“Bruce, Mira, I’d like you to meet my friend, Vincent Porter. We went to seminary together, he’s good people.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Garrison.” Vince shook hands with Bruce, a tall but very skinny man who looked like the kind of person who ate only vegetable protein and exercised more than was healthy. “I hope Ed hasn’t been giving you any headaches.”
“He’s wonderful,” Mira said, a warm tone struggling against her pinched expression and haunted eyes. “Our kids love him. I’m sorry, Reverend Porter, Edward didn’t mention which church you worked at in town?”
“I work for Lighthouse Recovery Center, ma’am.”
It hadn’t seemed possible that her worries could get more obvious but her right eye picked up a nervous tic that clearly broadcast a new level of concern. “The rehab center?” She turned to her husband. “Honey, you don’t think Danica is involved with drugs, do you?”
“No one’s saying that,” Bruce said, waving for Ed and Vince to follow him in.“It’s just that Mr. Porter is used to seeing people wander off and figuring out where they’ve gone and when Ed suggested he help us look around I agreed.”
“I’m happy to do whatever I can,” Vince said, looking around as they walked into a small hallway by stairs upwards. Dim lights in the living room on the left lit the hall and the smell of garlic and bacon wafted through from the kitchen at the other end. “You’ve got a real advantage over what I usually do, too. The police won’t spend a whole lot of time hunting for an addict that wanders off but they’ll all turn out for a fourteen year old girl who’s gone missing. Has an officer arrived yet?”
“We haven’t called the police yet,” Mira said, looking mystified. “I wasn’t sure we needed to and she hasn’t been missing for twenty four hours yet, anyway. She came home from school and disappeared before we could eat dinner.”
“Waiting a day is a myth. You need to call and report her missing right now.” The Garrisons hesitated, confusion evident in their expressions, and Vince realized they were probably still confused by the unfamiliarity of their situation. He spun to face Ed. “Call now.”
His friend was already pulling out a cellphone, putting an arm on Mira’s shoulder and gently pushing her towards the living room. “I’ll get you started, Mira, but the dispatcher will want to get some details from you.”
Bruce made a motion to follow them but Vince made eye contact and tilted his head towards the stairs to the house’s second floor. The father raised his eyebrows and said, “You want to see her room?”
He actually wanted to talk to them separately but that was best left unsaid. “If you don’t mind. I won’t touch anything, better to leave that for the police, but it sounds like she left in a hurry and she might have left something out that she wouldn’t usually.”
“Right.” He started up the stairs, saying, “Do you want to talk to her brother?”
“Not yet. Is he still eating dinner?”
“Doing homework, I think.”
Bruce led him to a decent sized bedroom decorated with a distinct nautical theme. The desk backboard was stylized like an old fashioned ship’s wheel and had the name Danica engraved on a stylized prow jutting over the drawers. A red headed mermaid decorated the bedspread. A guitar sat in one corner and a pair of flipper shaped slippers poked out of the closet. Vince looked it over but didn’t see much out of place.
Not much but not nothing.
“Is Danica your daughter’s name?” He asked.
“Yes, her brother is George.”
Vince crossed to the desk and glanced over it, frowning. “Has she ever left the house without her cellphone since you got it for her?”
“No…” Bruce peered over his shoulder, looking more concerned. “But we make them put them in their rooms during dinner and we confiscate them if they aren’t plugged in and out of their hands during dinner and homework time.”
“You check often?”
“Most nights before and after dinner. It’s been there since I got home tonight.”
“The light in the corner is blinking,” Vince mused. “She’s got notifications. Can you unlock the phone and look at them?”
“Mira and I can unlock all the cellphones in this house,” Bruce said, sounding a bit defensive. He picked up the phone and unplugged it from the wall, thumbing at the screen as he muttered under his breath. Vince noted the phone case had a finned warrior with a trident on it. He tried to place the source of the art but couldn’t so he filed that away for later, if it was important. “Strange. It won’t unlock.”
Bruce popped the phone out of its case and turned its unadorned black body over in his hand, frowning. “This isn’t her phone. We got her the green one.”
“Can’t you read the notifications without unlocking the phone?”
“Yes.” He turned it face up again and started slightly. “Message from Brandon?”
“Boyfriend?”
“George’s friend.” Bruce keyed something into the phone and shook his head. “This is George’s phone. Why is it here? George!”
In spite of his wiry build Bruce was still able to put the fear of dad into his children and George appeared in the doorway before the second syllable in his name died away. He looked to be twelve or thirteen. “What’s up, dad?”
“Why does your sister have your phone?”
“She doesn’t!” George looked offended at the idea that his sister had touched anything of his. “Mine is on my dresser.”
The three of them trooped down the hall to George’s room where a phone case sat face down on a chest of drawers with a charging cable running into it. When Bruce turned it over they discovered there wasn’t a phone in the case, the cable was just taped to the case so it looked like there was something plugged in there.
Vince snorted. “That’s a new one. She must have moved his phone so it would take you longer to notice hers was missing. At least we know she planned this ahead of time.”
“Why?” George asked, clearly mystified by the idea.
“That’s not my area of expertise,” Vince admitted. “In my field of work it’s usually pretty obvious from the get go. I don’t suppose your daughter had any major changes in behavior in the last month or two? Has she possibly changed the way she dressed recently?”
“She’s been pretty normal,” Bruce said.
“Yeah, except she’s obsessed with that stupid fish musical,” George put in.
Bruce rolled his eyes. “Normal. Except I guess she started wearing halter tops again a couple of weeks ago even though she normally complains about the cold. Her mother’s been worried about it.”
Eyebrows raised, Vince said, “Short sleeves? Well, that’s unusual but doesn’t really help me. If it was one of my clients I’d expect things to go in the opposite direction so she could hide her arms.”
“She’s not getting high,” George said with the kind of impatience only middle schoolers could pull off. “Unless watching Disney movies constantly counts.”
“Not as far as the law is concerned,” Bruce said. Then he pointed towards George’s desk in a meaningful fashion. “Now get back to work.”
“Yeah, I’m working,” George said, slumping into his desk chair in adolescent fashion, poking his homework suspiciously.
As they went back down the stairs Bruce asked, “Does any of this help you any, Mr. Porter?”
“Sort of. I can’t tell you why your daughter is doing anything but I think I can help you find her. She’s got her phone with her, right?”
“Yes, but I don’t know if we can get the phone company to locate it very quickly,” Bruce said. “Don’t you need a warrant or something?”
“Maybe not, since it’s on your account,” Vince said. “Even if they’re willing to ping it for you it will still take a while to get ahold of someone who can, though. I think you can do one better. That phone was a Samsung, right? So your daughter must have a Google account.”
“Yes…” Bruce clearly wasn’t following what he was getting at.
“You can log into that, too, right? So pull her search history on her browser and Google Maps. Five times out of six we can tell where a client’s gone just by looking at their searches over the last twelve hours. Most people aren’t savvy enough to scrub that information.”
Bruce nodded vigorously, suddenly energized, and said, “Yes. That’s a good idea, let me grab my tablet.”
For the first time since arriving at the Garrison household Vince had a moment to himself. He took a deep breath and let it out, nerves jangling. He still wasn’t sure he should have let Ed drag him into this mess, he wasn’t a private detective. Sure, he’d gone looking for runaway addicts a few times but it wasn’t his favorite thing.
He glanced into the living room, to check on Ed and Mira, but found that they were still on the phone. Unsurprising, he hadn’t been upstairs more than a few minutes. He was considering going in to listen to their conversation when his own phone vibrated and chimed a soft series of musical tones.
He thought he’d set it to silent. Curious, Vince pulled it out of his jacket pocket and fumbled with the screen. To his surprise there wasn’t a notification on it. Maybe he’d cleared it by accident. He was about to unlock it when Bruce popped up carrying a tablet, saying, “I’ve got it here.”
Vince shoved his phone back in his pocket, assuming it couldn’t be that urgent, and said, “Let’s have a look.”
The search history didn’t hold much of interest but Danica had looked up a Lutheran Cemetery on New Jersey Street in Google Maps less than two hours ago. A shiver of nerves went down Vince’s back. “Do you have family buried there?”
“No.” Bruce looked incredibly annoyed. “This better not be some kind of Halloween thing. She said she was too old for trick or treating two years ago, you’d think she’d know she’s too old to hang out in graveyards.”
Vince looked at his watch. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet but the cemetery was on the other side of the river and it could take them as long as an hour to get there, depending on traffic. “Well it’s getting late. We’d better get there before it gets on towards midnight.”
“Let me tell my wife then we’ll take my car.”
They arrived at the cemetery a few minutes before ten, piling out of the Garrison’s comically overlarge SUV, breath misting in the autumn air. Ed and Mira were still at the house, waiting for the local police to make an appearance. That left Vince and Bruce walking up to the graveyard’s gate and letting themselves in. Getting through didn’t take a lot of work. At some point there had been a lock on the gate but time and moisture had taken a toll on the latch and it didn’t look like it closed anymore.
Not that they had any illusions about that. The gates were wide open when they arrived and the only reason Bruce hadn’t driven right in was Vince counseling against it. As they walked towards the gate Bruce turned back to eye his parking job on the side of the drive, clearly concerned about someone on the main road clipping his ride. “Is there a reason we’re walking?”
“I’m hoping this makes the car more likely to start later.”
“Right.” Bruce turned his discontented gaze to Vince. “Are you worried about some kinda superstitious mumbo jumbo? Just cause it’s Halloween doesn’t mean the graveyard is haunted.”
“Let’s hope you’re right, Mr. Garrison.” However, when Vince crossed over into the cemetery’s confines he felt the change instantly. The air grew still. The birds grew quiet. His heart beat faster.
Something was amiss.
There were certain things that followed along behind the supernatural and a lot of them were starting to line up. Vince shot a sideways glance at Bruce, gauging the man’s temperament. Ed had mentioned the Garrisons both worked for some kind of software developer so they were probably level headed, logical people. The question was, were they too logical?
“Try calling Danica, Mr. Garrison.”
“Good idea.” Bruce fished his phone out and tinkered with it for a few seconds while Vince did his best to watch him out of the corner of his eye. Things turned out a lot different than he’d expected.
After a few seconds of waiting a distant trill of notes started drifting over the graves from the northern part of the cemetery. Vince blinked in surprise. He hadn’t expected Bruce to even get a signal, much less connect with his daughter. The two men headed towards the sound, Bruce picking up speed as he shoved his phone back into his jacket pocket.
“Danica!” His voice echoed off the headstones. “What are you doing out here? Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in?”
As Vince jogged along behind him little details began jumping out at him. His feet were pounding on the ground yet they made no noise. The music in the distance kept playing in spite of the fact that Bruce had ended the call. The fact that the phone in the distance was playing the same tune his own phone had played when it rang at the Garrison house.
There was a strange, misshapen thing looming up at the far end of the graveyard, a dim light flickering near its base. The two men slowed to a stop on one side of a narrow dirt path, the noise and light coming from a structure on the other. It looked like a mausoleum of some kind, though it was hard to be sure. There were at least four pairs of pants draped haphazardly over the grave along with a mess of jackets and shirts. A line of five cellphones sat propped along the base.
One of them was still ringing.
Vince crossed the path and picked it up. It wasn’t green and it was still in a chunky, waterproof case so he guessed it wasn’t Danica’s. Tentatively he answered it saying, “Hello? Can I ask who this is?”
No one answered.
“I found this phone on the ground in a graveyard,” he went on. “Do you know who it belongs to?”
The phone chimed with the end of call tone. Confused, Vince looked at the phone but it had returned to the lock screen and he had no way of unlocking it and looking at the call history so he figured that was a dead end. He put the phone back on the ground.
Bruce was holding a glittery tank top and looking very confused. “Why would she take off her shirt in the middle of the night in a cemetery? With four other people? In October?”
It was a sensible enough question but Vince wasn’t sure this was the right time to focus on answering it. He dug through the clothes to get a good look at the mausoleum itself. As he pushed a pair of jeans aside he found himself staring at the stoney eyes of a mermaid carved into the side of the grave.
When he shoved the rest of the clothes to the side they tumbled to the ground in a rush of stale, greasy air. Vince swallowed hard. “Call Danica again.”
Bruce gave him a disbelieving look. “Again? Why! Her phone’s right there.”
“I want to hear the ringtone again.” By now the other man was looking at him like he’d grown another head but he pulled out his cellphone and dialed. A few seconds later a green phone started ringing. Vince pointed at the phone. “Have you ever heard that tune before? It’s not a default Samsung ringtone.”
“No, I don’t know the song,” Bruce snarled. “Is it important?”
“The other phone was playing the same tune when it rang,” Vince said, pulling his own phone out and looking at it. “When I was at your house mine rang with it, too.”
As he said it Danica’s phone stopped ringing, even though Bruce hadn’t touched his screen again. Confused, Bruce lifted the device to his ear and listened. After a few seconds he tapped the screen and shoved it back into his pocket. “Voicemail.”
“Sure.” Vince unlocked his phone and checked its volume. As he’d suspected, it was still set to silent. He put the phone down on the mausoleum and picked up the sleeve of a shirt, holding it to his nose and taking a long, deep breath. The smell of rancid bacon flooded his lungs.
Bruce yanked the shirt away from him, looking vaguely disgusted. “What the hell are you doing? This isn’t -” He paused and sniffed the air. “What is that?”
“Mr. Garrison, is there any reason you or your daughter might have visited this graveyard before? Or even this section of the river?”
Bruce stopped in the middle of lifting the shirt to his nose. “No? I can’t think of any reason for either of us to come here. She wasn’t a fan of the river, said it was too narrow for her. The closest she got was when she went surfing in the summer.”
Vince grimaced. “Stranger and stranger.”
Fog was creeping in from the river to the east, piling up around the gravestones and drifting past like waves in slow motion. The moisture in the air pressed down on them, soaking each breath and leaching warmth from the skin. It gave the world a dull, soft feeling. Yet it didn’t dull the senses quite enough to keep Vince from noticing the soft, distant sound of voices singing a familiar yet unknown tune.
He was running before all the implications had processed.
All that really mattered was that someone out there was singing the phantom tune and he was certain Danica was among them. As if to muddle the sound of the singers, all five phones behind him started ringing at once.
“Wait!” Bruce called, clearly wishing he could answer them. Maybe he hadn’t heard the song.
“Later!” Vince half wheezed, half yelled as he headed east towards the Sheboygan. “They’re by the river.”
The eastern wall of the cemetery was built of old, vine covered bricks stacked up to about shoulder height. He got a good grip on the top and scrambled over, his feet ripping leaves and branches down as they scrambled for purchase. The ground beyond the wall was lost to the fog. Vince pressed forward regardless, tripping over unseen rocks and gulleys, doing his best to see over the fog even though it was piling up higher and higher.
The stench of old meat and grease hung heavy in the air. His pulse pounded in his veins in staccato syncopation with his feet on the ground, his ears did their best to make out the distant melody over the competing percussion. He caught snatches of the lyrics.
“Forsake your legs and driest land… embrace the sea, never breathe again.”
The ground underfoot suddenly changed from dirt to pavement and Vince found himself charging across 17th Street. He caught a glimpse of headlights on his right. He wasn’t sure if Bruce was behind him but to be safe he yelled, “Car coming!”
A few seconds later he heard a car horn blaring behind him but no sound of impact so hopefully that turned out okay.
The fog cleared a little as Vince approached the river, rushing along some fifty feet beyond the road. The water churned, an unseen mass writhing just below the surface, and guttural sounds rumbled beneath the high, clear singing voices. Gasping for breath, he looked back and forth, hoping to find the source of the song.
There were four four kids clustered in the shadows of the New Jersey Street bridge, stripped naked and up to their waist in water.
If they had stayed bent down in the dark Vince would never have seen them. But when they hit a high note in the melody they jerked upright, dragging a thrashing girl up out of the water by her neck and shoulders, holding her there for just a moment as she gasped for air. Then they plunged her under again.
The shore of the Sheboygan River was all slick rocks and muddy grass, either sucking at his shoes or sending hims slipping and sliding as he ran. Vince had no idea how far it was from where he started to the bridge. What really mattered was that he didn’t cross the full distance before the malevolent presence that had watched him all night finally made itself known.
The pigs came churning up out of the water, growling and squealing in fury. The swarm of porcine demoniacs scrambled over each other as their short, stubby legs beat the river to froth with the slimy fins that replaced their hooves. In their beady, sunken eyes shone an ancient hatred.
Fear fell upon the river like a storm.
Vince’s sprint nearly became a retreat as sheer panic sank its fangs into his brain. He took a deep breath and begged for grace, not so much for himself as for the kids. Words boiled up out of him. “Enough, legion of the Gerasenes!” Rather than shying away from the pigs Vince strode out into the water among them, ignoring their shrieking calls. “Have you given up the refuge you were granted? Seek you again dry and arid places to wander while you wait for judgement?”
“It is not time!” He couldn’t see any one pig speaking, the words seemed to echo back and forth among the teaming throng. “It is not our time!”
The first rule of demons was simple. They didn’t matter. They could only distract you from your purpose. What mattered was those they oppressed. Vince fixed his eyes on the children in the water and slogged towards them. Forty feet. “You can be chained to your dungeon until your time.”
“We were given shelter here!” The pigs replied, pressing closer and closer to him yet never quite making contact. The water thrashed and a thick, viscous layer of putrid grease coated its surface, soaking Vince’s jeans, but the pigs themselves never touched him. “By what right would you take it away?”
“We were promised the right to such things, and even greater things than these.” Vince watched the dark patch of water ahead. Was it still churning as Danica struggled under water? Or had she gone still? What kind of damnable ritual were they trying to do?
“No power! No power!” The pigs screamed, churning the water white.
“Give me Danica Garrison,” Vince snarled, “or I will bind you to the driest wilderness until Judgement Day. I swear it on the name of Ya-”
The pigs plunged under the water so violently he was nearly thrown into the air by waves they threw up. The noise, the panic and the grease all vanished. Vince found himself in the shadow of the New Jersey bridge, a few feet from a girl floating face down in the river.
He immediately grabbed her under the arms, flipped her over and hauled her head up out of the water. Danica coughed and took a struggling breath. Vince began dragging her to shore, looking around frantically. When another pair of hands grabbed Danica he jumped, then realized it was just Bruce, wrapping his daughter in his coat. The man was white as a sheet but his grip on his daughter was solid. “Are they coming back?”
“They better not.” Even as he said it Vince knew that wasn’t a positive thing. “Danica, can you hear me?”
“Yes?” She said faintly.
“Let’s just get out of the water,” Bruce said.
Vince ignored him. “What are your friend’s names? I might still be able to break the hold on them with their names.”
“Oh.” The girl was still badly out of it but she managed to say, “RealmRazer47, Antigodz…”
He did his best not to cringe. It wasn’t the time for it. “Not user names, Danica, I need to know their real names. Did they ever tell you?”
She weakly shook her head, starting to cry.
“Then that’s the end of it. Let’s get her back to the car.”
Bruce gave him a curious look as they slogged up out of the river. “Is there anything we can do for the others?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We’d have to find them, first. I know someone in the Sheriff’s Department, I’ll see what they can find out.” He dug his phone out of his pocket and tried to wake it up but the screen remained dark. Water trickled off of its case and the faint whiff of stale bacon came from it when he held the device up for a closer look. He sighed and put it back in his pocket. “Never mind. They finally got around to squashing our phones.”
The other man snorted. “This isn’t your first time with these things, is it?”
“Never met the pigs before.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“It’s enough for now. We’ll talk more some place warmer.”
They trudged through the graveyard, ignoring the ringing phones by the mausoleum, only pausing long enough to grab Danica’s clothes, then bundled her into the SUV and cranked the heater up to full.
Just before they climbed in themselves Bruce said, “She doesn’t look right. What did those things do to my daughter?”
“They tried to kill her, Mr. Garrison. I think that would be obvious.”
“Yeah but… is she, like, possessed or something?”
“I don’t know right now,” Vince admitted. “It’s possible. I’m not the best person to suss that out, to be perfectly honest. I can give you a couple of names of people better qualified to figure that out, if you want. Ed might know a few others.”
“But what about that thing?”
Bruce had more to say but Vince held up a hand. “You’re letting it win, Mr. Garrison.”
“What?”
“Every moment you fixate on that thing you’re ignoring your daughter. They want you to think you’re dependent on what they decide. It’s their greatest deception. The first step to healing from their influence is walking away from them. That’s as true for you as it is for your daughter. Now what do you think she needs right now?”
Bruce took a deep breath and nodded. “Right. Let’s get her home and talk to her mother. We’ll take it from there. Sound good?”
Vince nodded. “As good as can be. Let’s get going.”
Nate Chen Publications 