“And we’ll give you a loaner while you’re waiting,” Earl said. “You’ll need a car for your supernatural investigations and such.”
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t going to turn down the offer of another vehicle. It meant I wouldn’t have to rely on Felicity to get around. It also meant I wouldn’t have to squeeze myself into the Mini.
“I’ll get the keys,” June said, heading for the office.
“Could I see that newspaper too?” I asked.
“Sure thing,” Earl said. “We’re done with it, so you can have it.”
June disappeared for a few seconds and then reappeared with a set of car keys and a folded Dearmont Observer. She gave me the newspaper and took the keys over to a brown Chevy that was in good condition but looked at least thirty years old.
“She’s a 1985 Chevy Caprice,” Earl said. “She’s old but she runs just fine.”
June unlocked the driver’s door and opened it for me.
“Thanks,” I said, looking at the boxy design of the mud-colored car and wishing Earl had something cooler on his lot, like an Impala.
I got in and June handed me the keys. The interior of the car was warm and smelled of lemon thanks to an air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. The seats were beige velour but the fabric wasn’t worn at all, despite the age of the car, so I guessed June and Earl had replaced the fabric recently. The dash was upholstered in light brown vinyl and that looked like it had been recently restored too. The way June and Earl were looking at me with expectant faces, I figured this old Caprice must be their pride and joy.
“Very nice,” I said.
Earl grinned. “That’s the car we spent our honeymoon in. Took her on a road trip all the way to California and back in 1987.”
“She’s a beauty,” June said, lovingly running her hand over the bodywork.
Considering what the Land Rover had been through recently, I wondered if it might be better if they loaned me a different car. I didn’t want to smash up a vehicle that gave them happy memories. But I was only going to be investigating the church and the lake in the next couple of days, so I didn’t anticipate any car chases or arguments with cemetery gates. I just had to make sure Polidori didn’t get behind the wheel.
I tossed the Dearmont Observer onto the passenger seat and thanked June and Earl again before cranking the engine. It came to life with a throaty purr. The mechanic couple had probably spent the last thirty years tinkering with the engine, or maybe even replaced it with something more powerful.
I waited for Felicity to get into her Mini before following her out of the parking lot and back onto the highway. As I left the lot, I waved to June and Earl. They waved back, watching me drive their pride and joy away.
I just hoped that when I returned the car, it would be in the same condition it was in now.
CHAPTER 3
We reached the township of Clara an hour later, after coming off the highway and following narrow roads that wound through the trees. A simple wooden sign by the roadside, bearing the name CLARA painted in uneven red letters, told us we’d reached our destination.
There were six houses, three on each side of the road, and a couple of rough patches of farmland but nothing to suggest that anyone lived here. The houses looked abandoned, the farmland neglected and overgrown.
After we drove past the houses, I spotted a small hand-painted sign that read CHURCH over an arrow pointing down a dirt road that looked just wide enough for a car to pass.
Felicity’s Mini slowed in front of me and she turned onto the dirt road. I followed, the undergrowth at the edges of the road brushing against the sides of the Caprice. Maybe Felicity’s small car had some advantages after all; it was ideal for narrow roads that led to weird churches.
I had no idea if the church actually was weird or not but I already felt creeped out just from driving along the dirt road. The trees shielded the road from the sunlight, casting an oppressive gloom over everything. Ahead, I saw the church, a tall stone building covered with dark green moss. The windows were stained glass but I couldn’t make out the designs from this distance.
The church seemed incongruous sitting among the trees. There was a grassy parking area but other than that, the area around the building was heavily wooded, the trees huddling so close that they formed a natural barrier.
Felicity parked in the grassy area and I brought the Caprice to a stop next to her Mini. When I got out, the air smelled earthy and damp. Silence sat over the area like a heavy blanket. No birds sang in the trees. No insects buzzed around us. The church stood in a silent, lifeless world.
Felicity closed her car door softly, the sound of the latch clicking amplified in the quietness of the clearing, and looked around. She hugged herself as if she were cold. “This place give me the creeps, Alec.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said. I opened the Mini’s trunk and took out an enchanted dagger in a leather sheath. I attached the sheath to my belt and then took the crystal shard pouch out of my pocket. As soon as I opened the pouch, the blue glow from inside was unmistakable. I removed the glowing crystal and held it up. “Plenty of magical energy here,” I told Felicity.
I walked closer to the building. The glow’s intensity increased. When I got to the church doors, I put the crystal back into its pouch and then into my jeans pocket. It had told me everything I needed to know to continue; the massacre that had occurred here was linked to supernatural forces.
Felicity stayed close behind me, her hand on my shoulder, her dark eyes wide as she looked past me to the closed church doors. “This is really spooky,” she whispered into my ear.
“Yeah, it is,” I agreed. I reached for the handle on the double doors and tried it. The doors were unlocked. They swung inward with a groan. The air that rushed out from the building smelled fetid and damp.
The interior of the church was lit only by sunlight filtering through four stained glass windows, throwing colorful shapes across the floor and walls. Amy had said the windows had been covered in blood when the bodies were found and there were still pale red patches on the glass.
There were old style wooden church pews and modern plastic chairs scattered around the room as if a tornado had touched down and thrown them against the walls. Most of the chairs and pews were broken.
I stepped inside, Felicity still hanging on to my shoulder. Despite the stained glass lighting effect, the interior of the church was gloomy. Shadows clung to the walls and spread over the corners. I took the Maglite from my pocket and played the light over the room. I didn’t want any nasty surprises to come rushing out of those dark corners.
A slight burning sensation on my left pectoral muscle told me that one of my protective tattoos had been activated. The tattoo in that location was an eye of Horus and had been magically enchanted to allow me to see through a glamour or veiling spell. Something in this room was disguised by magic.
Thanks to the tattoo, I would see the disguised item in its true form. To the police and FBI, the item would have appeared as something else entirely when they searched the church.
“What do you see?” I asked Felicity. She would see the item in its disguised form, so if I could figure out what I was seeing differently than her with my enhanced sight, I’d know what was being hidden by the magical veil.
Where the sunlight illuminated patches of the walls, bloodstains were visible, some of them up near the ceiling. It looked like the victims of the massacre had been thrown around in the same manner as the chairs.
“Just a lot of broken furniture,” she said. “And blood on the walls.”
We moved forward slowly, stepping over broken chairs and splintered wood. I realized I was trying to move as quietly as possible, as if making a sound might awaken something evil that was sleeping in the building’s foundations. At the far end of the church, a gray stone altar sat atop a raised dais. A wooden lectern lay next to the altar, broken in two.
I glanced up at the nearest window. The image depicted by the colored gl
ass wasn’t the usual biblical scene; it showed a cliff edge and a tempestuous sea below. On the cliff, hooded figures in white robes were performing some sort of ceremony around a magic circle. A naked woman walked calmly toward the edge of the cliff, her eyes vacant, her face devoid of emotion. I looked closer at the sea in the image. There was something dark lurking beneath the waves, waiting to rise from the depths.
“You don’t see that in most churches,” I whispered.
Felicity looked up at the window and frowned in confusion. “”What do you mean? The stained glass?”
“No, I mean the image.”
“The crucifixion is one of the most common images in church windows, Alec.”
I looked back at the window and the image of the woman walking toward the cliff edge. “The crucifixion,” I said. “Right.” I took out my phone and took a photo of the window. The photo showed the woman, the cliff, and the robed figures. I showed the screen to Felicity. “What do you see?”
She looked at me with narrowed eyes as if I were playing a joke on her. “You can see it for yourself, Alec. There’s Christ on the cross, the Roman soldier with the spear, and Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross.” She pointed to areas of the phone screen where I saw the sea, the cliff, and the woman.
At least now I knew it was the windows that were hiding under a glamor.
“There’s a spell on the windows,” I told Felicity. I see something different than you because one of my tattoos is letting me see through the spell.
Her dark eyes widened. “What do you see?”
“I’ll show you later. I have something at the office that will let you see past the glamor in the photos,” I said.
She nodded and looked back at the window, which to her sight was nothing more than the depiction of a biblical scene. “Why would someone cast a spell on the church?”
“I don’t know,” I said, stepping over the debris to the next window. This one showed a beach scene. On the sand, thirteen white-robed figures dead. There were tracks on the sand as if something huge had slithered across the beach and into the sea. The water was disturbed, implying that something big had entered it and sunk beneath the surface a moment ago.
“There are thirteen dead people in that window,” I told Felicity. “Thirteen victims, just like in the massacre here.”
She sighed. “So you don’t see John the Baptist and his followers.”
I took a photo of the window.
The window closest to us on the opposite wall showed the resurrection of Lazarus according to Felicity. What I saw there was something very different.
The image was of a forest at night. A clearing in the distance was lit by a fire and thirteen figures danced around its perimeter. In the darkness between the trees, a pair of huge eyes glowed, watching the dancers with a malevolence that made my insides feel like they were knotting up. I wanted to flee the church, to get away from the oppressive atmosphere I suddenly felt all around me.
I was sure Felicity felt the same fear, even though she couldn’t see the eyes in the window. She was breathing hard and fast in my ear, as if trying to control a panic attack. “We should get out of here, Alec.”
“Just take a deep breath and try to stay calm,” I said, putting my hand on hers. “There’s a residue of terror in the atmosphere here and it’s affecting us, that’s all. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” But even as I said that, my eyes were scanning the dark corners of the church, expecting to see a monster lurking in the shadows. I took out my phone and took a picture of the forest image before moving to the final window.
“Mary holding baby Jesus,” Felicity said before I even asked her what she saw. She obviously wanted to get this over with as soon as possible and get out of here. I felt exactly the same but we had to search this place if we were to have any chance of finding out what happened here on Christmas Day.
The stained glass image was made up of mostly red and black glass because the picture showed the interior of a cave with a blood-covered floor littered with bones and skulls. The far end of the cave was hidden in blackness and the same pair of eyes from the forest picture lurked there. I took a photo and pocketed my phone, making a conscious effort to breathe deeply. If there was some type of terror-inducing magic attached to the windows, my tattoos were helpless against it.
“Let’s see what’s through there,” I said, pointing the Maglite beam at a closed door beside the altar.
We made our way over there, stepping over bits and pieces of broken furniture. The door was unlocked. I pushed it open to reveal a room that seemed to have served as an office. There was a single plain window that looked out over the woods at the back of the church. The dim light coming in through the window was sufficient to see by.
A large mahogany desk sat at the far end of the room. There was a computer power cable plugged into an outlet on the wall, but no computer. The FBI must have taken it as part of their investigation. A bookshelf running along one wall was empty A filing cabinet near the window was open, the top drawer empty. I had no doubt the other drawers had been cleared out too.
“What are we hoping to find?” Felicity asked. “The FBI have already been here and taken everything.”
“The FBI thinks this was a mundane case. They only took things of interest to a normal murder investigation. They would have missed anything that pointed to the supernatural. Unless they sent a real-life Mulder and Scully in here, we should be able to find something of interest, because we’re looking at this from a totally different angle. We just need to find what the FBI overlooked.”
“But this room is empty and there’s nothing in the main part of the church except broken chairs and pews.”
“And those creepy windows.” I cast a cursory glance around the empty office. Felicity was right; if there had ever been anything of interest here, it was gone now, probably locked away in a federal building in Boston. We needed to search in the main part of the church again if we were going to find any clues.
When we stepped back into the main room, I said to Felicity, “You check up around the altar and I’ll look through the broken chairs and stuff.”
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
“Anything strange. A symbol maybe, or an inscription in the walls or on the floor. It might help us to pinpoint exactly what type of magic was used here.”
She went up the steps of the dais and began looking at the floor around the altar. As soon as she stepped away from me, I missed her closeness. Sure, her close proximity had been prompted by fear but it was nice all the same. I looked at the debris on the floor and sighed. Looking through this stuff was going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
I went over to a broken chair and lifted it up to look at the stone floor beneath.
“Alec, wait!”
I turned to face Felicity. “What is it?”
She held up a hand, telling me to wait, and climbed up onto the stone altar. When she was standing on top of it, she pointed at the mess of broken chairs and pews. “You need to see this.”
I looked at the place on the floor where she was pointing. “What is it? I don’t see anything.”
She shook her head excitedly. “No, you have to be up here to see it.”
I went up the steps of the dais and looked at the debris. From this vantage point, the mess didn’t look so chaotic. I could see definite lines and curves formed by the broken furniture.
“Up here,” Felicity said, beckoning me up onto the altar.
I climbed up next to her and looked at the floor of the church. The plastic chairs, metal chair legs and pieces of wood from the pews hadn’t been thrown around at random at all. They formed a perfect circle and half a dozen magical glyphs, within the circle and outside of it.
Standing on the floor among the debris, the circle and magical patterns were impossible to see. The patterns could only be distinguished from up here, looking down at them from above.
“Do you recognize any of those symbols?” I ask
ed Felicity. None of them were familiar to me, so my method of determining their identity would be to take pictures and look them up later in the Society database.
But Felicity specialized in ancient languages and occult symbols so she might know what they were just by looking at them.
“I recognize them,” she said. “They belong to a language that has unknown origins. It’s appeared on artifacts from ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, and even further back in history. Those artifacts are always magical or religious in nature, usually connected with evil gods or dark magic.”
“So do you know what this circle represents? What those particular symbols mean?”
She narrowed her eyes and looked at the pattern with an intense stare. “I understand what some of it means. Two of the symbols are in a position relative to each other on the circle which means, ‘the tearing of the veil’. I can’t interpret the others without referring to some texts on the subject.”
“Okay, we’ll get photos of everything and examine them back at the office.” I got my phone out of my pocket again and began taking pictures of the patterns on the floor. Felicity did the same with her own phone.
“I think we’ve seen enough,” I said when we’d taken pictures of every square inch of the church floor, both with and without flash. “Let’s get out of here.”
“That’s the best idea you’ve had all day,” she said.
We went outside and closed the doors behind us. Even though this area of the woods was creepily silent, being outside was a thousand times better than being in the church. Even the earthy air tasted fresh as I breathed it in.
We got in the cars and I followed Felicity’s Mini along the dirt road. When we reached the half dozen houses known as Clara, I saw a gray-haired woman standing among the weeds in one of the overgrown lawns. She wore a pale yellow dress that fluttered in the breeze around her thin legs. As I drove past, she fixed her pale eyes on me and scowled. I could feel the malevolence of her stare as if it were slithering into the car through the windshield.
Dark Magic (Harbinger P.I. Book 3) Page 3
