by Jenn Bennett
“We’re close,” Hajo said. “Really close.”
I slowed the SUV as the bumpy road became covered with creeping bramble and downed tree branches every ten feet or so. Across the water, white-purple lightning struck on the edge of the horizon as darker storm clouds gathered. Angry waves crashed against the shore below us as we drove further down into the small peninsula where the cannery sprawled. Sections of the buildings transitioned from land to water with the aid of stilts. A long dock with missing boards wrapped around the Pacific edge of the buildings where tuna boats used to empty their catches.
“Stop.”
I braked in front of one of the cannery buildings.
“Inside there,” Hajo said, flinging off his seat belt.
I switched off the ignition and exited the SUV under a smattering of cold rain while Lon dug around in a seat pocket for a flashlight. He flicked it on and followed Hajo to a large loading door at the end of the building. Waist-high weeds, dead and brittle, blocked the door. Lon and Hajo worked together silently to stamp them down until they revealed a vertical door handle chained with a blackened padlock.
“You know how to pick locks?” Hajo asked Lon.
Lon shone the flashlight on the padlock, studied it for several seconds, then beckoned for me to take the light from him. “Hold it right there,” he instructed. He fished out his father’s old pocketknife and dug rusted bolts from the metal plate holding one side of the chain. Within seconds, the entire plate fell away with the chain still attached.
“Don’t get your fingerprints on anything. Just in case,” he said. He retracted his hand inside the edge of his jacket sleeve before sliding the large door a few feet to the side, and one by one we slipped into darkness, shaking the rain off as we entered the crumbling warehouse.
A shallow ramp led into a cavernous empty room. Everything was concrete—the floor, walls, rows of columns, even the ceiling. Only a narrow, rectangular band of windows broke the monotony. Stormy twilight passed through busted glass and illuminated an impressive display of faded graffiti that tagged the walls. Near the entrance, wooden crates were stacked high, a make-do ladder leading up to one of the broken windows, presumably used by graffiti artists to get in and out of the building. A pile of rusted spray-paint cans lay nearby.
We walked in, wet shoes squelching as we avoided rubble and some foul-smelling standing water that ran through the center of the room. At the end, we continued through a passage into a second area filled with tables and long metal tanks. Abandoned machinery was choked with weeds that snaked in through the broken windows. The graffiti tags tapered off here.
“So strong . . .” Hajo mumbled. “Keep going.”
Something stirred in the darkness to the side. I started and Lon herded me in closer to his hip. “Just rats,” he assured me, “or bats. Or maybe seagulls.” Any of them would explain the strong, acidic smell of animal droppings that stung my eyes.
“People get sick from breathing in pigeon shit,” I complained, eyeing the darkness with trepidation. “Like, hospital sick.”
Lon grunted. “Isn’t your buddy Bob here a healer?”
“I’m not good with disease,” Bob argued in a loud whisper behind me. “Just minor injuries. My father’s knack was stronger. He was a well-known GP in Morella before he died.”
He was right about that. Earthbounds with healing abilities were fairly common, and those with substantial skills usually made a career of medicine. Their high rate of success gave them a sizable advantage over human doctors and also gave them access to the highest-paying jobs. In fact, Bob lived off his father’s inheritance. I often wondered if Bob felt overshadowed by his father’s success—he talked about the man a lot, especially after a few drinks.
“It’s just on the other side of that hallway,” Hajo said.
We all looked where he was pointing. “That hallway” was long, narrow, and echoed with the sound of water dripping from broken pipes running along the ceiling. Every fiber of my being screamed a warning not to step into it. If Jupe were there, he would tell me that people too dumb to live did this kind of thing all the time in horror movies.
“Can you track more than one body at a time?” Lon asked.
Up until now, neither of us had brought this up. We couldn’t very well just tell Hajo that we were hunting the remains of the abducted children from the original Snatcher case. We might be too dumb to live, but we weren’t dumb enough to trust Drug Lord Hajo with that information.
“Naturally,” he said. “You wanna know how many bodies I sense on a daily basis? Thousands. Humans, animals—even insects, if they’re big enough. Death is everywhere, man. I can’t walk by a graveyard or I’ll pass out. And, yeah, there’s a boatload of dead things up in here, as if you can’t smell that yourself.”
I tried not to gag and inhaled with my mouth instead of my nose.
“You think I enjoy having this knack?” Hajo continued, his tone abrasive. “Would you? Why do you think I smoke sømna and just about anything else I can get my hands on? Anything to make me forget about it, or I go crazy.”
Lon grunted and aimed the flashlight at Hajo, who shielded his eyes.
“Come on,” I coaxed. If the children’s bodies were here, we were about to find out.
Single file, Hajo leading the way, we marched down the dank hallway. He stopped in front of a thick metal door. “Inside here.”
“Open the door,” Lon instructed.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” Hajo admitted. “I just . . .”
I stuck my head around Lon’s arm and guided his hand to aim the flashlight on the door handle. A diffused wedge of pink glowed between the frame and the door. “It’s secured by a spell,” I said. Weird magick. Temporary spells fade, but stronger magick cracks. The pink glow here was riddled with fine lines, which meant that the spell must’ve been set a long time ago. Years and years . . . maybe even thirty years.
Lon bent low to inspect the glow, reaching, then suddenly withdrew his hand. “What are we looking at here? A serious ward? A warning?”
I examined the markings. They weren’t anything I’d seen, but on closer inspection, they followed a familiar pattern. “I think it’s just a deterrent. A trick to keep people out. Move away.”
We shifted positions. I tried to open the door myself, but my hand wouldn’t grasp the handle. What a clever spell; I wished I knew how to do it. In order for us to get inside, I’d have to short it out. I retrieved a short stick of red ochre chalk from my jacket and drew a sloppy circle around the handle, then marked it with three sigils. I would’ve preferred to use a better spell, one that required kindled Heka, but we were sans electricity, so I had to use simpler magick. I mumbled a dissolving spell and spat on the sigils. The red ochre markings crackled with a brief flash of light, then popped and died. The old pink haze disintegrated.
I stood and started again to open the door, but Lon’s arm hooked around my waist and pulled me backward. “Let him do it.”
Hajo balked. “You paid me to dowse, not lay a red carpet down for you.”
“Open it.” Lon wasn’t asking.
Hajo muttered to himself but complied as Bob scooted closer to cower behind me. I think he was sniffing my hair—probably still experiencing lingering effects from Hajo’s vassal suggestion—but I was too anxious about finding dead bodies to care.
The door creaked open and a foul, musty odor wafted out. We turned our heads away and moved back, waiting several moments for the stench to dissipate. This couldn’t be good.
The golden arc from Lon’s flashlight drifted over a square, windowless room. A bulky piece of broken conveyor machinery with several cranks and ceiling exhausts jutted out from the left, taking up a third of the area. Near the far wall, sketched onto the floor, I could just make out a row of mandalas: holy squared circles. Large ones. They are most commonly found in Buddhist and Hindu spiritual art, filled with delicate patterns and used for meditatio
n and trance induction to focus energy. The outer circles of these were much simpler in design. But it was the size that caught my attention: three or four feet across. Inside the outer rings, a strangely patterned square was drawn, then another smaller circle inside the square. Four simple sigils rimmed the outer boundary. None of it was chalked. The designs were etched into the concrete. Serious stuff.
“I need to look at the symbols,” I said.
We moved as a unit and stepped inside the room.
“Stay here and guard the door,” Lon instructed Bob.
“In the dark?”
Lon dug a silver Zippo out of this pocket, snapped open the cover, and flicked it on. “Don’t lose this—it’s vintage. Speak up if you hear anything coming.”
“Oh, God,” Bob mumbled breathlessly, accepting the lighter with fearful reluctance. The blue-and-yellow flame bounced up and down in time with the Earthbound’s shaking hand.
“The spell on the door was old,” I assured Bob, putting a steady hand on his elbow. “No one’s been here for years.”
Lon picked up a rusted piece of piping off the floor, shook off cobwebs, and gave it to Bob. “Just in case.”
Bob whimpered.
We left him at his post and walked toward the mandalas. My stomach twisted as I counted them. Seven. Probably not a coincidence. And when I stepped closer and got a good look at the first one, I mentally changed that “probably” to a “definitely not.”
They weren’t charged—no Heka glowed within the lines—but, like the pink spell on the door, there was something achingly familiar about the patterns around the inner square of the mandalas. I knew it well. Change the square to a triangle and you had practically the same markings that were painted beneath each of the tables in Tambuku.
“Binding magick,” I whispered to Lon.
The magical artwork surrounding the mandalas was unique. Each of the four sigils was drawn with clean lines, and all were scored with letters in a sophisticated, evolved alphabet that wasn’t earthly.
I squatted and looked closer. “Something Æthyric, maybe.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Lon mumbled.
No sign of old blood, Heka, bones, or anything else around them. I took out my phone and snapped a quick photo of each one, trying not to think about terrified kids being held here. If there were such things as ghosts, as Jupe stubbornly believed, I couldn’t imagine anything worse than their being trapped in a place like this for eternity.
Lon shone the light around the room after I’d finished taking pictures. “I don’t see any remains.”
“That’s because the thread’s not connected. Those are clean.” Hajo pointed to the far side of the conveyor machinery, away from the mandalas. “The thread ends over there.”
My heart sped up as we treaded across the room. Hidden from view between the wall and a broken machine, an oblong oval stretched across the cement floor—not carved like the mandalas, but drawn with a dark pigment.
Outside the oval was more of that strange alphabet from the mandalas.
And inside the oval was a single skeleton.
An adult skeleton. Not a child.
The arm and leg bones lay in a pattern that suggested the body had been splayed out. The skull was still connected. In the middle—where the torso should have been—a pile of splintered bones radiated in a rough circle, as if a bomb had gone off inside the body. A dark spatter stained the concrete beneath, stopping abruptly inside the edge of the oval. No trace of any clothing whatsoever.
A gruesome sight. But what was written on the cement above the skull sent an army of chills down my spine:
JESSE BISHOP
Shock swept through me. I stood frozen for several moments, then pushed it away and focused on the details. The writing was definitely inscribed by the same hand who’d carved the mandalas, and, like the strange alphabet on those, the letters here were evenly spaced.
Like a child practicing block letters. That shook something loose in my brain. An image from an old newspaper clipping in the bottom of Dare’s banker box. I was no handwriting expert, but even I could see that Bishop’s name was written in the same manner as the names of the seven kids that were carved into the trees at Sandpiper Park.
Oh, Christ . . .
Bishop wasn’t the Snatcher.
Bishop was killed by the Snatcher. The key on the necklace had provided Hajo with a direct thread to its owner’s remains—not the children.
A dry croak stuck in my throat as I tried to say this out loud, but Lon immediately hushed me. “Take a picture,” he commanded softly.
With shaking hands, I pressed the screen on my phone to enable the camera function. It was all I could do to focus long enough to get a partially blurry shot, so I took a second one, but it didn’t turn out much better. One thing was obvious: though the seven mandalas were well planned and precisely executed, the oval holding Bishop’s bones was an afterthought. It was set off in the corner, the angle slightly askew. Drawn quick and rough. In a moment of anger?
“So, this is the guy you’re looking for, yeah?” Hajo said. “Looks like he was involved in some heavy occult shit. Remind me not to cross a magician.”
“Damn straight,” Lon muttered.
Hajo squatted down near the circle and pointed. “What’s that? There’s something behind the jaw. Looks like he swallowed it.”
Lon shifted the flashlight’s beam to illuminate the skull, while Hajo leaned over the skeleton to reach for it. When his fingers almost made it, he leaned in farther, taking a step inside the oval, and a tinge of dull red light, barely perceptible, washed over his shoe.
“No!” I shouted. But it was too late.
The red light sizzled around the oval and brightened. Another spell. It wasn’t a deterrent this time. Not a warning, either . . .
A deafening blast cracked the concrete beneath the skeleton and the whole room shook. An unseen force rushed at us, knocking Hajo against the wall and slamming Lon into the conveyor machine. My back hit the concrete floor. Pain ripped through my lungs. Lon’s flashlight flew from his hand and ricocheted off the wall. It blinked a couple of times as it spun on the floor and rolled somewhere near me.
“Cady!” Lon bellowed in the darkness.
Before I had time to answer, “What happened?” echoed in the distance and I saw Lon’s golden Zippo flame flickering, floating through the air like a yellow fairy as Bob ran toward us.
I pushed myself up, scanning the dark for the flashlight. It was pointed at the wall. I touched the handle with my fingertips, accidently pushing it away as a strange scuttling sound vibrated through the air, somewhere off in the corner.
Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch.
“Be quiet!” I yelled. Bob’s running feet stopped abruptly.
My hand stilled as I strained to listen to the bizarre scratching sound. It multiplied and moved, and my heart nearly stopped.
Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch.
What was that? Claws? Something small was clicking on the concrete, moving closer.
Bob shrieked and the Zippo flew through the air, the flame extinguished before the lighter clinked on the floor. Sounds of a struggle broke through the darkness, then Bob shouted, “Get it off me!”
My fingers gripped the handle of the flashlight. I swung it madly, bouncing the cone of light around the room. Lon, Hajo, Bob, surrounded by shiny things. Moving things. Birds?
I shone the light on the skeleton. The tripped spell that knocked us off our feet had furrowed the concrete floor and part of the wall and left a gaping inch-wide crevice. It had also cracked the skull—cleaved it right in two, from crown to jaw. And in the center of the split skull, like a sprout emerging from soil, the moving things slithered out and made a thumping noise as they hit the floor.
Not birds.
Bugs.
Enormous goddamn cockroaches.
Ribbed, shiny, flat bodies. Spiny legs that clicked on the cement like claws. Twitching an
tennae as long as my fingers. Beady eyes that glowed turquoise under the flashlight’s beam. Eyes? I’d never seen a roach’s eyes. I’d never seen roaches this big. They looked like terrifying prehistoric bugs from another planet.
Bugs from the Æthyr.
One extended a pair of shiny wings the color of burnt sugar. Then it made a hissing noise, buzzed its wings, and took off several feet into the air . . . and landed on Hajo’s leg. He kicked it away. It made a queasy crackling sound when it landed, then a scraping noise as it skidded on its side across the floor.
Okay, make that flying bugs from the Æthyr.
Screams cut through the room. Mine. Hajo’s. Maybe Lon’s. I’d never heard him scream, but who could tell. I nearly wet my pants in a moment of hyperventilating revulsion.
“Help!” Bob fell to the floor, reaching for his leg. Nearby, a trail of light brown goo dripped from the conveyor machine. A squirming bug carcass lay upside-down at its base, its spiny legs twitching violently. “It bit me!”
I scurried on hands and knees to help him while Hajo defended himself against the oncoming horde, kicking away the bugs as they emerged from the skull.
“It bit me,” Bob repeated in near hysteria. “It burns—” He hiked up his pant leg. Blood streamed from a jagged mark on his ankle. But that wasn’t the problem. The “bite” was swelling, and way too fast. A series of black rings already ridged the flesh around Bob’s ankle and advanced one by one up his leg.
“What the hell?” Hajo bellowed. “What are these things?”
Another bug skittered up behind Lon, its spiny black legs clicking on the cement. I called out a warning. Lon swiveled in time to raise his foot and stomp. The awful sound of cracking exoskeleton filled my ears, followed by a splatter of brown bug guts across my jeans.
A gurgled cry of fear bubbled up from Bob. The black lines ringing his leg had disappeared past his pushed-up pant leg. He gripped his stomach. I pried his hands away and wrenched up his Hawaiian shirt. The rings had already made it up there, too.
