Eximere (The River Book 4)

by Michael Richan

  “Yes,” Steven said. “We need to go back. And fast.”

  Steven turned and walked, then ran back to the door. Roy looked at Eliza and they exchanged a confused look, then followed him.

  “What’s going on?” Roy asked him once they were back inside the stairwell.

  “She’s here,” Steven said. “We can’t go in there.”

  “Who’s here?” Eliza asked.

  “Anita,” Steven said. “I’m not going through that again, not if I can help it.”

  “Calm down,” Roy said. “How do you know she’s here?”

  “I saw her, in the upstairs window of the house as we were approaching it,” Steven said. “I’m surprised she didn’t see us.”

  “Are you sure?” Eliza asked. “I didn’t notice anything.”

  “I’m sure,” Steven said. “One hundred percent. We can’t go in there, not with her there.”

  “Let me check,” Roy said, poking his head out the door and straining to see the house. “I can’t make anything out.”

  “Your eyesight isn’t that great,” Steven said.

  “Here, I’ll look,” Eliza said. She walked a few steps out of the door to get a better angle at the house.

  “Come back in here!” Steven said. “She’ll see you!”

  “I can’t see anything either,” she said, walking back to the stairwell to join the others.

  “You’ve got to trust me,” Steven said. “She’s there.”

  “OK,” Eliza said, “I believe you.”

  “What do we do?” Roy asked.

  “It makes sense that she’s here,” Steven said. “We’ve seen her descend from her room upstairs every night at dusk. Eximere is where she goes.”

  “And back upstairs in the morning?” Eliza said.

  “Back and forth, on schedule. When we were in town, Roger told me that many people have seen her do this over the years, it’s a bit of a legend,” Steven said. “And it’s exactly what we’ve seen her do.”

  “Ghosts love routine,” Roy said. “Doesn’t surprise me.”

  “But there’s a reason,” Steven said. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s a reason she comes down here. She’d rather be up there, but she’s afraid of something. When I first met her, when you were all trancing, she was in the process of interrogating me. She wanted to kill me at one point, but she suddenly stopped and left to go down the stairs.”

  “That’s just the routine thing,” Roy said. “They’re stupid, they can’t give it up no matter what’s happening.”

  “No, she said she had to hurry,” Steven said. “She said ‘they’re coming.’ She was running away from something, running down here, where presumably she’s safe.”

  “And she goes back up in the morning, at sunrise,” Eliza said. “Maybe it’s the marchers? They’re out at night up there.”

  “Maybe,” Steven agreed. “Could be she’s running from them.” Steven remembered the look of Anita’s face – the flesh peeled away.

  “But they don’t come in the house,” Roy said.

  “We don’t know about her room,” Steven said. “They might come in there. Percival did warn us to stay out of it.”

  “Well, in any event, we’re not getting back into Eximere until she leaves,” Eliza said, “which, if she stays on schedule, will be in eight hours from now.”

  “I guess we try again in the morning,” Roy said. “Come on, let’s head back.”

  ◊

  The next morning they assembled in the dining room before beginning the trek to Eximere. The others weren’t up yet.

  “I’ll go watch and make sure Anita climbs the stairs,” Eliza said. “Here Roy, will you hold this?” she extended the plastic bag of dirt towards him, then turned to walk down the hallway. “Back in a bit, once she’s out of the way.”

  “What are we going to do about Jonathan?” Steven asked Roy. “Myrna overheard a phone conversation he was having in his room. She’s pretty sure he was talking to Percival. She overheard him say ‘two more days.’”

  “Bastard,” Roy said. “All the time keeping secrets. What I don’t get is why he’s willing to risk his own abilities by doing this.”

  “Myrna thinks he’s got a deal with Percival,” Steven said. “She overheard him say something about being safe.”

  “Fucking bastard!” Roy said. “And a fool. Whatever this is, he’s wrapped up in it too.”

  “Unless he wasn’t tagged somehow,” Steven said.

  Roy turned to look at him. “Was he? Did you see?”

  “I can’t be sure,” Steven said. “It happened too fast.”

  “Damn,” Roy said. “Well, it doesn’t change anything, either way. He’s the rat, and he’s going to have to pay, somehow.”

  Eliza joined them from the other room. “She’s upstairs now,” she said. “Safely in her room.”

  “Are you going to tell her about Jonathan?” Roy asked.

  Eliza looked at Steven. “What about him?” she asked.

  “I’ll tell you on the trip downstairs,” Steven said.

  ◊

  They emerged again from the door’s threshold and onto the brick path, Steven leading. The light had returned, and it looked exactly as it had the day before. Eliza was carrying the bag of dirt, and Roy followed in the rear.

  “Sense anything?” Eliza asked Steven as they approached the house.

  Steven was scanning the façade, checking each window carefully.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t see her, and I don’t feel her. Yesterday I could sense both. Now, nothing.”

  “I think our theory about her coming and going at sunrise and sunset is correct,” Roy said. “We’ll be fine here as long as we’re gone before sundown.”

  “I’d like to make it faster than that,” Steven said, reaching the door frame that led into the house. He stepped into it and walked through the house to the second doorway that led to the back yard. “I think we should keep our exposure to the device at a minimum.”

  They walked into the back yard and towards the large banyan tree. Roy led them to the grave he’d identified the day before. He knelt down in front of it, as though he was about to place flowers on it. Instead, he dug his hand into the bag of dirt that Eliza held open, and spread the dirt over the surface of the grave. He repeated the process several times, spreading multiple handfuls. Slowly, the material under the dirt began to lighten in places where the dirt had been rubbed. Steven noticed the material becoming translucent, and the clearness dropping slowly into the grave. Eventually it reached the body, and the features of a man’s face came into view, followed by the rest of his body. The clearing continued until it was an inch or two below the corpse.

  Steven was surprised. The body looked like Roy.

  “Roy,” Eliza said, staring down into the grave. “Is that you?”

  “Of course it’s not me,” Roy said. “I’m right here.”

  “Looks an awful lot like you,” Steven said.

  “I told you it was family,” Roy said. “Come on, it’s time to try the séance again, while this soil is doing its thing. Steven, I think you should join us this time. I don’t think there’s any threats here we need to worry about.”

  The three of them sat on the ground next to the grave, cross-legged. They joined hands, and within a moment they were all in the River, with Roy leading the séance.

  “Who are you?” Roy asked. “We are speaking to the body that lies in this grave. We know you want to communicate with us. We have made that possible now. Tell us who you are.”

  “I am Thomas,” they all heard.

  Good, no more writing in the dirt, Steven thought.

  “Automatic writing was my preferred way to commune with the dead when I was alive,” they heard. “For the reverse I found the lady susceptible, so I used her. No need for that now. How did you release me so I could speak?”

  “Your son, Thomas junior,” Roy said. “His book. A section in it described how to lighten the effects of the blo
ck that covers your body.”

  “He used it once to talk with me, many years ago,” they heard from the grave.

  Steven was confused. Who exactly are we talking to? he thought.

  “I’m Thomas’ father,” they heard. “Thomas senior. I was buried here many years ago. I presume you know by whom.”

  “James Unser,” Roy said.

  “Correct,” they heard Thomas say.

  So the book we have, Steven wondered, the first section of our book, that’s from Thomas junior?

  “Yes,” Roy said. “Did you have a book, Thomas?”

  “I did,” they heard. “In the house is a library. Have you seen it?”

  “Yes,” Roy said. “We’ve seen the library. Full of volumes from families like ours.”

  “My book is there,” they heard Thomas say.

  That’s what Thomas was referring to in his book, Steven thought. Those references that didn’t seem to match up to any page we had. He was referring to locations in your book, his father’s book, which we didn’t have.

  “Correct,” he heard Thomas say. “My book has been in that library for many years, placed there by James Unser after he buried me here. You can see his handiwork around me.”

  “It continues,” Roy said, “in a different way. A device he built to drain our abilities is in operation somewhere nearby. It’s working on us now. We need to find it, and stop it.”

  “I know the device,” they heard Thomas say.

  “You helped him build it,” Eliza said.

  “Yes, I did,” Thomas said. “Although I thought it was for a different purpose. I thought it would enhance our gifts. James used me to perfect it. Once I realized what it was, what his intentions were, he killed me and buried me here. He couldn’t afford to have the secret of his device known.”

  “What were his intentions, exactly?” Roy asked.

  “Killing us achieved his goals, but he knew it would draw too much attention, sooner or later. He wanted something he could use that would continue to work until all of us were impotent without anyone suspecting, and that meant it needed to work silently and quickly, perhaps for generations. It was his plan to locate one of us, then keep the device nearby until we were drained, then move on and find another. We’d never know what caused the drain; we’d just slowly lose our ability with no way to stop it. As long as it was within a mile of its victim, it would work. I guessed what he was up to, and he poisoned me. He knew death wasn’t good enough with our kind, so he used this substance I’m in to block us from communicating. And he kept our writings locked up, making sure they were never passed on.”

  Steven felt himself leaning back in the circle attempting to take all of this information in. He opened his eyes, and glanced into the grave that was not more than ten inches from where he sat. He could see the body suspended in the material, about six feet down. He thought perhaps Thomas would open his eyes, or make some kind of movement, but the body was still. Only Thomas’ thoughts were active. But the clearness of the material was beginning to fog. There were parts of Thomas that he could see before, but couldn’t see now.

  Roy was reciting the family genealogy to Thomas. “You had Thomas, Thomas had Charles, Charles had David, David was my father, and I’m Steven’s father. I have all their books.”

  “You must add mine to yours,” Thomas thought. “Inside it you will find a solution to the device.”

  “Do you know where your book is, in the library?” Steven said. “There’s hundreds of volumes in there, and we can’t stay here long.”

  “Mine had a green spine,” they heard. “I do not know on which shelf it lies. You will have to look for it. But use caution, be sure you replace anything you touch exactly as you found it. If Anita discovers that something was disturbed, she will know someone has found a way down here, and she’ll hunt you down.”

  Steven felt a cold chill run up the back of his spine. He resolved to ensure the books in the library looked as though they had never been touched.

  “You must stop the device,” they heard, “but your real enemy is Anita. James always hated that she was dark. I thought he was obsessed with trying to repel the dark, in reaction to his mother and how he was raised. But I discovered he hated it all. Dark, light, didn’t matter. He hated her so much, he despised anyone with the gift, because it reminded him of her. She knew what he was doing, and she was horrified by it, but she couldn’t stop it. James was more powerful than her, and she knew it. So she found ways to steal from him, to use what he was doing as more power for herself. I expect she plans to take the power that’s currently draining from all of you. She’s the real enemy you must deal with.”

  “How should we deal with her?” Roy said. “What about the device?”

  “She’ll know the moment you touch it,” they heard Thomas say weakly.

  “So we must stop her first?” Roy asked.

  No answer came. They turned to look at the grave – the material was dark again, looking the same as before they had applied the soil.

  Steven felt the séance end, and hands were dropped.

  “Ran out of time,” Roy said.

  “Do we have any more soil?” Eliza asked.

  “No,” Roy said, “used practically all of it.”

  “Look, there’s a handful at least,” Steven said. “Try it.”

  Roy rubbed the soil on the grave once again, and the clearness began to form under the area where Roy applied it. It dropped down inside the grave, clearing the first three feet, but stopped before it went down enough to clear the body.

  “If we want to talk more with Thomas senior,” Roy said, “we’re going to need another batch.”

  “I don’t relish trying to get that group upstairs to do it again,” Steven said.

  “We should concentrate on what he’s already told us,” Eliza said. “His book is in that library somewhere. We need to find it and locate the information about the device. We have to do it while we’re down here, we can’t take the book upstairs and risk Anita finding it gone.”

  “Agreed,” Steven said.

  They rose from the ground. Roy stopped a moment to look back down at the grave.

  “I know where the rest of them are buried,” Roy said to Steven. “But I didn’t know anyone earlier than Thomas junior. It bothers me he’s here, where I can’t visit him.”

  “You visit the others?” Steven asked.

  “I do,” Roy said. “I try to. Memorial Day, sometimes during the holidays when I miss my father and grandfather. I suppose I visited Thomas junior’s grave the least. Being my great-grandfather, I never knew him.”

  “But you know his writings,” Steven said. “You’re his legacy.”

  “So are you,” Roy said, looking at Steven, and turning to walk back into the house. “Let’s go add another.”

  ◊

  Three walls of the library were lined with light-colored bookcases from floor to ceiling. The fourth wall faced the outside, and had several large open windows. Light from outside streamed in, making it one of the most open and airy libraries Steven had ever been in. He scanned the spines of the volumes along the wall he’d been assigned to search.

  “Don’t touch any book you don’t have to,” he said.

  “That’s the third time you’ve said that,” Eliza said. “We get it. We won’t.”

  “Old Thomas really put the fear of Anita into you!” Roy laughed.

  “I don’t want to deal with that old bitch ever again,” Steven said. “I’m just hoping Thomas’ book will give us a way to kill her.”

  “She’s already dead,” Roy said.

  “‘End’ her, then, if you like that better,” Steven said. “Basically, no more Anita. That’s what I’m after.”

  “Sometimes you can end things by finding a way to neutralize them,” Eliza. “All this talk of killing, I don’t like it.”

  “Well,” Steven said, “I’m sick of neutralizing. We’ve left Michael and Jurgen alive, both of them wanting revenge, I’m s
ure.”

  “Jurgen is certainly dead by now,” Roy said, getting down on his knees to scan books on a lower shelf. “And we didn’t have to get blood on our hands.”

  “Anita isn’t alive,” Steven said. “No blood to worry about. And you don’t know that for sure about Jurgen. He was a crafty little fucker with access to lots of contraband.”

  “Ah!” Eliza said, removing a book from the shelf and opening it. She looked at it briefly, then said, “Oh, not his,” and placed it back.

  “Make sure you put it back in exactly!” Steven said. “Do you remember how it looked? You have to take note of how it looks before you remove it, so you can make sure it goes back in exactly the same.”

  “It’s the same, Steven,” Eliza said, looking at Roy.

  “What about dust on the bookshelf in front of it?” Steven said. “Did removing the book leave a dust streak?”

  “There’s no dust,” Eliza said. “I’ve not seen any in the house at all. Imagine a house with all the doors and windows open, that you don’t need to dust. Heaven!”

  “James must have been far more powerful than we initially thought,” Roy said. “To have built this whole place, and to keep it running like this, even after he’s gone.”

  “It might be Anita who’s keeping it running,” Steven said.

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Eliza said. “There’s too much positive energy flowing through the place. I don’t know about you two, but the house, the yard, this library even, it all makes me feel carefree. Like a burden has been lifted from my shoulders. Just the way you want a home to make you feel.”

  “Probably a side effect of the device,” Steven said. “Lull you while it drains you.”

  “You know, Steven, lately you’ve become quite cynical,” Eliza said.

  “He’s stressed,” Roy said to her.

  “Goddamn right I’m stressed,” Steven said angrily. “Marilyn’s blood, Anita’s attacks, a great-great-grandfather’s writings we didn’t know existed but can’t keep, yes, I’m a little overwhelmed. We’re in a friggin’ underground house for chrissakes.”

  Eliza walked over to Steven and placed her hand on his back. “There,” she said calmingly, “it’s all right. We’ll figure this out, and we’ll be fine.” She began rubbing her hand in a small circle. “We looked at a couple of books in here the day before, remember? And it didn’t set Anita off.” She kept rubbing, and Steven felt his anxiety melt away. Apparently Eliza could see it leave on his face. “Better?” she asked.