by Peter Nealen
Going back to the memory of that oppressive malice made me briefly wonder why I was even bothering with this house, instead of just tossing a few Molotov cocktails into Mayhew’s windows and skipping town.
I had to admit to myself that it probably wasn’t going to be that simple, and wouldn’t be even if there weren’t four missing persons in the mix. I couldn’t be certain that the girls and Bob weren’t in the basement of the center somewhere—if I burned it down and left, and they were there, I’d answer for it, in this life or the next.
No, there were still too many unanswered questions about this setup. While I was fairly certain that Mayhew was in the middle of it, I had to track down every root of this corruption to burn it out. There are rarely neat solutions in this business, least of all in a place like Silverton.
Johnny led the way, passing between the two Silverton Police cars out front. Silverton’s Police Department may have had only four full-duty cops, but they were spooked enough by the disappearances that they were out in force. Mark was standing out front, talking on his cell. When he saw me, he forgot what he was saying for a moment. Mark and I don’t get along.
“If it isn’t the famous detective,” Mark said sarcastically as we walked up to the house. “Really, John, why are we letting this jackass walk around here? He should have been slapped in jail or at least run out of town after the last time.”
Johnny, who happened to be Mark’s superior, glared at him. “Let’s see, we didn’t slap him in jail because there was nothing to charge him with, Mark. He helped out and saved some lives. So shut your mouth.” Johnny may not have been all that comfortable with my stated purpose, but he was willing to put that aside for the moment.
Mark glared at me, but subsided. The truth was, he didn’t hate me because he thought I was a fraud. He hated me because when he’d been confronted by the very real revenant the cultists had managed to call up, he’d frozen, like most normal people confronted by the Otherworldly for the first time. I’d had to drive the thing off him. He’d hated me for saving his life and his sanity. He was also one of the people who, when confronted by the reality of things beyond their ken, compensate for being out of their depth by just getting angry about it.
Johnny shouldered past Mark, and I followed. I might or might not have shoulder-checked Mark a little as I passed. Okay, sometimes I can get a little belligerent, especially when I’m getting flak from somebody whose life I’d saved, the day after my truck was destroyed by a giant toad-monster. The screen door slammed behind us as I stopped in the entryway.
The short entryway opened directly into the living room, with the dining room and a staircase beyond it. The walls were white, and the floor was some kind of dark paneling made to look like hardwood.
The doorjamb next to me was splintered, as though someone had kicked the door in. An armchair in the living room had been knocked over, and the general disarray of the rest of the room suggested someone or something large had plowed through it like a freight train, heading for the stairs. Johnny led the way toward the staircase and I followed, taking in every detail I could.
The top of the stairway opened on a narrow hallway, with dark-trimmed doors on either side. The second door on the left had been kicked in, the jamb just as damaged and splintered as the front door’s. Daniel, looking pale and sick, was standing by the door. Johnny walked to it, then stopped, stepping aside for me to go in first.
The room was a disaster area. The bed was tipped on its side, a pillow was slashed open, and the dresser was wrecked, with all the drawers emptied on the floor. One of the drawers was smashed. A floor lamp had been broken in half, and a laptop computer was a mess of shattered plastic and circuit boards.
None of that was nearly as chilling as the blood spattered across the tangled sheets spilling off the overturned bed. And that was nothing compared to the message scrawled in blood on the wall.
The message wasn’t in so many words. Actually, there were no recognizable words at all. It was a complex web of pictographs and more abstract symbols. The abstract symbols just caused some general sense of unease, except for the large, incredibly complex one in the center, that just made me want to puke, lie down and cry, gouge out my own eyes, or some combination of all three.
Eerily realistic lightning bolts of blood formed a network of lines between the glyphs and the more graphic pictograms, which consisted of some of the most creative and twisted sadism and depravity I’ve ever laid my unfortunate eyes on. Although it had been made the day before, the blood was still wet, glistening and dripping slightly. I also noticed that everything had been pushed away from the wall, leaving this…pictogram from floor to ceiling.
I tore my eyes away from the horrific mural and squeezed them shut, trying to push away the very memory of looking at it. “Get everyone out of here,” I said. There was a strange, chemical tang in my nostrils, but I had seen and heard nothing to suggest that we weren’t alone in the room. “Now.”
Johnny didn’t argue, in fact he didn’t say a thing. When I opened my eyes and looked at him, he looked a little green around the gills. Nobody in their right mind could look at that horror on the wall and not be nauseated.
I shouldered past him into the hall. He followed, thoughtfully pulling the splintered door most of the way shut. “I take it that’s bad,” he said.
“Yeah, it’s bad,” I replied. “Are the parents still here? I have to hear what happened exactly as it happened.”
He shook his head no. “Parents are divorced; only the mother and the daughter lived here. The mother’s in the motel at the moment—she didn’t want to be here with the place busted up, her daughter gone, and…that on the wall.”
“She’s smart,” I replied. “Nothing good is going to come from being in the same room with that.” I glanced at the door and felt another twinge. I crossed myself. “Don’t let anybody back in there. I mean it, Johnny. Not a soul. That’s not just graffiti in there.”
“What about the girl?” he asked. “Did you spot anything we might have missed?”
“The girl’s dead.” There was no doubt in my mind. “Did you see the amount of blood on the wall? There’s no way she survived that.”
“Then why take the body?” Johnny asked, as he pulled out his phone.
“Don’t ask,” I replied grimly. There was any number of reasons, each of them more disturbing than the last.
I stalked down the hallway, taking in the place. It felt violated, but empty. Whoever or rather, whatever had done this was long gone. He, she, or it had also been confident enough not to leave any traps for investigators following on, unless that mural of sick had been the trap. Either possibility was cause for some serious concern.
The more I thought about it, the more I doubted Mayhew himself had done this. I had to ask some serious questions before I could be sure, but something about it spoke of a far greater power than any mortal man I knew of could control. And that possibility scared the hell out of me.
Johnny caught up to me in the living room. “We can go to the motel where the mother is staying. She’s agreed to tell you what happened.”
As I followed him out to the car, ignoring Mark’s glare, I asked, “What did you tell her about me?” I knew Johnny wasn’t dumb enough to tell someone that they were going to be questioned by a professional Witch Hunter, especially when everyone knows that the supernatural doesn’t really exist, and people like me are nuts.
“Just an outside specialist brought in on the case at my request,” he replied. “I said that you were an expert on these sorts of things.”
“On teenage girls becoming sacrificial meat puppets for demonic something-or-others?” I replied. “I suppose I am, at that.”
He glared at me over the roof of the car before getting in. “On kidnappings with possible cult connections,” he growled. “This is a hard enough case, Jed, don’t be a jackass about it.”
“Johnny,” I said as I climbed in the passenger seat, “if you knew what I know, and wors
e, suspected what I suspect, you’d understand that in this case, being a jackass is as good a way as any to keep a lid on the bowel-loosening terror.” I looked back at the house. The image of that mammoth thing stirring at the edge of the Abyss sprang clear and unbidden to my mind. “Whatever Mayhew’s trying to do, I’m afraid that if we don’t stop it, nothing and no one in this town will survive it.”
Johnny looked over at me, hard, as he pulled away from the curb. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Have you ever known me to joke about these things?” I asked.
“Yeah, about a minute ago.”
I shook my head. “I’m serious. See, this is my serious face.” I still didn’t look at him, but watched the houses go by as we headed for the motel on the edge of town. “Before I ask Mrs.…”
“Robinson.”
“Before I ask Mrs. Robinson what happened, what did she tell you?”
He frowned at the road. “She said that she was in the kitchen when the door was kicked open, then she blacked out. When she came to, Rebecca was gone, and that…artwork was on the wall.”
“Any idea how long she was out?” I asked.
“We didn’t think to ask,” he replied.
I raised my eyebrows. “You didn’t think to ask?”
“There were other details to look into,” he said defensively. There was a moment’s silence. “And I may have been a little unnerved by that splatter on the wall in the girl’s room. I’ve felt a little sick ever since I first looked at it.”
“Try not to think about it anymore,” I told him. “I’m serious, Johnny. That’s some really, really bad medicine back there. When this is over, you have to find some reason to condemn that house, tear it down, and burn that wall.”
He glanced over at me, his eyes a little wide. “It’s that bad?”
I nodded, my eyes straight ahead. “I can’t say what it says, but I’ve seen enough to know I don’t need or want to know. I don’t want those worms in my head. Who else saw it?”
“Mark and Ralph,” he said. “Mrs. Robinson. Maybe one or two others.”
“Keep an eye on them,” I said. “And if you start having thoughts that don’t seem normal to you, or hearing voices, you come straight to me or Father Pat. Don’t go to the shrink, one or the other of us.”
There was real fear in his voice now. “You think that’s…”
“I don’t know what it is. I just know it’s dangerous.” Again, I thought of the leviathan in the Abyss. I couldn’t help but think that it was somehow connected to that big central glyph. I felt my gorge rise at the memory of the symbol, and forced the image away. The truth was, all I had right now were hunches. Hunches and two sets of demonic symbols in two different places.
Two different places…I started to get a really bad feeling. “I wonder…” I muttered. “Nah, I need to find out more. Still…”
“What the hell are you muttering about over there?” Johnny asked, as we pulled into the motel parking lot.
“Nothing. Just a hunch,” I replied. “Can’t say for sure if it’s even plausible yet.”
“What’s your hunch?” he asked.
“I don’t want to say until I’ve got more to go on,” I answered, as he shut off the engine and we climbed out of the car.
The motel was an old one. It was one long, vaguely U-shaped, one-story building, with the rooms opening onto the parking lot. The white paint was cracked in more than a few places, and there were only three cars in the parking lot. Granted, it was the middle of the day, but the Silverton Motel never did get a lot of visitors.
Johnny, looking uneasy and shaken, led the way to one of the dark green doors, with a tarnished brass “6” tacked on it. He knocked. “Mrs. Robinson?”
The door swung opened as soon as his knuckles hit it. It hadn’t been latched.
At first glance the room was empty. The covers on the bed were thrown on the floor, a suitcase was opened on the chair next to it, and the TV was on, but muted. Then I heard a faint whimper from the bathroom.
My .45 was already in my hand. Johnny drew his Glock. Carefully, we both advanced on the open bathroom door.
Mrs. Robinson was huddled on the floor, trying to squeeze between the shower and the toilet. She was shaking like a leaf.
She must have been a handsome woman at any other time. But now she just looked like a terror-stricken animal. Her brown hair was a rat’s nest, and her fingernails were bleeding as she clutched her hands to her head, like she was trying to ward off a blow. What I could see of her face was pale, blotchy, and utterly terrified.
“Janice,” Johnny said gently, holstering his sidearm, “Janice, it’s me, Officer Steiger. It’s all right, you’re safe. Everything’s all right.” She just whimpered louder. Her stocking feet slipped frantically on the tile as she tried to scuttle further back into the space between toilet and tub.
I slowly holstered my 1911, while taking another long, careful look around the hotel room. Unlike the Robinsons’ house, there was no sign that the door had been kicked open. Either something else had done this to Mrs. Robinson, or for some reason it wanted less visibility when it came to her. I couldn’t be sure. I put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder.
“Let me try,” I said quietly. “Take a good look around; see if you can spot anything out of the ordinary that I’m missing. I’ll talk to her.” He nodded, his eyes clouded by a combination of fear, confusion, and doubt, then stood up slowly.
“Janice, Jed here is an old friend of mine, who’s here to help find Rebecca,” he said, quietly and gently. “We’re here to help you, Janice, and we’re not going to let anyone hurt you again. But we need to know what happened.”
I nodded to him and took his place in front of the trembling woman. I squatted down on my haunches to bring myself level with her, though she was still looking down at the floor and shaking. She wasn’t trying to retreat anymore, though, so that was something.
“Janice?” I said, very quietly, very gently. I had to ease past that wall of horror that was locking her inside herself. Otherwise, we’d never get anywhere. “My name’s Jed. Johnny’s right, you’re okay now. We’ve got you.” I wanted to coax her out of her attempted hiding place.
It took five more minutes of that before she even looked at me. Finally, in a voice barely above a whisper, she asked, “Is he gone?”
Who? I had to force myself to take my time here. She was on the edge of catatonia from fear. “Yes, Janice, he’s gone. There’s just the three of us here.”
Another half an hour and three false starts later, I had her out of the bathroom, sitting on the side of the unkempt bed. She still wouldn’t look either of us in the eye, but stared at her hands and the blood on her fingernails. From some of the marks on her face, I was pretty sure it was her own.
“Who was here, Janice?” I asked, once I was pretty sure she was stable enough to start answering questions. “What happened?”
When she spoke, her voice was still only a hoarse whisper. “He just opened the door. It was locked, and he just opened it like he had the key. He was dark.”
Johnny had come over and was kneeling beside me, looking up at her. “You mean he was Hispanic, or black?”
“He was dark,” she said, her voice strained with fear. “Like a shadow. He was big and dark, and his eyes were red…” She choked back a strangled scream. “He…he…he touched me…”
This wasn’t good. What she was describing was a Shadowman, probably the same one Lars had warned me about. If he’d touched her…
“What happened when he touched you, Janice?” Johnny asked.
She really did scream then, her eyes wide, bloodshot, and horrified, looking at something we couldn’t see, and I was pretty sure we didn’t want to see. “I saw…I saw Rebecca…” She broke down into hysterical crying as she curled into the fetal position, putting her hands over her head. I stood up and stepped away, drawing Johnny with me.
“What the…” he was watching her with his own eyes wide
. “What happened to her?”
“It was a Shadowman,” I said quietly, hoping she couldn’t hear me over her own sobs.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“You ever hear of a Wendigo?” I asked.
“I’ve heard the name, but that’s about it,” he answered.
“A Wendigo is the spirit of a medicine man who committed some horrible, unspeakable crime, usually involving cannibalism,” I said, keeping one eye on Janice. She wasn’t actively trying to hurt herself yet, but I was pretty sure I had some vague idea of what the Shadowman had shown her. After that, I doubted she’d ever be herself again. “They’re nasty, and very, very difficult to kill. Usually the best you can do is imprison them.
“A Shadowman is something similar, but worse. I’ve never heard of anyone besting a Shadowman. They’re hard as hell to pin down, and they’re malice incarnate. Nobody really knows how they came to be what they are, because most Indians won’t talk about them. The Cherokee call them sgilli, but when you bring them up, they get quiet, with good reason.” I looked down at Janice. “A friend of mine warned me that one was coming here. I suspect that this is the same one, unless whatever Mayhew’s doing has drawn more than one.” I actually shuddered at the thought, in spite of how much nastier I’d sensed that thing in the Abyss was.
Johnny crouched down and tried to comfort Janice, but it wasn’t working. “I wonder what she saw,” he said.
“It probably showed her what it did to her daughter,” I said.
He looked up at me. He was running out of ways to look horrified. “Why?”
“From what I know about these things,” I replied, “probably just for the fun of it.” I looked around the room again. “There’s no sign of any glyphs, it left her physically unharmed…this was just for the hell of it.” Although it may not have hurt her body, unless she was really extraordinarily tough, her mind was shredded for the rest of her life. “The fact that it didn’t kill her after that is just one more stroke of cruelty.” It wanted her to suffer with the memory of what it had shown her for a long, long time.
