Harmony Black (16 page)

TWENTY-SIX

J
essie squinted at the dead bolt keeping Mitchum Kite’s closet securely shut.

“Clearly,” he said, “he didn’t want anything getting out. I can think of one good candidate. How about you?”

“Cover me,” I said.

She pulled her piece and held it steady, standing a few steps back. I took hold of the dead bolt. A frosty chill clung to the brass, too cold to be natural. The bolt slid free with a low, slithering rasp. I took a deep breath and braced myself.

Ancient hinges groaned as the closet door swung open. No monsters lurked inside, just cedar walls and a dangling string attached to a single bare bulb.

I tugged the string. The little closet flooded with light.

Pictures covered the walls. Pictures in crayon, stick figures and stick houses, scribbled in a child’s confused hand. A couple of broken crayons sat on the cold floor, next to a metal bucket. Scrawled words ran down the right-hand wall.

i’m sorry

i’m sorry

i’m sorry

i’m sorry

Jessie whipped out her phone, her eyes as hard as her voice the second Kevin picked up.

“Check your intel,” she snapped. “You’re
positive
Mitchum didn’t have any kids? Yeah. Yeah, because there sure as hell
was
one here. Kevin, I—
listen
. I don’t care,
triple
-check and call me back.”

The psychic miasma that clung to the Kite house was almost overpowering here, bordering on a physical odor that twisted my stomach into knots. Hopelessness. Dread.

“This house,” I said. “It’s been passed down through the family, right?”

“That’s what April says. Started with . . . Edwin, Edwin Kite, the paper mill’s founder, back in the 1800s. Why?”

“So Mitchum inherited it when Jeremiah died. And he would have grown up in this house.”

“That’s right,” Jessie said.

I looked to her, to the portrait on the wall, to the closet and back again.

“I think this might have been
Mitchum’s
closet.”

“Jesus,” Jessie said. “Okay, let’s . . . let’s keep searching.”

The last door we checked, on the first floor, offered another mystery. More extra hardware on the frame, but instead of a dead bolt, a pair of heavy-duty padlocks sealed it shut.

“And this must be the cellar door. Want me to get the bolt cutters from the SUV?” Jessie asked.

I stood in front of the door and held out my open hand, waving it slowly forward and back. The air, right in that spot, was at least ten degrees colder than the rest of the house.

“Hold off,” I said, slowly backing away. “Let’s check the rest of the house first. Whatever’s on the other side, it isn’t going anywhere.”

A couple of rooms on the second floor might have been bedrooms once, but they’d been stripped of furniture. Nothing remained but bare floorboards and lace curtains. And closets.

Every closet in the house had a dead bolt.

We checked those, too, but they were just as barren as the bedrooms. Not even a speck of dust on the sanded cedar boards.

Mitchum had sent a demon to murder us—twice—but the more we saw, the more I wished we’d been able to take him alive. I couldn’t get a grasp on this place, or the kind of man who would live here. Who was Mitchum Kite, really?

And what had been
done
to him?

He kept his private office at the end of the hall. It was the only room in the entire house that felt lived-in, and that wasn’t saying much. He had a desk, a frayed olive oval rug, a stiff-backed wooden chair, and a cheap coffeemaker next to a stack of disposable Styrofoam cups. No pictures sat on his desk, no personal mementos, just the closed shell of a laptop computer.

“Now we’re talking,” Jessie said, sitting down in his chair and opening up the laptop. I stood at her shoulder, waiting as it chittered and hummed to life.

“Great,” Jessie sighed. “Password protected. Okay, let’s bring this back to the motel and see if Kevin can crack it.”

I rubbed my thumb against my chin, thinking.

“Try ‘Jeremiah.’”

Jessie rattled off the password. A red
X
popped up.
Username or password is incorrect.

“How about ‘father’?”

She tried again. Another red
X
.

Jessie turned in the chair, looking back over her shoulder at me. “Any other ideas?”

“Just one,” I said. “‘Closet.’”

Welcome
, read the log-in screen.

We peered into the digital version of Mitchum Kite’s house. No media, no games, hardly any utilities, his hard drive stripped down to its absolute bare essentials.

“E-mail,” I said, leaning in over Jessie’s shoulder and pointing to one of the only icons on the desktop. “Let’s see who he’s been talking to.”

As it turned out, quite a few people. Mitchum did his mayoral business on this account, and his box was flooded with the day-to-day minutiae of running a small town. Meetings, bulletins and memos, interoffice requests, hundreds of bits and pieces, and none of it unusual.

One piece of mail stood out. Jessie spotted it at the same time and double-clicked to bring it up on the screen. It was part of a series of exchanges between Mitchum and someone calling himself CTide06. CTide’s first message was an eye-opener.

You’ve done enough. Your entire adult life, you’ve stood sentinel for the family, living in that damned house. Keeping that THING from escaping. I won’t let you pay Nyx’s price. It would be monstrous, after you’ve already lost so much.

Mitchum’s response came fast on the first e-mail’s heels:

That’s the point. I don’t have a life. He took it from me. You have a family, people who love you. I’ll pay so you don’t have to.

“What does she charge for a hunt, anyway?” Jessie mused. “I mean, do demons need cash?”

“I’m focused a little more on the ‘thing’ part, in all caps.” My thoughts drifted to that downstairs doorway. The one with the double padlocks.

We’re all in this together, Mitchum. We all agreed. The evil ends with us. We ALL have to pay our fair share, not just you. It’s worth it, if it stops that bastard once and for all.

Mitchum’s next e-mail was only six words long, and it chilled me to the bone.

I am quite ready to die.

CTide06 hadn’t responded to that yet. Mitchum had sent it just a few hours ago, before leaving to meet us at the paper mill.

“Got his wish,” Jessie said. She looked back at me. “You know we’ve searched every part of this house except for one door, right?”

My shoulders slumped. “Let’s get the bolt cutters.”

Just as Jessie was about to close the laptop lid, though, the screen blinked. New incoming mail, from CTide06.

It took her. Just found her crib empty. She’s going to be the next Returned. THIS HAS TO STOP.

“We’ll take this with us,” Jessie said, powering down the laptop. “Kevin might be able to trace the e-mails, find out where they’re sent from. Of course, if we get a call in an hour from Sheriff Barry, telling us about another abduction report, we’ll know exactly who CTide is.”

I shook my head. “We won’t. ‘The next Returned’? It’s the ’80s all over again. One child from the Kite family goes missing, and they don’t want anyone knowing about it. They must know the Bogeyman’s going to bring their kid right back.”

“If that’s so,” Jessie said as she stood up, tucking the laptop under one arm, “why aren’t they
happy
about it?”

We went out to the SUV and traded the laptop for the bolt cutters. It felt good, getting a few breaths of fresh air, leaving the oppressive gloom of the Kite house and standing under a canopy of stars.

The respite ended all too soon. We went back inside to face the final door.

Jessie braced one boot against the door frame, leveraging herself as she squeezed the cutters around the thick padlock arm. She grunted, straining, while the metal buckled and finally surrendered with a hollow
crack
. Thirty seconds later she’d gotten through the second one. She plucked the useless locks from their hinges, one after the other, and tossed them to the floor.

“Of course,” she said. The door swung open, revealing a rickety wooden stairway descending into darkness. “Of
course
it’s the basement.”

Her penlight guided us down, catching motes of dust in the humid, dank air. Whatever horrors I was expecting, an empty cellar wasn’t it. Mostly unfinished, the walls were crude stone coated in eggshell-white paint. Bare gray foundation concrete under our feet—no windows, no lights, no electrical outlets. We stood in a box. A cold and lonely box.

A smell hung in the air, mildew and something else. A faint, odd spice, a little like sandalwood incense, almost too subtle to notice.

Jessie swung her light in slow circles around the room. It settled on the one piece of furniture: an old wooden shelving unit, about six feet high and almost as wide, laden with a clutter of junk. Ancient, crusted paint cans, rusty tools, a stack of newspapers so old they were petrified, nothing worth hanging on to.

“How long do you think it’s been since anyone’s been down here?” Jessie asked me.

“Years,” my voice answered back.

But I hadn’t said a word.

I slowly looked to my left. Another me stood there, grinning, with empty eye sockets and obsidian teeth.

Earth, air, water,
I thought, beckoning my power, then I froze.
What was next? Four elements. Wasn’t there? Maybe it was just three.
The smell of incense welled up, rising over the mildew, overpowering me when I tried to breathe.

“You’ll never get this right,” I heard my mother say. Sunlight flooded the cellar.

No, not the cellar. Not anymore.

We were in her kitchen, in the old house in Talbot Cove, and I was six years old. I stood on a stepstool beside her, craning my neck to see over the counter as she chopped herbs for a magical poultice.

“Honey.” She crouched down and held my shoulder. “It’s not your fault. Sometimes the gift skips a generation, or it only goes to a single child. Your blood just isn’t strong enough.”

“But,” I stammered, tongue slipping over a missing baby tooth, “I
am
a witch. It’s what I do, it’s . . . it’s the only thing I’m good at. It’s why people like me.”

My mother smiled sadly and shook her head.

“Oh, sweetie, no. You’re worthless. Why do you think we had a second child? Because we knew you weren’t going to amount to anything.”

“You’re not even my kid,” my father said, alive and smiling as he strolled into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator, leaned in, and pulled out a bottle of beer. “You know that, right?”

My mother squeezed my shoulder in a parody of affection. Her adult fingers clamped down hard enough to make my eyes water.

“It’s true. You were the product of, well, let’s call it a one-night stand.”

“I wasn’t mad,” my father said. “I just wanted a
real
daughter. Figured we should tell you the truth because, let’s face it, kid: you’re not exactly bright, are you? Not like you’d figure it out on your own.”

My mother clucked her tongue and let go of me, reaching for the kitchen counter.

“Now, Harry, be nice. Oh, well. I suppose we should make the most of what we have. One real, healthy daughter.” She picked up her butcher’s knife, turning toward me with a hungry smile. “So I suppose we don’t need this one anymore.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

I
ran. I ran as fast as my stubby legs could take me, out of the kitchen and down the hall. I heard my parents laughing behind my back.

The sunlight vanished. Night, now, and the hall went on for a thousand miles with darkness ahead of me and darkness behind. I ran past a hundred identical night-lights as the thick shag carpet grabbed at my bare feet and slowed me down.

The door to my sister’s room was up on the left. It hung open a crack, just a crack. I peered inside.

Something squatted in Angie’s crib. Something black and leathery and toadlike, something that rasped and wheezed as it strained to breathe.

“You hated me,” came the creature’s wet, sickly voice.

“No,” I said, backing away. “That’s not true.”

“You
hated
me. You knew your parents didn’t love you. You knew they wanted a better daughter, so they had me. To replace you.”

“I was six years old!” I screamed.

“It should have been you. The Bogeyman should have taken you instead of me. And you know it. You’ve always known it.”

My father bellowed, “It should have been
you
!”

I turned to see him coming, running in slow motion down the endless hallway. His throat torn open, just like the night he died. His eyes were pits of black rage.

In his muscular hands, he gripped a fire ax.

“It should have been you that died, not her. Not our
real
daughter!”

It should have been me,
I thought.

Just like I had thought those words a thousand times before.

Tears stung my eyes as I turned and ran. All I could do was run, sprinting down the endless hall just ahead of my father’s ax blade.

Why am I running?
I thought.
I deserve this. I’ve had this coming for thirty years.

A woman’s distant scream jarred my thoughts. Not my mother, no, someone familiar. I struggled to remember, but my brain was as fogged as the hallway air, slowing time to the pace of a slow-dripping tap.

Someone needs help.

My senses perked. I was stronger, faster,
older
. Adrenaline kicked my nerves into motion. Someone out there was in pain and needed a rescue. That took priority over anything else.

Door up on the right. My old bedroom. Closed tight. I didn’t hesitate, just threw my shoulder into it and stumbled through as it burst open.

A rippling curtain of water sheared my bedroom in half, with a vague, gauzy void on the other side. I heard my dead father’s howls of rage, coming closer by the second. If I laid eyes on him, I’d be six again and helpless. I knew this in my heart. It was a brief, blinding flash—a moment of perfect clarity as I stood on the edge of my mind prison.

Images drifted by on the far side of the water curtain. Endless primeval forests. A bloodied hacksaw, bloodied limbs. A shabby bed in a trailer home, arms and legs tangled together and the bed rocking with brutal, loveless thrusts. None of it frightened me. This wasn’t my hell, it was—

Jessie
. This thing, whatever infested the Kites’ basement, it latched onto our minds and twisted our nightmares. Feeding on us while we suffered. Eating our hearts.

“But there’s nothing scary about somebody
else’s
nightmare,” I said out loud. “Jessie!”

I felt her. She heard me. Her mind turned my way.

I took a step back as my father’s footsteps raced up the hall, only a few feet from the bedroom door.

“I’m coming in!” I shouted. “Reach for me!”

I ran for the edge of the nightmare, and jumped.

I
floated, adrift.

Inky, fluid space surrounded me, a bubble displaced in time. A blank margin in the pages of the universe.

Jessie floated toward me. Our legs curled in zero gravity, hair flowing free. We reached for each other at the exact same moment. One chance to connect.

We grabbed each other’s wrists. I pulled her close.

“If you’ll fight my demons, I’ll fight yours,” I whispered. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she whispered back. Her blue eyes flashed.

I pulled with all my might and then let go, sending us sailing in opposite directions, straight toward each other’s dooms.

I
landed in a crouch, wet peat under my fingers and toes. The scent of cedar pines filled the air, that and the song of night birds.

I rose up, standing in a forest clearing. I smelled the creature before I saw it. Its miasma washed over me, the stench of stale sweat and musty sheets and morning-after regret. Then came the other smells, the ones I’d learned by heart from visiting a hundred crime scenes: rotting flesh and the coppery tang of human blood.

The shambling figure could have been an ancient Viking, with his shaggy mane and braided gray beard, naked save for the black furry pelt that he wore as a cloak. His skin was mottled, though, rotting, and the thorny nightmare dangling between his legs didn’t belong to any
human
male.

He saw me and paused. He studied me with eyes that glowed turquoise, bright as bonfires.

“What?” I asked. “Not who you were expecting?”

His voice sounded like chicken bones in a garbage disposal, and a thick rivulet of drool ran from the corner of his mouth as he replied.

“I am the King of Wolves,” he rasped. “You will feed me.”

A fleeting memory rose up in the back of my mind. What Barry told me on the night my father died.

This badge means it’s my job to find bad people, and make them go away so they can’t hurt anybody else. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

I reached into my breast pocket, took out my badge, and held it high. It caught the moonlight and gleamed like liquid mercury.

“You’re nothing but a child’s nightmare,” I told him. “Just another monster. Do you know who I am?”

“Meat for my table,” he grunted, shambling toward me. “Warm, screaming meat.”

The night wind kissed my skin. The forest bed washed my bare feet in fertile loam, lending its strength. My badge grew hot in my hand. A purifying heat.

“Wrong,” I said.

Earth, air, water, fire, be my weapons, be my strength.

“I’m the woman who makes the monsters go away.”

The badge erupted with blinding light, turning midnight into high noon. As the monster staggered back, throwing up an arm to shield his eyes, I slowly twirled my other hand. I guided the flow of power, hastened it, stirring the light into white-hot streamers that floated in circles around the forest clearing. Treetops ignited in the streamers’ wake, exploding with peals of thunder, and showered the world in orange-and-gold sparks.

The streamers of light circled all around us, faster and faster, leaving an inferno in their wake. Then I raised my hand and pointed at the King of Wolves. The lights blazed toward him like a school of piranhas on a bleeding calf.

They all converged on him at once, and the entire world erupted in flames.

I wasn’t afraid. The fire was my friend.