“Yes, it’s a relief. And while I was there, I used his records of ancient Egypt to find out more about Rekhmire’s Curse. There’s a way to beat it, Alec. If Mallory puts the heart from the Box of Midnight back into Tia’s mummy where it belongs, the curse will be lifted.”
“Well, we have the heart,” I said. “Maybe we can find out where the mummy is, if it still exists.”
“It has to exist for the curse to be active. The legend says that Rekhmire hid the mummy somewhere where no one would find it.”
“We’re going to have a problem finding Mallory too. I’ve tried to contact her almost every day since she left but she isn’t answering her phone and she hasn’t called me back. The last time I spoke with her was when Mister Scary slaughtered all those kids at Oak House.” I didn’t mention the nightmare I’d had in which Mallory had been trapped inside a mirror.
“I’m sure she’ll contact you eventually,” Felicity said.
“Yeah, I hope so. Right now, though, we need to find Sammy Martin and something tells me he wasn’t taken to the lake. Not along this pipe, anyway.”
I pointed my light directly in front of us to where a grate blocked our way. Branches and leaves had collected against the grill, held in place by the force of the water. The grate looked heavy and rusty and was bolted into place. There was no way anyone or anything had gotten past it last night.
“So if it didn’t go this way,” Felicity said, “it must have gone up to the surface, probably at that last grate we passed.”
I nodded and we retraced our steps. Walking back along the pipe, against the rising water’s current, was much more difficult that going with the flow. By the time we got to the rungs, the water was splashing against my upper thighs. It was rising quickly thanks to the storm.
“You want to go first?” I asked Felicity.
She nodded and climbed up, pressing her shoulders against the grate and pushing it out of the way. When her feet disappeared over the edge of the hole, I followed her to the surface and found that we were still in the woods. Thunder rumbled overhead and the rain was pouring down through the trees, streaming off the leaves and branches.
Felicity pulled up the hood on her jacket and began to inspect the area around the hole from which we’d just emerged. “It looks like the creature came this way,” she said. “There are broken twigs and disturbances in the undergrowth.”
She surveyed the area some more and then pointed down a slope. “It went down there.”
“Let’s go,” I said.
The slope led down to a stream that cut through the woods. The storm had swelled the stream so much that it had burst its banks. It coursed through the woods, sweeping away mud, branches, and leaves as it went.
“I don’t think the police have been here,” Felicity said. “There are indicators that something came out of the stream and moved through the undergrowth to the storm drain and then later went from the drain to the lake but there aren’t any signs of the police searching the area.”
“Figures,” I said. “They didn’t even search the storm drain until I called them.”
“Shall we follow the stream to the lake?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I have a better idea, one that means we won’t be fumbling around looking for tracks in the mud. We’ll be able to see exactly where the creature took Sammy.”
“How will we do that?”
“We’ll use faerie stones,” I said, looking at the tall pines and beeches overhanging the stream. “The trees will show us what happened here last night.”
Felicity nodded. “All right. What equipment do we need?”
“I need to mix a couple of potions to make us receptive to the visions and we need the stones. They’re at my place.”
“Perhaps I should sit with Mrs. Martin while you go and get them,” she said. “I’ll see if I can get some more information about Sammy. There must be some reason the creature wanted him in particular.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “The more info we can get, the better. If that thing came upstream from the lake, why not just go to the closest house and kidnap someone? Why leave the stream and head into the drain to get to Sammy’s yard?”
“I’ll see if I can find out,” Felicity said.
We walked through the woods to the dead ground behind the Martins’ house and slipped through the bushes into the yard. Mrs. Martin was in the kitchen, looking out of the window. When she saw us, she rushed to the back door and opened it.
“Did you find anything?” she asked, coming out into the rain.
“Not yet,” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “We’re still looking. I need to get some equipment. Felicity is going to stay here with you while I’m gone, if that’s okay.”
She nodded. “Yes, of course.” Then she saw the mold and slime on our clothes. “What happened to your clothes?”
“We searched a storm drain,” I said.
Her hand flew to her mouth and her eyes grew wide. “No,” she uttered.
“It isn’t what you think,” I told her. “We were tracking the creature you saw last night. It used the drain to move through the woods, that’s all.”
Her legs seemed to lose all their strength. She leaned heavily against the kitchen table. Felicity guided her into one of the chairs.
“We didn’t find anything down there,” Felicity said. “Like Alec said, we were just following the creature’s movements.”
Our words did nothing to comfort Mrs. Martin. She put her face in her hands and wept.
Felicity shot me a questioning look. I shrugged. I had no idea why Sammy’s mother was reacting so badly to the news that we’d been in a storm drain, especially when we’d assured her that we hadn’t found anything down there.
Mrs. Martin looked up at me with eyes that held a deep sorrow. “I don’t believe this is happening again. It can’t be happening again.” She put her face back into her hands.
“Mrs. Martin,” Felicity said gently, putting her arm around the distraught woman’s shoulders, “what do you mean? What’s happening again?”
Mrs. Martin composed herself and looked at Felicity. “Ryan, my husband, was a trucker. He used to haul refrigerators and dishwashers down to Providence and Boston. A couple of years ago, he told me that he felt uneasy every time he had to leave the house because he was sure something was following him. Not someone, he always said something. And he said it was watching from the storm drains. I dismissed what he was telling me because he’d had…problems…all his life and I thought he’d get over it, you know?”
She took a deep breath as if steeling herself for what she was going to say next. “But his paranoia got worse as the days went on. Eventually, he couldn’t take it anymore and he got professional help. There’s a hospital where the doctors specialize in the kind of problems Ryan was experiencing. He went there for therapy and even checked himself in for a couple of weeks at a time. But then he went missing from there.”
The tears came again and she wiped them away. “The doctors called the police and a search was carried out. But all they found were pieces of Ryan’s clothing in a storm drain. They’d been ripped to shreds, as if Ryan had been attacked by an animal. His body was never found. And now the same thing has happened to Sammy.”
“Listen,” I said, crouching down and looking into her eyes. “We didn’t find anything at all in the storm drain. I’m going to go to my house and get some equipment while Felicity stays here with you. I promise, we’re going to find out exactly where your son is.”
I stood and gave Felicity a little wave before leaving the kitchen and going to the front door.
When I opened it, the scene outside was very different from when I’d arrived. There were at least a dozen reporters gathered around the trucks, most of them huddled beneath umbrellas.
Some of them were recording broadcasts, standing on the sidewalk in front of the house with microphones held to their mouths while they spoke to the cameras.
When they saw me emer
ge from the house, they all stopped what they were doing and flocked to the gate, pointing their microphones and cameras at me.
“Sir, are you with the police?”
“Can you tell us if there is any progress with the case?”
“Could you comment on Joanna Martin’s mental health? Is this related to her husband’s disappearance two years ago?”
I shoved past them and climbed into the Land Rover. While they were aiming their cameras through the window and shouting questions at me, I pulled onto the street and accelerated, leaving them bewildered in the middle of the road.
I didn’t want to end up on the news. The press already thought the monster story was crazy; if they found out I was a preternatural investigator, they’d have a field day. Mrs. Martin had been through enough already without having to deal with that.
I just hoped that the promise I’d made to her in the kitchen was one I could keep.
3
When I got back to my house, I went to the kitchen and found the herbs I’d need for the potions. After grinding them up with a mortar and pestle, I measured them into two glass vials and topped them up with rum.
I put the potions into a backpack and then went upstairs to the spare bedroom where I kept most of my magical items. Grabbing two faerie stones—stones with natural holes in their center—I added them to the backpack along with a couple of enchanted daggers. I wasn’t expecting trouble but there was no harm in being prepared for it.
As I left the room and walked to the top of the stairs, I heard something that made me stop dead in my tracks. It also made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Had someone just whispered my name? The sound had been barely audible yet I was sure I’d heard it.
I mentally checked the wards around the house. They were still intact, so the whisper had originated from somewhere within the magical barrier.
I took a couple of tentative steps down the stairs before I heard it again.
“Alec.”
The voice was cold, faint, and thin and it seemed to be beckoning me.
The scariest thing about it was that I was sure the sound hadn’t come from inside the house at all. The cold whisper was rising up from within my own mind.
The air around me felt suddenly icy.
“Alec.”
I went downstairs slowly, listening to the house around me even though I was sure the whisper was being transmitted directly into my head.
I walked into the living room and tried to figure out what was happening. The wards were still up so nothing had entered the house, either physically or magically.
The sound was coming from my own mind, which meant either I was hearing voices that weren’t there or something was reaching out to me telepathically. Something that was already in the house.
I had a number of powerful artifacts in here but they were all kept in certain conditions that prevented their power from leaking out. There was only one item that had arrived here recently and was simply hanging in a cupboard without any containment measures holding its power in check.
I went down to the basement and walked across the training area to the cupboard on the wall. The air seemed even colder down here.
I’d opened this cupboard and looked at the sword inside many times but as I reached for the handle now, fear bloomed in my brain like a viper uncoiling itself from a nest.
“It won’t hurt you,” I told myself as I grabbed the handle and pulled the cupboard door open.
Excalibur wasn’t glowing or vibrating, it wasn’t wreathed in magical smoke, or emitting glowing eldritch runes. It simply hung on its pegs like a normal sword, giving no indication that it had been whispering at all.
In fact, I was beginning to think I’d imagined the whole thing.
I reached forward and touched the red and gold thread that was wound around the grip. There were no flashes of magic, no voice that suddenly penetrated my mind, just the rough touch of the thread.
After closing the cupboard, I went back upstairs, heading straight out the front door to the Land Rover.
Backing out of the driveway, I told myself to concentrate on Sammy Martin for now. I owed it to him and his mother to put all my time and energy into finding him, not thinking about a creepy legendary sword that was hanging in my basement.
In the rearview mirror, the house receded into the distance but, despite the growing distance between me and it, and despite the fact that the heating in the Land Rover was on full blast, I felt an icy chill creep into my bones.
4
Instead of parking outside the Martin house where the news vans were, I drove around the block and found a place where I could access the strip of dead ground behind the houses.
The Land Rover had no trouble mounting the sidewalk and driving over it and onto the wide area of mud that had once been designated Dawson Street by the town planners.
I stopped at the rear of the Martin residence, got out, and slipped through the bushes to the lawn.
A few moments after I knocked on the back door, Felicity opened it. “Alec, are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I’m fine,” I said. I hadn’t realized until now that the encounter with Excalibur had affected me so much that I was visibly shaken. “Come on, let’s go find the boy.”
“There’s something you need to see first,” she said, stepping aside so I could enter the house and get out of the rain. “I asked Mrs. Martin if I could look in Sammy’s bedroom. I found something there that pertains to the case.”
“Okay,” I said, “Show me.”
She led me past the living room, where Joanna Martin was sitting on the sofa watching the news on TV, and up the stairs to the second floor. A dim light illuminated several closed doors. Felicity went to one that bore a homemade cardboard sign that read SAMMY’S ROOM printed in green marker.
She opened it and we went inside. Just like the rest of the house, the room felt damp and when Felicity clicked on the light, it gave off a feeble, yellow glow. There was a window that probably looked out over the back lawn but it was obscured at the moment by thick black drapes.
Apart from that, the room was like any other ten-year-old boy’s. There was a TV in the corner, a single bed with a Star Wars comforter and pillow case, and a desk with a laptop and textbooks.
Band posters adorned the walls, as well as some of Sammy’s own drawings. These were of moonlit forests and deserted streets beneath a starry sky.
I wondered what it was like for this boy, to live in a night world and never see the sun. Vampires lived that way, of course, but they were creatures of the night. Sammy was a normal boy who’d had this nighttime existence forced upon him through no fault of his own.
“Look at this,” Felicity said, going to the desk and picking up a black hardbound notebook and handing it to me.
The pages inside were filled with drawings of the fish creature. In some of the pictures, the creature stood on the shore of a lake, rocks and trees in the background along with a full moon in the night sky. In others, it was prowling along a pipe that looked a lot like the storm drain we’d been in earlier.
“What do you think this all means?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Obviously, Sammy knew of the creature’s existence before it came here.” I pointed at a drawing that showed the creature emerging from moonlit water near a rocky shoreline. “Is that Dearmont Lake?”
“I don’t recognize it,” she said, flipping through the pages of the book and taking a photo of each page with her phone. “It could be Dearmont Lake, I suppose. Or a place Sammy drew from his imagination.”
“He didn’t imagine the creature that took him last night,” I said.
Felicity finished photographing the sketchpad and put it back into the desk drawer.
We went back downstairs. Mrs. Martin was still watching the news in the gloomy living room, her worried face illuminated by the pale glow of the TV screen.
“We’re going to continue our investigatio
n,” I told her from the doorway. “I’ll get back to you soon.”
She nodded and said, “Okay,” but her attention was on the TV. She was waiting to hear something about her son, maybe that the police had found a body. I hoped I could bring her happier news.
Felicity and I went out back and slipped through the bushes. It was still raining hard and as we walked through the woods, the ground was wet and slippery.
When we reached the grate we had come out of earlier, I opened the backpack and handed Felicity one of the vials. “Here, drink this.” I took the other vial and swallowed the contents. The rum burned my throat on the way down and the herbs left an aftertaste in my mouth.
Felicity took a sip and wrinkled her nose. “That tastes terrible.”
“Yeah, but it will let us see things we wouldn’t be able to otherwise,” I said, taking the faerie stones from the backpack and passing one to her. “The trees are going to show us a vision of what happened here last night.”
She nodded and waited while I recited the words of the spell. Then she held the faerie stone in front of her eye and looked around. “I can’t see anything yet.”
“It takes a couple of minutes,” I said, bringing my own stone up to my eye and looking at the grate. After a couple of heartbeats, the image I was looking at through the faerie stone changed. Day became night. It was still raining in the vision but now I was looking at last night’s rain, not today’s.
“It’s working,” Felicity said.
The grate was suddenly pushed open violently and the creature emerged into the night. It looked just like the creature Sammy had drawn, with scaly skin, bulbous fish eyes and webbed fingers. Its body was adorned with various shells, tied together with strings of weed. The shells clattered together as the creature moved.
It was carrying Sammy over its shoulder. The boy was crying but he wasn’t struggling against the creature’s grip, as if he had accepted that he couldn’t get away.
“Oh, that poor child!” Felicity said.
Shadow Land Page 3
