Black Cat Weekly #81

Chapter 5-3

It wasn’t a person, or even a solid form. There was a white haziness in the dark that only became perceptible after a few moments staring unfocused into the shadows. If my eyes moved, even a bit, I lost it, but it was easier to find the second and third time. Without being able to explain why, it felt childlike to me.

“Who is it?” I asked, afraid to turn my head and lose track of the apparition.

“I can’t tell. Something weak, or it would be tougher to handle. It’s a good thing, too, because this thing is chock full of anger. Feels a bit like an animal, to be honest, like a dog who wants to bite everybody.”

I took one last look at the ghost, and then squared up to Roth. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“You don’t have to do anything. You’re just here to get some exposure.”

“Fine. I’m exposed. Speaking of animals, why are there none around here?” I lit up the cabinet under the sink. This deep in the country, an abandoned house should have been crawling with all manner of wildlife, but there wasn’t even a single mouse turd.

Roth was having trouble following my change in focus. I think he wanted me to be more impressed by the ghost. “Uhm, it’s the spirit, probably. I’m calming it pretty hard, but once I let go it will snap back into a state of rage. Animals don’t like that.”

My light made a weird shadow on the cabinet base. I knelt to really look under the sink. The lap flooring creaked slightly louder than my knees. “What’s the history of this house? What happened to the people who lived here?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice rising with his annoyance. “I don’t know if anyone does. It’s been abandoned since I moved here ten years ago. The Collective bought it from the county for the back taxes and put it on my list. I’ve got like, half-a-dozen places like this I check on once a year. What are you doing?”

I ignored him and felt the edges of the cabinet base. “No one’s looked it up?”

“Why? It’s not a danger. Or not much of one. And no one really comes out here. Do you have any questions about the ghost, maybe?”

“Not really.” The base, just a warped sheet of melamine, rocked under my hand. “Hand me a fork or knife or something.”

It was an old cop’s trick: unambiguous directions delivered with confidence. Give people something to do and they’ll do it, if for nothing else than to abdicate responsibility. Roth handed me a knife without further comment. I dug the cheap, stamped metal utensil into a c***k in the corner and pried up the melamine.

“Well, this wasn’t what I was expecting.” I set the board to the side and brushed the dust off one of the plastic bottles packed into the hidden space beneath the cabinet. Old Hobson’s Genuine Whiskey. I handed the half-full bottle to Roth and climbed to my feet.

Old Hobson’s Genuine WhiskeyHe unscrewed the cap and sniffed the contents. “Looks like someone was squirreling away booze by the crate. And not the good stuff, either.”

I didn’t know the local brand, but I knew the type. Cheap liquor, the kind you could buy at charging stations for a few bucks. Why hide it, though? It didn’t make a lot of sense. Roth’s hypothesis wasn’t absurd, but it also wasn’t right.

“I don’t think the monster that used to live here was too worried about someone stealing his hooch,” I mused aloud. “The guy in the wedding photo was a slab of muscle, and nothing I’ve seen in the house leads me to believe he got stood up to a lot.”

No, whoever hid the alcohol was keeping it from the man of the house, not for him.

forI looked at the kitchen again. I’d been too dismissive on my first pass, allowing my own standard of living, the amenities I’d grown inured to, to tint my vision. Judgmental, that’s me. It had been one of my shortcomings.

At least I was self-aware about it.

The appliances were all old and cheap to begin with, but they looked to be in good working order. The tinfoil on the stove was dusty with age, but it had been fresh when the house was abandoned, the creases still crisp. I opened the pantry and found it stocked to bursting with freeze dried produce, the vacpacks labeled with cartoon images of fruits and vegetables. Of all the places in the house, the kitchen showed the husband’s touch the least. This was the wife’s domain, her stronghold, her sanctuary.

On an impulse, I opened the deep drawer to the left of the stove, the one where Grandma had kept the Dutch oven in her kitchen. My light glinted off what looked to be a pure copper skillet, the kind that had to be hand polished every week. For a rural housewife like that, it would be an heirloom, as sacred as a family bible. That fit the bill, all right.

But something was wrong. I reached in and lifted the heavy cooking utensil out.

Someone had folded the soft metal in on itself, deforming the pan. It had been inexpertly hammered back out, the strike marks from the round head of a common ball-peen hammer like fingerprints at a murder scene. Worse, the copper had split, torn from the stress of the process.

With purpose and malice, someone had ruined the beautiful antique skillet. Even after all that I’d seen in a long, hard life, the cruelty of it struck me.

Roth moaned. I turned to see what he was whining about and caught a glow of red out of the corner of my eye.

“What the actual hell?” Roth sputtered. Beads of sweat swelled on his scalp and poured down his face. He braced himself against the doorframe. Absent other factors, I would have assumed heart attack, but even I, with all my notable lack of extra sensory perception, felt the growing menace in the house.

“What’s wrong?” I still held my light in one hand and the skillet in the other. Lifting both, bracing for an attack, I scanned left and right. Despite the months of intense training with the Collective, my brain thought in terms of physical threats.

“Fuuuuck!” Roth gurgled and dropped to one knee so hard it echoed through the house. “So much…anger,” he gasped, and clutched his head like he was holding together a split cantaloupe.

I dropped the pan and hooked him under the armpit. The pan bounced on the floor, clanging and ringing loud enough that I winced. Mine wasn’t the only reaction.

The room seemed to bow, flexing as though it were sucking in a breath. The shadows crowded my tiny light, and the darkness took on a terrifying depth that I can only relate to suddenly looking into the coldest, darkest part of the ocean from the bow of a very small boat. The inky blackness had contours etched in a sanguinary red so dark that it was barely discernible from the shadows.

Roth, though clearly still in pain, moved with a purpose. He drew a stone from somewhere in his ridiculous coat and set about scratching a design into the cheap vinyl flooring. The stone had a rough edge, but he put his not-inconsiderable weight behind it, gouging thick lines all the way down to the subfloor.

“What can I do?” I asked. I recognized his attempt at a casting but that’s as far as my knowledge took me. My eyes darted about, vainly chasing the crimson form that lurked always just at the edge of my vision.

“Go,” he snarled, but didn’t look up from the task at hand.

“Okay, we’re out of here.” I grabbed the collar of his jacket, intending to back him out of the house. He didn’t budge.

Instead, he slapped my hand away. “I have to stay, try and bind it.”

The full weight of the entity was on us now, pressing down with slow, inevitable menace. It was like being crushed under a mudslide. I was familiar with the feeling. I’d been there once before, flailing in a panic against a despair so profound that it alone was enough to squeeze the memory of hope from my mind. The night my career ended. I’d barely escaped with my sanity, and I didn’t care to roll the dice again.

Roth was too big and I was too old to drag him, so I tried reasoning. “It’s been here a while, right? Then it can hang out here a while longer. If we can get out of the house, we can call in Dr. Whitlock or somebody and let them deal with it.”

The rock slipped and skittered on the floor. Roth picked it up with a trembling hand. “No,” he said, almost whimpering. “We disturbed something, messed up. It’s not a spirit, it’s a marker. There is something driving it and it’s coming through now. If it isn’t held here, it’ll take form. It’ll kill. And worse. Can’t let that happen.”

nowTime for hard truths. “You told me you’re a part-timer, Roth. Isn’t this a little out of your league?”

He went back to marking the floor. “I’m who’s here.”

Goddamn it. The way he said it…just a statement of fact. My old partner Kendal had been like that. Not fearless, just brave. It’s what killed him.

Instinct told me to get the hell out of there, but for all my faults, abandoning brave idiots was not one of them.

The fine folks at the Collective kept telling me they brought me in for a reason. There had to be some value I added to the equation. I set my brain to picking at the knot.

Roth had called the apparition a marker, but that meant nothing to me. I was sent here to get some face time with a simple spirit, the echo of a person bound to a location by trauma. What had set this thing off? The bottles? The pan?

I’d no more than thought the thought when my light hit the copper skillet on the floor, and the story suddenly came into focus. The spirit didn’t belong to the big man in the photo; it didn’t have that feel, that sense of entitlement that was almost always present in such men. It wasn’t the wife, either. She’d spent most of her adult life learning to cope, to suppress.

That left the son.

Patricide had to be sufficient trauma to bind a spirit. It was a leap, but it felt right. But what could the boy have done against such a monster as his father? He’d need a tool. A g*n? A knife?

had to beRoth was on both knees now, clawing at the ground with his little stone and mumbling a chant that half sounded like a sob. Tears joined the sweat dripping from his face.

The lumpy grocery store worker might have been a lightweight in the grand scheme of things, but from what they’d taught me over the last few months, anything that could hurt him like that across the planar barrier would take at least a mid-strength warlock’s spirit. As I understood things, a teenager’s soul wouldn’t have the required energy, let alone the concentration of will.

What had happened in this awful house?

As much as I hated to, I left Roth in the kitchen and ran to the back of the house. A quarter of a century of experience investigating domestic homicide told me the answer was in the boy’s room.