Urban Legends (An Eve Hathaway's Paranormal Mystery Collection Part 1)

Urban Legends Part 1

  By Eve Hathaway

  Published by Publications Circulations LLC.

  SmashWords Edition

  All contents copyright (C) 2013 by Publications Circulations LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this document or the related files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, companies and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  ~ ~ ~ ~

  The Child of Mystery

  Chains of Darkness Part 1

  Chapter One

  Tick Tock.

  The grandfather clock downstairs ticks off the seconds that have passed since Aunt Frances and Uncle Josiah went to bed. She listens for their creaking bed-one body, then the second. In fifteen minutes, Uncle Josiah will begin to snore, but even after three years of living with her aunt and uncle, she still has no idea if her aunt ever sleeps.

  Tick tock.

  She suspects not-although she knows that her aunt cannot read her thoughts, she also knows that her aunt suspects something. It is the night before her fifteenth birthday-and her wedding. Melinda has been planning her escape for three months, now; ever since her aunt and uncle arranged for her to become Old Man Herman's third wife. She tries not to think about the consequences if she were to get caught. The last girl to protest a marriage had been forcibly raped by her betrothed in front of the elders. Rumor has it that she lives, still bound in chains in the basement of the man she never married, every year giving birth to a child whom she will never see. And she had merely protested-what Melinda is doing probably warrants death, if she were caught.

  So, she had better damn well not get caught.

  Tick tock.

  She reaches over her head to twitch the curtain aside so that the light of the moon can shine on the alarm clock on the dresser. Ten o'clock: two more hours to wait. Melinda feels the exhaustion from the day's labor creep up on her, but she'd poured some of her uncle's morning coffee into a thermos earlier that morning and drank it before she went to bed, and now, it's all she can do to keep her body under the covers. Luckily, her cousin Lucy is nine years old and a sound sleeper, so she won't be awake when Melinda slowly eases out of the warm bed and tiptoes out the door.

  Until then, though... tick tock.

  Three years ago, her mother got run off the road on the way to Melinda's recital. In any other state, it would have meant a hospital stay; maybe a few stitches and a cast, but in Boulder, Colorado, it was a death sentence. It wasn't until she saw her Aunt Frances at the funeral that she understood why her mother never mentioned her past. Three years, living with these crazy Christian Knights, kneeling to pray and biting her tongue and singing the praises of the simple life-all the while scouting for a way out, watching and timing the patrols that circled the compound, learning which floorboards squeaked and how to move silently through the creaky clapboard house. It all came down to this night. And the boy who was not a boy, but an angel.

  The elders say that he is possessed by the devil, but Melinda can see the truth behind his form. It's a gift of hers that she's kept secret in this dangerous place-being able to see angels and demons as they stalk the earth. During her first year in the compound after her mother died, she wondered if somehow the gift had died, along with her freedom, because she could not see any of their glowing auras in the people they inhabited. She still does not know what to make of the fact that the cult is so isolated that neither heaven nor hell will bother with it. But then Caleb wandered into the compound, and though she knew him for what he was, nobody else did. When they discovered he didn't know how to speak and had nothing between his legs, the elders decided he was possessed and needed to be exorcised. Since then, he has been kept in the equipment barn, crammed into a large dog crate. Nobody quite knows what the elders have been doing to him for two years, but the screams that emanate from the barn frighten even grown men into grumbling about letting the boy go.

  Still, nobody dared enter the barn to do it.

  The hands of the alarm clock converge on midnight. Everybody is resolutely asleep. Melinda reaches under her pillow, pulls out her old sneakers, and slips out of the room like a shadow. Tick tock. She's wearing the clothes that she brought with her when they first moved her to the compound-sweatpants, socks, Polartec fleece sweater (they allowed her to keep these because they were "more useful than vain"). She's carrying her sneakers-she hasn't tried them on this floor-there's no telling if they'll squeak.

  Her heart is going like a trip hammer and a cold sweat breaks over her as she goes, ever so slowly, down the stairs, each step a careful consideration of her weight on the wood. The door to her aunt and uncle's bedroom is closed, but that doesn't mean Aunt Frances is lying in bed, sleeping. For all Melinda knows, her aunt could be wide awake, just waiting to throw open the door and catch her deceitful niece obviously trying to escape, and throw her upon the justice of the elders. She wants to be out the door NOW.

  When she's halfway down the stairs, the banister gives a squeak. The sound might as well be a shriek piercing the silence. Melinda stifles a gasp and holds her breath. Above her, there is a muffled shifting of springs, but after a minute, neither her aunt nor her uncle opens the bedroom door. She lets the air out of her lungs, fights to keep her legs from collapsing. Somehow, she manages to make it down the rest of the stairs without a sound.

  Then she creeps through the living room and into the kitchen. It would have been faster to go through the front door, but the great lock on the front door cannot be opened quietly, and the hinges squeak. Though the kitchen door is quieter; the tumbling of the bolts as the knob turns seems impossibly loud, and she wonders how her aunt could possibly not hear the grating noise of metal-on-metal, or the gunshot clarity of the click as the door opens. But still, the house is silent, and as the cool night air rushes past her, she breathes a sigh of relief. There is a peculiar finality to the act of closing the door behind her-ahead of her, the night. Behind her, the nightmare. And on the horizon, a new dawn.

  Chapter Two

  She doesn't think there are patrols within the compound, but she keeps her head up as she laces her sneakers anyway. Uncle Josiah had been grumbling about one of the elders making such a proposal, but nothing seemed to come of it. Nevertheless, she keeps to the shadows, hoping the navy blue of her clothing is close enough to black. The moon is full tonight, but the clouds are patchy so, what light there is, shifts, rendering even the shadows unsafe. In the dark, she is even more aware of how sharp the blades of grass are against her fingers and how loud the crickets really are. Shut up, she wants to scream. She can't hear her own footsteps-how is she going to hear someone coming up behind her?

  It takes her longer to reach the barn than she thought it would. She doesn't have a watch, but the skies have shifted noticeably from when it was first dark and the moon is high and white in the sky, and this frightens her. What if she can't get him out in time? What if he can't run?

  She pushes those thoughts out of her mind. He's an angel, she reminds herself. Even if they've broken him, he can heal. How she knows that-she won't think about that, now. Now, she has to pick a lock.

  She reaches into her pocket and takes out the bobby pin. It's a simple operation, really-push and slide,
until the tumblers fall apart. But it takes skill, and patience, and a delicate touch, and warm hands, and daylight, and luck. She is painfully aware of how clearly she can be seen against the barn door, should anybody happen to glance her way. The cult members go to bed early, adhering to the old maxim of early-to-bed-early-to-rise, but even though the windows remain dark, it feels as if the houses are watching her, accusing her, sending a silent alarm to the elders. She finds herself glancing up at them from time to time, the words, "Please, be quiet" on her lips.

  Finally the lock gives, and she slips into the barn. It's pitch black-the sliver of moonlight that she let in disappears as she closes the door-but after a moment, the glow of his aura spills from behind the tractors. It's faint, but it's enough to keep her from running into the tractors and combines that he's housed with. She's alarmed at how silvery it is-most angels have a golden aura-but when she sees him, he is surprisingly whole-and naked. She had not prepared for that. She hopes Gabe is. A few scratches mar his ghostly pale skin. He blinks at her, his eyes black with pain.

  "I've come to get you out," she whispers.

  He says nothing. She takes a slender metal file she'd filched from the foundry and lodges it into the padlock. She takes a deep breath, and slams the file and padlock into the ground, so that the file crunches into the lock. A bit of shimmying, and the lock springs open.

  "Come with me," she whispers, wishing that the clanging as she unwinds the chain from the bars of the kennel would stop. The air in the barn is still, silent-there's no echo. Still, it would be dangerous to assume they are safe. "Stay close, and stay quiet."

  She leads him to the back of the barn, where there's a smaller emergency door. She wishes she knew what time it was. They'll have to go out and pray that the patrols have passed, or are still far enough away that they can make it to the first cornfield without being seen. Fifteen minutes between patrols seems like a long time, but given how much open space there is between the barn and the corn field, their window of opportunity is actually quite small. She cracks open the emergency door-it's chained shut, but the chain is so loose that they can both slip through the gap in the door. There is no one in sight. Together they run, darting for the corn.

  The crash of their bodies against the stalks will have alerted any nearby patrol, if there were one. She doesn't take chances, doesn't stop to listen and see. She grabs Caleb's hand and leads him down the narrow row and to the footpath through the field-a narrow gap between the rows where people can walk, the easier for the farmers to get home in the middle of the day and have lunch. They're running when, overhead, a flare bursts. They've been seen.

  Shit.

  Chapter Three

  She'd hoped to at least get to the edge of the corn before they were seen. Still, they are moving quickly, without disturbing too much of the corn-but it will be obvious which path they are on. She turns into a bare row-where they've laid down the water lines this year-and follows that. They're a little noisier-there's less room-but the tassels overhead are still, and that's what matters.

  In the distance, she hears men shouting. Keep running, keep running. Her legs burn, but she wills herself on. A stitch knots in her side, stabbing pains shoot through her with every step. Nobody ever died from pain.

  Caleb manages to keep up with her as they turn onto another footpath. She doesn't know the corn fields that well-it makes her nervous, not to follow the original path. Gabe will be expecting her to come out at one spot-if he's there. It's the only part of her plan that she could not prepare for. It's the only part of her plan that must not go wrong.

  It is too late to turn back. They run. The darkness carries the menacing roar of diesel engines being revved.

  Oh, fuck.

  And suddenly there is no more corn, just grass. They've made it out of the fields, but she can tell by the sound of the engines that they're going around the corn. They've got only a few minutes, at the most, before the men catch up to them.

  She takes Uncle Josiah's Zippo lighter out of her pocket, lights it, and waves. It's answered by a flicker of headlights a good 300 yards away, and her legs nearly melt with relief. Behind her, there's shouting-the men in the cars have seen her signal. She must stay still, though-Gabe can't see her in the dark. If he runs her over then everything will be useless-

  And there he is, not a hundred feet away. A burst of adrenaline hits her and she jerks Caleb, and together they run towards it. "Open the door!" she screams. "Open the door!"

  Gabe gets out. He's gotten taller since she saw him last, and ganglier, and there's a stoop to his posture that suggests crushing burdens. But he's here, that's all that matters, now. He flings open the back door of his Jeep. It's a new car to her-when she was still living in the outside world, he was driving a Ford Escort, but that's a minor detail-"Go, go, go!" she yells. "They're coming!"

  The first of the headlights pops out from behind the far edge of the corn field. "Shit!" Gabe says. "Hang on!" he shouts. He guns the engine and they rocket backwards. She and Caleb fall to the floor in a pile of limbs, and her arm slams against the divider between the front seats. The jeep bounces up and down, throwing the two of them into the air-even in this desperate state, Gabe had the sense to lock on his seat belt. Gabe throws the car into gear and they shoot forward, heading towards the interstate. "I hope they're empty," Gabe mutters.

  The jeep has higher ground clearance, but it's slower in four-wheel-drive. The cars the men are driving send beacons of light bouncing wildly through the Jeep, but those beacons are getting brighter. As they rumble forward, she pulls herself up and looks out the rear windshield-and is nearly blinded by the headlights.

  "Yeah, wouldn't do that," Gabe says, the nervous edge in his voice the only indication that he knows that they're there.

  "Can't you go faster?" she pleads.

  "Not if I don't want to roll over."

  "They're catching up to us!" she shrieks.

  "They'll definitely catch us if we roll."

  The blast of a shotgun catches Melinda's throat as she begins to reply. There is no tearing of metal or shattering of glass, though. It might have been a warning shot, it might not have been-the cars are bouncing too much to be certain. For the first time that night, Melinda senses the hopelessness of their situation, a falling sensation that crushes the breath from her. She watches in horror as the cars spread out behind them in a line.

  And then Caleb's aura becomes a blinding light to her, but Gabe is as insensitive to this glow as he is to the headlights in his rearview mirror-and the coal-black eyes begin to glow red, and then white. And as she watches, he spreads his ethereal wings and says something unintelligible, yet the anger in his words is unmistakable. Lightning flashes from his eyes, and a red glow comes out of his mouth. He is all aura, now-a beautiful, terrible creature, whose sole purpose is death. Melinda covers her ears and closes her eyes, terrified.

  A wall of orange light and heat hits and surrounds the Jeep. She looks back-the line of cars has become a wall of flame, a solid wall of orange light occasionally broken by a grill. Caleb slumps to the floor of the Jeep, unconscious, drained. Gabe, in his usual, tight-lipped manner, says only, "Well, that was something."

  She breathes a sigh of relief. Gabe drives on. They reach the Interstate, and head south.

  Chapter Four

  "It's not exactly a matching set or anything, but it's wearable," Gabe says, as he enters their motel room.

  They'd driven through the night, stopping only for gas, passing Wichita and turning west. Gabe finally pulled into a roadside motel at daybreak. He paid for two nights and a room with two twin beds, and slept most of the day, while Melinda watched TV and Caleb drifted into and out of consciousness. In the daylight, Caleb's hair is a pale, white-blond. His eyes, when he opens them, are a clear, milky gray, and the birdlike bones of his body jut alarmingly from his skin. Melinda tried to convince him to eat something out of the mini bar, but he wouldn't touch it. She has spent the day looking between the unconscious f
orms of Caleb and Gabe and Law and Order reruns. The news channel mentioned nothing about an inferno last night, which probably means that they are safe, for now. An hour ago, Gabe finally woke up, stretched, and said, "I'm going to get us some food. Anything you want?"

  "A Coke," she said. It'd been years since she'd tasted one. The cult is a strange one-it forbids Coke and candy but not Twinkies, cell phones but not cars. Members are only allowed to go to "the city", as they call the little college town of Lincoln, on business approved by the elders. In that sense, it was lucky that she was getting married, because a wedding dress was approved business. Her uncle had taken her, but he wasn't allowed at the fitting. "Please mail this for me," she whispered to the attendant. The attendant looked at her, alarmed, but pocketed the letter. In the three months that followed, she prayed that she'd been explicit enough in her diagram of the compound, the signals that she planned to use, that the letter had not been intercepted. The only thing she knew for sure was that Gabe would be there if he got it.

  And he was. She wonders, for the first time since her escape, if it means something that he's driven three-hundred miles across across purgatory to rescue her.

  Gabe tosses two bags on the floor. "Thrift store in town," he says, by way of explanation. Melinda opens one-boys' clothing. She hands it to Caleb, who picks out a pair of worn jeans and a red NASCAR t-shirt. The other bag also has boys' clothing, but anything is better than the scratchy woolen dresses that she's worn for three years on the compound. She picks a pair of cutoffs and a tank top, and finds a denim jacket. For shoes, there's a pair of Keds, a turquoise plaid, a half size too big, but they'll do. She puts those on, too, trying not think about whose feet had been in them.-beggars not being choosers, and all that.

  In the meantime, Gabe has set out a row of Styrofoam containers on the dresser, and a twenty-ounce bottle of Coke. She grabs it and chugs it, feeling the sugar and caffeine hit her system like a freight train. She was never very fond of Coca Cola, not until she was in a place where it was forbidden. It'd become an obsession of hers, to taste the "synthetic poison", as her aunt and uncle called it. Now, she feels as if the world has taken on an extra bit of clarity, and she feels her heart kick-start into another gear, slightly faster than normal. It's wonderful.