He turned the dial further, moving into the range where green mist, representing the bio-magic of Aethis, would become visible. He went all around the house, ending up back in the living room, and finding nothing, which was pretty much what he’d expected; Joe didn’t know squat about Aethin magic. It wasn’t his thing.
He turned the dial further, into the range where residue from the activity of higher-planes entities—demigods and the like—would show up as a shining white mist, and then just skipped on past without doing a search. Joe wasn’t the religious type and had no interest in working with those kinds of forces, but there might well be traces here and there anyway because higher-planes entities showed up everywhere from time to time and stuck their noses into things.
The next turn revealed several pools of black mist.
Black represented demonic-psi activity. Joe couldn’t handle Demon spores—his connection to The Stream wasn’t strong enough for him to survive linking with even a very weak demon—but he rubbed shoulders with plenty of stronger gifteds who had enough mojo to work with certain demons, not to mention the fact that demons, just like godlings, were always nosing around and messing with people. Overall it wasn’t surprising to find a fair number of black traces, and their presence wasn’t relevant to the issue at hand.
What mattered, the main reason he’d been sent here, was the next color.
Thackery turned the dial again, feeling a bit of trepidation as he did so.
At first he saw nothing, and felt a moment of relief.
The living room was clean.
Then, as soon as he walked out into the hall, he found it: several tiny trails of bright red mist, most only about an inch wide, criss crossing each other, leading from room to room.
Red represented the native psi-energy of The Gap, that strange landscape between the worlds where all sorts of very alien creatures lived, including the various kinds of titans.
The basic shape and pattern of the traces suggested they probably came from a channeling stone rather than the actual presence of a Darklord or—god forbid-a living breathing titan on the premises. The channeling stones used to link with entities from The Gap were always psychically active, leaving tiny energy traces behind themselves like a jug with a leak in the bottom, and consequently, they tended to make little trails that were fairly distinctive.
He walked through the house and found dozens of the trails, with larger pools in the kitchen, the bedroom, and one particular closet in the hall, suggesting that a stone had actually been stored for some length of time in those areas.
Some of the traces were very faint—probably at least three weeks old. Others looked fresh enough to be less than a week old.
Of course this didn’t really confirm anything nefarious. There were some very mild entities from The Gap, creatures that were totally benign and safe even for a slightly gifted person like Joe to handle. He might’ve just developed an interest in this particular area of arcane research.
Still, even if it wasn’t confirmation, it certainly counted as supporting evidence.
At this point he had more than enough information to call Enid and give her an update, but Thackery decided to try another of his gadgets first: his Ouija-Pad.
Unlike the See-All, the pad only proved useful occasionally, but in those rare situations, it could give him insights that were impossible to get in any other way.
He took the pad out. It was a fairly recent piece of Traveler technology, acquired—plundered really—some time in the late fifties by Thackery’s father under circumstances that were somewhat shady to put it mildly.
The device looked like a pocket-sized spiral bound notebook with a leather cover, but the pages were much thicker, made of a shiny white material that felt a bit like rubber to the touch. There was a pen tied to the spiral wire with leather cord.
The Ouija-Pad had exactly 30 pages, though they were so thick it looked like a full notebook. Both sides of each page were linked in some mysterious way to a particular spectral frequency range, reaching into different levels of the current reality. It was like having a very poorly trained medium in your pocket.
He unclipped the pen from the spiral wire, and felt the device accessing The Stream through him.
Once the pen warmed up, he started flipping through the notebook, slowly, looking for any page that shimmered slightly in an unnatural sort of way—a subtle effect that required a close look to keep from missing. Such a shimmer would tell him that the pad had formed a connection to an ethereal being.
He wasn’t 100 percent sure how the pad worked, but in his experience the earlier pages—the first ten or so—usually found beings existing fairly close to our reality: ghosts of the recently dead, life-force parasites, spirits of intelligent inanimate objects, and psychic storms.
The pages between 10 and 20 were more likely to contact older things: very old ghosts who had ascended to higher levels of existence, and other kinds of spirit beings, both good and bad—mostly nature spirits and various lowly demons.
As for the pages beyond 20, Thackery supposed that would be for gods and higher devils. He had never personally connected with an entity on any of the pages beyond 18. In truth, he was far from sure that his connection to The Stream was strong enough to let him access something that high up, even with the Ouija-Pad to help him.
Which is why he was a bit shocked to see the front side of page 27 glowing very prettily.
Chapter 6 - Encounters
Simone had never realized until today how many walls there were in the video store.
First there were the literal walls that surrounded the place, concrete blocks painted white, very solid, very stuffy. The wall that faced the parking lot had many large windows, which might have helped, but unfortunately they were the only windows in the entire place, and most of them were covered with posters and signs.
Then there were the rows of shelves, which also functioned like walls. They were tall and wooden, and—despite the colorful boxes they held—oppressive. They made the big, roomy space into a maze of narrow corridors.
Even the counter she stood behind was a kind of symbolic wall, a little cage, keeping her separated from everything else, as if the literal walls and the shelves weren’t enough.
All these walls, all around her; it made her want to claw her own skin off. Being here had never made her feel that way before, but today the sense of being caged was all but intolerable.
She went to the bathroom again for the fifth time since her arrival.
The bathroom was, of course, much smaller, and much more claustrophobic than the rest of the building, but for some reason it was still much better. She felt safe in there. Private. It was the right kind of closed in.
More like a hideout than a prison.
As soon as the thought came to her, she felt it vibrate through her in a very pleasurable way. The idea of a hideout seemed quite fitting at the moment.
That’s what she would like to do: hide out.
Somewhere dark. Dark and quiet. Alone.
She stood in the cool whiteness, idly examining her reflection in the mirror, smelling chemical cleaner strong in her nostrils.
I could even take my clothes off in here and nobody would know.
Not all her clothes, of course—that would be excessive—but maybe just her shirt and pants… Then she could put them back on real fast if a customer came in…
“And why in the fuck would I ever, ever want to do such a thing?”
It was the third time a little voice in her head had urged her to disrobe, and it was starting to make her feel afraid.
Would she actually do it?
I’m losing my fucking mind or something. It’s that simple.
Through the thin wooden door of the bathroom she heard the bell above the store’s main entrance jingle, signaling the arrival of a customer, and then she heard the soft sound of footsteps on carpet.
She took a second to compose herself, then walked out.
There was a
dark-skinned black woman waiting at the counter. Her height was startling. She towered over everything.
At first glance Simone thought she might even be seven feet tall, but then realized it was just an illusion—the shock of seeing such a big woman had distorted Simone’s perception, making the lady seem even larger than she actually was.
Still, she had to be at least 6’5, probably with a little to spare.
Simone wondered if she might be a post-op transsexual. It seemed likely, but if so, there was certainly nothing obvious about it; not that there necessarily would be.
The woman glanced over and smiled. She had a pretty face, but her eyes were strange—orange and oddly luminous, as if little embers burned deep inside them.
Contacts I guess? Probably intended as a freaky fashion statement.
Simone stepped behind the counter. “Can I help you?”
“Yes. I’m new in town, and I just noticed this place—I was wondering if you had a particular movie.”
The woman’s accent was a bit odd—sort of like an Australian accent crossed with an American deep south accent.
Simone opened up the database program on the store computer. ”What movie are you looking for?”
“Do you have the original Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur? It’s an old movie from the 1940s.”
“Hold on a sec, let me check.”
Simone typed the title into the computer system and hit search.
She found the movie right away, but there was a special note attached the entry for the title—apparently it’d been rented about 20 years ago and never returned.
“We had it on VHS back in the 90s” said Simone, “but somebody stole it, and the store owner never replaced it.”
The woman’s face fell. “Oh well, that’s a real shame.”
“We do have the newer version, from 1982.”
The woman shook her head. “It’s pretty good, but the original is an all-time great. One of the most underrated films ever made. Have you ever seen it?”
“No. I’ve heard of it though.”
“Oh, well you’re really missing out. It’s a movie about the things that women bottle up inside just to make all the men in the world happy. The woman in the film bends over backward to appease this milquetoast little pip-squeak, and he keeps pressing her, asking for more and more—asking for things that she can’t give, expecting her to conform to his fairy-tale idea of what a woman is supposed to be. Eventually he pushes her too far, and gets more than he bargained for. On the surface it plays as a simple horror film about a woman who can turn into a deadly cat, but on a deeper level—in the subtext—her husband is the real villain of the piece. There are only a handful of horror movies with as much depth and subtlety as Cat People.”
The woman was behaving as if she and Simone were old friends.
And, oddly, it sort of felt like they really were. The lady had an ease about her that was kind of contagious.
“Sounds like a movie I need to see,” said Simone.
“I’ve found it very relevant to my own life in many ways, and it actually helped me form a major part of my own personal philosophy. I always make it a point not to bottle things up too much. We all have things we have to keep inside most of the time, of course, but you have to find times when you can let yourself be yourself.”
“Yeah, I think I get that.”
The woman leaned in closer. “Speaking of which, it may not be any of my business, but I’m a very intuitive person, and I get feelings about people… You seem tense to me. I think big changes are going on in your life. You’re probably trying to fight them, to keep things the same, because that’s what people generally do. But maybe you should just let it happen, you know?”
The woman was now only a few inches from her face, and Simone noticed an odd—and extremely familiar—smell coming from her, just underneath the perfume.
The smell was sour, not a gross smell, but a smell that made you want to wrinkle your nose up.
Was it lemons?
Simone’s face must have changed because the woman suddenly broke eye contact and stood back up to her full, towering height. “It’s really a shame you don’t have Cat People. You should seek it out for your own benefit as soon as you can.”
“I’ll definitely try to watch it whenever I get a chance. Can I help you find any other movies? Or if you want, you could go ahead and sign up for a membership while you’re here.”
The woman shook her head. “I would, but I’ve already spent too much time talking, and now I’m about to be late for an appointment. But we’ll see each other again soon I think.”
Simone nodded, not really sure how to respond.
The woman flashed a bright smile, waved, and walked out of the store.
Simone watched out the windows as the woman climbed into the passenger seat of a dark SUV. The driver was a small bearded white man with a crew cut, wearing dark sunglasses and a camouflage jacket with rolled up sleeves.
She said something to the man and then they drove away together.
Well, Simone thought. That was kind of an odd encounter…
But, actually, not an entirely unpleasant one.
In fact, she felt a little better now than she had before, a little more relaxed. The video store seemed like an ordinary place again rather than a creepy dystopian prison.
She settled down on the stool behind the counter.
There hadn’t been many customers so far this afternoon, and she figured there probably wouldn’t be many more.
She dug her Kindle Fire out of her pocketbook and clicked on the icon for Stickman Golf—a fun little game she’d recently become addicted to.
Some time later, the bell above the entrance jingled again.
Simone looked up from her tablet as Sandy walked inside, looking harried, her red hair hanging down in her eyes. “I’m sorry it took so long,” she said.
Simone shrugged. “It’s fine.”
Sandy stopped in her tracks and stared at Simone for a second. “Are you pissed at me or something?”
“No. Actually I’m in the best mood I’ve been in all day.”
Sandy arched an eyebrow, clearly skeptical, then walked behind the counter, and started nervously explaining all the reasons she was late.
Simone put her hand up to stop her. “Really, it’s no big deal.”
“Then why are you glaring at me like that?”
“I’m not glaring.”
“Come on Simone, you’re clearly pissed.”
“Actually I’m really sorry I was so mean when you called. I’m having some weird issues today, and they have nothing to do with you. I had no business being so awful.”
“Well I’m really sorry I had to fuck up your off-day. If it ever comes up again, I’ll try to get somebody else.”
- - -
Five minutes later, Simone was in her car driving home.
Her claustrophobia had returned full blast as soon as she got into the vehicle, accompanied by a recurrence of the uncontrollable urge to take her clothes off like some kind of fucking lunatic.
Something is definitely wrong with me. What’s going on in my head?
She stopped at a red light and her stomach rumbled loudly, reminding her that she still hadn’t eaten a bite all day.
Maybe that’s the problem.
She decided to pick up some groceries while she was still in town, and headed for the local Walmart.
The place was overrun, as it always was on Friday afternoons, and she had a hell of a time trying to find a decent place to park.
She drove around for five minutes, absolutely determined not to settle for a spot way in the back, and finally, her patience was rewarded.
She found a woman unloading her grocery haul into a big, brown SUV. The woman appeared to be almost finished, so Simone braked and waited, hoping to snag the spot.
The woman was older—big and round and slow, with red hair and giant glasses, wearing an orange and green floral pattern shirt
.
Simone found the woman’s movements interesting, and she watched her going back from the buggy to the vehicle.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Moving with a slight limp.
Slow. Predictable. Weak.
Simone felt something wake up inside: a wordless feeling of anticipation and excitement, like some part of her was coiling up tight, getting ready to spring forth.
The feeling, while not unpleasant, was also totally alien, and after a moment it started to make her uncomfortable.
With great difficulty she managed to drag her eyes away from the woman, forcing herself instead to stare down at her own thighs, clenching her fingers together in her lap.
She was so intent on not looking up that she failed to notice the woman had vacated the space until she’d been gone for several seconds.
- - -
The store was cool inside and crowded, and she felt surprisingly good walking down the aisles among the teeming masses.
Other than her three days at work every week, she hadn’t been around people much lately, not since her mom left. And truthfully, the video store wasn’t usually very busy when she was there.
Maybe all the alone-time was having a bad effect on her.
You have to be careful Simone, have to take care of your mind. You’re not like other people.
She made her way to the cat food section and grabbed several cans of the really expensive, all-natural gourmet stuff—she felt bad for scaring Melvin earlier, and wanted to make friends with him again. She also impulsively grabbed a little wind-up mouse toy as she was leaving the isle.
After that she quickly headed over to the frozen food.
Her tastes tended towards junk, so that’s what she focused on. Soon her buggy was full of cheap frozen dinners, frozen pizza’s, two different kinds of Popsicles, and three different kinds of ice-cream.
To top it off she grabbed three bags of cheap frozen chicken nuggets, two bags of fish sticks, and a couple of tasty looking frozen pies.
The DARK Trilogy: Titan's Song Chronicles Volume 1 (Books 1 - 3) Page 5
