Before I reached the door, three police officers wearing rubber gloves walked out and got into the cars. Two were uniforms, one was a woman with wild hair, normal dress, and rubber gloves. They glanced at me but said nothing. They spoke quietly among themselves and then drove off. It looked like an investigation team to me. I steeled myself, expecting to see something unpleasant inside.
McKesson met me at the door, which was an elaborate affair of iron-bound wood and cut glass. The door alone must have cost ten grand. I marveled at it as I followed him inside. The entry was gray-white marble tiles—the real stuff, not something made of vinyl or polished cement. Yellow plastic crime scene tape was all over the place, but it had been pushed aside.
The mansion was two stories and clearly built in a better day when people in this part of the country were richer and crazier. There were cupolas with Greek statues stationed under soft recessed lights, a grand spiraling stairway that would have caused a southern belle to swoon, and a huge saltwater fish tank that filled one curved wall between the kitchen and the dining room.
I walked toward the fish tank first, noting the glass was cracked. The tank was half-full of cloudy water. Inside, a few exotic fish floated on their sides.
“That looks expensive,” I said.
“It was expensive. Must be a thousand bucks worth of sushi in there.”
“Who owned this place?”
“Some dot-com guy who lost his bank account over it. They rented it out to some people who called us about a week ago. We found the place like this. Never found the residents.”
I looked at him sharply. “A week? About when I had my accident?”
“Same night,” McKesson said, returning my stare.
“Why’d you bring me here?”
He pointed at the fish tank, and I looked at the dead fish. There were lights inside the tank, making it a bright point in an otherwise dim room.
“What?” I asked. “Do you want me to scoop out the dead ones?”
McKesson snorted and flipped a switch at the base of the tank. The lights inside it went out. I could see through the tank now. There was a darkened kitchen beyond. Three islands could be seen in the kitchen—it was big enough to run a restaurant.
I frowned, noticing dark shapes laid out upon the counters and overflowing the sinks.
“Are those body parts?” I asked.
“Yeah. But they aren’t human.”
I felt a chill. I didn’t want to walk back there into the kitchen. Not if it was full of chopped up monsters.
“Not—things either,” McKesson said, reading my mind. “They are animals. Someone bought out a butcher shop. Sides of beef, legs of lamb, ham hocks, and at least ten buckets of lard. They even cut up a fifteen-pound turkey.”
“What the hell for?”
“Now you know why you’re here. They’re cultists of some kind. These events always attract them like beetles to a corpse. Don’t you specialize in investigating this sort of thing?”
“I specialize in unexplainable events,” I said. “Not loonies with knives.”
McKesson rubbed his chin and shook his head. “You know, a couple of years ago I would have agreed with you. I would have dismissed these people as freaks with a collective mental problem. But if you do something like this and it works—I mean it really has a measurable effect on our physical world—can they really be dismissed as crazy? Like a thief or a robber, they are doing something with a purpose. A bad purpose, but a purpose nonetheless. They aren’t simply deluded.”
I stared at him for a second. I wasn’t sure if he was apologizing for these freaks or having some kind of philosophical episode. Either way, I didn’t have any answers for him, so I just shook my head.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“No, there’s more downstairs.”
McKesson led the way past the kitchen to a dark stairwell leading down. I glanced to my right, where stacks of meats were spread all over the granite counters. I squinted in the gloom. Were those catch basins lining the counters? Had they defrosted the meats and caught the juices? Why?
Shaking my head, I followed him down a narrow stairway. As wide and grand as the stairs were leading up from the marble entry, this stairway was ignoble, dingy, and dimly lit. The steps were made of wood planks rather than ringing tiles. Our shoes scraped and the planks creaked as we descended.
The cellar had a single purpose: to store wine bottles. Unlike the kitchen above, the cellar wasn’t trashed. I fully expected a cluster of candles and a pentagram painted with old, brown bloodstains. I found neither, however. The center of the cellar was clear, with the wine-laden shelves shoved back against the walls. On the cement tiles there were only two things: a scorch mark and a single, severed finger. It was grayish in color.
I stopped following McKesson when I reached the bottom of the creaking steps and spotted the finger. That was close enough for me. I recalled distinctly Jenna’s tale of a warping of space in her suite’s bathroom. Could this have been a similar phenomenon?
McKesson turned back, saw me lingering at the stairs, and chuckled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This finger’s pointing days are over.”
“Do you know how it got there?”