by Brian Harmon
Her pretty eyes lit up. “Yay!”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Eric turned into an impressive driveway framed by a huge gate constructed from three enormous cedar logs. Hanging by chains from the horizontal beam was a big, cedar plank sign that read “Neemley Farms” in two-foot-tall letters burned into the wood.
A smaller, painted sign to the side of one of the vertical posts informed him that the produce stand was open Saturdays and Sundays from seven to noon. Fresh eggs, vegetables and preserves. Taped to the bottom of the sign was a paper that read, “FREE KITTENS” in big, black letters.
Not exactly the gates of hell. And yet, he felt nearly sick with dread about what he would find waiting for them here. His stomach was twisted into knots. Although he hadn’t eaten since he and Jude drove through the McDonalds the previous evening, he was far too anxious to feel even remotely hungry, not even at the thought of fresh eggs and preserves.
So far, however, there were no signs of trouble. He saw no rising smoke, no monsters creeping in the surrounding fields. But things had a way of changing quickly.
The long, gravel driveway led between a sprawling pasture populated by hundreds of heads of cattle and a vast cornfield. Several massive barns and silos stood in the distance. At the end of the driveway was a large, beautiful farmhouse with a huge front porch complete with a porch swing, wind chimes and hanging flowers.
The lawn was lush, recently cut and beautifully landscaped with flower beds, fountains, bird baths and feeders, and even a few of those strange, two-dimensional, black shadow cutouts of people leaning against trees.
What the hell was with those things, anyway?
A tool shed stood to one side, big in its own right but dwarfed by a detached, three-car garage next to it and a barn behind it that looked big enough to park a small fleet of school busses in.
He felt a little like Jack at the top of the beanstalk. Why the hell was everything so huge in this place? Who were these people? What did they need all this space for?
But none of that mattered. What mattered was finding Marissa. She was somewhere on this farm…which of course didn’t narrow it down very much.
“Any idea where she might be?” he asked.
Holly frowned. She scanned the yard, her eyes drifting from one building to the next. “I’m not sure…”
“You can’t sense her?”
“I can. But… I can’t tell where she’s at.”
Eric glanced down at the phone.
NO MAGIC MAN, Isabelle informed him. Then, NOT YET
That was strange. He’d been expecting to find him waiting for them. Why wouldn’t he be here? Unless he’d already been here and gone. But there was no sign of fire. Everywhere else the psycho had turned up had ended up torched. It was his calling card. His signature. It didn’t make sense that the pattern would change this time.
But then again, maybe it simply didn’t make sense to try finding sense in the mind of a murderous lunatic. Especially a murderous lunatic wizard.
“Something’s not right,” said Holly.
Eric stepped out of the van and withdrew the dagger from under the seat. “Of course it’s not. Why would it be?”
She gave him that pucker-lipped shrug again and opened her door.
To Isabelle, he said, “Can you feel anything out of the ordinary about this place?”
NOTHING I CAN PUT MY FINGER ON. SORRY
“It’s all right.” He slipped the phone back into his pocket and looked around. It was so quiet…
Clearly, people lived here. And it was very early yet. The owners of Neemley Farms were probably still in bed. Although, weren’t farmers supposed to be notoriously early risers?
He desperately hoped nothing had happened to these people. The last thing he wanted was to find the family slaughtered in their own home, tragic casualties of a war they had nothing to do with and never even knew existed.
But he didn’t exactly hope to meet them, either. He had just pulled into these people’s driveway unannounced and was now wandering around their yard carrying a large knife. And after all he’d been through, he probably looked like a deranged psychopath himself, with his hair a mess, his shirt torn and his shorts stained with blood.
And what precisely would he say anyway? I’m sorry to bother you, but have you seen a witch? What about a scary-looking wizard with fire hands?
He walked toward the house, his eyes and ears open, expecting someone to shout at him at any moment. Or to just shoot him on the spot. Or maybe a monster would leap out of the bird bath and try to disembowel him. It all seemed equally likely after the night he’d had.
He spotted one of those little, pointy-hatted lawn gnomes lurking in one of the flower beds and suddenly remembered that gnomes were one of those creatures Delphinium mentioned, one of the creatures Desmond used to talk about, along with imps and ogres and dragons. It didn’t look particularly nasty, with its little chubby cheeks and big, round nose and a strangely love-struck expression on its face, and yet he had no doubt that if one started stalking toward him, he wouldn’t find it even remotely adorable.
He walked around the side of the house. The back yard was enormous and framed by acres of tall, green corn. He didn’t care how beautiful it was or how many bathrooms this place had, he could never live here. He hated cornfields.
It had been almost a year since his encounter with the corn creeps, but he’d found that he still couldn’t look on a cornfield without feeling a chill creep down his back.
He felt the same way about wardrobes, rowboats and nudist resorts.
(Long story.)
Eric walked all the way to the back yard and peered out. The place was beautiful. In fact, it was too beautiful. Somehow it was far creepier knowing that something was terribly wrong here when everything looked so lovely.
He looked back at Holly, who was following him. “Anything?”
“She’s near,” she said. “But it’s like she’s resisting me. I don’t understand.”
“So she’s definitely not…”
The idea seemed to startle her. “No!” Then softer: “No… I’m… I’m sure.”
Eric turned and walked back toward the front yard again. It was so quiet. How was he supposed to know where to even start?
But as he reached the back porch, he caught sight of something out of place. In the vertical slats of the porch railing, the neatly painted wood had been hacked open, as if with an axe. It looked fresh.
He touched the splintered wood. Maybe it was nothing, but it seemed odd. Everything else on this property gave the impression that whoever lived here strived for perfection. They were clearly quite proud of their home.
He wasn’t sure why, but this seemed relevant. Something had collided with this railing. The location of the damage suggested that it had come from the front and side. Something carried by someone rushing past, perhaps. Or… He turned and looked back toward the tool shed and the looming barn behind it. Or something thrown from that direction.
Something was moving at the foundation of the barn, a small, black shape slinking through the grass. For a split second, he thought it was one of the shadowy creatures he’d encountered last month in Creek Bend, but it was much too small to be one of those. It was a…
“Kitty!” said Holly, pointing at the creature.
He would’ve said, “cat,” himself, but she was right. It was a black cat, with a white splotch on its face.
“Marissa!” she said.
Eric remembered. According to Holly, Marissa attracted feral cats. “Maybe,” he agreed. “Or maybe it’s just a barn cat.” The sign at the end of the driveway had been advertising free kittens, after all. “Let’s not get careless.”
She nodded and followed him as he walked toward the barn.
The cat saw them coming and ran away. Feral? Or just shy?
The barn’s side door was open. Again, Eric thought it was oddly sloppy in this otherwise neat space. But there was more to it than that. He’d ha
d hunches like these before. Somewhere deep down, he simply understood that these things were significant.
He paused as he approached the door. If this hunch was right, they were going to find trouble inside this barn. He turned to Holly, intending to tell her to reserve her spell unless she was absolutely forced to use it. It still troubled him how much it took out of her. But something caught his eye before he could say anything.
A strange, curved gash had been blasted into the wood of the tool shed, visible only from behind it and similar to the damage he’d seen in the porch railing.
“Marissa’s thrust!” exclaimed Holly.
She was right. In fact, if he placed himself at a certain angle, he could see that there was a single, crescent-moon shape that carried beyond the corner of the shed and continued across the railing. One shot, two points of impact.
Holly looked at him with dread in her eyes. “Hers takes a lot out of her. More than any of the rest of us. She wouldn’t have used it unless it was a life-or-death situation.”
Life or death? That sick feeling was working its way through his guts again. This was bad. Were they too late again?
At his feet, the grass looked like it had been recently trampled. Was it his imagination, or did it appear that something had been dragged from here to the barn? If her last resort attack had failed, she would’ve been at the monster’s mercy. Had it killed her and dragged her body inside?
He turned and made his way back to the open door. He became even less optimistic as he realized that the door had been forced open, the jamb splintered.
And there was blood. A tacky, gory smear on the clean, metal handle.
Holly made a sick squeaking noise in her throat.
With his heart hammering in his breast, Eric pushed open the door, letting the morning sunlight spill through onto the dirt floor, revealing a woman’s shoe.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Fortunately, there was no foot in the shoe, attached or otherwise. But the scene was only slightly less concerning without a body. After all, where was the owner of this lonely Reebok?
“Marissa, where are you?” squeaked Holly.
Yes, thought Eric. Where are you? He tried the light switch, but it didn’t work. “Really?” he murmured. “Somebody’s a fan of horror movie clichés.” He squinted into the darkness. The barn was huge, with enough natural lighting to get around, but the morning sun had left him blind to the gloom.
Holly slipped her small hand into his. He barely noticed. He was looking around at the five massive tractors that were parked in a neat row in the middle of the floor. Even more than before, he felt as if he’d wandered into a land of giants. He half expected to see the huge creature they encountered in Clodsend Park stroll through the enormous main doors wearing bib overalls and a straw hat.
A scream from the rear of the building drove the image from his mind before he could decide whether it was more amusing or disturbing.
“Marissa!” gasped Holly. She tried to run toward the sound of her sister’s cry, but he held her back.
“Careful!” he warned her, his voice a harsh whisper. “Don’t lose your head!”
She nodded, but the panic in her eyes remained.
“Come on…”
They moved quietly toward the rear of the building, their hearts racing. Eric strained to hear, but there was no noise but the pounding of his pulse in his ears.
The good news was that Marissa appeared to still be alive. Between the signs of struggle in the yard, the blood and the lone shoe, he’d begun to fear the worst. Unfortunately, however, she was clearly still in terrible danger.
There was a door at the back of the room. A machine shop, perhaps. It stood ajar and as they approached, he realized he could hear the soft sounds of a woman sobbing.
Eric’s knuckles were white on the handle of the dagger as he reached out to push the door open. The blade trembled. His heart was racing, his mouth dry. Better than most, he knew a bad situation when he saw one and this was definitely a bad situation. Something awful was waiting behind this door. It wouldn’t be wise to simply barge in, but neither could he afford to linger.
Steeling himself for whatever horrors awaited him, he pushed open the door with the tip of the blade and stepped into the dark room beyond.
At first, he didn’t see anything that shouldn’t be here. Work benches. Tools. Machines. Tractor parts. But then a whimper drew his attention to the back corner. There, deep in the shadows, he saw a young woman. She was sitting on the concrete floor, one foot sprawled in front of her, the other folded beneath her. She was wearing shorts and a light blouse and only one shoe. Her head hung down, her curly blonde hair obscuring her face, one hand resting on the floor. She was trembling. Her whole body shook with the force of her quiet sobbing.
“Marissa!” Holly tried to rush to her, but again, Eric held her back.
“Don’t!” he warned.
Marissa lifted her head and peered at them through the dirty strands of her hair. Her face was bloody. Her shirt was torn and gaping open in the front, revealing a lacy white bra beneath. She was gasping for breath between sobs. “No…” she croaked, lifting her hand off the floor and flapping it at Holly as if she were too weak to do anything more. “Don’t… Don’t let it…”
“Let go!” cried Holly, trying to wrench her hand free from Eric’s grip.
But Eric pulled her back and stepped in front of her. “Look, damn it!”
She clearly didn’t understand at first. She kept trying to free herself from his grip, but then she abruptly stopped struggling and he knew that she saw it.
It sat on a chair in the corner, behind the battered girl, where it blended into the shadows, barely visible in the deep gloom with its dark, dirty skin. It was grasping her upper arm in its huge hand, twisting it back so far that Eric hadn’t at first seen her arm at all. He’d thought she was holding it behind her.
It was even bigger than an ogre, and didn’t really resemble any of the things he’d seen during the night. Surprisingly, it was far uglier. It had a huge, misshapen head, massive hands and grotesquely swollen lips that looked like fat sausages with cracked casings. Alternately, it had a tiny little nose, beady eyes and no visible ears. Its torso was bloated and fat, its legs as big as tree trunks. Long, straggly strands of dirty hair dangled from its head like dreadlocks. Like most of the creatures he’d encountered since arriving in the area, it didn’t appear to be wearing any clothes. Its dark skin was blotchy and covered in sores, as if it were riddled with disease.
And he could smell the foul thing from where he stood. It reeked of body sweat and sewage. And blood. Lots of blood.
It seemed almost to be grinning at him.
“Go…” gasped Marissa. Then she coughed and her head lolled backward, her eyes fluttering back into her head. She was teetering on the edge of consciousness.
What had this monster done to her?
“Stay behind me,” warned Eric as he let go of Holly’s hand and took a step toward the monster, holding the dagger out in front of him.
The monster’s grin widened. It was definitely not a grimace. He actually heard it chuckle, as if his threats amused it.
Eric braced himself, ignored the terror clawing up from the depths of his belly and waved the dagger a little higher. He took a step forward, but he wasn’t sure what to do. He’d fought plenty of monsters, but this was his first hostage situation. “Okay, Butt Ugly. Let’s do this.”
But then the thing did something that he didn’t expect: It spoke.
“You’re one to talk,” it told him.
Eric stopped and lowered the dagger, distracted. “What?”
“I’m only saying. You’re not much to look at yourself.”
He stood there, his thoughts stuttering in his head. He hadn’t expected the thing to talk, much less insult him. Did this hideous thing really just call him ugly? What the hell?
The monster lifted Marissa to her feet by her arm, wrenching a painful shriek from her
that made Eric lurch a couple steps forward. Her arm was broken or dislocated, he realized. The monster was torturing her.
“This one’s not bad, though,” the monster said, peeling its bratwurst lips back from its yellow teeth in an evil grin and giving her a hard shake so that she let out another agonized scream.
“Stop it!” Eric shouted, lifting the dagger again. “Put her down!”
“What’s the point? She’ll be dead in a few hours anyway, just like the rest of her kind.”
“I’m warning you!”
The monster gave him another evil grin, but it lowered Marissa back to the floor, where she dropped onto the concrete and sobbed louder, clutching futilely at the monster’s massive fingers with her free hand.
“Desmond Weizner’s cursed blade,” the monster observed.
Eric glanced quickly down at the dagger and then met the beast’s eyes again. “You know it?”
“Some say it cuts all the way to the soul.”
“Fascinating,” said Eric. “Stings like a bitch, I’m sure. Now let go of her.”
“No.”
Eric opened his mouth, but he wasn’t sure what to say. He didn’t seem to have much bargaining power. This thing was clearly not afraid of Grandpa’s soul-cleaving blade. His mind was racing, but he had no idea what to do. He didn’t know how to save the poor girl.
The monster looked down at her, giving her arm a small twist as he did, and wrenching another wail of pain from her. “I think I’ll hold on to her for now. You see, you and I have some things to talk about.” It spoke quite well for a hideous freak of nature. The English teacher part of him was actually impressed.
“I’ve got nothing to say to monsters.”
“Perfect. Then you can shut your stupid mouth and listen like a good boy.”
Eric was getting a little tired of being talked to like this, but he found that he didn’t have any clever comebacks to that. The only thing that came to mind was, “No, you shut your stupid mouth,” and that was as un-hero-like as those less-than-macho noises he sometimes made when he was startled. (Who are you kidding? he thought. Sometimes you scream like a girl. Don’t sugarcoat it.)
