Sometimes you just get lucky. I was passing through Saco, Maine, on my way to Boston, and I stopped for an evening coffee at a roadside place called Dill’s. As I walked in the door, the locals were tossing around phrases that might as well’ve been gold bullion for the taking: phrases like “mutilated bodies,” “some kinda spooks,” and “I heard it was the Devil hisself!”
“What can I getcha, friend?” the gigantic proprietor asked in a small man’s voice.
“Just coffee, thanks. Say, what’s all the hubbub?”
He poured the steaming coffee with ancient equanimity. “‘Fraid it’s murder. Three folk up to Gerrymander’s Dell got ’emselves exsanguinated. Bodies was marked with them, whattayacallit, pentagrams. Some’re sayin’ it’s cults, some’re sayin’ it’s creatures from below.” He shrugged. “Me, I reckon murder’s murder, whoever done it.”
“Agreed. Listen, I’m actually an official blogger for the Catholic Church. I don’t suppose you could point me toward the scene of the crime?”
He leaned forward, very slightly, and peered at me. “Are ya now.” Then he shrugged again. “Reckon it’s your own business, friend. You wanna head for the old Innsmouth House. Keep goin’ south, take a left on McGinney, and go straight. You’ll get there by and by.”
“I appreciate it. Can I get that coffee to go?”
New England sundown comes early in February. It was full dark by five, and the heavy mist was turning to a light sleet as I drove along McGinney Road. The good news was, my phone was at least as smart as me, and a quick search turned up the address of Innsmouth House. When I was getting close, I pulled off the road and quickly changed into clericals in the back seat.
A minute later, I rounded the final curve. A column of birch trees, pale and gaunt in the shadows, flanked the road as it unspooled its way to the dead-end doorstep. The house was somehow gaunt as well, four stories tall but unnaturally narrow, terminating in spires that looked like spikes in the fitful starlight. I couldn’t make out the color: it was blue or grey or some uneasy compromise, the color of rain at night. And where in God’s name were the windows?
There were four squad cars out front, their lights painting a lurid, flickering tableau. Four officers stood by the front door of the house, smoking. None of them looked up as I pulled into the driveway.
“God save you, friends,” I said somberly as I approached. “My name is Fr. Beauregard, from Our Lady of the Snows. I’m told there’s an evil force at work in this house.”
They glanced at me, glanced at each other, and shrugged. “Active crime scene, padre,” one of them mumbled. “Don’t touch nothin’.”
“Wouldn’t go in there if I was you,” another one said.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” I replied, a bit perfunctorily. These poor schmoes were obviously too rattled to care what I said or did. The door was closed, but not locked; I turned the knob and went inside.
Three bodies, like the man said. Twisted in agony, covered in blood. Five-point stars carved into their torsos, the apex pointing to their feet. To the One beneath the floorboards. They looked like college kids, a girl and two boys. Had they broken into this place, maybe on a bet or a dare, maybe just to smoke a bowl with the ghosts of Innsmouth? Were they grandkids of some reclusive patriarch, back in town to keep themselves remembered in the old man’s will? Or were they kidnapped somewhere else and dragged here? I saw some bruising on their faces; they’d gone down fighting, at least.
The parlor where the corpses lay constituted the entire first floor. There were chairs and couches, roped with dust, and a cold stone hearth in one corner. Narrow stairs wound upward from the other corner, and a door stood in the peeling wall nearby. There were no windows. The beam of my flashlight barely alleviated the dirty gloom, but merely turned it yellow.
A slow, deep dread was building in me. I frowned and shook myself. “Snap out of it, Monaghan,” I muttered. “You’ve seen a lot worse.”
I activated my detector: sure enough, it started to beep and squiggle immediately. Spectral entities, you know, give off massive amounts of electromagnetic radiation. They’ll replace fossil fuels entirely within twenty years.
The sense of dread grew worse. I gritted my teeth and slapped myself in the face. “Get a hold of yourself, man. This is what they train us for.”
No wonder the cops were traumatized. I’ve trodden ghastly and unhallowed ground before, but I’d rarely felt such raw terror coiling inside me. It took all my professional pride as well as my strength of will to open the nearby door. As I expected: basement stairs.
Downward, downward, to the lurking depths below. Bare dusty rafters overhead, bare concrete underfoot; an old disused boiler in one corner, and a giant off-white freezer in the other. No skulls, no demon altars. I tried the light switch, but of course it didn’t work.
“Good enough,” I said aloud. Regardless of where the haunting originates, the energy tends to be strongest at the house’s lowest point. I reached into my jacket and pulled out a Delving Industries model P-157 Plasmatic Cell.
A simple cone of steel and plastic, the size of a loaf of bread. We’ve got them in over a thousand haunted houses in the continental U.S., yielding an annual output of nearly 100,000 megawatts: enough to power New York City for a week and a half. To our scientists, the natural is only a prologue.
Pulling off my faux priest’s collar, I knelt and positioned the Cell unobtrusively behind the boiler. With a reflexive glance around the room, I opened the keypad and punched in one of my two personal codes. (The other code was my duress protocol, in case someone forced me to activate Delving technology for purposes of corporate espionage. The Cell would emit a taser-like pulse, stunning everyone in a fifty-foot radius, and HQ would dispatch a retrieval team to my location at once.) Tonight, however, I entered my all-clear code, and the Cell began to emit a quiet, comforting hum as it commenced collecting the house’s EMFs—electromagnetic frequencies.
“Hiya, Tommy.”
Who the hell? I jumped to my feet and spun toward the stairs, and then I froze in place. The head of a woman in her mid-twenties—strawberry blond, rather pretty but for the hard grey eyes—was floating next to the steps. She grinned.
“What’s the matter, Monaghan? This can’t be your first decapitation.”
“You’re no ghost,” I said flatly. “I’ve seen prototypes of that tech before.”
“Sharp as a tack.” Two hands appeared, parting the folds of a camo cloak. The fabric consisted of hundreds of tiny cameras, projecting a chameleon image of the wall behind the wearer. It wouldn’t hold up under daylight scrutiny, but it was more than enough in a clammy basement. “Ruby Kell, at your service.”
“And what can I do for you, Miss Kell?”
“Oh, you’ve already done it. You took my bait. Did you really think it was coincidence, a Satanic murder scene right where you happened to be passing by?”
I stared at her. “Dear God, you staged all this? You butchered those three kids just to lure me here?”
“I represent some people who are very interested in Delving’s Plasmatic technology. But I couldn’t just hit you over the head at a gas station and take it, now could I? We know all about your duress protocols. You had to activate the Cell of your own free will.”
Miss Kell sashayed in my direction as she spoke. She was long and lithe, and the swing of her hips was like the swish of a feline tail. Her boots, I noted, had stiletto heels. I saw no firearms, but the hilt of a combat knife protruded from a scabbard at her hip. Probably painted with the blood of three innocent people.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, easing away from the boiler, into the open space where I could maneuver. “I felt dark energy up there. And the cops were too scared for a simple 187, even a grisly one.”
She laughed, and I saw the sheen of excitement in her face. She was having the time of her life. “Isn’t that fun? The boys in the lab call it Numinon 48: a psychotic aerosol that reproduces the atmosphere of a genuine haunting.”
Clever enough, I had to admit. Numinon—ask your doctor if it’s right for you. “But the EMFs were genuine.”
“Ghosts aren’t the only things that give off EMF, Monaghan. If you hadn’t been so busy shitting your shorts, you might’ve noticed a little power module under one of the couches upstairs. All part of the con, don’t you know.”
“Nicely played.” With that, I whipped out my aspergillum and dashed a line of baptismal water into her face.
She laughed again, even harder, and her eyes were feral. “What’s this, holy water? Sorry, Tommy boy, I’m not possessed. I just love my work.” And she freed the blade from her scabbard. It glittered in the dimness.
I brandished my aspergillum, which doubled as a taser. Electricity sparked from the tip, reacting with the trickling holy water. Backing away slowly, I plotted out egress lines that would get me past her to the stairs. “There’s one thing you haven’t considered,” I said, stalling. “With our resources, we could easily kidnap vagrants and hold Satanic rituals in our warehouse on a nightly basis. It’d stir up a storm of demonic EMF, cut way down on our overhead. So why do you think we spend all this time and money hunting ghosts all over the country?”
“Your paltry ethics, I suppose.”
“Well, I like to think that’s part of it; but let’s be real, we’re a corporation. At the end of the day, the bottom line’s the bottom line. No, the real reason is that you shouldn’t whistle for the wind if you don’t want it to blow.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means, sometimes when you hold a ritual inviting the Devil to appear—he does.”
The lunatic glee in her eyes turned to puzzlement. Her mouth opened, but her voice was strange. Speaking through some viscous fluid. “I don’t— In nomine Dei nostri Satanas Luciferi excelsi. What—what am I— In nomine Dei nostri Satanas Luciferi excelsi!” The voice grew resonant, powerful. “In the Name of Satan, Ruler of the Earth, King of the World. In the Name of Satan, Ruler of the Earth, King of the World!”
Well, this was fun and all, but her getting possessed by the Powers of Hell didn’t make her any less likely to stab me to death. I whipped another line of blessed water at her, and this time she reacted with a flinch and a hiss. I dodged around her and sprinted for the stairs. She didn’t follow.
Bursting into the parlor, I tripped over a corpse as I headed for the front door. Stumbling to my knees, I found myself face to face with one of the sacrificial victims. A sudden awe welled up within me. Just the drug, I thought desperately, just the drug. Numinon 48!
But I knew it was different this time. It was still fear—but the fear of mighty mysteries. Of the everlasting sea, of the infinite gulf of space. The fear of the ancient, the vast, the immeasurable. The Divine.
Satan, Satan, whispered something inside of me. Satan!
“No,” I choked out. But in the sightless staring eyes of a dead man, I glimpsed a secret. Something hidden, something deep. A part of me, I knew, had always yearned for that secret.
Down through the earth. Down, down, ever down and down. The old Army joke: “We have to get out of this hole, boys! Dig faster!” But the real truth, the real secret: if you go down far enough, you’ll find you’re going up.
Dark king, dark knight, dark bishop. Powerful pieces on a chess board. If you dig through the earth, you’ll come to the land where chess began. The land where dragons are held in reverence: the Dragon, which in Christian symbolism means the Devil. The fallen angel, hurled from heaven. Down and down, forever down. Dig faster.
Through the cosmos, through the chaos. Down, down, through the sulphur-pits of Hell, beyond the smoke and shadow, through the spine of Eternity itself, till you find yourself soaring high. Sailing over the universe with Satan, treading the ultimate impossible empyrean with Lucifer, Lord of All.
Dark King. Dark God.
“Yes,” I breathed.
A floorboard creaked behind me. Ruby Kell emerged from the basement, smiling calmly. I smiled back. The storm was over now.
My cell phone buzzed. The head of Ruby nodded, so I answered. “Monaghan.”
“Thomas, it’s Dr. Reinhart. We’re getting a faulty reading from your P-157. I don’t think those EMFs are spectral in origin.”
“You’re right, Doctor, they’re not. I got a false positive.”
“Is everything all right?”
Ruby’s smile widened, and so did mine. “Five by five, sir. But I’m glad you called. You see, I’ve been thinking: all this time and money we spend hunting ghosts all over the country—I think I’ve got a way to cut down our overhead.”
—
J.B. Toner studied Literature at Thomas More College and holds a black belt in Ohana Kilohana Kenpo-Jujitsu. He has published two novels, Whisper Music and The Shoreless Sea, and numerous shorter works, including “Tell It On the Mountain” in last year’s Theme of Absence. Toner lives in Massachusetts with his lovely wife and two daughters.
Good combination of mystery, crime drama and horror seasoned with dark humor. Nicely done.