The Gathering Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  * * * * *

  In loving memory of my sister Rose, who would have loved ParaCon. She always told me she was a witch, and I believe her.

  As always, special thanks to my husband, Dale, and cousin Kiki.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  The Gathering

  Copyright © 2016 by Moebooks

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any way without the express written permission of the author.

  Cover designed by Revelle Design, Inc. www.RevelleDesign.com

  * * * * *

  Chapter 1

  It was just a normal, average night. In fact, I was sleeping soundly, not dreaming anything that I can remember. The nightmare started when I woke up. My eyes popped open, my heart was suddenly too thick for my chest, and I came awake with and an icy shock running through my body. Just outside the house, in the animal shelter’s kennel, I heard the barking of the dogs go from a garden-variety intruder alert to panic and fear. Out of all that, I could hear the voice of King, a magnificent Belgian Malinois, taking charge, frustrated at being caged, demanding to be let out so he could lead his pack into battle.

  I sat up in bed, quaking. I took a shuddering breath and tried to wake Michael, but he was sleeping like a man who’d had too much to drink the night before (he had), after playing eighteen holes of golf under a brilliant sun in a local tournament (his team won, yay), followed by a wine-soaked bacchanal. All he did was snort, flutter his eyelids, say, “Nah guilty, yerronner,” and slide back into the courtroom drama of his dream. He’s a retired lawyer. Most of his sleep-talk ends with “yerronner.”

  When I heard one long, mournful howl, I suddenly found myself up on my feet standing next to the bed. I must have popped up like a piston. With or without Michael, I was going to see what was going on out there. I may be an older woman, but the fear in the animal’s howl sent me straight into battle mode. I run an animal shelter on an old estate by a river, and when it comes to protecting them, I am the warrior queen.

  Fortunately it was a long trip through the old mansion from the master bedroom down to the main floor and out the back door to the yard, and I had time to come to my senses and at least grab a flashlight. A nice, big, heavy one that would also be good for cracking heads if it came to that.

  I had not had enough time to come to my fashion senses, though. On my way through the mud room I grabbed my old kangaroo-pocket sweatshirt and pulled it on over the t-shirt I’d slept in, then I went out into the January night in pajama bottoms and flip flops. Fortunately in coastal Florida, a January night is only coolish, not frigid. It had been kind of a knee-jerk reaction to pluck my cell phone from the nightstand and carry it with me, but other than that and the flashlight, I was a 60-something woman en dishabille trying to run in flip flops. Easy pickings. Once outside, I wasn’t going back, though, because King was still in a wild fury and all the other dogs were howling now. Inside The Cattery, the felines were being sensibly quiet.

  When I finally got to the old barn and slung the door open, the dogs were still in an uproar, and when I turned the lights on they went into a frenzy. My presence emboldened them, and they wanted to form up the pack and advance against the enemy.

  “What?” I said, but of course they couldn’t hear me, though they could read my body language. They just went on barking while I looked around and saw nothing unusual except for a lot of hysterical dogs.

  One of the great frustrations of my life has always been the fact that dogs and cats cannot speak Human. I have so many questions for them. Not being able to discuss the situation, I did the next best thing: I put King on a leash and let him lead me to wherever he thought the problem was. He knew exactly what he wanted to do: he charged toward the door. If I didn’t open it, he was going to dig his way under it or bash his way through it.

  “You’re sure about this?” I asked him. In answer, he put his head down and started fiercely digging at the brick floor near the bottom of the door. With all my strength, I pulled him back so he wouldn’t hurt himself. I was beginning to have doubts about actually coming face-to-face with whatever had gotten the dogs so upset. King looked up at me with those almost-human eyes of his, assumed an aggressive stance, and then stared hard at the door, willing it to open.

  I decided to trust him, possibly with my life.

  The moon was too low in the sky to give very much light, but by now my eyes were dark-adapted and I could see fairly well. That didn’t reassure me, though. If intruders really were out there and I could see well, so could they. King was pulling toward the hill behind the barn and for the moment at least, I followed his lead. He backslid on his paws a few times, straining against the leash, but I held him back from a mad charge up the hill into the teeth of whatever was up there.

  My mind was clearer now. I reasoned that if we had trespassers, the fact that we were out of the barn and headed their way might have been enough to scare them off. Personally, faced with an alpha male like King in full battle cry, I’d make a run for it and hope he didn’t track me all the way through the 1,500 acres surrounding the Cadbury House mansion. I couldn’t imagine it was anything worse than a few kids spending the night in the old cemetery at the top of the hill. After all, the cemetery was the only thing up there.

  Then the thought that we sometimes encounter panthers in northern Florida crossed my mind. I was counting on knowing the terrain better than an intruder would, so I had decided not to use the flashlight, which would have made us an easy target, but for about twenty seconds I turned it on and did a sweep, looking for eyes. Nothing. I looked back over the river and carefully scanned the landscape, holding King back until he turned and whined at me in frustration. He was still projecting urgency, still determined to get up that hill.

  “Okay, boy,” I told him, “but only as far as the cemetery. We are not diving into the bushes.”

  As I began to move, he galloped in place, trying to pull me forward. King was a valiant animal, but it was up to me to exercise caution and not get us into something I couldn’t get us out of. I began to have bitter thoughts about what I was going to say to Michael about grown men who party all night like frat boys, but I knew I needed to keep my wits about me, and I pushed that little pleasure aside for later.

  We moved up the hill. I suddenly realized that the chorus of the night – frogs, crickets and whatever that thing is that makes a cracking noise – was silent. Everything around me seemed to be holding its breath, and the higher we got up the hill, the lower my confidence went. I looked down at King and saw him slow down and put his ears back. I made a sudden decision.

  “Okay, King, that’s it. Whatever it was, we’ve scared it off. We’re going back now,” I told him, just as a figure rose up twenty feet in front of us, made an unearthly screech, then fell onto all fours and scuttled away through the brush, making a strange grunting noise as it went.

  I froze. I held onto the leash or I would have lost King. He lunged and barked heroically, wanting to run the thing down. Down the hill below
us, the other dogs took up his call as if they’d seen it too. I was unable to move. Literally. My grip on King’s leash was purely mechanical. I could not think, and I could not move.

  The figure had been squat and black, with the feeble moonlight faintly glazing it. It had been about the height of a human 3-year old, and a little broader. I had not been able to make out a face, but the head had been overly large, and the limbs had been overly thin, and there had been two luminous yellow points that could have been eyes. As it retreated, I heard a low-grade, desperate whining, like an animal crying for breath. I stood there for at least an hour, which in real time was about twenty seconds, straining my ears at the hardening silence. Then, as the whining dissipated in the distance, I thought I heard a sob.

  I was horrified. When I looked down at my hands, I realized I’d worked them through the leash’s handle until I was nearly handcuffed. Clumsily, I managed to free one hand and used it to grab the flashlight from the kangaroo pocket. Too late, I flicked it on and looked at the bushes it had crashed through, directly in front of me and slightly to the left. King was all for pursuit, but I was not going into those bushes. I had absolutely no desire to follow that thing through the coastal scrub.

  When he realized we weren’t going after it, King finally began to calm down. Our prey was long gone, and the dog could only turn his head and stare at me. I knew that I had disappointed him with my cowardice.

  “Sorry, boy,” I said, patting his head. “I know, I know. I wouldn’t make a very good dog. But I’m a pretty good human, and I think this situation calls for retreat. Whatever it is, it’s gone now and it won’t be back. I think we scared it more than it scared us, if that’s possible.”

  Saying it out loud didn’t convince me, though, and King was still giving me a withering look. When he walked beside me back to the barn I could feel disdain radiating up at me. I even thought I heard a little grunt or grumble, which in Human would have translated into something like, “Sheesh!”

  I didn’t mind. I was still trembling from the encounter, and all the way back to the barn I kept the flashlight on. When we got inside, the other dogs calmed down. Taking their cue from King, they decided the crisis was over. I walked around and checked the cages, making sure water bowls were full and the dogs were settled, but I was just killing time. I would have to go back outside now and walk across the yard to the house alone.

  But as it happened, I did not walk back alone. My cat, Bastet, was waiting for me when I stepped outside the barn. I didn’t remember her coming out of the house with me, but I didn’t stop to wonder about it. Bastet has a way of materializing out of thin air. Her black fur was frosted by the cold blues of the late-rising moon, and her green eyes were luminous and unblinking. She looked me over, checking me from my head to my flip flops, then, satisfied, she turned and led the way back to the house with her tail in the air.

  “This way, Bastet,” I said as we crossed the lawn. “No sense waking Michael up now.”

  I headed for the seawall that bordered the river, and after a prolonged stare, Bastet decided she would come with me. I was in the open now; no shivering bushes were nearby to hide scuttling night things, and my fears fell away from me, leaving me exhausted and wired at the same time. At the seawall I finally clicked the flashlight off and put it down on the ground at my feet. As I sat down on the cold coquina I realized how weak I felt, and what a relief it was to get off my feet. I tried to settle down and think.

  I was strangely unwilling to decide that it had been a big raccoon and just let it go at that. That had been no raccoon, and that noise had been like nothing I had ever heard from a living thing. I decided I needed to do something about this, and I knew just who to call for help.

  It was a sad example of what my life had been like for the past year or so that I had a paranormal investigator on speed-dial. His name was Edson Darby-Deaver and he was a bit of an oddball, but he got the job done. His specialty, as far as I could figure, was hauntings, but whenever anything weird happened I tended to think of him first. If he couldn’t handle it, he knew someone who could. Let’s just say he had an interesting Christmas card list.

  It was just after four in the morning by that time, but Ed wouldn’t care. He lived alone, and he lived for his work.

  The night was pleasantly cool, and somehow I sensed that I wasn’t in danger anymore. Ed answered on the second ring. Anybody else would have angrily asked if I knew what time it was, but not Ed. Knowing I wouldn’t be calling at that time of night unless I had had a strange experience, he actually sounded excited when he answered.

  “Yes? Taylor? What is it?”

  I hesitated, groping for the right words.

  “Taylor? Are you there?” He lowered his voice. “Can you speak? If not, tap the phone – three for yes, two for no.”

  Finally, I just blurted it out.

  “Ed,” I said, more desperately than I’d meant to, “do you do aliens?”

  Chapter 2

  “This has been terribly upsetting for you,” Ed said. “Let me begin by saying that the skeptical literature on alien encounters speculates that the current rash of reported sightings parallels, and may even be a derivative of, the reported sightings of angels in Medieval times. Angels among us,” he said in a tender voice. He probably meant to be comforting, so I took it that way. In anybody else, I would’ve called it smarmy, if not condescending, but Ed’s not like that. He’s hypersensitive to condescension, having swum through a sea of it his entire life. He’s a paranormal investigator who manages to annoy even his fellow para-snoops by insisting on things like proof and logic. He’s always throwing “Occam’s razor” around (the principle that the simplest explanation is probably the true one), and his colleagues find that annoying.

  Edson Darby-Deaver is a smallish, slender fellow, professorial and fussy, and always very neat. His shock of white hair can no longer be called premature, but he’s had it since it could’ve been called that. Now he’s in his mid-fifties, and his body has caught up with his hair. His mind is still as open as a child’s, though, or he would’ve given up his paranormal researches in despair a long time ago. He has worried brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, and can force himself to make eye contact, but just barely.

  “Angels among us,” I repeated. “Running through the bushes in the middle of the night, scaring the bejeepers out of us?”

  He spread his hands. “Who can guess the motives of an angel? Most reports described them as coming in dreams, or arriving as living beings, looking like flesh-and-blood beings, during moments when the subject was alone. But this probably wasn’t an angel,” he added matter-of-factly. “Everybody in town has been seeing them. No, I think there’s something else entirely going on here.”

  If he’d clamped a hand over my mouth he couldn’t have stopped my breathing more effectively. I gawped at him for a moment while the world stood still, then things went on and I took a deep breath. The seabirds were waking up now and looking for breakfast, screaming their heads off and picking fights, and a general rustle and rising was happening around us.

  “Everybody’s seeing them?” I repeated dully.

  He was in mid-sip with the coffee cup, so he just nodded largely, nodding the cup along with his head.

  We were sitting on the seawall together, where he’d joined me about 45 minutes after I’d called him. He lived a 30-minute drive away, but he explained that he’d spent 2 minutes dressing, 9 minutes assembling notes on alien encounters, and another 4 minutes picking up coffees for each of us at the all-night convenience store in Hammock. He mentioned that it hadn’t taken much time to grab his notes because he already had them out on his desk, but I was so focused on describing my encounter that it had slipped by me at the time. While we sat there on the cold stone wall in the dark of the pre-dawn, I had given him a blow-by-blow description of my trip up cemetery hill. By the time my adrenaline was finally dropping and Ed turned off his voice recorder (he always uses it during investigations), I felt empty
inside, and was beginning to shiver. Bastet had sat beside us the whole time, gazing at each of us in turn and generally looking smarter than both of us put together.

  Michael was still upstairs in bed sleeping it off. My fantasies about telling him off while he staggered around with a hangover were gone. When I was done talking to Ed, I was going to go in and get a great big hug from Michael and not even bother to tell him why I needed it right away. Suddenly, the need for that reassuring hug was overwhelming. I could already feel his body heat through the tee shirt he was sleeping in, and feel the stubble of his beard against my cheek.

  I turned my head and squinted at Ed, who was still analyzing the motives and methods of angels and speculating on why they would use flying saucers instead of wings, and I realized I needed hugs more than explanations.

  “Come on,” I said, startling Ed in mid-sentence. “I’ll make you some breakfast.”

  Bastet streaked ahead of us toward the house, and Ed muttered something like, “How can you think about food at a time like this?” while I trudged toward the house feeling heavy and tired.

  * * * * *

  Michael wasn’t up yet, and the coffee I had set up the night before was still waiting for the timer to hit 7:00, so I pushed the “On” button as soon as I got into the kitchen. This was no time for dry cereal. I got a skillet out of the cabinet and got eggs, bread, butter and orange juice out of the refrigerator. We were having a hot breakfast.

  As I settled myself down to multi-tasking at the range-top, Ed hiked himself up at the breakfast bar and started getting paperwork out of his satchel. The smell of brewing coffee and pan-frying eggs did almost as much to ground me as Michael’s first hug was going to, but I was still looking forward to it. When the coffee was done, I quickly topped up our cups and went back to the range to plate the eggs and butter the toast. Then I set the plates on the breakfast bar, side-by-side, walked around the counter and hiked myself up next to Ed. He was giving the food a surprised look, but as soon as I was seated he dug in like a man who hadn’t eaten in days. Ed is cavalier about food; maybe he hadn’t eaten in days.