by Anne Frasier
We whooped and waited.
“That’s my footage.” I kept my eyes on the screen along with everybody else in the place. “I filmed that. Well, not film. Video, but it’s mine.”
Claire sat at the bar with her hand over her mouth, her eyes big, trying to keep from laughing out loud.
The anchors came back.
A joke piece. That was immediately apparent. Well, that should please Claire. They were playing the same angle she’d been going for. Either way, it made the town look stupid.
They used only about fifteen seconds of tape. The part where the psychic mentioned revenants and said things called strigoi were looking for bodies to inhabit. Then they cut to a reporter ambushing the mayor outside his office. A microphone was jabbed in his face. I almost felt sorry for the guy.
Jake moved down the bar and collected our drinks.
“Hey, I haven’t even started that.” Stewart grabbed for one of the beers Jake was hauling away.
“You’re done,” Jake said.
Stewart blinked.
I looked around. Faces that had been friendly were now hostile. Ian grabbed my arm. “Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
I slid off my stool and half expected somebody to pick up a wooden chair and hit one of us over the head. They all just stared as we left.
Mayor McBride cursed under his breath, shut off the television, and tossed the remote down on the bed. Goddamn them. A minute later he picked up the phone and called his lawyer.
The owner and manager of the Tuonela Inn shut off the television.
She’d been nice to those kids. She’d fed them an inn favorite of apricot jam and cream-cheese French toast when she could easily have told them to go down the street and find something to eat.
You couldn’t trust outsiders. That was what her mother had always said, but Annabel had never wanted to believe it. She’d even left Tuonela to go away to college. On campus she’d met a boy she thought was nice, only to have him and one of his buddies rape her at a frat party. She quit school shortly after that, but she never told anybody what had happened. Her fault for trusting the boy. Her fault for not listening to her mother.
No, you couldn’t trust outsiders.
So what if the apricot jam came from the Dollar Store? It was the thought that counted. Those boys had seemed so happy to have a home-cooked meal. Just like that other boy had seemed so happy to have her come to his frat party.
It was Tuonela against the rest of the world; that’s what it was.
Chapter Nineteen
Alastair didn’t want to watch the news, but he was a cop. Cops watched the news.
He picked up the remote, turned on the television, and sank into the couch. His mind drifted from one topic to the next, until the word Tuonela got his attention and he straightened and focused on the screen.
The bit was one of those wink-wink things, half serious out of respect for the recent death of Brenda Flemming, but light, because who called in a psychic to do a tarot reading on a town?
He didn’t know anything about art or film, but he immediately felt a visual draw to the piece. The psychic was a splash of brilliant color in the center of a gray landscape of black river and dark, roiling sky. The weather seemed the star until the woman started talking.
There was nothing exceptional about her voice. And the way she looked was just plain silly. But her words . . . She said something about spirits inhabiting the dead. And something else about a revenant.
Some would think the clip funny. The news crew certainly got a kick out of it, doing the usual good-natured chat once the story was over.
“That interesting little piece was courtesy of a group of University of Minnesota students who are in Tuonela working on a senior project.”
“Wish I’d had that kind of senior project,” the weatherman said.
Big chuckle for the camera.
Alastair shut off the television, tossed down the remote, rounded up his laptop, and took it to his bedroom, where he got ready for bed.
He balanced the laptop on the covers and did a quick search, surprised to actually find a page of links.
Strigoi are spirits that have returned from the dead. They pass through different stages after rising from the grave. Initially a strigoi might be an invisible poltergeist. After some time it can become visible, looking similar to the way the person looked in life. Strigoi feed on humans and can eventually inhabit the bodies of the living.
He clicked on another page.
Strigoi can slumber harmlessly for centuries as long as the grave remains undisturbed.
And a revenant . . . ?
An animated corpse that rises from the dead to torment the living. Those who returned from the dead were wrongdoers in their lifetime. A revenant must be destroyed by decapitation followed by incineration.
He didn’t even bother to bookmark the pages. He powered down, shut his computer, and put it aside.
Strigoi.
Foolish nonsense . . . But a revenant . . . ? Maybe not so foolish.
Scratch, scratch.
With a gasp and a jerk, Alastair came awake, ears straining for a repeat of the noise. Strange that he was able to fall asleep, but he’d hardly slept the past several days, and he was so goddamn tired.
He grabbed his Smith & Wesson from the bedside drawer, turned on the light, and tossed back the covers. His heart was beating hard. Like he’d put away a pot of coffee.
Just a dream.
Silly old man. That’s what he was. Some silly fool. Should have packed up his family years ago. Should have gotten out of Tuonela when Johanna was pregnant with Evan. But he’d been weak. And he’d had a great job offer. Yeah, he’d finally gotten out. Too late, but he’d needed to prove to himself that he could do it. That he could leave. He’d also hoped Evan would join him in Florida.
He should have known better.
He stuck his feet into slippers.
Such a normal thing for a man with a human skin in his freezer to do. What could be more normal and boring and mundane? See, I’m a normal guy with a normal life. Nothing weird here.
With his ears tuned for unnatural sounds, he made his way through the house, the night-lights weakly illuminating his path. This was the house he and Johanna had bought when they’d married. Peo- ple did that back then. Marriage and a home. You settled in for the long haul.
They’d done a lot of work on the place. They re-finished the hardwood floors, stripped and varnished the thick, heavy trim, and removed layers of wallpaper. A labor of love was what it had been.
That first year they planted a garden. A huge one. They’d packed the freezer with snap peas and green beans.
Who woulda thought . . .
The years had flown by, and lately he found himself thinking about the past more. It used to annoy him when geezers got nostalgic. Look to the future, not the past. But the past defined you. That’s what he hadn’t understood when he was young. You couldn’t get away from it.
He was lonely.
He hadn’t expected to live out his golden years by himself. His wife had never been a strong person, and news of Evan’s terminal illness had been tough on her. Her heart just gave out one day. He missed her terribly, but he was glad she wasn’t around to see this, to see what Evan had become. To see what he’d done . . .
Evan had gotten sick, and their world and focus had narrowed to a point. Find the right doctor. Find a cure. Save Evan’s life.
Make a pact with the devil.
The front door was locked. The kitchen appeared undisturbed.
Alastair forced himself to go to the cellar, gun drawn. He’d gone without sleep for so long that his eyes were playing tricks on him. Shadows in his peripheral vision moved and shifted.
The earthy scent of damp stone and mildew hung in the air. He threw the freezer door open and jumped back, gun hand trembling. A moment later he dug down through the frozen deer meat.
Still there.
He l
et out a breath.
He slammed the lid and scrambled back upstairs.
Then he did what he’d been doing a lot lately.
He got drunk.
His goal was to drink himself into a stupor, to shut off his head.
But his head wouldn’t shut off. And his thoughts kept going back to one thing, the same thing.
Evan.
Could Evan have murdered that poor woman? If so, could Alastair do what needed to be done?
He’d given his son a new life; could he take it away?
Evan couldn’t focus on his digging. He finally gave up and went for a walk.
It felt good to move, to get out from under the trees of Old Tuonela, to see the stars. He picked up speed and his steps fell into a steady rhythm. He walked across cornfields that had been fall-plowed. Through pastures where cattle huddled and moved nervously as he passed. Before he knew it, his footsteps took him into the river valley and the heart of Tuonela.
The town slept a soft slumber.
Far off in the distance came the deep warning of a barge horn, the sound echoing off the river bluff and moving through the otherwise silent streets. For Evan the sound was a comforting reminder that other people also lived their lives at night.
Car lights approached, and he stepped into the shadows to wait for the vehicle to pass. Once it was gone, he resumed his journey.
To Rachel’s.
He spotted a light in the turret window of her apartment. A faint glimmer of red framed in blue velvet. Maybe just a night-light.
He closed his eyes and inhaled.
She was there.
It had been hard to stay away before, but now that he knew about the baby . . .
He didn’t blame her for not telling him and for not wanting anybody to know he was the father. Christ. He didn’t want the kid growing up with that stigma either. What a life that would be. It would be no life. Hounded by the media, teased and feared at school. He wouldn’t wish that on anybody, especially a child.
A shape passed in front of the turret window, blocking the light.
Rachel.
He stepped deeper into the shadows, but kept his vigil.
Could she feel him down here? Did she know he was but a shout away? He wanted to step into the middle of the street. Wouldn’t that be romantic? Well, maybe not from her point of view. It seemed creepy, now that he thought about it. She would probably call the cops to tell them he was stalking her.
No, it was best if he left her alone and stayed away so no one would suspect he was the father of her baby.
He remained hidden until she moved from the window. Then he turned up his collar, stuck his hands in the pockets of his long wool coat, and walked home. But he couldn’t shut off his head.
What about the baby?
What strange blood would move through the child’s veins? At the same time Evan felt reassured by a basic knowledge of genetic code. Most likely both parents would have to be carriers of a recessive revenant gene—something they didn’t need to worry about.
Chapter Twenty
“Slow down.”
Gabriella Nelson let up on the gas pedal of her Ford Taurus.
Franklin bent forward in the passenger seat and strained to see through the darkness. “We’re close.”
“How close?” Gabriella asked. “Yards? Miles?”
“Stop.”
She braked and the car lurched to a halt in the middle of the road.
“That’s it.” Franklin pointed. “The lane that leads to Old Tuonela.”
“Oh, my God!” Millie shrieked from the backseat directly behind Gabriella’s head. Hard to believe Millie was in her sixties.
“Should I turn?” Gabriella asked. “Should I go up there?”
“No!” Franklin’s emphatic response wasn’t as unexpected as it was cranky.
Gabriella had found him on the Internet. They were both members of a Yahoo! group called Weird Wisconsin. She’d posted a question to the group, asking if anybody was familiar with Old Tuonela. Her post had generated a lot of interest and replies, and someone had finally told her about Franklin Trent.
At first the others in her group had been against the idea of contacting him—being on the Internet and all. They watched the news. They’d heard about the predators out there. But after asking around they’d made contact with someone who knew Franklin. “He’s a little spooky but on the up and up.”
He wouldn’t take them into the woods and rape and kill them.
He was a ghost hunter, psychic, and urban explorer. More like unemployed stool warmer, Gab-riella had decided. He’d been inside the Tuonela Mental Hospital, and the tunnels that ran below the streets of Milwaukee. He’d even been to the Ed Gein Farm more than once, but Old Tuonela was his specialty.
This would be his twelfth trip.
An even dozen, he’d told Gabriella in his e-mail.
Franklin had led a lot of people into Old Tuonela, but things were different now. Evan Stroud lived there. His presence on the outskirts of the abandoned town would make things much trickier.
A hundred bucks.
That didn’t seem like much to pay the guy. Split three ways it was less than the cost of a fancy meal. Hell, Gabriella paid that much for a lot of things she hardly ever used, like her cell phone and gym membership.
There were three of them in their little group. Three was a good number when you were casting spells. They’d been witches for a couple of years. Ever since retiring. Gabriella had started it. She’d wanted a hobby, she’d wanted to expand her horizons, and she’d always been interested in the power of the unknown.
Millie had suggested they take a craft class together. Stained-glass making or some such crap. Shirley had wanted to start a book discussion group, but Gabriella had bigger things in mind.
They became members of Witch’s Brew, a large group of practicing witches spread throughout Wisconsin.
They had witch coffee mugs and witch T-shirts. They went to Wicca meetings, where they talked about projects and fund-raisers. Where they discussed how to remove candle wax from a tablecloth, and what to do if a candle went out before the spell was completed. They collected herbs and even dried goat’s blood—purchased from a supply shop.
But deep down Gabriella knew it wasn’t real. And she suspected the rest of the girls felt the same way. Deep down this was playacting, something they were doing for fun.
“Where should I park?” she asked. There wasn’t even a shoulder, just a weedy ditch.
“Pull forward.” Franklin waved his hand. “You should come to a lane that leads into a neighbor’s cornfield.”
She accelerated, wishing Franklin had driven. Apparently his truck didn’t always run, and all four of them wouldn’t have been able to squeeze in anyway.
When she was young, Gabriella believed in many things. But as she’d aged, she’d become more skeptical. That didn’t mean she voiced her doubts. It didn’t mean she wasn’t still looking for something that felt real and right. But at sixty-two she feared that would never happen. The time for believing was past and tied more to the path she’d already walked than the one ahead of her.
And so she’d decided to pursue this Wicca thing, hoping to find something. But all it turned out to be was a bunch of silly women doing silly things. But she liked silly things. Everybody liked silly things.
“Here.” Franklin pointed in the green glow of the dashboard lights. “Take a right.”
She turned and pulled to a stop in front of a metal farm gate. They all got out of the car. Shirley checked and worried over her denim fanny pack, verbally cataloging the contents for the third time. “Water. Camera. Flashlight. Hand gel.”
“What about a container for the dirt?” Gabriella asked.
“I thought you were bringing it.”
“Noooo.”
Gabriella got back in the car and retrieved a Zip-loc bag she carried for dog walks. It didn’t seem the right thing for graveyard dirt, but she could shift it to something mor
e suitable once she got home.
The women clustered and whispered.
Oh, the excitement! The darkness! The stealth!
They weren’t doing anything illegal, Gabriella had told herself several times. Old Tuonela used to belong to everybody. It should still belong to everybody, and would if Evan Stroud hadn’t purchased it out from under the city of Tuonela. Sneak.
It was just as much their place as anybody else’s. That’s the way she saw it.
“We walk single-file,” Franklin told them. “Keep your flashlights pointed at your feet. Never shine it at the trees or parallel to the ground. We don’t want to attract attention.”
They nodded and clicked on their small flashlights, chosen for their very lack of candlepower.
“This is so exciting!” Millie said.
“Shhh!”
She dropped her voice. “This is so exciting.”
Gabriella was excited too, but she hoped Millie exercised some self-control. Millie was a loud woman who liked to draw attention to herself, especially when out in public. Gabriella found it annoying. The last thing she wanted to be was part of a group of loud, obnoxious women.
They moved forward.
The first problem was finding the gate locked. They climbed it—not an easy thing for women their age. Franklin had to help Millie and Shirley. Hand on their waists, he guided them to the ground.
The day had been warm for late fall. Temperatures had dropped with the setting sun, but it wasn’t horribly frigid. Gabriella wore a pair of cheap stretch gloves she’d picked up at the checkout counter of Tuonela Discount. Right now the gloves made it a little hard to grip the flashlight.
The ground was uneven and soft.
Gabriella hadn’t been hiking in the woods since she was a young girl, and everything was much more difficult than she’d anticipated. There was a moment when she wondered if they should turn around.
“How much farther?” She gasped, one gloved hand clinging to a sapling, the flashlight hand braced against her knee.
Franklin surveyed their surroundings. “I think it’s just over the next rise.”
If it wasn’t, they’d go back. This was getting ridiculous. Three old broads wandering around in the woods. One of them could break a neck, or at least an ankle. What had seemed like fun in the safety of Gabriella’s living room was looking more foolish by the second.
