Beneath the Mall of Madness (A Jaspar Windisle Mystery Book 1) (20 page)

It was a bipedal skeleton, dripping with gore. It was at least fifteen feet tall. I was too terrified to take in more details, except that it had a bestial head, and
it was staring straight at me
. I hit the gas and drove into its knees.

“Reverse!” Cecilia screamed at me. “Reverse!” Fortunately, the bone monster didn’t fall onto us; if it had we would have been crushed. I put the car in reverse. The creature howled again and came after us.

“Go faster!” Cecilia said.

“We won’t get away if I drive into a ditch,” I reminded her. I tried to calm my own racing heart before soothing her. “With all the time it took us to get in the car while it stalked us it can’t be very fast.”

“I don’t care!” She shrieked. “Go faster!”

“What’s that?” Cassandra asked groggily. I was almost to the road when we were surrounded by blinding light and a thunderclap. I hit the brakes in surprise. When my vision came back the monster was lying in burnt chunks on the ground, and Fiona was standing behind it. I put the car in park and groaned.

“Sorry about that,” she said when I got out of the car. “I swear I usually keep these things confined to my property.”

“That came through your portal?” I asked.

“Yes, along with friends,” she said. “Don’t worry about the mess, I’ll clean it up.”

“Thanks for saving us,” I told her.

“It’s my job,” she said. “If you live here you shouldn’t go out at night. Escapees from my house aren’t the only dangerous things up by the cliffs.”

“I know,” Cecilia said. “I should have taken more care.”

“Quite,” Fiona said. “This place could use some landscaping.” She looked at the hunks of the monster at her feet. “Assuming anything can grow here. I believe this was a hellbeast of some sort. Their blood often fouls the earth. Something to keep in mind before you waste time and money on anything elaborate.”

“You mean before Steve wastes his time,” I corrected her.

“Yes, if Steve lives here,” she said. “Will you be coming over tomorrow Mr. Windisle?”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“Excellent. If you’ll excuse me, I have to get some cleaning equipment.” She turned and walked back into the forest. My school of goldfish came back to me, swimming around my head as if they hadn’t just abandoned me.

“Well,” Cecilia said, “Fiona has a harder job than I thought.”

“Was that lightning?”

“Yes. She’s a wizard, remember? Wizards can do that.”

“Yes,” I agreed. Let’s get in our cars and get out of here before anything else crawls out of the woods.”

“Right. And I’ll still meet you at the hotel?” I looked into the car. Cassandra was collapsed in her seat, seeming oblivious to everything that had just happened.

“Yes please,” I said. “If that didn’t wake her up I’ll need help getting her up the steps.”

Cecilia followed me back to the hotel without further trouble and helped me get Cassandra to her room.

“Is this a kidnapping in progress?” Agent Steiner asked from behind us.

“No, just someone working too hard,” Cecilia said. “What’s it to you?”

“I
am
an FBI agent,” he reminded her.

“And have you solved any crimes lately?” I asked.

“I’m getting there,” he said. “Is that Dr. Cassidy?”

“Yes, but she’s not in any shape to answer questions,” I told him. Her head rolled against my shoulder. “She’s pretty out of it.”

“I see,” he said. “When she’s awake, would you let her know I need to interview her?” He moved closer.

“Sure,” I said.

Agent Steiner leaned over to check out her eyes.

“Do you really think she’s just tired?” He asked.

“We know she hasn’t been sleeping,” I said.

“And she was talking right up until she collapsed,” Cecilia added. “She woke up a little when Jaspar shook her, so it wasn’t a seizure.” Agent Steiner continued staring at her face.

“Maybe we should take her to a doctor just to be safe,” I said. Now that someone else was involved leaving her alone didn’t seem like such a good idea.

“Oh, I can stay with her,” Cecilia said. “I have my new magazines to read. You go have dinner.”

“If you’re sure. . .”

“I’m positive,” Cecilia said. I helped her put Cassandra in bed and left. Agent Steiner was still standing outside the room.

“Have you known Miss Bishop long?” he asked me.

“For almost three weeks now,” I said. “Why?”

“You seem awfully close.”

“She’s easy to get along with.”

“Hmm.” He stared at the fish circling my head.

“One of these was staring in my window last night.” I looked up at them.

“It’s better than cockroaches,” I said. “At least goldfish are nice to look at.”

“Sure, but
flying
goldfish are different. What are they up to?”

“Not much, I would imagine. They’re not really there. See?” I took a swipe at Barry, and after an instant of resistance my hand passed through. “Besides, they’re goldfish. It’s not like they can bite.”

“I suppose not. The first hotel we tried to stay in had red food coloring in their drinking water.”

“You went in? I didn’t have the guts after looking at their signs.”

“Lucky thinks the fish are the greatest thing ever.”

“The greatest? He’s easily impressed.”

“He’s been trying to figure out how they’re doing it since he saw them.”

“Oh, you think it’s a gimmick, like at the other hotels?” Agent Steiner raised an eyebrow.

“You don’t?” I looked at my school of fish roaming the halls and sighed.

“I’ve decided not to think about it as long as I’m still getting a good night’s sleep.”

“Yeah. I don’t think I’ve slept better in my life. It’s odd. The mattresses don’t seem different from standard hotel mattresses.”

***

I’d been getting some grief over the phantom goldfish, but not nearly as much as Fiona gave me the next day.

“How long have you been walking the earth?” she asked. “Yet here you are, being bested by a bunch of dead fish.”

“They’re trickier than they look,” I protested. It seemed we were going to ignore the events of last night. She hadn’t brought it up, and I couldn’t think of a graceful way of mentioning it. She was rolling out pastry while I ‘helped’ by eating the fragments of pie crust she deemed not good enough. She was making blueberry, blackberry, and pumpkin pies. I’d wondered how she was planning to make food for hundreds of people in one day, but her oven turned out to be wider on the inside than the outside. Every time she opened it I had to look away, or my eyes started to hurt.

“They’re fish,” she said, “you should be able to trick them with your eyes closed.”

“Gregory’s a squid, and he can get the best of you.” Gregory seemed to be in heaven. Every time Fiona looked away he ate another berry. He was already almost as fat as he’d been after eating the chupacabra.

“Squid are highly intelligent for their size,” she said, “goldfish are not.”

“So, how’s the investigation going?” I asked her.

“As well as it could be,” she said. “After I deliver all this I’m going to go to the cave myself and see what I can do about the portal.”

“How are you going to get down that hill?” I asked.

“I’m not going alone,” she said. “Zebulon and Mordecai are coming with me.”

“Not Earl?” They seemed close, and he was a good person to have around if things got violent. Which seemed likely if she was going to head down that hill. If the cultists figured out what was going on it would be a piece of cake for them to set up an ambush for anyone leaving the tunnel.

“Zebulon insisted on coming and I think those federal agents would notice if both men who recently shot somebody disappeared at the same time.”

“Is there going to be trouble over that?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Fiona said. “They both have witnesses swearing that it was self-defense.”

“What about the man Earl shot in the swamp?” I asked. “I was the only other person there, and I haven’t given a statement.”

“They don’t know about that one,” Fiona said. “After he saw what was in that book, the sheriff made Mr. Smith disappear.”

“Do I want to know?”

“You definitely don’t want to be in the hands of anyone who owns that type of thing, let alone carries it around with them.” She started putting more pies in the oven. “It’s full of nasty stuff for the sake of being nasty.”

“Who has it now?”

“I cut out the text and burned it,” she said. “The cover is going to the Arkham Society of Cultural Anachronism.”

“The what?”

“They do a different kind of historical reenactment. They can fill it with blank pages and use it in their games.”

It seemed like as good a plan as any, but I had to ask,

“Didn’t you think of donating the whole thing to a library or a museum?” She gave me a scathing look.

“So some other sicko can learn how to make origami cranes out of living human skin? This is the twenty-first century Jaspar. We don’t need to save trash just because it was written on high-quality paper. It can go in the garbage where it belongs. Or in the case of that book, in seven separate bodies of water, each blessed by seven holy men from different religions.”

“When you destroy a book you really destroy a book.”

“I like to think I can learn a lesson occasionally. If I’d been as thorough with the psychic cheese wasps, we both could have avoided a great deal of aggravation.”

“That’s true.”

“Are you going to the reenactment?” she asked with deliberate casualness.

“Since I’m here I thought I might as well see what the fuss is about.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“Why are you going down to the cave right after the reenactment?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be better to wait a day and get an early start?”

“It will be safest immediately after the reenactment.”

“We didn’t worry about timing the last time,” I said. “Should we have?” Fiona seemed to search for the right words to say.

“Whatever is in Bishop’s Corner follows cycles. A few weeks ago it didn’t matter if you went down there and had a picnic. Right now, it would be very dangerous even if there weren’t cultists to worry about.”

And yet multiple people had told me that no one knew what was down there. It was so hard to tell when the people in this place were acting on secret information when they were being superstitious, and when they were just being odd.

“By the way,” she said as she started rolling out more pie crusts,” I heard about the conversation between you and the sheriff the other day.”

“The one where he told me to keep quiet if I knew what was good for me?”

“That’s the one,” she said. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it if I were you.”

“Why not,” I asked somewhat sharply. I’d been worrying about it every time I passed the agents in the hotel lobby. It didn’t help that Agent Starr liked making small talk.

“Mordecai told them everything when he was questioned,” she said. “And by everything I mean he told them that our town is full of witches and cultists, that the hotel is haunted, and that the woods are crawling with monsters. From what I heard they didn’t take it well. As a Whateley and the mayor, there’s no way Sheriff Warren can bury
him
out in the woods, and you couldn’t possibly do more damage than he did.”

I was stunned. Mordecai hadn’t struck me as naïve or stupid enough to do something like that.

“How’d the sheriff take it?” I asked. Fiona sighed.

“I said there’s no way, but I’m afraid my cousin came very close to earning himself a shallow grave. I expect things to be tense tomorrow. Not nearly as tense as they would have been if my boyfriend had killed you to keep you from talking though.”

I felt very cold. It was one thing to suspect people had been thinking about killing me, another to know.

“You’re talking about Earl right?”

She nodded.

“That was before Mordecai marched into the police station yesterday afternoon and gave his interview.”

“He did that yesterday?” I asked. Agent Steiner hadn’t shown any sign of having a truckload of crazy dumped on him earlier in the day. Come to think of it, Mordecai didn’t seem different either. “He seemed his usual self at dinner.”

“Mordecai’s always been the quiet, determined one,” Fiona said. “If you want to know why he did it you’ll have to ask him yourself. He refused to explain himself to me.”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” I said.

I spent the rest of the day surrounded by the smell of baking, talking about nothing in particular and feeding Gregory blackberries whenever Fiona’s back was turned. Earl stopped by for a while and told stories about his alleged antics as a train robber. I didn’t bring up the plan to kill me. It seemed petty, and he was an excellent storyteller. I left looking forward to the reenactment.