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He was confused as to what to say next, so he spat it out. “Why am I the one to stop them? What the hell are you talking about? What does this have anything to do with James? Or Andy? This is madness, lady. It’s nonsense. You expect me to believe everything you’ve just told me? I mean, really?”

“I told you Priest Hutchinson could speak to the living now that he’s dead,” Pricilla continued. “And he spoke to your brother. This man used your brother for his ends. The dead harbor many secrets, and I explained they can’t be turned into flesh again, but they can be other things. They can mimic life and come close to the real thing, but they’ll never be pure flesh and blood. Your late brother was a popular magician, and he used the spirits to improve his act. At first they served him well without expectation of payment. And like Priest Hutchinson, they began to request special things of him.
 

“The ghosts inhabited your brother’s props through the use of contagious magic. This means that an object is taken over by a spirit and is magically charged, like how a rabbit’s foot draws luck. Your brother learned from the dead how to draw their spirits into an object. It’s how they escaped their realm. The spirits of the dead fed his magic, but when they turned against him and stole that girl during his act and never gave her back many years ago, James lashed out against them. He shut them out and locked himself up in that house.

“Years later, the dead must’ve convinced him to try his act again, or maybe he couldn’t stand them anymore. And you know what happened from there. His final show, over fifty were dead and missing. James did his best to stop them, but there is no rationalizing with the dead. The horrible event drove him to burn the objects and drive the spirits back to the world of the dead, but he didn’t destroy every object, Mr. Ryerson.”

Ned was on the dividing line of believing her or considering her senile. The way she spoke, the drive behind her words, how could it be a fabrication? Most psychics spoke of a person’s fortune, love and life expectancy, not the secrets of the dead. And during most psychic readings, the participant wasn’t terrified and neither was the psychic.

Pricilla stood. He hadn’t realized before that she was using a cane. She picked up the wine bottle from the table and drank from it with an audible chug, the liquid inside sloshing at the palsied shake of her wrists.
 

“I bought this bottle special. Redoma wine, it’s made in Portugal. It’s lavish, for me. I usually drink the cheap Zinfandels or an occasional Malbec.” She raised the glass with a tearful glance. “My last drink, friend, so heed what your brother tells you. Correct his mistakes.”

“What?” He rose from his chair with a start, wanting to shake some sense into her. “Pricilla, what’s happening? How can I correct my brother’s mistakes? What the hell are you saying?”

Pricilla lost hold of the bottle, and then she, too, crashed to the floor. He rushed to her side to help her up, but when he touched her, her muscles grew rigid. She threw aside the cane and launched to her feet.
 

Then the miraculous turned into a menacing spectacle. He gasped at the blood gushing from her eyes and mouth, seething through the pores of her skin like melted wax.
 

“
I don’t have long, brother
,” she said in a low voice not her own, but instead a man’s. “
It’s James. I swear to you it’s me! The spirits will try and stop me eventually. This body won’t last long against their energies. I’ve let a group of spirits escape. I destroyed the items they inhabited, but there’s a film projector at the house. Andy’s been using it to watch movies. The spirits are using tricks of light and magic to make the images on the film come alive. People are being killed because of them
.”

Ned recalled Andy was watching horror movies for a job given by his professor at Iowa State. He couldn’t question what was truth or lie, not when the woman’s face was slick with running blood. The woman’s eyes drowned in crimson, and the blood spattered the floor.
 

“My God, w-w-what do I do?”

The woman’s words were obstructed by the blood she coughed up. “
Destroy the projector. Burn it—burn the entire house! It’s charged with the spirits of the dead. They’ve grown stronger after the deaths of those at the club. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but it’s my fault. Burn the projector. Burn everything. Do it, brother. You have to destroy the film projector!
”

Ned staggered back shaking his head. He eventually struck the wall.
 

“
I’ve used this woman’s body to contact you, and now it’ll die. Don’t let her death be in vain!”

Upon those words, both eyes ejected from Pricilla’s sockets, breaking when they hit the floor. Her tongue slithered from the mouth and slapped the floor a wet piece of meat. Teeth slithered from their gums, abandoning their posts. Hair bled from the follicles and turned into a flesh-slide, running down the scalp. The woman’s skull cracked open down the middle with a brittle breaking, the glisten of her brains visible under the room’s lights. He fled in terror unable to watch a moment longer, and as he crossed through the front door, Pricilla’s body disintegrated.
 

3

Sheriff O’Malley stood with the heads of forensic research, Dr. Samuel Duncan and Dr. Michelle Menzer, in the lab on the fourth floor at the Green County Police Forensics Department. The corpse of Jorg—no last name—was displayed naked on the metal table beneath a surgical dome light. Everyone was dressed in blue scrubs and wore paper face masks. The sheriff grew nervous at the way Duncan and Menzer treated the body, as if it were a fallen meteor, an alien. The meeting had been arranged special in the wake of the multiple murders in Anderson Mills.

“It’s not human,” Dr. Duncan finally said after ten minutes of silently prodding the remains with a scalpel and forceps. His bushy white eyebrows budged up and down as he stared down at the anatomical anomaly. “There are no genitals, and no signs the genitals were ever removed. This man was born neuter. The body is mostly comprised of fat and muscle, hardly any bone.”
 

Dr. Menzer added her take of the report. “If you notice the opened sternum, the bones are ill-formed cartilage. The bones are practically transparent, without marrow. The blood doesn’t run from veins, and there is no evidence of a circulatory, lymphatic, or a digestive system. He has a ninety-five percent smaller brain than the average human. He has no lungs. Both Dr. Duncan and I have made incisions along the arms and legs to inspect these bones, and they are the same cartilage as the sternum. This isn’t a human body. Not born naturally, at least.”

“What the hell is it then?” the sheriff demanded. “The man killed nearly a dozen people today. He has to be something, and saying he’s not a human being isn’t getting me anywhere. You’re the experts. Don’t you have anything else to share? Come up with something credible. You’re scientists. Be pragmatic.”

Dr. Menzer looked him over with her almond-colored eyes. “I apologize for the people that have died, but this isn’t a human being. You said so yourself, he has no fingerprints. He carried no identification. No one knows who he really is, and there’s no conclusive way to prove how he exists. According to science, he can’t be alive.”

“He wielded a clever at me. Trust me, he was very much alive. He’s real enough to commit these crimes. Damn it, this isn’t what we need. This is inconclusive bullshit.”

Police Chief of Green County, Ben Graham, offered his encouragement. “We’re stumped, okay? It’s not anyone’s fault. Dr. Menzer is right, this will take further research. Frankly, being in the room with this thing puts me off my cookies. It looks like a human being, but the internal workings say it isn’t so. Hell, the bastard has no bones or a circulatory system. What can anyone say about it now? We might have to call the government on this, FBI maybe. They’ll have better equipment.”

The sheriff rubbed his chin. “Yeah, and what if they just take this body away and file it somewhere like Area 51 and never get back to us? What do I tell the families of the folks who died? What crap explanation do I feed them?”

The episode at Silver Lake with Jill Hammock drove deeper his concerns. Kevin Brenner’s body was missing, and the blood on the road suggested foul play. Detectives Kyle Redding and Frank Garrison were compiling evidence at the scene, but Jill said that six people had cannibalized her boyfriend. There were still people out there murdering people, and this strange corpse wasn’t a satisfactory conclusion to the investigation. It was only a beginning. It was obvious the slab on the table murdered the people today, but what else was out there in Anderson Mills? And where did it come from?

Chief Graham agreed with the sheriff’s concern. “I’ve never had this happen to me. No one has. It doesn’t make sense. Okay, nobody has to know what this man is or isn’t. He’s a murderer, bottom line. Until we find out the orders from the higher up assholes, this is what we stick with, okay?”

“What is the purpose of this man existing?” the sheriff asked, not commenting on the advice. “This man couldn’t live very long. He’s not intact. He couldn’t eat.”

Dr. Menzer pointed at his trachea. “He does have an esophagus and stomach but no intestines. The stomach is swollen to three times its size. It’s about to burst.”

“That’s because he was eating his victims,” the sheriff said. “He was built to murder and eat people. God, even that sounds crazy.”

“Nothing’s crazy at this point,” Dr. Duncan assured him. “But I know once the FBI gets here, you can say goodbye to this body. We’ll never see it again. You’re right, Sheriff.”

The sheriff understood the body was now government property. He eyed the opened skull. It was a shell of fat and tissue. He was left with questions, but he couldn’t linger in Green County long. Deputy Stafford was pulling a double on night patrol with many other of his officers. They were searching for the six involved with trespassing on the Hamdens’ property and kidnapping—and potentially murdering—Kevin Brenner, and he almost forgot the murder of funeral caretaker Cal Unger.
 

“You call me when something turns up,” the sheriff confided in Chief Graham, “if anything does turn up. I think we’ll be left in suspense on this one. And I hate suspense.”

He left the lab for the elevator. It would take him twenty minutes to drive back to Anderson Mills. When he reached his patrol car in the parking lot, he received a call on dispatch. “O’Malley here.”

“It’s Stafford,” the voice answered with a sharp crackle. “I’m running out on a call from Walter Smalls at his gas pump. He says there’s an intruder. I also have something else to tell you.”

“Yeah,” he said, aggravated by another wave of bad news given by his deputy.
 

“Those graves that were disturbed at Anderson Mills Cemetery, Kyle Redding called and told me the graves were empty.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Those weren’t even dug up, how can that be? Jesus, I better get down there. I’ll meet you at Walter’s shop as fast as I can get there.”

He piled into his car and started the engine. He sped onto the highway, the dread of what could be waiting at the gas pump haunting him all the way back to Anderson Mills.
 

Chapter Nine

1

Deputy Stafford parked his patrol car in the street and entered the quiet scene. He removed his flashlight and combed the gas pumps for signs of Walter Smalls’ trespasser. His boots crunched over leaves and kicked at gravel, the noise doubly loud since there was no sign of life or activity.
 

“Are you there, Walter?”

He stepped closer to the gas pumps and studied the closed mechanic’s garage. The lights were on inside, but Walter wasn’t present. The deputy was half-way to the building when glass fragments glittered up at him on the pavement. The windows of the garage were shattered. Trails of blood streamed down the front of the garage door.
 

He muttered under his breath, “Christ, what happened?”

The deputy slipped on a plastic glove and lifted up the garage door. He then withdrew his .28 Renner pistol and was ready for anything. The image of the butcher Sheriff O’Malley shot down across the street at Wayne Brooks’ deli still had him on edge.
 

The trails of glass and slashes of blood continued between the car lifts. Walter’s office door was wide open with no one inside. A fork of crimson trickled forth from the shadow at the end of the room toward a drain. “What the hell?”

He pointed the gun at a pair of feet dangling from behind a car lift occupied by a ’79 Chevy—the same one that had been up there un-repaired for five years. He aimed the flashlight at the floor, but before the shadows cleared, a moving form shifted from behind a body.
 

“Hold it!”

The flashlight missed the figure, and it leapt out from behind the Chevy. The deputy had no time to react before something knocked the gun from his hand.
 

The object swung down again, too fast to be seen, and stripped the flashlight from his other hand. He stumbled against the wall, both wrists blazing in raw agony. The wrist bones jutted up from the skin, dislocated and broken on each hand. He couldn’t bend his fingers or move them at all.
 

Unable to fight back, he cowered into the office and yanked the door closed with his limp hands. He locked the door by pressing a round button on the brass knob. He let out a series of startled breaths as the pain seized him. The room closed in on him, spinning like a carousel from hell. The office was big enough for him to take two steps back before he hit the wall. The drapes were closed; he couldn’t see the perpetrator. He was unarmed and vulnerable. He tried to use the phone, but his fingers couldn’t manage the task, and before he could try again, the window shattered. Glass flew in all directions, and clear shrapnel struck him.