The Shadow's Touch Read online

  He only ran a few feet before he stopped and turned to the wave. His mouth twisted in fear as it dawned on him who the wave had targeted. He held up the butcher knife and screamed at the black wall of water as it crashed down on him with terrifying speed.

  “Fuck you! Bring it on! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

  As the wave slammed down on Erick, I could still hear him screaming at the top of his lungs. He thrashed and shrieked as it crushed him into the sand. An ocean of blackness poured over him, and the raging torrent overwhelmed his cries. He somehow got out three last words.

  “… please, help me!”

  His body absorbed the vast blackness like a thirsty sponge. The last of it disappeared into his body, then he sat up and turned pitch-black eyes to me once more. I yelled in fear of the new hunger I saw there and struggled to move.

  He grabbed my head and squeezed. I screamed again.

  ***

  I woke to my mom bent over me where I lay on the couch. She had one hand on the side of my head and stroked my forehead with her other.

  “Shhh, Finn. Shhh. It was only a bad dream. You’re safe now.”

  Her words calmed me down, though it took a few seconds for my heart to stop racing. The dream had felt terribly real, but I was so tired that when I dragged myself to my room, I fell back to sleep before even registering where I was.

  Break In

  The next morning, I received a call from Uncle Mark at seven o’clock. He said, “Finn, get down to the shop as soon as you can. I need your help. We had a break-in last night.”

  “What happ—” The line was already dead. The adrenalin rush from the news banished my memory of the dream and the worst of my typical early-morning malaise.

  Downstairs, I found my mom in the kitchen.

  “Mom, someone broke into Uncle Mark’s store. When are we going to the hospital to see dad?”

  She fidgeted uncomfortably a bit before she spoke. “Ah, well, Finn. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. Your father isn’t… that is, he would like some alone time today, so we’re going to give him some space. I’m certain he’ll just take a little while to get used to Shady Oaks.”

  “But, Mom! If I don’t go and juice him up, he might fall back into a coma or attack someone again. I’ve got to go see him.”

  Her eyes grew bright with unshed tears, which she tried to blink away. “I know, Finn, but I’m sure by tomorrow, he’ll be more open to company.”

  “But… I…”

  “I know it’s hard, Finn. Right now, I think you should go help your uncle.” My mom crossed her arms, fending off her inner chill.

  “But, I don’t want to leave you alone, either.” I pulled her into a tight hug. After some resistance, she hugged me back.

  “Oh, sweetie, I’ll be fine. I think you should go. It will give you something to do to get your mind off of everything.”

  When I pulled back, I peered into her face. Her eyes were red, and her cheeks were wet.

  “I can’t leave you like this,” I said.

  She sniffed and gave me a weak smile. “Finn, you should go. I’m going to get some chores done, do some cleaning, and maybe go get some more groceries. Someone around here has been eating enough for three linebackers.”

  I searched her eyes and could tell she wanted some time alone. Sometimes you have to recognize when you can’t do anything for someone you love.

  I caught her eyes with mine. “Well, okay, I’ll go, but you have to call me the minute you need a hand with something, or you just want me to be here.”

  She brushed her fingers over my cheek, and her smile grew lopsided. “Thank you, Finn. I love you so much.” She squeezed me tight.

  With my head over her shoulder, the familiar scent of the berry shampoo she used surrounded me. I whispered past the lump in my throat, “I love you, too, Mom.” I pulled away. “Promise you’ll call me?”

  She nodded and dropped her hand. “I will, sweetheart, I will.” She handed me a set of keys. “Here, take your father’s car.”

  “Mom, I’m going to take my bike. I really need to burn off some steam.”

  “But…” She stopped and took a deep breath. “Okay, but you have to call me when you get there and promise me that you’ll be home before it starts to get dark. I’m still worried about Erik and that gun.”

  “Okay, Mom. I’ll be careful.”

  ***

  Once on my bike, I went all-out and enjoyed the push. That had never happened to me before. Usually any exercise was pure torture, but now, the feel of my muscles pushing through each stroke, the pumping of my heart, and the wind blowing past my ears was exhilarating. I got to the store in record time feeling flushed, but not even a bit nauseous.

  The sight of the police cruiser parked in front of the shop and the shattered picture window banished all other thoughts. Angry, anxious, and appalled, I went inside to find Mark talking with a police officer I didn’t recognize.

  Mark nodded at me to wait when I came in, so I made a sweep of the shop, mentally tallying all the missing rocks and native artifacts. Whoever our burglar was, he’d had a fine old time smashing displays and windows and knocking over counters. The more I saw the damage, the angrier I got. It had to be Parmely, and I vowed that he was in for a world of hurt.

  My heart skipped a beat when I saw the empty, shattered display case that had held the snake whistle. I couldn’t allow him to keep that priceless, irreplaceable, and possibly magical piece. That idiot would probably just break it or throw it away.

  Concern for the skull flashed through me. What might he do with such a thing? Nervously, I opened the door to the back storeroom while the cops continued to work in the front room. The damage continued there. The shelves, which had held so many precious things, had been pushed over, one into the other like dominoes, their shattered contents strewn across the floor. Many irreplaceable treasures lay broken on the stained concrete. This was sacrilege, but one fact dominated everything else: the skull wasn’t on the desk.

  A mantle of heavy, helpless dread covered me and rooted me to the spot while my heart beat quickly against my ribs with heavy force. The skull was gone and with it, the oily black presence that it held.

  I uprooted my toes and inched toward the desk and nearly breathed a sigh of relief. The skull lay on the floor in front of the desk. Then I saw the other half of the skull behind the first.

  “Aw, frick!”

  Spring’s feelings of relief hit me before her words. Hey! It’s gone! Totally righteous, dude!

  She was half-right. The blackness had vanished. Definitely non-righteous, Spring.

  She picked up on the images flooding my mind of the black spirit wandering free or even worse, finding a new body—like, say, Erik’s over-muscled physique.

  We don’t know that it can do anything like that.

  No, Spring, I’m pretty sure it can. Its last body was once human.

  She had seen my memories of the vision and what the spirit had done to its host’s body. Oh, like, that is totally bogus to the max!

  I had to agree with her on that.

  I stepped up to the two pieces of the skull. The dread was gone. The halves might have been just scary movie props. I reached down to pick them up with a half-baked idea of fixing the damage, as if that would bind the shadow again.

  “Finn! Don’t touch anything!” Mark stood in the doorway to the front room.

  “Yah!” I jumped away from the desk.

  My ears burned, and my face scrunched in apology. Even I knew better than to touch evidence at a crime scene. The sheer scale of the potential problem was overwhelming, and I wanted nothing more than to fix everything.

  I pointed to the skull, as if he couldn’t see it as clearly as me. “Mark, did you see what he did?”

  Mark nodded and scowled. He came into the room and closed the door, leaving us alone. “The cops think it was a couple of drunken teens. It’s hard to image the magnitude of the destruction they perpetrated—” />
  “Mark, it wasn’t drunk teenagers, it was Erik Parmely. I know it!”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He slashed the tires on my car yesterday while I was working here. I had to buy four new tires just to get home. He hates me and vowed to get revenge on me. He’s been stalking me for weeks.”

  “Is he the one that left you that ‘I know who you are, and I saw what you did’ letter?”

  I gawked at him. “How did you know about that?”

  Erik had left a note that said, “I saw everything. I know what you are. As God is my witness, I will stop you.”

  Mark just shrugged. “I saw it on your table in the hospital when I stopped by.”

  “You stopped by?”

  He just raised an eyebrow at me.

  I immediately felt stupid. “Never mind. Of course you did. I just never thought about it.”

  “You did have a few other things on your mind, Finn.”

  Mark lowered his brows. “Finn, just what did you do to this boy?”

  “Nothing! I just stuck up for Jen that one day, and he’s been gunning for me ever since.” More literally than I could say.

  I studiously avoided looking at Mark’s skeptical gaze and stared at the broken skull on the floor. I didn’t know how to tell my uncle about what had happened with Spring, or that something nasty, something black and evil, had escaped.

  The police team came into the back and started doing their job. When they were done, one of the officers approached Mark.

  “Well, I’ll put this in and see what I can find. I’ll have a team down here within the hour to collect prints, then you can start cleaning up.” He handed my uncle a card.

  “Thanks, officer,” said Mark.

  After the team had gone and we received the okay, we spent the rest of the day boarding up the broken front window and cleaning up the damage. I called my mom around two o’clock, hoping Dad had changed his mind, but nothing had come of his time alone.

  When everything was as organized as we could get it, Mark said, “Finn, I’m going to go pay our Mr. Parmely a visit. Want to come along?”

  “Shouldn’t the police be questioning him?”

  “I didn’t tell them about Erik’s little vendetta.”

  “Really? Why?”

  A thin smile creased his lips. “First, I have no real proof... and I wanted the chance to speak with him first.”

  I hesitated, thinking about the missing shadow. The last time we’d discussed it, my uncle had told me to trust my instincts. That was the only reason I could scrape up the nerve to bring up my fears now.

  “Uncle Mark? Do you remember when we talked about the skull, and the bad feelings I got from it?”

  He bobbed his head.

  “Well, you suggested maybe I was just getting psychic imprints from it, but now that it’s broken, I don’t get those feelings anymore. I think there was something evil in it. I’m worried that it might have taken over Erik.”

  My uncle did a passable imitation of Dr. Anderson’s laser gaze of doom. “Finn, what have you and your family gotten into?”

  I yearned to tell him everything, but couldn’t. “I want to talk to you about it, but I can’t. I promised my parents. Maybe you can convince my dad to tell you.”

  My face likely showed how unhappy I was keeping secrets, because he let the matter drop.

  “Well, regardless of whatever is going on with you, Erik was already a class-A scumbag. If he’s been possessed by a demon, it’s probably just going to make him more likeable.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  Unless he turns into a ten-foot-tall monster and eats your face.

  Gee, thanks, Spring. I really needed that image.

  Well, if we’re going to do this, Finn, let Uncle Mark go first. I don’t want to get eaten or get shot again.

  Relax, Spring, I’ve got Erik’s gun.

  Yeah, but you didn’t bring it with you, dude.

  That was a decent point.

  Death in Ohio

  The overcast sky was deepening when Mark and I pulled into the Parmelys’ driveway. The house was a squalid little shack strewn with trash, broken furniture, and old car parts.

  The Parmelys lived a bit off the beaten path in a large wooded lot. After we had parked at the end of the gravel drive, we stepped out into the quiet heat of the evening. The car doors thunked loudly, announcing our presence. I shivered in the heat, thinking again about a demon-possessed Erik lurking nearby. I felt like an idiot just contemplating it, but that didn’t banish the fear.

  Mark strode up to the front door without hesitation. I trailed along behind him. A large, dirty picture window to the left of the door revealed a dark living room. My attention was on Mark when he went to knock on the door. He stopped when something caught his attention through the window. His face set into hard, grim lines and I squinted past the reflections of the dying day. When I did, I wished I hadn’t. The flickering television irregularly illuminated a fat man without a face sitting on a couch in a shirt covered in dark stains. A mass of blood and gore replaced the missing face. It dripped down thickly onto his large potbelly.

  Oh hell, Finn, run away!

  I swallowed bile. I don’t think this guy is any threat, Spring.

  As I said this, Mark barked at me, “Get down!”

  My reaction was not quick enough for him, and he pushed me onto the broken concrete of the front door landing just as a shot rang out from the house. The front window exploded out into the yard and showered us with little cubed pieces of safety glass.

  Another shot sounded beside me. My uncle poked his head up a little bit to snap off several shots with a small pistol. A cry from inside the house followed by silence seemed to signal a hit. Mark glanced my way.

  “Stay down!”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice, or even once. I curled in a ball on the sidewalk as he crept to the door, reached up, and tried the handle.

  I told you to run away!

  Mark opened the unlocked door a crack, and then slapped it open all the way with his hand. When no gunshots greeted him, he pelted into the house in a crouched run. His gun swept quickly back and forth in his outstretched hands.

  After what seemed like an eternity, while I considered a strategic (not cowardly!) withdrawal, Mark called to me. “It’s all clear, Finn. You can come in.”

  I got up and walked through the front door where a scene from a cheesy horror flick greeted me. Blood had splattered over a wide area. The sharp metallic smell of it mixed with the scent of feces and stale beans, which caught me like a smack in the head. My gorge rose, but I willed it down.

  Like, totally grody!

  Spring, please?

  “You can come in, but avoid the blood on the carpet and don’t touch anything!”

  Another sniff was all I needed to decide that I didn’t need to come in. “Who was shooting at us and who did this?”

  He was searching around the area for something. “It was your buddy Erik, and if I’ve guessed right, that body used to be his dad.”

  “Why the heck would he kill his own father?” As soon I said that, my mind went to the broken skull and the shadow that it no longer contained.

  “People just lose it sometimes, Finn.” He lost himself in thought for a minute while I absorbed the horror of the scene from beyond the open doorway. Shadows cast by the flickering light of the television made Erik’s father seem to jiggle and jump in place.

  “I was sure I hit him a couple of times—good solid body shots, but he hightailed it out of here fast enough.”

  “Uncle Mark, how come you have a gun?”

  He rewarded me with a pleased grin. “You never know when some lunatic is going to shoot at you with a shotgun.”

  His grin dropped as he saw the splatters around the floor where he stood. He muttered, “He shouldn’t even be standing.”

  My balls tried to pull up into my chest as I contemplated the unnatural vitality of Wendigo
ta and what that might mean.

  The walls of the small front room held several crucifixes and bloody pictures of Jesus. Blood and bits of gray matter coated one particularly large crucifix on the wall behind Mr. Parmely.

  I ran outside and donated my dinner to the local ecology.

  The only enjoyable part of that evening was the face time I got with the beautiful Detective Hunter, and this time, I wasn’t the one under suspicion. I was starting to see how someone could develop a uniform fetish.

  To the Loony Bin, and Beyond

  The next day, after my mom woke me up from the couch again, I forgot about the images of blood and headless bodies that kept running through my dreams. My dad called and asked us to come visit, pushing everything else out of my mind.

  Before long, we headed to the Shady Oaks Continuing Care Facility.

  They don’t have insane asylums anymore. They have “Continuing Care Facilities” or “Residential Care Facilities for the Chronically Ill.”

  My dad had an old collection of George Carlin skits (for those who don’t know, Carlin was an old comedian my dad liked). Carlin’s observations about the English language continue to reign true. We add syllables to emotionally charged words and concepts until they stop meaning anything. His example was the journey from “Shell Shock” to “Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.”

  In this case, what started out as a simple, vivid concept, “Insane Asylum,” which everyone could grasp at a visceral level, was now “Residential Care Facilities for the Chronically Ill,” which leaves our visceral selves bemused and untroubled. Of course, when Carlin talked about it, he made it much funnier.

  Anyway, apparently, there aren’t a lot of these modern day insane-asylums-by-another-name, but we were blessed that “Dr. Mengele’s Loony Bin” (a name I felt was satisfactorily well charged with emotions) was only about a forty-minute drive to the east of our house.