Nightmare

by Robin Parrish

  After quickly running a search for his email address, I sent Pierre Ravenwood a brief note:

  One of the "dropouts" mentioned in your article is a friend of mine. I have reason to believe that she and the others who've disappeared are in terrible danger-if they're still alive. If you have the means to investigate a company called Durham Holdings International in Copenhagen, I think you should do so. This "complex conspiracy" of yours may come into focus if you dig deep enough.

  There. That seemed to sound good and juicy. Just the kind of thing an ambitious reporter wouldn't be able to ignore. I hesitated, but then as an afterthought ended the email by adding:

  The nightmare is coming, Mr. Ravenwood.

  I thought it might be hours or days before I heard back from him, but I received a reply before I even logged off.

  I already suspected a connection to DHI. The question is, what do you know about it? Can you meet me in person to discuss? I promise to keep you an anonymous source if that's your wish.

  I had just replied with an affirmative suggesting he call to set up a meeting when Derek reappeared. His head popped up over the cubicle barrier separating my computer station from the one next to it.

  "Found it," he said.

  I'd had him working on a separate task related to the second thing I wanted to do today.

  "Columbia has a visiting professor in the Department of History and Archaeology. Sounds like exactly what you're looking for. Apparently the guy's pretty famous. Name's Dr. Ronald Eccleston."

  I looked at my watch. It was four o'clock already. We'd both missed our entire day's class schedule, which still bothered me, even though the last few days-not to mention what happened in my room Monday night-had proven that I was caught up in something a lot more important than my studies.

  "Where is he now?"

  "Last lecture of the day," Derek reported.

  "Where?" I asked, quickly rising from the desk.

  We made it to Eccleston's classroom just as he was wrapping up his lecture. Not wanting to interrupt, we waited out in the hall for the room to clear, which took a surprisingly long time, as Eccleston seemed to have quite a few admirers who felt the need to offer their praises of him after the class ended.

  Once we were satisfied that the last student was gone, we headed inside. Eccleston was still up at the front of the large room, which had stadium-style seating and a huge old-fashioned blackboard that stretched across the entire front of the room. The professor had written across a good three-quarters of it during his lecture, and was now taking the time to erase all of it himself.

  A classy leather briefcase sat open on the room's desk, beside a black golf hat. The professor himself wore an all-black suit and tie that made him resemble a Mafia hit man. He looked like he might be in his late forties, which meant a slightly sagging stomach and a light gray goatee that was so full it looked like fur.

  "Dr. Eccleston?" I began, approaching him from the side entrance to the room.

  "Yes," he said absently, not turning around to acknowledge us, "thank you, dear. I'm glad you enjoyed the lecture, but I really have no more time for personal requests today, thank you." He had an American accent, though he spoke with the unnecessarily formal diction so often used by a lot of highly educated professors.

  He was still erasing the chalkboard as I drew near, Derek right behind me. "I'm sorry, sir, we weren't in your lecture today. I was just hoping-"

  "Ifyou weren't in my class," he interrupted, his back still to us, "you really have no business being in here, now do you, dear."

  All right, I admit it. I didn't like the way he kept calling me "dear." It probably seemed like a quaint, charming little affectation to him, but it rankled me.

  "Look, Professor," I started again. "I don't have time for your-"

  "Sir," Derek jumped in, seeing the irritated look on my face. "If we could just have a moment-"

  I rolled my eyes and walked up to the professor until I was standing right over his shoulder.

  "Now listen here," Eccleston said, his voice turning authoritative. As he finally turned to face us, he was saying, "I've already told you I can't-"

  But he saw something he wasn't expecting when he faced me. I'd pulled out my cell phone and called up the photo I took of Carrie Morris's neck. When Eccleston turned, the tiny screen was right at eye level.

  He startled for a moment but then his eyes focused on the image on the screen and grew wide for just a brief second as he took it in. He glanced at me, then back at the symbol, and then at me again, and Derek, as well.

  When he spoke, he was no longer looking at me as the famous professor. All formalities had been dropped, and his tone was one of urgency. "Who did you say you are?"

  Eccleston's temporary office was a spacious room almost the size of a classroom itself. But where I'd expected to find plenty of "old world" wooden furnishings, huge armchairs, walls covered in books, and a smoking lamp or two, instead it was more like a state-of-the-art computer lab.

  Not what I'd expected from a world-renowned art historian.

  "Have a seat, please," he said, throwing off his sports jacket and placing his hat and briefcase askew on his primary desk. He walked to the wall and retrieved a rather large and impressive laptop computer. But instead of sitting down behind his desk, he sat in another chair next to us so that we could see what he was doing.

  We'd spent the ten-minute walk to his office explaining where I'd taken the picture of the symbol, and I could see that his scientific curiosity had gotten a jolt of excitement at the prospect of a new puzzle to solve. The fact that someone as versed in symbology as this guy was, was this excited over what I showed him told me that this was no ordinary symbol.

  "Ms. Peters, would you kindly email the photograph from your phone to me?" he asked, and then followed the question with a spelling of his email address.

  I did as he asked, and then Eccleston got to work on his computer, quickly retrieving the image from his in-box and opening it in some kind of imaging program.

  "Have you ever seen anything like this before?" Derek asked.

  "I don't believe so, no," said Eccleston, who had eyes only for the prize on his computer screen. "Look at the finely detailed engravings around the edges.... It's not symmetrical at all, yet it has a certain balance to it ... Just spectacular-it really is quite spectacular for something so small, isn't it?" He seemed to be descending into his own little world now. "And to achieve that kind of perfection on human skin, of all canvases.. ."

  I started to fear that he'd forgotten we were there, so I spoke up, trying to clarify his statements. "So you don't recognize it, then?"

  Eccleston glanced at me, his eyebrows raised in excitement. "Oh no, I didn't say that, dear. This mark has telltale cultural indicators, just as all symbols do. I'm certain I can identify it, but it will take some time.... It almost looks alchemical in origin, but it's much more complex...." He was talking to himself again.

  Sensing that our presence was more a courtesy extended by Dr. Eccleston than anything else, and also that we were likely to just slow him down, I stood and nodded toward the door. Derek agreed and followed me.

  "So you'll call us then, when ... ?" I called out.

  "Yes, yes! Of course, my dear, of course," he replied, leaning in so close to his computer screen I was sure it had to be doing harm to his eyes. "Fear not-I have your phone number right here, at the bottom of the email you sent.... I'll let you know the moment I decipher it."

  Good enough for me.

  We were exiting the building when my phone rang. My hopes jumped instantly that Dr. Eccleston had already had a breakthrough, but it wasn't a number my phone recognized.

  "Hello?" I said as we continued to walk.

  "Maia?" said the caller in a hollow, despondent sort of way.

  I stopped walking and nearly dropped the phone on the sidewalk. I recognized the voice.

  "Jordin?!" I shouted.

  Derek tripped over his own feet and scraped his kne
es on the pavement before jumping back up.

  "The nightmare is coming," whispered Jordin. "Follow the symbol, Maia! The symbol holds the answer."

  The line went dead. My heart gave a profound thud against my chest, skipping a very long beat, and then I gasped for air like I'd been underwater for a full minute.

  The world blinked and swam, and before I knew it, Derek had grabbed my arm and helped lower me to the ground, where it was all I could do to keep from losing myself to the darkness.

  MARCH 5TH

  "We shouldn't stay here long," I said as we walked through the white brick fence surrounding St. Louis Cemetery. It was already after eleven, and streetlamps from out on the sidewalk were the only source of light. It was a sultry New Orleans night, and sounds of parties and general revelry met us from nearly all sides.

  Jordin looked at me teasingly, holding her usual video camera in one hand and her digital voice recorder in the other. "Surely you're not frightened by this place?"

  I didn't share her humor. "This place? No. The vandals and grave robbers and thugs who frequent it in the dark? Yes."

  Jordin turned serious, almost alarmed. "Then why did we come?"

  "Because it's haunted."

  "It's tiny," she complained. "Just one city block."

  "Which is exactly why it has so much activity," I told her. "There are more than a hundred thousand people buried here, mostly in above-ground crypts. This tiny city block is a concentrated paranormal nexus."

  Right on the edge of the French Quarter, St. Louis Cemetery was one of three different graveyards in New Orleans to go by that name. The one I'd selected was by far the smallest, but also the oldest and most famous. It was filled with above-ground granite tombs of wildly differing architectural styles and sizes. All of them had once been white, but now most had faded to gray thanks to decades of mold and mildew.

  It was unlike any location we'd investigated yet, because it was outdoors and completely open to the public. I'd already warned Jordin on the drive in that there was no way to seal it off for our investigation, which meant that we had to contend with sneaking around the above-ground burial vaults in the dark knowing that any shadowy figures we might chase could very well turn out to be flesh and blood.

  "Come on," I said, leading the way into the interior.

  "Where are we going?" Jordin asked.

  "You asked me the other night about voodoo, so I want to show you something. The most famous tomb here belongs to Marie Laveau, a powerful and influential voodoo priestess who lived in the 1800s. It's said that people saw her wandering the streets of New Orleans after her death, and some claim to see her still."

  "Okay," Jordin said, playing along. "How come you seem skeptical?"

  "Marie Laveau was a genuine historical figure, and she really was known as the Voodoo Queen. But does she haunt the cemetery? I've seen strange things happen here, but no more so in front of Laveau's crypt than any other."

  We arrived at the tomb, and I again noted that it was fairly unremarkable, hardly the most beautiful or ornate in the graveyard. It was tall and narrow and white all over, with a bronze plaque affixed to its bottom left corner identifying it as Laveau's crypt.

  "What's with all the junk?" Jordin asked.

  Surrounding the tomb's base were "offerings" to Laveau- beans, tiny statues, candles, and even coins. Much worse was the graffiti covering the tomb; it was the same mark, over and over, but in different colors and sizes. Three x's in a row, again and again and again.

  "Just a bit of local color," I replied. "Tourists ask for Laveau's help with some great desire. The tradition says that if you knock three times on the head of the crypt to wake her up, draw three x's on the crypt, knock three times again, and state your wish, she may grant it."

  "That's ridiculous," Jordin said with an odd look on her face. Almost like she knew it was absurd but wanted it to be true.

  "Is all this about your parents, Jordin?" I blurted out. I half wished I hadn't and half wondered why I'd waited so long to say it. "Just tell me, all right? I won't judge you."

  She sighed, long and hard. "Yes, okay? Happy now? I want to talk to my parents. That's it."

  I couldn't help being curious. Her dogged determination to touch the paranormal was something I had pondered again and again since we'd met. But I wasn't so heartless as to touch upon a painful subject with a person I hardly knew.

  Until now. I don't know what made me ask it this night. Something about her expression when I talked about Marie Laveau granting wishes. In that moment, I just knew.

  "It's probably impossible," I said quietly.

  "I don't care!" she replied, tears swelling in her glassy eyes. "I have to try. They died when I was thirteen. You don't know what it's like, Maia.... I mean, have you ever lost anyone?"

  I grimaced, trying to think. "I lost my grandmother a few years back. But we weren't close. How did they die?" I tried not to be indelicate, but she was finally talking about it, and I wasn't going to miss the chance.

  "Car crash. But you have to understand ... they died together. I didn't lose just one of them, it was both, at the same time. My mom and my dad, gone in an instant. Imagine just becoming a teenager and finding yourself completely alone in the world. No one to take care ofyou. The two constants in your life, snuffed out during one of the most difficult stages of life. I'd give anything to see them again, talk to them. Touch-"

  Jordin's words were cut off midsentence when she let out a sharp gasp. She raised her arm and pointed over my shoulder.

  I spun and looked, but saw nothing.

  "What?" I asked. "What was it?"

  "There was a shadow!" she whispered. "As soon as I looked at it, it took off crazy-fast! That way!" She pointed farther up the row, and I stepped out into the open to get a better look. I couldn't see anything moving.

  "Are you sure it wasn't a person running by?"

  "No, it was just a shadow!" she said, resolute. "It moved by itself! Only it wasn't up against a wall or anything, it was right out in the open!"

  "Like it had its own mass and weight?"

  She nodded eagerly.

  "Show me," I urged her, and we ran.

  I had a very good idea what we were probably chasing: Jordin had seen a shadow person, a phenomenon I was well acquainted with. They were, simply put, a form that ghosts sometimes took when trying to manifest. Shadow people had three-dimensional physics completely unlike real shadows and moved independent of their surroundings. Some investigators believed them to be demonic in origin, but I'd never seen proof either way.

  We looked left and right down the aisles and rows as we ran toward the far end of the cemetery, but it was hard to make out one shadow from another. If a shadow person wanted to disappear, it would be easy enough with all of the real shadows cast by the crypts-some of which were well over ten feet tall.

  "Unless it moves again, I don't know that we'll ever find it," I whispered.

  Jordin's eyes grew big as she exclaimed, "Ooh! Ooh! I almost forgot!"

  She pulled off her backpack and whipped something out of it with great flourish and pride. I recognized it instantly.

  "Nice!" I said with sincerity, and took the item as she offered it to me.

  "A little surprise I ordered a while ago and had shipped to arrive to us this morning," Jordin said with a grin.

  It was a thermal imaging camera. It worked just like a regular video camera, only instead of recording what the human eye sees, it recorded any and all sources of heat. It was shaped vaguely like the handle of a gas pump, but with a shortened nozzle where the camera's aperture was. Behind that, above the grip, was a generously sized screen that showed everything the camera picked up. Red meant hot, blue meant cold, and there was a rainbow of temperatures in between.

  They were also terribly expensive, so much so that most amateur investigators couldn't afford them.

  I'd worked with these devices before-my parents owned oneand found them invaluable. If there was a shadow person her
e, the thermal imager would pick it up without a doubt.

  I turned it on and did a slow sweep of our surroundings. Unsurprisingly, the marble vaults all registered as dark bluecold and lifeless. This was a good thing if our friend should return; it meant his red-hot outline would show up on the imager in sharp contrast to his surroundings. There would be no missing him.

  I held the thermal imager out in front of us, and we began exploring the area. I kept my eyes glued to the screen while jordin moved in front, guiding our path.

  "Maia, do you believe in curses?" she asked, in a small-talk tone of voice.

  I felt a bit of whiplash. Just minutes ago Jordin had been angry at me for figuring out her secret. Now she was making chitchat about curses the way other girls talk about their favorite brand of makeup. Was she for real?

  And even though I wasn't looking at her, I noted how much effort Jordin was expending trying to sound casual when she asked the question.

  "You mean like hexes and gypsies and stuff?"

  Jordin paused, as if reconsidering this line of conversation. Then she let out a breath. "Do you think it's possible for a person to be cursed? You said the other day that certain people can attract ghosts."

  I thought carefully about my response before giving it. "My parents have met with clients who had above-average amounts of encounters with the paranormal, who believed themselves cursed. My dad doesn't put much stock in those kinds of superstitions, preferring to find a scientific explanation for everything. I would probably side with him on this."

  "Because it isn't something ... scientifically verifiable?" she probed. She continued walking in front of me, not making eye contact.

  "Why are we talking about curses, Jordin?"

  She shook her head. "I used to know someone who thought she was cursed, but it was a long time ago."

  "Who?" I asked.

  "Just an old friend."

  I saw something on the thermal imager. "There, look!"

  The outline of what looked like a man of above-average height and normal build stood some fifty feet away, but there was no way to tell if it was facing our direction or away from us. The surroundings registered blue and black, but the shadow person was a mixture of distinctly yellow and orange.