“What is he—?” Shelly started, but Allan quickly hushed her.
What happened next was difficult to understand, despite the fact that Cal was watching it unfold before him. The glow from the three quiddity started to pixelate, and some of it, their hands, feet, the tops of their heads, started to extend out, stretching like computer-generated taffy.
And it was flowing toward Robert’s hands.
Cal held his breath, knowing the consequences of being touched by the quiddity. As he watched, the glowing red and yellow hues started to stretch even further.
A split second before they touched Robert, however, the color built in front of his outstretched palms. And then it started to roil and froth, never quite making contact. The quiddity themselves lost some of their luster, leaving behind grayed-out shapes that were close, but not exactly, the same color as Robert’s own outline.
“Jesus,” Shelly whispered.
There was a flash of light in the center of Robert’s chest, visible through his back, but the camera quickly panned away before Cal could see exactly what it was.
Several distinct gunshots could be heard next, and then Cal caught sight of his own image, his face a reflection of sheer terror, falling to the ground. He reached out frantically to stop his fall, but his hands only grasped a dead inmate, accidentally pulling him on top of him as they both went down.
And then there was a final gunshot, the report of which was unexpectedly cut off as the camera went black.
“What the fuck was that?” Shelly demanded. “What happened to Robert?”
Cal took a deep breath.
“Seriously. The, uh, the uh, oh what the fuck—that glowing shit, it went into Robert’s hands?”
Allan shook his head.
“No, I don’t think so, but it seemed like he could, I dunno, command it somehow. Pull it toward him. And you all saw what he did with the first guard, Quinn—how he seemed compelled to listen, to answer.”
“But what was that in the center of his chest? The glow?”
“Dunno. Artifact, maybe.”
Shelly, who was leaning on the back of Allan’s chair, stood up straight, and the boy in the glasses bounced.
“I don’t think so,” she said softly. It was her tone that drew Cal’s attention.
“You know something, don’t you? Something you’re not telling us?”
It wasn’t meant as an accusation; he had intended it as more of an inquiry, but Shelly’s expression immediately hardened. He wasn’t even sure where it had come from. Still, as he waited for her to respond, he realized that it was something that had been bugging him for a while now. Shelly was so certain about specific things of which she should have no idea, an absolute confidence that exceeded even her typical attitude, that he was beginning to wonder if she really did know something that they didn’t.
“No,” she said at last. “But it was part of the tape. It was real. I felt—he told us that he felt pressure in his chest, remember? Whenever the quiddity are around?”
Cal didn’t quite remember hearing anything about that, but he had also been buried beneath corpses, so it was possible. Or maybe he had said something in the chopper, but Cal was pretty fucked up then, too. They all were.
“Yeah, well, whatever it is, only he can do it,” Cal said, averting his eyes. “Tried to tell Lorraine to stop in the cemetery. Even put my hands up like he did, and nada. Bitch kept walking.”
Shelly scoffed at his crudeness.
“There’s more,” Allan informed them.
“More? More video?”
“No, not exactly. But I found some stuff online, about a book? Remember when Sean and Robert were talking about a book? With the prophecy about the Marrow? Well, as soon as we got back, I started searching the ‘net. I didn’t expect to find anything, because I’ve been searching for years about anything to do with the Marrow and I have never heard anything about it, but then…all of a sudden, about three and a half months ago, posts started popping up about Inter vivos et mortuos. Someone was suddenly on all the underground message board, asking questions about it. And then it stopped.”
“Father Callahan,” Cal said quickly. At nearly exactly the same time, Shelly said, “Robert.”
Allan gave them both a strange look.
“Maybe, not sure—couldn’t trace any of their IPs. I mean, if it were Callahan, it would explain why he was in the prison in the first place. But how would Robert know about the book?”
“Maybe his father told him,” Shelly offered with a shrug.
Cal mulled this over, recalling the scars on Robert’s calf. Something had happened in the Seventh Ward, something awful. And Cal was fairly certain that his friend’s abrupt answers to his questions about what had happened were intentionally short.
He looked over at Shelly, who seemed lost in thought as well.
And she knows…she knows something. She knows a lot, maybe. More than she’s letting on.
Shelly suddenly looked up, and Cal held her gaze in silence until she averted her eyes. And when the usually overconfident woman did that, Cal’s suspicions were confirmed.
“I wish,” Allan began, turning back to his computer. “I wish we just knew more, or if we had—”
But his sentence was cut short when the lights in the estate flickered.
“Forget to pay the power bill, Shel?”
When Shelly didn’t answer, he looked over at her. She was clutching her chest, a pained expression on her pretty face.
“Someone’s here,” she said through clenched teeth. “Something is here.”
Chapter 14
“Robert?” Cal asked, his voice tentative.
Shelly shook his head, her eyes wide, her hands still clasped against the center of her chest.
“Shel? What’s wrong with you? You okay?”
Shelly shook her head again, and this time Cal went to her. Allan also stood, and was in the process of heading to her side, a concerned look on his face, when he stopped cold.
A heavy thumping on the door echoed into the family room.
Cal’s heart skipped a beat.
“Jesus, Shel, what’s going on?”
She still didn’t answer, and her face started to turn a deep crimson. Cal grabbed her chin and raised her face to look directly into her eyes, his own heart beating through his chest.
The pounding on the door came again, but he ignored it.
“I’m—I’m okay,” she wheezed at long last. She took a staggered breath, and her color started to return to close to normal.
“Who is it?” Cal asked, relief washing over him with the realization that she wasn’t having a heart attack. “Who’s at the door?” When Shelly just shook her head, he turned to Allan. “Go! Get her a glass of water!”
Allan, who was just staring at them, eyes wide behind the thick lenses, immediately bolted from the room.
The heavy knocking came again: bang, bang, bang.
“Fuck,” Cal swore. He gently guided Shelly to the couch and laid her down. “Fucking hell, Shelly. Is it the door? Is it the person at the door?”
Shelly’s face was pinched, and her skin was clammy to the touch.
“No,” she managed, “Not person—persons.”
“It’s alright, it’ll be alright. Is it your heart? You want an aspirin? What the fuck is happening?”
Shelly shook her head.
“Chest, so…tight…”
“Jesus Christ, what’s going on?” he nearly shouted. Lifting his head, he yelled for Allan. “Allan! Get back here! Allan!”
But he heard nothing—Allan didn’t respond. The knocking at the door seemed to have stopped as well.
“Allan?” he asked, his voice now tentative. “Where’d you go?”
He glanced down quickly to see that Shelly had closed her eyes, and then he looked back to the hallway that Allan had fled down only moments ago.
The silence in the Harlop Estate was alarming.
And frightening.
“A
llan?”
Panic started to creep into Cal, and he gently patted Shelly’s hand before rising to his feet. His eyes darted about the room, looking for anything that might be used as a weapon. Nothing jumped out at him. After what had happened with James Harlop, Robert had insisted that the fireplace utensils be removed. The only thing remotely close to a weapon were the cameras, tripods still attached, on the couch opposite Shelly where they had been lain after their encounter at the cemetery.
Cal swallowed hard.
It will have to do.
He grabbed the closest one, relishing the weight of it in his hand, and then he stepped out of the front sitting room.
The blood was instantly sucked from his face and limbs.
Allan was in the hallway, his glasses askew on his boyish face. His hair had been pulled back, thrusting his face upward. A short, four-inch blade glinted in the light.
The tip was pushed against the soft skin overlying his Adam’s apple.
“Wha—?”
“Don’t move,” a nasally voice instructed.
Cal gulped and tilted his head ever so slightly to one side. The person standing behind Allan was shorter than him by about four or five inches, but his large belly could be seen on either side of Allan’s thin frame. His face was hidden out of sight.
“Where’s Robert?” the man hissed. When he spoke, his belly jiggled, and the blade skipped up and down ever so slightly against Allan’s throat. Small dots of blood appeared where the tip touched his skin. “Where’s Robert?”
“I—I don’t know,” Cal breathed. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“Robert—I want Robert! Where is he!” As the man shouted, he shoved Allan forward, moving with him, somehow managing to keep the knife in place despite their awkward dance.
Cal was so taken aback by the sudden movement that he stumbled backward. His legs were numb, and he nearly fell with the first step. Righting himself by holding his hands out for balance, he realized that he was still holding the camera.
Without thinking, he raised the lens and then started clicking away, much like he had back in the cemetery. When the two kept moving forward, backing Cal into the sitting room, a sinking feeling came over him.
Whoever the man with the knife was, he was alive.
“Where is he?” the man bellowed.
“I don’t know! He—he left!”
Allan was crying now, tears streaming down his frightened face.
“Please,” he begged, but the man, who Cal realized now was pulling his hair from behind, told him to shut up.
“Who are you?” Cal asked.
“Never mind who the fuck I am—you best be thinking of how to find Robert!”
Find him? Who is this psychopath? And what does he want with Robert?
Cal lowered the camera, his mind working a mile a minute, desperately trying to come up with a way to save his friend’s life. It seemed ludicrous that despite what they had been through together at Seaforth, now Alan was going to meet his end at the hands of a mere mortal.
A short, squat human with a deviated septum.
It was unfathomable.
“Nah, nah, I don’t think so,” a female voice suddenly said. “I think you best be figuring out a way to stop your head from bleeding.”
Shelly seemed to materialize out of thin air; at some point during the man’s rush toward Cal, she must have used this as a distraction and had risen from the couch.
Now she was standing just inside the entrance to the room, just as Allan was shoved over the threshold. In response to her threat, the man made a strange growling noise and turned, still clutching a fistful of Allan’s hair.
Shelly swung the camera tripod with vicious intent. A resounding crack filled the Harlop sitting room when the metal legs collided with the top of the man’s bald head. Cal gasped, but he wasn’t terribly surprised; he had seen her in action before, back in the Seventh Ward, and he knew just how violent and ruthless Shelly could be.
The man dropped like a stone, his hands releasing the knife and Allan’s hair. He hit the ground even before the geyser of blood landed.
Allan fell forward onto his knees, coughing as he scrambled like a baby just learning to crawl, until he was right up next to Cal.
“You think you can come in here with a fucking pen knife and threaten us?” Shelly shouted at the man who was rolling on the ground, his head and face cupped in his chubby hands. She reared back, intent on swinging the now dented tripod again—one of the legs was dangling, twisted—but then something gave her pause.
The man on the ground wasn’t gasping or sobbing, as Cal had first thought. As he watched, he pulled his hands away from his face, revealing blood from a wound on the top of his head that had trickled down into his mouth, speckling his teeth with red stains.
He wasn’t even groaning.
He was laughing.
“Why the fuck are you laughing?” Shelly demanded, stepping even closer to the man, making sure he could see the tripod she was brandishing.
The man only continued to laugh in her face. Cal watched on in horror, unable to react. Shelly gritted her teeth and swung the tripod down on his massive gut this time, and the man’s short legs immediately shot up. He coughed and his hands went to the point of impact, but then he started laughing even harder. Blood that had dripped into his mouth was spraying from his thin lips, only to land on his face moments later.
The tripod was completely smashed, all three legs broken into three jagged spears.
“Tell me why you’re laughing,” Shelly demanded, her pale face twisted into a scowl. “Or I’ll stab you in your fucking guts.”
Allan made his way to his feet, and he now cowered behind Cal.
The man finally stopped laughing.
“Because,” he gasped, still out of breath from either the blows or the laughing, or both. “Because I didn’t come alone, you idiot.”
Cal, who had been slowly sidling toward the knife that was now only a few feet from him, froze.
“What?” Shelly asked, her posture becoming defensive.
“I didn’t come alone,” he repeated. He brought two fingers to his lips and whistled, spraying blood all over his hand and the hardwood below. Shelly took a step backward, and Cal reached down and snatched up the blade.
It had looked massive, like a machete, when it was pressed against Allan’s throat, but now that it was in his hand, it felt as puny as a Swiss army knife.
“I brought some friends,” the fat man whispered as he grunted and pushed himself to his knees.
There was a rustling sound from behind Cal, and he whipped around. The knife clanged to the floor.
“No,” he moaned.
Three people approached, their heads low, their complexion gray, indistinct. He couldn’t see their eyes, but he didn’t have to to know that they were dark black orbs.
They were dead.
Cal heard Shelly scream, and he turned back the other way so quickly that he felt sick.
There were dead people everywhere, all shuffling toward Cal, Shelly, and Allan, encircling them.
And through their heavy breathing and shuffling steps, Cal could make out the wet sound of the fat man’s nasally laugh.
PART II - Inter vivos et mortuos
Chapter 15
Robert Watts started looking in the only place he could think of: Father Callahan’s church. And, surprisingly, it hadn’t been all that difficult to find.
His memories, the ones that Sean Sommers had forced him to recall, ones that he hadn’t even been aware of before having met the man, had given him some clues. And he found that the more he concentrated, the deeper he went into his own mind and the more he remembered.
It was a small church with a high-peaked roof located somewhere warm—in the South. It had massive wooden doors that swung inward, not all that much unlike the Harlop Estate. But other than the stately doors, it was otherwise a fairly plain and modest structure.
Noise.
He
remembered constant noise, as if there was construction going on around the church.
Robert could have tried to reach out to Sean, as he was positive that he knew where the church was, but that was the last thing he wanted to do. Sean Sommers wasn’t who Robert had thought he was.
The man had shot and killed someone in cold blood, a man who had his hands bound behind his back, no less. And he had also pushed the Seaforth warden into the Marrow, which might have even been worse. No, the last thing he wanted was Sean Sommers knowing where he was going.
Or why.
In fact, Robert wanted nothing to do with the man ever—irrespective of the fact that they were both Guardians of the Marrow, and their fates seemed intrinsically bound.
And then there was the whole issue of Carson, of his brother…Robert just hadn’t been able to bring himself to kill the man, despite knowing that it was the right thing to do. That it would be in the best interest of everyone, living and dead, that it would even be merciful.
But he couldn’t do it.
And yet he had killed.
Just thinking about firing the pistol at Father Callahan caused a knot to form in his stomach so tight that it nearly made him sick.
It was the only way, Robert—the only way.
Maybe, but he had still taken a man’s life.
Robert opened the window to his rented Chevy and let the hot air slap him in the face. As the wind accosted him, he closed his eyes for a brief moment.
But then they quickly snapped open again.
It wasn’t just because he was driving, but more because every time he closed his eyes, blackness overcame him, an all-encompassing void that would eventually crystallize and become a sea.
And then his mind would be back with Leland on the shores of the Marrow. And he wasn’t ready to go back. Not yet, at least.
Less than an hour later of uneventful driving, Robert found himself outside the South Carolina Public Records in Columbia.
Scarsdale Crematorium (The Haunted Book 4) Page 7
