Pawsibly Murdered

by Harper Lin

  We heard the doorknob of the big closet door jiggle. It was yanked open, some of the doorframe cracking in the process. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry a little, but I couldn’t. Not now. Not with Blake’s life in my hands.

  “Coenum lutum!”

  My eyes widened.

  “Did you hear that?” I barely whispered to Blake.

  “Yes,” he replied, holding me tighter.

  It was a female voice.

  For a second, a horrible thought came to mind. If it was Tom’s mother and this was her idea of getting me out of the picture, oh, what I wasn’t going to say to her before she left town.

  I shook my head.

  It couldn’t be her. She had no idea about this house, and Niles was killed before she even arrived in town. There was no way she’d be involved with this. No matter how much I didn’t care for her, I didn’t really believe she wanted me dead.

  “Coenum lutum!”

  The sound of the monster’s heavy footsteps moved away from the door. There were a few seconds when we heard murmuring, but I couldn’t make out what was being said. To be honest, I couldn’t be sure I was hearing the murmurs from the other side of the door or if they were inside my head.

  Like the voices we’d all heard when Aunt Astrid, Bea, and I ran away from this place. They were inside and outside our heads. It was like trying to locate a mouse scurrying inside a wall.

  Then everything got quiet. Too quiet.

  22

  Galileo

  “What should we do?” I whispered.

  “I think we should stay put for a little while,” Blake replied. “I’m just not ready to step outside this little circle you made.”

  He snapped on the flashlight. I barely realized he had his arms around me. But I did realize that my foot had fallen asleep and was now rippling with pins and needles.

  “So what exactly did we just witness?” Blake started. He ran through a couple possibilities, including that perhaps we’d been drugged. There was a strange mist that could have contained a hallucinogen.

  “Would we see the same thing?” I asked.

  “The whole thing could have been staged. This could be some kind of elaborate hoax that was dreamed up by…” He shrugged.

  “To what end? What would be the point of scaring us, and why go through the extremes of killing Niles and Patrick? That doesn’t make sense.”

  He sat quietly for a moment. I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. I was afraid he was going to crack up. This wasn’t his area of expertise. I didn’t think Blake Samberg dealt with the spiritual or supernatural in his life. Everything was cut-and-dried, black or white. Any gray area was there because the problem just hadn’t been solved yet. The unexplained was dangerous to a mind like his.

  “What do you think it is?”

  I stood up as best I could, still slightly hunched by the slanted roof.

  “I think that Niles tried to conduct an experiment that went terribly wrong. He was killed by his own creation. Patrick had a hand in it, and so the creature took care of him. Now, you and I have seen it, and well, we’re next if we don’t stop it.”

  “Do you have any idea how that sounds?” Blake’s words were not cruel. They were simply stated as if he were telling me the weather.

  “Yes. Of course I do.” But then I remembered something. “Do you know that when Galileo said the earth revolved around the sun, the authorities told him all he had to do was prove it and they’d believe?”

  Blake stared at me.

  “He couldn’t prove it. He didn’t have the technology. It took another guy, much later—I can’t remember his name—to prove the earth revolved around the sun. Galileo was right. But he couldn’t find a way to prove what he knew in his heart. I’m not Galileo. But I know I’m right. I just can’t prove it. No matter how crazy it sounds.”

  I stretched my legs, thankful the pins and needles were almost gone.

  Blake didn’t immediately say anything. I didn’t mind. That was quite a big lump of steak to digest. I let him chew on it.

  It was just blind luck I happened to see something at the corner of the small room. A glint off Blake’s flashlight caught my eye.

  “What is that?” I pointed.

  He shined the flashlight. Stuck between one of the wooden beams and the insulation was something wavy. I went to get it, when Blake’s hand clamped on my arm.

  “The circle.” He pointed down.

  He was right. There was a chance that if I stepped out of it, I might weaken my already thin line of defense. Still, we needed to see what that was sticking out from its hiding place.

  “I don’t hear anything. Do you?”

  Blake shook his head.

  “I’ll just take one step and see what happens.”

  “Cath.”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  Carefully, I stepped one foot out of the circle. So far, so good. I stretched my torso as far as I could and reached my arm out just before lifting my other foot out of the circle.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  The little door with the crystal knob began to shake as something on the other side tried to get it open. I stepped back in the circle and focused all my effort in order to get the invisible barrier back in place.

  The banging stopped, and again it was silent.

  “I guess that thing knows we’re in here.” I wiped my brow. “Sorry about that. I guess I got a little too comfortable.”

  “What do we do now?” Blake whispered. “Is that thing just going to wait us out? Starve us to death?”

  I had no answer. Aunt Astrid seemed pretty sure that daylight sent that thing back to Hades. I just hoped she was right.

  “Let’s just wait until morning. It’s all we can do.” I sat back down, facing Blake. “I’m sorry I didn’t make the circle bigger. We’re a little cramped.”

  “None of this is an ideal situation.” He smirked. “But I’ve been in worse.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  He went on to tell me about being stuck in a section of sewer. That wasn’t as bad as when a body was found in a landfill. He had to investigate the surrounding area for clues. His favorite was when he was trapped in an elevator for over seventeen hours with a perp in handcuffs and a claustrophobic defense attorney.

  “That sounds horrible.” I yawned.

  “It was. Especially when I was starting to like the perp more than the attorney.”

  I laughed and rubbed my eyes. “I can’t believe I’m feeling tired. You’d think my nerves would be so strung out I’d be fidgeting and fretting with wide eyes and a clenched jaw.” I showed my teeth like a shark.

  “What happens if you fall asleep?” Blake asked. “Will your defense hold?”

  “In theory, as long as we stay in the circle, we should be okay.” I swallowed.

  “What might be a good idea is for us to take turns getting a little rest. You can lean against me. I’ll wake you up in twenty minutes. Then you can keep watch for me. Twenty minutes. No more.”

  “Okay. Why twenty?”

  “Science has proven people benefit more from short naps of no more than twenty minutes than they do sleeping a couple of hours. Especially when they are under duress.”

  “You’ve got a weird factoid for just about everything, don’t you?”

  “Weird? I’m not the one waving silver and drawing circles to sit in.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him and scooted a little closer.

  “Is this okay?” I rested my head on his shoulder.

  “Fine,” he said.

  It took a matter of seconds for me to fall asleep. I didn’t know how long Blake managed to stay awake before he slumped over and involuntarily stretched his leg out past the edge of the circle.

  In my dream, I heard the doorknob turn. The click of the mechanism pulling back and the squeak of the old hinges were not the familiar noises I’d hear in my home. But I wasn’t in my home. My eyes opened. For a second, I didn’t move.
The light of the flashlight had dimmed as the battery was starting to lose its strength.

  When I looked up, my heart lodged in my throat.

  The little door was open.

  The mud creature was on its belly, reaching for Blake’s foot that had involuntarily stretched out past my pitiful protection ring. It looked at me with those burning red eyes and sadistically grinned as it clamped its muddy, oozy hand around Blake’s ankle.

  “Blake!” I screamed.

  His eyes popped open, and he instinctively reached for his gun.

  The thing laughed as it proceeded to yank him closer to the door. Once it got him out there, I wouldn’t be able to help.

  I grabbed his free arm and tried to pull him back, but I just wasn’t strong enough.

  “Cath!” he yelled.

  He pointed the gun at the creature and pulled the trigger. The bullet hit but was swallowed up by the mud. It barely fazed the thing. Again, Blake fired another round and another, but it didn’t stop the creature. It kept pulling him.

  Call it a witch’s intuition if you want, but I turned to the strange thing that we had seen sticking out from the wall. I darted across the small room in three steps and took hold of the part that was protruding from the fiberglass. With one hard yank, I pulled out a dagger with a squiggly blade.

  Without taking a second to study the weapon, I charged the mud man and stabbed the forearm of the hand holding Blake’s ankle.

  It screamed in pain.

  The blade sank through the mud and wedged itself into the floor. I backed up as Blake scurried backward like a crab out of the thing’s reach.

  With a grotesque tearing sound, the creature made no attempt to pull the blade from its arm. Instead, it pulled its arm back as the knife separated the muddy flesh. Like a worm being attacked by ants, the thing writhed in pain, pulled itself back from the tiny door, and disappeared into the darkness of the other room.

  Carefully, I stepped forward and peeked out, not daring to step out of the circle again. I could see the windows at the far end of the room. The sky was getting lighter. Soon the sun would be up. Already I could hear birds chirping.

  “Blake?” I quickly knelt next to him. “Are you all right?”

  “My ankle really hurts.”

  I nodded. Of course it hurt. Heaven knew what kind of poison or toxins that thing was made of. Blake was probably going to need a series of tetanus shots just to be on the safe side.

  He pulled himself up. Visibly trembling, he pulled himself back into the small circle.

  “Well, there is a weapon. I’m afraid it has my fingerprints on it now. But maybe it will help you,” I replied.

  “It can’t hurt.”

  We waited a little longer until the light outside the window was a cheerful lemony yellow.

  “It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day,” I joked.

  “Yes, it does.”

  Blake looked at me. I could see in his eyes that he was struggling to understand what he’d seen. There were very few people who would be able to process something like that and remain calm. Blake seemed to be doing pretty well. I wished Bea were here. She’d be able to help him understand and ease some of the confusion and hurt that had to be swirling around inside him right now.

  “I think we’d better get to my aunt’s house.” I took his hand as if we’d been helping each other off the floor all our lives. “She’s got to be worried sick.”

  “I’d like that. I’d like to see your aunt.”

  With our eyes darting in all directions, we saw no sign of the mud monster. But we didn’t want to tempt fate. Even though we had the strange knife that saved Blake’s life, we both wanted out of that house. Even as he was limping, Blake took my hand, and we bolted out the front door. He couldn’t run, but that didn’t stop us from moving as fast as we could back to the car. It felt as if it were miles away.

  Finally, once we were safely inside and zooming down the deserted morning streets to my aunt’s house, Blake spoke again.

  “I don’t know what happened last night.”

  Those were the words I was afraid of hearing. Blake was in denial. He might be for the rest of his life. If only he knew that, in addition to creepy, slimy monsters, there was a myriad of beautiful things people like me could pull into focus, then he wouldn’t be so scared. This world was full of mysteries, and not all of them had red eyes and sharp teeth. Some of them were as simple as loving who we love with no reason or explanation.

  “But I’m glad you were there,” he finished. I didn’t expect that at all.

  “Well, you were pretty good company too.”

  “You saved my life. And I don’t think this was the first time.”

  Nor did I expect him to say those words. His expression didn’t tell me anything about how he was feeling, if he were mad or scared or curious or what. All I knew was that he’d said something very nice. It was what I’d been waiting for.

  I smiled until I remembered someone else had been waiting too.

  I was supposed to meet Tom last night.

  23

  Pentagram

  “I’m sorry, Tom,” I pleaded on the phone in Aunt Astrid’s bedroom. “I couldn’t get away. Really.”

  “Bea said you were with Detective Samberg.”

  “I was.” Leave it to Bea to never tell a lie. Not even a little white one to save her favorite cousin’s hide. “But it isn’t what you think.”

  “You are gone for the whole night with another man who I can tell has feelings for you.”

  “What? We’re friends, sure. He is Jake’s partner. It’s hard not to get to know the man when he’s around all the time.”

  “I’m sure he made every effort to get you back in time to meet me.”

  There was no use arguing. Tom was mad, and I didn’t blame him. Getting stood up never felt good. What I was going to do to fix this, I wasn’t sure. Part of me wasn’t sure I even wanted to fix this. Everything that had to do with Tom seemed to be weighing more and more and getting bigger and bigger.

  “Can you meet me this morning, Cath? Can you spare me a few minutes?”

  “I’m at Aunt Astrid’s. She needs me.”

  “Yeah. Blake is there too.”

  “How do you know?”

  “When you didn’t show up last night, I went by your house. Bea was pulling in her driveway and told me you had left with Blake. So I waited around.”

  “Until this morning?” I gasped. “You stalked my house?”

  “No, Cath. I was worried.” Tom sighed. “You’ve been so different since you met my mother. I just wanted to clear the air about that.”

  “Maybe I’m different since I met your mom because your mom doesn’t think I’m good enough. She basically came right out and told me. Ask Aunt Astrid if you don’t believe me. Your brother and sister married some real top-drawer individuals. You, unfortunately, won’t be received by any of the proper families in Wonder Falls if you are associating with the likes of me.” I said all this in my best Scarlett O’Hara and thought it sounded just perfect.

  “That isn’t what she told me. She said she thought you were fine.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. She said she thought you were very pleasant and hoped that you wouldn’t judge her quiet nature with disapproval. It’s obvious that you have.”

  That conniving woman set me up.

  “She came into the café and had more than that to say to me,” I replied.

  “Cath, I know your gift sets you apart from everyone, but it doesn’t make you better than anyone.”

  “I never said it did.”

  “I don’t think you listened to my mom. I think you had made up your mind long before you met her. I know she’s not the doting kind of woman like Aunt Astrid and she won’t jump at your every request, but she’s my mother.”

  “Tom, I don’t think this is the right time to talk about this. And I don’t think doing it over the phone is right
, either.”

  “Well, I tried to meet with you, but you had other plans.”

  “I’ve got a family emergency right now, Tom. I’ll call you when things have calmed down.”

  My eyes started to burn as tears of anger flooded them. I didn’t wait for a good-bye when I hung up the phone. I sat on the bed with the phone in my hand and took a deep breath.

  “Cath?” Bea peeked in. I was sure she’d picked up on the turmoil my soul was feeling. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded and sniffled.

  “I hope I didn’t get you in trouble telling Tom you were with Blake.”

  “It’s okay. If he doesn’t trust me, that’s on him, right?”

  She sat down next to me.

  “He said his mother thought I was fine,” I repeated what Tom had explained to me. “Does that sound like a set-up to you, or am I being paranoid?”

  “Did you tell Tom what Aunt Astrid had said?”

  “No. I didn’t want to get her in trouble. Plus, it is Tom’s mom. What would I say?” I wiped my eyes. “Why am I so confused, Bea? Why did I turn over my own applecart?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. I have no idea.” I chuckled bitterly.

  Bea looked at me while she took my hands in hers.

  “The truth will reveal itself to you, Cath. You just have to be willing to see it.”

  “Okay, Bea. Thanks. That really cleared things up. You answered all my questions, and I am almost positive I can see every answer to every question ever.” I rolled my eyes.

  Bea laughed a little and squeezed my hands.

  “I hate to do this to you. But you’ve got to clear your mind. We need your help. That sword thingy you brought home? It’s got some seriously bad mojo attached to it.”

  “Did your mom find anything like it in her books?”

  “Yup. She actually knew exactly what it was without a book, but she showed me the picture in her reference book. Of course, it has to do with The Sequence of Ursaken.”

  “Man, I hope I never hear about this sequence ever again.”

  Bea and I went back to the kitchen, where there were several big books open and spread out across the kitchen table.