Book of Shadows

CHAPTER Forty-eight

Garrett drove like the wind on the country road under a darkening sky, wishing like hell he had Land with him. One hand on the wheel, he speed-dialed Schroeder and asked for Palmer or Morelli. Neither was in. Garrett left an urgent message.
Next he called Dispatch to connect him to the local police in Malden. “Detective Garrett, BPD. I have a possible hostage situation at the old Greenbrier Nursery. Suspect John McKenna, resident of Lincoln, whereabouts unknown. Suspect wanted for murder,” he lied. “Request immediate assistance.” He disconnected before he had to answer questions.
Just past the town of Malden, acres of dense forest had been cleared to make room for the fields of commercial trees, shrubs, and plants of the now-defunct Greenbrier Nursery. Garrett turned off the highway and onto the packed dirt road and looked out through the windshield over gently rolling slopes under dark and fast-moving clouds. Rippling on the hills were high canvas tents, erected to create a more sheltered environment for the less hardy outdoor flowers and plants, but now filthy and sagging and flapping in the strong wind.
Garrett rounded a curve and the main building came into view: a barn with several attached greenhouse wings, the whole structure vaguely in the form of a star, or a starfish, with its arms being the long glass-paned greenhouses.
Garrett didn’t drive all the way up to the nursery’s front door, with its drooping sheltered porch. Instead he parked the Explorer beside a massive spreading oak tree. He killed the engine and his ears were immediately assaulted by the spiraling rumble of the wind outside, so strong it swayed the Explorer on its tires.
He looked back toward the dirt road. Where the f*ck are the cars? There were no police vehicles in sight, no sirens either, and that was unnerving.
An uneasy thought flicked through his head.
A spell. No one’s coming. He’s keeping them away.
Then he dismissed it as nonsense. Insane.
Garrett turned back and stared through the windshield as the car shuddered. There was no other vehicle in sight, no sign of the dark blue Camaro. Maybe he’d gotten lucky and arrived when the killer was off the premises. Then again, he wouldn’t expect the car to be parked anywhere immediately visible.
Wait for backup? Could he chance it?
And if Tanith is here, if she’s really been so foolish and crazy to come out here on her own, with nothing but some belief in occult powers, and perhaps a ritual knife which McKenna will take from her and use on her without blinking . . .
Garrett opened the console and withdrew the Glock he’d taken from the drawer of his nightstand. He checked it and holstered it on his belt. He took out the Taser and put that in his windbreaker pocket for good measure. He already had the Kevlar vest strapped on underneath the jacket. His thoughts were racing, against his will.
It’s beyond stupid to go in. But if they’re in there . . . if he’s in there . . .
He reached again to the console and took out protective latex gloves, several pairs of them. He pulled one pair on; the others he stuffed into his other jacket pocket.
He got out of the Explorer and started up toward the building, fighting the wind. It hurled dry leaves in his path, papery flurries, racing and rolling as the trees swayed precipitously, their branches shuddering and shaking. Witch’s wind, he thought, not knowing if he’d made the phrase up. The sky was layered thickly with clouds, from steel gray to purple to black, and there was an eerie orange light.
Hell of a storm coming, Garrett’s uneasy thoughts continued. As if things aren’t bad enough. He looked back toward the road, hoping to hear the sound of sirens. There was nothing.
He tried to focus ahead of him as he walked. The property had been stripped and most inventory moved away, but there were still vestiges of ponds and waterfalls and fountains in the front of the building, and some statuary and concrete garden accessories, which Garrett wound his way through now: cracked and chipped birdbaths, urns, benches, sundials, forlorn stone frogs and rabbits and turtles that had been too damaged to bother moving out or looting: the discards, the left-behinds.
The greenhouses had been vandalized; there were shattered windows and some with rock-sized holes and spidery cracks, and ugly words spray-painted on the sides of the barn. The site had been utilized, most certainly, for timeless teenage rituals; Garrett saw scattered beer cans and broken bottles and limp condoms in the dirt. But there was a pall over the place now that had nothing to do with those hopeful drunken fumblings. The wind pushed through the trees, laying branches flat and swirling dead leaves in cyclones along the packed and parched grounds. Dark and layered clouds moved and gathered in silent waves, and lightning flared on the horizon, not close enough to branch, yet, but flickering feverishly, like a dying lightbulb. Garrett braced himself against the gusts, smelled the iron scent of rain.
And as he approached the barnlike door of the main building, he saw blackened footprints in the rippling weeds: scorch marks.
Choronzon . . .
No, a killer. A killer named McKenna. Remember that.
He drew his weapon and surveyed the door, a wide stable type. It was padlocked shut, but it had been opened recently; he could see the drag marks in the dirt.
His instinct was not to touch any of it. McKenna’s house had been booby-trapped with lethal chemicals; it was a good bet that this location was equally contaminated.
He debated his options, with heart pounding. Shoot the lock off? If McKenna was inside, and wasn’t aware of Garrett’s presence already, that would seal it. And if he wasn’t inside, but returned anytime soon, the broken lock would alert him to someone within.
Garrett stepped back and scanned the front of the building, looking for a less obvious option.
The greenhouse wing to the left of the building had several shattered panes of glass in the tall windows. As Garrett moved toward them, a tornado of dust and leaves spiraled up in his path; he had to sidestep it, turn his face away from the choking dirt.
On the way toward the wall of windows he grabbed a concrete pedestal, and as he reached the largest of the broken windows, he put the pedestal down. He took off his jacket and wrapped the cloth around his arm to knock out the remaining glass, then threw the jacket over the window frame and stepped up onto the pedestal to look inside.
There was just enough dusky light left in the sky to light the interior of the building in gray.
As Garrett’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, he looked in on rows and rows of long wooden tables of different heights, laden with all manner of plants and trees and shrubbery. It was a maze.
There was no one visibly moving within, and he could hear no human sounds.
He boosted himself up on the window frame and hoisted himself inside.
From the window he dropped down onto the cement floor; the sound was a hollow thud in the long room. A puff of powdery dust floated up from the floor; Garrett felt the gritty sting in his nostrils. He straightened up, willing himself not to cough, and moved quickly out of the dust cloud, looking around him in the dim gray light.
It was an eerie, dead place, with withered vines and blackened plants and flowers—not just dry and dead; they’d been burned.
Choronzon . . .
No, an effect. It’s an effect.
But the effect meant that McKenna had been there.
Garrett’s grip tightened on his Glock. Instinctively he understood that for his purposes the killer would need more darkness than this wing of the greenhouse afforded. Garrett started down a long plant-lined aisle toward the wooden inner building, his whole body tense with listening and looking.
The greenhouse was quiet; Garrett’s own breathing sounded magnified to him, labored. Then he heard rustling to the right of him. He spun, leveling the Glock.
On the table beside him, a row of green plants was withering in front of his eyes, shriveling and curling and blackening.
Garrett’s pulse spiked with shock and disbelief. There was a whispering all around him, like the sound of voices overlapping.
This can’t be happening . . .
And then he realized.
The dust cloud when he’d dropped from the window. There was some powder on the floor beside the windows. A hallucinogen.
He had a sudden flash of Landauer, frothing and raving and shrieking.
The demon causes mental chaos.
He forced himself away from the thought, forced himself to focus, take inventory through the wild pounding of his blood in his veins.
How bad am I?
There was a faint glow around the shapes of plants around him. The door in front of him seemed ever so slightly to be breathing.
Garrett had once done psilocybin mushrooms as a college student—it had been a reckless night, and recklessly he’d said yes to the drug that another student had offered him at a party.
The effects he was experiencing were like that trippy night: slightly off from reality. Physically he felt queasy, but not incapacitated. He took several strides toward the door, partly to see if he could . . . and found his legs were functioning adequately, although there was a heaviness to his limbs that was worrisome. The situation was not ideal.
He moved forward and leaned to listen at the door without touching it . . . and thought he heard a human whimpering.
He stepped back and lifted a leg and kicked open the inner door.
He darted through it, leading with his weapon and shouting, “Police!” Simultaneously a powder exploded from the top of the door, a pale cloud of granules, drifting down.
Garrett ducked away, covering his face with his sleeve, trying not to breathe.
He had just time to see a triangle inscribed on the floor in powder, gleaming whitely, and candles flickering at the three points—
Then something heavy came down on his head and everything went black.
He woke to a breath of air, like touch, gentle, urgent, and a voice whispering in his head.
Garrett. Wake up. You have to come around.
He forced his eyes open—it was an effort; they were crusty and gummy. His head was throbbing. He tried to sit up, but found he could not move. He flexed wrists, and then ankles, and realized he was bound. He could smell her, though, the scent of apple musk.
He blinked, staring through the dark—and suddenly Tanith knelt on the dirt floor beside him. Her skin glowed as if it were lit from within, and he started . . . then realized he was tripping; he could feel the drug roller-coastering in his veins, the lurching feeling of nausea. He swallowed and tried to focus. She seemed insubstantial, not merely glowing, but nearly transparent—but that was the drug, wasn’t it, he was still hallucinating?
Untie me, he said, but heard no words.
She shook her head. I’m not here.
Garrett blinked, and tried to process. She was speaking, but not speaking; the voice was inside his head.
There are three kids in there; he has them trussed like you are now. Can you stand?
He opened his mouth to speak. No, she said sharply. Don’t answer aloud, just tell me.
Drugged . . . he managed. It seemed a great effort to form the word in his mind.
I know. And your gun is gone.
Garrett’s stomach dropped, and his pulse rate shot up, which brought on another wave of nausea, and a rush of colors, but she was speaking, and he tried to focus. He could feel the Taser was gone from his pocket, too.
There is a nail, in the wall behind you. Can you sit up?
Garrett fought the nausea, and jerked himself upright. In that sitting position he swayed, and fell back against the wall, wincing at the hollow thud he made, not because of the pain, but because of the sound.
He used his fingers to feel along the wall behind him and found it, a bent nail, rusty, protruding.
Hurry, she said, and faded away.
He felt the edges of the nail, getting a sense of it, and then began to saw the rope against it.
The barnlike inner room had no windows, no glass at all; it was a light-controlled space. Outside, the night had darkened, the moon was hidden behind the storm clouds, and the clouds finally dumped their rain, a thundering, splashing roar on the panes of glass. Water cascaded down from numerous broken panes. Now the room was as dark as a cellar, with just faint outlines of illumination along cracks in the wood. The floor was dirt, and a large triangle was inscribed on the floor in some powdery substance, lime or concrete, faintly glowing. A huge triangle, at least fifteen feet at the base, and black candles lit and flickering in a circle around it.
A man sat on the dirt floor at the highest point of the triangle, but outside the faintly glowing lines, and he faced away from it. He was cross-legged, surrounded by more fat black candles, and he sat in front of a large upright piece of black glass, at least five feet by five feet. He stared into it with fixed and dilated eyes and chanted, an ominous and repetitive muttering.
At the edge of the room, beside the door, Garrett stood perfectly still, not breathing, his eyes locked on the man. Thanks to the muffled roar of the rain outside, he had gotten through the broken inner door without drawing attention to himself, though now that he was in he realized that if the dark plate of glass had been a real mirror, he would be visible to the man at the head of the triangle right now, and probably dead.
But the reflection in the glass was so dark—just a faint glimmering of the candles and the insubstantial outline of the man . . . that Garrett realized it couldn’t be a mirror, but something else. And that meant perhaps the killer might not be able to see him. Certainly he was deep into whatever bizarre meditation he was engaged in.
The sick-sweet smell of incense wafted from the altar and various other points around the triangle; the smoke drifted in the candlelight, swirling in eddies with the drafts. Outside, the wind was a dull roaring that shook the building.
The man at the point of the triangle—McKenna—was dressed in a black robe and his crossed feet were bare. He had unkempt, bushy hair, a beard covering most of his face.
Garrett’s quick assessment was that he was medium-sized but powerfully built. A lethal-looking double-edged sword lay across his knees. And he has your weapon, Garrett reminded himself grimly. Within reach somewhere.
The bearded man stared into the black glass and muttered to himself, a barely audible chanting that sounded vaguely Latin, though Garrett could recognize no words from the old-style masses his mother had dragged him to.
Garrett’s eyes quickly scanned the huge, dark room.
There were familiar dark smears on the wall, the sigils of Choronzon: 333 and the three triangles. Above him, veils of cobwebs hung from the rafters and Garrett saw gleaming red eyes watching him from the silk strands. Hallucination, he reminded himself.
He glanced to his right and his heart lurched. On a crude altar, three leathery heads were lined up, with lit black candles sizzling wax around and between them. They were pasty and unreal, they looked fake, but didn’t feel fake, and Garrett knew they were not. Two were barely recognizable as female; one had Erin Carmody’s long blond hair; the other the waifish dark hair of Amber Bright. The other was vaguely male, from the angularity of the features.
Garrett felt a surge of fury, and tried to breathe in quietly to control himself. Lose it now and you lose everything.
He stood as still as a statue and continued to take visual inventory. Across the triangle from the altar with the three heads was another altar, lit by a candle the holder of which made Garrett’s stomach turn again: another shriveled, waxen hand. A large book lay open on the center of the altar, with the rough pages Garrett recognized now as handmade, hand-bound: grimoire pages. The drugs made the pages appear to glow with a sickly pallor, the glow undulating upward like the heat from a candle flame.
Garrett’s eyes widened as he took in the other items on the altar: a chalice—and a dagger, a shining eight-inch blade. So far his best chance at a weapon. But the altar was a good twenty feet from him, and the cross-legged man with the sword was only five feet from it. Garrett would never make it.
He held the thought of the dagger in his head and shifted his eyes to the phosphorescent triangle in the center of the floor, and of all the things he had seen so far, this sent his stomach plummeting. At each point of the triangle, a human body lay, each wrapped in coils and coils of rope, looking sickly like huge insects caught in spiderwebbing. All three were so still Garrett felt a stab of fear that he had arrived too late.
But then he saw one shift slightly and moan . . .
A small swirl of dust started at one of the points of the triangle. At first Garrett thought it was a breeze, but then a second began, and then a third, three dust devils rising at the points of the triangle.
McKenna’s chanting grew louder, with a note of triumph. “Choronzon, acerbus et ingens! Cede pectares alere flamman tuam. Ab Choronzon principium. Do et dus—”
And the altar with the grimoire began to shake. A candle flipped over and thudded to the dirt floor. And then the entire altar slid four feet through the dirt, with a powdery scraping sound.
Garrett looked toward the dark mirror and froze. There was an insubstantial shape taking form, the outlines blurry but disturbing, behind the flickering reflections of the candles. First just a pale shape with dark crevasses of eyes . . . eyes that were living black holes. Then the paleness began taking form.
I’m not seeing this. It’s the drugs, Garrett told himself, but his legs felt like water and he was unable to look away.
The face in the black glass was ivory, discolored as aged teeth; a skin leached of life; like a corpse, like a mummy. A feral, triangular head with a long narrow jaw, bony ridges above the eyes, and something like a ridge on the top, something spiny and inhuman . . . but it was no animal; there was a savage intelligence in the black eyes, in the snarled set of the jaw. The mouth was maybe the most frightening . . . it seemed either snaggle-toothed, or as if the mouth had been stitched together in crude, wide, triangular stitches and then ripped open in a gaping death’s-head grimace.
It was huge, the face, at least three feet across, and the contours of the body were rapidly filling the entire five-by-five glass, the shape becoming clear. It was powerful, like a lynx, but bigger, horribly bigger, and it was crouched on haunches with talons extended—and as Garrett watched in paralyzed disbelief, it sprung, like a tidal wave of black water.
The shape was in the triangle now, a savage thing with red and demonic eyes.
Hairy, yet naked. Human, yet monstrous. Insubstantial, but vibrating with power. Yellowed fangs and lolling tongue.
Garrett felt a drowsy, paralytic terror, felt his mind shudder with denial.
McKenna leapt to his feet and spun, holding the sword up in his two hands, and began to chant deliriously. “Choronzon, acerbus et ingens! Cede pectares alere flamman tuam. Do et dus. Date et dabitur vobis! Abyssus Abyssum invocat!”
The creature in the triangle threw its spiked head back and roared, a sound that ripped through Garrett’s whole being, in its wrongness, its essential negation. It strode on clawed feet toward the man in the robe but when it reached the phosphorescent line of the triangle, blue sparks flew from its hide and it roared in pain and rage. Garrett stood staring and stupefied, but then shouted at himself, It’s the drugs. You’re drugged.
The demon roared, a hideous snarl that sounded impossibly like infinite voices, layered on top of each other. “Otref coh sutcam eaem eugueailiamaf omod siem euqsirebil ihim suoitiporp snelov seis itu, rocerp seceprp sanob obdnevombo otref coh et!”
The killer stood above the first cocooned body with the sword and his voice was calculated, cunning, a question: “Date et debitur vobis?”
The demon snarled back in that impossible, layered voice: “Otref coh et!”
The killer raised the sword above the first webbed body, hilt clutched in both hands, about to plunge the blade.
At another point of the triangle, one of the bound kids came to life, thrashing in her trusses, and began to scream, a piercing, nerve-ripping sound. The thing in the triangle opened its jaws in a yawning growl of pleasure . . .
Garrett seized that distraction and ran headlong for the altar, pounding in the dust. He lunged past candles, sending them flying, but as his fingers reached for the dagger, McKenna spun and was upon him, brandishing the sword, bringing it down with a snarl of rage. Garrett let McKenna begin the swing and then viciously kicked out at his knee and connected. McKenna roared in pain and the sword crashed down into the altar instead.
Candles fell against the wall, black wax sizzling and splashing. The dry wood went up like tinder, flames licking up the walls, an orange glow. Behind them in the triangle, the demon shrieked, a hundred savage layered cries.
Garrett lurched for the splintered altar and grabbed the dagger, and while McKenna struggled to pull the sword from the wooden altar, Garrett whipped around and thrust the blade into McKenna’s throat.
McKenna dropped to his knees, gagging hoarsely, eyes wide and staring as he clutched at his neck. Blood seeped from between his fingers. Behind them, the unearthly thing in the triangle paced and snarled, but did not move beyond the gleaming white lines . . . McKenna collapsed onto the packed dirt, convulsing . . .
Then Garrett felt screaming inside his own mind as the eyes of the first head on the altar opened and looked at him, then the next, then the next, until all three were staring with filmy, black gazes. The dead mouths opened and mouthed words, without vocal cords, voiceless. But Garrett heard them anyway: Help. Help. Help.
And as the thing in the triangle turned toward Garrett, with jagged teeth bared and red eyes glowing, McKenna rose to his knees, blood pouring from around the dagger stuck in his throat. But Garrett had heard the death rattle, the gag of breath; he could smell the stink of his evacuated bladder and bowels.
He’s dead, Garrett’s mind shouted . . . but McKenna kept coming, a shuffling stagger, lifting the sword.
Then there was a breath of wind, so soft it might have been a dream.
And behind McKenna, Garrett saw Tanith in the black mirror, standing pale and shimmering, with her arms raised. Three insubstantial wisps surrounded her, swirling and circling, as if drawn to her light. She stood and chanted, and Garrett saw the world open, a black universe of night, that shuddered and separated into dark and light. The three wisps swirled up and toward the light. Inside the triangle, the demon shrieked in rage. It crouched, coiling into itself, and pounced at the glass, toward Tanith. It hit hard and bounced back off it as if it had tried to charge a closed door.
Tanith drew her hands together, drawing the light into her grasp. And then she turned and hurled the ball of light at the mirror.
The light hit and the black plate of glass shattered. But instead of exploding outward, it imploded, inward. And the thing in the triangle was pulled into the explosion as into a vacuum, howling its rage in the cyclone of wind . . . a wind that pulled at Garrett, staggering him, pulled at the dust on the floor, pulled at the flames licking up the walls of the greenhouse, pulled at the very structure of the greenhouse until the beams and joists groaned . . .
And then was gone. The triangle was empty. In front of Garrett, McKenna’s body dropped to the ground like a stone.
The walls around Garrett were pure flame now. One of the teenagers bound at the triangle was screaming endlessly.
Garrett lunged toward McKenna’s body and pulled the dagger from the corpse’s throat. He bent and slashed the ropes binding the screaming teenager. “I’m Boston police. Can you run?” he shouted in her face. She nodded, wide-eyed and shaking. “Then go.” He pulled her to her feet, turned her toward the door. “Get out.”
She staggered a few steps forward, then bolted. Garrett seized the next bound body and began to drag it toward the door.
He pulled both bound bodies into the main greenhouse, one at a time. Smoke drifted blackly in the rows of shriveled plants, but Garrett’s vision was clearing; the effects of the drug were wearing off, perhaps diluted by adrenaline. Garrett stooped and lifted the first bound body, registered that it was a boy, before he threw it over his shoulder and ran for the nearest door.
By the time he made it back in for the last teenager, the barn was an inferno behind them, flames reflected in a thousand panes of glass, blazing through the whipping wind and pouring rain. Garrett lifted the girl’s body and clutched her to him as he stumbled forward, through the rows of shriveled plants, through the door . . . into the night, into the wet, into the wind.