Chills, page 13
After what felt like several long minutes of clicking and typing, clicking and typing, a PDF popped up on screen.
“Here we go,” she said, sinking into the chair.
“What is it?” he asked, leaning in over her shoulder. This close to her, he could smell her perfume—something light and floral—and it pleased him immensely.
Some of the document was in other languages. Teagan recognized Latin, Greek, Japanese, German, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, but there were portions in a language he had never seen before. It looked like a cross between complex pictographs and cuneiform. Interspersed between these sections and wrapping around diagrams and other graphics was the English text.
“Well, not a counter-spell, per se, but a pretty good idea of where to find it. See, these passages here”—she pointed to the language he didn’t recognize—“are in a special sort of secret language of traders—people in, uh, my line of work, I guess—who need to exchange information from forbidden or banned grimoires. It looks like nonsense, a made-up language, right? It’s not. It’s designed so that sensitive information isn’t accidentally accessed by the uninitiated, and so it can pass without trouble under the noses of most gatekeepers. There is an underground compilation series of books in this language—I have a copy of every volume except the most recent—that contains accumulated knowledge from all of the most important books, scrolls, and documents on the occult in the world—The Munich Manual, Codex Seraphinianus, The Voynich Manuscript, the Heptameron, The Book of Doors, the Libro Novem Saecula, The Picatrix, the Oera Linda Book, oh, and The Red Dragon Grand Grimoire, of course . . .”
Seeing Teagan’s polite but confused nodding, she moved on. “Anyway, if there is a spell to counteract the one used by the Hand of the Black Stars, one of these PDFs will have it, or tell us where to find it.”
“Right then. Ah, anything I can do to help? Other than try to read that?”
“Pour me a drink?” She winked at him, then turned back to the computer. “Glasses are in the kitchen cabinet all the way to the right. Bottom shelf. Vodka . . . that should be on the counter by the sink.”
Teagan headed toward the kitchen. The occult aspects of the case were, frankly, beyond him. He’d grown up in a strictly, stiflingly Roman Catholic family, and he had shirked most aspects of religion, anyone’s religion, a long time ago. While his upbringing had given him some understanding of a worldview on supernatural evil, what Kathy was talking about was different. It was science and science fiction and magic and religion and physics and mathematics all sort of rolled into one. That somehow made it more terrifying. It wasn’t just a matter of simple faith, but also of invasive and immutable truths that belief systems of pure faith and no proof sought to bury under layers of condemnation.
He found the glasses and poured out two vodkas, and was set to carry them back into the den when his cell phone rang. The sound was jarring. It had been days since he’d gotten so much as a text message, and the ringtone seemed almost unearthly and out of place in that little kitchen. He put the glasses down and took the cell out of his back pocket. It was Morris.
“Hey there, mate,” he answered the phone.
“Teagan! It works! The cell, I mean. I had my doubts I’d be able to get through. I couldn’t reach Jack at all.”
“Aye, I was a bit surprised meself to hear the mobile ring,” Teagan admitted. “How’re you holding up out there in the snow?”
“It’s . . . quiet. It’s kind of how I imagined a nuclear winter might be.”
“Spend much time imagining such things, do you?”
“In this line of work,” Morris said, “I imagine a lot of ways the human race will ultimately fuck itself over.”
Teagan smiled thinly. “Not much left to the imagination these last few days.”
“Tell me about it. How are you and Kathy?”
“Fine. We’re at her apartment. She’s looking for the counter-spell to the one that caused this mess.”
“I hope she finds it,” Morris said. He didn’t sound all that confident.
“So what’s going on?”
“Well, I found out about that figure you and Jack described,” Morris said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Took some leg work, by the way. Not the kind of thing you can just Google, even if the Internet were working right now.”
“You’re a prince among men.”
“No kidding. Just left the home of a local college professor to ask about it. Their theology expert, Trina Majoram. She’s a recognized authority—right here in town, no less—on obscure ancient religious symbolism. The rituals, mythologies, gods and goddesses, all that sort of thing. I guess you could say she bridges the gap between the church of my Sunday school days and the cults of Kathy’s, uh, devil worshippers.”
Teagan balanced the cell between his ear and shoulder and brought the glasses of vodka into the den. He handed Kathy hers, and she nodded a thanks, then mouthed out Who? and gestured at the phone. Teagan switched the phone to his free hand and responded with Morris. To Morris, he said, “Did she recognize the description of the figure? I’m putting you on speaker so Kathy can hear.”
“Yeah.” Morris’s voice came through a little tinny on the speaker setting, but he was audible. “She confirmed that such descriptions historically have been found in relation to ritualistic torture-sacrifices offered to gods of other worlds. Almost exclusively, those rituals were attempted by that Hand of the Black Stars cult Kathy mentioned. She said there isn’t much written about them, but she did know they were a bad, bad group of people. They’re into some pretty freaky stuff. Cannibalism, piquerism, necrophilia, cryptozoophilia—hell, some of this stuff I don’t know the meaning of, and I don’t want to know. But they’ve been doing these things a long time. There’s evidence of them at least as far back as the Nineteenth Dynasty of ancient Egypt. Old-school, pissed-off, violent group of psychos, as if we didn’t know that by now.”
“Aye, that’s what our Kathy says about them. What about the figure? How does it relate to this ritual?” He took a healthy swig of the vodka. It burned a little in his throat—Teagan was more of a whiskey man, himself—but it warmed his chest.
Morris cleared his throat. “Well, Majoram told me—” There was a sound like papers being shuffled on Morris’s end. “Geez, it’s complicated. Okay, so according to Majoram, they’re scouts of sorts, I guess. They’re mentioned as demons in other religions, but she recognized them all right. If evidence points to these Black Stars nut jobs finding a door to a dangerous alternate dimension, like Kathy said, a portal between worlds, then they must have found the keyhole, too. Fashioned a key and unlocked the door—you know, in a metaphysical, supernatural sense, I guess. When it opened—the door, I mean—the snow and everything in it came through. And those figures, the scout-demons or whatever, control it all—the snow and ice, the monsters, probably even the cultists at this point. Majoram called them the Blue People.”
“The Blue People? Charlene mentioned them,” Kathy said, then turned to the PDF to check for the phrase.
“Yup. They’re . . . cleaners, I guess you could say. Interdimensional fixers. They and the monsters and the snow are meant to wipe out everything. All life, anything that might complicate the arrival of... others. Apparently, the cultists think that once the Blue People are done making Colby an empty, frozen wasteland, the conditions will be right for these ‘others’ to come through that door and take over.”
“Sounds like that’s bang on with what that header told Kat.”
“That’s what I thought, too. And why go to all this trouble destroying Colby, you ask?”
“I did wonder,” Teagan replied with a small smile to Kathy.
“Because in exchange for preparing the way, these cultists will get their rocks off on being the new favorite pets of whatever ‘others’ come through that door. Those ‘others’ would, and I quote, ‘provide knowledge of the universe, of other universes, and of the forces which create and destroy, cure and kill, forces which bend time and fold space. Bodies would be changed to withstand the powers unlocked in the mind. ’ ”
“So wait—” Kathy began.
“There’s more.” Morris flipped through papers again on the other end. “These ancient beings were ‘formed in and of the pure dark of starless space from which all of creation and destruction springs forth.’ Sound like those Greater Gods Kathy’s nut job mentioned?”
“Aye.” The smile slipped from Teagan’s face.
“I think we might be fucked here, guys.”
It was a difficult point of view to argue with just then. Teagan could see the grim consideration of what Morris had told them in Kathy’s expression as she scrolled through her document. The light from the screen reflected in her eyes seemed to magnify her determination. But it was a lot for Teagan to swallow. He managed with great effort to shake his head. “Nah. We’ll stop it. You’ll see. We’ll stop it.”
“I wish I had your confidence,” Morris said quietly, then, “but I’m up for a fight, at any rate. Gotta jump off. Snow’s getting bad up here, and—”
A pause followed by a high-pitched scream caused both Teagan and Kathy to exchange alarmed looks.
“Morris? Hello? Morris?”
“I’m okay,” Morris said. “I’m fine. But I gotta go. I’ll call you back.”
The phone disconnected, and for a few seconds, the two detectives just stared at it. Finally Teagan put it in his back pocket and took another swig of vodka.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” he said.
“Sure,” Kathy agreed, taking a healthy gulp of her own drink. “It’s Morris.”
“Aye, it’s Morris,” Teagan said. But the knot of worry in his gut was reflected in Kathy’s eyes. “Any luck finding anything?”
“A reference to the Blue People in the Libro Novem Saecula—that is, the Book of Nine Worlds. I happen to have a copy of that one on here, but it’s an abridged version. Let’s hope we have enough.”
* * *
Morris hung up the cell and slipped it into his pocket, drawing out his gun. It seemed like he was doing a lot of discovery and rescue these last two days. His newest distress call was coming from a tan SUV across from his parked car. The driver-side door was open and a middle-aged man was half sprawled across a snow drift that had risen up to meet the tops of the tires. His legs appeared to still be in the vehicle, while his arm was draped over his down-turned face. A little blond girl of about eight was screaming and pounding on a back window with tiny mittened hands.
Remembering the beastly thing he’d seen when he’d come upon Dan Murphy stranded the night before, he opened his car door, grunting against the efforts of the wind to push it closed again, and cautiously got out. The wind bit into his cheeks and sailed beneath his clothes, making him shiver as he scanned the immediate area for signs of monsters, human or otherwise. The abandoned car appeared to be alone, collecting snow and losing heat by the minute.
Morris flashed his badge to the girl so she would know he was a police officer, and that seemed to calm her a little. She stopped screaming and her pounding on the window faded to muted little thumps, but Morris could see that she was shaking badly, probably from both the cold and from fright. Whatever she had seen was likely something no little kid should ever have to see.
He reached the open door of the SUV, and crouched by the man’s head. Enough snow had blown in under the car that there was no space beneath for anything to hide, but no way for the tires to move. From the color of the skin on the man’s neck, he could tell the man was dead. He touched a shoulder and found it stiff. When he tried turning over the body, he saw that the blood that had spilled from the man’s head had frozen into crimson ice and adhered to the snow beneath. It took some tugging, but Morris got the man free and turned him over. Then he cried out and fell backward into the snow. The man’s face was missing. Instead, a blood-soaked mess of fleshy frozen shreds of butchered meat and white protruding skull bones had replaced anything even vaguely resembling facial features.
With a quick glance at the girl in the back seat, who now sat quietly, apparently numb with shock, Morris hastily turned the body back over into the snow. The rest of it slid out from the car, and Morris gagged a little as the tattered stumps where the man‘s legs had been thudded against the door frame. He rose with some difficulty; it felt like the snow had been trying to bury him under, just in the few minutes during which he’d been on his ass in it. He brushed it off as best he could, instinctively repulsed by the hard clumps of ice which clung to his coat and gloves. He unlocked all the doors from the panel on the driver-side door and went back to the girl.
When he opened her door, he was surprised to find that although she was bloody and a little bruised, she was not seriously injured. She was a tiny wisp of a thing, doll-like in her features. Her long blond hair had clumpy streaks of crimson in it, just under her wool hat, and a small cut on her cheek had trickled a tear of blood that had almost made it to her jaw before drying. Her mittens had dark brown smudges on them. Similarly colored stains on her light blue parka looked unnervingly like smeared handprints.
“Hi,” he said in what he hoped was a soothing voice. “I’m Oliver. What’s your name?”
“Jill. My family calls me Jilly.”
“Hi, Jilly,” he said.
She looked up at him with round, haunted hazel eyes and in a monotone, replied, “You’re not my family.”
“Uh, yeah, of course. You’re right. I’m a police officer, and I want to help you, Jill. I want to get you out of here.”
“It took my mom,” she whispered. Then, a little above a whisper, she added, “My brother, too. Kenny. And my dad—it killed him, didn’t it?”
“Was that your dad that was driving?”
She nodded, tears forming in her eyes.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” he said, and then fell silent as she bent her head and cried softly. It broke his heart to see her crying, this little blond angel, an innocent little child, over a loss too big for words. But indeed, no words came out; nothing seemed to do justice to that kind of pain, that kind of horror. Nothing would adequately explain the terrible wrongness, the impossible strangeness of having her mother and brother taken away from her and her father torn apart by the very monsters she had spent the first few years of her young life being convinced were not real. He just let her cry, because sometimes tears were stronger, safer, more powerful, more honorable than words could ever be. And when her crying had reduced to sniffles, he squeezed her shoulder.
“We should go, Jill,” he told her. “It’s not safe here.”
“I know,” she said, and exhaled a shuddery breath.
“Do you have someplace I can take you? Some family, or a family friend?”
She looked up at him with big hazel eyes still shining with tears. “Ms. Harper. My mom always told me that if anything bad happened and she and my dad couldn’t get to me”—fresh tears spilled down her cheeks—”that I should go to Ms. Harper’s.”
“Okay,” Morris said, helping her out of her seat belt (she was still dutifully buckled in) and out of the SUV. “Do you think you can guide me there from here?”
Jilly nodded. She felt like such a small thing, so fragile, as he steered her by the shoulders to his car. She went around and got in the passenger seat, buckling the seat belt again. The gesture made him smile softly as he got behind the wheel and buckled his own seat belt.
“Okay, Jill, lead the way.”
She directed him back toward the center of town and down a few side streets to a dead-end cul-de-sac of large houses and landscaped lawns. She pointed at a brown cedar-shingled three-story Dutch Colonial house numbered six, and he pulled into the driveway.
Morris put the car into park. “Come on. I’ll walk you up to the house and explain everything to Ms. Harper,” he said gently.
The little girl nodded, allowing him to lead her to the house.
Morris listened to the surrounding stillness as they walked up the driveway. It was unnerving, how quiet it was. Even the sound of snow, which should have crunched beneath their feet and blown dustily about in the wind, was muted. There was something about snow, especially that much snow, that deadened everything, darkened it even in the day. It created a perception of being isolated, alone in a world of feathered white crystal. It was a dangerous thought in its all-encompassing pervasiveness, the kind of thought that made a person sit amid all the silence, let it surround him, deafen and silence him, weigh down his limbs, lull him to cold, shadowed sleep....
He shook his head. Deep down, the beginning waves of unease were washing back and forth inside Morris, but he kept walking. It was far more likely that whatever was wrong was out here with them instead of inside that house, but to be sure, Morris kept a hand on the butt of his gun.
When they reached the front door, he knocked heavily. There was no mail in the mailbox, he noted. It was just another little jolt of reality, of the disconnect between Colby and the rest of the world. It made him shiver.
“I don’t hear Hunter,” Jilly said.
“Sorry?”
“Ms. Harper’s dog. Usually, he barks like crazy when someone knocks on the door.”
Morris frowned. He didn’t say anything, but those waves of unease were beginning to crest.
He knocked on the door again. From within came sounds of movement, and a soft and somewhat elderly-sounding voice said, “I’m coming.”
The door opened a crack and the muzzle of a shotgun peered out. Immediately, Morris shoved Jilly behind him. Grasping the stock and trigger in a death grip were two bony white hands with neatly manicured and pink-painted nails. The sliver of face visible in the doorway was equally as bony and white, with one sharply intelligent brown eye and the corner of a firmly set and delicately thin-lipped mouth.
