Summoning the Night (17 page)

We shifted positions. I tried to open the door myself, but my hand wouldn't grasp the handle. What a clever spell; I wished I knew how to do it. In order for us to get inside, I'd have to short it out. I retrieved a short stick of red ochre chalk from my jacket and drew a sloppy circle around the handle, then marked it with three sigils. I would've preferred to use a better spell, one that required kindled Heka, but we were sans electricity, so I had to use simpler magick. I mumbled a dissolving spell and spat on the sigils. The red ochre markings crackled with a brief flash of light, then popped and died. The old pink haze disintegrated.

I stood and started again to open the door, but Lon's arm hooked around my waist and pulled me backward. “Let him do it.”

Hajo balked. “You paid me to dowse, not lay a red carpet down for you.”

“Open it.” Lon wasn't asking.

Hajo muttered to himself but complied as Bob scooted closer to cower behind me. I think he was sniffing my hair—probably still experiencing lingering effects from Hajo's vassal suggestion—but I was too anxious about finding dead bodies to care.

The door creaked open and a foul, musty odor wafted out. We turned our heads away and moved back, waiting several moments for the stench to dissipate. This couldn't be good.

The golden arc from Lon's flashlight drifted over a square, windowless room. A bulky piece of broken conveyor machinery with several cranks and ceiling exhausts jutted out from the left, taking up a third of the area. Near the far wall, sketched onto the floor, I could just make out a row of mandalas: holy squared circles. Large ones. They are most commonly found in Buddhist and Hindu spiritual art, filled with delicate patterns and used for meditation and trance induction to focus energy. The outer circles of these were much simpler in design. But it was the size that caught my attention: three or four feet across. Inside the outer rings, a strangely patterned square was drawn, then another smaller circle inside the square. Four simple sigils rimmed the outer boundary. None of it was chalked. The designs were etched into the concrete. Serious stuff.

“I need to look at the symbols,” I said.

We moved as a unit and stepped inside the room.

“Stay here and guard the door,” Lon instructed Bob.

“In the dark?”

Lon dug a silver Zippo out of this pocket, snapped open the cover, and flicked it on. “Don't lose this—it's vintage. Speak up if you hear anything coming.”

“Oh, God,” Bob mumbled breathlessly, accepting the lighter with fearful reluctance. The blue-and-yellow flame bounced up and down in time with the Earthbound's shaking hand.

“The spell on the door was old,” I assured Bob, putting a steady hand on his elbow. “No one's been here for years.”

Lon picked up a rusted piece of piping off the floor, shook off cobwebs, and gave it to Bob. “Just in case.”

Bob whimpered.

We left him at his post and walked toward the mandalas. My stomach twisted as I counted them. Seven. Probably not a coincidence. And when I stepped closer and got a good look at the first one, I mentally changed that “probably” to a “definitely not.”

They weren't charged—no Heka glowed within the lines—but, like the pink spell on the door, there was something achingly familiar about the patterns around the inner square of the mandalas. I knew it well. Change the square to a triangle and you had practically the same markings that were painted beneath each of the tables in Tambuku.

“Binding magick,” I whispered to Lon.

The magical artwork surrounding the mandalas was unique. Each of the four sigils was drawn with clean lines, and all were scored with letters in a sophisticated, evolved alphabet that wasn't earthly.

I squatted and looked closer. “Something Æthyric, maybe.”

“I've never seen anything like it,” Lon mumbled.

No sign of old blood, Heka, bones, or anything else around them. I took out my phone and snapped a quick photo of each one, trying not to think about terrified kids being held here. If there
were
such things as ghosts, as Jupe stubbornly believed, I couldn't imagine anything worse than their being trapped in a place like this for eternity.

Lon shone the light around the room after I'd finished taking pictures. “I don't see any remains.”

“That's because the thread's not connected. Those are clean.” Hajo pointed to the far side of the conveyor machinery, away from the mandalas. “The thread ends over there.”

My heart sped up as we treaded across the room. Hidden from view between the wall and a broken machine, an oblong oval stretched across the cement floor—not carved like the mandalas, but drawn with a dark pigment.

Outside the oval was more of that strange alphabet from the mandalas.

And inside the oval was a single skeleton.

An
adult
skeleton. Not a child.

The arm and leg bones lay in a pattern that suggested the body had been splayed out. The skull was still connected. In the middle—where the torso should have been—a pile of splintered bones radiated in a rough circle, as if a bomb had gone off inside the body. A dark spatter stained the concrete beneath, stopping abruptly inside the edge of the oval. No trace of any clothing whatsoever.

A gruesome sight. But what was written on the cement above the skull sent an army of chills down my spine:

JESSE BISHOP

Shock swept through me. I stood frozen for several moments, then pushed it away and focused on the details. The writing was definitely inscribed by the same hand who'd carved the mandalas, and, like the strange alphabet on those, the letters here were evenly spaced.

Like a child practicing block letters. That shook something loose in my brain. An image from an old newspaper clipping in the bottom of Dare's banker box. I was no handwriting expert, but even I could see that Bishop's name was written in the same manner as the names of the seven kids that were carved into the trees at Sandpiper Park.

Oh, Christ . . .

Bishop wasn't the Snatcher.

Bishop was
killed by the Snatcher.
The key on the necklace had provided Hajo with a direct thread to its owner's remains—not the children.

A dry croak stuck in my throat as I tried to say this out loud, but Lon immediately hushed me. “Take a picture,” he commanded softly.

With shaking hands, I pressed the screen on my phone to enable the camera function. It was all I could do to focus long enough to get a partially blurry shot, so I took a second one, but it didn't turn out much better. One thing was obvious: though the seven mandalas were well planned and precisely executed, the oval holding Bishop's bones was an afterthought. It was set off in the corner, the angle slightly askew. Drawn quick and rough. In a moment of anger?

“So, this is the guy you're looking for, yeah?” Hajo said. “Looks like he was involved in some heavy occult shit. Remind me not to cross a magician.”

“Damn straight,” Lon muttered.

Hajo squatted down near the circle and pointed. “What's that? There's something behind the jaw. Looks like he swallowed it.”

Lon shifted the flashlight's beam to illuminate the skull, while Hajo leaned over the skeleton to reach for it. When his fingers almost made it, he leaned in farther, taking a step inside the oval, and a tinge of dull red light, barely perceptible, washed over his shoe.

“No!” I shouted. But it was too late.

The red light sizzled around the oval and brightened. Another spell. It wasn't a deterrent this time. Not a warning, either . . .

A deafening blast cracked the concrete beneath the
skeleton and the whole room shook. An unseen force rushed at us, knocking Hajo against the wall and slamming Lon into the conveyor machine. My back hit the concrete floor. Pain ripped through my lungs. Lon's flashlight flew from his hand and ricocheted off the wall. It blinked a couple of times as it spun on the floor and rolled somewhere near me.

“Cady!” Lon bellowed in the darkness.

Before I had time to answer, “What happened?” echoed in the distance and I saw Lon's golden Zippo flame flickering, floating through the air like a yellow fairy as Bob ran toward us.

I pushed myself up, scanning the dark for the flashlight. It was pointed at the wall. I touched the handle with my fingertips, accidently pushing it away as a strange scuttling sound vibrated through the air, somewhere off in the corner.

Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch.

“Be quiet!” I yelled. Bob's running feet stopped abruptly.

My hand stilled as I strained to listen to the bizarre scratching sound. It multiplied and moved, and my heart nearly stopped.

Scritch, scritch, scritch, scritch.

What was that? Claws? Something small was clicking on the concrete, moving closer.

Bob shrieked and the Zippo flew through the air, the flame extinguished before the lighter clinked on the floor. Sounds of a struggle broke through the darkness, then Bob shouted, “Get it off me!”

My fingers gripped the handle of the flashlight. I swung it madly, bouncing the cone of light around the room. Lon, Hajo, Bob, surrounded by shiny things. Moving things. Birds?

I shone the light on the skeleton. The tripped spell that knocked us off our feet had furrowed the concrete floor and part of the wall and left a gaping inch-wide crevice. It had also cracked the skull—cleaved it right in two, from crown to jaw. And in the center of the split skull, like a sprout emerging from soil, the moving things slithered out and made a thumping noise as they hit the floor.

Not birds.

Bugs.

Enormous goddamn cockroaches.

Ribbed, shiny, flat bodies. Spiny legs that clicked on the cement like claws. Twitching antennae as long as my fingers. Beady eyes that glowed turquoise under the flashlight's beam.
Eyes?
I'd never seen a roach's eyes. I'd never seen roaches this
big. They looked like terrifying prehistoric bugs from another planet.

Bugs from the Æthyr.

One extended a pair of shiny wings the color of burnt sugar. Then it made a hissing noise, buzzed its wings, and took off several feet into the air . . . and landed on Hajo's leg. He kicked it away. It made a queasy crackling sound when it landed, then a scraping noise as it skidded on its side across the floor.

Okay, make that
flying
bugs from the Æthyr.

Screams cut through the room. Mine. Hajo's. Maybe Lon's. I'd never heard him scream, but who could tell. I nearly wet my pants in a moment of hyperventilating revulsion.

“Help!” Bob fell to the floor, reaching for his leg. Nearby, a trail of light brown goo dripped from the conveyor machine. A squirming bug carcass lay upside-down at its base, its spiny legs twitching violently. “It bit me!”

I scurried on hands and knees to help him while Hajo defended himself against the oncoming horde, kicking away the bugs as they emerged from the skull.

“It bit me,” Bob repeated in near hysteria. “It burns—” He hiked up his pant leg. Blood streamed from a jagged mark on his ankle. But that wasn't the problem. The “bite” was swelling, and way too fast. A series of black rings already ridged the flesh around Bob's ankle and advanced one by one up his leg.

“What the hell?” Hajo bellowed. “What are these things?”

Another bug skittered up behind Lon, its spiny black legs clicking on the cement. I called out a warning. Lon swiveled in time to raise his foot and stomp. The awful sound of cracking exoskeleton filled my ears, followed by a splatter of brown bug guts across my jeans.

A gurgled cry of fear bubbled up from Bob. The black lines ringing his leg had disappeared past his pushed-up pant leg. He gripped his stomach. I pried his hands away and wrenched up his Hawaiian shirt. The rings had already made it up there, too.

The bugs were venomous.

“Can't . . . breathe,” Bob choked. “My heart—”

“A little help over here!” Hajo shouted frantically. He'd found another piece of pipe and was swatting at the bugs with savage swings. Squishy, crackling roach deaths echoed off the walls, but the bugs didn't stop coming. They were still pouring from the cracked skull like brown lava.

I blocked out the scuttling and the hissing and the horrifying flitting of wings to concentrate on a solution. Hajo had definitely tripped a spell when he entered the oval around the skeleton—some kind of magical ward, something big and nasty that I'd never seen before. But if it was just a ward, then these bugs weren't real. They were thought-forms; illusions designed to instill fear. That seemed more reasonable than a spell that opened up a hole in the cosmos into a nest of Æthyric cockroaches.

“It's just magick,” I said. “Not real. The pain is psychosomatic. Listen to me, Bob. It's not real.”

Lon bent over Bob and ripped his shirt open. The black rings were inching up Bob's throat. His face was dark red. He couldn't breathe.