A Place So Wicked by Patrick Reuman (life books to read txt) 📕

34

From somewhere, there was a loud, annoying ring. Toby’s eyes wiggled under their lids, still reacting to the dream he was having. In it, he had followed Addy back into the woods, to where they had made love. She was so far ahead of him the whole time, but she knew he was behind her and he somehow knew that she wasn’t going to wait up. When she disappeared into the woods, he hesitated, remembering the darkness that waited, locked beneath the canopy of trees.

He pushed ahead anyway, knowing that he couldn’t lose track of her, that he needed to keep up with her or something bad would happen. So into the dark he went, his memory of his last visit guiding him through the trees where his eyes could hardly see.

When he came out at the water, the area was empty. Not even the creeks churning could be heard, or the patter of the animals that should have been roaming the brush, or the insects infesting the air. It was as if he had just walked into a silent film starring himself and literally nothing else.

He looked around, his eyes snapping from side to side. If nobody was there, then why did he have this overwhelming feeling of being watched, as if he were on stage performing in front of an audience of starving wolves?

There was a ringing. It was loud, and repetitive, and annoying. Like an alarm clock. He looked all over, trying to trace the sound to its origins, or at least close enough to give him somewhere to start. But it was as if the ringing was coming from everything. The trees. The grass. The creek didn’t make the rustling sound of water bouncing off rocks but instead a mind-numbing ring that only grew louder and louder and louder.

He sat up with a jolt. Everything was spinning at first but quickly slowed to a standstill. He was awake, looking at Paisley, who was asleep on the couch. He remembered now that they had opted to sleep in the living room, both afraid to go anywhere else in the house, alone, after learning what they had about the house. But the ringing was still going, continuing even outside his dream, loud, and terribly annoying.

His cell phone was on the table, the screen lit and flashing. It was a call coming in. The ringing was his cell phone. He got up, but before he could reach the phone, the incoming call ended.

Missed call from: Eli read across the screen. Paisley woke, rolling over to see him standing over the table. She looked confused for a moment but regained her sense.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Eli called.”

She sat up and snatched her phone from the table where it had been sitting a foot or so away from Toby’s. Twelve missed calls from Eli. She hit the callback button but hung up when she noticed Toby with his own phone already up to his ear.

“Toby!” Eli said, answering the phone.

“What’s up?”

“I called this university that’s not that far away, a few cities over, and there was a professor of Latin Studies there!”

“Holy shit!” Toby nearly jumped out of his skin. “What did you say? What did he say?”

“Well,” Eli said, “I didn’t give him much context. I told him it was for a sort of game. But I spelled out the text on the basement door.”

“And?” Toby said. Paisley was staring at him, eager to know what Eli was saying, so he put the phone on speaker.

“Well, we had it wrong. Apparently, internet translators are ‘hogwash,’ as the professor said. According to him, ‘ULTRA HAEC QUAEDAM TENEBRAE MANENT—IPSAS UT LIBERES—VERBA CLAVE CANTA’ translates to…” Eli paused. Toby could hear Eli’s shallow, hurried breathing, as if he had just sprinted into his house and dialed Toby’s number without remembering to take a breath. “It translates to, ‘Beyond this, a darkness awaits. In order for you to free it. Recite these words with the key.”

There was a pause. Toby and Paisley looked into each other’s eyes. The words repeated in his head. Beyond this, a darkness awaits. In order for you to free it. Recite these words with the key.

“Reciting the words isn’t the key,” Eli said. “Not the only key at least. There’s a real key, too. An actual, physical key. You need the key and the words.”

“But we don’t have the key,” Toby said, his words strung with foreboding. “The real estate guy said he couldn’t find it, either. We’ve been trying to locate it since we got here.”

Eli took in a deep breath, staring out his bedroom window. The last time he did so little as look into the town’s past, people literally showed up at his door for him. He remembered the fear in his mother’s voice as she demanded that he leave it alone, a fear he shared. If he did what he was about to do, his life would be in danger, and so would his mom’s. But the alternative was just as horrible, if not worse. If he stood by and did nothing, Paisley’s entire family would die just like so many before them. And he couldn’t live with that.

“I think I might know where it is,” he said, his hand shaking and sweaty.

Eli slid on his shoes, trying to maintain what little composure he had left. Then he slid his pocketknife into his pocket, the only weapon he had. The truth was he could feel the fear straight down to his marrow. Everything he had told Toby replayed through his mind. There was a church near the center of town. He knew very little about it other than it was practically ancient, perhaps the oldest building in the entire city, the oldest still standing at least. He had only been