“Good to meet you.”
Tom noticed they didn’t offer their names, and he didn’t ask. Not yet. “You going to answer me?”
“Sure, we see weird things. This is Red frickin’ Creek. Home of the strange and land of the depressed. You wanna see some odd shit, pop a squat beside me for a bit and keep your eyes peeled.” The man pulled a pack of smokes from his pocket, passed one to the woman, and lit them both up. She tossed her butt into the can and accepted the offering.
Seeing them sitting there chain-smoking made Tom grateful his wife had made him quit. It had been years. Even when it ended, he hadn’t gone near them, even though they’d called to him for a while. Long after he’d tried to reconcile with his wife, the death sticks sang to him like sirens to sailors.
“What does that mean? You see things here?” Tom asked, wondering if he was barking up the wrong tree.
“You do know what happened here, right?” the man asked.
“Doesn’t everyone?” Tom threw back at him.
“All them bodies. Children, mostly. Kids have an energy to them, a strong life force. Smother that out too early, and they’re bound to linger. That being said, I haven’t seen as much as felt things out here.”
Tom was surprised by how soundly and astutely the man was coming across. He pressed his luck. “Were you nearby on the night Brittany went missing?”
“I’m always around. Ever since I sued that trucking company for hurting me in an accident, I sit here most days and nights. It’s peaceful, if you can get on with the fact all them murders happened here,” the man said.
“You didn’t see anything?” Tom asked.
The man peered at the woman, and she nodded, speaking for the first time. Tom put her at thirty-five, but she sounded like she was in her late sixties. “Didn’t see so much as hear something. Thought I heard a scream around eleven. Buzz here had just gone in to use the can. We were going to go to bed.”
“You heard a scream out here that night? Around eleven?” Tom asked.
Tom grinned when he saw Buzz’s face go slack. He wasn’t sure if it was because the woman had used his name or because they’d become potential witnesses.
She suddenly looked afraid. “Maybe. Can’t be sure.”
“What did you do?” Tom asked.
“I peeked around the corner, didn’t see nobody, so I went in, locked the door, and went to bed. Didn’t hear anything else,” she said.
“Did you tell Buzz about it?” Tom asked.
Buzz shifted in his seat. “No, she did not. Why is this the first I’m hearing about this?”
“Because you worry too much, and I don’t want your heart to go off again,” she said.
Tom doubted the six-pack of empties on the concrete block, or the pack of cigarettes, was helping much.
“Bear in mind, Detective, it’s not that unusual for someone to scream around here in the dead of night. You may have noticed the residents of this here condo aren’t cut from silk,” Buzz said.
“Here’s my card. Anything else comes to mind, call me,” Tom said.
They left in a hurry, moving inside. Tom wasn’t sure if she’d really heard something, but it warranted a deeper dive into the area. He couldn’t do that now. Not on an empty stomach with a pounding headache, after a sixteen-hour day.
He walked up to the front doors on the other side of the building and pulled the handle. It was locked. Only ten names were on a buzzer system inside; at least another six slots were empty. Tom doubted this place had ever had full occupancy.
With a sigh, he got into his car, and started the drive to his house in Gilden.
_______________
Taylor stared at the ceiling, then plucked her phone from the nightstand. Three in the morning. She’d dozed off briefly after one, when they’d finally called it a night. The three of them had spent a few hours scouring the internet for stories of shadow entities, getting many different variations from different cultures. None of them sounded exactly like the one she’d encountered as a young girl.
It was so frustrating. Her ancestors were tied up in this. The book. They’d gotten so distracted by the shadow stories, they’d forgotten to keep looking through the journal. Taylor had it in the room with her, and she slipped out of bed, her bare feet pressing on the shag carpet. The book sat on a desk by the door, but she suddenly froze in fear.
A slight glow emanated from her phone, casting a dull shadow on the wall. Had it moved? She stayed still; the only part of her moving was her eyes as they frantically searched the room for it. Taylor had the relentless urge to climb back in the bed and pull the blankets over her head, only she knew that would do nothing against the creature from the drawing in the book.
It was malicious and demented. It fed on children. Maybe their flesh, organs, or souls. Taylor didn’t know the ins and outs of it, but she intended to find out. If she could understand it, she could destroy it once and for all.
She stood still for another long minute when she finally lunged for the book, snatching it and rushing over to the bed, where she turned on the bedside lamp. It came on with a click, the soft yellow light of the incandescent lamp cascading over the wood-paneled room. Nothing was in here with her.
Taylor found her breath again and smiled in spite of her fear. She needed to toughen up. Her whole life, she’d been afraid. Taylor thought she would be stronger when she went off to college, but when she got there, she didn’t leave her dorm room after classes for a whole week. It took introverted Karen to get her to go meet some people the second weekend.
To this day, Taylor stayed close to the streetlights when she walked the campus in
