Transmission: A Supernatural Thriller (20 page)

Suddenly, something entered into his periphery, and it was only by a quick tug of the wheel that he avoided hitting it.

Pounding on the breaks, Reggie steered the LeSabre to a halt and looked into the rearview.

It'd looked like a person crouching near the road. A hitchhiker, perhaps? It seemed unthinkable to him that someone should be seeking a ride at this hour in so remote a locale, however a glance proved his suspicion correct. The figure, draped in some fabric, shambled towards the car from the shoulder and peered in at him through the passenger side window.

Reggie loosed a sigh of relief. He recognized the face looking back at him. He unlocked the door, allowing the hunched, panting form of Mara Antall inside. “W-what are you doing all the way out here?” he asked, his heart still pounding for the fright.

Appearing winded and tired, Mara leaned against the seat and shut the door. She was wearing a number of shawls, some of them thick and woolen, though her style of dress appeared far too light for such cold weather. She rubbed her wrinkled hands together and offered a slight nod. “Thank you for stopping.”

Reggie, recalling the purpose of his errand, straightened out his seatbelt and cleared his throat. Maneuvering back into his lane, he started once more down the road, a bit more slowly than before. “It's no problem,” he said after a time. Both hands on the wheel, he glanced at the woman from the corner of his eye. “So, what brings you out here at such an hour?”

He wasn't asking simply to make conversation.

The moment she'd sidled up to the car he hadn't thought twice about letting her in despite his usual aversion to hitchhikers. Mara, though eccentric, had never seemed particularly dangerous, however her appearance on the side of the road well after midnight, in Akeley, proved immensely troubling to him. The timing might have been viewed as a mere coincidence, however judging by the night's events Reggie was inclined to believe her arrival in the area to be anything but. He waited patiently for her answer.

Still panting, Mara donned a thin smile. “Oh, it's been a very long day for me. After what you told me, I thought about coming out here on my own, to have a look around. I hoped I might find Agnes. Unfortunately, I wandered too far and lost my way.”

Reggie nodded. “Where's your car at?”

“Oh, I had to abandon it some miles away. I ran out of gas. I've been walking for some hours now and feared I'd spend the night sleeping on the side of the road.”

The story seemed to check out, but that didn't mean Reggie wasn't unnerved by the timing. He wet his lips and decided to share the news with her. “I know where your friend Agnes is at,” he said, his voice withering into something of a whisper.

Mara glanced at him and perked up in surprise. “Really? Did you find her?”

“I did,” he replied. Reggie didn't care to divulge the details. Describing the process by which he and the two students had found the site of Agnes' burial alone would have sounded insane. The news that Agnes had been found dead and buried, however well-preserved, may have been rather upsetting as well.

The news inspired a low chuckle in Mara. It grew until her whole body shook, and peaked in the higher register, sounding like something more befitting a schoolgirl.

Probably she was happy that her friend was found and was entertaining the thought of being reunited with her after a ten year separation. It must've been a joyous laugh. A laugh indicative of great relief.

Why, then, could Reggie only sense insidiousness in it?

He grasped the wheel and gave the LeSabre more gas.

THIRTY

Dylan paced in a circle, mashing his hands together. “We never should have come. I mean, what the fuck is that out there? She doesn't
look
dead. Not in the least. And yet, who could live that way, underground, for ten years? No one. Not unless they were a witch, Kenji. Not unless they were, like, a real-life freakin' horror film. This... this is all bullshit.
 
What if she gets up out of there? We shouldn't have ever done this. I regret the day I chose to help you clean up that audio. I regret the day I drove us out here. I wish I'd never done it...”

Kenji's eyes were locked onto the book. He slammed his fist into the desk, sending up a cloud of dust, but never stopped reading as he muttered, “Shut up.” His gaze worked over the page line by line, letter by letter. The gears were turning. Though it was slow-going, the archaic prose was gradually translated into something he could make sense of. Now and then he stumbled, and would have to reference the dictionary he'd brought. He flipped through the dictionary's pages so hard that they tore in the corners.

It didn't matter.

Nothing else in the world mattered.

All he wanted was to know what secrets the book held. If this strange matter was to be tied up in some way, then it was the book that held the key.

The more he read however, the more he could feel the blood draining from his face. Things were falling into place. The pieces were being arranged in the proper order and he needed only to connect them. As he made sense of the text, reading and sometimes re-reading certain sentences to make certain that their content was fully understood, he felt his grip on sanity loosening. There was simply no way that a rational mind could embrace the heretical, nightmarish ideas proposed in this section of the book; and yet, after all he'd witnessed that night, he found himself with precious little choice but to entertain them.

Finally, when he reached the bottom of the page, he let his arms go limp. Sitting dazedly in the folding chair, he looked up vacantly towards the ceiling. “Oh, my God...”

This got Dylan's attention. He stopped marching around the shack and stationed himself beside the desk. “What now?” he demanded. “What's happened? Did you find something?”

Kenji couldn't answer at once. His mouth was suddenly dry as stone and his tongue didn't seem to want to move. His limbs were sapped of strength and he barely remained upright on the chair, slumping forward so that his upper body rested against the desk. He felt his guts roiling, felt his entire digestive system coiling and rebelling for what he'd read.

He had enough energy left for one thing, however. With a whimper, he reached out and batted the large, silver tome off of the desk. It landed on the floor with a metallic thud.

Then, with no little difficulty, Kenji hoisted himself out of the chair and looked through the window. He could see the field outside, could see the borders of the hole they'd dug. Their shovels were still scattered about.

“What's going on with you?” asked Dylan. He peered nervously through the window. “Is Reggie back with the cops?”

Kenji's breath fogged up the glass as he finally spoke. “Do you remember,” he began, “how I mentioned the 'Dark One' before the séance?”

Dylan nodded. “Yeah, what about it?”

 
Kenji had some trouble in continuing but soldiered on regardless. He still couldn't believe the words coming out of his mouth as he sought to convey what he'd read in the accursed
Carte de Umbra Lungi
.

No, that wasn't quite right.

 
He didn't
want
to believe them.

But, after all that had happened, he knew them to be true.

“I found a ritual in that book. A ritual that a previous owner of the book seems to have referenced with frequency. The Dark One is mentioned constantly... and this ritual is meant for summoning it into the world.” He gulped, but his throat only seized up and a groan wormed its way out from his deepest reaches. He supported himself against the wall. “You know how it works?”

The look of frightened bewilderment on Dylan's face said all. He shook his head.

“In order to bring the Dark One into the world, a willing participant must be b-buried for a period of ten years. Buried underground, as the dead are buried. When the right preparations are made, however, the body never really dies. They are preserved in a state between life and death, wherein they may mingle with the world of the dead... create a strong connection with it. This takes a decade. In that time, the soul of the buried individual encounters all sorts of things as it straddles the border between life and death. It is in this way that the Dark One is called upon. The longer the individual remains underground in the trance state, the more powerful the connection becomes, until one day, after ten years, the person gets dug up.”

 
Dylan took Kenji by the shoulders and shook him. “
And?
” The white rims of his glasses slid down the bridge of his nose.

 
His legs failed him. Kenji toppled over and fell onto his ass. “When you come back from that space between the world of the living and the dead... when you've lived as the dead have lived but are unearthed, you come back to life.” He grit his teeth. “
And you bring it back with you.”

“What... what does that mean, exactly?” asked Dylan, dropping to one knee. “What do you bring back with you?”

 
Slowly, Kenji turned and gazed at the book on the floor. The
Carte de Umbra Lungi
sat in a dusty niche beside the desk. “You bring the Dark One with you. The book says... it says it walks out of the grave with you, hand-in-hand. After ten years of s-stewing in the ground and forming that connection, you literally haul it into the world with you.”

 
The laugh that left Dylan's lips wavered on the borders of tearfulness. “You serious?” he asked. “That's not right, though. There was only one person in that grave, Kenji. We all saw it. Just one body. And, you know, she's dead in there. I mean, of course she is. She
has
to be! Body looks real good for a dead woman, but she's dead, right?” He massaged his temples and whimpered, trying again and again to convince himself that the old book was nothing but fiction. “We all saw her, for God's sake. She wasn't breathing, wasn't moving or anything. I know what I said earlier, but goddammit, I was scared. Agnes is definitely dead, though... she
has
to be dead. I'm... I'm trying to look at this rationally, man. That stuff you're talking about is impossible. N-no one can live that long in a trance.”

Kenji wiped his eyes. They were sore and hot. He felt like crying, despair coursing through him till he was completely overwhelmed. “Are you really so sure? What if... what if it's like those monks we watched on TV? People have managed all sorts of feats while meditating for long stretches of time.” He shook his head. Even in that moment it sounded ludicrous to him. “No... that shit isn't real. And neither is any of this. You're right. Agnes died while trying to complete the ridiculous ritual in this book. Who do you think helped her out? Someone had to have buried her. Someone had to have had a hand in it. Think one of her Hungarian buddies may have helped her do it?”

“Who knows,” replied Dylan. “But what I do know is that someone's probably looking for her. She had that friend, Mara, that put out the missing person's announcement. Probably wanted to find her, to know if she'd actually risen from the grave like they expected. Wouldn't be surprised if she knew more than she was letting on, or if she were actively looking for Agnes as we speak.”

Talking through things in this way helped Kenji calm down somewhat, but there were still a few things he struggled with. “What about the video? And the song? Agnes' voice is what led us here. She fed us the coordinates in the hope of being uncovered. Why?”

 
“Simple. The transmission was a plan-B. If she was buried but her accomplices in the ritual somehow forgot where she was, or died before they could unearth her, then Agnes wanted someone else to do it. The people following her directions would have no idea what they were getting themselves into.” Dylan gulped. “
We
didn't know what the hell we were getting into. We thought we were helping a spirit who'd been wronged. In all actuality, Agnes probably wanted to manipulate us so that she could get her way even if her friends failed to dig her up.”

 
Kenji furrowed his brow. “But how did she transmit her message? How did she imprint upon the media? Is she... is she really a witch, then? Do you think she actually has...
had
powers of some kind?” The more he ruminated on the question, the worse the pounding in his temples became. It appeared Agnes was indeed capable of projecting her voice and image onto media in some supernatural way.

This being the case, was it so impossible to think that she might pull off the summoning ritual; that she might have somehow stayed alive underground for all those years?

 
Dylan was grasping at straws. He motioned to the radio, to the space above their heads. “Look, man. I don't know.
No one
knows exactly how spirits tap into technology and manifest. They project their energy in some way that interferes with radio waves and such. Maybe Agnes had a radio and she used it to tap into the grid. Or the power lines outside this place. All of that stuff is connected in some way, you know? The whole world is connected through technology, through energy. If Agnes tapped into that network of connections from all the way out here, it's entirely possible that her energies were projected elsewhere, to places they didn't belong.”

“Like that song, or the documentary.”

Dylan nodded solemnly.

It was clear that the two of them would never have full answers to these questions. It was simple enough for Kenji that, somehow, Agnes Pasztor had injected herself into bits of media in the hopes of luring some do-gooder to the shack. Once there, the chances that she might be unearthed and that her ritual would be completed rose exponentially. On the day of her burial ten years ago she'd inserted hints into a song and documentary, had invaded them like a virus entering a cell.

Gaining his feet, Kenji walked to the door of the shack and paused. “There's really only one thing for us to find out, then.” His voice was low, his tone bereft of humor. He sounded like a broken man, standing before the closed wooden door and reaching shakily for the knob.

“Where are you going?” asked Dylan, rushing towards him.