After the headache of a conversation with Beth, Hunter spent the whole day blasting through the list of chores Dad had sent him. Desperately in need of a shower, he came back to his room, only to find Marcie passed out with Texas Chainsaw Massacre still playing on the TV. As soon as he switched it off, a notification on his phone screen seared its blinding blue light into his pupils.
“Basil! Hey!” He picked up quickly and spoke in hushed excitement.
“Hey neighbor,” the voice from the other end of the line called. “How’s the corpse bride?”
Hunter peeked over at Marcie who was still motionless and soundless. He’d told her earlier of Beth’s demands to meet up with Marty Gillman and get her weed, to which Marcie insisted she come as ‘backup’. They came to the compromise that she could come as long as she didn’t make any direct contact unless she had to. What constituted a ‘must intervene’ situation was still up for debate, but there was little time to hash that out before Dad came knocking to ask why the lawn hadn’t been mowed.
“She’s sleeping,” Hunter replied.
Basil snorted and gave a sly cackle. “Like the dead?”
“Yes. Like the dead. Ha–ha, very funny,” Hunter sassed.
Basil wrapped up their prolonged laughing fit. “I’ll catch her next time. It’ll be nice to finally get to talk to her in real life. I’ll be in class in ten minutes, but I have something important to tell you. I have a vision. At a crossroads, the right path is paved with danger. What lights your way is consumed by darkness. The rest of it isn’t super clear but what I know is that someone is trying to steal the book tonight. Please, be careful.”
When they first met, Hunter and Basil went back and forth figuring out what to call this power they possessed and what to call them. Seer or fortune teller gave way too much of the ‘old lady with a bunch of jingly tassels in a dark room’ vibe, though their obsession with incense was fitting and they weren’t opposed to a crystal ball for the flare. They landed on Oracle, like the ancient Greeks.
Their power was never wrong. It led Basil to Hunter. It led Hunter to the book and consequently to Marcie. So someone was for sure going to try to steal the book.
“Uh–Okay. Thanks for the heads up,” Hunter said, trying to process.
Basil clicked off with a quick, “I gotta go.”
Watching Marcie wake from absolute stillness would never cease to be somewhat uncanny. Hunter wasn’t sure he’d ever get over his fear that he’d shake her body and she wouldn’t open her eye.
This time it only took a couple pushes before her body sprung upright like Regan from the Exorcist. In the recoil of her violent rising, she fell back towards Hunter, knocking the wind out of him. He wrapped her in his arms anyway.
“Ugh, is it already time?” Marcie said, muffled with her face buried into the clean shirt he’d put on after his shower.
Lamplight shone faintly out the guest house window. Night had fallen.
Hunter squeezed Marcie tight. “Well, I think we could be fashionably late to a drug deal. Take your time getting ready to go. I have to figure out what I'm going to do about the book.”
“What’s up with the book?” asked Marcie.
Hunter walked over to his dresser. “I got a call from Basil. They said that someone’s going to try to steal it.”
“Shit,” Marcie responded aptly.
A top layer of socks and underwear covered the Necronomicon. Red light no longer glowed through them. Maybe the book had to cool down after being used? For as many incantations as Hunter translated throughout the last year, the book held very little information about itself. No author was ascribed to it. There was no foreword or acknowledgements, no index or glossary. It was as if someone very deranged had bound together looseleaf notes and nothing else. All to say, the Necronomicon was wholly enigmatic.
To add credence to this claim, when Hunter riffled through his socks, he found the book had grown fleshy tendrils into the drawer. The sticky-note translations he had stuffed the book full of were now ballooning out the sides and stuck onto the tendrils. The odd snaking things were the color of vitiligo-affected skin and it warped the wood of his drawer like tree roots splitting the concrete of a sidewalk.
Hunter reeled back with a startled, “eugh!”
The tendrils pulsated like they were pumping blood. Marcie leapt to her feet and joined Hunter as they both stared down at the Necronomicon, embedded into the structure of his dresser.
She began to reach down with hesitation. Hunter, purely on instinct, smacked Marcie’s hand away. Marcie, in return, looked downright offended.
“Don’t touch it. I don’t want it to fuck with your zombie-ness,” Hunter cautioned, then reached for it himself.
“You don’t touch it!” Marcie argued, pushing Hunter’s hands away. “What if it zombifies you?”
Hunter reached for it again, grabbing the book in both hands. “I think I already grazed it when I was digging through the drawer. I’ll be fine.”
Just as he reassured her, the patchy tendrils of the book tore apart his dresser drawer, cracking straight through the holes they bored. They wrapped around Hunter’s arms and as he was yanked forward, the pages flipped open and he heard something like the gurgling of deep sea bubbles.
Marcie pounced on the book, tearing the tendrils off of Hunter as they writhed and began to bubble and mutate. What used to be fleshy and soft grew tough with a segmented exoskeleton. As Marcie ripped the book off of Hunter, the ends of these hardened flailing tubes grew serrated jaws and tore through the skin on her arm. She screamed, though only out of fear and not pain.
Wrenching her arms back to grab hold of the worms, Marcie slammed the book and its demonic arms straight down. The exoskeletons crunched loudly from the impact and flesh and blood splattered onto the floor. All the tentacles fell limp and the gurgling sound fizzled out.
The pieces the worms had taken out of Marcie’s arms were already healing over. Hunter and her were both fear-frozen, but at the very least physically unharmed. The book lay still on the floor.
“What the fuck was that?” Marcie asked, wide-eyed and shaking.
Hunter had no answer for her.
“Maybe it's better for someone else to take this,” she offered.
“No,” Hunter said. “I still need it in case anything happens to you. There’s a lot of valuable information.”
Marcie groaned, “Okay, but do we have to bring it with us?”
“If another Lovecraftian horror starts leaking out the pages, I’d rather keep it far away from my family,” Hunter reasoned.
“Good point,” Marcie agreed, still shell-shocked.
It was nearly impossible to convince himself that this was the best plan he could hastily put together when its structural integrity was making him more uneasy by the second. Marcie demanded she come along, promising to stay out of sight. He had some suspicions on who they would be meeting that night, and while Martin Gillman wasn’t particularly dangerous, they weren’t exactly on the best terms. That tension was only going to be complicated by the wild monstrosity the Necronomicon was turning out to be and Hunter would have to handle the whole mess piece by piece as it unfolded.
Marcie bound the book in a roll of duct tape she’d found half used in his closet. Then for extra measure, pat the cover in a nurturing way as if to convey to it ‘there, there, be a good little Necronomicon’.
“You’re sure about this?” she asked.
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“As I’ll ever be,” Hunter assured her, while attempting to assure himself.
The night air of the wharf held the thick stench of seafood in all its variable states from fresh to rotted. Its alleyways and roads were bare of working men and quiet, save for the soft rocking of waves. Any fishermen that were on their boats at this time of night were still far from the dock. That’s where Marty operated, in the liminal window when the docks were entirely deserted
As Hunter walked through the misty fog with Marcie trailing behind, he noted that Marty’s jig might soon be up. As of his return to town, it seemed every corner of Redwood Cove was being systematically outfitted with cloud-based, AI-powered, surveillance cameras, generously provided by the Lovett estate. The fact that Mr. Lovett was the primary shareholder of Starlight Technologies wasn’t noted as a conflict of interest by anyone else, apparently. Silver lining, Marty wouldn’t be able to use the docks for much longer. Then, Beth would have no choice but to quit for good.
Hunter couldn't help but swivel every now and again to check on Marcie. They had packed the bound Necronomicon in Hunter’s book-bag and Marcie was in charge of carrying it until the meeting was over. Something told him that duct tape was not the demonic-incident repellent they hoped it’d be. The fog made it easy for Marcie to step in and out of sight like a stalking ghost. Hunter’s choice of vintage clothing only served to add to the feeling like she was something out of time. Their eyes met and he swept his hands to tell her to get lost. Marcie quickly darted behind a trash bin, then stuck her arm out with a big thumbs up.
Up ahead, Hunter saw exactly who he expected.
Marty Gillman was hunched in a black hoodie down the alleyway between the canoe shack and another warehouse. His hair looked visibly greasy and was slicked to the side like he was about to break into the Jet Song from West Side Story. Though, remembering when the two of them were placed in the tenor section in concert choir for their one year of required arts class, it’d be a rather shit rendition.
When Marty noticed Hunter, his expression turned from neutral to sour. He said something Hunter couldn’t make out for certain, but it most likely included the words what, the, and fuck, in that particular order.
Hunter stepped forward. “I come in peace.”
I come in peace? What was he? An alien?
“What are you doing here? Where’s your sister?” Marty asked with slurred words.
“I’m just here to buy for her and then I’ll get out of your hair,” Hunter said.
Marty looked puzzled. “Why would you be in my hair? How would that even work?”
“No dude. It’s just a common idiom–”
“–Don't call me an idiot!”
Hunter grunted. “Look, I’ll just take the bag and go.”
Marty seemed to find no fault in the prospect of a quick job. “Alright.”
He fished a small crumpled-up ziplock bag out of his pocket. Its contents were small enough to rest on a quarter. The amount was a relief, at least for Beth’s sake.
“How much?” Hunter asked, rifling through the loose change and random bills in his wallet.
“Forty-five,” said Marty.
“Forty-five!? You were gonna charge my sister forty-five dollars for a quarter of an ounce?” It was unbelievable. Marty was more of a scumbag than he ever could have imagined.
“No, Hunter. I’m charging you forty-five.”
That made more sense. Hunter had no choice but to fork over the cash and get the hell out of there. They made the exchange. Marty tossed him the bag and Hunter handed him a wad of tens and all the dimes and quarters he’d found.
Holding the bag in his hands brought to mind something Grant had told him in the supermarket. He’d stormed off in such a huff and hated the spiral he’d gone down the moment he saw him that he almost forgot anything more than the essential details.
Marty had turned to walk away, but Hunter stopped him with a question. “What did you give her that night?”
He turned. “What?”
“The night that Marcie died,” Hunter pressed, “What did you give her?”
“So, it was you!” Marty accused. Of what, Hunter didn’t know and couldn’t give a damn.
“You were there. I know you were there. What did she have in her system?”
Panic rose amongst the tension. Marty looked like he wanted to break down with the insistent questioning, but Hunter couldn’t find it in his heart to care about that either. Now that he was here, now that he was starting to see the strings, the red lines that led to the truth of Marcie’s death, he felt it too. That feeling Marcie talked about. The need to know.
“I don’t know dude! We were all smoking the normal shit,” Marty frantically admitted.
Hunter was about to interrogate him more but something made him jump out of his skin.
“Who’s we?” Marcie said behind him. Her voice was midway between a whisper and a feral growl.
Marty was speechless for many moments. Fog passed between them and Marcie took strides forward past Hunter. He put a hand on her shoulder. She brushed it off easily.
“I’ll get to you after,” she whispered to him.
A terrifying edge was overtaking her. She got very close to Marty, who had reappeared from the fog, completely frozen in fear.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Marcie pushed herself up on her toes to stare at him eye to eye.
“Look closely,” she demanded. She slipped off her eyepatch revealing her uncovered face and the empty socket underneath.
Marty’s pale face turned paler. He did the only sensible thing one would do in the face of a zombie girl who died in front of them, and ran. His immediate action shook Marcie out of her anger and she looked back at Hunter for a moment sort of lost and dumbfounded.
Then she bolted after him, faster than any human should be without intense training.
Screams rang through the wharf. Hunter wasn’t so lucky. Even in a full sprint, he trailed behind, unable to see clearly through the thickening fog. He lost track of them for stretches of time between Marty’s shrieks of terror. The path they made turned left, then right, and all which way around boat shacks and cannery buildings. They were headed for the main road.
Finally, he caught up. Marty had stumbled just before the road and was sprawled on the ground, half his body hanging off the sidewalk. Marcie towered over him. Her face held a menacing glare.
“Please don’t kill me!” Marty repeated in varying volumes of distress. “Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.”
Hunter stepped forward to diffuse the situation. It was getting way out of hand. He wasn’t handling his pieces. “We just want to ask you some questions.”
Marty looked Hunter’s way, like his words were his only anchor left on his sanity. He was jerked back into a nightmare when Marcie crouched to meet him at his level, cracking her joints while she sank down.
“What happened to me, Martin?” she interrogated. “What did you all do to me?”
“N–nothing. I swear,” he shook out.
Marcie’s stare intensified. “You must have done something? I can’t remember that night. Did you roofie me? Give me something laced?”
Her words had so much bite, so much ferocity, it was like a beast had taken over.
Marty froze again, trying to parcel together anything to say.
“ANSWER ME!” Marcie screeched.
And that got him to move. Marty threw himself upright to escape and broke into a full sprint into the road. That’s when the lights came. Two bright lights barrelling down the street right into Martin Gillman.
A splatter of blood that looked black in the shadow of night and bright red in the streaming of headlights, spewed across the vague shape of a car and all over the street.
Marty’s body tumbled down the road, a broken mess of limbs and a torso. It reminded Hunter of how Marcie packed herself into his suitcase. Except when he laid there on the concrete, crumpled, he did not move. He did not speak. There wasn’t even a minute twitch of his eye.
Whatever odd trance Marcie was in was abruptly halted when Hunter let out his own scream. It came from deep within his lungs and heart, which he had lost all control over.
It wasn’t until the door of the sedan, which had stopped in its tracks, opened that the two of them could get enough of their bearings together. Marcie’s demeanor had returned to normal and Hunter’s heart was finally beating at a regular pace inside his chest.
What walked out from the car nearly made his heart relapse into full arrhythmia. The figure was wrapped in shadow, made of darkness, and seemed to eat the light around it. The only reason why Hunter thought it might be a person at all was because all the light it ate and shadow it exhaled created an event horizon in the vague shape of a body.
The Void started to speak. Its voice sounded like the low moaning of creaking wood mixed with the hiss of a snake. And somewhere, deep under those dark noises, was the faintest of human speech.
Hunter parsed out the words and horror took hold of him.
“Give me the book.”