A Witch Axe to Grind Page 9

  She could call Keith, of course. Ricky did mention that he reported the roving dog pack to the sheriff. But Keith Schwenk, as far as she could tell, got paid by the suspicion. This wasn’t law enforcement business. She didn’t want him involved.

  Occasionally, since she rarely had much walk-in business, Nann would close the store early if she was hot on the trail of something. Today, either the ad for Nick’s signing, the little story run by the paper, or word of mouth had brought in a couple dozen browsers. Somehow, a few people stopped in, expressing their confusion that this was a bookstore and not a furniture store. It hadn’t been a furniture store in Nann’s lifetime. At least no one came in looking for milk or mushrooms.

  Of course, having business was a good thing. Despite her anxiousness to get out to Old State Road, she chatted up customers, explained the rainbow paint scheme, or located a book someone wanted. The rest of Nick’s books sold.

  In between customers, Nann flipped through the book. She didn’t find a clue about Arthur Perkins. She did see a drawing of the original Founder’s House, which was a little better than a log cabin, next to a photograph of what people now called Founder’s House, the big Victorian she’d inherited from Aunt Nancy. The photo of the current house was from 1909, a little stable for horses near where the garage now stood.

  Finally, before five, the trickle of browsers ceased. Nann hung a “family emergency” sign in the window glass, just in case anyone else happened by. A minute later, she wheeled Cricket around to the south, picking up 104 for a couple miles. Cricket, even though she was the best car in the world, was a Suzuki Jimny, top speed about fifty-three miles per hour. State Route 104 was the kind of winding country road that people tested their muscle cars out on. The kind of road that harried soccer moms floored it on, to get their kids to the next activity.

  Luckily, only about seven or eight cars blew past her before she took the left onto Old State Road. Pocked with potholes and just wide enough for traffic in two directions, not a lot of traffic plied the blacktop ribbon. There were a few businesses here and there, but for the next twenty miles, there was nothing but farms and fields interspersed with woods.

  It would have been a pleasant drive, if Nann wasn’t looking for the home of a murder victim. In a few months, it would turn beautiful with the changing of the leaves. At every farm she neared, Nann got a case of the sneezes. The harvest was underway, the pollen of which exploded Nann’s histamine response.

  As dark fell, she pulled to the wide shoulder of the road near a roadside vegetable stand. Popping a couple Benadryl, she bought a few pounds of fruit for herself and Pokey, and a few root veggies.

  Sniffling and a little drowsy, she headed home. Nann would have to approach this some other way. Letting Cricket do most of the driving, she sat back, looking at the glow of distant windows lighting up against the coming dark.

  “HOW AM I GONNA FIND this guy’s house?” Nann washed and chopped veggies for Pokey, although he liked them dirt-covered just as well. “That road is miles and miles long.”

  Pokey’s voice came through the radio in the dining room. “Did you look in the phone book?”

  Nann scraped the vegetable cubes into his bowl. “Phone book? Who uses a phone book anymore?”

  The pig scampered into the kitchen on his miniature hooves. As he ate, his voice still issued from the radio. “Someone must. You got a new one in the spring. Don’t you remember? You laughed at it because it was about as thick as Time Magazine.”

  Though the information age had pretty much done in the phone book, they were still produced. The one for Brooklyn was more easily measured by the pound than the page. For this part of the county, both white and yellow pages measured about a quarter of an inch thick.

  Nann headed to the living room. She’d left the phone book on the tall, narrow stand where the house phone, no longer connected, still sat. It was one of those old Bakelite models, black and heavy enough to use as a bludgeon. Nann found it aesthetically pleasing, even if she didn’t have home phone service. She slid the slim volume from underneath the phone. In four pages, she found the Ps.

  “Is he in there?” Pokey asked.

  “Yeah, he’s in there.”

  “Aha!”

  Nann put the book back under the phone. “He has a number, but no address listed.”

  “Dang it.” Pokey wandered into the living room. “Hey, maybe I can help you.”

  “How?”

  “With my pig super-senses. A bunch of dogs probably smell pretty bad.”

  Nann frowned. “You’d walk for miles up and down a road smelling for dogs?”

  “Miles? Oh, hell to the no. You’d have to get me in the vicinity. Look at my legs. They’re inches long, woman.”

  “I’ll have to find another way.”

  “Maybe you could just wait until Monday and ask Ricky the mailman.” Pokey ran across the living room and hopped up on the low couch on his first try. “Could you put on the news?”

  Nann thought that was probably the only way to go. She dug the remote from the couch cushions. The county sheriff, Jerry Gynther, appeared on the screen. “...increase in violent crime as a percentage is probably inaccurate, given the increase in population due to the mill reopening, and starting a second shift. That would bring the percentage way down.”

  A reporter with a mic stood outside the sheriff substation in Amity Corners. “Even though the percentage of violent crimes might be lower, given the increase in the population as of late, this does not explain the spreading of incidents from the boundaries of Amity Corners to Port Argent, Fair Haven, and beyond.”

  Nann leaned forward, turning up the volume. Keith mentioned the increase in assaults and domestic violence. Now, the news had picked up on the story. There were statistics, a graph with an arrow pointing way up. A map of the county became blemished with the locations of crimes and violence.

  One man interviewed on the street blamed it on the new workers moving in to work at the mill. A woman claimed it was the stress of back-to-school time. Although Nann didn’t have children, she thought that back-to-school time would be more a relief than a stressor.

  What she did know was the sudden spike in violence was due to invisible bugs that manipulated dreams. They were now all over the place, not just in Amity Corners. “I don’t think I can wait until Monday to ask Ricky,” she said aloud.

  Pokey glanced at her over his shoulder. For once, her familiar didn’t have a word to say.

  Chapter 19

  She gassed up Cricket early Sunday morning and drove. Nann knew she couldn’t just aimlessly search, hoping for some happenstance that might direct her. Just past the intersection of Old State Road and 104, she pulled to the shoulder.

  On the bottom of her conjure bag was a little pocket. From this, she removed her Athame, a small black knife for Druid ceremonies. She held it in front of her in both hands. Eyes closed, she charged the knife. When she opened them, she traced the shape of the windshield with the tip of the blade. She performed the ceremony, speaking familiar words:

  “Divulge to me what my eyes can’t see

  cast away all anonymity,

  disregard the forms my mind finds real,

  let any magic stand now revealed.”

  The windshield took on a shimmer, like a heat mirage. Unfortunately, it was a late summer day. Actual heat mirages lifted from the roadway in some places. With the ceremony’s effect short lived, Nann was in for a long day.

  Long after noon, she took a detour to the closest restaurant, a pizzeria in Hannibal. After topping off Cricket’s tank, she headed back to Old State Road. She’d covered the whole distance, focusing on the right-hand side of the road as she headed northeast. Now, after driving up 104-B, she started at the far end of Old State Road and focused on the houses on the opposite side as she drove southwest.

  It was just after sunset, the sky still bright, when she saw it. Many of the mailboxes out here had only a number, some of those faded to near nothing. This wa
s one of those. Except in the shimmer of the ceremonial lens, it burned like a torch.

  Nann only saw it for a moment. She pulled over to the shoulder, performed the ceremony again. This time, the flame from the mailbox hurt her eyes with its white flame. Blinking away spots, she looked at the property. All she could see was a long driveway through the woods.

  “I guess this is the place, Cricket.”

  Her little yellow-green Jimny didn’t respond. Perhaps the dark and narrow drive made the car just as nervous as Nann. The steering wheel felt reluctant under her hand, but Nann maneuvered the four-wheeler up the path.

  When the trees swept back, Nann didn’t feel any better. An old farmhouse leaned toward her, empty windows staring her down. At some point, paint might have covered the warped boards. Now, they just shone silvery gray in the dusk light. The place sat beneath a low ridge. To the left, an outbuilding and a dog run looked just as run down. No vehicle parked outside. The front yard was a garden of burned yellow grass and droppings—a veritable dog toilet.

  “This must be the place,” she said. “Why can’t it be a nice split level, or a tidy ranch house?”

  Since Cricket was not greeted by a howling chorus, the dogs must be elsewhere. At least, this is what Nann hoped as she shut the car down and got out. She trod carefully toward the outbuilding. Even though the sky would remain bright for at least another hour, she used the flashlight ap on her phone. Had it been high noon, the creepy factor would’ve made her do the same. The cooling tick of Cricket’s engine sounded like nervous fingernails.

  Given the state of the buildings, Nann would doubt anyone had lived here recently. Yet the garbage in the yard, mostly forty-pound dog food bags, looked crisp, not yet sun faded. Nann moved closer. The Dutch door stood open on the bottom. After shining her light in, expecting an explosion of barking at any moment, she opened the top half and stepped in.

  Carpeted in dog beds, smelling overpoweringly of animal, the room revealed little as she swept her light across. On the far wall, a low porcelain trough stood. Next to this, a door led out back. This was odd, as the building was set right up against the looming ridge. On the right, a doorway led to the dog run.

  Nann whispered to herself, “Okay, awesome, you’ve proved a lot of dogs lived here.” She knew she was stalling. Nann needed to go into the spooky farmhouse. Still, she detoured to the back door of the low dog shelter.

  There was maybe a yard or so of space before the ground sloped up at a sheer, steep angle. Directly across from the door, she saw a hole in the rocky soil. Surrounding it were stakes, wooden and metal. A few had some kind of day-glow orange ribbon hanging from the tops, limp in the windless night. Nann studied the hole. She thought it might be a cave as her light caught layers of shale dripping with water. It was about a foot tall, maybe six inches wide. A chihuahua might fit in there. Despite the smallness of the hole, the stakes were spread widely, maybe six paces to each side.

  Nann thought it might be some kind of sinkhole, or something dangerous enough to mark off with stakes. Once upon a time, there might have been caution tape fencing it off. With a sigh, she knew she’d put it off long enough. She sidled around the back of the dog housing.

  Looking inside the dog run, she saw a lot of ropes, leashes and tethers. These were tied together in one big tangle. A few strands of orange ribbon stuck out. In places, she could see chewed edges, the aged exterior bitten through, revealing a brighter core. One huge dog toy? She mused. Not knowing what to make of any of this, and getting no closer to understanding how Perkins was connected with the Somniumites, she moved on.

  There was a lot of room to run around for dogs. Even though trees tightly surrounded the driveway, lots of open yard surrounded the house. Nann thought there were worse places for a dog to live.

  Just beyond the end of the run, saggy steps led to the back door of the farmhouse. An oversized dog door was cut into the bottom of the door. She creaked and groaned her way forward; found it unlocked. Damn. Hinges audibly dissented the motion as she pushed in. She saw nice hardwood floors extending beyond the mudroom. Unlike the outside, it was clean in here. Nann left the door open, in case she needed a quick escape, and stepped in.

  Furniture had been removed, only slight patterning in the dust attesting to recent occupation. Living room, kitchen on the other side, dining room beyond, bedroom to the left, hall and staircase to the right. Scary on the outside, cozy on the inside, she thought to herself.

  In the silence, floorboards creaked like gunfire. Nann looked around, unconvinced that anyone had lived in the home recently. But in the kitchen, she found a garbage can overflowing with microwave dinner packaging and paper plates. Through dusty panes, she saw the day fully fading. She wanted to get out of here soon. The upstairs awaited.

  Stair treads crunched like crusted snow. On the landing, she found her first hint of weirdness. Graffiti covered the white walls in black letters. This was not kids, nor gang member tags. Upon close inspection, she saw lines of text, perfectly horizontal. Some of the words were Latin, she thought. Without knowing what they meant, she walked down the hall to the farthest room.

  An office, she thought, a desk covered with papers and old books. More graffiti marred the walls, along with symbols she thought to be magic, but not a magic she was familiar with. The Druid Way was passed down verbally. Sigils and diagrams were not in her vocabulary. Nann entered, to get a closer look at the contents on the desktop.

  As she did, her phone light shifted the shadows. All except one. Instead of moving away from the light, this one moved closer. Nann saw the shape of it as it moved across the window, a human shape. It was coming straight for her.

  Chapter 20

  Nick O’Broin materialized from the shadow. “Ah. You found it. I thought you might.”

  Nann stood in shock. “You—you—you nearly made me pee my pants!”

  “I thought Druids would be used to such travel,” Nick said.

  “No. Nope.” Nann shook her head vigorously. “Negative. Nuh-uh.”

  Nick moved to the desk. “It wasn’t my intention to startle you. Maybe now I can finally figure out what Perkins was up to.”

  Nann’s brows knit. “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Human witches—who can say what they might get up to.”

  Her eyes widened. “Human witches?”

  “A strange bunch.” Nick shifted some papers, holding them to the last light of day.

  “Human as opposed to what?”

  Nick reached out and took the phone from her hand. “You’re a smart woman. Surely you’ve figured out that I’m not exactly human.”

  Nann had surely not figured this out. She suspected, yes. But as to what Nick O’Broin was? Not a single idea. Worried about looking dumb, she decided to drop her own bomb. “Anything there about the Somniumites?”

  Nick closed the grimoire he was studying and turned to her. “Somniumites? Now I know you’re far more than you appear, Nann.”

  “You didn’t know about them?”

  “Of course I know about them.” Nick scowled. Nann got the feeling he didn’t, but wouldn’t admit it. “It explains why I couldn’t track Perkins down. Dreams are the natural gateway between my home dominion and this one. It makes sense that Perkins would call up a dream-based entity if he wanted to hide his work from me. I find it uncomfortable to be here.”

  Her head spun a little. “Dominion?”

  “It’s called the Twih, an adjacent reality to this.”

  Uh-huh. Adjacent reality. Whatevs.

  O’Broin cast his phone light over the desk and freed a large sheet from beneath the other paperwork. The sheet of parchment was about a yard square. Nann puzzled over the connected lines, shapes, symbols. After a moment, he rocked back on his heels. “Now I understand why he adopted all those dogs.”

  “You do?” Nann looked over his shoulder. She didn’t see anything about dogs, just geometric shapes drawn all over, parts labeled with phrases in Latin, or symbols made of cu
rlicues. Nann hadn’t taken Latin. “Why?”

  “It’s the kind of thing all human witches do—summon creatures to do their bidding.” Nick absently traced a few of the lines that crisscrossed the square chart. “This area, like many areas on the southern Great Lakes, is charged with enough energy that humans can actually use it. I believe it has something to do with the last Ice Age. Pressure from the glaciers.”

  Nann was losing track. Humans, dominions, summoning. Arthur Perkins, as far as she knew, was a retired dentist, not a witch.

  At the same time, the energy thing made a kind of sense. When she’d first arrived in Amity Corners, boys were going missing, victims of a summoned creature. It turned out that the paper mill’s board of directors were members of the sorcerous Galère de Merlinite, and were murdering each other with sympathetic magic. Mythical creatures, Storm Hags, had tried to crash a party at Nann’s place. Maybe she couldn’t buy into alternate dimensions, but the magic energy thing?

  “Okay, so what about the dogs?”

  “Once Perkins summoned the Somniumites, he needed to feed them.”

  Nann had seen a couple of the ugly critters. “Feed them dogs?”

  “Feed them dreams,” Nick said. “Somniumites eat dreams and foster more vivid dreams in their prey for better future meals.”

  This made Nann feel a little sick. She tried to get the thought of one of those creatures actually eating her dreams. Ick.

  “All mammals dream, and some birds as well. As far as dogs go, young dogs dream more than old dogs. But large dogs dream for longer periods. If you looked at the history of the dogs Perkins adopted, you noticed a litany of abuse and neglect. Given those animals’ rough history, I’m sure they were ripe for the Somniumites’ favorite dish—nightmare.”

  Nann held up her hand. “Okay, dream-eating. I get it. Yuck. But what could Perkins possibly have to gain from causing people to have nightmares?”