quick rounds into the darkness. With another guttural snarl, the beast was gone and Frankie scrambled back into the light beam, gun raised against the darkness. “Some kind of animal scratched me!” he shouted, pressing his free hand to his cheek. It pulled away bloody.
“Ah crap,” Hugo trotted halfway down the stairs to join him as Frankie picked up his phone and moved the beam back around the large room again. Several crumbling holes in the foundation stone revealed access points where feral creatures could have crawled burrowed into the building from the outside.
Frankie turned his head so his partner could look at the wound.
Four long claw marks opened up the skin, but the wound was not too deep. “Might need stitches—maybe just butterfly bandages. But you’ll definitely need a rabies shot.”
“Crap,” Frankie spat as he holstered his pistol. They climbed back into the kitchen and left Woodson’s brother to the animals and the forensics team.
Stepping back into the kitchen, Hugo’s nose twitched. He sniffed and turned a large, inquisitive circle.
“I smell gas,” Frankie said to Hugo, his statement actually a question seeking corroboration.
“Yeah, me too.”
Walking to the stove, Frankie found it turned on, though the burner was unlit. “That’s weird. It couldn’t have been on when we came in. We’re out in the sticks so there must be tank on the property; it woulda run out a long time ago. I musta bumped it when we came in.” There’s a rational explanation for everything.
Hugo gave him an apprehensive nod. He said he agreed, but his expression was not so sure. Things were getting weird in this creepy old house and Hugo, the more open minded of the two, didn’t want to risk believing that the hairs rising on the back of his neck might be right.
Frankie turned back to the mess. “Wait, did I close that cupboard door?” He was sure that he hadn’t.
When closed, as it now was, the door hid an empty shelf space. A culinary knife protruded from the cupboard’s door at a forty-five degree angle.
Frankie pulled his gun and looked around the kitchen. His expression was deadly serious.
Hugo drew his own gun. He trained a standard issue Glock 22 at the kitchen doorway and muttered a prayer to Mary as he placed the rest of his faith for protection in the forty caliber handgun.
“It must be the other missing teen,” Frankie argued against his instincts, desperately trying to rationalize the weirdness. “Somebody’s messing with us. Something’s going on here.”
“I don’t think so,” Hugo said.
Frankie pointed at the stove. The burner glowed with a steady azure flame that had suddenly lit. “This doesn’t add up. Somebody’s got to be messing with us.”
Hugo holstered his gun and made eye contact with his partner. “Something is odd, but that doesn’t mean we’re in danger.” He went to peer at the stovetop, turning the burner off and snuffing the flames. “The burner could have a delayed igniter?”
“Yeah?” Frankie put his gun away. “Maybe. There’s got to be an explanation for everything.”
“Well, let’s keep looking around.”
4
The two men followed the path of least resistance and walked into the next room. A spacious, well-appointed living room sprawled open before them.
Frankie exhaled. The wide-open space felt cold to him, sub-arctic. He exhaled and watched his breath crystallize around him. He shuddered and hugged his arms to him. Just about to panic over such a well-known supernatural phenomenon, it suddenly didn’t seem cold at all. The vapor was not his breath, but rather the dust kicked up by their presence.
I must be going crazy… maybe fumes or something… making me hallucinate. The gas—something in that, maybe? Frankie shook his head, trying to rattle whatever had dislodged inside his brain back into place again before Hugo could think his partner was slipping.
He looked around. The room was lavishly furnished, fine leather furniture and oak fittings adorned the beautiful, regal setting. A crafted stone fireplace sported a burning cedar log, which cast off warmth and light.
Slack-jawed with frustrated conjecture, Frankie did a double take. There was no fire. There were no fine fixtures. Only dusty, wooden chairs occupying a darkened room, arranged in a semicircle. His partner was in the middle of them, examining them.
“Everything okay?” Hugo asked, noting the confused expression on Frankie’s face.
“Yeah. I just don’t feel so good, that’s all.” Frankie stated, taking care to annunciate each word. It helped him feel like he’d reasserted control over his body and senses as they’d clearly, momentarily revolted.
Frankie shook the fuzz out of his brain again for good measure and looked for clues in the graffiti on the walls. Words and symbols reminiscent of Satanist-dabblers and misguided youth revealed nothing new. From the corner of his eye, one word blazed upon the wall—it dripped red, like blood: Kayla Adams.
Frankie turned to it, but it wasn’t there. Instead, a poorly painted brimstone symbol, an infinity sign bisected with a double-barred cross, adorned the grimy wall. The detective shook his head and muttered for the millionth time about misguided youth who probably didn’t know what they played at.
Hugo joined him and stared at the symbol. “Probably saw it on a heavy metal album cover. You know, one of those with some font so jagged and illegible that it looks like a pile of tree branches.”
“I gotta get some air,” said Frankie. He rubbed his eyes and walked back to the main entrance.
Hugo caught up with his partner a couple minutes later. “Feelin better?”
“Is this really happening? I mean, am I awake here?”
“As far as I can tell,” replied Hugo as he regarded his partner apprehensively.
Frankie stuck his head out the front door and sucked in a deep breath of fresh air. The whole place still smelled musty, but the air cleared his head. “Okay. I feel better; let’s crack this case. Gimme the details.”
“We have three dead bodies. Dead a long time, we expect to find a fourth male at some point. We’re looking for a girl, or at least some evidence of her. She was last seen two months ago and the old lady has been dead at least a month.”
Frankie paced back and forth through the foyer as his partner ran over the details for him. He knit the facts together in his mind, putting together a plausible chain of events.
“Special circumstances?”
“Ms. Woodson complained about demonic disturbances and wild teenagers. Those dead boys look like they were performing some kind of séance when they died, but nothing suggests they were anything more than punks with an Ozzy Osbourne fetish.”
Frankie paused. “The old preacher at that snake-charmer church said that an incident involving a bunch of teenagers had rattled her enough to abandon her family estate. Do you think she witnessed their deaths?”
“Maybe,” said Hugo. “Another possibility is that the vandalism scared her off. My money is on one of these boys having a relationship with the girls, Kayla Adams, and getting too big for his britches—he and his buddies scare off the old lady who’s afraid of their heavy metal voodoo so they can drink her booze and screw like rabbits in rut.”
“Well, old lady Woodson was purportedly a person of great conviction; perhaps she let her imagination ran away with her.”
Hugo raised an eyebrow. “You mean my idea has merit? She could have been fooled, or even misconstrued the vandalism as demonic activity?”
Frankie nodded slowly, but then shook his head to the negative. “No. That doesn’t work. She did differentiate between the two types of harassment. The preacher said that the demonic disturbances didn’t bother her too much.”
“Her faith must’ve been dauntless.”
“Something scared her away, made her leave everything behind—including the girl the state was paying her to watch.”
“We need more clues,” said Hugo. “That, or to find the girl and get more information from her.”
“I’m going to
go look over those boys again. We didn’t do a thorough examination of the room.”
“I’m going to look upstairs,” quipped Hugo as he ascended the rickety staircase. “Maybe I’ll find another corpse.”
Frankie found the bodies and laid all their belongings together, searching for anything to help him make sense of it all. Mostly, it seemed a collection of cheap, satanic themed junk-artifacts: trinkets and jewelry the teens had likely bought at heavy metal concerts or from the advertisements in cheap magazines sporting Charlie Loves You t-shirts and the like.
The detective noted an old book lying nearby and flipped it over; he rifled through the aged pages. Amongst their black-arts possessions, it was the only thing that appeared authentic. Embossed upon the leather spine was the title, Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis. Inside the cover was the plain title, The Lesser Key of Solomon. A piece of parchment paper slid from the pages and fluttered to the floor.
Scanning the written page, it looked very old. Printed in faded lettering, Frankie recognized the writing as a Native American dialect, one of many dying languages that few persons knew much about. Because of the proximity to Black Peak Indian Reservation, his job required a minimum number of cultural training hours for continued education credits. Right now, he wished he’d had more—but at least he could identify the origins.
Frankie struggled to piece together the letters at the top from a Native American alphabet he’d been forced to memorize. He wrote the letters down on a small notepad he kept in his
Father of the Esurient Child Page 3
