By Al Bruno III
April 2nd: It took us about forty minutes to get from where we had been doing our surveillance to where I had parked. When we reached the edge of the forest, Cousin Roy again held some branches aside for us. I went first and was the first to see my Ford Escort parked off to the side of the road. I was also the first to see the police car parked in front of it, its lights off and the tall, athletic frame of Deputy Regina P. Bannister leaning against the hood. The stars were bright overhead, but they weren’t bright enough to reveal her expression.
“Evening, officer,” Cousin Roy said.
“Oh shit,” Sara whispered.
“We…” The Deputy walked over to her car and opened the back door. “Need to talk.”
As you long-time readers know, this would not be my first time riding in the back of a squad car, but it was my first ride with my Cousin riding beside me. Deputy Bannister told Sara she could sit up front as long as she didn’t ‘act squirrely.’ Sara promised she wouldn’t. And that was the only restraint we endured—no cuffs, no zip ties, just a little gentle parenting. She drove in silence, and I couldn’t help but notice that the radio and other equipment in the squad car were turned off. That was a little worrying, but when I gave a questioning glance to Cousin Roy, he just gave me a smug little wink.
Instead of a police station or a doughnut shop, our thirty-minute car ride brought us to a two-story home with a two-car garage just across the Maryland border. Deputy Bannister pressed the garage door opener clipped to the sun visor and pulled the squad car into the very crowded but organized space set aside for it. She got out of the car and opened the rear doors so my cousin and I could get out. Sara didn’t have to worry about a perp-proofed door, so she was already at my side.
Deputy Bannister pointed at a 1970s-era refrigerator near the steps that led into the house. “My husband’s got it filled with soda, juice, and energy drinks. Help yourself to something.”
“Husband?” Roy said with feigned outrage. “I thought we had something special.”
Everything went into slow motion as she turned back to shoot him a glance of grim mischief.
“I think participation in a criminal conspiracy is pretty special.”
Sara said what I was thinking. “What the Hell is going on?”
Cousin Roy didn’t reply. He was too busy grabbing a pair of Red Bulls. Deputy Bannister held the door open for us.
“Make yourself comfortable in the dining room. I’ll let Ethan know you’re here.”
“Ethan?”
She headed upstairs, unbuckling her gun belt as she did so. The dining room, like the rest of the house, was the very essence of subdued opulence. There was nothing ostentatious at all, but there was also not a damn thing that could have come from a Bob’s Discount Furniture or a family member clearing out their garage.
The overhead lighting fixture was an elegant joining of rectangles. The tablecloth looked to be plain white, but when you looked more closely, there was a pattern of interconnected butterflies along the edges.
Then there was the two-foot-tall bronze statue on the credenza. It depicted Medusa with a sword in one hand, and the head of what I assumed was Perseus in the other. Her body was nude, slender, and athletic, the snakes on her head relaxed against her scalp instead of writhing, and her face held the calm expression of the “Well, who’s next?” variety.
Sara and I sat on one side of the table, Cousin Roy on the other. The chairs were wide and comfortable.
“Roy?” I said. “What in the flying fuck have you gotten us into?”
He opened the first Red Bull and drained it with a series of gulps. “I’m working the case.”
“By skipping the frying pan and going straight into the fire?”
“Man, you got a real blind spot when it comes to cops,” Roy said.
Sara nodded and took my hand. “He’s kind of right.”
Indignant didn’t even begin to describe my reaction. “Nine times out of ten, law enforcement is part of the problem. They are tools of the powers that be.”
My cousin shrugged. “The powers that be keep the lights on and the trains running on time.”
Sara frowned. “That is not the clever retort you think it is.”
“Good morning, everyone.” A Black man walked into the dining room. He was short and bespectacled, with frizzy hair. He wore a bathrobe and pajamas, but no slippers, just dirty socks. He had a thick manila folder in his hand.
“I’m Ethan Hannigan.”
Cousin Roy opened his second Red Bull. “How could you not be?”
“You have a lovely home,” Sara said.
Ethan said, “We’re pretty blessed.”
I am very proud that I didn’t say anything about bribes or asset forfeiture. I just crossed my arms and asked, “What’s in the folder?”
“The truth,” Ethan said. “Or at least as close to the truth as we have been able to figure out.”
“Are you a cop too?” I asked.
“Oh, hell no!” He chuckled. “I’m a day trader, but after what happened, I’ve been trying to help Reggie.”
“Reggie,” Cousin Roy snorted. “I guess I know who wears the pants in this family.”
Ethan just smirked. “She said you were a pistol.”
“You two been married long?” Sara asked.
“We hit our five-year anniversary in August.” He smiled and set the folder down. “How long have you two been together?”
“A little over a month.” Sara looked at me and smiled. How could I not smile back?
He paused in going through the papers. “A month, huh? I asked Reggie to marry me after about a month.”
“What you got in that folder there?” Cousin Roy asked. “Your prenup?”
Ethan looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Prenups are for wimps.”
“Damn straight,” Sara said.
“What I’ve got here is everything we know about Bayard Estates. Reggie and I think it would be good to share information.”
“Wait a minute,” I turned to my cousin. “You managed to find the two people conducting a parallel investigation in town, managed to get arrested by one of them, and still managed to get them to help us?”
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his fingers behind his head. “Not bad for the family fuckup.”
“The arrest was a cover story.” Regina entered the room. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. It was obvious she had just taken a shower of the quick and efficient military variety. She walked past her husband, tracing an affectionate fingertip along his back before taking a seat at the table. “This way, whatever extrajudicial things we do in pursuit of this thing won’t come back to ruin our lives.”
I said, “And by ruin our lives, you mean your lives.”
Ethan and Regina exchanged a glance and then nodded.
“Well, okay then,” I said.
Cousin Roy said, “So day three of me traipsing about the woods spying on the place, she finds me.”
“I was aware of you way before that,” Regina said. “You aren’t inconspicuous.”
“Thank you. So she asks me what the Hell I am doing, and I spilled the beans.”
“And by that,” I said frostily, “you mean my beans.”
“Whatever. Listen, she and her sweetie pookie have a lot of information here, serious stuff.”
“Yes,” Ethan said, “and if the pookie can get us back on track, I will let you know what we know.”
It was an impressive presentation, with printouts, timelines, and eventually some homemade snacks.
The story began two years before Stan Russel’s arrival in Bridgeville. It was 2004, and a storefront opened in a dying strip mall on the east side of town. It was called Price Smart, and at first glance it looked like your average dollar store, but it sold nothing but Emblazon Unlimited products.
On paper, the owner of the store was a man named Rhett Vane, but in the three years the store was open, no one ever saw the man. The store was staffed by a seemingly never-ending stream of cute girls from out of town, and they seemed to rotate out every few weeks. No one ever knew where they lived, but they certainly made themselves a prominent part of the town’s nightlife, and they were a flirty bunch. Age and gender did not matter, but according to the many disappointed paramours, those girls were far more interested in making sure those nights ended with a new independent distributor on Emblazon Unlimited’s roster.
“She says they got a few suckers, too.” Cousin Roy couldn’t help commenting. “A great man once said that a guy will do anything as long as he thinks it’s foreplay.”
Regina said with a disapproving glare, “Actually, that was Susan Sarandon in the movie Bull Durham.”
“Never saw it.”
“Once Stan Russel arrived in town, the Price Smart started shutting down,” Ethan explained. “Not in an obvious going-out-of-business-sign-on-the-door way, but the stock on the shelves started dwindling, never to be replaced. And the hours it was open became pretty random.”
And the other thing that started dwindling was the parade of hotties that populated the store. Instead, it was now staffed by a pair of pale-skinned, gothy women who attached far more importance to black eyeliner and lipstick than they did to engaging with customers in any way. The women that everyone around town called ‘the Porcelain Twins.’ While that was going on, Stan Russel had begun making his moves on Bayard Estates, and by 2009, all the old residents had either moved out or died.
“Meanwhile,” Regina finally entered the conversation, “that damn MLM had its hooks in some people. They drained their savings buying products and taking courses. Realistically, it wasn’t that many people, but it seemed like every friend group had one person desperately trying to sell them off-brand Scrub Daddies and Beef Whips.”
“The secret ingredient is bull penises,” Cousin Roy chipped in.
“Then how is it a secret?” Sara commented.
Ethan pointed at her. “Well said.”
Regina cleared her throat in a way that was more of a warning than a request for a beverage. She went on to explain that slowly but surely, these independent distributors found themselves going further and further into debt. Their increasing desperation drove family and friends away, cost them their day jobs, and eventually left them facing foreclosures and evictions.
This was about the time Regina entered the picture. She was a freshly minted deputy, and she suddenly found herself having to help toss out members of a community she was just trying to become a trusted member of. But all was not lost, or perhaps it was, because a substantial number of these newly homeless independent contractors were given a bunch of newly renovated manufactured homes to live in at Bayard Estates, thanks to the generosity of its new owner, Stan “the Man” Russel.
“Except he wasn’t being all that generous,” Ethan said. “Because those folks, and a bunch of out-of-towners that seemed to have had similar stories, were pretty much indentured servants for Emblazon Unlimited. They had a roof over their head, cable TV, and food, but they were working for Stan in whatever way he wanted them to, and for however long he wanted them to.”
Cousin Roy dropped his voice to a baritone and sang, “I sold my soul to the company store…”
“Funny you should mention that,” Regina said.
“Yeah,” Ethan nodded, “because around 2010 or so somebody starts buying up all kinds of stuff at the local hardware store—bags of concrete, all kinds of lengths of PVC, sump pumps, flexible ducting, masonry anchors and security lights. Everything you would need to build a series of tunnels under a manufactured home community.”
“But,” Regina interrupted, “it wasn’t Stan’s LLC that did the buying. It was all done via a trust in the name of Luther Nord.”
“Luther Nord…” Sara said, “Isn’t he Rhett Vane’s lawyer?”
“Exactly.”
I made a mental note of that, and I also made a mental note that we may be dealing with a supervillain group called the League of Extraordinarily Funny-Named Gentlemen. “We are all assuming that they are building tunnels. For all we know, they are just adding some basements.”
“Dude, there are no sex dungeons in trailer parks.” Cousin Roy gave me a disparaging look. “I would know.”
Ethan grinned. “I just met the guy, but I bet he would. Thing is, though, we have proof they are digging tunnels.”
“Two years ago, a woman by the name of Daphne Mason showed up with the dirt-covered body of a man called… a man called…” Regina floundered until Ethan handed her a piece of paper. “Bill Smith. He was not in good shape, sweating, pale-skinned, and delirious. The triage nurse said it looked like sepsis, but before she could even finish getting his vitals, he coded right there.”
Regina went on to explain that Daphne was hysterical and desperate. The hospital staff did what they could, but he was too far gone for them to save him. In fact, the on-call doctor said it was a miracle Bill Smith had lived long enough to get there.
Later, a forensic investigation would show he died from an infected series of what appeared to be lamprey attachment wounds. This, aside from being disgusting, was also slightly impossible because you’d have a better chance of finding Chicago-style pizza in Bridgeville, Delaware, than a sizable lamprey population. And besides that, the species of lampreys you can find in Delaware are barely parasitic.
But Regina didn’t know any of this when she was dispatched to take a statement from Daphne. Since she had never seen Daphne before, Regina immediately realized she must be one of the new residents of Bayard Estates, not that Daphne wanted to give much information about anything at first. She was evasive and distrustful, and strange buzzwords kept slipping into her vocabulary. She talked about Bill Smith disrupting internal synergies by improperly managing proprietary data. And that he hadn’t been the same since he gained multi-level access to upper management while pursuing completion of the central presentation chamber and the greater egress. None of it made sense.
“Then she mentioned her son,” Regina said.
“She mentioned him last.” Sara’s voice became grim. “That says a lot.”
Ethan nodded. “The kid’s name was Zane, and there was no record of him being enrolled in any local schools.”
“Homeschooling,” I said. “The last refuge of loonies and cultists.”
“And Aunt Peg,” Cousin Roy added.
“And Aunt Peg.”
Regina went on, “That changed everything. Where was this kid? Was he still buried alive someplace? I started leaning on her.”
I assume it didn’t take Regina long to break Daphne, because the training and brainwashing regimen of Emblazon Unlimited had left her will just weak enough to succumb to a mild browbeating from the local PD. Everything started moving pretty quickly. Regina got her supervisors and Child Protective Services involved, but before they could arrive, Stan Russel reared his meaty head.
He said that Daphne was a disgruntled employee who had stolen a company car and “fled the campus” with the body of a co-worker who had died in a tragic gardening accident. I am not sure which part of that statement was more ridiculous, but equating a trailer park with a corporate campus is right up there.
“He gave a statement, which meant we had to take Daphne Mason into custody,” Regina explained, “but I was fine with that. No one trusted Mr. Russel, and after all, Bill Smith’s DMV records showed he was a resident of Bayard Estates. As far as I was concerned, Daphne Mason was a material witness.”
“It was a complicated situation,” Ethan said.
Regina flashed him a small smile, then said, “And then the press got involved…”
###
The Statement of Deputy Regina Bannister
It was nine PM, September 10th, 2012. I was parked about a mile from U.S. 13, just far enough away from it that a driver had a good, honest chance to slow down before hitting town. I’d already given two warnings and a ticket for an expired registration, so I figured I might as well do it now, before the high-end surveillance systems get installed in our cars and we won’t even be able to sneeze without it going onto a report somewhere.
I’m half listening to the radio chatter and trying to figure out a way to one-up Ethan’s anniversary present this year. I got him a gold fob watch, and he got us a ten-day cruise to Alaska. I don’t know how it works for other couples, but our relationship has become this kind of arms race of gifts over the years. I was honestly thinking of asking him if we could just write poems to each other or go camping.
Everything changed when I got the call, a 911 hang-up. The dispatcher had heard screaming and what sounded like a struggle before the line went dead at 841 Jonkers Street. I knew that house. It belonged to Joan Scanlon.
Joan Scanlon was a well-known local reporter. She had been working for the Milford Chronicle for over a decade, and she had covered some of the biggest scandals and crimes in Sussex County. Thanks to her, a number of politicians lost their jobs, some local businesses ended up having to pay massive settlements, and more than a few shady cops ended up in hot water.
She had brass balls.
And she showed up at the hospital the night Daphne Mason brought in Bill Smith. She had been investigating Stan Russel’s impact on the town for over three years. Just like everyone else, she knew something was wrong; she just didn’t know exactly what that was.
That was until Bill Smith became her informant. A few months ago, he had found himself realizing that he was in what was, for all intents and purposes, a cult. He had been okay with working more than twelve hours a day for Stanley Russel, first as a telemarketer and then later on lurking on every social media platform imaginable and turning every conversation he could into a chance to extol the virtues of Emblazon Unlimited. He was even okay with it when he and all the other residents of Bayard Estates and their families were strong-armed into engaging in acts of unlicensed tunnel construction running beneath each of the mobile homes and also having a single quarter-mile passage that came out in the nearby woods that your Cousin Roy nearly blundered across twice.
Then Rhett Vane became a presence in their lives. He had been living there all along in seclusion, only ever being visited by the Porcelain Twins, who, despite their heavy makeup and wigs, Joan was able to identify as Delphine Cotton and Mary Ann Topping. The first was a bunko artist, and the other had been twice charged and twice found innocent by a jury of murdering her first and third husbands.
But, as I said, once the tunnels were ninety percent complete, he began moving through them, offering suggestions and making introductions. He privately oversaw the installation of a large black door on one side of the tunnel complex, affixed to what should have been nothing but a solid wall.
Once that happened, Bill Smith said everything became strange and frightening—strange visitors and deliveries at all hours of the night, out-of-tune music coming up from somewhere in the tunnels an hour before sunrise.
And the animal bites. Circular wounds about six inches in diameter. Everyone began getting them, but no one remembered when or how.
Stan Russel told everyone it was just rats and to keep working and not ask questions.
Most of them didn’t.
And that was why Bill Smith reached out to Joan Scanlon. He knew about her regular articles about Bayard Estates. She had spoken out about many of the good people being chased out and the litigious nature of Stan Russel and his LLC.
Enough about that. Let me get back to 841 Jonkers Street. I was the first one there, and I found not just the house dark but the whole street. I radioed in to report a probable power outage, but all I got back was a faint voice I could barely make out. I chalked it up to radio interference of some kind, got out of my vehicle, Maglite in one hand and my firearm in the other. That was my nerves getting the better of me because once I reached the front door of the house, I had to fumble my Maglite into my armpit to jiggle the door handle. It was unlocked. I opened it, returned the Maglite to my left hand, and announced myself before entering.
The interior of the home was the ugliest kind of disarray: toppled furniture, broken mirrors, and silverware strewn about. The kind of thing I associate with the end stages of a long series of domestic violence calls. But Joan Scanlon was a lifelong bachelorette. My radio blared static randomly. I announced myself again.
Normally in situations like this, my training kicks in, rote discipline taking over for conscious thought. A checklist of protocols that equals survival. But now the hairs on the back of my neck were going up. I looked down to see that a small bare foot had stepped through a puddle of half-dried blood and left a trail up the stairs.
I followed it. What else was I supposed to do?
Using the beam of my Maglite, I followed the footprints up the stairs and down the hall. To the right, I caught a whiff of something both sweet and scorched. There was more blood. I slowed my pace as I reached the open door of the master bedroom. I pressed myself against one of the walls and slowly made my way to the edge of the door.
In the military, clearing a house was a group effort, but backup was miles and minutes away. I don’t ever think I’d felt so alone before. For a little while, I considered my next move. I decided to be brave.
“Sheriff’s Deputy! If anyone is inside, make yourself known!”
There was a long pause. The voice that answered me was familiar, but it somehow sounded decades older. It was Daphne Mason. After much legal wrangling, she and her child had been released into Joan Scanlon’s custody. As I said, the woman had brass balls. She had replaced one informant with a member of Stan Russel’s inner circle and kept that informant close at hand.
“What took you so long?” Daphne Mason said.
“Show yourself!” I ordered.
“Come here where I can see you.”
Disregarding everything I knew, I stepped into the doorway. If Daphne Mason had been armed, I would have been directly in her line of fire. Whatever orders I had ready to shout next became a ragged gasp. My vision was overwhelmed by the sight of a woman kneeling beside the bodies of Joan Scanlon and Zane Mason. They were propped up in a sitting position against the wall. There was blood and kitchen utensils all around them. The tops of the woman’s and the child’s heads had been hacked away. Everything above the nose was gone, everything. There was a single emergency candle in the center of the wound, the flame flickering and casting ugly shadows.
There was no stopping what happened next. I pitched forward at the waist and emptied the contents of my stomach down the front of my uniform and all over my shoes.
“She didn’t believe me,” Daphne Mason said. “I tried to explain that it wasn’t money laundering or organized crime. I told her about the Mire of Nix and the Great Machine. The Zoogs and the Egregores. Gorgo, Mormo and the Thousand-Faced Moon. And the Candle Barons, the Candle Barons most of all.”
Nothing she said made sense to me. All I knew was that two people were mutilated and a madwoman was speaking nonsense. I straightened up, my body wet with my own sick. I’d dropped my Maglite, but I didn’t know when. It had rolled away and was facing the far wall, so I had to aim my firearm by the sputtering candlelight.
“Lie down on the ground.” I meant to shout it, but all that came out was a whisper.
She picked up one of the knives. It was caked with gore. “The others are selfish; they want to keep it a secret like their books and statues. They don’t want anyone else to know dreams really do come true. I want the world to know. The whole world.”
“Put the knife down!” Now I was shouting. “Put it down and lie face first on the floor!”
“So I showed her with Zane.” She stood. “The Dance of the Candle Barons. There should have been seven, but he danced. Oh, how he danced.”
“Drop the knife!” I was screaming now. “Drop the fucking knife and get on the ground!”
“And when she saw, she understood. She begged me to… she begged me to…”
Daphne Mason seemed to lose track of her thoughts. There was a long, dangerous pause, then she said, “She had to see, she had to know.”
“Drop! The! Knife!”
But she didn’t drop the knife. She raised it up with a sure and steady hand. She said, “A dream is a wish your heart makes.”
And cut her own throat from ear to ear.
Her expression was joyous expectation. It reminded me of the expression on Ethan’s face when he handed me those two cruise tickets.
Again, my training kicked in. I put my firearm back in the holster and moved to save her. As an MP, I had seen a few suicides, usually the bullet-to-the-brain variety, and once it was a drill sergeant in front of his own trainees.
Just like those other times, I knew there was no saving Daphne Mason, but you still have to try. I swatted the knife away and began attempting to apply pressure to the wound while at the same time trying to keep the airway open. And I was doing this all with one hand while trying to raise dispatch on my radio with the other. Warm, wet redness seeped between my fingers. It was on my knees where I had knelt down, too. God, I was a mess, puke and blood everywhere.
The sound she made was this gurgling, increasing in intensity with every rise and fall of her chest. It rose and fell ten times before a final drowning gurgle escaped from the wound in her neck, and she was still.
I fell back into a sitting position, more blood on the bottom half of my uniform. I thought of how it would have to be taken into evidence when the forensics team got here, and I would never see it again. I was glad for that.
I thought about how I wanted nothing more than to go to Bayard Estates, drag Stanley Russel out of his fancy trailer, and beat him until he told me what the Hell was going on and then beat him some more.
The next part, the next part of all this, isn’t in the report, and I didn’t mention it to the department’s critical incident counselors or the Sheriff. I only told Ethan because I knew he would believe me.
But I know you three will believe me too.
As I sat there trying not to go mad and listening to my radio spit useless static, I started to hear music. It was a broken, melodic sound like a child’s music box that was winding down or needing repairs. My skin felt a swampy sensation- that’s the only thing I could call it- and I had that vertigo you sometimes get just as you’re about to fall asleep. Except I wasn’t falling asleep. If anything, I felt like I was falling awake.
The music seemed to shift around me, then I saw a sudden movement to my side. I spun around, my firearm back in my hand before I could register it.
The half-headed bodies of Joan Scanlon and Zane Mason were moving, limbs jerking in time to the music and lips smacking as though they were trying to speak. I watched, unable to comprehend what I was seeing, as the flickering flames of the candles embedded in the ruined remnants of their skulls brightened and discolored.
They were trying to stand…
###
Regina Bannister’s voice trailed off after that. I recognized the look in her eyes; Sara and I have it too. Cousin Roy and Ethan Hannigan, not so much. And speaking of Ethan, he started talking, picking up where she left off. He told us about the late-night call informing him that his wife was in the hospital. Not the ER, though; she was on one of the upper floors, the one reserved for people that had experienced a break with reality.
You know what I say about that? You either have a break with reality or reality breaks you.
“Sheriff Aparo told me they found her two miles from the crime scene,” Ethan explained. His eyes were fixed on his wife as she stared down at the dining room table. He continued, “She was easy to find, she had been shedding her uniform as she went, she was barefoot and in her underwear but she still had her gun in her hand. She was pretty incoherent and maybe that was just as well because when she started telling people what she saw…”
“But you believed her right away, didn’t you?” Sara said.
“She didn’t tell me what happened until days later. Not until I had gotten her out of there and let her recover,” Ethan said. “But when she told me I believed her. I never doubted her for a second. The only thing she’s ever lied about was my taste in ties.”
Regina laughed, a single happy expulsion of breath, but she still didn’t look up.
There was something about Regina’s story that triggered a memory from Ethan’s childhood. One of his favorite things had been the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! newspaper cartoon. A particular write-up and its accompanying art had really stuck with him. It was about the Lighthouse Man of Chungking, China.
A 1941 account described a man who supposedly had a candle stuck into a hole in the top of his skull. Every night he would walk the streets of his home city and, for a small fee, help lost travelers by lighting the way in his own very unique style.
Was this a real thing? Well, the comic strip was called Believe It or Not, but that memory was enough to set Ethan off on an Internet scavenger hunt.
What do you find when you search for ‘the Dance of the Candle Barons?’
Nothing at first. But then he made contact with an Italian textual critic specializing in Renaissance-era manuscripts, who shared with him a manuscript called Chorea Baronum Candelarum. The author of the text was unknown, but there was a working theory that it had been written by the greatest fan fiction writer of all time, Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri.
Yeah, that Dante.
No one went to Hell in this particular story, but in it the unnamed narrator is taken on a journey by a strange man named Zurama, who is described as skeletal, with leathery flesh and a ‘tortoise-like’ smile.
Not sure if it is that Zurama but damn did I flinch when I heard the name.
As punishment for a perceived blasphemy Zurama forces Dante to accompany to reclaim two students from a place called the Palus Nix. They traveled through a door made of black stone into a starless swamp littered ruins of cities and automata with enormous gears until they reached a ‘Sallow colored cottage’. The door was locked but Zurama had a key.
Inside were what the text described as “…eunuchi vultibus instar laternarum et corporibus ex sevo,” which, if I may translate for those of you with a useful college degree, means “…androgynous beings with bodies like wax and faces made of flame.”
There were seven of them, all seated on tall chairs, arguing with each other in a language Dante did not recognize but which sickened him. On the floor at the base of those tall chairs were Zurama’s students, a young boy and girl, twins. They had slit each other’s throats.
Outraged, Zurama began to shout at the strange figures, his voice slipping into their language with ease. One of the strange figures said something in response, and Zurama nodded with satisfaction.
Then Zurama turned to Dante and ordered him to sing. At first Dante didn’t understand, but when he finally did, he refused. Then Zurama did something terrible, something so terrible that Dante refuses to elaborate, but he did sing.
As soon as the first words of the hymn, ‘We praise you, God,’ left his lips, the dead twins began to get to their feet and began to dance in a way that reminded Dante of the movement of insects.
“Sounds like a Candle Baron dance to me,” Ethan said.
Cousin Roy smirked. “Sounds like Dante was on some good shit.”
Regina looked up at him, her expression becoming dangerous. “Is that what you think? That I was high?”
“Oh no.” Cousin Roy reached across the table and gave her hand a quick, gentle squeeze. “No. Don’t think that. I’m just an asshole.”
Sara nodded. “It is kind of on brand for him.”
Ethan put his arm around Regina. “Let’s just chalk it up to his roguish charm.”
There was a long, uncomfortable pause. We all looked at each other, but no one said anything. Still, though, it didn’t seem like our meeting was over.
“Brian,” Sara said, “you’re awfully quiet.”
Another long pause, then I said, “Sara, I already told you about Zurama. He’s either some kind of… thing that’s hundreds of years old, or it’s just a name creepy old mystics take to enhance their reputations.”
That surprised Ethan. “He’s a real thing?”
“I’ve never seen him myself. I’ve just come across what he left behind a thing or three, but that’s not the only familiar thing you told me about.” I held up my phone. “The Mire of Nix. The Great Machine. The Ruins of Creation. The Black Door. I know it all.”
“How?” Regina Bannister asked. She looked hopeful and frightened. After all, I was proving she wasn’t crazy, but that also meant there really were Giants in the Earth, that this wasn’t all some big Scooby-Doo-style misadventure, and that it was all the work of cruel millionaires with a Spirit Halloween fetish.
Ethan said, “I think we need to hear about this.”
“We all need to hear this,” Sara said.
“You’re right, but if we are going to keep going, we are also gonna need some coffee,” Cousin Roy said, “…and sandwiches.”
.png){kind=link}