town. You can access those on the computers, but it helps to have very, very specific key words. Property purchases, business contracts, census results, yadda, yadda. That’s all in there, too. And hanging up like the racks for newspapers are the maps of Wonder Falls from its inception to just three years ago.” The woman smiled a huge, toothy grin that nearly made her eyes disappear behind her pushed-up cheeks. “Will this help?”

  “This is great,” I whispered. “Thanks.”

  The librarian nodded, and before I could say anything else, she was already walking back the way we had come.

  Truthfully, I didn’t even know this little section existed. When I came to the library, I usually looked for books to escape reality, like sweet love stories or a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants thriller. Aunt Astrid was the history buff, and well, Bea read any nonfiction that had to do with vegan recipes or holistic remedies.

  I thought my best bet was to start with the
maps. I spread them out and was amazed at how much the town had changed over just the past fifty years.

  The area in question around County Line Road 63 was mostly farmland.

  “That would explain why it was so quiet out there last night.”

  I tried to convince myself of that, but nature itself is noisy. If anyone ever ventured out into the woods and just stood still for a second, they’d see what a bustling business nature really was. Squirrels darting in a dozen different directions at once, birds singing, twigs snapping as old ones broke off and died, making room for new buds. At nighttime, it was even more alive with nocturnal hunters—raccoons, opossums, owls, and mice. So that theory quickly went the way of the dodo bird.

  As I followed the road on one of the maps from the 1970s, I saw that at one time it had split, one branch following through the farmland for several miles to join with another major road. The other branch wove through the area, crossing a bridge and fairly significant creek that I had never known existed.

  That was odd in itself because it is a well-known fact that witches have a unique connection with bodies of water and almost always know where they can be found.

  I can recall a few times in the recent past where natural running water saved my hide. The strength of the current or the depth of the bed can have amazing effects on supernatural situations. Not to mention the spirits and mystical creatures that reside there. Sometimes just dipping a toe in the water could mean the difference between life and death.

  “Evergrave Creek,” I muttered. “And the bridge is called nothing. There is no name. No listing for any bridge in the area. Hmmm.” But I looked at the maps and could see the bridge had to be there. There was no other way to get out of the area, and according to the census, there were homes back that far. “It’s got to be there.”