Alexandra Sokoloff - Book of Shadows

Then there was shrieking, and the huge foul thing was on top of him, mauling him, grappling, grasping his neck.

Garrett gasped for breath even as the alien sounds chilled his blood. The bulk on top of him was a good seventy pounds more than his own weight and there was more than ordinary heaviness, the weight of crazy.

Garrett suddenly went limp, made himself a dead weight, playing possum. His heart pounded out of control in his chest while he willed himself not to move… there was a horrible, suspended moment as his attacker paused, trying to gauge the change…

Garrett shoved his hand down his own leg and grabbed for his Glock, freeing it. But just before he squeezed down on the trigger, he hesitated—and instead jerked his arm up from between their bodies, up toward the ceiling, and slammed the metal weight of the weapon against his attacker’s head with a yell, hammering him over and over as the madman shrieked and screamed.

The last thing Garrett felt was warm and sticky blood running down his fingers, his palm, his wrist, as the bulk on top of him finally, thankfully, collapsed into a dead faint, knocking Garrett’s breath out as it pressed him hard into the stale and stinking earth.

What happened next was unclear.

His attacker stirred on top of him and Garrett shot back to consciousness with a jolt of lifesaving adrenaline. He thrashed on the dirt cellar floor to reach the plastic handcuffs clipped to his belt, and in a frantic race against time, he freed his hands to grasp the wrists of the body on top of him and wrest him into the cuffs.

Even as he did so, he was aware of something hideously, mortally askew. His attacker was reviving, starting to writhe and spit guttural obscenities, but the voice was horribly familiar, and the feel of the clothes he wore was terribly wrong; Garrett could sense the cut of a suit coat and matching trousers, and the size and shape of the man on top of him… too, too familiar.

Garrett pushed with all his strength to roll the body off him, and simultaneously rolled hard to his right in the dirt to get himself free. He scrambled up to his feet as his attacker began to rage, his shrieks echoing off the cellar walls and ceiling.

The cellar was black with just a splash of light from the beam of Garrett’s fallen Maglite.

Garrett lunged and grabbed for the Mag.

The rasping words of his attacker behind him chilled his blood: “Choronzon, acerbus et ingens! Te hoc ferto pectore flamman Choronzon—”

With his heart in his throat, Garrett spun and trained the flashlight beam on the man who lay cursing him, his rants stripping his throat.

The light illuminated a face hideously distorted by madness and hate. And even though Garrett had known what he would see, the sight chilled him as no other moment in his life.

The frothing monster was Landauer.

It was an eternity before the crime-scene van arrived, and the ambulance. Garrett was running down the dirt road as soon as he heard the sirens and the approach of vehicles, running and shouting. “Don’t touch anything!”

He strode to meet Lingg as the crime-scene tech emerged from the van, followed by other HazMat-suited crew. “The place is booby-trapped,” Garrett rasped out. “I think there are psychotropic drugs painted on the doorknobs, maybe other places. Land touched them—I didn’t.”

Lingg looked at him questioningly for a split second, but then nodded. “You stay, Detective,” he said, and his voice was kind. “Stay here.”

Garrett was about to protest, but found his legs buckling underneath him. And as he braced himself against the side of the van, he saw something that turned his bowels to water.

In the long grass beside the van were burned footprints.

The EMTs carried a raving and cursing Landauer out in a strait-jacket. Garrett thought, half-consciously, that the shaken looks on the faces of the EMS guys must match his own.

As they muscled Landauer into the ambulance, a dark Lexus pulled up into the dirt road. Garrett turned… and through his numbness felt dull surprise to see Dr. Frazer emerge from the car. He crossed the drive to stand with Garrett. “Malloy wants this handled in-house,” the psychiatrist said softly. “What happened?”

“The doorknob,” Garrett said again. His voice shook. “He said it was sticky. Ten minutes later he was…” He looked toward the ambulance, where Landauer was still ranting, his voice by now bloody raw and hoarse from abuse, starting to fade, but barely. “Probably belladonna,” Garrett said bleakly. “I told the EMTs so they don’t give him anything that would react…” He slowed, and swallowed, trying to block out his partner’s invective. He was sickly glad the words were in Latin so he wouldn’t have to know what Land was saying.

A tech slammed shut the doors, mercifully cutting off the hoarse shrieks. Garrett and Frazer watched as the ambulance pulled away.

They joined Lingg at the crime-scene van and both suited up in white HazMat jumpsuits. “Don’t touch anything,” Lingg instructed the other men. “Even with gloves. Walls, doors, furniture—we have no idea what might be tainted.” He turned to Garrett and Frazer. “Probably whatever psychotropic it is was mixed with DMSO for rapid absorption into the skin.” He handed both of them helmets with respirators. “We don’t know how much might be airborne, either. Detective Garrett, we’ll follow your lead.”

“Straight down to the cellar,” Garrett said through a dry mouth.

Inside the house all walked gingerly, single file, careful not to brush against the doors or walls.

The cellar door still stood open; the stairs plunged precipitously into darkness. Behind Garrett, Lingg switched on a halogen lamp and shined it down the stairs to illuminate the musty cavern below.

The light was harsh, blue-white, and created stark shadows in the dingy basement. The painted triple triangle symbol was huge on the wall, and 333 was traced on the wall opposite, with more scrawls of text surrounding it. Garrett recognized some Latin words; others were unreadable. He flinched at the sight of the altar against the wall with its gruesome human candleholder, and turned his head away, though he knew there were worse sights in store.

He reluctantly turned his gaze toward the triangle in the center of the cellar. It glowed with phosphorescence on the packed earth floor, the lines now smudged and blurred from Garrett’s scuffle with Landauer. Garrett focused on the three pedestals, one at each point of the triangle in the dirt.

And he froze.

The heads were gone.

Garrett stared. Each stone shelf held three fat black candles—and a dark blotch, something dried and dark, but there was no sign of the heads.

Garrett’s mind did a weird, nauseating flip. But I saw them. Not candles. Heads.

“Their heads were there,” he croaked out. Lingg and Frazer looked toward him. “On the altars.”

Lingg shined the lamp into the triangle. The stone pedestals were clearly bare, except for the candles and dark blotches on each.

“I saw them,” Garrett insisted. “They were on the altars. Three heads.”

Frazer and Lingg exchanged a wary glance. “Was there anyone else in the cellar with you?” Frazer asked, his voice maddeningly neutral.

Garrett was reeling. “I don’t know, I…”

His mind was racing, out of control. Was the killer here? Was he in the cellar with us? Did he take them out from under my nose?

He had run, left Landauer and run…

Garrett suppressed a shudder… and remembered the overpowering feeling of being watched when he stood under the cellar door. He spun to look up the stairs.