“What are you thinking about?”
Patrick was driving, and he tended to be quiet for long stretches when we were on the road, but this latest stretch of silence was a record even for him. He glanced at me, a ghost of a smile flickering on his face as he gave a small shrug.
“Just wondering how likely this is to be another waste of time. Another goose chase.”
I let out a small sigh as I nodded. “I know it’s frustrating. The data we got from Tattersall, even combined with your own research and my contacts…we’re looking for something…” I trailed off as I saw his jaw tighten.
“Say it. We’re looking for something that might not exist.”
I put my hand on his arm. “No. I didn’t say that. I worry it could be true, sure, but I don’t really believe it. We know there are ways into the Nightlands, right? Jason found a way there, and…” I swallowed and forced myself to go on. “And Josh found a way through Martin.”
He met my eyes briefly. “We don’t have to talk about this again.”
Shaking my head, I went on. “No, it’s okay. My brother died so that monster could get across. It’s terrible, but that also means it’s possible. And is it an easy or common thing? No. The House has spent centuries searching for a way in, and even with their resources and their access to these things they worship, they only had rumors and theories. Scraps of information that weren’t very useful on their own.”
Patrick nodded. “You’re right, of course. These past few months have been hard, but we have made progress. And I never would have made it so far so fast if not for you and your people.”
“Our people. They may be my groupies, but more and more of them are seeing you as the boss.” I snickered. “Mainly because they’re terrified of you, but still.” I looked to see if he smiled, but his face was still serious, his eyes sad as he studied the road ahead.
“It’s just…we’ve checked five rumored ways across so far and they’ve all led to nothing.” He paused and shook his head slightly. “Or at least not to the Nightlands. To Jason. And every time we come up empty, I feel like he’s slipping further away.”
I looked out at the road. “I know. But we’ll keep trying, right? And I have a good feeling about this one. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the ones that come too easily are bound to be wrong. The real paths are always a bit hidden, with some mystery at the end of the path.” I pointed to the county line sign as we passed it. “Plus, we’re already here.”
Patrick regarded the sign skeptically. “Yes. Let’s see what Tulset County has to offer.”
Before two days ago, the information we had consisted mainly of three disparate threads. The first thread were the rumors and legends. I had collected a few mentions of a “Mystery Cave” in the area over the years, but they were few and far between. Nothing that, by itself, prompted me to investigate it as an Outsider-related phenomena, or anything more than urban legends. Of course, Janie’s network, with its impressively vast ties to so many sources of occult and esoteric knowledge, were able to lend more credibility to the idea that something noteworthy was going on in Tulset County.
The other two threads had come from the volumes of data we had harvested from Tattersall. One, which had been easily accessed once Janie’s people were past the initial encryptions, was collected data Tattersall had scraped from national crime statistic databases. If you knew where to look, it showed subtle but unmistakable patterns—imperfections in the weave of the fabric of life and death in several places across the country. Spots where there were anomalies one way or the other, or even blanks where there should be none. One such anomaly radiated out from Tulset County.
Statistical variances aren’t that noteworthy on their own, of course. They can be influenced by so many unseen or unknown factors that it becomes easy to see patterns where there are none. Still, it was the way that this pattern manifested that caught my attention. I’d asked Janie if she saw anything odd looking at a map of the five hundred miles around Tulset County. The map was color coded with hot spots of unsolved disappearances, and at a glance, it might look fairly uniform in its lack of uniformity. More people went missing in bigger towns and cities, of course, and some of the smaller places had very little activity, including the area around Tulset County.
I watched her expression change slightly when she saw it. She really was a smart young woman, and aside from her utility, I had come to appreciate her company and keen mind, as well as her reservoirs of courage. While I’d never asked her to come with me on the few hunts I’d gone on while we searched for a way to get Jason back, she’d often volunteered, and in time I could see her becoming a good hunter in her own right.
“You see it?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
She nodded, pointing at the map and tracing a finger along a thin line of pink that trailed around in a rough, uneven circle. “Yeah. It’s like…There’s nothing much near the place where Mystery Cave is supposed to be, but for the last thirty or so years there’s been more than average all along here. And it’s not like these other spots, bunched up in cities or along major highways or interstates. This is kind of a ring, with Tulset County in the center and always a couple of hundred miles away from where people are going missing more.”
I nodded, hiding a smile. “And what does that tell you?”
Janie glanced at me and then back down to the map, her brow furrowed. “That somebody is doing it. Making the numbers go up more than they would be otherwise. And that they are either making a slow circle around the whole region or…” She met my eyes again. “Or they’re trying to hide what’s in the center.”
I’d smiled at her then, but driving past the sign announcing we were entering Tulset County, I tried to keep my thoughts and emotions from being too evident. I was excited at the prospect of a viable lead, but I was nervous too. Not because I was afraid of this being another dead end, but because I was increasingly sure it wasn’t. I was hiding this growing certainty from Janie not because I didn’t trust her—I had resigned myself to the fact that I was starting to view her less as a colleague and more as a surrogate granddaughter—but because of the last thread I had managed to pull from Tattersall’s tangled web of information just a week ago.
It was an apocryphal account by a House member from 1893. According to them, they had been part of an expedition sent out to discover possible doorways to other realms, including the home of their gods, the Nightlands. They believed they had found such a place—a magic cave that served as a nexus to many other wheres. Their exploration of the cave system had been cut short, however, by the arrival of a creature, a monster, that demanded something from them. “Tribute” was the word she used in the account.
Whether they refused or gave something that was unsatisfactory was unclear, but in either case, the creature began to slaughter them in short order. This expedition party was not without resources or defenses of its own—aside from firearms and torches, the leader of the party was one of the House’s vaunted Ascendants—a young man capable of becoming a being described as something akin to a large flaming serpent.
Whatever his abilities, they did not fare well against the thing they found in that cave, and the Ascendant and the author of the account tried to escape back the way they had come. They almost made it, but just outside the cave’s entrance, the House’s little god found itself seized, and its panicked final attacks on the monster of Mystery Cave did little to dissuade it from tearing the fire snake in half, spraying its burning blood across the nearby trees and setting them ablaze.
The last surviving member of the party barely made it out of the forest alive, and of what might have happened to her after that account, I had no sign. It would have been easy to dismiss the whole story as the ramblings of some insane cult member trying to justify coming back alone, but that somehow didn’t ring true. The House was insane, but they were not generally stupid, and their religious fervor tended to make them treat anything related to Outsiders or the Nightlands as sacrosanct. Consequently, the likelihood of fanciful embellishment or outright lies was, at the very least, mitigated, and a quick bit of research on the area showed that there was, in fact, a major forest fire around the time the account described.
But while this all served to increase my certainty that something noteworthy was happening at Mystery Cave, it did little to assuage my concerns. If this was real, it was a place of sacrifice and death, controlled by something we had never encountered and didn’t understand.
And normally that would have been reason enough to proceed slowly and cautiously. To temper our excitement with care and calculation. But two days ago, Janie came across something new.
It was on an internet forum devoted to people discussing self-harm and suicide. Some of it was a detached form of grief-counseling or pointing people toward the help they needed. But other posts were people describing what they were going through or how close they were to stepping over the edge.
One such post had been written by a young man who said he couldn’t live with himself anymore. Not after all he had done, all the people he had hurt. Through a back and forth with commentors on the post, it was revealed that his name was Tommy Johns and he was twenty-four years old. And for over a decade, he had worked with an older man to hurt people.
When someone asked for more details of where he was or what he had done, Tommy quickly grew more taciturn. He was smart enough to not say too much, lest someone contact local authorities. He did finally make one final admission, however, which is what triggered Janie’s crawlers to pick up the post in the first place.
Tommy assured a commentor that he hadn’t actually killed anyone himself, but he knew that was “ a cheat—a bullshit answer” because of what he had done.
He’d tied them up. Tied them up and left them outside of a place he called Mystery Cave..
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