Dark Siren (eBook)

The intruder was hiding in the back room, and it had killed all the lights in the building. Alice Werner approached the door at the end of the hall, stepping lightly—more out of habit than as part of any kind of strategy—and breathing calm, long breaths. This wasn’t her first rodeo, but even experienced riders weren’t exempt from the pre-game jitters. 

The owners of Mack’s Pub, a couple of old-bloods who identified more with their Irish roots than the American soil they were born on, had never seen the intruder, but they knew it had taken residence in the store room like a rabid possum. Alice was the person called when the weird and otherworldly required eviction or extermination. The two most important words in this particular case were intruder and now. 

She knew two things. Number one, the thing which had been upturning kegs of beer, ripping pipes right out of the ceiling, and slamming the door to the store room at all hours, was just as much pissed off as it was unwelcome. The second thing was the intruder had only recently started making a mess of the place, so it was likely to be some poor, angry new kid on the block, or an old, nasty haunt freshly awoken from a century old sleep.

Having committed herself to a lazy day when she had woken up this morning, Alice hoped for the former.

“Is this the room?” Alice asked, in a low, almost whispered voice.

Mack and Sherry Byrne had walked Alice as far as the corridor leading to the store room, but had stopped at the mouth of the hallway and looked like statues—frozen in time, and deaf to Alice’s words. She frowned and tried again. 

“Is this it?” she asked, pointing to the door at the end of the hall and speaking a little louder. There were two other doors in the hall, one of them probably led to a kitchen, the other to an office. All of the doors were closed, though the one at the end of the hall looked pretty worse for wear. Thin, jagged lines expanded in a spider web pattern around a central point of impact, but the wood was bent outwards suggesting it had been hit from the inside. Enough force had been put into the blow to cause the wood to chip and crack in some places, and the paint to flake off and collect on the ground in front of the door. 

What the hell hit this? Alice thought.

“That’s it,” Mack said, but before he could say anything else, Sherry said “Don’t get too close.”

One of Alice’s eyebrows came up in an automatic, quizzical gesture. “Didn’t you hire me to get close?” 

The couple gave no response. Sherry looked like she was one sharp breath away from a panic attack. She was turning a rosary over in her hands so fast it looked like she was rubbing her palms, her eyes were red and puffy from tears, recent and old, and she was muttering something that could’ve been the Lord’s Prayer. 

Alice set her backpack on the ground and cracked her knuckles. Unzipping the backpack, she removed a smaller bag from within and pulled a peculiar looking old Polaroid Instant Camera out. The hairs on her arms stood on end as she carefully handled the machine, an instrument so old it had been taking pictures since before she was born.

The camera was black all over and had a matte finish. A red stripe ran across the top with the word ‘Trapper’ written in black paint. Feeling cool to the touch, it seemed to almost hum in her hand, as if singing with delight—if such a thing was even possible. Alice flicked the camera on, waited for a second, and brought it up to eye level.

“You’re going to take our picture, now?” Mack asked. 

Alice spun around and saw him through the eye of the camera. Aside from the trigger button, the camera had a slider toggle on the side. One setting read “REF,” the other read “MAT”. It was always set to REF because setting it to MAT and accidentally triggering it with a human in view wasn’t something she wanted to risk doing. Alice double checked—REF. Concentrating her will into the camera, Mack and Sherry’s forms suddenly seemed to shimmer as if seen through water, like swimming shadows in the gloomy darkness of the corridor. Then they disappeared. 

When she was looking through the eye of her camera, it was as if she had become a part of the camera itself. Her field of vision wasn’t constricted to a tiny square of light, but rather expanded so that she could see more of the world than she could with the naked eye.

“No,” Alice said, “I’m going to take its picture.” 

“Is… that how you… do it?”

Alice lowered the camera and let the smile come naturally to her face. “Do what?” 

“How you, you know, deal with these things.” 

“I don’t think a pair of good, church-going Catholics such as yourselves really want to know the answer to that question. Best leave the Necromancy to the heathens, as it says in the Bible.”  

“You know the Bible?” 

“You sound surprised.” 

Something smashed on the other side of the door. Sherry jumped and made a sound half way between a laugh and a cry before hiding behind her husband. Mack’s eyebrows met in the middle and he clenched his jaw. The sound hadn’t startled Alice, but it had set her body alight with anticipation and excitement. The drums of war had started beating.

“That thing’s been causing us nothing but trouble,” Mack said through gritted teeth. “I don’t care how you do it, just get rid of it.” 

Alice nodded. She reached for the door and let her hand rest on the knob. Icy to the touch. “Whatever happens, whatever you hear,” she said, “Don’t open this door.”

I’ve always wanted to say that, she thought, and she didn’t check for Mack’s reaction as she turned the knob and pushed on the door. It swung open, croaking loudly on its hinges like a fat toad in a swamp, and revealed the dark room beyond. A cool, stale breath which reeked of old beer, wet wood, and burnt electrics rode out to greet her, but she pressed on and swept inside. As soon as the door closed, she understood two more things about the thing taking residence in this room. 

She wasn’t welcome here. Despite it being the intruder, it had made this place its home—a place of rest, a lair. Who wants a stranger stepping into the place where you sleep? She was also beginning to understand, judging by the slowly rising electric charge in the air, that it was aware of not only her presence, but also her power… and it hated her for both of those reasons. 

“Alright,” she said into the darkness, in an almost casual way. “I know you’re in here, we both know you’re not supposed to be here, so why don’t you just pack your shit and leave?”

She heard a sound from the other side of the room, like a chair scraping across a floor. The only illumination in the room was a rectangle of light filtering in from a small window high up on one of the walls. Dusk was settling outside, and the shaft of pale, orange light was cutting a clean set of lines in an angle across the room. But she couldn’t see what chair had moved, or where it had moved to. 

“C’mon, man,” she said, “We both have stuff to do. Can’t you just get out?” No points for trying, but she figured she would attempt the easy approach first.

Silence followed, but her heart was starting to pick up the pace. Alice brought Trapper up to her eye and looked through it. She made a scan of the room, first left and then right, and settled on a corner of the room in which shadows seemed to congregate like flies on a corpse. There were boxes on the floor there, and a set of tall shelves which had been knocked over, their contents nowhere to be seen. Alice concentrated, blinked, and the shadows lightened to reveal… a shape. It was human, but it also wasn’t. The angles and dimensions were all wrong; the shoulders too hunched, and arms so long that the hands—if they were hands—almost seemed to drag across the floor. 

If she hadn’t known she was looking for a human, it could have been mistaken for a large ape.

“There you are,” she said, “Aren’t you a handsome devil?” and she moved her finger to the trigger, but the shape bolted before she could press the button, flying across the room in a blur. Alice spun around and attempted to find it again, but the thing was slippery. It smashed through what was left of a wooden table, sending an explosion of splinters in all directions like shrapnel from a grenade. Alice covered her eyes and turned away to shield herself from the spray. She took a step back and her foot came down on an inconveniently placed bottle of wine. The ground rolled underfoot and the world tilted, but she stuck a hand out and held herself against a wall. 

“Okay,” she said once she had recovered. She kicked the bottle aside. “That wasn’t cool.” Her heart was beating hard, now. Not from what she had seen through the eye of the camera, but from the thought of having almost fallen over. The floor was wet and sticky with beer, and there were pieces of broken glass and splintered wood everywhere. Forget that.

“See this?” she asked, holding the camera in front of her chest. “Do you know what this is?” 

A can of beer came hurtling out of the darkness, but Alice saw it and twirled out of its path before it could strike her. It slammed against a wall with a loud boom, and the beer came spitting out in all directions like a tiny fire hose. “I don’t think you know what exactly this camera is,” Alice said, continuing as if nothing had happened, “That’s okay, you don’t have to know what this is or does. All you need to know is that you may have given the grim reaper the slip and managed to hold on after you passed, but you won’t slip by me and this camera. I’m the one they send to clean up stragglers like you.”

She felt her chest tighten, as if someone had poked a hole in the room and all the oxygen was being sucked out. “I know,” Alice said, “I know you want me out. But this isn’t your place, and you need to leave. I can help you do that. I can help you cross.” A bottle rolled along the floor. She wasn’t sure if this was the same bottle she had almost stumbled over a moment ago or a different one, but the sound had come from somewhere nearby, which meant the thing was nearby too. Alice chose not to raise her camera.

There were two ways she could deal with this thing. She could trap it, or she could reason with it. Some spirits were less willing to talk than others, but whenever she could get one of them to leave without having to use her camera, everybody won. Other times, trapping a spirit was all she could do if she wanted to get the job done; and when you’re getting paid to do something, the end result is all that matters. But using her camera was taxing, and if she could get away without using it, she would.

“Talk to me,” she said. “Let me help you deal with whatever’s brought you here so you and I can both go home.”  

A finger of ice caressed Alice’s right shoulder and she spun, camera up, reacting on instinct. She saw, through the eye of the camera, a skinny shape shoulder-charge one of the wooden support columns in the middle of the room. The thing hit the column with such force the floor shook and dust fell from the ceiling. Knowing she only had an instant to react, Alice pulled her camera up and pressed her finger to the trigger. The camera made a clack and the room filled with harsh blue light. 

Silence fell. The pressure around Alice’s chest lifted, and she lowered her camera. It made a whirring sound, and a second later a blank Polaroid came sliding out of the slit on the front. She plucked it out, and shook it once, twice, three times. The image formed much quicker than it would have from an average, off-the-shelf camera, but this one was special. 

Inside the picture frame, a man was staring at Alice literally as if he had been caught on candid camera—eyes wide, mouth opened in an O of surprise, hands up to protect his face. He was old and frail, with wispy white hair falling down the sides of his face, sallow, gray skin, clear blue eyes, and was as naked as the day he was born. Alice didn’t know who he was, where he had come from, or why he was so angry. She would probably never know, now, but she had at least tried to reason with him.

The picture on the Polaroid suddenly started to move. The man came running toward Alice, his face twisted with fury, and eyes shining with malice. The picture shook in her hand like a fish trying to escape the fisherman’s grasp, but she gripped it more tightly. Alice didn’t jump, though her heart leapt into her throat and remained there far longer than she would have cared to admit. There were few things about her job she hadn’t adjusted to—with enough time, you could get used to anything. But the way her prisoners always tried to leap out of the frame after being captured was one of those exceptions.

Alice packed ‘Trapper’ in her backpack and safely stored the Polaroid in a small, black envelope. With the noisy spirit tucked away, there was nothing left for her to do here but cash in on a solid night of work. So she stepped lightly around the detritus in the store room and returned to the door. When she opened it, she heard Sherry’s breath hitch in her throat, and then release when it was Alice who walked through and not some invisible monster. 

Alice gave the couple a quick nod, and the owners of Mack’s Pub embraced each other and breathed sighs of relief.  

“What happens to the, uh…” Mack said, trailing off as he counted bills he had just pulled out of a safe. Six hundred, seven hundred, eight hundred…

“Hmmm?” Alice said, a little absentmindedly. 

“The thing… what happens to the thing now?” 

“Oh, him? Why? You looking for a souvenir?” 

“Not at all,” he said. Thirteen hundred, fourteen hundred… “Just curious.” 

“Now I put him away where he can’t hurt anyone else.” 

“Will he… feel pain?” 

“I wish I could tell you. There are limits to my knowledge.”

Mack grunted, and Alice sensed his discomfort. She understood it, too. These people were devout Catholics, and while Alice didn’t subscribe to any particular religion—knowing the things she knew about the world had thrown everything she believed up in the air a long time ago—she could relate. Her parents were the kind who said grace before meals, went to church on Sundays, and genuinely took steps to protect themselves against the Rapture. This man was trying incredibly hard to understand what had just happened without letting it shatter his worldview.

“Why don’t you say a prayer for him?” she said. “It might help him get to wherever he’s going.” 

He looked up at her, pressed his lips into a thin line, and nodded. A little white lie, said for the right reasons, could never hurt anyone. 

“Three thousand,” Mack said, and Alice took the money, rolled it up, and stuffed it into a pouch in her backpack. 

“Pleasure,” she said, and she shook his hand. When their hands separated, he was holding her business card. Alice Werner, Paranormal Investigator Extraordinaire. “Remember to tell your friends; I work on referrals only.” 

Alice turned around and headed for the door. She felt good, not just because she had another ‘job well done’ notch to scratch under her belt, but because the job had been clean, easy, and she had finished it without inflicting any further collateral damage—either physical or psychological—this time. The prayer thing was a nice touch, too, if she did say so herself. Mack didn’t need to know that the spirit she had just trapped wasn’t going anywhere except for her Chest of Haunts; her own private Alcatraz. 

Best leave the Necromancy to the heathens; why tarnish a pure soul, right?