by Richard Hein
Damn.
She suddenly looked very old. I mean, she clearly was pushing her late eighties, but she didn’t carry herself like someone who felt the weight of years bearing down on her soul until that moment. Her eyes dulled, her smile dwindled, and she sighed as if the world would never be warm again.
“If you find the man who killed Ben, would you give him a punch in the throat for me? I’d very much like that.”
I nodded. “If it’s who I think it might be, I’ll be doing worse, Jessica. You have my word.”
I turned away toward Ben’s house, and the door clicked closed behind me. I strode through Jessica’s yard, leaving a path through the dew-laden grass, stepped through the bushes separating the two lots and stomped my way through the beauty bark that lined Ben’s side. The lawn hadn’t seen any care in the last month, and wet grass clung at my calves as I forged a path to the front door. Property values were sure to be plummeting already. I stepped into the entry alcove, which was larger than my living room, and pushed open the door.
It was different than I’d had in mind. I was expecting some kind of ultra-modern, stainless-steel and utilitarian white. Instead it looked like a very nice house, only without cheap drywall and bargain-barrel doors. I could hear muffled voices echoing through the lofty spaces as I strode in.
Okay. It was business time, and my heart began a quick little dance of anticipation and excitement. It felt like prom night, that heady sensation of excitement and nervousness setting my innards twisting. Hopefully with less vomiting this time. This wasn’t pushing numbers around a spreadsheet, this was something that mattered. I’d tried to tell myself I hadn’t missed this, that I might have even hated it, but as I walked into a home that had been host to the unmistakable presence of something other-worldly, I couldn’t deny the simple truth.
This kicked ass.
I walked to the den, shoes whispering across fine blue carpet, breathing in stale, lifeless air. My eyes were half closed as I tried to feel the past. It’s not like I had a sixth sense or anything. It was something anyone could do. You wove together all of your senses, all of your emotional tells into something that described things that didn’t quite exist. Each would give you a small snippet of the puzzle, and could give you the full picture once stitched together. People can always tell things beyond the immediate. Like how you know when someone’s in the room with you, even if your eyes are closed. Something beyond the sum of all your parts. It can be honed and refined, and close contact with the supernatural helps to key one in on that.
In theory, anyway. It wasn’t like we taught a class at the OFC about this or anything, but it was something you picked up with enough time. You felt it, once you’d been around it enough, and eventually you could piece together things from the sights and sounds, the smell and touch of a place. It’s ambiance. It’s aura, maybe. Hell, we didn’t know what it was, but it worked.
I paused before the wall-spanning humidor, jaw clenched. We. I pushed the feeling away, trying not to let myself get distracted. I wasn’t OFC, even if I was technically still on a book somewhere, even if my soul was still bound to Sanctuary because whatever lobotomized thing that still gave it shape couldn’t sever that tie without severing my soul as well. A feeling raked at the back of my neck, like tendrils of wet, malevolent garbage gathered from the dumpster behind my apartment. Something twisted had been here. More than once to leave a mark after these weeks.
Unless it had returned since then.
I tugged open the glass doors with my jacket sleeve, not wanting to leave prints, and peered about the myriad boxes. Full of cigars and not at all demonic imagery as I’d suspected. Rather than the neat organization I’d have expected, the boxes lay strewn about. I frowned at them. A sign of his worsening mental state at the end, or just a guy that doesn’t pay much attention to detail?
If he smokes cigars, though, I thought… and headed for the kitchen.
While the kitchen was larger than half my apartment, it was no more clean. The stack of dishes near the sink gave me pause. It wasn’t a tower of dirty dishes like I might have had — if I bothered with plates, that is. Someone simply stacked plates to cups nearly three feet high, a miniature tower of eatery. The feeling of unease rolled in waves near there. I moved away, senses searching.
Jackpot. The important find was the cabinet in one corner that doubled as the bar. A dozen squat glasses lay tumbled on the upper shelf. More disorganization. Interesting. I grabbed a bottle of Scotch with a healthy amber color at random with my hand in my jacket sleeve.
I spun off the cap and took a healthy swig to help focus my mind.
“Samuel?” I heard Kate call. “We’re in the study.”
Not like I know where that is, I thought, taking another few sips. No demons in that bottle. I sealed it back up and puttered around the kitchen while avoiding the unholy tower of expensive dishes, checking cupboards and cabinets until I felt the healthy warm buzz filling me. It was cheap food, the sort I’d buy, crammed in without any thought of storage. Ben’s state of mind seemed clear. I shuffled toward the source of the voices upstairs.
I paused in the hallway as I came across a long line of photos dotting one wall, all in simple black frames. Each was meticulously dated and named. So Ben used to be neat and organized, I thought. The images showed that Kate always favored the smile she wore, even as a little girl. There was an abundance of photos, taken with Ben, Kate and their parents all across America. A few were even international. Little Katie and her family at Notre Dame, the big half dome things in Australia — whatever they were called, and even Stonehenge. They weren’t just young photos. The last was dated 2006, and showed Kate in her early twenties here in Seattle at the Sci-Fi museum, posing in front of some of the exhibits.
Nothing newer. Strange. Why had Ben stopped taking photos of his sister almost a decade ago? She still lived in the area, or at least did now, and his particular supernatural predicament was recent. Other photos lined the wall, but none with family.
And none of them had Kate in a uniform that gave me a hint of a job. Damn.
The next doorway led to a shrine crafted of books — a church for worshiping the printed word. I let out an appreciative syllable as my eyes soaked it all in. I couldn’t even see the walls. Every bare spot lay covered with book shelves, each crammed full of every sort of imaginable tome. Paperbacks. Hard covers. Leather-bound. I wasn’t the most voracious reader, but I could appreciate a display such as this. Pressing out my senses, I let my thoughts wander through the room, but felt nothing amiss. It took long moments to peel myself away from the door, images of lounging in the hefty leather chairs with a bottle of booze and any random book filling my mind. It would be irreverent, though, and there was work to be done.
I wandered upstairs.
“You know, I was expecting something a little more Ernest Hemingway,” I said, standing in the doorway to Ben’s office. “Lots of books, a big desk with a roll top. Probably a typewriter. I got a real typewriter vibe somewhere along the way.” I waved a hand at the room as Kate and Daniel turned to stare at me. “This is more Hannibal Lecter.”
Nearly every wall was covered in papers — tacked, nailed and taped at haphazard angles. Many weren’t even full sheets, just ripped from newspapers or magazines and scrawled over with thick red marker. Everything was covered with those same angular alphabetic runes that had been at the back of his journal. Like the book Kate carried, there was no organization to his madness that I could see. The symbols ran in every direction, sometimes diverging into spirals and angles.
Except for where the desk had been. It was clear where it should have sat, dimples in the beige carpet still evident.
“Shit,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut. Right. He’d died in here. Kate starred at me with cold eyes. Even Intern Daniel, wonderful, hapless Intern Daniel, looked at me like I’d just kicked his puppy.
“Ah, crap, Kate,” I muttered. I shuffled in and ran a hand through my hair. Damn it all, I was an ass
. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
Kate took a step forward and pressed her face close to mine. For one frantic second, it looked almost like she was going to kiss me, but she paused as she sniffed. She met my eyes, staring into them as if she could read my soul. Well, I guess she could at that. Kate nodded to herself and stepped away. My shoulders slumped.
“Are you okay?” I asked, trying very deliberately to not look in the direction of the bare spot in the room. “Being in here?”
Kate shrugged one shoulder and pushed her hair behind an ear. “As well as I can be. It’s not my first time coming by the house. Just the first time in here. Figuring out what happened is more useful than cowering in a corner. There’s things to do, Samuel, and some of us don’t have time to be crippled by our past.”
Ouch.
Ah, hell. I was not crippled. I didn’t expect her to understand that, though, and my actions at solving this dilemma would prove me right in the face of any silent accusation, so I pushed her accusing glare to the back of my mind.
“Glove me,” I said, holding out a hand to Daniel. He sighed and fished out a pair of nitrile gloves from a pocket and slapped them into my hand a little sullenly. I tugged them on with a loud snap.
“Anything you want to tell me?” Kate asked, eyebrows raised. There was still a little frost around them as she fixated on me.
“Fingerprints,” I said, holding up a blue finger and wiggling it. “You’re family so you’re okay. Danny and I would raise questions if the cops ever show back up. The OFC has a few inroads with the powers that be, but it’s just easier this way.”
“Couldn’t you have brought your own gear?” Daniel asked, pulling on his own pair. “You never know when a spare set comes in handy.”
“I thought you were the boss here,” I said. “Gear management should be your priority.”
Kate’s fingers reached for a picture on the wall, of a young man I assumed was Ben beside a wiry young Kate, positively dwarfed by a giant tree that filled the photo. She plucked it from the wall with a wan smile, wiping a frosting of dust from it with a thumb.
“I used to spend a lot of time here, just after high school,” she said softly. Shimmering eyes stared into the glass frame. “Mostly in his library. Half those books are probably mine. None of them are fiction, you know. I’ll read just to learn something new. We’d sit down there and read, or go through old photo albums. Ben never left home without that damned camera of his, always pausing every five steps to take a photo of something.” She tapped the image against one knuckle, gaze distant. “I don’t even remember when this was taken.”
“You should keep it,” I said.
“Eventually, once this is all figured out,” said Kate, hanging it back against the wall amid the sea of inscribed scraps of paper. She eyed it critically and straightened it. “It felt too soon to do any of that, and then I got his effects back and his journal and…” She sighed. “Did you discover anything useful next door at least?”
“Some,” I admitted. I let my senses drift around the room. If there was anything, it’d be strongest here. I’m sure Daniel was doing the same. I’d taught him the little trick, but I’d had years more practice. Of course, I’d also had years of putting the skill in a box in my closet, so to speak, so who knew. “The nice old lady next door saw some strange creepy guy coming over an awful lot in the month or so leading up to Ben’s death. She never got a good look at him though.”
Daniel perked up. “Oh?” he asked, fishing a book off of a hefty steel shelving unit that was also plastered with paper. “That helps rule out one avenue at least. Very good.”
Kate’s head swiveled between the two of us. “What avenue?”
“Possession,” I said, voice quiet. I swallowed the ragged glass that appeared in my throat. “That he used magic and left himself open to something very nasty coming through. If the neighbor saw someone, it wasn’t something he internalized. It was an extra-reality thing influencing him in the physical. Now we need to know why, and figure out a way to stop it.”
“Good,” Kate said, raising a fist. “Something I can vent on sounds cathartic.”
“Hold up a second there, Rambo,” I said, pushing her hand back down. “There’s one small problem with that.”
Daniel slapped the book closed and pointed at Kate with it. “Well, uh, something summoned those EDEs. Human or otherwise. We need to know who before we can make sure you’re safe. OFC rules mean we analyze and assess the angles first.”
I stepped away and began glancing over the scribblings that littered the walls. Kate retreated to the clutter of a second bookshelf on the far side of the room, opposite of where her brother’s desk would have been. I traced a few of the thick drawn lines with a finger. Like Daniel said, most of them seemed unique. At first glance they seemed like a language, but there were differences in most of them, even ones that seemed similar. A hatch mark higher or lower, two small circles above instead of three. I wasn’t a linguist. What could it mean?
“So, there’s two ways for these Entities to get to our reality?” Kate asked. I glanced over my shoulder and watched as she squatted down and began yanking cardboard boxes from the bottom shelf and pawing through them. More notebooks like the one she’d been carrying in her purse appeared in her hand, and her face went sickly at the sight of them. She lowered herself to the floor and began paging through them. “Summoning or possession.”
My eyes flicked up to Daniel, and found he was already watching me. A flicker of heat shot through me, but I battered it back down.
“Magic is exceptionally dangerous.” My words sounded detached, like I was reading them from a textbook. They hurt, but not as much as they might have once. Not for the first time, I was glad for the numbing effects of booze, light as it was. “The first one is deliberate of course, but not always like you’d think. Not like conjuring up demons or something, though that’s possible if you know what you’re doing. You mess with magic, you have a high chance that you are going to open your soul up to a visitor. Infinite realities, and they’re all filled with creatures waiting for us to call them collect. ”
“That’s a bit, uh, exaggerated,” Daniel said. “He’s right in that magic is impossibly perilous. It’s how things get into our reality, in one way or another though. Every dark thing we fight came in that way.” He spun and leaned against the paper-covered wall, watching Kate for a moment.
“Sounds like it happens often.”
“We can’t get into the specifics of magic, of course,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “It’s forbidden.”
“No exceptions for a girl like me, Daniel?” She actually batted her eyes at him, and the book in his grasp slipped free. He caught it against his leg.
My jaw tightened. “Hey,” I snapped. “Seriously, cut it out. Quit trying to wheedle information out of us. What part of ‘this shit is dangerous’ are you not getting? It killed your brother, Kate.”
Heat flared in Kate’s eyes to match my own for a heartbeat, then dwindled into ache. She nodded and broke my gaze.
“I can say there’s usually intent involved in bringing an entity into our world,” the kid continued, “though it can happen by accident when magic and devotion are in effect.”
“So, when I wished for a pony really hard when I was eight, I was close to getting a flesh-eating demon-pony? Honestly, I’d have been okay with that too. I got socks instead.” She frowned, and her voice grew sad. “I think.”
“More like imagine the summoning capability of a few hundred million focused prayers toward the big guy upstairs,” I said.
Kate stopped flipping pages and craned her neck to look up at me. “Seriously?” she asked, arching an eyebrow, skepticism clear on her face. “You’re telling me that God is an extra-dimensional being?”
“Infinite universes,” Daniel answered. He crossed the room, and the floor gave a creak beneath him as he stooped to pull one of the journals from the box beside Kate. He thumbed it open to a random page
and began spinning in a slow circle, head bobbing up and down as he tried to compare the symbols on page to the ones on the wall. Oh, that was a good idea. I gathered up another book and tried to look like it was standard procedure and not like I was copying him. “So are Cthulhu and Ra.”
“And Gozer the Gozerian,” I added.
Kate made a face, but I held up a hand before she could talk. “Keep in mind that summoning something like that requires an awful lot of willpower. Which run-of-the-mill-humanity is lacking.”
“So, you make up for it in throughput,” Daniel said. He squatted down, placed his journal on the floor, turning it neatly so it was perfectly parallel to the box and fetched up another. “Bigger numbers. It’s why you hear stories about ritual summoning pulling up demons. It’s why the Christian God is big right now. The signal has a lot of noise, but there’s juice behind it.”
“God is real, but is some thing from another reality?” Kate asked.
“Um, yes,” Daniel said, nodding.
“You’re a believer then, right?” Kate said to me, craning to glance over her shoulder. “It’s not like you can be agnostic or an atheist.”
I squeezed my eyes closed. “I’m whatever the term is for don’t care.”
“You can’t not believe,” Kate said. I could hear the frown in her voice. “You know.”
“And I don’t care,” I said, a little more harshly than I intended. Kate scooted around on the floor to stare at me. Her eyes were wide, but she was looking lower than my face. I glanced down.
My hands were pressed into shaking fists.
“Let it go, Kate,” Daniel said, voice gentle. I turned away, suddenly intent on a scrap of paper down near the floor. A single drop of crimson marred it. “Samuel has his reasons.”
I stared at the drop of red. Someone always gets killed. It always came back to that.
Who would it be this time?
“The reverse is also true,” Daniel added, as if the interlude hadn’t happened. “You can send an Entity back home as well. That’s usually termed exorcism, of course, though that has religious connotations that have nothing to do with reality. Again it’s simple willpower and careful application of forces.”
