Danvers Pointe— Episode Fourteen

Last week: Darla found him—Cody. Hood down, staring into the center of a chalk circle. She started to call out his name, when suddenly a hand clamped over her mouth. Cody vanished from sight.

Danvers Pointe, Massachusetts — 1938

And then Cody was gone.

Her ankle screamed from the impact. The barrel thudded faintly behind her as she was dragged deeper into shadow.

The hand over her mouth crushed her lips against her teeth. Wool scratched her cheek.

Oil and sweat filled her nose. She bit down again. Flesh gave. She tried to tear away, but the hand tightened.

A sharp hiss in her ear.

“Stop fighting.”

The voice was low. Controlled. Familiar.

Jackson.

She relaxed.

The grip loosened. The arm slipped from her ribs. She released the bitter flesh and pushed off him to get her balance. She spun on him, breath coming hard.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she hissed.

“What’s wrong with—” He grabbed her shoulders and pulled her toward him, into the shadows. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I was thinking my brother is standing in the middle of a cult ritual, or sacrifice!”

“You walk into the middle of whatever the hell that is and announce yourself?” His whisper was harsh. “You tryin’ to get yourself killed?”

She hated when men talked down to her. It made her blood boil.

Jackson stood in front of her massaging his hand. He was lucky she didn’t take chunks out of that nasty tasting thing. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but he’d have some heavy bruising. Served him right.

The hum in the mill deepened, vibrating through the soles of her shoes. Twisting lantern light revealed strange shapes lurking in the upper darkness.

She opened her mouth to fire back—

And saw it again, through his eyes. A circle of cultists chanting or murmuring. No one seemed to be struggling, no one being held against their will—

She had to admit she wasn’t thinking straight. But something just wasn’t right.

This wasn’t the same Cody who sent her the letter a few weeks ago. That Cody had been scared. She could see it in the shaky handwriting. She imagined him huddled behind the piles of wood scrawling the letter, afraid for his life.

But seeing him now, he wasn’t at all what she’d expected. None of this was.

Jackson followed her gaze.

“You rush in blind, you don’t help him,” he muttered. “You just join him, or worse.”

She spat to get the taste out of her mouth. It didn’t help. She sighed again. He wasn’t wrong. That almost irritated her more than if he had been.

“Fine,” she said through her teeth. “So, what’s your play?”

Jackson jerked his chin toward the far wall. A rack of robes hung near the entrance. He put a finger to his mouth shushing her.

“We blend,” he said.

The wool scratched at her wrists as she slipped a robe over her shoulders. It smelled of storage, damp cedar, and mildew. She pulled the hood low and felt the world narrow to lantern light and breathing fabric.

The hum wasn’t just sound now. It was all five senses. Behind her eyes, she could smell the color of the hum. In her teeth, she could see the waves of sound. Her stomach lurched more than once.

She stepped into the crowd of townsfolk.

It wasn’t coming from them; it must be from the circle.

Faces she faintly recognized stood inches away. Jaws twitched. Eyelids fluttered. Fists clenched.

Whatever they were focused on, it was taxing. Thankfully it pulled their attention from her as she slid through the crowd.

At the center of the circle, chalk symbols crawled across the floorboards in white arcs and branching lines.

The wood around them looked darker. Warped. As she tried to focus on it, she saw the charred wood. Someone or something had burnt the symbols into the wood, the chalk was rubbed into the char.

At least that was how her rational mind saw it.

As she refocused her gaze on the entire scene, she saw it.

At first, she thought it was heat from the lanterns. Had she not been focused on trying to capture every detail, she’d have missed it.

A shimmer.

Vertical and thin as a blade. The center was black. No. Deeper than black.

It was the stain from the photographs. The weird thing that stood in the road as they came into town.

The tear hovered inches above the floorboards and stretched toward the beams above.

It wasn’t glowing. It was the reverse. Darkness seeped from it. It was like reality had been sliced open and left to bleed out in the mill.

The hum was coming from the tear. The hum was the tear and it beckoned her.

What wonders might she glimpse if only she could touch it.

It pulsed. The darkness reached its tendrils toward the edges of the circle. Soft. Caressing. A tightening and releasing, like someone breathing under a sheet.

She saw her arm raise, though she hadn’t commanded the muscles to do it. Her hand reached toward the source of her longing. It was so close.

Her throat went dry. The tear widened—barely. And she saw through it. Blurry at first. Not like a window. More like a memory forced into the present.

And then everything came into perfect focus.

He was there. Talking to someone she couldn’t quite see. The words were garbled, like a foreign language that hurt her mind when she tried to focus on it.

But he was solid. She was aware of her mouth hanging open but didn’t care.

Tears ran down her cheeks.

He was real as the hand in front of her. Wearing the brown flannel shirt that he loved, corncob pipe dangling out of the corner of his mouth. Never lit, but always present. His hair was darker and the lines around his eyes hadn’t dug in quite so deep yet.

His cheeks weren’t yet hollowed by the disease that had eaten him from the inside out in those last months.

He had to have been ten years younger than when she’d last seen him.

In the coffin.

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