ALSO BY ROBERT MASELLO
FICTION
The Einstein Prophecy
The Romanov Cross
The Medusa Amulet
Blood and Ice
Vigil
Bestiary
Private Demons
Black Horizon
The Spirit Wood
NONFICTION
Robert’s Rules of Writing
Writer Tells All
A Friend in the Business
The Things Your Father Never Taught You
What Do Men Want From Women?
Fallen Angels and Spirits of the Dark
Raising Hell: A Concise History of the Black Arts and Those Who Dared to Practice Them
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 by Robert Masello
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503951198
ISBN-10: 1503951197
Cover design by Damonza
CONTENTS
Start Reading
26 November, 1894
PART I
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
28 October, 1881
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
28 October, 1881—Midnight
29 October, 1881
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
29 October, 1881
4 November, 1881
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
22 November, 1881
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
6 December, 1881
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
8 December, 1881
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
9 December, 1881
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
25 December, 1881
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
3 January, 1882
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
PART II
22 February, 1885
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
3 March, 1885
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
10 April, 1885
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
15 January, 1886
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
31 August, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
2 September, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
3 September, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
9 September, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
10 September, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
26 September, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
30 September, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
30 September, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
30 September, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
1 October, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
1 October, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
10 November, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
10 November, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
10 November, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
11 November, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
12 November, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
15 November, 1888
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
PART III
25 November, 1894
30 November, 1894
2 December, 1894
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA Present Day
5 December, 1894
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.
Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886
26 November, 1894
From: Robert Louis Stevenson, Vailima House, Samoa
To: W. E. Henley, 18 Maybury Road, Old Woking, Surrey, England
Dear Henley—
What I must tell you now, I tell you with dread.
It has happened again.
What we thought—what we prayed—we had left behind us in the back alleys and darkened doorways of Whitechapel has, I fear, awakened from its awful slumber.
It has struck again, right here, in what I had foolishly thought might be Paradise.
And I have been the unwitting agent of its malevolence.
To you alone, my oldest friend—you who know so much of the story and played such a brave and crucial part in it—can I entrust this final account. I will send it to you by way of the next packet boat to leave the island. Who else, I must ask, would believe it?
Last night, as I sat on my verandah, lighting a pipe and contemplating the face of the full moon—sometimes, Henley, it hangs so close to this mountaintop, it is like having a silver pocket watch dangling in front of my eyes—I saw a flicker of light emerging from the jungle and making straight for the house. For a moment, I thought it might finally be one of the aitus—evil spirits—that the natives believe haunt the tangled slopes of Mount Vaea, but then it resolved itself into the burning end of a torch. Someone was running across the cleared land, torch held high, and I could hear, above the soughing of the wind in the banyan trees, a voice shouting, ‘Tusitala! Come quick!’
Tusitala—teller of tales—is how I am known in the native tongue, and now I could tell that it was the voice of one of my boys, Malaki, who has helped clear the brush and dig the well. He arrived panting at the foot of the porch—his bare brown legs are crisscrossed with so many tattoos that they look as if he wears lace breeches.
‘Keep your voice down!’ I warned. ‘The house is asleep.’
‘Come quick,’ he repeated, though in a lower tone. ‘And bring gun.’
‘Why?’
Pausing to catch his breath again, he merely said ‘gun’, and it was then that I took note of the stain on the drooping folds of the pareu wrapped around his waist. In the moonlight, it had at first appeared to be dirt or perhaps red wine—though the Samoans have no taste for wine—but its crust and gleam now revealed it to be dried blood.
A sight that you and I, my friend, know all too well.
‘Are you hurt?’
He glanced down at the scrap of yellow cloth covering his loins. ‘Blood not mine.’
Asking for no further explanation, I hurried inside and up to the eyrie in which I write. As you know from previous letters, the house has no doors, the better to let the trade winds play through its many rooms, but the servants sleep willy-nilly on the floor, wherever they choose to throw down their grass mats, and so I had to tread lightly, and with care. In my haste, I stumbled over one or two of the houseboys, who grumbled and rolled over, and once in my study, I unlocked the case that holds my Colt rifle. Unrelia
ble as it is, it still affords the best and only means of protection from threats more dire than a hot word or native curse. I loaded the black powder and two .44-caliber rounds into its chambers—my fingers fumbling, I am not ashamed to say—and by the time I had returned to the porch, Malaki had saddled the horse and was holding the reins.
Mounting, I asked if he would like to ride, too, but Malaki shook his head, as I had suspected he would, and trotted alongside us, torch in hand, as we took to the jungle trail.
The villagers, who built this path for me in gratitude for past services, call it the Road of the Loving Heart. Even in the daylight, it is not easily navigable, twisting and turning, as it must, down the steep and overgrown hillside. More than once, Malaki had to wait impatiently as I—in my loose canvas trousers and shirt, the rifle slung across my back by a leather strap—had to guide the horse around a rocky outcropping, fallen tree trunk, or particularly tenacious liana vine. Had it not been for the beacon of the torch, I might have lost sight of him in the darkness altogether.
Before long, however, I could detect the crashing of the surf, and I knew that the most arduous part of our journey must be coming to an end.
But what awaited me then?
Breaking free of the suffocating trees and brush, we came upon the crescent strip of sand, strewn with pebbles and shells, which runs along the harbour front. I dismounted, looping the reins around a slender palm, as Malaki, hardly winded, gestured for me to come closer. Lowering the torch towards the sand, he pointed out what were unmistakably two sets of footprints—one made by dainty bare feet, the other by a man’s tackety boots, hobnails protruding from the heels. As we tracked them down the beach and in the direction of the dock, I could not help but judge from the impression of his steps that the man must have been a bandy-legged sort. That, or an ape had donned a pair of boots and gone for a nocturnal stroll.
‘Where are we going?’ I whispered. ‘What did you want me to see?’
Malaki just shook his head and waved me on. ‘Follow. Follow.’
As we drew near the pier, he bent low and ushered me under the wet timbers. Stooping over, I crept after him, the smell of kelp and rotting fish joined by something else, something that transported me, however reluctantly, to that grim little room I once visited at 13 Miller’s Court.
‘See,’ Malaki said, slowly waving the torch, its flame nearly extinguished, over a tide pool where a clump of long and dark strands, which at first I took for seaweed, washed back and forth in the water.
It was then that I saw the bright pink hibiscus blossom tucked—as the married women do with it in these islands—behind the left ear. She was lying with her face in the water, and when I moved to turn her over, Malaki stepped back in fear. From bosom to hem, her puletasi had been ripped wide open—as had she—and though in my heart I knew it to be impossible, all I could utter in horror was, ‘Did you do this?’
He vigourously shook his head in denial. ‘I turn body. No more.’
A crab scuttled over her shoulders, pincers extended, and I brushed it aside. ‘Let’s get her out of the water.’
But Malaki would not help.
I dragged her, as best I could, above the tideline. She looked like a girl of twenty or so, someone I had seen once or twice weaving baskets in Apia. I drew the ragged ends of her dress together and unwound a ghastly necklace of sea grapes from around her throat. The trail of the hobnailed boots ended at the waterline—plainly, her murderer had followed, or perhaps lured, the girl here—but they picked up again on the dry sand. Though the torch was out, by the light of the moon I could see that the prints continued towards the customs house, which was mounted on caissons not forty yards off.
‘You stay here,’ I whispered, though there was little enough chance of his following me into any greater danger.
Crouching low, I followed the telltale prints to the foot of the ladder, stealthily climbed the rungs, then skirted the barrels of copra and coffee beans clustered on the narrow deck. Positioning myself outside the door of the house, I unslung the rifle from my back. There was a small, smudged window encrusted with salt spray, but through its quarter panes I could discern a vague silhouette shifting about.
Putting my ear to the warped wood of the door, I heard sounds, too—muffled and low, but anguished nonetheless. The moaning of a tormented creature locked in a cage.
I cocked the rifle, and had no sooner readied myself to break inside when the door was flung open so violently that I instinctively fell back. The weapon was knocked from my hands, the cartridge exploding in the chamber with a shower of orange sparks and blue smoke, as a force like the wind toppled me over the railing. I landed on my back, stunned, as something dropped with a thud onto the sand at my side, and then, righting itself, shot past me. All I could see of it was a blur, black and swift as a bat, escaping into the maze of empty fish stalls and weighing stations.
But it was enough, old friend.
Enough to tell me that the nightmare had not ended in the squalid streets of Whitechapel, but had travelled halfway around the globe, ten thousand miles, to resume its dreadful enterprise.
PART I
TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA
Present Day
Piloting his jeep up the old abandoned fire road, Rafael Salazar could see all around him further evidence of the terrible drought that was afflicting not only the Santa Monica Mountains, but all of Southern California. Great plumes of dry soil rose around the tires, enveloping the vehicle in a cloud of dirt and dust as it bounced its way over the rocks and potholes, past the trees with their melancholy branches hanging low, the scraggly chaparral, the withered grasses. As a field officer with the Environmental Science Service, a perpetually underfunded division of the Bureau of Land Management, he had seen the canyon in all kinds of conditions, but he had never seen it this bad.
The forecast, unfortunately, was for more of the same. One errant spark and the whole thing could ignite like a torch.
As he came around a grove of leafless willows huddling together like conspirators and approached the top of the road, he saw a red pickup truck, parked in a rare patch of shade. He knew whose truck it was, though he’d yet to determine how or where they’d circumvented the chain and padlock that sealed off the bottom of the road. He also knew why, even in this blazing heat, they would be up here. The only question was, had they already gotten what they came for, or would there be time for him to stop them?
Pulling the jeep as far off road as he could go, he got out, slung his binoculars around his neck and his backpack over his shoulders, and started toward the truck. His legs were stiff and his butt was sore from all the jouncing in the jeep, but he knew there might not be any time to waste. He also knew that he could lose his job for this. It wasn’t the first time that he’d had to consider that possible outcome.
It wasn’t the first time that he had dismissed it, either.
He approached the beat-up old truck warily from the back, and only when he had determined that no one was in it did he get close enough to look into the flatbed.
To his relief, all he saw were some ropes and tackle, empty Dr Pepper cans, a busted fishing rod, and a Styrofoam cooler.
But which way had they gone?
He went to the top of the hill and swept the binoculars around the surrounding range and deep ravines. Running along the Pacific Coast and stretching forty miles from the Hollywood Hills to Point Mugu in neighboring Ventura County, the Santa Monica Mountains comprised a wilderness habitat unlike any other abutting a city as large and sprawling as Los Angeles. Canyons cut through the rolling hills and jagged peaks, and tiny towns were nestled here and there, but for the most part these undulating hills and winding gullies were still untouched and untamed, home to thousands of wild creatures, from foxes to raccoons, mule deer to brown bears, rattlesnakes to coyotes. It was the coyotes that had brought him here in the first place; even now, a pair of them, wearing the radio collars he had affixed, roamed these tinder-dry mountainsides.
<
br /> He saw no sign, however, of the two men, virtually inseparable and known locally by just their first names—Seth and Alfie. Seth was the tall one with the scruffy gray beard; Alfie was built like a fire hydrant (and was just about as bright). But even they would know to go where the water was, or at least where it had been, so Rafe started down the other side of the hill, the loose pebbles and grit from the trail skittering under his hiking boots. Two or three times he had to put his hand down to the parched ground to arrest his sliding out of control. He should have topped off his canteen before he’d gone out on his patrol—standard protocol—but it was too late to do anything about that now.
When the land leveled off, he followed the rudimentary track that animals had used since time immemorial to make their way down to the lake—more like an overgrown pond—where they could drink. The closer he got, the worse it looked, and smelled. In fact, when he finally arrived on its banks, he saw that the water level had dropped lower than he had ever seen it. At least a dozen yards of ground that had once been underwater were now visible, the gravel and desiccated weeds exposed to the bright sunlight, the remaining water still and fetid. The tips of rocks that had not seen the light of day for centuries or more protruded from the surface of the pale-green water, and the rusted frame of a mountain bike lay where someone must have once flung it into the lake.
Rafe stopped to catch his breath and take a swig from his canteen. A little farther out, he spotted something even more unlikely. It looked for all the world like the corner of an old green steamer trunk. Who would have dropped a thing like that all the way out there? With the binoculars, he was able to make out a row of tarnished brass bolts running along its rim, but that was all. If he wanted to retrieve the damn thing, he’d need a raft and another pair of hands.
Watching his step, he walked around the perimeter of the lake, but before he saw anything else odd or suspicious, he heard it—scratching, a feeble humph of air. All his senses went on alert, and he dipped into a crouch, twigs and thorns catching at his khaki shorts and scratching the bare skin below. The cuts and scratches were nothing; bumping into Seth and Alfie would be a whole lot worse.
Following the sounds, he entered a clearing and saw a clump of hardy chamise that had lost its normal russet color, fading to a pale pink, but managing even in this drought to remain thick and alive. That alone would have served as a lure, offering some shade and protection to a parched animal passing by. The contours of the metal cage were concealed among the branches. Without even seeing its prisoner yet, he knew what the trap contained.
The Jekyll Revelation Page 1
