by Corey Edward
Damn it. Damn it all. My father would never have fallen victim to this ambush. He would’ve been listening for footsteps, looking over his shoulder periodically, and maybe even would’ve cast a protective spell to shield himself from a spell or two prior to leaving home. I had done none of the above, and could’ve been killed for it.
It was a miracle that I was able to walk away from the incident alive. I’d been given a warning, loud and clear. And it said the spiders would be nothing compared to what would happen unless I left the whole thing alone. The spiders, in fact, might be preferable.
It was tempting to give up, but I couldn't do that. I had to find out who (or what) was behind all of this. I had to find out why my father- my flesh and blood- had died. I had to stop these killings from happening before another life was claimed.
Or spiders would be the least of my worries.
Seven
Stay With Us
Puking up spiders was actually pretty nightmarish, but there hadn’t been any lasting side effects as of that evening, thank Merlin. I still hadn’t gone to the bathroom since then, but I was hoping that my luck would hold up when that event happened.
Not that I had any experience, but the only thing worse than puking up spiders was shitting them out.
I put on my best about-face as I was leaving the museum, but I was still more than a bit unsettled by the whole incident. I wasn’t about to let myself be intimidated out of doing the right thing, but I also wasn’t about to pretend like I was a-okay with being hexed.
I told Enisa and Frankie what happened via text. The former offered to come over right away to take me to get X-rays since she seemed to think some may be building webs in my lungs (thanks for that picture, Enisa). Meanwhile, Frankie asked if I now had superpowers and whether I'd tried scaling a wall or slinging webs.
The stark difference between my two friends has never been clearer.
The spiders were my first big shock of the day. My second big shock came when I laid down to read before bed, curling up underneath the warm blanket Grams had knitted for me once upon a Christmas. The TV was on as background noise, and had been for about an hour. Rusty was chewing on a rawhide bone, content as could be, and I buried my nose in the pages of a brand new Stephen King novel. I was halfway through the fourth chapter when something on the news caught my ear.
“… BPD officers are currently at the scene of a homicide at a house in Westbrook, where they say a man who lived alone has been murdered… ”
The house the reporter stood in front of was familiar, even in the darkness. It was familiar because I’d been there just one day before. It hadn’t been cordoned off by yellow caution tape yesterday, though. And there weren’t ambulances there yesterday, either. And there most definitely wasn’t a body bag… or a cleaning crew.
“Police aren’t yet sure of a motive, or if the murder is connected to another of a museum employee that was killed weeks ago...”
My stomach felt worse than it did when I was vomiting arachnids. I’d suffered a gut punch from a steel fist, and it nearly knocked me right out of my bed. I didn’t even need to listen to the rest of the report to know what happened.
Gabriel O’Mackey had been murdered.
I was frozen.
With fear.
With apprehension.
With panic.
What if I was a suspect? Or worse yet, what if I was arrested in the middle of lunch tomorrow and paraded out of the house in handcuffs? Grams would be heartbroken and Gramps would be disappointed — and that's saying nothing about my already nonexistent social life. I was sure they’d dust for fingerprints and all, but…
But.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to worry about being arrested.
Maybe instead, I had to worry about surviving the night.
Maybe I would be the next one to be found with a snake carved into my chest, dead in my bedroom, dead like —
The phone rang, and I kid you not when I say I literally almost screamed. I decided to ignore it in favor of staying curled up beneath my warm covers. I didn’t recognize the number, but the area code was right around the corner.
But then it rang.
And rang.
And rang.
The fourth time around, I finally decided to pick it up, holding it up to my ear.
“Hello?” I said, a bit snipper than usual. What could I say? It was late.
“Hi. Is this Candle Paranormal Investigations?”
I didn’t recognize the voice, but it was female, and not too much older than me, by the sound of it. There was a hint of breathless panic bubbling just beneath her words.
“Maybe,” I said. “Who is this?”
“Oh, thank God,” she said back. “Listen. You’ve got to help me. I’m at the old Arkham Prison, and I lost all of my friends, and I can’t get the fuck out, and I’m seeing shadows everywhere I look even though it’s dark and-”
“Wait, wait, wait. Hold on a second. Just take a deep breath and relax. Let’s start with your location.”
The sheer horror her voice communicated was almost contagious. Here was a person trapped, convinced they were in mortal peril. I knew how that felt, and didn’t want to let them down.
“I’m at Arkham Prison,” she said, sounding only a touch less frantic. “And I don’t know what’s going on. I lost my friends about an hour ago and I keep hearing their screams and… and other things. I’ve been looking for a way out but I can’t find one. Please come, hurry.”
“What’re you doing at Arkham Prison?” I asked. “That place has been abandoned for the last fifty years.”
And more than that, it was a death trap. Even if it weren’t for all the ghosts and Darkon probably kicked up by all that negative energy, the asbestos and crumbling floors would make it dangerous enough.
It was a miracle this girl was even still alive in the first place. If I didn’t get there fast, she probably wouldn’t be staying that way.
“I went there on an urban exploration trip. There were five of us in total. My friend, Brad, was taking a picture of a creepy-looking room when we heard something growling. We turned around and there it was — a giant, furry monster. It got Brad first and stuck one of its claws right through his chest. We all went running, and —oh God, there’s another scream. I’ll pay anything, just please help us.”
“What’s your name?”
“Amy.”
“Okay, Amy. I’ll help you. It’s about ten o’clock now. I’ll be there in thirty minutes or so. Try to hold out until then and keep looking for an exit. If anything changes, call me right back.”
“Thanks.”
I hung up the phone and forced myself out of my comfy bedtime cocoon. Then, I pulled up my group chat with Frankie and Enisa and decided to shoot them a message. I was, after all, about to embark on an extremely dangerous journey to an extremely dangerous place. Someone would need to know where to find my body if it came to that.
ME: There’s a girl trapped at the old Arkham Prison outside of town. I’m going to save her. Make sure the food at my funeral is good.
I slipped on my hooded blue coat, a pair of jeans, and my checkered Vans. As unappealing as it was to be going from the safety of my bedroom to a haunted ass prison in the middle of nowhere, I knew I didn’t have much of a choice. If I didn’t save her, nobody would.
I was a Candle wizard, after all.
And sacrifice was what we got out of bed for.
~&~
I shook Rusty awake and slowly opened my bedroom door. Grams and Gramps would never approve of me leaving the house at ten o’clock to infiltrate a prison, so I had to sneak out. All told, it wasn’t that difficult and it wasn't even my first time: the house was big, and they were both too busy slumbering away to hear much of anything aside from the occasional creak of the wooden floorboards.
I felt guilty, deceiving them like this. They had both taken me in at a time when my dad was too busy fighting the forces of darkness and day drinking to be a prope
r father, and for that, they deserved my complete honesty. But they also had never approved of magic or all the secrecy that came with it and probably never would. Sneaking off into the night was just how I had to operate.
Maybe one day, I could be completely honest with them. Maybe one day, they would accept my choices, just like they had accepted their daughter’s when she married a wizard. But that time was not now.
I was all on my own.
“Ready, Rusty Dusty?” I asked my pug. The fear and apprehension in his beady black eyes told me that he couldn’t have been less ready if he’d tried. He didn’t have to say anything; I understood that from a mere look alone.
But the funny thing about being a dog is that you don’t have much say. Not really. What your owner said went, and we were going to prison whether he liked it or not.
“Same,” I said. “I’d rather be in bed eating popcorn and reading, but I’m a Candle wizard, and you’re my Familiar. If we don’t save this girl, she’ll be Darkon food.”
If she wasn’t digesting already, that was. Locations like the infamous Arkham Prison were like homing beacons to those in search of a good fright. What most of them didn’t understand, however, was that the beings who inhabited such places offered way more than a scare.
A big, furry Darkon with claws. That covered hundreds of different species alone, without saying anything about the others hidden in there with it. I couldn’t say which one it was without referring to the Dictionary Infernal, and that was shelved away at Candle Investigations. So the Darkon’s identity was a mystery. That would make banishing it a challenge, if not an impossibility.
I plugged the location of Arkham Prison into my GPS and was soon on the highway. I left the bright lights of the city behind me and set out into the western woods, full of autumn color mingled with foreboding darkness and sinister fog.
The first thing most outsiders noticed upon coming to New England was the sheer enormity of the trees. And it’s true: they’re huge. Bigger than monsters in children’s nightmares and just as inescapable.
Sometimes — on cloudy October nights like this one — it felt almost like they were watching you, warning you to stay away.
Sometimes, it was worth listening.
There were things out there in the woods that loved it when an unsuspecting human wandered into their territory. A stray hiker here. A drunk college kid there. Maybe even a tourist who wandered a few steps too far off the beaten path, trusting that the modern technology they carried would keep them safe from ancient horrors.
But New England was thick with deadly, secret places waiting to be found by those who couldn’t resist seeking them out. Arkham Prison was one such place, tucked away deep amongst trees which were older than America itself.
If it's reputation alone wasn’t enough to warn away intruders, the dilapidated exterior would do the trick. Every last one of its red bricks loomed like a threat, daring the foolish and the brave to step inside. It had housed the worst of the worst when it was open, and they had only gotten worse in death.
How ironic was it that the only ones wanting to escape there tonight were those who had voluntarily let themselves in?
I parked in the middle of the overgrown lot and got out of my car, instantly feeling the darkness as it seeped out of every boarded-up window and door. That was a wizard’s intuition, the same one I’d inherited from my father, and it was screaming for me to go home and stay away. Hell, maybe it had a point.
Did I really want to enter a place so full of death, evil and Merlin knows what else?
But Amy, said the voice in the back of my head that sounded suspiciously like my father. She needs you. She needs us.
I could ignore her, I suppose. I wasn’t the police. I had no legal obligation to save her from her own foolish mistakes. But how much better would that make me than a Darkon?
Not much.
I was there, so I might as well try to help.
I pulled out my phone and called Amy, searching up her number from my list of previous calls. It rang twice before I got an answer.
“H-h-hello?” she whimpered. “Is this Henry?”
“Yeah, it’s me. I’m here,” I said. “Where are you? Can you describe your location?”
Silence.
“Hello. Amy?”
“I’m in a cell. I can’t see. He took my eyes.”
A wave of needles passed into my heart. “Who, Amy? Who took your eyes?”
“The rabbit. He said I needed to be punished. He was right.”
The call ended before I could question her further.
By the sounds of it, some Darkon was toying with her, seasoning her soul with a pinch of madness prior to consuming it whole. Even if she did make it out of there alive, there wasn’t any guarantee she would be going home sane. Darkon sometimes followed, latching onto a person’s soul and slowly draining it away. She had given them an invitation by seeking them out, and they had obliged.
If that really was her, she was in more trouble than I could even articulate.
And I’d be, too, if I didn’t enter into that brick monster prepared.
I held out my arms and closed my eyes, imagining a protective bubble extending outward from my soul and encasing me in white light. Peace and serenity flowed within me, and I told myself that both I and my Familiar were safe from all harm. I would keep up this invisible barrier for as long as I could and hoped it would be enough.
“So mote it be,” I muttered, dropping my arms. I gestured for Rusty to follow and made my way into the prison, hoping to Merlin the eyes I saw watching me from the corners of my vision weren’t hungry.
I eased the door open and crept inside. The stench of mold and ammonia assaulted me straight away, slamming into my face like a dump truck. I coughed, pulling my sleeve in front of my nose.
The interior of the prison was just as ancient and worn-down as the outside. Piles of debris littered the cracked cement floors, and what little remained of the walls were covered in graffiti. Long hallways loomed in both directions, filled with darkness deep enough to swallow a man whole.
“Fireflit,” I muttered, holding up my palm. A tiny yellow light the size of a quarter came fluttering out, illuminating the area in an arc around my body. It hovered over the top of my head, giving me a somewhat better view of the immediate area.
Damn, was it ever dark — and I don’t mean just literally. The stench of rot and tar reached my nose, signaling the presence of a Darkon. Rusty reacted to it, too, sticking as close to my protective barrier as he could get.
It knew we were here.
Whatever it was.
I thought of Amy, and what little of her energy I could register through the phone. A wizard’s intuition, as I’d said, was usually not far off — and mine was pointing down the narrow corridor to the left. I started walking, Rusty following at my heel.
The darkness was everywhere. A prison was full of negative energy, and the spirits who died within its walls remained imprisoned there well into the afterlife. A thousand and some odd voices were barging their way into my mind all at once.
I’m innocent.
I’m guilty.
I didn’t kill her.
I killed him.
I loved her.
I hated him.
I hate you.
Fuck you.
Fuck
You
Get out
Get you
GET YOU —
“I hear you,” I whispered. “I hear all of you. And I’m not interested. So go away. Now.”
Assertiveness wasn’t my strong suit, but Dad always taught me to be firm when it came to spirits and bullies. The dead were obsessed with the living, and could torment someone with their thoughts forever if allowed. I couldn’t listen or give in. Anything less than total condemnation would be treated as an invitation.
All but the most persistent of voices listened. Usually, they did, unless their death was particularly violent or angry. Then they might stick
around and bring their ghostly bodies along with them.
Hundreds upon hundreds of empty cells surrounded me. Hundreds of stories of pain and death and evil, layered beneath the foul stench of decay. They were only empty on the surface. In reality, every one of them was occupied by someone or something else.
All this darkness. All this sorrow. It was like an all-you-can-eat buffet for a Darkon. Tortured souls were their favorite delicacies. The only other place with more tormented souls would be a mental institution or a concentration camp.
“Amy?” I tried, halfway between a whisper and a shout. “Amy, where are you?”
Here.
Here.
Here.
Here.
No, stop it, I thought, retreating into my barrier. You’re not her. You’re nothing. Leave me be. Now.
This time, they didn’t quiet down. Not even a touch. Instead they only grew louder and louder still until they were practically shouting at me, begging for my attention. What had them so panicked? And why were they seeking me, of all people?
Rusty whimpered and I bent down to pick him up. He didn’t know how to shut the voices out, and they were probably having a good old time weaseling their way inside of him. That made me angry. Come for my Familiar and they came for me.
Leave him alone, I thought. Leave him alone or I’ll banish all of you to the Nether Realm. I’ll do it, I swear-
“Henry?”
Amy’s faint, near-death voice.
She was there, in one of the cells up ahead. I could feel her.
And then I felt something else, something far darker than a dead man, coming right toward us. Or maybe it was already there, hiding itself, waiting for the perfect time to strike. I felt it like a curse, tangling itself up, taking a great big whiff of my tasty magical soul.
I hurried ahead, moving to a slow, steady jog, forcing myself not to look at the faces floating in the cells around me. My barrier was under assault from all sides; it was draining me of every last bit of energy I had left. But still, I ran. I needed to grab her and get out.
