The max porter box set, p.33
The Max Porter Box Set, page 33
Drummond paused. He scratched his jaw and made sure he had Max’s full attention on this next point. “Sandra used a location spell, didn’t she?”
Max didn’t like the sound of that. “Yeah. So?”
“She shouldn’t start to rely on that. They can be finicky spells. Not always reliable. But all magic, even the little things like a location spell, has a cost. Sally Stroud learned it that night. When I told her what had happened, she wasted no time in setting up a location spell.”
Stroud told Drummond it would be difficult to find another witch, especially one with evil intent. Such a witch would undoubtedly use a ward or spell to hide from prying eyes. But that witch would be stuck when it came to the children. Either she would not shroud them from location spells and such, in which case, Sally could find them easily, or the witch would go to the effort of hiding the children with numerous wards or spells.
“That kind of magic — enough to hide a dozen children — will create a hole in my magical vision,” Stroud said. “In other words, I’ll be able to guess where she is because there will be a section of the town in which I can’t see anything.”
Fifty-two minutes passed before she called for Drummond. She said she thought she found them. She wasn’t sure, though. Closing her eyes, she said she would push further in.
“Where?” Drummond asked, his fingers clenching.
She swore she could sense them. Glowing.
Placing his ghostly hat back on his pale head, Drummond said, “Max, listen to me. That sweet woman — her eyes burned out. I watched smoke pour from her sockets and flashes of fire. She screamed and fell to the floor dead. I must have stood there for ten minutes, just watching her, like I expected her to get back up and tell me where the kids were hidden. But she never moved again.”
“Is that why we’re out here?” Max said. “Is she buried here?”
Drummond shook his head slow and deliberate. “I don’t know what happened to Sally Stroud’s body. I left that night and went back to my office. I grabbed the fake book where I keep my whiskey, and I started drinking. It was over. I had no leads, no way to find those kids, and a witch powerful enough to kill another witch just for looking. Anything I could think of — and to be plain, I couldn’t think of anything — it didn’t matter. If those kids were alive, they wouldn’t be for much longer. It was ugly and terrible, but I drank and reminded myself of the cases I had solved, the good I had done. You can’t save everybody, I thought, but at least you tried your best.
“Except I was wrong.
“I had given up, quit because I couldn’t think of what to do, when instead, I should have been wracking my brain, going over the case again, searching for any clue, and I should never have stopped until I either succeeded or the police found a bunch of dead bodies.”
“I’m sorry,” Max said. “And I hear you. That’s why I came looking for you. I’m out of ideas, but I hoped you could point me in the right direction.”
“You never wanted this case from the start. You came out here hoping that I would tell you it’s okay. That you fought the good fight and sometimes you have to lose the battle to win the war. You wanted me to give you an out. But it’s not that simple.”
Max scowled. “You really think you’re responsible for the deaths of those children? You didn’t kill them. That witch did. You tried to save them. You can’t carry the burden of every death around you. That’ll warp your brain. Lead you to self-destruction. If I did that with this case, I wouldn’t be able to help any others in the future.”
“Told myself pretty much the same thing around my third drink. And maybe, if it all had ended there, maybe I would’ve woken up the next day hungover but believing that I had done my best and I should move onward. But as I sat at my desk, opening my throat to fiery whiskey, I had a thought — it would have been too hard to move all those kids from the orphanage without being seen or heard. All those kids? Some would have been crying. Some might have even yelled out for help. Herding them out was too cumbersome, too risky.”
Max agreed, his mind falling into Drummond’s case. “She never left the orphanage, did she?”
Drummond had smacked his leg into his office desk as he stood. Recalling that Cooper had said he couldn’t see much in his vision other than the children, Drummond asked himself a crucial question — why? Why couldn’t Cooper see anything else? Fear, sure, but for a seasoned cop, fear would have the opposite effect. Cooper should have become hyperaware.
What if he saw nothing because there was nothing to see — because the room was so dark? The only place in that building which would be dark like that — meaning no windows — and also large enough for all the kids had to be the basement. Drummond swept up his coat and hat as he rushed out the door.
Driving from Winston-Salem to Greensboro only took about forty minutes — in 2017. But back in 1939, without a highway system or a car that could hit seventy miles an hour, Drummond had to drive for two hours.
The orphanage, a block of brick and misery, had a cold, empty look that night. Not a light on. Not a sound from inside. Like a sarcophagus — lifeless but not empty.
Drummond picked the lock with ease and entered the welcome lobby. The air smelled strong of cleansing supplies. He guessed the headmaster put the kids to work every day scrubbing, scouring, and sweeping the building to an immaculate state. He wondered who would clean up the headmaster’s blood.
With his old .38 in hand, Drummond hustled down one hall and up another in his search for a stairwell. He found it at the end of the second hall. When he opened the door, he heard soft chanting.
As he descended the stairs toward the basement, the chanting grew louder. His heartbeat matched the steady pulse of the witch’s voice. The temperature rose with each step down as if he lowered into the depths of Hell. When he finally reached the bottom, he wished for Hell. It would have been a better sight.
The twelve children were all dead. But they no longer rested shoulder-to-shoulder on the ground. Back when Cooper had seen that image, it may have been true. But that time no longer existed. The witch had cast her spell — blood magic requiring the virgin sacrifices of youth and innocence. Powerful stuff.
“I’ve seen a lot in my time — both when I was alive and after I died,” Drummond said, once more drifting toward the log. “Never have I witnessed anything so terrible as I had that night. It wasn’t just that the children had been gutted. Or the blood — and there was more blood then I ever experienced. It coated the ground as if a water line had burst and flooded the basement. Everywhere I stepped, I heard the slosh of my shoes in blood. But that was nothing compared to what she had done to their bodies.”
“You don’t have to go through it all again,” Max said, trying to hold back the wobble in his voice. “I get the picture.”
“You need to hear it. You need to understand where this all sent me. Because I’ve seen slaughtered cattle that were treated better.”
Drummond stood in that basement, fighting to maintain his sanity while swallowing against the gorge in his throat. The witch had split open the children and gathered their entrails and organs in large bowls. The bodies were then pressed up against the walls, arms and legs spread out, like nightmarish tapestries.
Off to the side, a fire burned on a raised platform. The bowls filled with the children’s innards surrounded the platform. In the center, the witch sat on her knees with her arms crossing her chest and her eyes closed. She swayed as she chanted. The stink of burnt meat permeated every inch of the basement.
“I thought the odor came from the children, but I was wrong. The witch, still in a trance of some sort, lowered her hands. I saw twelve, thick crystals embedded in her chest. Each one glowed a soft red.”
Max said, “I’ve never heard of that kind of magic. What was it?”
“I had no idea back then. All I knew was that I could have shot her,” Drummond told Max. “I had a sight on her. I could’ve pulled the trigger and she’d have died before she even heard the gunshot. But the rage swelling inside me wouldn’t let it be so easy. She had to suffer. I holstered my .38 and climbed the stairs. At the top, there was a fire ax. I picked it up and as I came back down the stairs, I felt that fire in me blaze strong. I went right after her. That’s when I learned what she was doing.”
The witch’s eyes snapped open. They were filled with a bright, red light. She flicked her wrist and Drummond sailed across the room as if punched by a giant. Back on his feet, he charged again, and once more the witch parried him with barely a motion.
“No way would I get to her by force. So, I did the next best thing — I bluffed. I got up, and this time, instead of running, I stepped as close as I thought she would let me get. Then I looked off to the side and nodded as if I was signaling somebody behind her. Stupid trick, really, but it worked. She turned around, and by the time she spun back on me, angry and ready to kill me, I was already swinging that ax. I buried the blade into her neck. Blood sprayed out to the side, and I yanked it out. She was alive but stunned. I didn’t stop. The blade was dull, so I had to hack and hack and hack. Eventually, I chopped her head off.
“It was brutal and horrible, and it was one of the few times I ever had to take a human life. It wasn’t over, though. I wouldn’t learn this part until later, but now I know that she was trying to do more than gain a lot of power, a lot of strength. She wanted to be immortal. There are some kinds of magic, the rarest kinds, that supposedly tap into the primal forces of all existence. Most witches I’ve ever talked with about it will say it doesn’t exist. That it’s nothing more than witch fairy tales. But I know what I saw. In all these decades I’ve been around, I’ve never once seen anything like it again.”
“You said it wasn’t over.” Max looked at the log and started to have a bad feeling. “What happened?”
“She had been in the middle of casting her spell. If she had succeeded, according to a trusted source, she would have absorbed the life energy of those kids — when she killed them, she had put that energy into the crystals. Anyway, she would have taken that energy and put it into herself.”
“Only that didn’t happen.”
“No. Yet I could see right away the tragedy I had created. She had no head, no way to speak the proper words, no way to stop what she had started. She was dead but her body refused to die. And the kids ...” Drummond swallowed hard. “The kids were trapped, too.”
“Those crystals?”
“Every child had been murdered, yet they could not rest. They couldn’t even have the existence I now have as a ghost. They’re stuck in those glorified stones, deprived of any solace or rest. Stuck in the unending horror of what had happened to them.”
When he faced Max again, there seemed to be tears welling in his eyes. Max figured it was a trick of his ghostly glow in the deep darkness of the woods — after all, ghosts don’t have tears — but it sure looked real. Max made a mental note to ask Sandra about the whole tear thing.
Drummond moved in close, reaching out to hold Max’s shoulders, and only stopped at the last second. “You’ve got to believe me. I did everything I could to fix things, but I had to have it all cleaned up before anybody discovered the basement. Once the cops got involved, it would be over. I called Malone.”
“Who’s that?”
“I never told you about Malone? Oh, he was sort of a mentor to me. When I first got started learning about ghosts and witchcraft and all of it, I self-taught. He found me one day in the occult section of a bookstore. Hey, wipe that astonished look off your face. I can research stuff, too. I just prefer a more hands-on approach to getting information. Anyway, Malone is the one who taught me a lot of the basics. So, I called him in. He took one look and, after he threw up, he said there was nothing we could do. The kind of magic this witch attempted to access is called eternal magic. It’s not supposed to exist, and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe that’s why the whole thing got botched, even if I hadn’t killed her.
“Whatever the case, that body with those crystals, those kids, it was stuck forever and there was no breaking it. Worse than that, once word got out, every witch in the area would be trying to get that body. It was powerful stuff, and they would all want it. The Hull family, too. They’d have gone nuts for it, if they ever knew. So, I made sure that never could happen.”
Max gestured toward the log. “You brought her out here, didn’t you? Buried her under there.”
“We did. Put her in a pine box, warded the box, and buried her. Warded all the trees around here, too. Even some of the stones. No spell can find her. No spell can get to her. Nobody can even get close to this spot.”
Max recalled how the place looked like a dark copse of trees before Drummond had touched the symbols. “It’s cloaked from everybody.”
“I’m the only thing that can unlock the symbols, and now I’m the only ghost that can get this close to her. I know those kids aren’t at rest, but this was the best I could do for them.”
“I’m sorry to hear all that. You know it’s not your fault, though.”
“Of course it is. Are you listening at all? If I had taken the case seriously from the start, or if I had not given up when I ran out of viable leads, or if I had pushed harder for information from Cooper, or anything like that, the chances are pretty good those kids would have lived a long, healthy life. And if I had still not found them, if I had been too slow getting to that basement, I would have gotten there sooner than I did. I could have stopped those kids from being trapped in that crazy spell. Understand? That’s why you can’t stop. Not ever. Believe me, you don’t want deaths like this on your shoulders.”
For a minute, Max said nothing. When he finally spoke, he simply said, “I’m not quitting.”
“Good. Then what’s our next move?”
“Now who’s not listening? I came here to find you because I’m out of leads. Whether you want to hear this part or not, I kind of expected all of this work to go nowhere. I had hoped a lead would pan out, but I’m not surprised.”
This pricked Drummond’s interest. “Why?”
“Because we’ve been lied to from the start.”
A noise from behind grabbed their attention. Max popped on his phone and spread the light in the direction of the sound. A shadowed figure burst from behind a tree and ran off.
Drummond slapped the symbols on the trees, shrouding the area in darkness. “Get him!” he said as he flew through the pines after the receding figure.
Chapter 19
MAX USED HIS PHONE TO LIGHT THE WAY as he raced along the uneven terrain. Though his footfalls and breathing filled his ears, he still managed to hear the snapping branches as the man tried to escape. Max peeked off to the right. He glimpsed Drummond’s pale light zipping through the dark.
But looking at Drummond meant not looking at the ground. Max’s foot snagged a root, taking him down hard. His cheek smacked against a sharp rock, and he felt his warm blood wetting his face.
He clambered back to his feet and searched for any sign of Drummond or the man. Only darkness. Then from behind, he heard Drummond shout in pain.
“For Pete’s sake!” Drummond said. “This guy’s wearing a ward against me.”
Max whirled around and saw the ghost’s light. Taking his approach as fast as he dared, Max kept his phone lighting up the way ahead while pausing every few feet to keep oriented on Drummond’s glow. But he could tell he moved too slow. If he didn’t risk another fall, the man would get away. Drummond could follow him, but since the man had a ward, he most likely had other magic to thwart Drummond in the long run.
Clenching his jaw, Max picked up his pace. He refused to lose another lead. He refused to lose, period.
Keeping his focus on the ground, he sped up, barreling through the brush and weaving around the trees. He tried not to look for Drummond, to trust his own sense of direction and know that his partner would alert him to any major shift. But he still glanced up a few times. The last time he looked, he saw amber lights. They were heading toward the road — apparently, much faster to reach when going in a straight line.
Quit the sarcasm and think!
Shutting off his flashlight, Max pushed onward using the dim streetlights to guide him. Blood trickled into his mouth, coating his tongue with a bitter, coppery taste. Rather than chase after the man, Max angled his approach, hoping to cut off the man’s escape.
The man caught sight of Max and angled away like a sailboat tacking for position. Max chanced a glance at the road. He couldn’t tell how close they were — too difficult in the half-dark with the streetlights flickering between the trees.
He vaulted over a fallen pine. Sap stuck to his hand. He rubbed his palm against his pants but his mind yelled to stop wasting time — nothing else mattered but catching that man.
“Keep on him, Max,” Drummond said. “I got an idea.”
He soared about ten feet ahead, then pivoted directly into the man’s path. Max understood right away. As Drummond crouched and held his hands over his hat, Max found the strength to run harder.
The man peeked back, saw Max gaining, and pushed on straight for Drummond. Two feet away, the man’s ward smacked into Drummond’s prone form. Drummond’s anguished yell erupted as he fell over, but for the man, it must have been like running into a solid wall.
Max watched as the man flattened into an invisible barrier of his own making. He jolted backwards, flailing his arms as he lurched. His heel twisted on a rock, and Max heard the crash of a body into sticks and leaves.
Shooting forward, Max leaped onto the man. With his knee locked on the man’s chest, Max made a tight fist and struck him hard in the jaw. Twice more he hit the man.
Ignoring the burn in his lungs as he fought to catch his breath, Max pulled back his fist one last time, and said, “Who the hell are you?”
“Get off of me.”
