by Derek Adam
Emma was watching me for a response.
I couldn’t tell her. No way she could process what happened without having it blow back on me somehow.
But the usual story was horseshit, and she wouldn’t buy it.
I struggled to come up with something and I pursed my lips.
“I’m prying. I apologize, it’s not really my business.
“No! You’re totally fine, Emma. I just don’t know how to put it into words. I’ve never really had to before… with someone like you, anyway.”
I gave a look, trying to wear my struggle on my face so she understood. I was being honest. I didn’t have the words to describe it, or what words to use.
And I wasn’t sure how much to tell her, though it wasn’t a matter of whether or not I could trust her.
I made the turn onto the barely visible two-track that led up the hills toward the lake, the truck rocking as I turned through the transition from pavement to the uneven dirt.
I guess I just didn’t want her to freak out on me. I knew she wouldn’t shoot me or anything, but I also didn’t want any problems while we wrapped this up and then… what?
She’d go back to wherever?
“Let’s just say, with what my grandfather was involved with, he didn’t have a peaceful exit from the world. He raised me. I grew up around his stories and the things he taught me so… naturally…” I opened my hands on the steering wheel, shrugging toward her as I trailed off.
“You’re looking for answers to what happened to him?”
Yes.
“Eh… yes and no. I dunno. I don’t fit in anywhere else. When he died, I didn’t really have anywhere to go. I tried working regular jobs in my teens; those never panned out. Tried the ghostbuster thing but was too green. That’s where Virgil and Sutter helped me. Been kind of my teachers, mentors, and surrogate parents… as scary as that is.”
“What about your parents?”
“A story for another time.” I glanced at her as I wheeled around the bend. The trees that closely hugged the two-track fell back a bit and the road opened up at an intersection. “Over to the right will take us around to where I found you yesterday, and then around the lake to the last cabin. Straight ahead and to the left here are the cabins you hadn’t seen yet.”
We sat at the intersection, the truck idling as I watched her. She glanced from one dirt track to the next.
“I know you wanted to see the two other cabins but trust me, there’s nothing worth seeing there. Back at the last cabin though… Virgil spotted something in the pictures that I want to look at, and you’ll probably want to see.”
“What is it?”
“A symbol and some markings. I’m not sure how the hell I missed it. I shouldn’t have, but I was kind of distracted.”
I scratched my cheek and glanced at her. She met my eyes and gave me a knowing look. If she weren’t looking at me, I would have rolled my eyes while curling up to die.
She took a deep breath and blinked as if recapturing her focus and turned to look out her window. “Let’s go right then.”
*****
The cabin looked a lot more inviting in the early morning hours. If I didn’t know what was all over the interior of that place, I’d almost consider booking it for a little R&R.
That was something I couldn’t ever recall doing. I traveled plenty, and had been all over the U.S., but it was all related to jobs.
I stepped to the side as Emma passed, Virgil and Sutter lingering close to me.
“Been a while since I been able to shoot anything. Kinda lookin’ forward to seein’ some uglies.” Sutter was getting impatient and we’d just gotten here. We dealt with a lot of odd jobs in this line of work, and a good chunk of the people we helped had pretty tame issues with spirits.
On occasion though, there was wet work to be done. Sutter looked forward to those times. He said popping demons made him feel useful and alive again.
I tried to get him to understand how he’s always useful. I wouldn’t even know what I know if he hadn’t spent countless hours with me as a teen teaching me to shoot, fight, and survive.
Sutter might be a poorly educated, long-dead lawman from the 1800’s, but he had survivor instinct and a knowledge of thriving in harsh environments – and deadly situations – that saved my ass more than once.
“Let’s just keep it tame for now, Sutter. I need your eyes and ears.” I looked back to Virgil as I followed Emma into the cabin, tugging my backpack up onto my shoulder. “That goes for both of you.”
“When have I ever done you wrong, Rooster?”
I stopped in the doorway and paused, before looking to Sutter.
“Oklahoma, 2006.”
“…oh yeah.”
Virgil chimed in. “And the electrical blackout in the Northeast in 2003.”
“That wasn’t me, that was Luca!”
“It was your fault, Sutter,” Virgil mumbled under his breath as I turned my attention back to Emma.
“Shut up, nerd…”
I followed her into the cabin and felt the familiar wash of hatred that flowed and rolled through the air. It coated the skin and my attention fixed to the wall where the bodekin had appeared. Its remains were still on the floor, though in a pile that looked like little more than black ash at this point.
Every bit of me wanted to know what the hell that was about. Emma was dead-on there. I knew those things were choosy about where they went and why. The why was usually because they were told where to go. They were just puppet demons.
Virgil and Sutter were completely quiet, which was unheard of. Sutter might run his mouth often enough, but Virgil turned into a non-stop chatter box when we were investigating.
I turned and found them both just inside the door of the cabin with their mouths hanging open a bit, slowly looking around.
“Guys?”
“Uh… Rooster. If you could see what I see…”
“That… is… horrifying.”
Emma was coming back toward me, looking between the three of us. “What do they see?”
“The other bonus to these two. You and I can get a peek through the veil and see spirits. They see more.”
“How much more?”
I shrugged, gesturing to Virgil. He looked to us and shook his head.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, Luca. I’m not even sure how I could describe it to you.”
“Try.”
“Like someone pouring whiskey bottles of ugly… and evil… all over everything and flowing like an evil river… full up of evil.” Sutter wasn’t the most articulate, but he always made an effort.
“Well, that explains a few things.” I shook the backpack from my shoulder and dropped to a knee, setting the bag down. “Time for the toys.”
Digging around in the bag, I pulled out the modified multimeter. It really wasn’t a multimeter anymore, other than the controls, housing, and gauges. I had built it to pick up on spirits and such when doing investigations.
I pulled the antennae from the top of the meter, extending it to the full two feet. There was a loose metal coil that wound up around the antennae, that bobbed like a slinky.
“Oh, you are a ghostbuster.” Emma stepped around next to me to look at the meter, one of her eyebrows crawling high on her forehead as she looked from it to me in disbelief. “You don’t believe them?”
“I totally believe them. They wouldn’t lie to me. This isn’t really like…a ‘yes or no’ thing, though it’ll do that. It’s more of ‘how much yes.’”
Emma was looking at me, the eyebrow still up. She didn’t get it. I turned the meter so she could see it and I tapped the face of it with my finger.
“If you were to ask the question ‘is there weird shit here’, that’s a yes or no. It doesn’t really do that accurately because there’s always weird shit here.” I thumbed toward Virgil and Sutter. “Better question is, how much weird shit are we dealing with.”
“It looks like the remote for a toy car, Luca.�
��
I smirked and nodded in agreement, and a smile crossed her face as well. I liked that she teased me. There was something in the one playful jab that felt more authentic than just about every other interaction we’d had so far.
I tried to cling to that feeling but it was fleeting and quickly buried under the constant molasses of dark emotion that was coating everything in the cabin.
That brought my attention back into sharp focus, and I looked to the meter again, still grinning a bit as I clicked the dial to the right.
The red needle jumped and buried itself to the right side of the gauge and completely disappeared. My grin disappeared immediately. “Oh.”
Emma peered again. “What does it say?”
“Well, normally when I turn it on around these two, it’ll jump to about ten, moving just a little bit. But it’s way past two-fifty.”
“Two hundred and fifty what?”
“Weirdshits.” I bopped the side of the meter with my hand and shook it before looking at her, the metal coil around the antennae bouncing and ringing slightly against itself. She was hitting me with a look of disbelief. “I never said it was an exact science. There isn’t an officially registry for this stuff, and I haven’t thought up a good name for it.”
“Hey, Rooster, I don’t …uh… think it’s such a good idea to hang around here. Maybe we should go.”
The whole lot of us turned to look at Sutter, including Virgil. He looked between us and didn’t offer any other explanation. I had never, in all my years with Sutter, heard him sound off about backing out of anything.
That bothered me more than two hundred and fifty weirdshits.
“It doesn’t feel any different than yesterday though.” I tried to use sheer optimism to bury the feeling of dread that crept into me at the idea of a macho spirit getting nervous.
“Yesterday, you had a bodekin try to crawl inside you.” Emma looked at the meter and back to me again. “Where’s that symbol you mentioned?”
It took me just a second to recall the photos and orient myself in the large open cabin, but a quick scan of the walls turned it up and I pointed toward the markings.
We made our way over, Sutter and Virgil following behind. I glanced at the meter again, but the needle hadn’t moved. It was still pegged. The now-familiar sound of nails on wood registered as Bella crossed from one side of the door to the other. She was deeply invested in whatever scent she was slowly pursuing from one end of the porch to the other.
“That is fascinating.” Virgil walked straight through me and I felt my insides twist a bit, my bowels and stomach contracting like I suddenly had a terrible stomach bug. I grimaced but didn’t say anything. I’d have words with him later about doing that, but I didn’t want to interrupt him. This is where Virgil shined.
I could make out just about everything up there around the main sigil, but a few were foreign to me.
“Impress me, Virgil.”
“Well, the sigil at the top is late renaissance and it represents death, I think. Sigils were very personal to magicians or those who practiced, so there’s some variation. The symbol at the bottom is clearly a Leviathan Cross.”
“Yeah, but I doubt this has anything to do with the Knights Templar, Virgil.”
“Right, Luca. Ah, with consideration for what has happened here, then it most likely is the alternate symbolism as the alchemical sign for Sulfur. But this…” Virgil stood facing the wall, his hands on his hips as he looked up to study it quietly a moment longer. “I don’t know these.”
“Those are the symbols of the Ahnenerbe. The one on the left, the sword and runes within the circle, piercing the loop – that represents them. The other is the black sun. Or at least a variation of it.”
I’d studied a significant amount on the occult through my twenties, but that one was new. “What the hell is an Ahnenerbe?”
Emma looked at me, a significant amount of frustration and irritation showing in her eyes, though I could tell it wasn’t directed at me. “A German group with ties to the Nazis.”
“Nazis?!” I laughed, mostly out of disbelief. I’d ready plenty about the Germans studying into the occult, but a lot of it was conjecture and conspiracy stuff around reanimating bodies and trying to hunt down religious artifacts.
“Ah yes. I see it now.” The excitement in Virgil’s voice was climbing. He leaned in and was gesturing Emma closure. “And this symbol in the center? Do you know it?”
We all looked to Emma as she stared at it. Her eyes were telling.
“It’s an Enochian glyph. It means ‘nameless one.’” She sighed and looked at me again. There was something there but I couldn’t decipher the look. I wondered what was going on in her head.
“Well, I’m gonna take a stab here and say it looks like someone was trying to reach out and touch someone else.” I put a hand to Emma’s shoulder as I stepped forward, pointing around the symbols. “Binding and summoning, then mixing Sumerian and Enochian invocations all around it.”
“It’s like a bowl of salsa.”
Emma and I turned to look at Sutter. He was nodding at the symbols as if he were on to something, trying to look the part of a noble scholar by stroking his stubbled skin.
“Actually, that’s an elegant… if not rudimentary… comparison.” Virgil nodded to Sutter, who nodded in return with a smug grin. “Salsa is a variety of components made more intense in flavor, as well as heat, the more ingredients you add and concentrate.”
“But this ain’t like regular salsa.” Sutter turned as he moved closer, gesturing toward it, but at nothing in particular. “This is like fancy stuff. Like chili con queso with salsa mixed in… and some sour cream. Chives maybe.”
It wasn’t Sutter’s imagination that had me speechless. More so that Virgil was agreeing and encouraging him.
Sutter gave me a thumbs up, nodding with the most serious face as he squinted one eye at me. He snapped his fingers and pointed at me.
“It’s a Mexican demon.”
“Jesus Christ, Sutter.” I collapsed the antennae on the meter and stowed it in the bag while looking at Emma. “You think maybe they were successful with whatever they were doing here?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think that dryad had anything to do with this, other than maybe being attracted to… all of this. We came from too far away.”
“What makes you so sure?”
Emma hesitated and then shrugged. “I’m not.”
“Well, that’s reassuring.”
Emma scoffed at me in response, scowling a bit. “Do you have a better idea? Maybe you can build something out of Legos that might help.”
Zing.
I suppose I deserved that but it didn’t change the fact that she took a shot at me.
“At least it works.”
“Luca,” Virgil chimed in from behind me as I adjusted my backpack on my shoulder, squaring off with Emma.
She folded her arms across her chest, maintaining her scowl. “How do you know it works? Have you actually measured anything with that big antennae, besides your winkus?”
“Luca…”
I put a finger up at Virgil to pause him and gave Emma a confused look. “Did you just say winkus?”
“I did.”
“Lady, I’ll have you know that I don’t need to measure anything. I’m perfectly happy with the size and performance of everything… my meter and my winkus.”
“He ain’t lying. Why you think I call him Rooster?”
Emma looked to Sutter, and her eyes briefly floated to my waistline before bouncing back up to scowl at me, her chin lifting defiantly. “You don’t think much of me, do you?”
“Oh, I have plenty to think about.” I could feel my own irritation rising, even though I really didn’t know what I was saying or where I was going with it.
“What’s that supposed to mean? That I’m not worth anything more than my body?”
“Luca. If I could interject…”
“Shut up, Virgil.” I ste
pped toward Emma. “Now you’re just putting words in my mouth.”
“I’d like to put something in your mouth.”
“Oh, I like her,” Sutter chimed in this time.
I lifted my arms in a shrug, palms to the ceiling, as I looked around the room. “What the hell is that even supposed to mean?!”
“I don’t know!”
We stood there, glaring at each other, when Virgil stepped up, inserting himself somewhat between us. He put his hands up toward Emma and smiled cautiously before turning to me.
“Luca. You’re getting angry.”
“You’re goddamn right I am.”
“And you’re feeling a little hateful right now.” Virgil raised an index finger and pointed upward, lofting his brow. “You’re feeding it, and it’s using you.”
Virgil turned to look at Emma. “And you as well. I can see it changing as you fight. The cabin, I mean. I think something is coming.”
Chapter 11 – Emma
Virgil was right. As soon as he pointed it out, I realized just how much things had changed. All of my senses had been clouded by an intense and burning anger.
One that I wasn’t accustomed to feeling.
But now I could see it. Or, in this case, I could smell it. I would have normally caught even the hint of Sulfur as it grew closer, but I had been so distracted.
The smell was rapidly growing more intense. I drew both pistols from their holsters and turned to look around.
“Bella. Hier.” She appeared quickly in the doorway on the porch, but before she could enter, the door of the cabin slammed shut violently, followed by the wooden shutters in rapid succession.
With most of the light blocked, the interior of the cabin was plunged into near darkness, barely lit by thin shafts of light that cut between the seams of the shutters.
Bella was barking loudly, scratching at the door outside.
“Piss!” Luca exclaimed quietly, and I glanced at him. He gave me an apologetic look before sighing. I nodded to acknowledge it but had no words at the moment.
My attention shifted to a growing shadow, like a cloud forming of the blackest pitch at the far side of the room.
It quickly solidified into a sleek black silhouette that walked toward us. The figure looked like a man in shape, and muscular in tone. But it was featureless, like someone was wearing a shiny black latex suit from head to toe.
