Christopher Golden - The Borderkind

“The caretaker, or whatever he is, has gone to visit relatives over the holiday,” the sheriff said as he fished out the key he had acquired as part of his investigation. “The guy said he’d be back, but I doubt it. After a little time away, he’s gonna realize he’s got nothing to come back to.”

He unlocked the door and swung it open, then stepped in and glanced around as though worried there might be someone there after all. Or maybe that was just what you did in a house where people had vanished without a trace, and where an unsolved murder had taken place.

Sheriff Norris did not wipe his boots on the mat. He stepped inside and out of the way to let Sara enter. She paused inside the grand foyer to wipe her shoes. As she did, the grandfather clock against the wall to her left began to chime twelve. It was exactly noon.

The sheriff watched her curiously as she started to move through the house. She had promised she would not touch anything, so she kept her hands in her pockets. Though what more the police could learn here, she had no idea. The investigation was not closed, but surely they had finished in the house.

Then again, she was no cop. What did she know?

From room to room she moved, examining the furniture and the paintings on the walls as though she were a thief in the night, or visiting a museum.

How could Jackson Norris possibly understand? Her father had been investigating a mystery and now had become a part of that mystery. She had lost him, somehow, and even more than the fear that they would never talk again, that she would never be able to relinquish all of the love and anger and hurt in her, and never get the embrace that she had always wanted and never dared to hope for…more than that was the fear that she would never know the truth of what had happened to him.

Sara Halliwell was no detective. She could not even begin to imagine what had become of her father, or to hunt for him. Lots of people were already busy doing just that.

But she had to see this place, because this was where it had all begun.

The Bascombe house was the heart of this mystery.

Now, as she walked from room to room, she could almost feel it. There was an elegance to the rooms, but they also had an ethereal quality to them. Something terrible had happened here, but something incredible as well. How did people simply vanish?

As she passed through a sitting room with a fireplace, she saw several framed photographs on the mantel. They were old pictures, including a wedding portrait and several of the family together. Though he was much younger in the photos, she recognized the late Max Bascombe in the wedding photograph right away.

His wife had been beautiful in her white dress, like the snow queen in a fairy tale.

The other photographs were of Mrs. Bascombe with her children, laughing and innocent. They had grown up, those children. Their mother had died when they were young and now their father had been taken from them as well. But what had become of Oliver and Collette Bascombe?

Where are you? Sara thought, staring at the photograph of the two children with their mother.

Fingers on the mantel to steady herself, she closed her eyes. Where are you, Daddy?

In the eastern region of Euphrasia, in the creche created by the meeting of three mountains, near the entrance to a sprawling pagoda sculpted entirely of sand, a light breeze rose. It stirred and eddied, entirely independent of the winds that swept down from the mountain peaks.

The breeze spun in circles, a small dust devil centered around the scoured bones of Ted Halliwell and the sand and grit that had once constituted two distinct figures, brothers, facets of the same legend. The sand shifted, sculpted now by the wind, and identity became blurred. What had once been the Sandman and what had once been the Dustman could no longer be separated. The sand rose, a little whirlwind, and merged.

Then the bones began to rise as well.

Slowly, grain by grain, the sand and dust and grit touched bone and stuck, gathering gradually around the skeleton. A new figure began to take shape, neither Dustman nor Sandman. It looked a great deal like a dead man named Ted Halliwell and contained within it his thoughts and emotions, his very spirit. But it was only sand, and there were other spirits contained there as well.

One of them a monster.