Husk

Melissa studied him for a moment, pondering a retort. In the end she simply crossed her arms and leaned against her car. “You’ve got five minutes.”

Frank nodded. “Then I’ll keep it short. What we’re dealing with, Detective, is a creature that can harness the life energy of its victims and use it to manipulate the environment. Humans have done the same in the past. Ancient cultures used sacrifices as a way to tap that power and use it in funerary practices, supposedly to re-animate the dead. Aztecs and Mayans believed the gods they worshiped required human energy as food, nourishment they provided in exchange for a prosperous existence. For those people, blood offerings played a crucial part in their lives.”

Melissa checked her watch. “Does this little anthropology lesson have a point?”

Frank walked to the passenger side of his Blazer. He reached through the open window and picked up a manila folder off the seat.

“Kane was also sacrificing people, but it wasn’t part of any ancient religious practice or deity worship. I think the entity was teaching him how to manipulate the life energy of their victims, using it as fuel for their magic, just like the Mayans and the Egyptians once did. Look at this.”

He held out the folder.

Melissa only stared at him. “Magic?”

Frank nodded. “Don’t underestimate its legitimacy. If this thing has been around for as long as I understand, there’s no telling what sort of knowledge it might possess, or how many ages it’s been since the world has seen this kind of power.”

“Magic?” she repeated.

Frank flipped open the folder and pulled out a black and white printout of an autopsy photograph, holding it up for her to see. The charred, reassembled remains of a headless woman lay spread across an exam table like a filleted fish on a cutting board.

“Jesus,” she whispered.

“I got this from a friend up north. They identified the girl using medical records after she was reported missing by her parents. Her name is Penelope Styles. As you can see, her head and hands are missing and her ribcage is almost obliterated. The investigators are waiting on DNA tests for an official ID confirmation, but the body shows evidence of a healed break on the collar bone, which matches the girl’s medical history. She died in that gas station explosion a few nights ago. According to the chief examiner, however, it wasn’t the fire that killed her.”

He offered her the file again and this time she took it.

“What was the cause of death?”

Frank’s expression remained stoic. “Someone removed her heart.”

Melissa met his gaze, then flipped to the autopsy report and confirmed his statement.

“A beating human heart is the most powerful of all sacrifices,” Frank said. “Dozens of cultures have practiced heart removal throughout history, and I’ve come to suspect that’s no coincidence.”

She closed the file and handed it back. “No, it sounds more like a shared trait of humanity’s brutal social evolution.”

“Is it?” Frank asked. “Or does it prove that these creatures have been plaguing the world for centuries, appearing throughout history and selecting certain people to train in their ways? You wanted to know what Kane’s victims had in common. Well, I’d say it’s a good bet each of them shared unusually strong life forces. That’s why Kane went to such extremes tracking down certain people, why he killed so many of them at once. He wanted all that energy released at the same time, feeding the entity, powering their enchantments.”

Melissa saw where he was going. “The wounds you described that were cut into his body, the writing on that stone…”

“All part of some spell,” Frank replied.

“But what spell?” she pressed. “And why would it need Kane?”

“It wants a body,” he replied. “A living, breathing body. Why it chose Kane, I can’t say. Maybe he fit some supernatural criteria only the entity understands. Whatever the reason, their overall goal was to bond together, to merge the entity’s power and consciousness with Kane’s physical form.”

“How could you know that?”

“From the writing in Kane’s basement,” he replied. “The FBI’s linguistics experts originally told me it was gibberish, but over the years I’ve shown samples of it to various anthropologists all over the world. Most of the characters show similarities to dozens of ancient languages—Incan, Hopi, Aramaic, Norse, Bahasa; the list goes on and on. It refers to a creature known as the Vermorca, a man-god raised from the dead, and the two symbols they found repeated over and over again stood for unity and flesh.”

Melissa sighed. “This is bullshit, Frank. Do you even hear what’s coming out of your mouth? The whole idea of it is just… just… incomprehensible.”

“What part don’t you understand?”

Melissa laughed. She knew she should drop the subject, let it go, but Frank’s level of conviction infuriated her, and now she wanted to prove him wrong. “All right, answer me this: if your entity-thing has been around for so long, since the time of Christ—”

“Before Christ.”

“Whatever. If it’s as powerful as you say, being able to cast magic spells and make bodies out of anything it wants, then why now? Why didn’t this thing come after you five years ago, when you busted Kane? You’re the one who tracked him down and put an end to his crimes, you’re the one who ruined his plans. In all this time, why hasn’t this thing killed you? Seems sort of convenient that it would just up and vanish the second Kane got captured. The way you describe it, you’d think it would’ve come looking for revenge.”

Frank’s one eye broke from her gaze and his posture sagged. With a heavy, miserable breath he seemed to age an additional twenty years before her eyes.

“Now, there’s a question I’ve asked myself more than once over the years,” he said, “and every time I do, I wonder if it would have really made a difference.”

“What does that mean?” she asked in a softer tone.

Frank looked at the ground and cleared his throat, perhaps buying more time before needing to answer. “I’m fifty-seven years old and I need to sleep with the lights on. Sometimes I wet myself in my sleep from the nightmares I have of Kane’s basement, of seeing my friends slaughtered. And when I’m alone, it takes me almost an hour to work up the courage just to take the garbage out. You can imagine how hard it was for me to come all the way out here tonight. I don’t have any family left, my friends stopped visiting when I was reluctant to leave my home, and I haven’t been with a woman since this whole mess started. Believe me, Detective, sometimes it seems like I’m already dead.”

Frank’s revelation of how his experiences had affected him left Melissa speechless. She found herself unable to meet the humility in his eyes. Instead, she turned and stared at the glowing windows of the ranch house.

“Up until now, I believed the entity to be a transient being,” Frank resumed, “going from one person to the next, abandoning its devotee whenever it desired. That’s what had me scared half-crazy for so long, thinking it could show up at any time, which is why I invested in all this elaborate sensory equipment after I retired. You may not have noticed it, but I have an EMF reader in every corner of my apartment. I needed the peace of mind. But now, with all this taking place after Kane’s death, I’m starting to think that the entity didn’t come after me simply because it couldn’t. If Kane and this monster were performing some sort of union spell, something to blend them together, and if we hurt Kane badly enough before it was finished, the entity could’ve been trapped inside his half-dead body. That might explain all the thrashing around I told you about, all the incoherent ranting; it was the entity realizing it had bonded with a dying body, too weakened from casting the original spell to free itself. It was stuck.”

The wind hustled a gathering of dried leaves across the driveway, producing a sound like scuffling feet. Melissa and Frank spun to face the noise, but relaxed when they realized what it had been.

Frank faced her. “We can defeat it, Melissa. I’m prepared this time, everything from holy water to plastic explosives with remote detonators.”

“Explosives,” Melissa echoed.