“Don’t touch anything yet,” Ben told me as we advanced farther into the sparsely decorated living room. “Evidence Unit’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Yeah. No problem.” I nodded assent and continued to glance about the room.
My hair follicles were still stinging with strained discomfort, making my skin seem to crawl, while an arc of intense energy played up and down my spine. It felt pretty much as though I was holding on to a frayed extension cord while standing in a puddle of water. Slowly, my scalp began to tighten and my temples to throb. I had one hell of a headache coming on.
None of these sensations were new to me. I had felt them a handful of times in the past, though not often, thankfully. They were warnings-the physical manifestations of a “supernatural burglar alarm.” Roger, like any Witch, or practitioner of ritual magick, had shielded his boundaries. He had cast protective energy about his home as a way of marking territory to let others who were aware know that they shouldn’t intrude. In the physical world, I had simply stepped across the threshold. However, being an uninvited guest, in the realm of the ethereal, I had done the equivalent of breaking a trip wire on a hypersensitive home security system.
Two things immediately occurred. First, the walls of protective energy enveloped me with urgent warnings in an attempt to make me leave. Second, wherever Roger Henderson was hiding, he was made aware of my intrusion. Of course, as I said, these warnings were for others who are aware, so being the only Witch in the room, I was forced to endure the increasingly painful attempts at expulsion in tortured solitude.
The one feeling that wasn’t a direct descendant of the ethereal burglar alarm was the searing arc of energy playing xylophone on my vertebrae. Red hot, intense, and angry, it was the blatant otherworldly signature of the home’s occupant. The unmasked, undisguised essence of Roger Henderson’s immortal soul. Vile, putrid, and swelling with evil. I had to engage my own defenses in order to keep from becoming violently ill. It was obvious, at least to me, that though he wasn’t here now, he had been here very recently. We couldn’t have missed him by more than a few hours.
I was only superficially aware of muttered apologies and “excuse me’s” as officers pushed past me to go in and out the door. Several moments passed before I realized I was standing frozen, one step over the threshold, partially blocking the entrance of the house. Slowly, I shuffled around the room and as Ben had ordered, was careful not to touch anything-physically, anyway. As I moved farther inward, a new feeling joined the jamboree of sensations that were clawing at me for equal time. The feeling was fear. It was small and feminine but very intense. It was the fear projected by a little girl named Ariel. I pushed the feeling back and placed it on mental “hold” as I realized my breathing had quickened. I fought to maintain a grip in the physical realm, and closing my eyes, I willed myself to relax. When my respirations came back under control, I allowed my eyelids to flutter open and focused on the scene before me.
The walls in the small square room were washed with a thin coat of light blue paint, applied lethargically with what had apparently been a worn roller. Several swaths were severely lacking in coverage, unabashedly exposing the original antique white that lay beneath. The floor, at one time smooth, finished hardwood, was scuffed and gouged, with wear patterns criss-crossing the surface in a well-beaten path. A lone, straight-backed chair sat against a sagging card table-the only two pieces of furniture in the room.
The stained tabletop was littered with cigarette butts from an overflowing ashtray and a paper plate containing a half-eaten sandwich. The curl of the drying bread, a browning crust of mustard, and the unidentifiability of the luncheon meat gave evidence that the sandwich was several days old.
“Can’t say a helluva lot for his taste in decorating.” Deckert was standing next to me. I hadn’t noticed him until he spoke.
“I know what you mean,” I answered with a small sigh and began massaging my temples. My head was killing me, and I knew it was only going to get worse before getting any better.
“You okay?” Concern crept into his voice as he rested a hand on my shoulder.
“Yeah, I’ll be okay. Just a headache.” I didn’t feel like trying to explain the concept of protection spells and ethereal burglar alarms at the moment. From what I had come to know about Carl Deckert over the past week, I was sure he wouldn’t cast a jaundiced eye upon me, but I wasn’t exactly certain he’d believe me either. It really didn’t matter anyway. I was the only one who had to deal with it.
“Probably all the excitement,” he volunteered in a fatherly tone. “I got some aspirin out in my car, if you want some.”
“Thanks,” I smiled weakly, “I might take you up on that later.” All I really needed to do was get out of this house, but I knew that wasn’t an option at the moment.
“Looks like you got a fan club,” Ben called to me from a few feet away.
When I looked over, he was motioning to a bizarre collage. The section of wall directly above the card table was haphazardly peppered with newspaper clippings regarding the murders. Upon closer inspection, several yellow marks could be seen streaking the newsprint, and each of them was highlighting my name.
“He knows I’m helping with the investigation,” I offered. “He’s just trying to…”
“Great intel, Storm,” Special Agent Mandalay’s sardonic tone pierced the even murmur of the other voices in the room to cut me off. “Did your expert get it from his crystal ball or something?”
“We didn’t have just a hell of a lotta time, ya’know,” Ben spit back. “Surveillance showed lights goin’ off, so we had ta’ assume he was in here. We had no way of knowin’ they were on timers.”
“Well I’m not impressed,” she returned.
“And what would you have done? Tapped his phone and sat around with your thumb up your ass?” His voice increased in volume by a notch.
“I would have made sure he was here,” Agent Mandalay raised her voice as well. “This place looks like it’s been empty for days.”
“No it hasn’t,” I interrupted calmly. “He’s only been gone a few hours.”
She turned and looked at me as if I were a small child butting in to an adult conversation. “The expert speaks!” she exclaimed cynically. “Why don’t you let the rest of us in on it. How do you know he was here a few hours ago?”
“I can feel him,” I answered her barbed question simply. “He had the little girl with him.”
In an exaggerated motion, she tossed her head back, rolled her eyes, and then let out a loud, frustrated breath, “I suppose you can feel her too?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. I can feel her fear.”
“You ARE kidding. Right? This place is abandoned. Just look around you.”
Before I could answer, a surge of blinding pain bit viciously into my skull like a white-hot poker. As long as I was inside this house, my foothold in this plane of physical realities was shaky at best, and the sudden stabbing affectation was all it took to knock me over the precipice. I winced internally as the pain struck again, and I tumbled backward into the darkened abyss of the recent past.
Fear.
Confusion.
Pure, unbounded terror.
The terror of a small child.
A dark figure. Stocky and thick. Brimming with exaggerated excitement. I can smell a mixture of emotions in his profuse, oily sweat.
His excitement.
Her fear.
His anger.
Her terror.
He enters the room hurriedly. He’s holding a loosely wrapped bundle. A tattered blanket, stained and filthy with abuse and neglect. It encompasses a limp mass. Apparently, there is some weight to the bundle as he struggles to shift it while he wrestles with the door. Using his knee, he pushes the door shut then turns and backs against it, forcing the latch to pop into place. He jerks slightly, and a tiny hand falls into view from beneath the unclean shroud. The tiny hand of a frightened little girl.