Carnival of Stone: A Novella (The Soren Chase Series)

by Rob Blackwell

  It occurred to Soren that he was being too hard on his new partner. This was a guy that had risked his life to save him last night. Now he needed Soren’s help to try to save a friend. Maybe it was time to cut him a break.

  “I don’t know,” Soren said. “It’s possible he got away.”

  “You heard the screaming,” Glen replied. “It didn’t sound that way to me.”

  “Yeah, but there’s a lot we don’t know,” Soren said. “It’s possible that even if he was turned to stone, we might be able to reverse it.”

  “You think so?” Glen asked.

  Soren saw the same hopeful expression on Glen’s face. In point of fact, Soren did not think it was likely. The supernatural was weird, but he doubted anyone could recover from being turned to stone. But a little white lie wasn’t going to kill him either.

  “Maybe,” Soren said.

  The answer didn’t seem to satisfy Glen. He shook his head and looked back at the road.

  “You’re just humoring me; I can tell,” he said.

  Soren didn’t bother to deny it. Instead he changed the subject.

  “How close were you to Jay?” he asked.

  “For the first two years of college, we were inseparable,” Glen said. “Liked the same bands, enjoyed the same TV shows. He’s a great guy.”

  “What happened?” Soren asked. “Obviously there was some falling out.”

  “Turned out we liked the same girl, too,” Glen said.

  “Ah,” Soren said.

  He momentarily thought of John, Sara and him. They’d been friends since they were kids, not long after Sara had moved into the neighborhood. She was something of a novelty—a black girl in a mostly white suburban neighborhood. But it hadn’t taken them long to connect. And John had always had a thing for Sara, even before puberty hit. Soren could see it in his eyes.

  He abruptly realized Glen was still talking.

  “... and that about ended it,” Glen said.

  “You mentioned that Jay and you used to debate various issues,” Soren said, hoping he hadn’t missed anything important. “What were they?”

  “Jay was a hardline skeptic,” Glen replied. “I could bring up dozens of examples of strange stories and he always found a way to explain it. He was very Scully about it all.”

  “Very what?”

  “Never mind. It’s a reference to a TV show,” Glen said. “The point is Jay thought he had the world figured out. But I was a believer.”

  “Because of your uncle?” Soren asked.

  Glen shot him a confused look.

  “What?” he asked, before shaking his head. “Uh, no. I didn’t really know Uncle Terry that well then. I didn’t know what he did.”

  Soren thought that was odd, but let it go.

  “So you were interested on your own?” Soren said. “Why?”

  “Just from watching TV and movies and stuff,” Glen replied, his eyes shifting back to the road.

  Soren couldn’t put his finger on exactly why, but there was something false in Glen’s tone. He wondered if, like Soren himself, Glen had encountered something supernatural in his past. That would explain why he was such a believer, and possibly how he’d come to work for his uncle. In Soren’s experience, most people who hadn’t had first-hand experience with the supernatural didn’t really believe in it, even if they claimed they did.

  “How did you end up with Terry?”

  Glen spared a glance back in his direction and shrugged.

  “It just kinda happened, I guess,” he said. “I got out of college and needed a job and my mom suggested her brother was looking for some help. I didn’t even know what he did. When I talked to him, he mainly talked about it as a research gig, looking through old microfiche accounts of historical events, that kind of thing. He didn’t say anything about chasing ghosts or I would have been way more excited.”

  Soren nodded, but felt like there was something odd about Glen’s tone then too. When he talked about Jay, there was a lot of emotion behind what he was saying. When he discussed Terry, Glen’s tone was flat and expressionless. It was almost as if his answers were rehearsed. But that would be weird, wouldn’t it? He couldn’t think why Glen would lie about something like this.

  “How much do you know about your uncle?” Soren asked. “He’s a legend in the field.”

  “I’ve learned more since I’ve been with him,” Glen said. “He’s like a walking encyclopedia of information. He can recall almost every detail of any case he’s worked on. He’s damn impressive, but he’s also a little scary. Very intense—not unlike you.”

  Soren chuckled at that. He thought of a question he’d long wanted to know more about.

  “Does he say anything about his personal life? How he came to do the job?”

  “Nothing,” Glen said, shaking his head quickly. “And I’ve tried. I assume he had an encounter of some sort early on. He’s been doing this a long time. Even I don’t know how long.”

  “And your mother didn’t tell you much?”

  “No, not really,” Glen replied. “She’s not one for chatting either.”

  “So what’s Terry like when he’s not on a case?” Soren asked.

  Glen shifted uncomfortably in his seat and kept his eyes on the road.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like at Thanksgiving and Christmas and stuff,” Soren said. “You’re his family. What’s he like? Does your mom tell stories about him when he was young? Was she much younger than him? He seems a little old to have a nephew quite so young.”

  Glen didn’t answer and Soren felt a moment of satisfaction. Now Glen knew what it was like to be asked a bunch of questions he clearly didn’t want to answer.

  “Yes, she’s a lot younger,” Glen said finally. “As for holidays, I wouldn’t know. I never saw him much. He was part of the family but he didn’t come to that kind of stuff. He kept to himself.”

  Soren was disappointed. If he was going to talk the whole trip, he was hoping he might get something useful about Terry’s past. Soren had looked into it, but aside from references to cases he’d worked on, he was a black hole. And Terry always shut down any kind of personal inquiry. Soren hadn’t even known Terry had a nephew until Glen had shown up at the Leesburg Science Society one day.

  “One thing I’ll say,” Glen said, and Soren perked up. “I don’t know if Terry has mentioned this, but he thinks it’s getting worse.”

  Soren was momentarily lost.

  “What’s getting worse?”

  “Supernatural activity,” Glen said. “If you look through my uncle’s cases, you find plenty of odd stuff, but it’s kind of few and far between. Or it was. In the past several years, Terry’s been finding a lot more weird cases. Like this one. A creature that nobody thought about for decades suddenly shows up and does serious damage before it either gets put down or disappears again. And then there’s the stuff you’d assume is just bullshit. You probably heard about the witch in Alexandria several weeks ago.”

  “I was the one who—how did you say it—‘put her down,’” Soren said. “It wasn’t easy.”

  Glen looked over at Soren with his eyes wide.

  “Whoa. Terry didn’t mention that,” Glen said. “And it wasn’t in his file. Guess he hadn’t gotten around to updating it.”

  “You had a larger point?”

  “Yeah,” Glen said. “Terry feels like something is stirring recently. Like if all these creatures are somehow coming back again, there might be some rhyme and reason to it.”

  “Or it could be random,” Soren said.

  “You believe that?” Glen asked, and once again, there was a spark of hope in his eyes. This time, however, Soren knew he was going to let him down.

  “No,” Soren said. “No, I don’t. I believe someone or something is behind all this—and whatever they’re up to, it’s not good. In fact, I have a guess at what they’re ultimately after, and it scares the shit out of me.”

  “Care to share?”

 
Soren paused for a moment and looked out the window.

  “I think someone might be planning the end of the world.”

  Chapter Six

  They were still 20 miles from Hilltop when the gas light came on.

  Glen wished he’d been paying more attention to the gas gauge, but he’d been too focused on the road, which had become dangerously winding. There were constant switchbacks as they climbed to a higher elevation, but there were few guard rails. One small mistake could cause them to go careening down the side of the mountain.

  He spent the rest of the trip to the town praying his car wouldn’t conk out of gas before it reached their destination. He’d seen no traffic heading down the mountain and he worried they might be forced to walk the rest of the way uphill.

  The only upside to being so stressed out was he didn’t have to feel so bad about lying to Soren. When Terry had coached him on how to answer Soren’s questions, he hadn’t felt the least bit guilty. He didn’t like Soren and clearly the feeling was mutual.

  But for some reason he was regretting it now. It wasn’t that Soren was suddenly his best buddy, but he didn’t seem like he was lying when he said he wasn’t a murderer. And yet Glen knew that Soren was seen that way by the majority of his own family and friends. No wonder the guy was so arrogant and distant. He’d practically been run out of his own hometown. What would that do to a person? It was a wonder he was functional at all.

  It made Glen feel worse for purposely deceiving him. Terry had been very clear: Glen could discuss the case all he wanted, but under no circumstances was he to provide details on how they’d come to work together. Or anything at all about Terry.

  “It would be better to not answer than evade,” Terry said. “Soren is very good at sniffing out lies, not unlike yourself. The more you say, the more you could hang yourself with your own words.”

  Glen had made a passionate argument not to involve Soren at all. He could solve this case himself. But Terry had insisted—and he was the boss. And now look at them. Given their luck, they were both going to end up stuck on the road.

  The car sputtered and threatened to quit just as they arrived at the outskirts of town. Glen didn’t know if it was the sheer force of his will that kept the car going, but they made it to a small gas station on the outskirts of town.

  Glen pulled up to the pump, jumped out and jammed his credit card into the card reader and then waited for the pump to start working. After a moment, he realized there didn’t seem to be any power to the pump. He ran over to look at the other pumps nearby, and there was no display on any of them.

  “Shit,” he said. “No power.”

  Soren didn’t respond. He seemed more interested in looking around the area.

  Glen briefly worried that maybe the gas station was closed. Though he’d been up for hours, it was still early in the morning, just after nine o’clock. But there was an “open” sign in the window.

  He sighed and ran into the office—and screamed. There was a gas station attendant behind the counter, dressed in mechanic’s overalls and staring in wide-eyed shock at the doorway almost directly where Glen was standing, but he was in no condition to help.

  Soren came running in a second later with his gun drawn. He lowered it once he saw the mechanic.

  “I’ll be damned,” Soren said.

  The mechanic was completely made of stone.

  Glen had known what they were heading into, but the statue didn’t look as Glen had imagined it. When he’d thought of people frozen in rock, he’d conjured visions of hard, rough stone. The mechanic looked like he was carved from the finest marble. He didn’t know what kind of stone it was, but he would have guessed alabaster. The stone was white and looked buffed and polished.

  Glen walked several feet and reached out to touch the stone mechanic’s face. It was smooth yet strangely warm to the touch. Everything about him was so detailed. He could see stone sweat running down his cheeks, at least a half day’s worth of stubble around his chin and even several nose hairs. The mechanic was staring straight ahead at the gas station door with an expression of both surprise and fear. Glen knew he’d never seen a statue like this before.

  “It’s incredible,” he said.

  But when he turned around, Soren was no longer looking at the stone mechanic. He had his gun in one hand and a mirror in the other as he peered around the office. Glen tensed, waiting to see if anything jumped out at them. But nothing moved.

  Soren finished checking the office and Glen was forced to admire his calm. He looked like he’d done this kind of thing before, carefully checking the back room just off the office and then working his way through the garage bays out front. Glen watched him work but made no move to follow. He felt rooted to the spot and kept staring at the statue near him.

  Without thinking, he reached over and knocked on the statue, but it felt—dare he think it—hard as a rock.

  When he looked back into the mechanic’s face, however, he felt another shock. A moment ago, he’d been sure the statue was staring straight ahead. Now the statue’s eyes had shifted just off to the side in Glen’s direction. The mechanic was looking right at him.

  “Soren!” Glen shouted.

  Soren came running back into the office as Glen took a step away from the statue.

  “He moved,” Glen said. “The statue moved. He’s looking at me.”

  But that no longer appeared to be the case. When Glen blinked and looked back at the statue, it was just as it had been originally, looking directly at the main entrance. For the first time, Soren seemed to focus just on the statue, eying it carefully. After a moment, he turned to Glen.

  “You sure he looked at you?” he asked.

  His tone of voice wasn’t skeptical. Glen had expected Soren to mock him, perhaps suggesting that he was just spooked. But he seemed to be taking him seriously.

  “Yes,” Glen said. “No. I don’t know. I could have sworn it was looking at me, Soren, but... that’s not possible, right?”

  Soren stepped back and waved his arms in the air in front of the statue and then pointed his gun in its face and cocked the hammer. The statue’s eyes stayed exactly as they were.

  “Hello?” Soren asked the statue.

  Nothing happened.

  “Maybe I just imagined it,” Glen said.

  “Or maybe you didn’t. How many cases have you worked before?”

  “I, uh…” Glen looked down.

  Terry had coached him on an answer for this too, but he suddenly couldn’t remember what it was. Soren seemed to divine the truth anyway.

  “Oh, shit, really?” Soren asked. “I thought you’d been working for your uncle for a while.”

  “It’s been mostly research. And a little ghost hunting, though Terry called it ‘paranormal anomaly detection.’ This is my first real case.”

  Soren shook his head and looked briefly to the sky in evident frustration.

  “Okay, well, listen up. First rule of this kind of work is trust your instincts. If you don’t, you die. Second rule is never dismiss anything out of hand. It doesn’t look like our mechanic can move and probably you were just freaked out. But at this point it’d be unwise to assume that for sure. Keep an eye out as we move into town.”

  Glen’s heart sank. He reminded himself they were there to save his friend, but the thought of doing anything other than running away as fast as he could was terrifying.

  There was a chirping sound and both Soren and Glen jumped at the noise. It took Glen a minute to realize it was Soren’s cell phone. He watched as Soren answered the call and then scowled at whoever was on the line.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Soren said.

  He ended the call abruptly and put the phone back in his holster.

  “Another sales call,” he said. “Where were we?”

  “Uh, I was freaking out because we’ve got to find what did this,” Glen said.

  Soren clapped him on the arm.

  “Look on the bright side,” he
said. “This is where the fun part starts.”

  “What part is that?”

  “The part where we go monster hunting.”

  *****

  Hilltop was small, but densely packed. It was laid out in four parallel streets that all sloped up a steep hill. The first contained most of the town’s shopping area. Glen spotted a hardware store, a bakery, a food mart and a few restaurants.

  The other three streets were more residential, with a strip of townhouses along one and dozens of small, detached homes on the last two. At the top of the hill was a small, white-painted church that seemed to look out over the town.

  A bright, cheery sign greeted them as they walked the mile or so up from the gas station.

  “Welcome to Hilltop, Population 312,” it said.

  It was a pleasant town, or at least it would have been if it hadn’t been so deathly silent.

  Along the main street, nothing stirred. Aside from a few pieces of trash blowing down the sidewalk, Glen saw no people or animals anywhere.

  He saw no other gas stations, either. The two of them had walked into town because his car was on fumes already. He wanted to save up his remaining gas to find a working station—if there was one to find.

  Without speaking, Soren and Glen ducked into a darkened bakery to find it completely deserted. Glen couldn’t tell what was worse—finding a statue or nothing at all.

  Soren immediately took an interest in the food and at first Glen thought his new partner was just hungry. But he appeared instead to be studying the croissants, cakes and cookies for sale. He picked up one pastry and nibbled on the end of it and then spat it out.

  “It’s stale,” he said. “And the cake over here is moldy. Nobody’s been in here for a couple of days.”

  “Around the same time that Jay left me his message,” Glen said.

  Soren nodded. Still holding his weapon out, he disappeared for a moment into the back office. The only thing Glen had in his hand was a small mirror, and he felt stupid for carrying it. What was he planning to do? Throw it in front of his face and cower behind it when he heard a hissing and rattling noise coming his way? He knew Soren had one too, but Glen had taken a smaller one that he’d tucked into the back of his jeans. He just had to remember not to sit on it.