Danvers Pointe— Episode Twenty One

Last week: The mill burned to the ground. The tear vanished. Cody survived the encounter with the void, but not unscathed.

The void left its mark.

Danvers Pointe

Outside the burning mill, Darla knelt in front of Cody. His eyes were open, but they stared past her. His fingers began moving slowly in the air. Tracing shapes. He whispered. The words were sharp, guttural, wrong.

Jackson stared at him.

“What the hell did it do to him?” asked Jackson.

EPILOGUE

Arkham, Massachusetts—1938

The apartment was too small for the two of them. Darla was used to her own space, but he needed her now.

Rain ticked softly against the window over the sink. Somewhere down the block a delivery truck rattled past, gears grinding. Normal sounds. City sounds.

Cody sat in the vinyl chair at the kitchen table. He had been there most of the afternoon. And most of yesterday. And, in pieces, the day before that.

Sometimes he was fine. Clear-eyed. Quiet. Exhausted but present. Then it would come over him. His gaze would drift past the walls. Past the room. And his fingers would rise.

Now they hovered in the air in front of him, moving with slow precision. Tracing.

Angles.

Curves.

The same shapes, over and over.

His lips moved in a low murmur. Clicking and sliding, like an insect dragging itself across gravel. The language wasn’t English. It wasn’t anything Darla recognized. Hard consonants and clipped syllables. Breath drawn sharply through teeth between phrases.

The temperature seemed to change around him. Though he didn’t notice.

She was waiting for a call from her father’s old friend from Miskatonic University. Professor Malcom Reed. If anyone knew what tongue Cody was speaking, or what had happened to her brother, it would be him.

She sat across from Cody at the kitchen table.

His satchel open in front of her. If he noticed, he didn't seem to care.

The leather still smelled faintly of smoke. She had waited to go through it. Part of her hadn’t wanted to know.

Jackson had stopped in that morning to make sure Cody was stable enough not to wander into traffic. He’d stood in the doorway longer than necessary.

“You call me if he starts glowin’,” he’d said.

She hadn’t smiled.

The pages were filled with notes. Most of which seemed mundane enough.

Observations about townsfolk, notes on Eleanor and their father, and then there were a few rubbings of the symbols from the mill’s posts.

She turned another page. There were a few sheets tucked into the binding almost like they belonged, but they were different.

Diagrams filled the margins. Precise sketches of the circle. Layered runes.

Annotations written in two hands.

Cody’s. And—father’s.

Where did he get these?

Her breath caught. She leaned closer. There were dates. Years of them. Not summoning rituals.

“Reinforcement cycles”.

Notes about “stress points in the boundary”.

On another folded page that looked like it had been forgotten, a note was scrawled and underlined twice.

"There have been no sightings of things coming through...yet. It needs the ritual to seal it... it will seek a stress point elsewhere... It manipulates time. Don’t trust your eyes."

Her eyes moved faster now. Cody’s recent entries were frantic.

Half-formed theories. He’d written about Eleanor’s method — about the... "yearly containment."

Her eyes flicked to her brother. Cody’s fingers were still moving. Precise and measured. Like he was writing a complex equation, but invisible.

His whispering grew slightly louder for a moment, then softened again.

There it was, again.

Now and then she caught the scent of smoke. She checked the apartment but never found anything.

It had to be the neighbor.

She flipped one more page. A final entry in Cody’s handwriting, shaky and slanted.

"It touched me. Now I can see."

She stood and walked to the phone mounted on the kitchen wall. Her fingers hesitated over the dial. She picked it up anyway. The line clicked. Rang once. Twice. On the third ring, a familiar voice answered.

“Majors.”

She swallowed. Her voice came out reedy.

“Jackson..."

She could still hear Cody’s hoarse whispering behind her.

“We were wrong.”

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                          Jackson and Darla will return...

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Hello my friends. Thanks for reading my story. I hope you enjoyed it. Please leave a comment.

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The picture of Henry Jekyll, my first completed novel is available on amazon as well.

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Mike