Hold Back the Dark Read online

  Logan felt the first flicker of sympathy, even though he didn’t want to. This wasn’t the first spirit who had shared details of his own autopsy. That had to be unnerving, to say the least, watching your own body being opened up on a slab.

  “Must not have been anything conclusive enough to interest the cops,” he said.

  “But that’s the thing.” Oscar sounded near tears. “They were convinced. They arrested her. They’re going to put her on trial for murder. And I know she didn’t poison me. But my wife hired a PI and he’s come up with a theory of how and why she could have done it, and I know he planted evidence and other stuff the police believe, or maybe they just slipped me the poison and made it look like she did. I think they’re both in on it, my wife and her PI, because I’ve seen them together, and I just—”

  “Oscar, what do you want from me?” Logan tried his best to keep impatience out of his voice.

  “My girlfriend doesn’t deserve to go to prison. She didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t poison me.”

  “And how do you think I can prove that?” A glance showed him that Oscar was looking even more miserable.

  “I don’t know. All I know is that it isn’t fair—”

  “Life isn’t fair, buddy. Why should death be?” But then the way Oscar’s voice had broken off tugged at Logan’s attention, and he looked at the spirit again.

  The spirit named Oscar seemed to be enveloped in a strange, multicolored aura, all the intensely bright colors swirling and dancing around him.

  Logan didn’t see auras.

  “What the hell?”

  Oscar shook his head slightly, as though trying to throw off an unwelcome distraction, while at the same time his expression was straining as though trying to hear something. And then he looked frightened. “I . . . I don’t . . . I don’t . . . Oh, damn, there won’t be time. Promise me, Logan. Promise me you’ll come back here and help me prove Lucy’s innocent.”

  “Come back from where? Oscar—”

  “Prosperity. When you come back from Prosperity.”

  A weird sensation of unease was beginning to crawl over Logan’s skin, unfamiliar and distinctly unpleasant. And his head had begun to pound. “What are you talking about, Oscar? I’m not going anywhere. My job—”

  “You have to take a leave or quit or something. You have to go to Prosperity, Logan. You have to help them.” Now he looked terrified. “We’ll all be in danger if you can’t help them stop it. The living and the dead.”

  Logan wondered abstractedly what sort of danger could or would trouble a spirit. Before he could even form the words to ask, Oscar and his rainbow aura vanished like a soap bubble.

  Decision out of my hands, Logan told himself with relief, ignoring the stab of guilt.

  “Nothing I could’ve done anyway,” he muttered, straightening and turning to head back home.

  After only two steps, he jerked to a stop and stood very, very still, only his eyes moving as he scanned the park in front of him.

  There were people moving around, just as there had been before. Couples holding hands, dog walkers, a couple of guys tossing a football and another two throwing a Frisbee. There were a few people on benches or just leaning up against a tree here and there with a book or tablet or laptop. Normal, even on a slightly chilly but sunny October day.

  What wasn’t normal were the others.

  The spirits.

  They looked as real as the living, not transparent. But as his gaze rested on them one by one, he saw them shimmer almost like heat off the pavement or a jittery image on a computer or special effects in a movie before becoming solid again. And every single one of them was just standing there, utterly still.

  Turned toward him.

  Staring at him.

  That was new. That was . . . different.

  Logan turned in a slow circle, scanning as much of the park as he could see from his position.

  They were everywhere. Dozens. Scores. More.

  A lot more. More than he’d ever seen in one place. Ever.

  As he completed the slow circle, he started in surprise to find one of the spirits standing only about three feet away. A woman. Too young to be dead, though people did die young and, anyway, he had learned that he didn’t always see spirits as they had appeared at death, but at some earlier stage of their lives. And he almost never saw what had killed them, spared at least that horror of nightmares of the living dead haunting him.

  He had no idea why.

  He didn’t care.

  All he knew was that he was far colder than the October day, cold down to his bones, that the unpleasant crawly sensation roving over his entire body was getting stronger and more unsettling, his head was really hurting now, and a very strong sense of foreboding gripped him.

  “No,” he said softly.

  “You have to go to Prosperity,” she said, her voice a bit hollow and distant, as they were sometimes. Her face was without expression, which was something else that was occasionally true of the spirits he encountered.

  This time, the total lack of expression on her face and in her voice was creepy as hell.

  Trying to hold his voice low and not betray to the living around him that he was a madman who saw what they didn’t, that they were moving blithely about among spirits, too many spirits, nothing normal about that even out on the paranormal fringes of his reality, he said, “I don’t have to go anywhere. Leave me alone.”

  “They need you. We need you, Logan.”

  They always knew his name. It had always bugged him.

  “Tap another medium,” he advised her. “It’s got to be somebody else’s turn.”

  “You have to go. Please, Logan. It’s so important.”

  “What—” But the half-formed question was never finished, because the spirit faded away quickly and with an eeriness he’d never seen before, like she just became smoke dispersed by the slight, chill breeze.

  It was a long moment before Logan could force himself to scan the park as he had before. But when he did, he saw no spirits. Only the living, going about their business as they probably did every ordinary day of their nice normal lives.

  “Goddammit,” he whispered.

  The day felt colder than he knew it was.

  * * *

  • • •

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 7

  Reno Bellman was congratulating herself for what had so far been a successful brunch date. She had not, after all, absently told her date, Jake Harper, any of the bits of information that had floated through her mind like flotsam on a calm sea since they’d met at this sidewalk café more than an hour earlier. She hadn’t reminded him not to forget his mother’s birthday next week, or told him his treasured high school football championship ring was not gone forever but had instead rolled under his nightstand, or even that he was going to get that promotion he was anxious about.

  She didn’t mention any of those things. Instead, she had chatted casually just as Jake had, on the safe topics generally reserved for a first date. Likes and dislikes, the undoubtedly miserable winter looming ahead for Chicago, and how the Cubs had done during the season. They both tacitly avoided politics and religion, those trickier subjects more suited to later—if there was a later—when disagreements would either be handled amicably or else judged to be insurmountable differences.

  Everything was fine, just fine, so when she became conscious of a rustling sound like dead leaves skittering over pavement, she glanced around in surprise. This sidewalk café was moderately crowded for a Tuesday morning in October, but nobody else seemed to see or hear anything unusual, and she couldn’t see any leaves or anything else skittering past.

  Reno was about to just chalk it up to her generally heightened senses when the rustle of dry leaves became instead whispering. Whispering by many voices. Or by . . . something else. Something tugging at her
with increasing insistence, causing the fine hairs on the back of her neck to stir and the skin all over her body to go unpleasantly pins-and-needles. Her head began to hurt. Badly.

  “Reno?”

  At first, it was only whispering, just sounds that seemed normal and ordinary, the background hum of a busy city neighborhood. But then, slowly, she believed she detected a sort of pattern to what she was hearing. And then words. Words whispered by many voices, all saying the same thing.

  “Reno—”

  “Hush,” she said absently, all but forgetting her date in the need to concentrate on listening. What was it? What were they saying? She wasn’t sure at first, but slowly some of the static faded, and she was just able to make out words.

  Words that gradually became clearer.

  Come . . . come to . . . come to Prosperity. They . . . need you. We all need you. You have to come to Prosperity—

  “Reno?”

  She never found out if she might have heard something more, an explanation, a reason, something she could glean safely and peacefully, in warm daylight and without fear, without being touched by violence, because in that moment Jake reached across the small table and laid his hand over hers.

  Before she could warn him.

  So he was yanked with her into the hellish maelstrom of a vision.

  And this one was bad.

  Anyone could have been forgiven for believing that where they were was, literally, hell. Or, at the very least, some acid trip or horror movie version of hell. All the worst bits of Revelation and Dante’s Inferno, with even scarier stuff added in for horror fun.

  The air was full of a horrible smell and choking ash, and as Reno stood there looking around, trying to tell herself that this was no worse than other visions had been, it became worse.

  It became a lot worse.

  The ash in the air thinned out enough to allow her to see more of her surroundings. Unfortunately.

  The heat was searing, the rotten-egg smell of brimstone acrid, and the ash from unseen but roaring fires drifted down—and drifted up—and drifted sideways. The alien landscape, as far as the eye could see, was a sickly reddish brown, with jagged rocks that looked razor-sharp and thick, muddy streams slopping between the rocks, and here and there a stunted, twisted tree, bare limbs charred and bent downward in defeated submission.

  And . . . the creatures. Dozens of them, more, dotting the raw landscape as far as she could see. Crouched and standing, still or swaying back and forth, with a few curled up on the rocky ground making pitiful soft noises that were awful to hear and impossible to ever forget.

  They might once have been human but looked deformed now, bodies twisted, limbs partially missing, their faces skewed, almost melted, the features blunted or open or missing. Some of them looked skeletal but with burned flesh clinging to bones, crackling sounds audible as they shifted and turned.

  To stare at Reno and her forgotten companion, or to listen if they had no eyes, or maybe just obeying the blind and deaf but primitive sense of an unusual presence and possible threat in their horrific reality.

  “What is this place?” she demanded of the nearest . . . creature.

  It did not answer, but cringed away as a shadow detached itself from a towering, jagged rock and stepped forward, toward Reno. She recognized it only because she had heard of Shadow People, beings from the spirit realm, or even deeper and much farther away, that might have once been human in some distant past.

  But now, from everything she had heard whispered on what some wryly or mockingly called the psychic grapevine, the current thinking was that they were simply the human-shaped utter blackness of everything wrong, twisted, sick, perverted, and evil—the psychic spillover of horrors poured into a creepily recognizable shape. Pure negative energy. As if they had been feeding for eons on the evil emotions and evil acts committed by humans.

  And maybe they had.

  Some people had called them demons.

  This one made itself taller, elongated, towering over Reno and the stunned, terrified date she had completely forgotten about.

  “Neat trick,” she said to the Shadow creature, tilting her head slightly to look up, but not otherwise moving. “Now answer my question. What is this place?”

  “Hell,” it answered in a croak.

  “No, this isn’t hell,” she countered immediately. “Been there.”

  A laugh like dry kindling scraping together came from the Shadow. “This is your earth, Reno,” it said in that scratchy, unused voice.

  She had been holding fear at bay, most of a lifetime of practice allowing her to keep it out of her voice and expression, because she knew that whatever and wherever this place was, she was here only in spirit. It was a vision. And in her visions, she had discovered, the bad ones at least, any fear from her gave the various . . . beings . . . she confronted power over her. And sometimes made it more difficult for her to escape the vision if things got dicey. But when the towering Shadow said this was earth, she felt a genuine jolt of horror.

  “What are you talking about? Some kind of war is going to do this?” The ugly landscape all around her certainly could have been the seared devastation of some insane nuclear conflict.

  Without the creatures, at least.

  Or maybe with them too.

  “Not that kind of war. Not soldiers in uniform fighting for flag and country, dying on battlefields.” The Shadow creature’s voice was still inhuman, yet managed to be mocking as well. “A different struggle. Too much evil building unchecked for too long. Darkness. Hunger. Need. Gathering. Growing stronger. Upsetting the natural balance.”

  Trying to think clearly, Reno said, “I would have thought you . . . creatures . . . would love that. Why show me? I’m shown things I can change, always.”

  The Shadow laughed again, weirdly both scornful and anxious. “This is something you need to change. Need to stop . . . if you can. To prevent if you can. Hold the line. Better for all if the boundaries between our worlds, our realities, are . . . maintained. An occasional portal or door opened here and there is one thing, releasing pressure, easing the strain. Natural. Normal. The way things are supposed to be.

  “This . . . is something else. A dead and burning earth is no more use to us than it is to you. And if you die, if you are destroyed, so are we. We need the chaos of humanity, the destructive fear and evil you create. The negative energy. We need to . . . feed. To exist. We balance you. The universe demands balance. Go to Prosperity, Reno. The very earth there is ready to heave itself open. To spill out evil even we can’t absorb. Can’t control. You must stop it.”

  “What, alone?”

  “There will be others. Those who need to be there with you are being called. Some already on their way. Balance, Reno. We all need balance if we’re to survive.”

  Reno had more questions than she could count, but as quickly as the vision had begun, it was over. And she was sitting at a small table at a sidewalk café on a cool Chicago morning, breathing in fresh air, the weak October sunshine making her blink.

  She felt the death grip on her hand abruptly released, and looked up to see her date lurching to his feet. His face was pasty white, and though he tried several times, he was clearly unable to say a word.

  Dammit, there goes another potential boyfriend.

  “It’s okay, Jake,” she said wryly. “I don’t expect to hear from you again. As for this little . . . adventure . . . I’m sure you’ll be able to explain it away somehow.”

  “You’re crazy!” he finally yelped.

  “I expect that’ll do,” she murmured.

  And, as he hurried away without a backward look, almost running, she called after him, “No, really, I’ll take care of the check.” And then her worser self reared its head, and she shouted, “And don’t forget your mother’s birthday next week!”

  By then, he was definitely ru
nning.

  The shout made the pain in her head worse, but she decided it had been worth it.

  She was being stared at by others at the café. She could feel it. But Reno ignored them all. After most of a lifetime, she’d gotten pretty good at that. No use trying to control what she couldn’t.

  She summoned a waiter with a glance, asked for the check, then asked, “Can you give me the time?” She wasn’t wearing a watch.

  The young waiter looked at the large watch on his own wrist and replied, “It’s eleven forty-five, ma’am.”

  “Exactly?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Your check, ma’am.” He looked after her hastily departed date, clearly somewhat indignant on her behalf.

  Reno didn’t notice. She glanced at the total printed on the check and placed several bills in the folder, covering the meal and adding a generous tip, then closed it and returned it to him. “Keep the change.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. More coffee?”

  She looked up at him, saw him, and blinked. “No. No, thank you. I’ll just sit here a bit if that’s okay.” Fewer than half a dozen of the sidewalk tables were occupied by now, in the lull between the departure of early brunch customers and the next wave of people wanting actual lunch. An exodus that had apparently happened during her vision. Which had, she estimated, lasted little more than five minutes. Time was always different in a vision.

  “Of course, ma’am.” He silently retrieved her date’s cup, saucer, water glass, and napkin, flicked a few invisible crumbs off the table with the napkin, and just as silently went away again.

  Reno reached up to rub one temple briefly, then dug in her casual purse, produced a small bottle of OTC painkillers, and swallowed several capsules with a sip of water.

  “Prosperity,” she murmured.

  After a thoughtful moment, she reached again into her bag, this time for her cell phone, grateful not for the first time that she was one of the few psychics they knew of who was able to depend on having a charged phone for a reasonable amount of time, just like a normal person. She could even wear a watch when she wanted to, something else many psychics couldn’t do because of how they used energy.