by Ryk E. Spoor
The six of us fanned out across the region of the crater—being very careful not to slip on that impossibly glassy surface until we got to the safer, dirt-strewn area—and began searching.
It was about twenty-five minutes later—I was getting pretty tired of studying one dusty clod of dirt after another, and developing a healthy respect for the four agents’ patience—when Syl suddenly turned, took two steps to her right and bent down, tweezers in hand. “Ha!” she said with satisfaction.
Achernar and his team seemed to materialize around us, staring at Syl’s find.
It was a long black thread, frayed, with signs of having been torn from something else.
Achernar extended a sample bag and Syl dropped it in. “Very good, Sylvie. And Jason—I’m impressed. It may not be much . . . but you just helped recover evidence we probably would have missed. Oh, the Jammer would have figured out what was in the pictures, but that would have been too late to actually get the thread.”
“Thanks. Glad to be of assistance. Though . . . is that really going to be of much use?”
Donovan Grant’s grin was predatory. “Mr. Wood, believe me; you’d be amazed what we can get out of a thread.”
Achernar suddenly cocked his head; a moment later, I could hear why he did: faint, distant fluttering, humming sounds. “Okay. Looks like we’ve done what we can for now. Company’s coming. Bambi, you guys hold things down here. I’ve got to get our consultants out of sight and home.”
“Thought you were planning to use my presence as evidence of your proactive nature,” I said as we followed him towards Hermes.
The smile was a quick flash of light. “The official interviews will be sometime tomorrow or the day after. But I don’t want them knowing you were on site now, or seeing Hermes up close, for that matter. Too many things I don’t want anyone knowing.”
“And I’m guessing that when we get home, they’re things we don’t know, either,” I continued, starting up the ramp.
“Hell,” Achernar said, following us up, “when I’m off-duty, they’ll be things I don’t know.”
CHAPTER 75
Client Referral
I opened up the fridge and poked around. “I think I’m out of AB, but this bottle of A is new.”
The vampire to whom I addressed the comment leaned back comfortably in one of my new office chairs. “That’s just fine, Jason. Verne’s the connoisseur; I try actually not to cultivate a discriminating taste.”
“Given that you’re theoretically still cursed, I suppose it’s probably a good idea. Here you go.” I placed the bottle in front of Father Jonathan, probably the most atypical vampire alive, given that he was a fully ordained Catholic priest and had chosen to visit me during a lovely sunny late spring afternoon.
The priest studied me as I sat down, maybe a little heavier than I wanted to. “You look absolutely exhausted, Jason. I hope married life isn’t a problem . . . ?”
I responded with a small chuckle. “Oh, Syl and I are doing just fine. I’d be a lot more tired if I didn’t have her around; she generally screens my public calls and filters out like ninety-five percent of them as total crackpots, and most of the rest I can dump off on other people who can do the looking as well as I can. But even the remaining one percent seems to be getting bigger all the time. Then when something really big and flashy happens, guess who gets called? I just got back from Africa last night.” For the second time, I noted to myself. No one was going to know about the first.
Father Jonathan gave a startled laugh. “Oh, how silly of me. Of course you would have been called in on that.”
“Yeah.” I acknowledged. “Since the Morgantown Incident that just about everyone’s heard of, plus a few other things that Certain People know about, I’m called in for everything weird these days. Thank God the Cold War’s over; a multimegaton blast back in, oh, 1960-something would probably have caused missile launches without anyone asking questions first.”
“I fear you’re correct.” He sipped at the blood, straight from the bottle. “And did you find anything of interest?”
I shook my head, frowning. “More a ‘dog in the night-time’ case, actually. What we didn’t find was pretty revealing. No sign of radiation. No sign of chemical explosives—not that a hundred million tons of high explosives could be smuggled into the middle of a jungle without causing talk—heck, I don’t think there’s that many conventional explosives OUT there. Not a trace of meteoric dust or iron, either.
“Of course, certain sources that we know,” I glanced at him and he nodded, knowing I meant Syl, Verne, and a few others, “all felt ‘something’ when it went off, but that’s not the kind of evidence I could bring to the table down there. Though it created the kind of crater you’d expect, it hadn’t burned everything for miles around. No one still alive nearby had seen or heard anything unusual before or just after the blast.” That wasn’t quite true, but what they had seen just raised more questions than answers, and I was too tired to go into the details, and not sure how much I could tell Father Jonathan, even if he was in the more unusual category himself. “Anyway, what brings you to the office?”
He looked mildly concerned. “I hadn’t realized how busy—or tired—you are, or I wouldn’t have come to you for what seems a relatively trivial matter.”
I waved that off. “If anyone isn’t going to be coming to me with a crackpot problem, it’s a guy who’s a vampire himself. What’s the problem?”
“Monsters in the closet,” he answered, looking embarrassed.
Well, that’s a new one. “I’m presuming it’s not your closet. My guess is you could take care of your own problems.”
He laughed. “No, you’re correct there. One of my parishioners, Dave Plunkett.”
“Plunkett . . . that name rings a bell. Is he with Plunkett Security Incorporated?”
He nodded, pleased. “He is PSI, yes.”
“Okay. Not the sort of guy who’s likely to come to you with a BS story, then.”
“Not at all. I’ve known Dave for, oh, ever since I came to this area. Years. He’s one of the most cheerful and down-to-earth people I know.”
“So what’s the story?”
“Dave has a summer camp, on forty-eight acres up in East Galway, if you know it?” At my nod, Father Jonathan went on, “So you know the area has no amenities—no water, electric, or sewer—but Dave’s grandfather built a large house there many years ago, and his family—Dave, his wife, and their two children—have spent several weeks there every year.
“Up until the last couple of years,” Father Jonathan continued, “they’ve had no real problems; oh, the usual kid’s complaints about isolation, a few nightmares, people calling the house ‘creepy,’ you know the sort of thing, but the worst you could really say was that it was . . . an ‘atmospheric’ place. Their kids actually liked the slightly scary atmosphere, and it was popular with some of their friends too. Then . . .”
“. . . it stopped being just atmospheric.” I finished, not entirely surprised. It really did seem that something was changing, something that started when the wolves appeared, or maybe when Raiakafan first showed up. Verne had hinted about that more than once. One of these days, I was going to have to sit down with him and go into these things in-depth.
Father Jonathan agreed that was a good, if all-too-brief, description of what had happened, and after I asked a few more questions, it was clear to me that I needed to talk with Mr. Plunkett personally.
“He lives in the area,” Father Jonathan said. “I know this is important to him, so if you don’t mind I’ll have him come over tomorrow.”
I checked my calendar. “That should work. I don’t have anything specific scheduled. Just have him give me a heads-up about half an hour before he’s coming over and that’ll be fine.”
“I shall.” Father Jonathan rose and shook my hand. “Thank you for listening, Mr. Wood.”
“No problem. Like I said, if you are the one bringing me weird-sounding problems, I’m
gonna assume they’re legit. I just hope I can help Mr. Plunkett.”
“So do I,” he said, looking pensive. “Because as I said, I know Dave. He doesn’t scare easily. He’s been in security and law enforcement for twenty years. It’s hard to scare a man like that.
“But when he came to me, I could tell by the way his voice shook . . . he was terrified.”
CHAPTER 76
Camp Fear
Dave Plunkett was of about average height, with red hair and beard—both showing a bit of gray—and a face of the sort that normally looked open and cheerful. Now, though, he looked more worried than anything. “Sit down, Mr. Plunkett. Father Jonathan gave me a really quick summary of your problem, but I’d really appreciate hearing it from you, straight.”
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “It’s . . . kinda hard to talk about it. I mean, in the daytime, here, it doesn’t seem real. Well, no, that’s not it. I know it’s real, Jesus Christ, yeah, but . . .”
“. . . you feel stupid talking about it because you wouldn’t believe it yourself.” I finished for him. “Mr. Plunkett—”
“Dave.”
“Dave, I understand completely. I still find it really hard to say the word ‘werewolf’ without wincing. And I’ve seen the damn things up close more times than you can count, or would want to. If Father Jonathan thinks you have a problem, he’s probably right. Just tell me about it. Start with what happened last year; I know about the camp.”
Mr. Plunkett scratched his head nervously, then started talking. “Right . . . well, last year, we—that’s me, my wife Jenny, and my kids Elizabeth and Mitchell— went up for our usual trip.”
“How old are Elizabeth and Mitchell?”
“Oh, Lizzie’s fourteen now, and Mitch is eleven.”
“Okay. Just needed to visualize the group of you. So they were thirteen and ten when this started?” He nodded. “Got it. Go on.”
“Okay . . . we got there in the afternoon, dragged in all our stuff, I grilled us some dinner, and then we all went to bed—well, we usually do some reading first, then we go to bed early the first day.
“About a half-hour later, Mitch screamed—loud enough to wake me right off, and I’m a heavy sleeper. Mitch said he’d seen something, something huge like a monster peering in the window, a black shadowy thing with faintly glowing eyes.
“Since this was just a little while after Morgantown, you can imagine what I was thinking; I had a shotgun with silver loads along, just in case. So I checked all around the house very carefully.”
Still listening to his narration, I mused that Mr. Plunkett would never have thought about doing a careful search if he’d ever actually seen a wolf. Or, if he did, the “checking” would have consisted of firing blasts of silver shot in all directions as he went around the house.
“I didn’t find anything; I even checked for prints outside of Mitch’s window. Mitch was positive he’d seen something, but he admitted that it was kind of blurry and that maybe the moonlight through the trees had made the pattern. So we pulled the curtains tight shut in his room and went back to bed.” He took a deep breath, then continued. “It wasn’t twenty minutes later that another scream jolted us awake, but this one was from Lizzie.
“We all rushed into her room to find her backed up against the wall with her bush knife in her hand, shaking so bad that she couldn’t even hold the thing straight. When she finally calmed down, she told us she’d glanced at her closet—well, really more a cabinet bolted to the wall, but a tall one a couple of feet deep—and noticed the door was open. That was just barely visible in the moonlight coming through her window. She was already falling back to sleep and trying to decide if it was worthwhile to go over the cold wood floor to close it, when she saw the door opening wider . . . and wider . . . and she could see something inside, something dark and huge with faintly glowing eyes and a wavering, fanged smile.
“Of course, we didn’t find anything. Her closet door was open, yeah, but she had it so crammed full of clothes you couldn’t have fit a kitten in there, let alone some seven-foot monster. Still, the kids were both scared as hell and Jenny was getting kinda creeped out by the situation—and, I gotta admit, so was I. Lizzie and Mitch hadn’t had those kind of nightmares in years, and nothing ever that bad, and it just didn’t make sense that they’d both suddenly go all scared overnight. Still, we were already there, it was late, driving back was out of the question at that hour. So we moved sleeping bags into the main bedroom and left a small oil lamp on until the kids fell asleep. Once me and Jenny were sure that both of them were sleeping, we turned out the light to go to sleep themselves.”
“And?”
Dave swallowed hard, then continued. “About ten minutes later, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard a faint creaking noise, and saw the bedroom door opening very slowly. You can bet I came awake right away then. But I didn’t say anything, didn’t even move, except to slide my hand over to where I had the shotgun. Just kept my eyes slitted almost shut, open enough so I could see the door. Mr. Wood, I’ve been in security for twenty years, been in my share of fights, even had guys trying to honest-to-God kill me, but I’d take all that over again rather than lie there like that, watching a door open that couldn’t possibly be opening, because I knew I’d shut it myself.
“It was black outside that door, black as pitch, and it kept opening, and then I saw a faint light; I thought I was finally seeing the window across the living room, and then I saw it was an eye. A glowing eye, and I swear to God I felt my heart stop dead right then. The door just kept swingin’ open, and I saw more and more of this black thing standin’ there, blocking out the faint moonlight from the windows, and grinning like some walkin’ jack-o-lantern. Then it moved, like it was getting’ ready to come in.
“Lemme tell you, that got my heart and the rest of me moving. All I could think of was that Jenny was right there next to me, and the kids off to the side, and there wasn’t any way I was letting this thing get them. I sat up and let that thing have it, three rounds as fast as I could pump it. There was a lot of screaming and jumping and moving, and I couldn’t see right away because of the muzzle flash, so I couldn’t see or hear where it went, but when the smoke cleared there wasn’t anything there.
“That was the last straw, though. We cleared out right away and drove home. The next day, we were still creeped out, but it sounded pretty silly, so we didn’t say anything about it, we just said that one of the kids got sick and we didn’t want to stay up there then.” He leaned back, looking slightly defiant.
“Somehow,” I said, “I don’t think you’re the kind of guy to leave it at that.”
He grinned, a tired grin, but real. “You’ve got that right. Sure, the next weekend I went up there by myself. Jenny didn’t like that, but someone had to go check it out. I brought portable lights, security cams and stuff like that, wired the place up, and watched all night. Had a couple of moments where I felt something was watching me, but nothing happened, and I felt pretty silly—not to mention tired—by the time morning came. So I caught me some sleep that afternoon and decided to go to stealth surveillance mode. I cut the lights and went to near-IR.”
I nodded my understanding. Many electronic cameras were sensitive in the near-infrared spectrum, and it didn’t take much power to send out enough NIR “light”—actually, heat—to illuminate a wide area while leaving it pitch-black to the naked eye.
“So again I was watching the little screens, but . . . well, I hadn’t really gotten a full night’s sleep and I’m not as young as I used to be, so pulling all-nighters really takes it out of me. I fell asleep. And I had nightmares, of all the doors around me opening, and monsters like the one I saw coming at me. But I couldn’t wake up for like the longest time, and those nightmares just went on and on, until finally I felt like I had to rip myself out of sleep—you know that feeling when you’re awake, but you feel like someone dragged you out of sleep with a tow chain? Anyway, I was totally—I mean, totally—soake
d with sweat, breathing like I’d done a marathon, and I look up and there the damn thing is, standing over me, reaching towards me. Now, I ain’t proud of what happened next, but I don’t know if anyone else wouldn’t have done the same. I screamed like a girl and I ran. Lucky I was in the dining room and not far from the door, because the way I was thinking, or not thinking, I’d’ve dove straight through the nearest window. I practically flew to my truck, had the remote starter start her up and turn her on as I was running, and I dove into the cab. I could feel that thing right on my heels, and as I slammed the door, I swear it was not three feet off. I left the cab lights on, gunned the engine, and got the hell out of there. Went back the next morning to get my equipment, and even then I was jumpy.”
“And did your cameras show anything?”
He slammed his fist on the desk. “Not one damn thing! They blacked out! Didn’t show crap!”
“Hey, take it easy. If they were independent units, that’s actually a pretty interesting fact. They shouldn’t have failed all at once. Was there anything wrong with them?”
“No, sir. I checked them all out before, and I checked ’em out again afterward. They all worked.” He gave me an apologetic look. “Sorry about bangin’ on your desk.”
“No problem, you’ve been through a lot. So what about in the time since?”
He recounted a few other incidents, which boiled down to the simple fact that no one—not him, not his family, and none of the few friends he’d dared tell about the problem—had been able to spend a night in that cabin since. Some of them wouldn’t even walk in the door; they got a feeling of dark foreboding that something terrible was waiting just inside. “So the damn place is going to fall to pieces. Ain’t no one been inside to clean it since that first time we ran out—I didn’t do any of that on my surveillance trip—and no one has stayed long since.”
I nodded. “Sounds like it happens mostly at night. Is that right? Has anyone run into this thing in daylight?”
