Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

Landauer frowned, squinting at the dirty screen door. “What the… ?” Abruptly he reached forward and pulled open the screen, to reveal a brown-red handprint smudged on the wood door beside the knob, with lines and whorls of fingerprints.

No question. Dried blood.

The partners looked at each other.

Landauer leaned forward and pounded on the door with a meaty fist. The hollow booming echoed in the house. “Mr. McKenna, this is the police.” There was still no stirring, no sound.

“McKenna’s missing…” Landauer pointed out. “Bloody handprint. Exigent circumstances. Reasonable suspicion of danger. I say we go in.”

Garrett nodded in agreement. Both men unsnapped the holsters of their weapons.

Landauer reached and grasped the doorknob. He frowned.

“What?” Garrett asked, tensing.

“Sticky,” Landauer said with a grimace. “And unlocked.” He turned the knob, pushed the door open.

They stared into the dark cave of the living room. Then, hands hovering beside their weapons, they stepped inside the door.

The room was dark from the drawn drapes, and there was a musty and slightly foul odor. A few pieces of sagging furniture, with empty beer cans and newspaper sections scattered beside the sofa on the old and dusty carpet. The air was tainted with the faint, sweet odor of rotting food.

There was a fireplace that looked like it was crumbling from the inside. Garrett was sure it was five kinds of fire hazard and he wouldn’t have lit it himself for any amount of money, but the still-pungent smell of wood smoke and the half-burned logs on the grate indicated it had been used recently.

“Mr. McKenna?” Landauer called again loudly, pro forma. “This is the Boston Police Department. Are you in the house, sir?”

No response.

As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Garrett scanned the walls, covered in faded flowery wallpaper. His immediate guess was that McKenna had inherited his parents’ home; the décor was circa 1940 with a few seventies’ touches, and none of it or the furniture were a man’s choices.

Garrett nudged Landauer and nodded up to the clock above the doorway to the kitchen. It was a round plastic battery-powered version and it was stopped, the thin red second hand frozen atop the longer hand with the big hands indicating 3:33. Landauer went strangely silent and just then Garrett realized the significance beyond the fact that no one had replaced the battery.

333.

Now Garrett stiffened, too.

The men fanned out, moving slowly. Garrett glanced through pocket doors into a front parlor stacked with accumulated junk: greasy tools, a small disassembled engine on a side table, a dinner table overflowing with newspapers and boxes. There was a hall extending to the back: bathroom and bedroom probably, and a set of stairs to the second floor. The kitchen was to the right, with a closed swinging door.

There was no sound and no feel of any presence besides their own in the house; they could both sense the emptiness, which diffused their tension somewhat. They both relaxed in the same moment, hands withdrawing from the vicinity of their firearms. They exchanged a glance in the dim room, then Landauer nodded toward the hall and moved into it, while Garrett pushed open the swinging kitchen door with the tip of his shoe.

It was as dark and dank as the rest of the house, with a rank, neglected odor. Garrett smelled stale, uncirculated air, garbage not taken out for weeks, long-dirty dishes, alcohol-laced sweat…

And something else. Something he didn’t want to think about, something naggingly familiar…

He was distracted from the thought by the faint sound of Landauer’s footsteps clumping from the second floor above him.

Garrett turned in the room, continuing his visual inventory. Dishes were piled in the sink, and the remnants of a meal were still on the table… several beer bottles, a fast-food bag, a petrifying half of some kind of burger in an open cardboard carton. There were two closed doors on the other side of the kitchen, one that led to the outside, and the other a solid door, probably to a cellar. (Garrett heard his father’s voice in his head: “Cella.” ) Garrett glanced at the outside door, then moved toward the other. He reached for the doorknob… but hesitated before grasping the knob.

There was a counter to his right with a dish towel crumpled by the sink, and he reached for the towel and wrapped it around the doorknob. The knob twisted under his hand, and the door opened onto a black chasm.

Still using the towel, Garrett felt his hand along the wall beside him, searching for a light switch. He found the plate, but when he flicked it, there was only an empty click.

The hair on the back of his neck suddenly rose, as if he were being watched from—not the cellar below, but right behind him. He twisted to look back at the door—

There was no one.

Garrett steadied himself against the wall in the dark and felt in his pocket for the Maglite on his key chain.

He switched on the small, powerful beam and shone the light down into the darkness. The staircase plunged precipitously, with narrow steps of unfinished wood opening into a cavern of cellar.

Garrett stood on the top step for a moment, and deliberately stopped his breath, listening… listening…

Again, he had an overwhelming feeling of being watched from behind… but a glance over his shoulder revealed no one at his back.

And there was no sound, no stirring, and more importantly no feeling of life below.

Garrett relaxed a tad, and began the descent down the stairs, sweeping the small, concentrated beam of the Maglite ahead of him. The light picked up glimpses of the cellar: pale drapes of cobwebs on the ceiling beams… a peeling, noxious pipe that was surely asbestos… a malevolent old iron boiler the size of a refrigerator…

There was a packed earth floor below, and sagging wood shelves with rotting junk hanging on the stone walls around him. The beam fell on another wall and Garrett froze… at the sight of the triple triangle sigil painted large on the plaster, and thick scrawls of other words. Then he shifted the beam lower… and what he caught in the light took his breath away like a savage punch.

There was a crude narrow altar against the wall, draped in black cloth with fat black candles atop it and more triangle sigils painted just behind it. And in the center of the altar was a candleholder that he had only seen in a crude and disgusting sketch.

A Hand of Glory. Erin Carmody’s hand, a wizened claw, clutched around a black taper candle.

Garrett gasped, breathing in shallowly against the sudden recoil in his stomach.

The smell of earth was around him; that root-cellar smell… and again, something else…

Garrett shined the flashlight beam straight ahead. It took him a moment to register what he was seeing and then he staggered down the remaining few steps.

A triangle was traced on the floor in some phosphorescent powder…

And at the points of the triangle were three low stone pedestals, each holding a roundish basketball-sized lump that on some level Garrett recognized instantly, but was unable to admit to himself. But the smell was a dead giveaway.

Dead being the operative word.

The eyes were the next clue… filmed over, but unmistakable. The round lumps were human heads. Three heads, planted at three points of the triangle, long hair on two of them…

Garrett choked out some guttural version of a cry… it sounded harsh and inadequate in the cellar.

He barely had time to register details of the scene, the fat, burned-down candles surrounding each pedestal…

And then an enormous rushing and a hideous growl came from behind and above him, and something was barreling down the stairs, thumping on the thin wood. Garrett barely had time to spin before it was on him, a snarling, frothing hulk of a creature, with the horrible reeking smell of madness, raving in lunacy, inarticulate, bestial sounds. It smacked into him and threw him to the floor. Garrett fell backward and hit his head with a sharp crack on something hard and cold, a stone surface. For a moment he saw stars.