Blind Shadows

by James A. Moore

  Carl pulled in front of the house he called Chez Blackbourne with a dozen other deputies along for the ride. He knew there was little chance that Merle was going to let them into the house. That was all right. He could do without actually getting inside as long as a good number of the people inside came to him.

  They came. They also came armed and ready for a fight.

  Merle walked out first, shaking his head and looking genuinely saddened by the state of affairs.

  “What can I do for you, Sheriff?”

  Carl held out the search warrant. “Either the rest of the people we discussed come out now, or me and my people go in looking for them.”

  Merle looked at the warrant, spat once, and stepped back. As he stepped back, he let out a sharp whistle.

  And the bullets started firing from the woods around the house. Carl expected a few people in the woods. He hadn’t expected a damned army.

  The good news was that he was prepared. Every last one of his people was wearing body armor, and they’d brought weapons too. The firefight was not long—they seldom are—but a great number of bullets were fired and a goodly number of those bullets hit their targets.

  Carl took a hard run at Merle, determined to get the patriarch of the clan in his custody. Merle stood his ground and raised his hands above his head. And just as Carl was reaching for him, the air shifted and something big stepped forward. He couldn’t even see what it was, only feel it as he was thrown backward.

  Carl soared through the air and did his best to prepare for the impact. Really, it was all he could do. The body armor helped. He rammed into the side of his truck hard enough to rock the vehicle on its tires.

  Despite the pain, and he was decidedly feeling pain, Carl aimed for Merle and fired. He saw the look of surprise on the man’s face and even as he pulled the trigger he knew he had Blackbourne dead to rights. The shot was clean and true. It never hit him. Something else stopped it in the air a good ten feet before it would have hit Merle. There was a ripple in the air and then a sound so low that Carl could barely hear it. And Merle ran back toward his house and moved inside.

  And the air hit Carl again. Only this time he couldn’t really roll with the punch. He was already braced against his truck.

  He knew darkness.

  * * *

  The sheriff went down and the deputies, well-trained and very serious about taking care of their own, got busy. They didn’t stand still and wait for the Blackbournes to come to them. Instead they moved into the woods and went on the offensive, chasing after the shooters. Radios blared and weapons fired and the Blackbournes, who were not at all prepared for serious resistance, very quickly surrendered. By the time the last of the people in the woods was getting cuffed, Carl was back up and looking decidedly pissed off. His nose was bleeding, his face was swelling and he was limping.

  Ben Randall and Liz Holiday caught up with him as he was getting to his feet. Liz was looking about as angry as a pissed off mountain cat. “You hurt, Carl?”

  “Goddamned right I’m hurt! And right now I’m about five ways to twitchy, so get the fuck behind me.” He didn’t walk to the front of the Blackbourne place, he stormed. He drove his shoulder into the front door and slammed it open. Merle was halfway down the hallway and reaching for a shotgun. Carl shot the fucker in his leg and watched Merle drop, screaming.

  Liz moved on his left and Ben on his right and the two of them watched and supported, not quite willing to point out that grabbing the man and hauling him to his feet wasn’t really proper procedure under the circumstances.

  The air in the room felt wrong, heavy and wet and colder than it should have. That was enough for Carl.

  Carl shoved Merle against the wall of his own home and pushed the barrel of his pistol into the man’s face. “You call it the fuck off! Now! Right fucking now! You hear me!?!”

  Merle nodded hard and screamed something that made no sense and half a second later the pressure went back to right.

  “Your sorry fucking ass is under arrest!” Merle’s leg tried to buckle and Carl held him off the ground, his arm shaking with the strain. “Read this man his goddamned rights, Liz!”

  Liz recited the Miranda as Carl hauled Merle through the front door, one hand on his neck, the other holding the pistol to the side of his face. There were several people in the house, and while Carl and Liz were busy with Merle, Ben went into each room with his gun drawn and grabbed person after person, giving none of them a chance to consider going for weapons. He was a scrawny red-haired kid with too many freckles but at that moment he was also a very scary bastard with a big ass gun and a bad attitude. They listened.

  Carl stayed in the car with Merle, who wisely kept his mouth shut. When everyone had been hauled out of the front of the house, Carl called the deputies back. The place felt wrong and he knew in his heart that something was decidedly not right. He didn’t want his people getting killed by whatever had thrown him through the air with such ease. He had Merle and suspected that as long as he did, whatever was there would leave him alone, but even though it was daylight and the things he’d dealt with the night before were supposedly nocturnal, he wasn’t taking any chances.

  Besides, Wade was in there. Why call attention to him?

  By most standards the raid on Crawford’s Hollow was a success. Over one hundred people were arrested on charges ranging from minor drug offenses to attempted murder, and there were still charges pending from the cars that had been collected.

  But when it was all said and done, four deputies were missing, and that was not a good sign. All attempts to get their attention by radio failed and more troubling still, though their cars had GPS trackers, they could not be located.

  Four deputies and two cars. One of the cars was later found on Highway 41, trashed and burned. The other was never found.

  Carl had his suspicions, but no way to prove them.

  Either way, the matter was being attended to.

  * * *

  Griffin moved through the woods in the pre-dawn twilight, keeping low and watching for sentries. It wasn’t likely that the Blackbournes kept anything like a regular watch, but Merle might have people watching the property, especially now. The trees were fairly heavy in that part of the Hollow and Griffin could just make out the rear of the old Blackbourne place in the dim light.

  Jeez, but how the house rambled. He had heard that the place had been rebuilt and expanded so many times that no one knew exactly what was part of the original structure, but hearing about it and seeing the almost mad sprawl of the place were very different. Some walls were brick and some were covered with aluminum siding, while still others were bare or painted wood. Sections of roof met at odd angles and there were chimneys, gables, and windows placed without seeming order. For a moment, as he looked at the place, Griffin thought he caught an odd shimmering effect on the edge of the many levels of roof, but then it was gone. Weird.

  Griffin picked out a likely looking entrance point, a small window close to the ground. That would probably lead to a cellar or basement. He didn’t relish the idea of seeing what sort of things the Blackbournes kept in a basement, but then again he figured climbing into someone’s bedroom window would be just as bad. In any case, he wanted to get close before the sirens wailed and people started looking out windows. He made one last quick scan of the area, then ran to the back of the house and crouched near the window. It wasn’t even locked. The Blackbournes were confident in their sinister reputation it seemed.

  Griffin slid the window open and looked inside. Just a small room with a disused furnace and a bunch of crates stacked against one wall. Perfect. Griffin slipped inside and closed the window behind him. On the far side of the room a flight of stairs led up into darkness. Griffin crossed the cracked concrete floor and went up the stairs, placing his feet on the inner edge of each step to minimize creaking. He found a wood paneled door at the top and this one was locked.

  Griffin set down the small bag he had brought along and removed
a lock pick-gun and a small flat probe with an angle on one end. He slid the probe inside the keyhole, inserted the pick-gun and three seconds later, the lock released. If people had any idea how easy it was to open a lock using those two tools, they would invest in better locks.

  Griffin replaced his tools, shouldered the bag, and slowly opened the door. Beyond was an empty hallway that seemed to stretch an abnormally long distance toward the front of the house. The place couldn’t be that big, could it? Griffin started down the hall which had a surprising number of doors set along its length. It reminded Griffin of those old Scooby Doo cartoons where characters would chase each other in and out of doors in a hallway. Griffin stopped at the first door and opened it with as little noise as possible. A bedroom, but thankfully unoccupied. Still there was something odd here. Bright sunlight was streaming through a window on one side of the room. Griffin knew that he hadn’t been inside more than a few minutes, but he checked his watch anyway. Eight minutes. The sun would just be coming up. Griffin went to the window and looked out.

  It was another one of those moments when his brain wanted to shut down, reboot, or just plain run away. Outside the window, the ground was at least sixty feet below. Griffin knew that the basement steps had taken him to the first floor, and for that matter, the Blackbourne house only had two floors and no window in the place should be that high. Of course all of that was secondary to the simple fact that the scenery beyond the window wasn’t Crawford’s Hollow. Instead Griffin was looking at countryside that would have fit more readily in The Hound of the Baskervilles, a wide expanse of grassy moor running to the horizon, occasionally broken by great boulders or pillars of stone.

  Griffin had to turn away from the bleak impossibility of the window before he lost his breakfast. He hurried back into the hallway and closed the door behind him. Inured as he thought he had become to the supernatural in the last few days, this most recent assault on reality was over the top. He paused for a moment, slowing his breathing, and reminding himself that he had a job to do. Carl had wanted him inside to find out what the Blackbournes might have hidden in the old family home and he was going to do that, regardless of what weirdness they threw at him. He slapped the holster at his side and felt the reassuring weight of the .38 revolver. The .357 had been too big and heavy for this sort of mission, but the .38 was loaded with Decamp’s special slugs.

  Griffin shook the tension out of his shoulders and opened another door. Thankfully this room was just a storage room of standard design. Nothing surprising here. Unfortunately the next room was the size of a football field.

  Griffin stood in the doorway of this next impossible room. How in hell were the Blackbournes doing this? The room looked like something out of a Jane Austen novel. A wooden floored ballroom, complete with an old fashioned chandelier. The early dawn light coming through the long row of windows on the other side of the room would have been comforting except that Griffin knew that there was no section on the outside of the house that was long enough to have that many windows side by side. Griffin didn’t leave the doorway. Whatever lay outside those windows, he didn’t want to know.

  Griffin shut the door and looked up the hallway. Though he had come some distance, he didn’t seem to be any closer to the end of the hall. He looked back at where he had first entered and that door too seemed farther away than it should. Griffin skipped the next two doors, deciding just to try one at random. He chose one that was painted a dark shade of gray and swung it inward. The floor of this room was dirt and there was a big hole dug in the center of the room. Griffin eased up to the hole and looked down. It was too dark below to tell how deep the hole was, but he could hear something moving around down there.

  The legends of the Moon-Eyed people said that they had lived underground and couldn’t abide light. Obviously some of the Blackbournes had no trouble with daylight, but according to Decamp those individuals were hybrids of some sort, at least partly human. But the true Moon-Eyes weren’t human at all and the closer to those ancient beings the Blackbournes were, apparently the less they could deal with light.

  Lost in thought for a moment, Griffin realized suddenly that the noises he had heard were getting louder. He peered down into the hole only to find several pair of glowing eyes looking back up at him. Shit! Griffin backpedaled away from the hole just as two gnarled hands gripped the edge and a face right out of a nightmare appeared over the rim. The head was more round than a human head and the eyes larger and more oval. The nose was a vestige really, more two vertical slits under a bony ridge than a proper nose, and the mouth was much wider than a human’s, with what looked like far too many sharp, yellow teeth. As Griffin watched, two more heads popped up out of the hole and then all three of the creatures began to scramble toward him.

  Griffin reached behind him and opened the door. He stepped into the hall and slammed the door just in time to feel something bang against the panel. There was no way he could lock the door or jam it from his side. Or was there? Griffin dropped his bag and pulled out the pick-gun. The device couldn’t be used to re-lock something as far as he knew but maybe he could screw up the lock. He jammed the pick-gun into the lock mechanism and twisted it until its metal end broke off inside. The door knob began to jerk and twitch but it didn’t turn.

  Griffin knew he didn’t have long before the Moon-Eyes broke through the door. Mission or no mission it was time to get out. He turned back toward the way he had come and started hurrying down the hallway. Again it seemed that the faraway door wasn’t getting any closer.

  One of the doors that Griffin hadn’t examined opened without warning and two pale skinned but mostly human looking figures stepped out. Griffin was on the first one before either of the pair had noticed him. He whipped an elbow into the side of the man’s head, then slammed him into a wall head first. The second man grabbed a handful of Griffin’s jacket, but Griffin caught the gripping hand and twisted it backwards until the bones in the wrist snapped. The pale man cried out and Griffin drove the edge of his right hand into the man’s throat, crushing his trachea. The man wouldn’t yell anymore and he’d strangle in his own blood in a matter of seconds. Griffin hit him in the nose with the palm of his hand just for good measure.

  Unfortunately the fight had delayed Griffin long enough for the Moon-Eyes to smash their way through the door and they were pelting down the hall howling like wolves on crack. Griffin ran, cursing the freaked out hallway. The basement door remained elusively far away and now there seemed to be more doors in between it and Griffin. Running was only going to wear him out. Time to make a stand while he could. He turned to the closest door and went in at a dead run.

  His feet almost slipped out from under him as he entered the room. The floor seemed to be made up of thick, slimy mud. There was no chance of bracing the door against his pursuers, so Griffin drew the .38 and shot the first pale one through the door in the head. The creature staggered and fell into the mud. The other two burst through the door and leaped at Griffin. He got off a second shot but it went wild as the Moon-Eyes landed on top of him.

  The next moment the mud erupted and something which looked like a giant white worm reared up and bit the head off of one of the Moon-Eyes. One end of the worm-like creature’s gelatinous form was a round mouth full of hooked yellow teeth. The thing had to be 30 feet long, and probably five feet in diameter. Griffin couldn’t begin to guess the size of the room he had stumbled into this time. There was nothing but darkness beyond the worm and the mud. The worm shrieked, spitting blood as it twisted toward the remaining Moon-Eye and Griffin.

  The Moon-Eye tried to back away, but he had forgotten Griffin. Griffin got his back against the door and kicked the Moon-Eye in the back, boosting the screeching creature toward the writhing worm. The worm’s mouth gaped wide and the Moon-Eye disappeared inside the tube shaped body down to his waist. The worm bit down and gave a savage twist, and the Moon-Eye’s lower torso fell into the mud, the legs still kicking.

  Griffin jerked the door open
and rolled into the hall. He scrambled to his feet, the mud on his shoes making him slip and slide. He heard another shriek, and glancing back he saw the upper part of the worm lurching into the hallway. Griffin took off at a dead run. He finally seemed to be closing on the basement door. He didn’t look back again. The sounds of the huge thing thrashing its way down the hall were enough. Griffin reached the door and stumbled down the steps into the basement room. The door exploded behind him and the worm’s mouth reared up. Griffin fired his last four bullets at the creature, causing it to twist away for a moment. He used that time to get the window open and drag himself out onto the ground. The window was too small too allow the worm’s quivering bulk to pass through, and Griffin’s last sight of the thing was looking straight down its throat as the wide mouth pressed against the glass, its hooked teeth full of black blood and chunks of pale flesh.

  Griffin hurried away from the house and into the woods. He wanted to put as much distance between himself and the Blackbourne family home as he could, and pretty god damn fast too.

  * * *

  “It sounds like the house wasn’t just built out in this dimension but in others as well,” Charon said. She, Griffin, and Carl were seated in Carl’s office. Charon had been glad to take Griffin’s advice this time and stay well clear of the raid, but now her particular sort of knowledge was needed.