New York, July 1972

They say fairy tales are for children. Make-believe stories, set in a world of pretend, which we tell our little ones to help them go to sleep at night. But that’s not always true. Some “fairy tales” are not make-believe, not pretend at all, and they would keep any sane person up until dawn. You may not believe that, but I certainly do. And I know one man—the father of a little girl—who would be the first to tell you that it’s all too terribly true. This is that story… believe it or not.

It was early in the morning, and I’d just finished up a case, a wife who wanted her missing husband back. She’d said he was out on a bender, running from his problems, and she was right. I tracked him down, sobered him up, and delivered him back to the little woman with a minimum of wear and tear on everyone involved.

Now I had a happy client and a well-earned fee for the agency, McGonigal and McCain, Private Investigators.

It was going to make my partner Mickey very happy. He’s a good guy when you dig down deep, but his favorite color is definitely green.

Now I was back in our dingy office, scribbling a few notes for the latest issue of The Nighthawk, my underground newsletter of the unexplained. I was gazing out the window at the bright morning sun, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and thinking about all the things that happen right in front of us… things we never ever see.

Then the phone rang.

I answered, and a man’s voice said, “I’m trying to reach Mr. Dashwood McCain.”

“Speaking,” I said.

There was an awkward silence, like he needed just a moment to work up his nerve. Then he spoke quickly.

“My name’s Henry Lewis. I—I need your help. My daughter… my little girl, she’s missing. It’s been three days now. The police are no help. Can you talk with me? I need someone… someone who can do something.”

I told him to tell me all about it.

“Thank you,” he said with a slight crack in his voice. “I’m calling you… because I’ve… I’ve heard my daughter. I’ve heard her voice… in our garden. She called out to me… from somewhere. But I—I couldn’t see her. I just heard her voice. I know she’s there, somehow, somewhere, and I need help to find her. Maybe that sounds crazy… but I’m not. I’m not crazy. I heard her…”

It did sound crazy, of course, but something told me I could believe him.

“Okay,” I said. “You called the right place. I’m here to help people when they need it.” We talked a few moments more, and I agreed to head over right away to see him.

He was out on Staten Island… in a stately older neighborhood where the well-to-do people do very well indeed. I got my hat, my coat, and my gun, but I stopped at the office door. That old feeling hit me right in the solar plexus—this was going to be a bad one.

I knew I would have to find his little girl… even if it killed me.

***

A little later, the Staten Island ferry was vanishing behind me. It was hot even for July, and I was already sweating in my hat and rumpled suit.

It didn’t take too long to drive out to the Lewis place, an old Victorian house lovingly updated for the modern age. It sat crouched behind an aging iron fence on a long winding street lined with tall trees and bright shiny windows.

I walked up to the door, and Henry Lewis opened it before I could knock.

He looked like a man who hadn’t slept right in several days and was starting to realize he might never sleep right again. He was in his early forties, middle height, wearing an expensive sweater over a tailored shirt. He was a stockbroker by trade and looked it… with tired eyes born to run numbers and wheel deals. And you could bet your last sawbuck he had plenty of family money to back it all up.

“Mr. McCain,” he said, shaking my hand anxiously. “Thank you for coming.”

He led me into the parlor. It had a high ceiling, old wallpaper, and a slight smell of perfume. The furniture matched the ritzy house, but everything had a strange stale quality like the whole place had been shut up just a little too tight.

“My wife is upstairs,” he said, nodding toward the ceiling. “She’s not… well.”

I told him I understood. We sat down on a couch that cost a little more than my car.

“I’m not sure where to begin,” he said. “I told you some of it over the phone. Our daughter Clara—she’s eleven. She disappeared three days ago. Vanished. The police have searched the neighborhood, the park, everywhere. They haven’t found anything. No witnesses. No note. Nothing. She’s just… gone.”

I was looking around while he was talking. The girl’s photographs were all over. She was a sweet-looking little thing—with dark blond hair, glasses, and an overbite. It was easy to imagine her laughing, playing, and plinking on the baby grand piano in the corner.

“And you said you heard something,” I prompted.

His face twitched—just slightly.

“Yes, that’s right. I heard her voice… twice.”

He looked like he was holding back tears now.

“Just inside the garden. Both times—at dusk. Last night and the night before. I wasn’t dreaming. I hadn’t been drinking. I heard Clara say, ‘Daddy?’ Just like she was standing beside me. But there was no one there. I thought at first I was losing my mind. But I know—I know what I heard.”

I didn’t say anything right away. You don’t chase that kind of thing with logic. I lit a cigarette instead and watched the smoke curl up toward the chandelier.

“So you told the police?” I asked after a moment.

He looked embarrassed. “Yes, and they made it very obvious that they didn’t believe me. That they felt sorry, that I was, you know… cracking up.”

I nodded. “Yeah, they do tend to do that.”

“One of them, an officer named Berrigan, was sympathetic. He recommended you.”

“Yeah? That would be my old pal Jimmy. He knows his stuff and what kind of cases I take,” I said. “Tell me more about Clara.”

He seemed relieved to talk about something besides hearing voices.

“Oh, she’s a good girl—normal, happy, never any trouble. Very mature for her age. She loves school—loves to read, loves to draw. She’s quiet—off in her own world a little, but very cheerful. She wouldn’t run away. I don’t think she’s been kidnapped—not the way the police might think. And I know she’s not dead. I just know it.”

He looked down and then back up, staring at me desperately. “I would do anything—anything—to get her back.”

I could tell he meant it. “Yeah, well, I intend to find her,” I said, “if it’s humanly possible, and I’m likely going to need a lot of information to do that. So you say it was out in the garden where you heard Clara’s voice?”

He frowned. “Yes, the garden… out in back. It’s… big and old fashioned with high stone walls. It’s strange, overgrown, wild even, but we thought it was charming when we moved in—six months ago. Clara loves it—she calls it the faerie garden.” He suddenly laughed, bitterly, at that.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll need to look around. Let’s start with the garden.”

He got up nervously. “One more thing,” he said as I stood up too. “The garden. I said it was… strange. But I feel more like it’s… I don’t know. Like it’s… haunted, I suppose.”

“Yeah? Haunted? Well, that just happens to be one of my specialties.”

Then we went out back to look at the garden… the haunted faerie garden.

***

The back door opened onto a broad porch gleaming with fresh paint and shiny brass. Beyond the porch was a massive green lawn, a little overgrown, and in the middle of that was the garden.

It was big… and worse for wear. The ivied walls were about eight feet high, cracked stone, topped with broken glass. The kind of walls meant to keep things out… or in.

The front gate stood a little open—the wrought iron carefully twisted into some long-dead Victorian floral design. The hinges creaked when I pushed it farther open.

Inside, I made it out at about 60 feet wide and about 120 feet long.

There were twin rock paths curved toward a dry decrepit fountain at the center, half-swallowed by ivy. On one side stood three smooth weathered standing stones about waist high, like a little Stonehenge arranged for miniature garden gnomes.

There were some odd little statuettes along the walls, weathered but somehow very modern in design—stylized featureless little figures. Some of the plants were ordinary—boxwood, wild roses, some twisted fruit trees. But there were others I didn’t recognize.

And the silence—it wasn’t quite right. No bees. No birdsong. Just my breath and the sound of gravel and dirt shifting under my shoes.

Lights seemed almost to twinkle even in the sunlight—like little fireflies or a will-o’-wisp. A few branches stirred, but there was not really any wind I could feel.

Henry was right. It was definitely strange… haunted was a good word for it.

I walked around slowly—feeling things out. Sometimes there’s a pressure you can sense in places… that touch the beyond.

This garden had it. Something heavy and quiet.

At the far end of the garden wall, a small wooden gate—weathered and warped—was chained shut.

That was it.

I told Henry he wasn’t mistaken—the garden was definitely strange—and then I asked to see Clara’s room.

Back inside, the house felt staler than ever. The parlor’s stifled hush gave way to a heavy tension in the upstairs hallway.

Clara’s bedroom had the same claustrophobic feeling, though the decor was fit for a little princess. A bright colored quilt folded over a fancy four-poster bed. Books stacked high on the nightstands. A silver-framed picture on the desk—Clara smiling with her pretty mother and a longhaired cat. Large stuffed animals scattered on all the chairs. More books and lots of clothes in the closet.

But the drawings…

Dozens of them. Taped to the walls. Stacked on the desk. Lying on the floor. Crayons, pencils, charcoal.

She had real talent—maybe too much for eleven.

They were mostly scenes of the garden, repeated again and again. Stars shining in close clusters. A tall thin woman with a veil. Strange faces everywhere—on rocks, trees, flowers. Odd little children playing.

I flipped through a sketchpad on her desk. Nearly all the pages were blank, but a single sentence was written out in a careful script: She wants me to come to stay.

The paper smelled faintly of the garden—loam, crushed mint, and something faintly metallic, like rust.

I stood there a moment, looking at the words.

Clara was gone, but how?

And was she still in the garden somewhere?

***

A little later I was tucked into a corner of the Staten Island Historical Society’s reading room. There was dust in the air, an AC clanking on its last legs, and a smell like old paper and floor polish.

The lady behind the desk was an older woman, very thin, thick glasses, in an old-fashioned dress. She looked at me like she thought I might try to steal something… so she was clearly a good judge of character.

I took a chance and let her know I was a PI working on the Clara Lewis case. She was intrigued and said she had read all about it in the papers and knew the old house very well. Soon she brought me a box with everything I could ask for: old property records, newspaper clippings, and a bound volume of The Staten Island Observer, yellowed and brittle.

After a little bit, she snuck back to see how I was doing and wound up helping me more with the research.

The property records were first.

The house had changed hands dozens of times in the decades before the Lewis family moved in. Nothing dramatic—no murders, no fires. But there was a pattern. People moved in, stayed a year or two, then left.

We kept digging and hit some real pay dirt.

In 1913, a girl named Abigail Morgan, age thirteen, vanished from the same house. She disappeared in the garden, according to the family. No signs of struggle, no evidence of foul play.

A week after the disappearance, the Irish maid reported hearing the little girl singing behind the garden wall—long after the search had been called off. The maid was sure it was the missing girl, but no one was there.

And Abigail Morgan was never found.

Then we hit something older.

In the 1880s, the house was built by a Mrs. Eugenia Llewellyn Jones, a prominent spiritualist and medium. Mrs. Jones was well-known for hosting “Druidic nature rituals” in her walled garden, which she referred to as the faerie garden, just like Clara.

Mrs. Jones also had an article published in a spiritualist journal referencing Indian legends about a sacred grove, where the “little ones” ran between the “talking trees.” Mrs. Jones claimed that she had built her walled garden at the very heart of the Indians’ sacred grove. She died without heirs in 1902.

I closed the file box and leaned back, rubbing my eyes.

Two little girls missing from the same walled garden, almost sixty years apart. A spiritualist who held “nature rituals” in that same garden, built by her, supposedly, on the site of an old sacred Indian grove.

I caught the next ferry back to Manhattan, with a lot of questions twisting and turning at the back of my mind.

I needed answers, and I needed them fast.

***

That night sleep came late, and I dreamed I was back in the faerie garden.

The moon was fantastically bright, hanging low over the tree branches. The gate had vanished. The walls were gone. The garden stretched out into a vast plain of moonlight on dark earth, lit further by thousands of tiny stars that moved like fireflies.

Little Clara stood in the middle of it all. She was humming something just out of hearing, arms raised and gently swaying like she was dancing. She glowed white in the moonlight.

I tried to call her name, but my voice came out in muffled echoes I couldn’t understand.

Then I saw the other figure.

Impossibly tall and thin. Not remotely human in outline—with spindly legs and no face that I could make out in the fluttering shadows.

The figure stood beside Clara, not touching her, but near. Too near.

Then the thing seemed to awkwardly twist toward me in the distance. Like it knew I was there and was trying to understand what I was.

Something dark and angular caught my eye, crossing low in the sky.

Suddenly, I was back in the Lewis house—floating along the dark hallways and rooms.

Through a doorway, I could see a red-haired girl in old-fashioned clothes. She was writing in a green book by candlelight, and then she took the book and crept into a closet.

It was the closet in Clara’s room.

And I drifted into the shadowy bedroom and started toward that closet, still flickering with light, and then I felt it—something was coming up behind me, something terrible.

And I woke up cold and sweating. That was that.

I knew what I needed to do next.

***

I went back to the Lewis house at dawn.

The place was dead quiet, but I was sure Henry Lewis would be up. I knocked softly, and he answered almost right away.

Henry looked bleak. “I didn’t hear her last night.”

I told him not to worry—that didn’t mean anything, that I was on the case, that I was figuring things out. We talked a little more, and I went up to Clara’s room to look around again.

I went to the closet—same as in the dream.

I opened it up and gave the books on the shelves another once-over—nothing unusual, just the volumes I’d seen before. Things like The Railway Children, The Secret Garden, Through the Looking Glass.

I ran my fingers along them, checking for gaps. One book tilted at a slightly odd angle in the back corner—an old volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I hadn’t looked at it closely last time.

I pulled it free.

There was a loose little board behind it in the shadows. It wasn’t large—but it was big enough to cover a small nook. I reached in and took out a small notebook wrapped in old wax paper.

The cover was cracked leather—and it was green. Inside was a girl’s careful handwriting in blue ink, dated 1913.

It had Abigail Morgan’s name in it.

The old journal was just a few pages of disjointed entries. It didn’t make much sense, but a few phrases stood out here and there.

The garden is so beautiful. I followed the pretty lights again today.

I must have walked miles but still couldn’t see the end. I don’t like the way the rocks looked at me at all.

The White Lady came again. She’s very lovely. The little ones kept playing.

The White Lady hid me today from the triangle.

She didn’t want me to go home. She seemed very cross. I don’t want to go back.

The last one was the final entry.

After that, it was just empty pages and a brownish stain in one corner, like something organic had seeped through long ago.

I closed the diary slowly, feeling that faint mint and rusty metallic scent again—the same one I’d found on Clara’s sketchpad.

Abigail Morgan had never been found.

But I was determined to find Clara Lewis.

***

I let myself into the garden.

It was just the same as before—silent, heavy, uncanny.

But I knew down deep that little Clara was there—on the other side of something.

I listened to the stillness and felt the pressure in the air. I began to walk along the ivied walls, just feeling what I could feel. A strange sense of disquiet was rising up through my feet to my stomach.

Then the walls began to seem off… like the garden was just a little bigger than before. There was a slight buzzing in my ears that wasn’t quite music. The twinkling of the lights grew even brighter in my eyes.

I stood still a moment, and I heard it, a strange whispery echo of a little girl’s voice, coming from nowhere and right beside my ear.

It said softly, “Look, there’s a man.”

I turned but no one was visible—just trees, bushes, empty space.

Then the garden seemed to… waver like the light was suddenly reflecting through deep water. An eerie stillness descended over everything. I didn’t even feel like I was breathing.

I started to step forward, and suddenly I felt something all around me. Tall ghostly white shapes, moving fast. They whirled and whirled, a hazy blur, until I fell to my hands and knees.

Then a voice spoke. It said: Nothing comes back the same.

It sounded like… my own voice.

After that, I must have passed out.

When I opened my eyes again, the garden seemed almost normal. I had been out maybe half an hour. I know I dreamed, but I couldn’t remember what. I was strung out and sick to my stomach.

I had a lot of questions, and I knew the man who might have some answers.

***

My friend and confidant Willy Vogel is three-hundred pounds of erudite Englishman with an unparalleled knowledge of the occult.

He opened the door to his rooms with a delighted laugh. “Ah, Dash, I wondered when you’d show up. It’s been too long.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I’ve been working legitimate cases… until yesterday.”

Vogel looked mischievous. “Well, I hope you’re onto something interesting now. I enjoy our consultations tremendously, and I am longing for some vicarious excitement.”

I told him I was definitely onto something interesting and maybe it was just a little too exciting.

We sat down among the heaps of books and papers and curios. Vogel offered me cigars, brandy, and Turkish coffee while I gave him a short version of the story.

He listened with his eyes half-closed, smiling faintly, breathing cigar smoke in and out.

When I was finished, he leaned forward excitedly. “Extraordinary! Yes, I’d say the garden sounds very much like… a haunted borderland. A twilight place where the line between our world and another is… indistinct. These can be quite dangerous as you well remember. I would say the girl has crossed over and can’t get back. Likely something took her. There was a somewhat similar case, as I recall, one in Wales in the early 1910s.”

I finished the last of my brandy and set the glass down. “Okay, well, I’ve got to find her and bring her home. I’ve been in the garden twice now. I haven’t seen anything that looks like a reliable doorway. How can I cross over to look for her?”

Vogel looked suddenly grim. “Dash, if it is a borderland, and you do cross over, you might not be able to get back. You know these twilight lands are incredibly dangerous.”

I looked down at the end of my cigar. “Yeah, I know that all too well, but I have to find her. She’s… just a little girl. The last one never came home.”

Vogel stared at me, and he knew my mind was made up.

“Ah, well, yes, of course. In the Welsh case I mentioned, I believe a twilight crossing was effected by an herbal compound—one with mind-bending properties. If one is sensitive, in the right frame of mind, and in the right location, one could conceivably cross over with this compound as an aid. Of course, I can’t guarantee it will work.”

He stood up and moved his bulk to a lacquered cabinet, unlocking it with a small key. Inside was a leather case, and inside that was a set of brown-glass vials.

He handed me two of the vials—filled with a cloudy greenish liquid, golden sediment clinging to the glass.

“Dash, most of the active ingredients in this tincture are what were used in that earlier case, if memory serves. They’re a compound of herbal extracts traditionally used in shamanic rituals. Some are not strictly legal in New York, of course. Think of it all as a… tuning fork for the mind.”

“Will it give me a hangover?” I joked.

Vogel was serious. “Yes, but if you cross over, you may get something far worse than that. Even if you survive and can get back, it’s true these places don’t tend to leave you as they find you. Keep that in mind. And whatever you do—work to remember who you are and why you entered. Borderlands can easily affect the mind. Who knows what things you may see...”

I thanked him. At the door, Vogel acted just a bit funny… like he thought maybe he was saying goodbye to me for the last time.

I wondered if he was.

***

By dusk, I was back at the Lewis house.

Henry was sitting on the back porch, staring out at the garden. He looked at me blankly. “There’s been nothing all day… except the lights. They’re a little brighter.”

I told him he should try not to worry, that I was sure his daughter was still in the garden. I said I was going to try a special drug that might help me find her.

He looked at me absently and nodded—like he wanted to believe but really couldn’t.

I said I’d be back as soon as I could, and I left him on the porch and went into the garden.

The place was heavy with silence. I knelt just inside the gate, set the vials out on a handkerchief next to my satchel on the overgrown grass, and carefully uncorked one of them.

The liquid glimmered faintly green. It smelled like mildew, charcoal, and something deeper—something that was already throbbing against the back of my teeth.

I drank it.

The change came very slowly.

I felt my pulse slow, and my thoughts grew thicker.

The garden brightened—lit from within—and the sky further dimmed in sharp contrast. I have to say it was indescribably beautiful. Threads of gray moved through the dark sky like oils mixing with water. Each twist and turn was an intoxicating delight.

Slow waves of distortion, like the reflection of a revolving funhouse mirror, seemed to ripple through everything. The effect was… fascinating, and I felt like I could have stared at it all for hours. The ground beneath my feet began to feel soft, like velvet, moving slowly and soothingly.

Then I could really see the trees. They loomed overhead, but the leaves were angular and shimmered almost like diamonds. It was captivating… like sitting in the heart of a stained glass cathedral.

I looked down at my watch. It had that same funhouse ripple, and the second hand was moving off-time. Then the hand stopped completely and started going backwards. I felt almost hypnotized.

And then I looked up and the garden seemed to stretch before me. Geometry unraveled. What should have been about a hundred feet became breathtaking miles beyond counting. The far wall was no longer in sight.

And I saw the path. It hadn’t been there before. A thin trail of silvery dust leading between the hedges, winding in the direction of the far wall.

Lights twinkled in the air along it. Like fireflies and fireworks. They seemed to want me to follow.

I said “Here goes nothin’,” and the sound came out like an old LP record played on a speed too slow—but with shiny echoes behind it, a brigade of tinny harpsichords sounding all out of synch.

I tried to keep my head on straight. I knew I would need to walk deep into the garden and then find my way back… with Clara.

***

I took a deep breath and started out after the sparkling lights. The only word for their gleaming colors was… enchanting.

Moving through the garden, I felt like I was walking deep underwater… with shifting currents and exotic filtered light. I walked and walked through the beautiful boundless place. My watch had stopped completely now, but I knew you couldn’t measure time here anyway.

The silvery path slowly dimmed and then disappeared, but the lights were always up ahead.

My thoughts kept coming more and more slowly, like the very last of the honey dripping out of an old mason jar, and I felt like my name was starting to… slip away.

I remembered what Vogel had said, and I began repeating my name: McCain, my name is Dashwood McCain, I’m here to find Clara.

I said it all over and over again.

My thoughts grew thicker and thicker.

Then I first noticed… the faces.

I wouldn’t know how to describe them, but the things around me now had… faces. The flowers, the trees, the rocks, even patches of ground.

All of them. It was surreal.

Some of the faces were pleasant to look at and some of them were definitely not. And many of them seemed to be watching me intently.

A group of fiery wildflowers I passed looked utterly malicious, and I gave them a wide berth, but then a stand of green trees greeted me almost like old friends. They murmured strange words of welcome I couldn’t understand.

Then I passed some bright red roses.

Their faces contorted, and they sang a bizarre song that made me feel dizzy and weak and sick to my stomach. I felt like the song was evil, unspeakably evil.

I hurried away as fast as I could, still following the lovely lights.

After a moment, I saw a bird land on a nearby bush, and I realized how strange it was—faceless and formless and pale, like a half-finished sculpture in white clay. It moved fluidly but somehow it didn’t seem really alive to me at all.

I kept walking and repeating my name.

Soon I came to a trio of tall stones. They looked carefully arranged—like a Neolithic worship site. I wondered if these stones were really the same as the little hanging stones I’d seen the day before—expanded with the bizarre geometry of the garden.

And then I saw that the stones had faces too, and theirs were solemn and half-asleep.

As I got nearer, I heard an ominous murmuring melody gently sounding in the air. It began to drift slowly through my mind, and the thought came to me that this was The Song of the Stones.

The song was seductive and then spellbinding. And time seemed to… expand, and my little life felt suddenly like a pointless dragonfly’s dance. A day was a million years, and a million years a day. And running through my mind was something else I couldn’t possibly understand—something words couldn’t express.

And I could see myself somehow, almost like a mirror image, standing between the tall stones.

I stood there, eerily reflected, and then my double grew old in a few seconds—or maybe it was a hundred years. White and frail, he crumpled slowly to the ground and quickly withered into a bleached skeleton and then a pile of dust.

He was me, and I was him. We were both gone somehow, and it didn’t matter to me.

And it seemed like I stood there for a long long time, listening to The Song of the Stones until I felt like my heart would break for all the death in the world, all the pointless death, that the stones, the poor stones, had to witness—as they sat and sat for millennia. And no one in turn would grieve for them when they crumbled into dust, and the whole world was gone.

I could feel the tears streaming down my face.

And I think I could have stood there forever, brokenhearted but wholly content beyond any worldly concerns.

Then the spell broke as I suddenly lost my balance and fell hard to the ground.

I jumped back up on my feet in a half-daze. Behind me, I heard a quick rustling sound and saw a flash of white disappearing into the glittering green bushes.

I knew in my gut something had come up behind me and given me a little push.

I turned back, and the stones were quiet now.

I felt strange and disconnected from my thoughts, but I knew I needed to keep walking farther into the garden to find Clara.

I took a deep breath and started walking again.

***

I marched deeper and deeper into the dazzling greenery, trying to hold on tight to my name and why I was there.

Time still seemed to move all wrong, faster, then slower, then faster again, and my thoughts kept drifting far away.

I said my name to myself—Dash McCain—and why I was there—to find little Clara. I was a man, I was alive, it was 1972, I was in the faerie garden on Staten Island.

I kept on repeating it all like it was a Hail Mary, and then I said a few of those as well.

The lights seemed to finally wink out one by one.

I began to call out Clara’s name. The sound came out with the same slow muffling and bright bizarre echoes as before.

I called her name again and again.

Then I turned down a side path and suddenly saw shapes moving through the hedges—slender, small child-like forms.

They were featureless, faceless, and pale too.

I watched them for a while—dizzy from the waving motion of the breathtaking garden.

The little things looked like white silhouettes, and their movements were odd—like they were playing an incomprehensible game. They shifted back and forth, up and down, and then around and around in a ring.

After a while, some of the little white silhouettes finally approached me. I didn’t feel like they were dangerous.

When they got closer, I could see that they were a shade of dull white and wholly faceless. Their hands and feet looked like little soft spades.

No impressions, no emotions, no thoughts came off of them at all. It’s like they weren’t really alive in any way I could recognize.

But they seemed to be pointing in a direction, and I thought maybe they wanted me to follow them.

I decided to go, and I walked after them as I kept repeating my name and the year to anchor myself.

One of the little ones pointed with a spade-like hand, and suddenly I saw her—Clara!

She was standing with her back to me off in the gleaming green bushes… with her dark blonde hair, wearing a simple child’s dress.

I yelled her name, and she darted away deeper in the bushes.

I began to chase her through the bright greenery, some of the little silhouettes running limply along beside me.

I kept catching glimpses of Clara through the bushes. I was calling her name, and still she kept running from me. But I was faster. I left the little ones behind as I closed in on Clara.

Then I swept her off her feet and took her in my arms.

Her head turned…

And she had no face.

I stared in horror. She had no face—just a soft white mass where her face should have been. Then her blond hair and dress melted back into her little white body.

She was… a white silhouette, hanging limply and coldly in my arms.

My mind was working… It was slower in the garden… but it was still working.

It was a game. They were playing a game with me.

But they knew who Clara was!

I said loudly to the little white thing in my arms, “I need to find Clara! Take me to her. Clara, the real Clara.”

It slid softly to the ground, and more silhouettes glided up to join us.

I said again, “Take me to Clara!”

They turned slowly and began moving forward together. I followed, and they led me down into a little hollow between thick sparkling bushes and tall trees with emerald-like leaves.

As I kept walking, I knew I was about to see something important.

And it was there.

The withered corpse of an old woman with long white hair. She was laid out on her back on top of a small mound of earth in the hollow with her arms crossed on her chest.

She looked like she had been dead a long time—almost mummified. It was a bizarre sight made even more so by the strange rippling light of the garden.

On one of the old woman’s wrists was a worn bracelet. I looked at it, and it was inscribed with the name… Abigail.

As I touched the bracelet I felt something strange: Delight, like the rush of a drug, and then immense heartbreak—because the delight had blotted out everything else, everything real, everything human, everything that mattered.

I had found the first little girl—almost sixty years after she had gone missing. She had spent the rest of her life lost in the faerie garden.

Abigail never got home… but I was determined Clara would.

***

I looked at the old woman’s withered corpse for a long time.

Then something made me look up, and there was Clara.

She was looking back at me from the other end of the hollow. Her appearance was distorted—wavy, moving softly, like everything else—but it was her all right. Dark blonde hair, glasses, overbite.

Clara spoke, and her voice sounded strange in a fuzzy slow motion with ringing echoes, but her words were clear enough. “The little ones brought me… You’re the man I saw.”

It took me a moment to gather my thoughts before I could speak.

“Clara, your father sent me to bring you home.” My words echoed through the sluggish air and the deep pressure.

Clara looked at me blankly. “The White Lady… she won’t let me go. That was her daughter. She’s dead now, and I’m her new daughter.”

I shook my head. “Clara, I’m your friend, and I’m going to take you back to your mom and dad.”

She just stared at me.

I walked over to her, picked her up gently, and started walking back in the direction of the gate. She didn’t resist.

I had to get her out of the garden, the intoxicating garden, as fast as I could.

The little white silhouettes all slipped away.

I marched with Clara through the endless weirdness of the twilight land. I held her tight and tried not to notice the strange faces, the murmurings, the songs.

We went a long way, and we attracted more and more attention. Odd mutterings followed us, growing louder with every moment. Clara kept her face pressed to my chest.

I couldn’t tell if the faces were cheering us on or calling out an alarm. Maybe it was some of both.

Then everything changed as the very atmosphere seemed to shift.

The White Lady suddenly swept out of nowhere and stood before us.

She was bright shimmering white, tall and terribly thin, twice the height of a man. And she was faceless and featureless—like the little silhouettes. She made me think of an abstract chess piece—bottles and globes stretched out into long spindly limbs. A white queen sliding swiftly across a surreal chessboard. She was wholly alien and terrifying.

The White Lady was blocking our path, standing over me in what seemed like a threatening posture of command. But she was also a complete and total blank space—an unnatural void, not alive in any sense I could feel.

I moved to step around her, but she quickly swept over the ground to block my path each time.

The White Lady towered faceless in total silence. I tried hard again to read her but could get no impressions—other than a strange coldness. She was an utter psychic vacuum.

My gut was screaming danger, but indignation was rising in my chest.

“You can’t have her,” I said loudly. “She has a mother and father. She doesn’t belong here.”

No response. Just the blankness looming over me.

Clara kept her face hidden, pressed against my shoulder. I could feel her trembling.

I couldn’t decide what to do. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I tried to push past this unnatural evil thing with sheer force, and I was afraid of what might happen to Clara if I let go of her even for a moment.

I was standing there indecisively, facing the White Lady in a horrifying standoff, when I began to feel very strange.

A cool numbness was descending over me. A little whisper of unfeeling seemed to say that none of this mattered at all, that all was well in a world without meaning. I could put the little girl down and rest—just rest and be at peace in the unending beauty of the faerie garden.

And I felt my mind begin to drift away when I heard a sound.

It was another voice calling Clara’s name. I turned and saw a movement behind the White Lady.

It was Henry Lewis—he was in the garden!

Henry shouted “Clara! Clara! I’m here!” He broke into a run, rushing around the side of the White Lady.

I didn’t hesitate. I handed Clara to him and yelled, “Run for the gate! Get her out of the garden! Don’t look back! Don’t stop for anything.”

Then I turned, swallowed my fear, and leapt toward the White Lady before she could slide after them. I tackled her, hitting her hard with my shoulder.

Her cold body staggered back, and I held on tight, my weight dragging her down. She felt unbearably creepy, like slimy freezing satin over soft sacks of ice. The scent of frozen rust and metal filled my nostrils.

A strange tingling pain crawled through my head and down my spine. Then it became excruciating. But I knew I could stand it, and I held on through the pain.

The White Lady was strong, and she slowly began dragging me through the bizarre landscape after Clara—with the trees and rocks muttering louder and louder all the while.

But Henry was moving with Clara at a steady run, and we soon lost sight of them in the scintillating bushes.

The hollow muttering call of the trees seemed to spread across the entire garden. I had no idea what it all meant.

I held on to the White Lady, and my upper body felt like it was freezing solid and the pain was steadily growing worse in my head and shoulders. Finally, she slowed, then stopped completely, and still I held on to her.

I kept gripping her tight until two other tall white silhouettes sped toward us. I began to feel a tremendous increase in the pain as they closed in, but I knew that Henry needed all the time I could give him to get Clara out of the garden.

I remember still holding the White Lady and feeling like I would surely die from the pain as it escalated beyond my comprehension. Then things became almost peaceful as a blinding agony blotted out everything but the prayer I was repeating.

The last thing I saw was something strange in the sky above the tall white silhouettes. It looked like an inverted black pyramid. It was absolutely motionless, and I felt that it was watching us.

Then everything went black.

***

I woke up in the dark.

I was lying on the ground—just outside the garden.

There was blood on my face and hands. I was numb and dizzy, and I didn’t quite feel like I could stand, so I crawled through the grass to the porch.

I managed to get inside the house.

A clock said it was 4 a.m. I’d been in the faerie garden most of the night.

I sat in the parlor in a stupor. I called out several times, but the house was empty.

I sat and tried to remember all that had happened. I was in a daze with bizarre songs still ringing in my ears.

After a while, it all began to come back to me.

Then the phone rang. I picked it up.

It was Henry Lewis. He was with his daughter and his wife, all safe, at his sister-in-law’s house in Manhattan. He had gotten Clara out of the garden and into the house, and then they had left immediately for the ferry.

Henry said he was sorry he left me behind, but I told him he’d done just what I asked him to… and what he had to do to save Clara.

He also told me what I had already guessed. He drank the second vial of tincture. He had gone into the garden, couldn’t find me anywhere, and saw the empty vial and the full one. He decided I had gone where Clara was, and he drank the tincture to follow me.

I told him he should never take his daughter anywhere near the faerie garden ever again. We kept talking, and the last thing I remember was looking out the window at the darkness.

Then I woke up in the parlor in the bright morning sun.

***

And that’s the story.

The Lewises were reunited. They had the faerie garden demolished and paved over with tennis courts before selling the house and moving out to Chicago. Clara, thankfully, doesn’t remember much of her experience and thinks it was mostly a dream she had while she was ill. The Lewises’ new home is in a high rise, and they don’t even have a potted plant.

I shared with Henry my belief that both Clara and he have second sight. That’s part of why Clara was vulnerable and why he could hear her voice in the garden and cross over himself. He knows now that Clara will need special safeguards and guidance as she grows up. That kind of sensitivity is more of a burden than a gift for most of us.

Henry paid the agency a small fortune and wouldn’t let me turn any of it down. I handed Mickey the check and enjoyed watching his eyes bug out. We needed the money, and my friend was smiling nonstop for a month.

Me? Oh, I had cuts and bruises, some frostbite, a few mystery pains, and a long series of very bad nightmares. But I’m fine now—like always. Black coffee, cigarettes, a little bourbon, and the next case always do wonders for me. The only thing that still haunts me is The Song of the Stones. I can’t say I remember the tune, but I don’t think I will ever quite shake the feeling.

And so I’ve redoubled my pledge to stay out of the borderlands. I know better than ever how dangerous they are. Vogel says he has no idea what the black pyramid was, but we both have a feeling it’s the only reason I got out alive. Of course, I can’t say for sure what it was, but I like to think that even the borderlands have their angels.

And you, if you’re ever out and about enjoying a little natural greenery, good for you. But if the roses start to sing or a strange silhouette glides up, then run—just run for your life, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

***

The Dash McCain story “The Faerie Garden” was inspired in part by Arthur Machen’s “The White People” (1904).

New York, June 1972

This city has a million stories—some of them literally unbelievable. You may think this is one of those, but I saw every bit of it happen… with my own bloodshot eyes. So believe it or not, as you please, and read it at your own risk. It’s not a pretty tale. It’s the ugly story of an evil man who tried to cheat death and found out that death cheats back. It cost him everything… but not before he took several good people away from those who loved them.

And I’m still here to tell the tale—only because I was lucky.

It all started for me late one evening at the office. It was summer, and I was out of sorts. I had been reading the papers—full of Nixon, crime, and Hurricane Agnes.

Now I was at my desk in the half-light, staring out at the darkening city, listening to the traffic stir, breathing in tobacco smoke, and trying to spark things up with the office bottle. But even my good friend Four Roses was letting me down.

It looked like a long night ahead.

Then the phone rang in the stillness.

I answered with the usual line, “McGonigal and McCain, Private Investigators .”

It was an anxious woman’s voice. “Yes, may I please speak to Mr. Dashwood McCain?”

“Sure thing, that’s me,” I said.

“Oh, good, I’ve reached you! Mr. McCain, I need your help—very badly. I’m so frightened. My name’s Lenore Allan. Can you please come to my apartment right away? I need protection.”

Now I don’t get that kind of call every day, so I started asking questions, but the woman stonewalled. She said it was urgent and that I had been specially recommended by a friend, and that’s all she would say.

She sounded scared but also sane and sober, which are my usual requirements for a client—along with a reasonable degree of honesty. And she also had that polished diction that so often means real money to spend, and I knew that would make my partner Mickey very happy.

I got her address and headed over.

It was a ritzy place uptown. Ms. Allan had asked me to be discreet, so I slipped past a shiny-buttoned doorman with a group of merrymakers and went up the elevator. Her place wasn’t quite the penthouse, but the people on the street were still a long way down as the crow falls.

She cautiously opened her door and said, “Oh, Mr. McCain, I’m so glad you’re here!”—like I was the U.S. Cavalry and had just chased off the Comanches.

I gave her a once-over. She looked like she sounded on the phone—frightened, sane, and sober.

And she was also beautiful—blonde and blue-eyed with the kind of heart-shaped face and soft satiny glow that sends men off buying flowers and writing poems. But I have to say there was more to her than looks. You could feel it right away, in the air around her, a certain something. The French have a phrase for it—I don’t know what.

I shook my head and smiled reassuringly. “Yeah, I’m glad you’re glad, Ms. Allan, and I’m happy to help if I can. Would you like to tell me now what’s going on?”

She looked grim. “I think… I think someone may try to kill me tonight.”

And she said those words with complete conviction and without a hint of drama. I believed that she believed it.

I stared at her a moment and started again with the questions, but she shook her head and refused to give me any details. No who, no how, no why—just that someone might try to kill her tonight.

And she refused to involve the police.

I didn’t like the setup—not at all—and said so.

“Please,” she said softly. “I’m asking you to trust me—just for a little while—and stay here tonight and protect me.”

It was far from ideal, but she was frightened and she needed my help. I couldn’t say no.

I shrugged. “All right, I can stay and hold your hand, but I could do you a lot more good if you’d tell me who and what you’re afraid of.”

She looked relieved. “Thank you, Mr. McCain. I knew you’d help me. You’re a good man. I need more good men in my life. I haven’t been very good myself… or even smart. But I promise I’ll tell you everything… tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. It’s a word we all like to use, but my gut told me this time it was almost tempting fate.

***

It was late, about 3 a.m., and I had my .38 out and my eyes peeled back—facing the only entrance and the balcony. I was sitting in the most uncomfortable chair I could find.

Ms. Allan was lying down in the dark in the next room with the door half open, trying to sleep a little.

With her squared away in there, I’d been able to do a little cautious snooping. I needed all the information I could find, and I might need it fast.

Lenore Allan looked like she was well off and well educated, living the high life in Manhattan. Her apartment certainly fit the picture—expensive furniture, expensive paintings, expensive rugs. She also had plenty of photos, including one with a funny-looking dog and her parents, a silver-haired couple who looked like they belonged to the yacht club.

And I found something extremely interesting—another picture face-down in a drawer. It was her in a nightclub happily entwined with a man I recognized.

His name was Llewyn Marshall.

I knew about Marshall. He was a stage hypnotist turned spiritual counselor and self-styled western guru. He’d given every bunco scam a try over the last twenty years—he was a mesmerist, a mind reader, an astrologer, and a medium. The only routine he hadn’t done was snake-handling faith-healer. But he didn’t need a snake. He had himself.

Still, the rumor mill said that some of his powers were real—at least if you dug down through all the nightclub corn and kitsch.

Now plenty of people don’t believe in the supernatural, but those people haven’t seen the things I’ve seen. I know what’s what—and Marshall was certainly not to be underestimated.

It was all very interesting.

I kept moving my eyes from the door to the balcony and back, even though you’d have to have been a cat burglar to hit the place from the balcony.

It was getting later and later, and I was tired and about to have another cup of coffee.

Then I noticed through the doorway that a faint light was shimmering in Ms. Allan’s room.

It was a hazy flickering light—like she had turned on the TV for the static. But there wasn’t any static sound.

It was odd.

I listened, and all I could hear was a soft ticking, like a watch swathed in cotton… running a little off time.

Suddenly, my hair stood on end, and the electric scent of ozone filled my nostrils.

Something was happening. Something bad. I knew it.

I tried to get up, but I felt paralyzed in my chair.

A deathly quiet fell over the apartment, and then around my head was strange rush of whispers like a scandal at a funeral.

My pulse was pounding, and my bones felt frozen.

And in my mind’s eye, something flashed—like a lightning strike in a dark room. I saw an awful vision of frantic blue lights with a strange black shadow sprawled across them.

Then there was something else.

A shriek—a single terrifying soundless shriek—that pierced through my chest and ran down my spine. I knew it was Lenore.

And everything was over.

Her room was dark again. I got to my feet, raced to the doorway, and flipped on the lights.

She was sitting up in bed.

I will never forget that sight—not if I live a hundred years.

Lenore was dead. But not just dead. She looked like she had been frightened literally to death. You could see it in her blank staring eyes, in her contorted mouth, and in every etched line of her horribly twisted face.

I’ve seen a lot of terrible things in my life, but this… this felt like the worst.

I kept looking at her, and then it really hit me.

She was dead. She was dead, and she wouldn’t be telling anybody anything—not tomorrow or ever. Never again.

And I had let it happen.

***

I stood there in the room beside her a long time.

I don’t know how long it was—watches don’t keep that kind of time anyway.

After a while, I reached out and closed her eyes. She was gone. She had been full of life, something special, you could tell that right away, and she was gone.

She had asked me to protect her, and I hadn’t done it.

I had to jumpstart my brain. There would be plenty of late nights down the road to go over my mistakes.

Something had killed her. I had to find out what—and put an end to it. I owed that much to her and to everyone else.

And down deep in my gut I knew I wanted blood for this—and plenty of it. I didn’t much like it, but that’s how it was.

I started searching the apartment—systematically this time.

I confirmed that Lenore had been Llewyn Marshall’s girlfriend… or one of them at least. There were plenty of photos and letters to prove that.

And I found something else.

She had also been seeing Blackwood Poehler, the celebrated criminal lawyer. There were letters from him and photos too.

I knew Blackie Poehler. He was larger than life—with a smooth-as-silk voice and a John Barrymore profile. He was always three steps ahead of the prosecution, and I’d seen him make a jury roll over and play dead. He had rarified tastes in clothes, cars, cuisine, and companions. Nobody ever thought he was on the level, and nobody seemed to care.

Lenore had had a type, it seems.

I took a few letters and some photographs. They might be helpful clues, and they’d also remind me that I had unfinished business. Then I slipped out of the apartment and left it to the housekeeper to find the body.

I couldn’t get mixed up in a police jam if I was going to find out who killed Lenore and why.

I wasn’t going to let anything stop me—not anything at all.

***

The next day I got a call from Sergeant Ed Gargan, an old buddy of mine from our days together on the force. If Hollywood had ever put out a local casting call for big flatfoot Irish cops, Ed would have been a cinch.

He started telling me excitedly about a stiff he had seen just that morning.

“Dash,” he said, “I ain’t ever seen nothing like it. The face was awful. Like one of them horror movies. I got the willies just looking at it. It’s gonna give me nightmares, for sure. So I thought of you. I know you always like to hear about the weird ones.”

“That’s right. I do.”

“And guess who the stiff was.”

I hadn’t expected him to say that, but I managed to make a joke. “It was Tiny Tim, right?”

Ed laughed. “Nah, it was Blackie Poehler. Remember that case we was on. He sure made me look stupid on the stand.”

“Yeah, I remember—he made us all look stupid.”

I was still talking, but my mind had started working overtime as soon as he said Blackie Poehler.

Quite a development. Blackie had got it too.

Lenore had been tied up with Blackie and with Llewyn Marshall. And both she and Blackie had died on the same night… in the same horrific way.

And Llewyn Marshall likely had occult powers. It was time to dive much much deeper into the investigation.

I knew my friend Willy Vogel would know much more about Marshall than I did.

I found Vogel hunched over an impressive plate of spaghetti in a quiet little Italian place near the East River. He looked heavier than ever—expansive in both his body and his mind. Vogel was a man with an unmatched knowledge of the occult and confidential contacts everywhere.

“Marshall?” Vogel said in his throaty English accent. “Extraordinary fellow, just extraordinary. Mind you, he’s a jumped-up street urchin, but he’s exceedingly polished, and he has developed decided powers. From what I hear, he’s playing with fire. His approach to mesmerism is unique—super-charged by an impressive psychic sensitivity. It’s a very potent combination.”

“So he’s the real deal, for sure?”

Vogel nodded. “Absolutely, and I’ve heard that he’s also researched and replicated some ancient necromantic practices that were better left forgotten. And that séance group of his—I have it on good authority that some of the summonings have been very real and very dangerous. I suspect he will come to a bad end. If you deal with him, you must be very careful, Dash.”

It was good advice, but I knew I wasn’t going to take it.

Lenore Allan was dead, and I was restless and ready to move.

***

I made my plans quickly. I’m a big fan of cage rattling, and it was time to rattle a cage.

I needed to see Llewyn Marshall face-to-face to do that well.

So I arranged to visit the silk-suit Svengali under the pretext of booking a spiritual reading. I had to call in all my debts to swing his “contribution” price tag. It was hefty.

Marshall held court at his old brownstone townhouse. The place was like a mausoleum—with an avant-garde decor poised midway between Charles Addams and Charles Manson. It smelled of fresh gardenias and rainwater.

“Mr. McCain,” Marshall said, shaking my hand like it was beneath him. “I only allow true seekers into my parlor. They don’t usually have private detective licenses.”

This was the first time I’d seen Marshall up close. He was a trim man of middle height about forty-five—with sharp eyes, a sharp chin, and slicked-down black hair. His clothes were sharp as well—with a studied stagey elegance.

He was also a snake, and he looked like he was just a little too bored to strike.

I was positive he had killed Lenore, but my job right now was to make nice. I turned on the low-rent charm.

“Sure, I’m a private investigator, Mr. Marshall. But I’m here for myself, not a client, and I do believe in the supernatural. I believe—and how. Perhaps you’ve seen my newsletter of the unexplained...”

Marshall nodded cryptically and led me to a black velvet armchair under a crystal chandelier with an old-world glitter. A stuffed Raven eyed me from the corner of the room. I’m sure it always provided a little thrill for his goofball clients.

I tried hard to get a good read on Marshall, but he was sealed off like a chamber behind a brick wall. Then I noticed a very faint rhythmic drone in the room—something that wasn’t quite a grandfather clock. It was very peculiar.

Marshall’s eyes locked on mine—with a sly superior smile. “Tell me, Mr. McCain—you believe in the supernatural, you say, but do you believe specifically in spirits… from the beyond?”

“Oh, ask anyone, I’m a big believer in spirits,” I said, “bourbon especially, but not from the beyond… if it’s beyond Kentucky.”

I laughed a little, and he didn’t.

“I wonder,” said Marshall without humor, his brow furrowed.

And suddenly I was cold. Not ordinary cold. Graveyard cold. Something prickled the back of my neck, as Marshall watched me intently.

“Ah, you’re sensitive,” he said softly. “Yes, you do believe—because you can feel them, at least sometimes. That’s interesting.”

I met Marshall’s shiny black gaze. “Yeah, I do, and I was hoping you’d help me contact someone who has passed over. It’s very important to me.”

Marshall’s face was granite. “I can feel that. And you’re not thinking of your saintly mother, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I was hoping to contact Lenore Allan. I wanted to ask her what she saw in her last moments… before she was murdered.”

Marshall smiled, but no one ever smiled with less humor, and his snake eyes seemed to flicker.

Then something happened.

The world seemed to slow down and then stop. Even my breathing. Everything stopped, and then I began to whirl in a sweeping dark circle. I dropped down and down into a maelstrom of… deep black sleep. I slept, and I slept.

And suddenly I found myself standing outside Marshall’s brownstone in the sun, blinking with a pounding headache and the distinct impression I’d forgotten something important.

I just stood there for a few moments trying to remember what I was doing and how I got there.

Marshall’s door was shut, and the fee I had paid him was back in my pocket.

That hadn’t gone quite the way I had planned, but there was nothing else to do at the moment.

I had to keep moving forward. Something was happening, and I was going to find out what.

***

I was in the office reading one of Lenore’s old letters, still scented with her perfume, when Ed Gargan called about the third victim.

It was Elizabeth Rowen, a crème de la crème socialite. She had once been a celebrated beauty featured in the rotogravure, with doe’s eyes and soft red curls, and then a handsome dowager, a matron of the arts, and a committed doer of good deeds, large and small.

Now she had been found sprawled across one of her priceless rugs with the same kind of frozen scream on her face that the others had.

Elizabeth Rowen was dead, and her beloved black cat was missing.

I ran down the scuttlebutt quickly enough.

It seems in her old age Mrs. Rowen had become obsessed with spirits and the afterlife. And she had made an honest but fatal mistake. She became quite taken with Llewyn Marshall, she made generous contributions to his causes, and she added a massive bequest to him in her new will.

And then she died.

Her death was as mysterious as the others, but there was an important difference this time around. There was a witness… or something close to it.

Tilly O’Donnell, an elderly housemaid, had seen something strange.

I managed to finagle a little talk with Tilly in the hot afternoon sun at the side entrance of the Rowen mansion. She swore to me she had seen something—not quite the killing itself, but definitely something.

What Tilly had seen was a ghost.

The old lady spoke in a quavering voice as her eyes darted back and forth. “Sure, it was a spirit, Mr. McCain! Folks may laugh as they please, but that’s what it was. And not just any spirit, mind you. It was a dear friend of the lady herself—a fine gentleman, Mr. Valentine DeMarr. I seen him with my own eyes. He had one foot in the grave, he did, and one foot out. And I could see clean through his body to the wall behind. All colored in blue, the man was, crying his poor eyes out… like his heart was breaking. That’s what I saw, so help me!”

Tilly said the apparition had appeared and then disappeared right in front of her just moments before she found Mrs. Rowen dead on the floor.

The police predictably said she was crazy, but I knew something was up.

I began to dig deeper.

Mr. Valentine DeMarr, it turned out, was a close friend of Elizabeth Rowen’s and also cut from very much the same cloth. An old family, a patron of the arts, a philanthropist, and a late-blooming spiritualist.

And he was another member of Llewyn Marshall’s séance circle.

But while Tilly O’Donnell said she saw DeMarr’s ghost, his friends were saying he was still very much alive and traveling incommunicado in India—on an extended spiritual retreat among the pilgrims and the ashrams.

He didn’t sound like the likeliest candidate for a spirit—even if you believed in hauntings as I certainly do.

While I worked to trace Valentine DeMarr’s travels in Asia, I was determined to make a black-bag visit to Marshall’s brownstone to see what I could see.

He had secrets, and I was looking for answers.

I intended to find them.

***

I got there after dark on an evening I knew Marshall was occupied—giving a hot air lecture to a paranormal society.

The lock on the service door wasn’t much of a challenge—not for someone with my misspent youth.

I slipped inside, and the place was quiet. Too quiet, like they say in the cowboy movies. Even the darkness felt like it was holding its breath.

I looked around. There was not much to see at first in the dim light of my flash. Just fluttering shadows and Marshall’s half-baked museum pieces.

But then things got more interesting.

I knew Marshall was an oddball, but the curios I saw in his backrooms were an unpleasant confirmation. There were row after creepy row of taxidermied cats and birds, wicked-looking axes by the dozen on the walls, and several sets of carefully arranged… human teeth.

It all put a pit in the middle of my stomach.

Eventually I crept up the stairs all the way to the third floor. And there was that soft strange droning sound again. Was it sounding in my ears—or down in my stomach? I couldn’t quite tell.

I kept looking around.

There was a room at the end of one hall. The door was closed, but a faint icy glow leaked out from underneath—cold and unnatural.

And it reminded me just a little of what I’d seen coming from Lenore’s bedroom—but softer and fainter.

The door was locked. I sprung it cautiously and nudged the door open with my shoe.

Then I looked in through the doorway.

And I stopped dead.

Valentine DeMarr was there, plain as day, long and lean, laid out like a corpse.

Because he was a corpse.

He was stretched out on a canopied bed like some twisted Sleeping Beauty, dressed in a silken robe with a bright Chinese pattern. The face was sunken, the skin pallid wax.

He was dead all right. And there was a slight blue haze in the room.

I watched him for several moments, and then it happened.

A terrible sound, a faint unnatural whisper, hollow and broken, coming from the vicinity of the unmoving body—and also from a million miles away.

It was unearthly, and it echoed from below… up through my stomach to the inside of my ears. I could just make out the words.

“Please… help me,” the voice rasped, just audible over the slight hum of that something in the background.

I stepped closer. The air had grown thick and metallic. The body hadn’t made any movement that I could see, and the sound had seemed to come from beneath it.

I stared in disbelief.

A soft distant wheeze seemed to ring out again from a cavernous depth under the body—without a hint of motion from the corpse.

Then the voice sounded again, a little louder now, in a viscous whisper. “I am dead but cannot pass…”

I was dumbstruck.

The voice continued thickly, “I am… trapped… he won’t let me… through.”

“Marshall?” I whispered.

DeMarr’s dead face remained frozen as the voice went on welling up from below. “He forces… me… uses me… to kill… please… I beg you.”

Then a strangled sobbing echoed… like it was coming from the bottom of a vast pit below.

Suddenly the bed glowed with a soft blue light and started to gently shake, rocking the lifeless body.

I knew now was the time to go. I backed out of the room fast, pulling the door shut just as a floorboard creaked somewhere downstairs.

My heart was pounding, my stomach cartwheeling. What I’d just heard would be burned into my brain for forever.

DeMarr was dead. But DeMarr’s spirit was trapped. Marshall was somehow using him as a weapon. And Lenore, Blackie, and Elizabeth Rowen were dead as a result.

I slipped out of the house into the night.

I had to stop the killings and set DeMarr free.

***

I sat with Vogel in his dusty book- and curio-stuffed apartment and told him all I had seen.

He looked deeply thoughtful, as he blew out a long stream of cigar smoke. “Extraordinary, Dash, and most disturbing. Of course, I have read of strange mesmeric experiments, but verifying authentic cases is quite difficult. In our daily life the body and the spirit are intertwined, and those bonds dissolve at the moment of death as the spirit passes into the next world. A higher-level mesmerism, supernatural in its effects, could conceivably alter that process and arrest the spirit along the path.”

I nodded. “If DeMarr is being used to kill, how do the victims die? Surely, he’s not just scaring them to death.”

Vogel’s brow furrowed further. “A very good question. Yes, I think this clearly goes beyond a garden-variety reaction to a ghostly visitation. Of course, it may be that proximity to or physical contact with a specter tethered to a dead body in this way induces certain reactions that result in death. DeMarr may indeed be trapped . . . halfway through a passage from our world to the beyond. Who knows what effect that might have on others—or what might go in or out of an open doorway.”

I rubbed my temples, which were throbbing now. “Okay, looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me. Any advice on confronting Marshall? My last encounter did not go well.”

Vogel frowned. “Yes, he’s definitely very dangerous, and you may be especially vulnerable to his brand of psychic mesmerism, given the experience you’ve already had. I do have a counter-measure that you could use, but it’s not without its own risks.”

“Which is what?”

“A drug, an herbal extract—perhaps not strictly legal in New York, mind you. Think of it as the inverse of scopolamine or sodium pentothal. Those increase sensitivity to hypnotism. This dramatically decreases it. But it also causes agitation, mood swings, paranoia, dizziness. It’s a dangerous drug. But it may be less dangerous than confronting Marshall without any form of protection.”

He went to his backrooms and returned in a few minutes with an old-fashioned snuff box. “Just a pinch should do it,” he said, “one in each nostril.”

I thanked him, and he looked grimmer than usual. “Be warned. It’s not just Marshall you may be up against. He is stirring up forces that he can’t control. It will all be very dangerous, I suspect. If he’s opened a door to the beyond almost anything might happen.”

It was getting very late, and I thanked Vogel and went home. I had plans to make, and I would need a good night’s sleep.

I didn’t know then there was no chance of that happening.

***

I made it back to my rat-trap apartment. It was a hot lonely night—with the street noises below and the flashing neon signs.

I put a scratchy Rachmaninoff LP on my old player, and I thought about Lenore… as the mournful music, the sound of funeral bells, filled the quiet room.

Lenore’s memory was as sharp as a razor in my mind. I looked at one of her photos, her eyes shining in the soft light, and I tried not to think about how she had died. The idea of mesmerism and spectral forces seemed far away somehow. I had a little drink or two… or four.

It was late, and I finally turned off the music and hit the sack. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

Then I was suddenly awake—just as my head hit the floor.

Hard.

I was on my feet in a heartbeat throwing a right cross in the shadows, but nothing was there.

I was all alone in the night, crouching, half-stunned, breathing hard.

What had happened?

I tried to get things clear in my head.

I’d hit the floor near the window. Next to the table. The phone was off the hook, hanging loose, the dial tone still buzzing. The cord had been tangled around my arm.

I hung up the phone. And listened to the silence.

Suddenly I heard a bang. It was a car backfiring on the street below.

Then it hit me—a backfire. A car had backfired, maybe the very same car, just a moment before.

That woke me up, and I fell to the floor.

I was sleepwalking. I had to be.

And I was standing by the window—but why?

Because I was… talking on the phone. In my sleep. That’s why the receiver had been beside me and cord tangled around my arm.

I could almost remember it now as I stood in the shadows—like one of those dreams you have flashes of but can’t quite piece together.

But who was I talking to… in the dark in my sleep? Then a terrible thought occurred to me.

Was it Marshall? Was I talking to Marshall?

And it all came together in my mind. I could almost hear his voice on the phone echoing in my ears—soft velvet over the fangs of a snake.

To my horror, I suddenly knew it: I had been mesmerized and left with a post-hypnotic suggestion: To phone Marshall in my sleep… and spill my guts.

But what had I told him? Did he know Lenore was my client? That I’d been in the next room when she was murdered? Did he know that I’d seen Valentine DeMarr’s body? Heard that awful voice? Knew the terrible secret?

The thought made me sick to my stomach.

Then his last words to me seemed to echo in my ears. “Goodbye, Mr. McCain. I won’t be seeing you again.”

And I felt something very bad was about to happen.

My hair stood on end, and an odd electric smell filled my nostrils.

A subtle offbeat ticking disturbed the quiet behind me. I can only describe it as ghostly.

I turned and saw a horrifying sight.

There it was—the translucent shade of Valentine DeMarr.

A spectral, bluish outline of his form—faintly glowing in the darkness.

He was a clichéd ghost, and he was absolutely terrifying. A bitter cold crept down my spine.

DeMarr’s expression was mournful—like he was wracked with an infinite grief. He seemed to mouth the words “I’m sorry” as he floated slowly towards me.

As he drifted closer, I could see he stood in the threshold of... something.

It looked like a shimmering oval doorway outlined in the same hazy electric glow.

This is what Lenore must have seen just before she died.

It was like a slow-motion train crash. There was no place to go. You can’t outrun a specter. And my feet felt paralyzed.

I stood there and whispered, “It’s not your fault.”

As the floating shade closed and then passed slowly through me, I shivered with an arctic chill that swept through my entire body.

Then I knew what had happened to the others.

I had passed through the doorway. In the halo of DeMarr’s spectral form, everything around me was bathed in a color I had never seen before—one impossible to translate into words.

And there was something like a… crack or tear in space. It was slowly rotating, vibrating, and flashing an eerie blue light. I knew instinctively that it came from somewhere terrible.

And there was an unspeakable thing there.

An immense amorphous black shape—sleekly gliding in and out of the fissure.

It was frightening beyond belief, and the panic began to rise in my body.

This was the thing that had killed Lenore.

And I knew if I could see it, it could likely see me back.

A little bell rang in the back of my mind, and I instantly tried to shrink down inside myself. I needed to hide and hide fast. I knew every thought, every emotion, every intuition was like a sound, a movement, a scent, in this doorway’s world.

And the thing was a bone-chilling predator on the prowl.

I raced to make my mind and spirit as small as I could, shrinking down to almost nothing—nothing but an emptiness. And the eyes of my soul were shut tight deep in that emptiness.

Then I heard the whispers, a faint eerie chorus, the words just beyond any understanding, but sounding so familiar that you wanted to hear them and to listen—like they were your old friends asking you to join them in the comfort of the darkness. The whispers rustled all around my head.

And I could faintly feel the thing on the edge of my consciousness, probing to see what, if anything, might be hiding. Like a massive black shark in deep water pressing up against a diving cage after a scuba diver.

I shrank further and blotted myself out.

And I was there, hunkered down inside myself, for what seemed like a very long time. Then finally I opened my eyes, and it was daylight.

I was alone in the apartment. I had survived. This time, at least.

I had been lucky, very lucky.

Then I thought of Lenore. She hadn’t been so lucky.

I knew what I had to do next.

***

It was midday, and I was sitting quietly in the séance room in Marshall’s creepy brownstone surrounded by all his modern-art-meets-haunted-house trappings.

I was waiting with my .38 in hand. I had taken the herbal extract. It had a definite kick—a little like Irish coffee times a hundred.

As I sat there, I had an increasingly bad feeling.

The strange drone I’d heard before was louder and faster—almost a buzz. I was twitching and my heart was racing. Was it just the drug… or something else?

A big part of me wanted to leave. But there was nowhere to go—not really. Someone had to do something. For Lenore, for DeMarr, and for everybody else. There were four people dead and more coming.

I sat with the panic slowly building, resisting the urge to bug out no matter what, and then Marshall arrived.

He walked into the room. My .38 was aimed right at the center of his red and black silk tie.

He didn’t seem at all surprised to see me. “Mr. McCain, I thought you might show up again. And you’ve brought a pop gun. Your efforts are certainly crude, but amusing.”

I said, “Thank you—I hardly ever shoot anybody, but I can make a special exception just for you, if need be.”

He laughed, and his voice began. Low. Soothing. Drenched in menace.

I could feel its pull.

“McCain, you remember my voice. You remember my commands. You obeyed me before. You will obey me now. Put down the gun.”

I felt the impulse, and my hand did move slightly, but that was all.

He looked very surprised.

I shook my head. “Yeah, funny thing, that won’t work this time. Now, things are different. Now I’m calling the shots. I know you killed Lenore. I know you killed Blackie Poehler. I know you killed Elizabeth Rowen. You probably killed DeMarr too… but it doesn’t matter. It’s all going to stop. Understand. It’s going to stop. You’re going to let DeMarr go. You’re going to let him pass on. Do it now, do it fast.”

He stared at me a moment, and then that slight sneer came back to his face. “Or what? I don’t think you’re going to shoot me dead in cold blood… right here in my own parlor in the middle of the afternoon.”

I didn’t like that—I felt a wave of drug-induced anger washing over me. It was going to be hard to keep from blowing a gasket.

A few feet from Marshall was a fancy bust on a fancier pedestal.

I shot it, and it blew to pieces.

“So much for Samuel Johnson,” I said.

Marshall had jumped when the gun went off. He looked at me with fear in his eyes, but he quickly recovered himself again and said, “That was Cagliostro, and it was very expensive.”

I pointed my gun back in his direction. “Your kneecaps are next. You got those for free.”

I could see that this display of wanton violence was having the desired effect, but I was also beginning to feel very strange.

Marshall blinked, swallowed hard, then he closed his eyes for a moment in concentration.

The shade of Valentine DeMarr slowly appeared.

DeMarr was there—and not there—standing in the same eerie blue-light doorway. Translucent, floating gently in the air, a spectral luminous outline of what he had once been in life. Still absolutely terrifying. He was drifting ever so slowly across the room. His eyes were hollow and full of pain and grief

Marshall opened his mouth to speak and then stopped.

I was feeling woozy, and I realized I had started swaying. It suddenly seemed like the room was spinning. The drug was obviously not working out quite the way I had planned.

It crossed my mind to shoot Marshall, but I couldn’t quite make myself do it.

Then everything went black.

***

I was on the floor, blinking, staring up at Marshall.

He had my own gun pointed at me.

I was wet where he had thrown water in my face to wake me up. My mouth hurt, where he had no doubt kicked me in the teeth. I could taste the blood in my mouth, and my hands were tightly tied behind my back.

He looked down and smiled. “You should have just shot me. That would have been the smart thing to do. Your problem, McCain, is that you’re stupid. You waltzed in here without protection the first time, you kept on snooping when it was clear you were out of your league, and you came back—what?—hopped up on some anti-hypnosis drug you couldn’t handle.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” I said.

He stared at me with contempt. “Just how did you survive the… visitation last night? You’re dumb, but I doubt it was just dumb luck. How did you manage it?”

“I eat my Wheaties,” I offered.

He shook his head. “Cheap cracks from a cheap hood.”

I looked over at the shade of DeMarr. He was still floating there—and more mournful than ever.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered half to myself.

Marshall was really enjoying himself now. “You have no idea who you’ve been dealing with. I mesmerized DeMarr on the cusp of death and bound his spirit to his body just as he died. The timing is very delicate, but he’s an excellent subject—very suggestible. I’m the first to do that in at least two thousand years. DeMarr belongs to me now, body and soul, and I’ve opened a... portal. You might say to hell, but it’s much worse than that, and it’s power, real power. It’s proven to be a very effective device for removing… obstacles.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen it. You may get a look-see yourself.”

Marshall laughed. “You’ll have to go too, McCain. It’ll be messy, but we’ll have to do it here. I can toss your body on the side of the road someplace. A fitting end for you.”

He stared at me—then he closed his eyes in concentration for a moment.

DeMarr’s spectral face contorted in sudden pain, and he and the glowing doorway began to drift slowly towards me.

This was it, I thought. The end of the line. I couldn’t hold out indefinitely—not from that thing.

I expected my life to flash before my eyes, but nothing happened, and I muttered one last little prayer.

The buzzing in my ears was now far more intense—a shrill mechanical whine, almost deafening. I absently wondered again just what it was.

Suddenly the buzzing peaked and stopped, and I felt something very strange. The air changed. It was different now—and all wrong.

Then I understood.

A presence had entered the room. Something old. Vast. Unknowable. A space of... anti-space. Like a vacuum within a vacuum.

It was the thing.

Marshall felt it. He gasped in panic, his eyes suddenly wild. He was speechless for a moment and then said, “It’s come. It’s come through!”

Nothing was visible, but I knew it was in there, blind and unspeakably terrible—and it was hunting. A sharp odor like burnt metal filled the air. Marshall had made a big mistake standing so close to the doorway so long.

He stared at me, suddenly accusing. “Did you bring it? Did you? Call it off,” he shouted. “Call it off! Send it back! I’ll do anything.”

Then the side of the room seemed to distort, like space itself was pushed out. A mirror on the wall suddenly cracked. The chandelier swayed off center. A bookcase warped and splintered.

The shade of DeMarr was gone now, but an immense shadow broke out—blacker than black, like the very negation of everything, a hole in space itself.

The shadow shifted like the ragged mouth of a black cavern, stretching and distorting the space around it. And the strange whispers came again and roughly rustled around my ears—both soft and somehow deafening.

Then time seemed to stand almost still for a moment. It was just a second... but it was the very edge of eternity.

Marshall stood there frozen, staring in horror. Then suddenly he sprinted to the hall’s open doorway.

He made it all the way to the threshold—when the bulging black nothingness darted out after him.

Marshall’s body convulsed as the shadowy void struck him and began to spread slowly over his torso. He stiffened, his mouth opened in silent terror. The deep blackness covered him completely within a few moments.

And then in a flash it was all over.

The black shadow was gone, and Marshall was gone. Like a man pulled under the ocean by a shark. Like he’d never been there at all, and the hall doorway had always been… just empty.

The room had snapped back into focus, and I saw that the far wall of the parlor was badly cracked from ceiling to floor.

There was true silence now—no ticking, no buzzing, no whispers. DeMarr, I knew in my bones, would finally be at rest.

It took me a minute to get my hands free, and I raced upstairs to that back room. DeMarr’s body lay on the bed… undisturbed. No hazy glow in the room. No unnatural voice beneath.

DeMarr was at peace now, and his body looked it.

And the man who killed Lenore Allan was dead.

***

Back at the dingy office the next day, Mickey, my supremely skeptical partner, was drinking coffee and muttering about ulcers.

“You know what I think, Dash?” he said.

“No, what?” I said.

“I think you’re lucky. Every month you have a psychotic break and still come back smiling the next day.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I got more luck than a barrel full of leprechauns.”

And I did. Marshall had been one step ahead of me the whole way, but I’d had the luck.

Still, I wasn’t smiling that day, not really.

I was thinking about Lenore, lost to this world forever.

I put her letters and photos aside, and I reached for my old friend… Four Roses. Chasing spirits with spirits. It felt like the only thing to do. I knew the office bottle wouldn’t be letting me down this time.

And that’s the story.

The cops, of course, had the case all figured out. They said Marshall murdered DeMarr and legged it—absconded to the Cayman Islands or Argentina or Timbuktu. And they never found him. He had vanished without a trace, as they say in the melodramas.

But I—I know what really happened.

And I never did hear a word from the police. I’d been careful. I’d wiped down Marshall’s place for prints and dug the bullet I’d fired out of the wall. They thought Marshall was on the run, not dead, and that was that. They weren’t interested in asking any extra questions.

Lenore’s family? They thought she died of heart failure. That was the coroner’s official report. I’m sure her parents are mourning her still.

I took flowers to her grave a few times myself. The last time I went another admirer was there. He’d also brought flowers and probably had a little poem with him too. Me, I don’t know how to rhyme.

And you? Well, if a mesmerist ever turns up some day for your last rites, you might just ask the priest to show him the door.

If not, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

***

The Dash McCain story “The Deadman and the Doorway” was inspired in part by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845).

A new Dash McCain noir occult detective story appears each month in 2026. In July, Dash investigates the strange disappearance of a little girl in “The Faerie Garden.”

New York, May 1972

William Faulkner once said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” He was right, of course, but I know a group of young people who had to find it out the hard way. One moment, it was a sunny spring day in a city park, and the next moment it was cracking thunder, blowing winds, and an unfolding nightmare three hundred years in the making. This is that story. Every bit of it happened just the way I’ve recounted it here—believe it or not.

It started for me on a cloudy day in a cheap diner in the East Village. I was sitting across a table from Madame Avadora, the mysterious Gypsy seer.

But actually she wasn’t that mysterious, not to me anyway. I had known her as Trudy Morgenstern for almost twenty years.

She was an old friend, an old flame in fact, and she was in trouble.

“Dash, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve been so sick—with the fever and the coughing, and my hands, my poor hands.” She held them up, and they were cramped in a stiff, claw-like grip.

I could feel her pain across the table.

She was on the verge of tears. “The fever comes, and it goes. I can only work maybe halftime now. And I can’t do Tarot anymore. Who can hold the cards with these hands? I’m down to a crystal ball.”

She was ill, but she was still lovely to look at. I told her she’d outshine Paulette Goddard any day of the week and asked her gingerly if she needed any money.

She smiled a little sadly. “You’re such a sweetheart, Dash. But money is one thing I don’t need. I’ve saved my pennies. And I know you don’t get rich as a private eye, not the way you do it. Sleeping in haunted houses! But your help, I do need.”

I asked her what I could do.

She looked at me very seriously. “Dash, I’ve been… cursed. I just know it.”

I asked her what she meant.

“Cursed. Bewitched. Hexed. All this—the fever, the cough. My hands. The doctors can’t explain it. This… this is not natural. This is something else. Magic—black magic!”

We were both believers, and I asked her what she thought might be behind it all.

Her eyes flashed. “It’s a witch with a capital B, if you know what I mean. Another fortune teller, a piece of work. A woman named Janet McClure. She’s the one. I know it’s her! I need your help. I don’t know where else to turn.”

I said of course I’d help, and Trudy filled me in a little more.

She said Janet McClure worked on the same street as she did in the East Village by Tompkins Square Park—in the back of an astrological bookstore. Janet was from upstate in the sticks and part of a flower-child group who sang folk songs in the park. A bunch of goofy kids figuring out life.

Trudy said Janet had been friendly at first, even bringing her daisies from her garden some days. But then she changed. Different attitude, different clothes, different everything.

And Janet had tried to steal one of Trudy’s more generous clients and picked a fight when that didn’t work out. She had flown into a rage, called Trudy a cheat, and said something about showing her what “true powers” look like.

Just after that, Trudy got sick. That was two weeks ago, and now she was at her wit’s end.

I needed to do something. Janet took drop-in clients in the afternoons, Trudy said, and I decided I would go have a look for myself.

My old friend was in trouble, and I was going to see what was what.

***

I walked the couple of blocks from the diner to the bookstore, Black Spot Books, passing a funny little troupe of East Village flower children on the way—with their long hair, homespun clothes, and bare feet. They were so with-it and mod, they were almost medieval.

The bell clanged above the door of the bookstore when I entered. It was a homey hole-in-the-wall place, dusty and filled with rube-bait—kitschy books, candles, and curios.

At the counter, a little man in love beads said in a soft voice, “Let me know if you need help finding anything, brother.” He was pleasant but also definitely looking me over.

I was a fifty-year-old “square” in a hat and rumpled suit, so not his average customer. I should have brought the latest issue of The Nighthawk, my underground newsletter of the unexplained, hot off the mimeograph. That would have sufficed as bona fides for the Age of Aquarius.

I said I’d like to have my fortune told if anyone was available.

“Sure,” the man said with a smile. “Sister Janet should be free. She’s right back there—just knock.” He pointed toward a door covered in astrological symbols.

I walked back and gently knocked to the catchy rhythm of “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits.” After a moment, a dignified woman’s voice said, “You are welcome to enter.”

Inside, it was a tiny room with a little table in the middle—jazzed up with a red cloth, dim lighting, spiritual symbols, powerful incense, all the usual things. A large black cat reclined on the table and lazily stared at me with a superior air.

And sitting behind the cat was the fortune teller, Janet McClure.

She was watching me, and her jet-black X-ray eyes were gleaming with a hungry interest. Young and attractive enough, she had sharp cheekbones and dark eyebrows, but her makeup was caked on thick, and she looked like she had been quite ill herself. She had a little white blaze running through the middle of her black hair, and it was striking in its effect.

She wore a thick high-collared cloak, buttoned under her chin, with the hood pushed back. Her clothes were all blacks and deep blues. She was clearly going for Pilgrim Mother rather than Queen of the Gypsies.

She just kept staring at me with her Daughter-of-Dracula eyes, so I said, “Sister Janet? I’d like my fortune told, if you’re available.”

A hint of a smile flickered across her face. “Yes, of course. Please do sit.”

Her accent was a little off for upstate, but I couldn’t place it.

“Five Dollars,” she said simply. I put a few crumpled bills in her offering jar as the cat lazily jumped to the floor.

Sister Janet took out her Tarot cards. She began placing them down in rows, picking them up, shuffling them, and doing it again.

I noticed her weird stiff posture—hunched shoulders, head held straight ahead, movements all from the upper body.

Then I felt something.

It’s hard to explain. Like part of her had quietly drifted across the table and… was trying to slip past my eyes into my head. It was very disconcerting, but I countered, pushing back and following that something across the table back to her. Like a quiet little game of… mystical tag.

Sister Janet stopped moving the cards. She was still except for those burning black eyes. Those darted up from the cards straight to my face. We locked eyes for a moment. Then she looked down again.

And I felt something else… something old and very wrong. Then the feeling was gone.

A flicker of anger flashed across her face, and she started laying out the cards again—as if nothing had happened.

I said, “Red Seven goes on Black Eight.”

She froze and then jerked up stiffly—staring at me like the Queen of Sheba.

Then she spoke slowly and carefully. “You are a curious man in a curious world. I can tell your fortune now. You stand at a crossroads. One road leads to good fortune and to long life, and one road leads to ill fortune and sudden death. Yours is the choice.”

There was now a chill in the air, and the room was strangely quiet. I looked at her a moment longer. Something else was off now, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Then she said quietly, “The reading is over.”

I nodded, got up, thanked her, and left.

Outside, I started down the street, thinking about what else was off with Sister Janet right at the end of the reading—when the room had been so strangely still. Then in a flash, I thought I knew.

In those last few moments, I wasn’t sure she was actually… breathing.

***

I knew I needed to learn more about Janet McClure, so I headed down the block toward another bookstore. It was that kind of street.

I could tell the rain was coming, and as I looked up at the sky, I noticed a bird circling overhead. Then it landed on the roof of a building.

It was a big black bird, a crow. You don’t see one of those every day in the East Village. The bird was looking straight down at me, and it gave me the willies.

I shook off the feeling and stepped inside the second bookstore. It was even more hippie-oriented than Black Spot Books, judging from the decor and the drug paraphernalia.

The young lady behind the counter looked like a TV folk singer—with a loud fringe vest and oversized glasses. She eyed me suspiciously.

I put on the low-rent charm. “Say, I wonder if you could do me a favor. I’m interested in the little bookstore up the street, Black Spot Books. Do you know anything about it?”

There was skepticism on her face. She asked if I were a cop, and I told her I was a private investigator.

That seemed to pique her interest a little. “Like Humphrey Bogart?” she said.

I nodded with a smile. “Just like Humphrey Bogart.” She smiled back and asked me my name, and I told her it was “Doghouse Reilly.”

She laughed a little, and we talked about the other bookstore. Then I asked her about the fortune teller.

The young lady grimaced. “Yeah, I know her. Janet something. She’s a weirdo. A real creep. She used to be nice—she was always talking about her flowers and her folk music… she played the guitar a lot. But she joined that Earth Mother sisters circle, and I guess it all went to her head.”

I asked her about Janet’s friends and family.

“I don’t know about family. Her friends are mostly from the Sisters, her circle. They call it the Tompkins Square something—you know, for the park.”

I asked if she knew any of the sisters.

“Yeah, I do—several. They seem to be having a hard time. Marian’s sick. She was the circle leader. Somebody said she went blind. Her name’s Pen-something. Penrose maybe. And there’s Lindsay—Burke, I think. She was a friend of Janet’s. Everyone says she’s real sick too—she can’t even walk. If you ask me, they all dropped some bad acid.”

That was very interesting. I quizzed her about addresses and phone numbers, but she didn’t know much. These kind of people move a lot anyway.

I thanked the young lady, and she looked at me with a shy smile and said, “Goodbye, Mr. Reilly,” as I went out the door.

The big crow was now sitting on the roof of the building across the way. It was still looking down at me, and it still gave me the willies.

I did some legwork up and down the street and made a few calls from a pay phone, all trying to track down addresses. The crow came and went but it was never far away for long.

I got some promising leads from some of the local hippies and yippies, but it was getting late, and then it began to rain.

I started getting waterlogged and a little antsy, so I decided to head for home.

Thankfully by then the crow was gone.

***

I sat down in my dingy apartment, drank a little bourbon, and put some scratchy LPs on the record player—a little Benny Goodman, then a little Arnold Bax.

After a while the rain stopped, and I hit the sack.

I lay there and thought more about Trudy and what to do next.

Soon I was dreaming, and I had one dream in particular—over and over.

Janet McClure, stiff-necked with piercing eyes, riding after me on a dark horse—with the crow and her cat. A strange man, all in black, was on the horizon, intently watching the hunt and writing in a little book.

And I was hiding and moving from one spot to another. Always just one step ahead of Janet and her crew. I knew if they found me something bad would happen.

I lay on my back, and I couldn’t quite tell if I was awake now or still dreaming. I noticed black smoke swirling in the room, but somehow it didn’t seem that strange to me. I was very calm.

Then a face slowly formed in the smoke, looking down at me. It was a woman—but it did not look much like Janet McClure. The face was older, plainer, heavier, but it gazed at me with the same hunger, the same piercing eyes, the same slight hint of a smile.

Then I thought I could hear a voice whispering through the smoke. “I have found you, little one. What have you to do with me? Whom do you serve? What would you have? My patience is short.”

The face got closer and closer as I lay on the bed.

The smoke began to press in on my chest like a heavy weight, and I felt my breathing slow and then stop completely.

I began to gasp and gasp for air. I was suffocating. I felt like the last of my life was leaking out of my lungs.

Suddenly, I startled awake, holding the cross around my neck and jumping out of bed.

I stood there in the dark, breathing hard. There was no black smoke, no nothing. I sat back down on the bed after a moment. It was 4 a.m., and I gave up on sleep.

I needed help. It was time to visit a man who knew everything about everything.

***

My friend Willy Vogel is three hundred pounds of English gentleman with an unparalleled knowledge of the occult. We sat in his book-stuffed rooms, blowing smoke rings and drinking a rare herbal tea imported from Tibet.

He had told me a little about his latest research into Amazonian spirit-walking rituals, and then I told him about my case—Trudy’s suspicions and what I’d seen and heard. He’d listened carefully with his eyes half-closed. I could almost hear the gears whirring in his brain.

At the end, he simply laughed. “You have the most extraordinary experiences, Dash—just extraordinary!”

I laughed a little too, but through gritted teeth, and asked him what he thought of it all.

He knitted his brows. “Ah, well, hard to say with certainty, of course, but I suspect from all you’ve said that this woman is a black witch. If that’s true, she’s likely practicing sympathetic magic with effigies anchored to victims with their hair, nails, or bits of clothing. This form of magic can be very effective with demonic powers providing the driving force. It can easily cause death if that’s the ultimate intent.”

“How do you defend against something like that?”

“If it’s what I think it is, there are several counter-measures which would mitigate its effects. Sheltering on hallowed ground can provide almost complete protection, but obviously one can’t stay in a church forever. Prayer, fasting, holy symbols, holy books all provide some protection, but a very effective counter is simply water… with its inherent purifying powers, inscrutably mixing the physical and the metaphysical. Of course, that makes holy water the most effective mitigator of all.”

I nodded as I listened with extreme care.

“And, Dash, you can fashion highly effective charms with water-soaked cords properly blessed. You can use a charm like that for defense—or offense, say, to bind a witch. They themselves can be as vulnerable to water as their magic is. That’s why ducking and dousing were so often used by witchfinders.”

“What about my dream and the feeling I was suffocating?”

Vogel looked pensive. “That’s hard to say. It may have been real, of course, but many witches have the power to invade dreams and even cause waking dreams to terrify their enemies. I’m not sure how much danger you were in beyond your own physiological reactions to extreme fear.”

That was a hopeful thought.

I asked Vogel next about the impression I’d had that “Sister Janet” had stopped breathing while I was talking to her.

He frowned for a moment. “That would suggest, of course, that she’s undead. Such entities come in many forms, as you know. If she’s both undead and a black witch, I suspect she’s a diabolic revenant. If that’s the case, holy water would definitely be the most effective measure for combatting her.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m gonna need a lot.”

Vogel nodded with a hint of a smile. “Yes, I expect you will… and be sure you watch out for familiars. Black witches usually have them. The crow and the cat in this instance. They can be quite formidable in their own right.”

We talked a little longer. Then Vogel loaned me a battered Celtic cross rosary with a small silver phial of holy water attached. He said it was a relic of special power and had saved at least one life already in a similar case of witchcraft.

I thanked him and left. I had lots to do.

***

Outside, I looked up at the overcast sky. It was going to rain again.

I turned a corner, walking back to my car, and it was there.

The crow, sitting on my windshield. It looked at me, I swear, with malice, and lazily took flight.

And there was something left behind—a little scrap of rough brownish paper with a crude circle and an “X” drawn in its center.

I picked up the scrap, and a cold shiver went through my body. Then a strange phrase echoed through my head, With this charm, I strike at thee.

Everything went deathly quiet. Like time had stopped. The street seemed suddenly deserted—except for a dark hazy figure of a man on a street corner up the block. He was looking my way.

Then a wind whipped up, and I heard something behind me… a lonely wail in the distance. Something awful was coming and coming fast.

I stood still. Somehow I knew not to turn around.

The wail sounded much closer, and I closed my eyes as my knees began to shake a little. I felt like my heart was going to stop.

A slight wordless muttering whispered in my ears, and cold air rustled around my head.

Then I felt something horrible, something like a hand sliding gently across my throat… with long, bony, hairy fingers. And it rested there a moment and then began to squeeze.

I clutched the old Celtic rosary in my pocket.

This is nothing real, I said to myself, nothing real.

Then the rain started coming down, and the horrible hand squeezed tighter and tighter until it… just melted away.

I stood there for a few moments, holding the rosary and letting the rain run off my hat and down my collar.

I took a deep breath and shook my head. The street was full of people again and the dark figure was gone.

I knew I had to get moving. Sister Janet no doubt was bringing in even heavier guns, and I needed to be ready for the next round.

I drove fast to St. Aidan’s to see my friend Father Tierney. He was a kindly old Irishman—and as tough as they come. He always worried about me a lot… with good reason, I suppose.

I let him know some of what had been happening.

He frowned at me and said, “I’ll give you all the help I can, my son. The church is always open to those in need.”

Father Tierney gave me holy water, and I soaked several cords in the running water from St. Aidan’s fountain as he blessed them.

I thanked the father and emptied my wallet for the poor box. It was only fifteen dollars. As I left, he said, “You’re a good man, Dashwood, but you’d be better still if you came to Mass now and again.”

It was late morning when I got to Trudy’s apartment. She opened the door, looking very ill.

I told her she was right about Janet McClure, and I gave her some holy water, a charm cord, and Vogel’s Celtic cross. She seemed to feel some relief almost instantly.

But she wouldn’t go to St. Aidan’s. “You know, Dash,” she said, “I’m not quite as Catholic as the Pope.”

I couldn’t argue with that, but Trudy did agree to go to her rabbi, a man I knew well, a mensch whose father had fought dybbuks in Czarist Russia. I was sure I could count on him to keep her safe.

I told Trudy not to worry—I was protecting her, and I would be back soon. As I walked out to my car, I lit a cigarette and kept my head clear.

There were places to go and people to see.

***

I spent the rest of the afternoon in the East Village, following up leads. I talked to shopkeepers, street musicians, and lots and lots of longhairs and flower children.

It was raining off and on, and I saw no sign of the crow, but I was sure it wasn’t too far off.

By early evening, I was approaching a walkup apartment building, a potential address for Marian Penrose, the leader of Janet’s sisters circle.

I saw a woman sitting outside on the curb. She looked early thirties maybe—tall, thin, and unwell. She was watching the sun go down and singing softly to herself.

She had a beautiful voice, and it took me just a moment to recognize the song… the old English ballad “Greensleeves.” The sound of her singing was like stepping into another world.

As I came up to her, she held a towel over her head and twisted it, letting the water fall on her face.

She looked vaguely in my direction as I got close.

“Marian Penrose?” I asked.

She seemed a little surprised. “Yes, that’s me. I’m sorry. I can’t see very well right now. Can I do something for you?”

“Yeah,” I said, “and I’m hoping I can do something for you. If you don’t mind my asking, are your vision problems recent? And are you having fevers as well?”

She stiffened a little. “Yes, and yes… who are you?”

“I’m a private investigator, Dashwood McCain. I’m looking into some unexplained illnesses in the East Village. They seem to happen to people who have run-ins with a fortune teller named Janet McClure.”

She sat very still for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “It’s not anything you can help with.”

“You might be surprised.”

Her voice was low and grave. “I mean, it’s not a poison—or anything you could take to the police.”

“Yeah, sometimes I’m my own police. Would you say it was witchcraft? That’s what it looks like to me.”

She peered up at me anxiously, trying to make out my face, and then looked around before whispering, “Yes… but we can’t talk here.”

I helped her back to her apartment, and I told her that I had some spiritual measures that would help protect her if she would try them. She looked at me nervously and took a vial of holy water and a blessed cord.

I said I could help her a lot more, but I needed information to do it.

Marian sat on her couch, looking distressed, the charm cord around her neck, as the room darkened with the setting sun.

“Tell me about Janet McClure,” I said.

Her eyes were scared, and she whispered. “I don’t know… I can’t say much. Maybe I’m crazy. But something… happened. We were all there. In the park. We did something… we didn’t mean to.”

I whispered back. “And what was it that happened?”

She looked sick to her stomach now, and her voice was barely audible. “There was… a witch… a real one. Not… just playing around.”

“A real witch? Tell me about that.”

Marian looked panicked, and I had to half-read her lips as her voice sank even lower. “No, I better not. It’s not safe. She can hear. I don’t know how, but she can hear. And if you say her name, she’ll come—not just for me, but for all the sisters.”

I dropped my voice lower like hers. “But this… this witch did something?”

She nodded and then suddenly she held up a finger to her lips. She turned her head sharply, listening, then she stared back in my direction with her half-blind frightened eyes.

After a moment, she got up, crept over to a heavy sideboard, and slowly pulled out a book from underneath it.

She looked like death warmed over as she shakily brought it back and held it out to me.

It was bookmarked at a particular page—with an old woodcut illustration. It was a stylized drawing of a woman surrounded by men in puritan dress.

And I had seen the woman’s face before. It was that older, heavier, plainer face that formed in the black smoke I saw in the night. And there was… a white blaze visible through the middle of her hair.

The picture was captioned “Examination of the Witch Abigail Ordway.”

As I studied the woodcut, Marian whispered desperately, “Please, please, don’t say her name.”

“I won’t,” I whispered as I looked over the book’s cover. I was holding Soulis Murdoch’s The Witch Trials of Old New England. I began to read while Marian sat wringing her hands.

The book said Abigail Ordway had been accused of witchcraft in Andover, Massachusetts in 1695. She had bewitched her husband and her neighbors. Everyone who crossed her had suffered horribly.

But Abigail Ordway was acquitted, and there was talk that her dark powers had swayed the judges. She then moved to a village in the Hudson Valley, where she later died about 1715. It was rumored that she had been seized by locals, drowned in a rain barrel, and then hanged from a tree in retribution for her witchery.

Abigail was said to have had a large black cat and a tame crow that followed her everywhere.

I glanced up at Marian and started to speak, but there was a sudden sharp sound at the window. I looked, and I saw it plainly.

The crow. Pressed up against the glass, a circle of darkness behind it. It made eye contact with me and gently tapped at the window. Almost like… a challenge.

I turned and told Marian that she would be much safer at St. Aidan’s Church, and I knew she’d be welcome there. She didn’t argue. I helped her grab a few things, and we hurried out into the night.

Everything would be happening faster now.

***

We drove in almost total silence through the dark city streets to the Church.

The only words Marian said were, “If I tell you anything more, the witch will kill us all.”

I shook my head. “I won’t let that happen. I’m keeping everyone safe, I promise.”

I took Marian into St. Aidan’s, entrusted her to Father Tierney, and quickly left again.

I knew what I needed to do next. Earlier in the day, I’d gotten a good tip on a possible address for Janet McClure. One of the highflying longhairs I’d talked to was a delivery boy, and he said he’d seen someone fitting Janet’s distinctive description outside an old brownstone.

I headed to the address. I managed to park near a back alley a few blocks away. I discreetly approached on foot, sticking to the shadows when I could.

The old place had recessed windows and a slightly sunken garden out front. All seemed quiet, and I slipped into the garden and ducked down between the windows and the shrubs.

The curtains were drawn, but the lights were on inside, and I could see through a gap.

After a few minutes, I saw something I wish I could forget.

It was Janet McClure all right. But this time she wasn’t wearing a cloak buttoned up to her chin.

And I could see what that cloak had been hiding.

A broken neck.

Her head was all twisted and tilted over on her left shoulder—like she’d been hanged on the gallows. It was bent so far that her left ear was almost at her shoulder.

It was painful just to look at. I don’t see how anyone with a neck broken that badly could still be alive.

But of course, she wasn’t. Not really.

And she sat there with her head held almost sideways… like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Then she left the room for a moment and came back with two little wax dolls. I got a good look at them. One was in a colorful costume—like a Gypsy—and the other was dressed like an Earth Mother flower child.

I watched Janet as she began squeezing the first doll’s little hands with a pair of pliers and binding them tightly with a thread. It looked like she was softly laughing to herself. Then she held the doll over a candle, and laughed again, as it smoked a little from the heat.

That’s what she had been doing to Trudy… and Marian. I had an almost overpowering impulse to burst through the window and settle things then and there, but I knew I wasn’t quite ready for her, not yet.

And then the witch must have sensed my presence because she turned her twisted head from the shoulders and peered at the window. A strange white mist began to gather around the house, closing in on me.

I left in a hurry. I quietly slipped out of the garden, raced back through the dark alleys to my car, and drove straight to St. Aidan’s.

I was going to need the rest of the story from Marian.

***

It was quite late now, and I was walking from where I’d parked my car. I was close to St. Aidan’s, and the street was deserted.

I guess they had been waiting for me.

I was startled by the witch’s crow suddenly swooping down out of the darkness and raking at my head with its razor-sharp claws. My hat came off, and I started throwing punches as best I could. The crow flapped its wings and darted in at me over and over again. It was horrifying, and blood was streaming down my face from wounds on my scalp.

Then I heard a noise and turned, and a cat—the witch’s monstrous black cat—raced up from the darkness and jumped on my lower leg and let loose furiously with its teeth and claws. The pain was instant and intense. I tried to shake it off, but the cat was gripping tight.

Then I suddenly knew what to do. I whipped out a cross from my pocket and held it out. Both the cat and the crow were gone in an instant. They just melted back into the darkness.

A few moments later, I walked into St. Aidan’s, worse for wear, bleeding from my cuts. Father Tierney and Marian made quite a scene. I explained what happened as they helped get me cleaned up and bandaged.

And I knew why I had been attacked the way I had. The witch used effigies for her most powerful hexes, and she needed things like hair, blood, and scraps of clothing to anchor them. She had gotten everything she needed from me out there on the street, including my hat.

Now I had to hit her, hard and fast, before she had time to hit me.

***

I took Marian quietly into a vestry side room. She looked terrified, but I knew the clock was ticking.

“You’re safe here,” I said, “and I’ll protect you. I know you’re scared, but you’ve got to tell me what you know… exactly what happened with Janet.”

She nodded yes, choking back her tears.

“Okay,” I said. “Your circle did something, you said… something you shouldn’t… in the park.”

“But we didn’t mean to!” Her voice was desperate as the tears came. “You have to understand. It was innocent! We were just… singing songs, doing white magic, little spells, blessings really.”

“Yeah, I know—I know you meant well. But what happened?”

She took a deep breath. “Janet… was our friend, she was everybody’s friend. She loved flowers, she loved the guitar, but most of all she loved old things. And she found an antique box, like a jewelry box… at an estate sale… upstate. She bought it… because it was supposed to contain something special… artifacts from a ‘genuine witch.’”

“Abigail Ordway,” I said.

Marian winced as I said the name. “Yes,” she said, her voice cracking a little, “the name was carved on the box…”

That was it—a reliquary!

“Keep going,” I said.

Marian’s voice was hoarser now. “We read all about Abigail. One of the old books said she was… a wise woman, a healer persecuted by puritans.”

“I’m sure it did,” I muttered.

“And we believed it… and Janet asked us if we could make Abigail the ‘matron saint’ of our circle… and have a ceremony in honor of her birthday. The book said she’d been born in May of 1672, so it was her three hundredth birthday. It seemed… providential.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, “but from the wrong direction.”

Marian was grim. “Yes, but I agreed. We all agreed, and we held a special circle meeting, a ceremony, in Tompkins Square Park.”

“Tell me about that.”

“It was very moving until it became… horrifying. Janet was there with her flowers and her guitar. She sang a song, sitting in front of… the box. Then she said something she’d rehearsed, something like, ‘Abigail Ordway, wherever you are, enter our hearts and renew our spirits.’”

Marian shivered. “Then it was like the sun dimmed, and there was this crack of thunder, and Janet flew through the air into a tree. She hit it so hard I was sure she must be dead. I ran up to her, and her head was all twisted, like her neck was broken. I screamed and ran for help.”

“What happened then?”

Marian shook her head. “I don’t know. There was a windstorm… it blew up out of nowhere, and the dust, it was blinding, and when we got back to where Janet had been, she had just… disappeared. And the next day, she was back at her place—acting like nothing at all had happened.”

“But something had happened.”

Marian nodded absently. “Yes, she was changed. Her neck… was hurt, and she was cruel and talked so strange and just raged at us when we tried to help her. And then nearly all of us that were close to her, we got sick… right away. Fevers, all of us. My eyes went bad. Lindsay couldn’t walk. Everyone suffered. It’s all been… so awful.”

Marian was barely holding it together, but I had one last question I needed to hear her answer. “So, really, what do you think happened with Janet?”

Marian’s face was bleak. “What do I think happened? I think Janet’s dead. I think she died in the park. I think the witch killed her. Abigail’s… spirit, it’s in Janet’s body. Our ceremony, that box. We brought Abigail Ordway back… back from the dead.”

We were both silent a moment.

“Okay,” I said. “That’s all I need. You did good. Now remember, you’re safe as long as you stay here.”

She looked off blindly with her tear-stained eyes. “I feel that. I do feel safe… here.”

“Yeah, now get some sleep. Things will look much better in the morning.”

And I intended to make sure that they did, but there was lots of work to be done before then.

In a few minutes, I had Vogel on the phone. He doesn’t like calls, but he keeps a line for emergencies and sometimes you can get him to answer.

I shared Marian’s story. Vogel’s voice was even throatier than usual. “Yes, definitely a diabolic revenant. They can be very hard to combat. Conceivably, her spirit could find another body to inhabit if you were to destroy this one. You might never find her again.”

“I can’t let that happen,” I said.

“Dash, the key is the reliquary—the artifacts. You’ve got to exorcise them. Place them in holy water. These relics are her anchor in this world. When their spell is broken, she will be swept back to the underworld. It’s the only sure way to banish her.”

That was that. I knew what to do. Trudy was safe, for now at least, with her rabbi, but I had to end all this once and for all.

A little later, I strode out into the dead of night.

***

I parked near the same back alley and slipped through the shadows to the brownstone.

I was as ready as I could be—with a large cross around my neck and a satchel filled with holy water and blessed cords. My nerves were jangly like they always are right before the action starts.

The place was still surrounded by the white mist. I went around to the back and made short work of the lock. Then I crept into the silent house.

It felt eerie inside, like the place was waiting for something to happen.

I began quietly looking for the witch. The front room she’d been in earlier was cold and empty, and there was no sign of the cat or the crow.

There was not a sound to be heard, but something ominous was hanging in the air.

I quietly went down a dark musty hallway, and then I saw it.

A strange swirl of luminous black smoke suddenly appearing on the far side. The smoke quickly spread from the floor to the ceiling. It didn’t have any odor that I could detect, but the back of my neck was tingling.

This was something . . . diabolic.

The smoke took on a horrible massive shape. It was Abigail Ordway’s face, her eyes somehow bright in the black smoke with a malicious hunger. She was scowling, and her mouth seemed to utter a soundless warning.

I knew I was running out of time, and this dark shape was in my path for a reason.

I held up my cross and splashed holy water at the shadowy image. It seemed to grimace in pain for a moment, and then it slowly dissolved.

I stood there a moment indecisively.

The black smoke had been guarding a door. I tried the knob, but it was locked. I felt sure it was bolted on the other side.

This was no time for finesse. I took a deep breath and then kicked the door hard three or four times—until it splintered and broke in.

Through the doorway, I could see into a bedroom.

And it was a horrible sight.

The witch was there, her eyes closed as if asleep. Her head still horribly twisted over on her shoulder.

And she was floating limply in the air five feet off the ground. It was like she was hanging from an invisible thread, swaying ever so slightly back and forth.

Suddenly, her eyes opened and her chin moved slightly, and she stared down at me in pure hate with her blazing black eyes.

The face was Janet McClure’s, but it was truly monstrous with the witch’s evil.

Her mouth twisted cruelly. “I lay a curse upon you,” she said in a shrill voice, “may your life’s blood pour out from your eyes and ears until you pray to your God for death.”

I felt a stab of pain in my head as I stepped inside the doorway and threw holy water up into her face.

The black witch screamed and crashed down to the floor—stunned. I touched my face. A drop of blood had rolled down my cheek like a red tear, but the pain was already passing.

I poured a ring of holy water around us for protection and awkwardly tied her ice-cold hands and feet with the blessed cords. She smelled like death.

Then the crow and the cat appeared from nowhere, but they stopped short in the face of my cross and the ring of holy water. Their eyes were shining and hateful.

Holding up my cross for protection, I dragged the witch to the bathroom and poured holy water across the threshold.

I threw her in the tub and started the water flowing. I carefully poured another ring of holy water all around her and then over her body as the tub filled. This is for Trudy, I thought to myself, and Marian… and Janet.

Then I took a few moments to catch my breath, watching the door.

Immersed in the bath water, the witch suddenly opened her dead eyes. She looked up at me with fury and mouthed another curse. There were no bubbles.

I knew I had her trapped, but I needed the reliquary to finish the job. I steeled myself and went back out into the bedroom.

The witch’s crow was there—blocking my way. It flapped its big black wings and croaked out an almost human cry of anguish.

I threw a jar of holy water at it. The evil thing hopped wildly and vanished with an electric crackle as the jar shattered. The black cat was nowhere to be seen.

In the bedroom, I found something beside a little table. It was a wax doll—of me. Complete with a miniature hat, coat, and tie. Alongside it was a scrap of bloody cloth from the earlier attack and my old hat.

I poured holy water on the doll to break its power, and then I began searching the house.

In an old-fashioned chest in a side room, I found the other wax effigies.

Trudy’s was there. The little wax Gypsy doll the witch had used to hurt her. I held it up and doused it thoroughly with holy water. Then I sprinkled all the other dolls, Marian’s and the others, and I went through the remainder of the chest with a fine-tooth comb.

But there was no reliquary.

I felt sure that it should have been with the wax dolls, but there was no trace. My gut told me it had been there—where could it have gone?

I was staring down in frustration, when I heard something unexpected.

It was a voice, and I hope never to hear it again.

***

“Looking for this?” a man had said in a cultivated English accent.

He was standing in a corner of the room, holding up an antique box.

I stared at him.

He was maybe sixty-ish and dressed in a set of formal evening clothes. He was white-haired, clean shaven, and had magnetic pale blue eyes. He was handsome and looked highly amused at the situation.

“Who are you?” I said.

His smile grew a little brighter. “Let’s just say I’m a lonely wanderer looking for any diversion from the old ennui.”

Then I recognized him—that hazy dark figure on the street corner, when the witch’s charm struck, the strange man in black in my dream, watching the hunt and writing in a book.

He smiled even more brightly as if he could read my thoughts. “Yes, and the hunter has now become the hunted… and all that sort of thing.”

I heard his words, but I felt like I was almost in a daze.

Then the man arched an eyebrow and spoke in a confidential tone. “You know, you can’t drown Abigail. She doesn’t need to breathe. She’s struggling free even as we speak. Her little ones will be back soon… with reinforcements. You really should be more careful. Discretion is the better part of valor. Live to fight another day, that’s what I always say. And you’ve got just enough time to get clean away.”

I looked at him—and a fury welled up inside of me along with the terror.

I said grimly, “In the name of all that is holy, I want that box, and I mean to have it.”

He burst out laughing good-naturedly. “Now, that really is diverting—very well said, my good man. And I must say, you are very fortunate in your… friends.”

Then his gaze drifted over to the doorway that led down toward the bathroom, and he shook his head. “You know, I had such high hopes for Abigail. All this is most disappointing.”

He turned back toward me with a strange smile. “Mr. McCain, my door is always open… if you ever find yourself in want of anything. I have all the time in the world, and I never give up, not ever. Please know… I’ll be watching you.”

His smile grew even wider, and then a final look came into his eyes that was absolutely chilling in its raging darkness. It was like staring down the barrel of a gun about to be fired in one’s face.

Next, the whole room shook violently, and the man was gone.

The reliquary was lying on the floor—its contents spilled out. A tuft of hair, a tooth, a finger bone, a comb, a bit of cloth, and a ring.

I picked up the relics and dropped them in a jar of holy water.

There was a painful shrieking sound, which rattled deep in my bones, as the witch Abigail Ordway was blown back to Hell.

***

And that’s the story.

My dear friend Trudy made a full recovery and is back working her Tarot cards. She gave me a sweet thank-you kiss and insisted I take a very nice fee out of all her saved pennies.

My partner Mickey looked at the money and said, “Nice work, Dash, and if this was another crazy case, I don’t even want to hear about it.”

Marian and all the afflicted Sisters of the Tompkins Grove recovered, and they held a ceremony in the park for their lost sister, Janet. It was a sad but beautiful affair—with folk songs and flowers—and they plan to keep Janet’s true memory alive as a loving friend and sister.

And I’m pleased to say I haven’t heard from the police. I hadn’t wanted any trouble, so I had taken care to clean up the brownstone that night and remove all the evidence. It looks like I did a good enough job.

But I did get an interesting call a few days afterwards from Vinnie the Vulture, my morgue attendant friend and a regular source of information on the QT.

He said he had another “weird one” for me. A “hippie girl” had been found dead with a broken neck in the bathtub of an old brownstone. But the coroner’s report indicated that she had been dead for at least two weeks before she rented the house. The police, he said, obviously believed it had been an impersonation, but it was definitely strange.

Of course, the police were right. It was an impersonation—just not the kind they had in mind. They think the past is dead, but it’s not. It’s alive and well and making the most out of the present.

And you, if you ever feel the urge to call on your own personal patron saint, well, take my advice—think things over very carefully and be sure to pick a good one.

Because evil is out there, and it’s watching us all the time.

***

The Dash McCain story “The Witch of Tompkins Square” was in part inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Thrawn Janet” (1881).

A new Dash McCain noir occult detective story will appear each month in 2026. In June, Dash investigates strange deaths associated with a corrupt mesmerist in “The Deadman and the Doorway.”

New York, April 1972

It was peaceful where I was walking.

Shady green trees on a sunny day, the birds gently singing. No one was around—though the city streets were just a stone’s throw away.

And there she was—waiting for me in a secluded spot, sitting on an old stone bench, surrounded by the trees.

“Mr. McCain?” she said as I walked up.

“Yeah, that’s me,” I replied.

She nodded, and I stood there a moment, looking her over.

She was fancy—fancy hair, fancy clothes, fancy shoes, all decked out in black and white. Dressed to kill, you might say.

And she was looking at me with a beautiful face—fragile, birdlike, ethereal, not a face you’d soon forget, not even if you tried.

But her eyes… her eyes were crazy.

She smiled at me strangely. “Thank you for coming. I don’t really know where to begin…”

“Oh, start anywhere you like,” I said as I sat down on the bench across from her. “I’m easy.”

Her hands squeezed the little purse in her lap. “I suppose it’s… it’s unconventional, my reaching out to you like this, but I think you may know who I am… Bridget Harrington. My husband’s missing, and the papers are spreading an awful rumor… They say… Well, they say I killed him. I assume you read the papers.”

“Sure, I read the papers all right,” I said, her name slowly coming back to me, “ever since I was a kid, especially the crime stories. And, yeah, I do recall your name… and the story.”

She looked at me hopefully. “Then you know I need your help. Do you think you can find my husband for me?”

I shrugged as the birds sang brightly up in the trees. “Maybe… if that’s really what you want.”

Her eyes flashed with anger. “Of course, that’s what I want!”

I shrugged again. “Okay, that’s what you want. What did the police say?”

She looked down, her eyes half-hooded. “They’re not really looking for him, not alive, I mean. They think… They think I killed him too. I’m sure of that.”

“But you didn’t, Mrs. Harrington? You didn’t kill him?”

“Of course not!”

“But you two had some trouble, didn’t you?”

She began to tear up. “Yes, we did. It was my fault. I was a fool. I didn’t think he was… exciting enough. But when he left me, I knew what a mistake I’d made, and I had to have him back.”

“But the papers, as I recall, said he’d found… consolations elsewhere and wanted a divorce.”

Her eyes blazed again. “She was nothing to him! Nothing!”

“But you were angry with him, right? Like you are now?”

“Yes, of course!”

“But you didn’t kill him?”

“No,” she said, her voice turning almost savage, “how can you even ask me that!”

I looked her over one more time. “Mrs. Harrington, I’m sorry, but I can’t take the case, not the way you mean anyway.”

Her mouth twisted in contempt. “I have a lot of money. How much will it take?”

“It’s not a question of money.”

“What will you take then?” she said with an odd little leer.

“That won’t work either,” I said, and she jerked her head back like I’d just slapped her face.

We sat there for a moment in a strained silence.

Then I decided to play it straight.

“I think we both know you killed your husband, Mrs. Harrington.”

“I didn’t!” she yelled.

“And you buried his body on the estate.”

Maybe that was a little too straight.

In a flash, her hand popped in and out of her purse, and a little automatic was pointed straight at my middle. It was only a .32, but it looked big in her hand.

She smiled an even stranger smile now—angry, reckless, amused, all at the same time. “What makes you say that?” she demanded.

My gaze kept shifting between her crazy eyes and the barrel of the gun. “I have a good memory… for crime.”

She poked the gun toward me for emphasis. “There’s nobody around. I could shoot you dead and get away with it.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

She barked out a laugh. “We’ll see!”

I shook my head. “Is this how you killed your husband? With that little thing? In a rage? Was it four shots, or only three?”

“Three,” she said with a laugh. “I hit him all three times.”

“You must have been taking lessons.”

The gun suddenly flared at me—three times in an eye-blink that felt like a long weekend.

It scared the bejesus out of my body, but my spirit was calm.

I sat there—not moving—just looking at her. No holes, no blood.

She stared in surprise and then looked down at the gun like it was a lover who had betrayed her.

“I think I found your husband,” I said.

She looked back up at me, shocked.

“Just now. You can probably see him better than I can. That’s him, right? All I see is a haze, but that’s him.”

She followed my gaze and blurted out in panic, “Steven?”

“He’s not here to hurt you,” I said. “I can tell that. He’s forgiven you, I’m sure.”

She looked back at me. “What—what are you talking about?”

“It was all a long time ago. Twenty-five years at least. You murdered your husband. Later, you overdosed on Seconal. That was that, and they found his remains a year or two afterward, shot full of holes, buried behind the stables on your estate. It was in the papers. I don’t forget things like that.”

She erupted in crazy laughter. “You’re insane—insane! Twenty-five years? What are you saying? Are you saying I’m… dead? I’m sitting right here!”

“Mrs. Harrington… Bridget, it’s time, time for you to rest. There’s judgment, but there’s grace too. Whatever happens, it’s better than this. It’s time.”

The haze shimmered softly next to her, and she turned and looked at it with a heartbreaking wave of despair. Then she slowly faded into nothingness, the haze right beside her. She was shaking her head “no” the whole time, but she went.

And I sat there… under the shady green trees on a sunny day with the birds gently singing. The headstones nearby lay still and silent, like they always do. Even the words on them don’t mean anything unless you want them to.

It was peaceful, and I remembered peace is something all of us can have if only we’re ready to ask for it in the right way.

Then I went back to the office. I had a lot to do.

***

A new full-length Dash McCain noir occult detective story appears each month in 2026.

In May, Dash investigates strange illnesses linked to an East Village fortune teller in “The Witch of Tompkins Square.”

To read the latest full-length Dash McCain story, “The Shadows,” click here.

New York, April 1972

The good people of our lovely city like to pretend that things are solid, fixed, predictable—like bricks, mortar, death, and taxes. Just ask the mayor or the chief of police. But sometimes the darkness presses in just a little too close, and you know, down deep, that things are not what they seem.

Take something as simple as a shadow. I can tell you from hard experience that there are shadows and then there are shadows—not just the partial absence of light but the total presence of darkness.

That’s what I saw, what I lived through, just barely, on a stormy night in an abandoned building out in the middle of nowhere.

And I’m still here to tell the tale.

It all began because someone needed my help and because of a little whisper always in the back of my mind since I was a boy: You can see things others can’t, and you can see them for a reason.

I’m a private investigator by trade, and my clients were the Bainbridge siblings of Westport, Connecticut—upper-crust and struggling to hold on to the family’s old position in the world.

The two had inherited a property from their late uncle. A long-abandoned building up in a forgotten part of the Bronx… near Hunter Island out on Pelham Bay. It was the boonies, as they say. The last stop before the raccoons start filing taxes.

The old place had been the home of the Hunter’s Haven Convalescent Institute until it closed permanently in the 1940s. It had been empty since then—sitting on the shore above the salt marshes and the tidal pools, dense forest behind, lonely and isolated.

It was said to be haunted, so the case was right up my alley.

The Bainbridges came to our office looking like they thought they’d stepped into the wrong part of town—which they definitely had. Our neighborhood sports some of New York’s finest purse-snatchers, and the facilities of McGonigal & McCain, Private Investigators, had seen much better days even when Ike was president.

But they came because they needed help.

Michael Bainbridge, forty-ish, had the slicked-down air of a man who sold securities for a living. His younger sister Vivienne stood out like a delicate ghost of debutante balls past and seemed like she was always braced for disasters that were all but inevitable.

They sat across from me a little nervously, and we got down to business.

“As I said on the phone, we want to sell the property,” Michael said. “A buyer is interested, but the local reputation, the rumors, are making things difficult.”

“And what would you like me to do?” I asked.

“Well, we’d like a report, a clean bill of health, something we can share with potential buyers to help show we’ve addressed concerns. You could look around, stay a few nights, talk to the locals, and let us—and them—know that everything’s all right.”

“Or if it’s not all right,” Vivienne added anxiously.

I tapped my pen on the desk. “Okay—sure. But can I ask you why you came to me?”

Michael looked at Vivienne, and she looked down at the floor, saying softly, “We know you handle unusual cases…”

I laughed. “That’s right—my specialty. Ghosts, ghouls, and things that go bump in the night. So let me ask you, any special reason why people think the place is haunted? Besides its being old and abandoned in an isolated spot.”

Michael answered. “Well, the building wasn’t occupied for long, which, of course, is a bit unusual. It closed thirty years ago, in ’42, after just two years. The official story is ‘wartime strain,’ but…”

Vivienne leaned forward to interject. “But people died there. Not in their beds. Not… peacefully. And some others disappeared. There was lots of talk at the time. That’s really why it closed.”

“I see. Have either of you been there before?”

I was asking because something in Vivienne’s eyes seemed to tell me that she had.

“Just once,” Vivienne said. Then she started to tear up. “Two weeks in November. That was 1941. We were small, of course. Our uncle sent us there after our parents died. Said we needed rest.”

“And it was some rest,” Michael said. “I had nightmares. She had pneumonia. They shut the place down the next year.”

I looked at them. They seemed to be dancing around what they really wanted to tell me, and I decided to take the direct route.

“So what did you see?”

They turned to each other—guiltily—and didn’t say a word.

I let the silence hang.

Then Vivienne broke out in a shaky voice, “Shadows. There were shadows. But they weren’t… they weren’t made by the light. It’s like they were… alive. Watching us, waiting. It was awful.”

She twisted a handkerchief in her hands. Michael looked skeptical and frustrated.

Then Vivienne said desperately, “I don’t care about the report, not really. I just want to know if they’re still there. I feel like I can hear them sometimes. Whispering. That’s why I insisted that we come to you.”

I looked them up and down again. All of this was giving me a very bad feeling, but they needed my help. And something deep inside me wanted to poke around that haunted house.

So I took the case… and sat there wondering if I would live to regret it.

***

That afternoon, I got an earful.

“Another crazy case, Dash,” Mickey yelled. “Can’t you take a regular case? These nutjob deals make us look bad.”

This was Mickey McGonigal, senior partner of McGonigal & McCain. He has a heart of gold. You just have to dig really, really deep to find it—past all the bad temper and the high blood pressure.

“Mickey, you’re an angel. First you’re mad because I don’t have a client, and then you’re mad because I do have a client. Make up your mind.”

“My mind is made up. It’s always been made up. I want clients. Paying clients. Normal paying clients. Is that so hard?”

“Well, two out of three ain’t bad.” Then I mentioned what they had offered to pay. It was a very respectable fee.

That had the desired effect. I should have led with the fee.

“Okay,” Mickey said. “I won’t say another word. If they pay, they pay. But that check better clear.”

“It will. And if I don’t come back, you get my share of the agency.”

He laughed, but he suddenly looked a little worried. I have to say I was touched by his concern, the big goon.

I felt more than a little off about it all, and he could tell.

***

The microfilm room at the New York Public Library smelled like yellowed paper and cheap antiseptic. But you have to do your research if you want to chase ghosts.

It’s quiet—spooky, really—deep in the stacks when you’re reading what I was reading. I felt a little like the shadows were leaning in, reading over my shoulders.

I fed another roll into the microfilm reader, clicked through the whir and stutter of the machine, and watched the headlines flick past like forgotten dreams.

And there it was—Hunter’s Haven Convalescent Institute.

The story was simple enough. The plans for the Institute’s construction were first announced in 1939. The grand opening of the place was in mid-1940. Happy news items of progress on the march and medical innovation.

Later there were other stories. Not so happy.

An orderly arrested for assault and confined to a mental institution. A patient disappearing. Then another. Then a nurse. None of them ever found. Then the death of a doctor. A possible homicide. Unusual circumstances hinted at but no details. Then the death of a patient a week later. Unusual circumstances again—with no details. And another doctor disappearing.

Then a quick and quiet notice of closure.

And that was it. Disturbances. Disappearances. Deaths. And the facility was shut down and abandoned.

It all took just over two years.

All the real details carefully hushed up, you can bet.

I sat there in the stacks. Staring at the fuzzy black and white photos of the building. Looking at the strange play of light and shade in the old pictures from thirty years ago.

I was sitting in shadows, and I was thinking of shadows. Soon I would be spending the night there. I felt like the man who fell off a ten-story building and halfway down said, “so far so good.”

But that’s where I was going, and I knew the man I needed to talk to first.

***

Willy Vogel let me into his spacious apartment—packed with books, papers, art objects, and curios, all covered in dust and steeped in expensive cigar smoke.

He was a friend and also a man who had all the answers and didn’t mind sharing them at length.

Vogel had been drinking port and began enthusiastically sharing his latest research about devil worship in Asia Minor while pouring me a drink.

“But you won’t want to hear too much about that, Dash,” he said, settling his enormous bulk into a well-worn spot. “You must be on one of your cases.”

“Yeah. Haunted house—allegedly. But a weird one. An old recovery hospital up in Pelham Bay. Two years of operation, multiple disappearances, some strange deaths. A lot of talk about shadows.”

Vogel mused. “A haunted house—a wonderful subject! Would you like a primer on hauntings?”

“Something like that, yes,” I agreed.

Vogel rubbed his hands together with enthusiasm and began.

“Take off the table all the false cases—pranks, superstitions, mental illness, suggestibility, and so on.”

“Okay.”

“Of what’s left, a large percentage of so-called ghosts are just spiritual echoes—residual energies impressed on our world. They are like a film reel that plays the same scene over and over. A spot that’s cold. A door that won’t stay shut. A weeping woman in an attic. They aren’t sentient. They don’t see people or react to them. They can be frightening, but they are typically not dangerous beyond that.”

“Sure—and what about the others?”

“Of the remainder, some hauntings, of course, come from the psychic energy of live persons. Poltergeists unconsciously caused by, say, a child’s deep unhappiness. Or spirits that project from a sensitive person while they are asleep. These are often associated with traumatic experiences.”

I nodded, sagely, I hoped.

“Of course, a few hauntings are truly trapped spirits or souls, who need some form of a final chapter to end their stories and rest in peace. Others are more like stranded soul fragments, powerful emotions deeply embedded in a place or thing, but partially sentient. They can be quite dangerous… even deadly.”

“Makes sense.”

“And then there are the hauntings caused by demonic forces or other entities we would consider malevolent. For instance, there are places where the lines between this plane of existence and other planes are thin and blurry. These are borderlands or crossroads, so to speak, and they often have the reputation for being haunted because of what may cross over on either side—intentionally or unintentionally. These can easily be the most dangerous of all.”

I had a feeling my haunted house, with its living shadows, might be one of these.

“Tell me more about the borderlands.”

“Oh, they can be small as a closet or miles and miles across. A place that’s not quite here, not quite somewhere else. The old Celts knew all about them, but so do many peoples. You’ll find them at a foggy lake in Western Canada, on the wastes of the Central Asian steppe, and the deep forests of Japan. There’s a stretch of marshland along the lower Danube—absolutely dead to navigation, but not to more sinister traffic. And there’s a small black wood near Shooter’s Hill, just outside of London, with a strange reputation for seeping darkness that’s hard to explain by any natural means.”

I puffed on one of Vogel’s fine cigars, but I couldn’t really taste it now. “These borderlands don’t sound at all… hospitable.”

Vogel arched an eyebrow. “They’re not. They are unpredictably dangerous. They cross over to different existential dimensions—some truly horrific—and they can shift even moment to moment. And, Dash, my friend, sensitivities like yours can be far more a liability than an asset in such a place.”

I blew out a smoke ring, preparing to make plans. “So what do you do to protect yourself in a borderland?”

Vogel laughed. “Why, you stay away from them, Dash. You just stay away.”

But I knew I couldn’t stay away… so I left a little later for the Bronx.

***

I can tell you, the lonely road along Pelham Bay didn’t feel like New York. It felt like something the city turned its back on. A place left behind deliberately.

As I neared my destination, I took in the silence and the salt air, the cracked stone paths overgrown with dank weeds, the stands of trees that leaned so close together you’d think they were sharing secrets.

Then Hunter’s Haven came into view as the sun sank low in the sky—three stories of gloom with its back to the forest and its face turned toward the bay.

When I got out of my car, I stood at the edge of the gravel drive and just stared up at the dark windows. They didn’t look broken or ruined. Just… blank.

The place felt like it was waiting.

Then I saw the old gentleman—the caretaker.

He was standing by the fence line, smoking, and watching the building and the trees in back.

I walked over to him.

He was small, elderly, with a face that looked carved out of stone. He wore a flat cap pulled low and a patched work coat… like he’d stepped out of a tourist brochure pushing colorful characters.

But you could tell he was plenty tough.

“You McCain?” he asked without looking at me.

“Yeah,” I said. “You Fergus?”

He nodded once, slow and deliberate. “Yessir, I look after the place.”

“I appreciate your coming out to meet me.”

He gave me a glance like he was checking to see if I was all there. “I do what I’m told. You really planning to stay the night?”

“Yeah. That’s the job.”

He shook his head and dropped the cigarette, grinding it under his boot. “I bet that’s not the best idea you ever had.”

“No?” I laughed. “Well, I have a lot of bad ideas. I’m incorrigible.”

“You don’t say.”

We were both silent for a moment. We just stared at the building.

Fergus looked at the sky. “Storm’ll be here soon. Bad one.”

“Yeah?”

He looked me over again like he was trying to make up his mind about something. Then he spoke. “You know, I been taking care of this place about thirty years now, I guess.”

“That right? You must know it inside and out.”

“Oh, I don’t go inside much. Not when I can help it. And I only go in during the day, with a helper, lots of lights. Real quiet. Five, ten minutes, and back out.”

“What are you afraid of?”

He looked at me impassively. “Hard to say. It ain’t right in there. Woods behind is worse. I go in, like I said, and get back out fast. Keep my mind on my work. Leave right away if I feel spooked.”

He reached into his coat and handed me a ring of old keys. “Take my advice. You see anything in there—don’t look twice. Just get out. Whatever they’re paying you, it ain’t worth it.”

A wind came in off the marsh, sharp and wet, and Fergus shivered even though it wasn’t very cold.

He turned without another word and walked back down the shore path toward his truck, not fast, not slow—like he’d done it a thousand times before and was still a little surprised to be walking away in one piece.

Then he was gone, and I was there alone.

***

I went up on the porch, looking around. The wind was rising up. The rain would be here soon.

I turned toward the door. Every bone in my body said stay out.

Here goes nothing, I thought, and I went inside.

The air was still and dry—like everything in the house had been holding its breath waiting to see who or what would arrive.

The beam from my flashlight caught peeling paint, cracked tile, the warped outline of a reception desk. A rusty metal fan lay on its side like it had fallen in a faint and died on the spot.

I took a step and the floor creaked—then something creaked back. I paused. Waited. But nothing moved.

Just nerves. Just the building settling.

I laughed at myself and began to explore.

Outside, the rain had started and the wind was really picking up now. You could hear the thunder and the patter of the raindrops. I wondered if the roof leaked.

The main hall stretched ahead, longer than I remembered from the blueprints. Doors on both sides, some shut, some open. My footsteps echoed a little too long, the way sound does in churches and caves.

I kept poking around as it got darker outside and the storm grew worse.

It was a creepy old place. Musty and much too quiet. My nerves were bad, sure, but I didn’t actually see anything out of the ordinary. I kept walking.

I found files upstairs in a dust-covered cabinet. Old patient records from the years it had been open. People must have bugged out in a real hurry and never came back to have left these behind.

I began looking through them and started reading about a patient recovering from a paranoid delusion. The file began to discuss his day-by-day deterioration in the home and his strange fixation on shadows. I felt myself shiver a little.

A peal of thunder startled me out of my thoughts.

And then I really noticed them for the first time—the shadows.

Something about them was off now. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was wrong—but they weren’t quite natural anymore.

There were too many of them. They didn’t quite seem to correspond to the light. If I moved my flashlight quickly, they seemed to move a little too slowly, like it took them a moment to react.

Was it real or were my nerves getting the better of me? I got up to clear my head and went back to walking the halls, poking into the dark rooms, looking around. Choking on thirty years’ worth of dust as the rain poured outside.

The place was big but still claustrophobic. I began to feel like a trespasser, an interloper, profaning a sacred site.

I had a feeling like I was really in the wrong place and would be made to pay for it.

I walked as quietly as I could—by instinct. Hoping the wind and rain outside would cover my noise. Upstairs and down, back and forth through the hallways, getting my bearings around the old place.

Then it seemed like the shadows were beginning to thicken. Gathering like a dense fog blown in from a stormy sea.

The shadows huddled near doorframes, bled into the seams of the ceiling. When I swept the light across them, they didn’t seem to scatter fully now—they held. Deeper and darker.

In the east wing, where the majority of the patient rooms had once been, I began to hear it. An undercurrent to the storm.

It sounded like a whisper.

It was like barely hearing someone speak from behind a thick curtain—no words, just a shapeless cadence. A muttering that rose and fell with no breath behind it.

It was the shadows. I felt like they were talking. About me. About why I was there, what I was doing.

It was like they were planning, plotting, conspiring.

Whichever way you turned, they were still at your back—watching and whispering.

I spun on my heel suddenly, light stabbing into corners, but there was nothing. Just shadows and more shadows. And that sense again, things in the darkness—watching, waiting, whispering.

Biding their time.

I kept walking among them—as quietly as I could. It seemed safer somehow than sitting still.

The whispering was a continuous murmur now beside the storm. The rustling whispers just beyond understanding.

My nerves were getting out of hand.

I sat down and took a deep breath. I counted to ten to give my mind something to do. Breathe and count to ten. I felt better after a few moments. My nerves were quieter. The shadows seemed to recede a bit.

I sat there—just breathing slow.

Then I saw in the distance something move. That wasn’t a shadow!

My heart skipped a beat as my flashlight beam covered it.

A rat. A massive rat with yellow eyes, looking right at me.

Or was it? There was something odd about it. Was it a little too big? Not quite shaped the right way? The eyes a little too human?

I watched it for a moment. It was watching me back. Something was wrong. I could feel it.

Then I stood up and took a step towards it, and it was lost in an instant in the deep shadows.

I decided to try to follow it.

I walked forward and felt the shadows begin to crowd and murmur again.

I plunged deeper into the darkness. As I walked, my flashlight seemed to get weaker and weaker. The batteries were new. I tried my backup flashlight. It had the same faltering light.

As I kept walking and walking, fiddling with the flashlight, trying to settle my nerves, a terrible thought occurred to me.

Hadn’t I come much longer now than the length of the building?

How could I have walked that far?

I felt like I was in a daze.

I knelt down, breathing slowly, trying to make sense of things. I had come a long way—longer by far than the building would allow.

But I must be mixed up.

Either I hadn’t come that far or I turned and came back—down one wing and up the other. It was pitch black outside now and easy to get confused.

The thunder sounded in the distance—and the wind blew.

I just needed to get my bearings and rest a while.

I sat on the floor again. It was so dark, and my flashlight was so weak, I really couldn’t tell where I was. The dust was choking me. The storm raged outside.

The shadows seemed to crowd around. The murmurings seemed a little louder and a little faster.

Discretion is the better part of valor, and I thought now I had better leave. Come back the next day. Explore in stages.

But I really didn’t know where I was or what way out was fastest.

I had made up my mind to walk in any direction and take the first way out I could find, when I saw them.

The shapes in the darkness.

They were enormous and strange. Like shadows made out of shadows. Much bigger, wider, taller than a man—blurry, formless, dark. Moving fast, up and down, back and forth.

They moved and moved. Ominous and rippling, monstrous and threatening, like stormy waves on a vast dark ocean.

It made no sense.

I now felt like I was in mortal danger—or worse.

If I could see them, maybe they could see me.

I edged away from them until I spotted a wall and some stairs, and then I went down.

An incredible sense of heaviness settled around me as I descended. Then I lay on my side as still as possible and turned off my flashlight. I closed my eyes and prayed a little.

I began to count again, and everything went black.

***

A voice came from a million miles away in the darkness.

“Wake up, mister. It’s not safe here.”

I opened my eyes. It was pitch black.

I turned on my flash. The light was very weak.

No shapes. No movement. The murmuring was still.

Kneeling beside me in the dim light was a woman.

She looked about thirty, frail and frightened, wearing a hospital gown.

“Are you lost?” she said. “I’m lost. I can’t find anybody. I’m all alone.”

“Yeah, I think… I think I’m lost.” I said. “But I can help you. Where did you come from?”

She looked at me confused. “They put me here after my husband got killed. I guess I went kinda crazy. He was just about all I ever had—’cept for my little girl. My family’s no good.”

She started to cry a little in the shadows.

I was in a half-daze. “Don’t you worry,” I said to her. “It will be okay.”

She looked at me through the tears. “He was in the Navy. They killed him. The Japanese. They strafed the ship. And he got killed.”

I shook my head, trying to make sense of what she was saying.

“Ma’am, your husband was killed… in the war? What year were you admitted?”

“Earlier this year. They took me away from my little girl. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”

She was really crying now.

“What year—”

She suddenly jumped, startled, and put a finger to her lips, whispering wide-eyed, “Listen!”

I heard a faint noise like a hum—almost like the sound of a gong or a cymbal.

It seemed to come from everywhere all at once. It was the oddest, creepiest sound.

She looked at me with panic in her eyes and faintly whispered “They’re here. They’re hunting. We gotta hide. It’s not safe!”

“Where do we go?” I whispered back. I felt the danger now deep in my bones.

She looked at me pleadingly. “You gotta hide inside. You have to disappear—inside yourself. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Just be empty—like you was nothing.”

The hum of the gong sounded again. Like it was below us now, radiating up through the floor.

“Lie down,” she said. “Be quiet. Be like you was nothing. I’ll tell you when it’s safe.”

The gong sounded again—where was it? Above us? Beside us?

I lay down and thought of nothing—black velvet curtains, a black starless sky. I watched the darkness behind my eyelids, and I listened to the silence roar in my ears. I focused on my breath and kept my fears quiet.

The gong kept sounding. Farther away and closer. Above us and below. It was an eerie, otherworldly, metallic sound. A clash, a hum, a vibration.

After a while, the air seemed to get heavy.

The woman reached out and held my hand, squeezed it tight, like she did not want to die alone.

And the air got heavier and heavier until I felt like I could barely breathe. The sound was deafening, like it was right on top of us. I could feel the panic deep down threatening every second to boil over.

I held the woman’s hand. The pressure above us was almost unendurable.

Then we hit a breaking point, and suddenly the air lightened and the hum sounded very faint.

Somehow they had missed us and moved on.

It was over and quiet… for now.

***

In a moment, the woman let go of my hand and whispered desperately, “That was close. You gotta leave, mister! Before they come back.”

I swept our surroundings with my flashlight beam. We hadn’t moved, but the stairs I’d come down were gone. It was infinite blackness crowding in from all directions.

“I don’t know the way out,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

She smiled meekly. “I think I remember now. I can take you to the front door.”

She didn’t have to say it twice.

I took her hand, and we began to walk softly through the suffocating darkness. The basement now smelled almost like a cave—damp stone, earth, mildew. The floor, the ground, was uneven.

We walked and walked, my flashlight swallowed by the unending gloom.

After a while, I heard faint patterings off to my right, deep in the shadows. Like little soft feet running along beside us. Then a raspy slight buzzing sound started fading in and out.

My skin began to crawl.

I turned to the woman, but she raised a hand to my lips and quickly whispered in a strained voice, “Don’t listen to them. They can hear you… they can hear you listening.”

Her words rang in my mind’s ear. They can hear you listening.

I shrank back instantly and focused on the soles of my feet inside my shoes gently hitting the rough ground with each careful step.

The noises faded, and we kept walking, quicker now, in the surreal shadows. I could hear the sound of water dripping somewhere off in the distance.

Then I was startled. There was a figure on the edge of my beam.

I stopped short and put the hazy light directly on it.

It was a man, standing motionless half in darkness, dressed like a doctor.

He was just standing there… unnaturally still.

And I could see that his eyes were lifeless and his head had several holes in it. Like he had been shot repeatedly with a small caliber gun.

I kept looking at him, and I don’t know how to explain it, but the flashlight beam on his body was… all wrong. Like the light couldn’t quite reach him, like his body was somehow trapped half in this world and half somewhere else.

“You can’t help him,” the woman whispered in a frightened voice. “He’s always there. He’s been dead a long time.”

I shuddered, and we started walking again in the blackness.

I felt like we were in an enormous dark space but the darkness itself was pressing in on us with a heavy weight. We kept moving, creeping forward as quickly as we dared.

After a few minutes, the woman jumped and turned sharply. “Oh! Do you hear them? They’re closer! Please, please, we have to hurry!”

And that strange hum, that ringing metal, was sounding off again in the distance, but something else had caught my eye on the far edge of the light, and it stopped me right in my tracks.

It was like an oily pool, blacker even than the surrounding blackness.

It seemed to be slowly rippling with a faint thick lapping sound.

Rattling around in my head was a thought… there was something inside the black pool, something down below, something shadowy moving in its slimy depths.

And the rippling oily ooze was somehow… reaching out through the stillness. It was a silent siren’s call, an invitation to wade into the inky bog, let it spill over me, and drift down to meet that something below.

I started to step toward the pool and then suddenly I could feel my companion tugging fiercely on my jacket and dragging me away. Her hands were quaking with fear, but she didn’t say a word.

And then I was hurrying off with her, walking faster and faster, shaking my head to clear my thoughts.

The ground was rocky and uneven now. I couldn’t place the smell around me, but it was stony, sharp, and acrid.

And a wind picked up and it began to rain a little in the weighty darkness.

I whispered to her, “We must be outside now.”

She shook her head. “No, we’re still in the basement. It changes... all the time. Back and forth, different things. But don’t think, please, don’t think. They’re looking for you! They’re closer now.”

The rain stopped, and the wind abruptly died. A noise passed overhead… like the roar of an ocean, and I could smell salt water in the air. Then suddenly it was gone too.

A moment later, the woman stopped and pulled on my arm.

I couldn’t see anything at all in front of us but blackness.

“We’re… cut off,” she said, choking on the words. “I… I was hoping… the way would be clear, but it’s not. They’re almost here! They’re coming, and we’re cut off.”

I walked a few steps farther and then I could see it in the dim beam of the flash.

It was like… the edge of a chasm. A sharp, black drop-off, ashy and rough, winding in front of us.

The light was faintly reflecting off dark water down below but the far side was out of sight in the looming blackness.

“We have to cross,” she said desperately. “Before they get here.”

I looked at her. “Can we climb down and swim?”

She shuddered in horror. “No, there are things in the water.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay, can we go around? How far does it go?”

“Forever,” she said in a strange, halting voice. “It goes… forever.”

We were silent a moment.

Then, with a sad little cry, she blurted out, “The bridge. We have to find… the bridge. It’s our only chance. Hurry!”

The way she said “bridge” gave me a very bad feeling.

We raced in our little circle of light in the smothering blackness along the chasm’s jagged edge, a desolate place a world away from ours and also somehow inside the basement of an abandoned hospital.

And now there were scrubby black bushes with odd silvery leaves in our way. Their presence felt malicious, and they seemed to sway toward us as we passed. The oily dark water was closer and closer to the top of the chasm.

The ringing came again, louder now, behind and above us.

We were at a dead run when we finally found what we were looking for.

Glimmering strangely in the faint beam of my light, a shapeless stone bridge, a natural rock formation… or maybe something totally alien in design. A long thin sliver of smooth rock jutting out into the gloom over the slowly moving water below.

I didn’t like the look of it, not one bit. But something terrible was coming and coming fast.

I grabbed the woman’s arm, and we scrambled up a few feet of rock face to the bridge.

I looked out as far as I could see in the shadows, which wasn’t far. The “bridge” looked like it was maybe eighteen inches wide, a slick narrow slab of stone disappearing in the darkness. It would be so easy to fall.

The metallic humming started again, even louder now, clanging in our ears.

“We have to go,” she said bleakly.

I put her in front of me with my arm around her middle to keep her steady, and we began to cross the strip of rock as quickly as we dared, the flashlight illuminating the way just in front of us.

The blackness somehow began to deepen even further.

My beam hit the face of the dark water below, and it was half-covered in the crabbed black bushes with the silver-tinged leaves. They were floating and looking up at us. They didn’t have faces, but I knew that’s what they were doing.

The woman took my hand at her waist and squeezed it in fear. I could hear her stifling sobs of terror.

Then I began to feel it.

It was something else, much worse, and it was watching the length of the endless stone bridge.

The woman whispered, “Don’t look, please don’t look.”

And I felt it even more.

And then I knew what it was.

We were two little specks of dust… and we were floating slowly before something terrible, a colossal blinking eye made up of black and white shadows, watching and waiting, just watching and waiting.

And I felt that if I turned to look at the vastness of that blinking eye, it would be the last moment of my existence in any form. Something told me I was on the cusp of… total annihilation.

Maybe that’s blasphemous, but that’s the way it felt.

I kept walking on shaky knees as the woman’s hand squeezed mine until the nails cut into my flesh and I began to bleed.

On and on, we crept half-paralyzed with terror in a little cone of light on that slippery sliver of rock over the black water.

And after what seemed like an agonizing eternity, suddenly… it was all over.

We were off the strange bridge and beyond the gaze of that terrible thing.

The ground flattened as we walked, and we came to a set of stairs in the darkness.

I stopped and looked at them. They went up and disappeared in the lightless void.

“We’re close now,” the woman said. “And they’re farther away again.”

We started up the stairs, the smell of dank water still strong in my nostrils. We climbed and climbed. It felt like thousands of stairs.

And then we were in the main hallway of the first floor, where I had started… a lifetime ago.

***

We stood together in the hallway, both instinctively holding our breath.

It was pitch dark, but the front door couldn’t be that far away down the hall in the shadows.

Or maybe it was miles away now. Nothing made sense anymore.

We started walking slowly down the hallway.

She whispered urgently, “Wait.”

We stood still in the darkness, almost afraid to breathe again. We were waiting for something… something horrible to pass us by.

But it didn’t.

The clashing metallic hum sounded. Then quickly again and again. It began getting louder and louder as the air pressure grew heavier.

I looked at her.

She said, “They’re here. They’ve found us. Run for the door. Hurry!”

I took her hand. “Hold on,” I said.

“I can’t,” she said. “Hurry!”

“Let’s go! C’mon!” I almost yelled.

“I can’t go!” she pleaded.

The gong rang out again—deafening now.

There was nothing left to do.

I grabbed my friend, threw her over my shoulder and sprinted for the front door! I thought of nothing. I thought of nothing and nothing and nothing.

The shadows crowded and murmured furiously, the gong blasted in my ears, the air grew heavy as lead, and the hallway felt impossibly long.

But I charged with all my might—and ran until I thought my heart would burst and my knees explode. The noxious air rushing in my face, the crashing sound of my steps ringing off the walls.

Just as a terrible cracking sound broke out, I flung us out the front door and raced us down the porch towards the shoreline.

Out of breath, on the shore, we turned back to the house. The dark shapes were there. I watched them trailing up and down the rainy night sky, rippling far above the building.

I was horrified, but I suddenly felt much safer. I knew we were out of the borderland.

In a moment, I was calmer and turned to the woman. She was on the verge of tears again, looking at the building.

I realized I didn’t even know her name, so I asked her.

She looked at me. “Mary. My name is Mary. I’m glad you’re out now, mister, but I have to go back.”

“What? You can’t go back in there!” I yelled.

“I have to. Listen, mister, if you see my little girl, tell her how much I love her and tell her I said goodbye. Her name’s Katie.”

“You can tell her yourself. You can’t go back in there!”

She looked at me sadly and said, “I remember now. I belong there. I died a long time ago, down in the basement.”

I stared at her, and I didn’t know what to say.

And then she slipped away in the darkness, and I sat half-stunned on the shore in the falling rain until the morning.

***

And that’s the story.

It all happened. The facts are the facts. I won’t say it’s believable, just that it happened.

I confirmed that Mary Sullivan had disappeared from the Institute in 1942. She was never found. Her husband had died in the war just like she said. Her little girl, Katie, all grown up, was still living in the Bronx.

I sent Katie an anonymous letter with Mary’s message. I styled it as a reminiscence of someone who knew Mary back in Hunter’s Haven. Mary was Catholic, so I got a sympathetic priest, Father Tierney from St. Aidan’s, to say a prayer for the dead outside the building.

Maybe that’s enough to help her rest.

The Bainbridges had Hunter’s Haven demolished—knocked down by bulldozers on a bright shiny day. Fergus and I helped supervise the job with a quiet, if uneasy, satisfaction. The Bainbridges don’t plan to sell the land, ever, or build on it again. But Vivienne’s nerves are a little better now that the old building is gone.

Mickey? He was happy with the agency’s fee. But he saw the look on my face when I got back from Pelham Bay and didn’t ask me any questions. He’s always a good guy when it counts.

Me? I’m fine, like I always am. Black coffee, bourbon, cigarettes, the next case, that’s all I really need. But I’ve decided to take Willy Vogel’s advice—and stay away from the borderlands, if I can.

And you, if you ever find yourself in the midst of whispering shadows or hear that otherworldly humming sound from everywhere and nowhere at once, just say a quiet prayer and blank out your mind—because those are the only things likely to save your body and your soul.

Take it from a man who had to learn it the hard way.

***

The Dash McCain story “The Shadows” was inspired in part by Algernon Blackwood’s novella The Willows (1907).

A new Dash McCain noir occult detective story will appear each month in 2026. In May, Dash investigates strange illnesses linked to an East Village fortune teller in “The Witch of Tompkins Square.”

New Orleans, March 1972

I remember leaning against a damp wall outside a cheap hotel room deep in the French Quarter. A light fog was drifting off the Mississippi, curling around the wrought-iron balconies and the gas lamps. A brass band sounded in the distance, practicing for a parade or a funeral. Down here it was hard to tell.

I was fanning myself with my hat, smoking a cigarette, and thinking hard about my next move.

And an old phrase kept rattling around in my head, “the sins of the fathers.” We all carry burdens from the past, of course, created by those who’ve gone before us, but it felt like here in New Orleans there was a little more of that kind of thing than I was used to.

I was a low-rent New York private investigator in town on a case, out of my element, trying to help someone in trouble.

And I was chasing something… and waiting for that something to start chasing me back.

It had all started just the day before—with a strange story about a missing heiress, a family legend, and a trail of peculiar animal sightings from the Garden District out to the bayous.

It seems a Miss Lila Thibault, one of the last surviving members of an old and well-to-do Louisiana family, had fallen off the map. It was my job to find her and make sure she was all right.

This time at least I had a client, a young woman named Margaret Endicott, Lila’s close friend. And Margaret was paying me more than enough money to keep my partner Mickey’s blood pressure under control.

It was the kind of case he hated, a “weird one.”

Margaret had walked into our office in New York—well-dressed with prep school diction and an overstuffed pocketbook, not the kind of person who usually hires private detectives like me.

She was looking for Lila, and she was worried.

“We were classmates at boarding school in Connecticut,” she explained. “Lila was always a little… unusual. Brilliant, intuitive, gothic, very southern, and so sweet. She used to tell our fortunes before class. We’ve been best friends since we first met.”

“And she’s missing, you say?”

“Well, yes, and I’m very concerned. She hasn’t answered me for more than three weeks, and we’ve been so close. I’ve called. I’ve sent letters. No reply. I spoke to the family lawyer in New Orleans on the telephone, Richard Lupin. He says she’s on a religious retreat and incommunicado. But I don’t believe that. And I don’t trust him.”

“Why not?” I asked.

She frowned. “I don’t know. Lila said she didn’t trust him and he’s strange. There was some legal thing about the estate and Lila’s half-brother. He’s illegitimate and very angry with everyone. And Lila has been frightened, so very frightened. Last time we spoke, she said something bad was happening, something about… well, ‘voodoo’ is what she called it.”

I tapped my pen on the desk. “Is she most afraid of the lawyer, her half-brother, or the voodoo?”

Margaret suddenly looked nervous. “All of them, I think. And also… also she said something about a…” She trailed off, embarrassed.

I smiled. “You can say anything you like here. I’m open-minded.”

Her eyes suddenly teared up. “She said something about… a wolf, a black wolf. She had a Cajun word for it. A lou-something. She said it haunts the family… like a curse. And, yes, I know how that sounds. Maybe she’s crazy, but there are voodoo cults down there. And she’s involved, and so is her brother. She talked about voodoo priests all the time. She said a woman named Seraphine was the only one who really understood. That’s why I came here…”

“Instead of a respectable agency?” I said with a laugh. “Yeah, you came to the right place.”

We talked some more, and Margaret gave me some photos of Lila and some newspaper clippings Lila had sent her right before she went silent. The clippings featured sightings of a mysterious feral black dog in New Orleans and a string of unusual livestock killings out on the bayous by an unknown animal. A rube tabloid had dubbed the latter a “ghost wolf.”

“Lila thought it was voodoo,” Margaret said. “Or worse. She said something followed her wherever she went. Like it was stalking her.”

That was that. I knew I would be headed south looking for Lila… and for the black wolf.

***

I made my travel plans and then slept badly that night in my shabby walk-up apartment. The neon lights and the city’s sounds failed to soothe me like they usually do.

The dream came on fast like high winds before a hurricane.

I was in a strange shadowy garden. Lush and overgrown… with Spanish moss on the trees and sickly roses smelling like a decadent perfume. The sun was sinking low on the horizon.

A movement caught my eye, and there she was… Lila, the image of the photographs I’d seen. Tall, beautiful, with black hair and pale blue eyes.

Lila in white, barefoot, staring at me with a look of fear on her face.

Then a chilling sound piped up through the silence. It was a long eerie cry of a wolf, slowly rising, falling, and rising again. It seemed excited, angry, hungry.

And the sky suddenly went dark.

Lila ran to me and spoke in a desperate wide-eyed whisper, “It’s out there. It’s after me. I have to get away. But where can I go? Wherever I run, it’s there.”

Before I could answer, she was gone in the darkness.

Then everything changed, and I was in the middle of a swamp, ankle-deep in cold water, the dank smell of it all in my nostrils.

I could feel something out in the shadows, and then a sound came off the muddy water, a low reverberating growl, like rolling thunder in the distance.

And the thing stepped into view.

It was an enormous canine shape… silhouetted in the moonlight with an eerie soft glow. The black wolf!

I could see its murderous intent displayed in every rippling movement as the thing began to slink forward, passing in and out of the shadows. The soft splash of its paws in the shallow water rang in my ears.

I had no weapon and nowhere to run. I was freezing with fear.

I held my breath, my mind racing, and… suddenly it was gone.

The swamp was strangely quiet for a moment, and time seemed almost to stand still.

Then something else came into the stagnant silence.

Something even worse. It was colder than the water, darker than the shadows. No form at first, just a pressure.

I looked up and watched in horror as a hazy presence took shape above me and began to swirl. It was massive and unreal.

A sentient shadow, a black cloud with teeth. It had no eyes, but I could feel it looking right through me. This was something that could tear apart not just the body, but the soul.

It hovered over me, and then it opened its cavernous mouth to bite…

And I startled awake.

I sat up in bed, breathing hard, and somewhere in the back of my mind Lila’s voice whispered, “I have to get away. But where can I go? Wherever I run, it’s there.”

This was going to be a bad one, I knew.

But someone had to help Lila, and that someone was me.

***

I called on my old friend Willy Vogel the next day before my flight.

Vogel was a heavy man with a heavier brain, a brilliant occult scholar—with a stage presence fit for a Shakespearean company or maybe a George Bernard Shaw revival. His apartment looked like a curio museum had collapsed into an antiquarian library… with no survivors.

I gave him the short version of the story.

He smiled, delighted, as I wrapped up.

“Ah, the name Thibault rings a bell, Dash. Give me a few moments. I think I may have something good for you.”

He went to one of his massive bookcases and spent a few minutes looking through some manuscripts.

“Yes, here it is—something you will find interesting, I think!”

He walked back to his chair and began carefully summarizing an account from an unpublished manuscript.

“In the 1850s, Landry Thibault was a wealthy landowner near New Orleans, and he had a very unsavory reputation as a practitioner of voodoo and black magic. His father was said to have left the Picardy region of France in the 1780s, under some scandalous cloud, and spent time in Haiti before ultimately settling in New Orleans. Thibault was also rumored to be a Satanist as well as a werewolf or loup-garou… the latter in part because he kept a large black wolf as a pet along with many local red and brown wolves.”

“Sounds like a nice fella,” I said.

Vogel smiled. He was enjoying the story. “Thibault ultimately disappeared under mysterious circumstances just before the ‘War between the States,’ leaving two sons to carry on the family name, one of whom survived to have children. There has been much talk since of a family curse and… a loup-garou which haunts the Thibaults each generation… with many rumors of evil deeds and dark secrets.”

Vogel shut the book and said, “This account is from 1898, written by a very discreet and reliable old gentleman of New Orleans.”

I nodded. “That sounds like the same people. My client said they were a very old family, well-off, and VIPs at one time. So what can you tell me about this loup-garou thing? I want to understand it as well as I can.”

Vogel took up his cigar again and gave it a puff. “Dash, the loup-garou is a fascinating subject. We are talking here of course of a man who is transformed into a murderous wolf-creature, through black magic. Usually, this power is the product of a Faustian pact with diabolic forces. It may be tied to a particular instrument of transformation—a salve, an animal skin, a talisman. But sometimes the transformation can be suffered by unwilling victims. Sometimes it can be hereditary, passed through a bloodline, or passed from one person to another… typically through the commingling of blood.”

I nodded again, trying to take it all in. “So how would you fight a loup-garou?”

“With silver, fire, and penance. That’s most effective. But see if a practitioner down there can also craft you a protective gris-gris bag. That kind of local magic will help.”

I thought a moment. “Is there—is there something else? In my dream last night, the missing girl was there. The black wolf was there. But there was also something else—something even worse. Like a black cloud, a spirit—with teeth.”

I could almost hear the wheels turning in Vogel’s head. “You do have the most wonderful dreams, Dash! The loup-garou is a man who transforms into a wolf. Perhaps the thing you saw was part of the process of transformation, which many view as akin to demonic possession. Of course, with the occult, we are only guessing at so much.”

Vogel and I talked a little longer about the case. Then he disappeared into his backrooms and returned ten minutes later with an old-fashioned cane. It had a silver head embossed with a crusader cross design with five crosses arranged in a circle.

“It’s a sword too,” he said, ‘but that end won’t do you much good with a loup-garou. The real power is in the silver head. I think you will find it very helpful in the right moment. Bring it back at the end of all this if you can. I rather fancy it, and there’s a very special history behind it. I’ll share it with you someday if you live long enough.”

Then Vogel laughed his booming laugh, and I laughed too, because it was the only thing for me to do.

***

I arrived in New Orleans that evening, checked into my hotel, called my partner Mickey long distance, listened to him chew me out, and then finished thinking through my plans. The first thing to do was track down Seraphine, the person Lila said was the only one who really understood what was happening to her.

I got at it bright and early.

A little cash bought a lot of answers. Seraphine was well known to the voodooists of the city. She was said to be a young priestess of great insight. Leroy was her last name, and I got a good lead on an address.

By late morning, I was standing outside a shotgun house on Dauphine Street in the growing Louisiana heat, trying not to sweat through my shirt. Somewhere behind a window, a chicken gently clucked.

“Mr. McCain, you said?” A woman’s soft voice came from behind a door.

I made sure I sounded friendly. “Yes, ma’am. Dashwood McCain. That’s what it said on my dog tags. I want to talk about Lila Thibault. I’m here from up north to help her.”

The door creaked open and a girl stepped out. Young all right, maybe twenty-three or four. She was barefoot and wore a dress the color of overripe peaches.

She had that look I’d seen in the transplants to New York from down here—half frightened and half amused.

“Yes, I’m Seraphine,” she said.

“Nice to meet you. I’m working for a good friend of Lila Thibault who is very worried about her. She sent me here to find Lila and help her out if she’s in any trouble. I understand you might know Miss Thibault. I would be very appreciative if there’s any help you could give me.”

“Yes, I know Miss Lila. She was one of my favorites. She came to me for protection. She knew what’s been coming. She’s hiding now, I bet.”

“And what has been coming?” I asked.

She looked at me like it was bad luck to say it out loud. “Le loup-garou,” she whispered. “The werewolf.”

“Uh-huh.” I said, projecting just enough skepticism to get more information.

“It don’t matter what you believe. Miss Lila believes. And it comes just the same. Miss Lila’s family done been cursed for generations way back to France—by le loup noir. That’s the black wolf. It claims a Thibault just ’bout every generation.”

“Uh-huh,” I offered again.

“Yes, and it got Miss Lila’s aunt, Janine, maybe thirty years ago. Miss Lila’s ’bout the last one left, except for her no-account half-brother. Not much you can do about it, really.”

Then she looked me over with a dreamy, concerned expression on her face.

“Oh!” she said suddenly. “You been marked. I know. I got the second sight. You been marked. So I’m going to help you too.”

She went back inside and returned a few moments later with a small velvet bag.

Then she looked at me with a little worry in her faraway eyes. “I’m not going to tell you to hightail it back up north because I know you not going to listen. But, mister, you been marked by the black wolf.”

She handed me the bag. “This is gris-gris. It will buy you time when the wolf comes. But if the moon gets high and the howling starts, the best thing to do is just run, don’t look back. Just run!”

Seraphine wouldn’t say much more—just that she’d remember “Miss Lila” and me in her prayers. I thanked her for the gris-gris bag and got going.

I had lots to do, and I felt like the clock was ticking.

***

I spent a couple of hours doing research in a damp corner of a public library with the aid of a very helpful librarian, an older gentleman of scholarly inclination sporting a Charlie Chan mustache. With his help, the work went more quickly than I had hoped.

I verified that Lila Thibault and her family were indeed direct descendants of the Landry Thibault of New Orleans, who had disappeared in 1859. I found a couple of accounts consistent with Vogel’s source—vague stories about a Thibault family curse and about werewolves.

I also confirmed that Lila’s aunt, Janine Thibault, had indeed disappeared… never to be seen again. That was in 1939, when she was just twenty-three years old. There were also strange reports of a feral black dog or a wolf sighted several times near the old Thibault estate at about the same time, and a child reportedly had been killed and others had gone missing.

It all seemed to fit.

And I found something else very interesting.

One account named Richard Lupin, now the Thibault family lawyer, as the fiancé of Janine Thibault at the time of her disappearance. That was a connection worth exploring, and I’d have the chance to do it right away.

I finished up at the library, and later in the afternoon I was on the St. Charles streetcar, sweating in the heat, on my way to see Richard Lupin.

Inside his law office, it looked just like what you’d expect—marble busts, yellowed photographs, and peeling wallpaper, with the scent of old money and mildew in the air.

Lupin was a fattish man in a linen suit who looked like he enjoyed his Kentucky bourbon and his catfish. He didn’t bother concealing his dislike of me.

“Miss Thibault isn’t missing, Mr. McCain,” he told me icily. “She’s just eccentric. She believes in some of the local superstitions—spiritual protections, gris-gris bags, all of that. She’s on what you might call a religious retreat. Her nerves are also disordered, and she needs absolute quiet.”

“Any idea where she is?”

He sniffed. “I believe she’s still out at an old family cabin in Terrebonne Parish.”

“You got an address for that? I have a client, and I’m determined to see her. I won’t upset her, I promise. If she’s there and okay, I’ll head back to New York.”

He eyed me for a moment, and then he frowned more deeply and scribbled some directions on the back of a business card and passed it over.

I asked him about Lila’s half-brother.

“That’s an unpleasant subject, Mr. McCain. Rene Martin is the man’s name. He’s the illegitimate son of Robert Thibault. He’s a very angry young man… with a drug problem. An embarrassment all the way around to the family and not recognized in the trust set up in Robert Thibault’s will. I’ve handled things the way Lila’s father would have wanted me to, but she’s softer and more sentimental. It’s caused some discord. Rene has been difficult with all of us.”

I nodded. “Okay, that’s helpful. So what do you know about this black wolf business? I understand it’s been worrying Lila.”

The iceman treatment intensified.

“I assume you are referencing one of the old wives’ tales about the Thibault family. People here talk nonsense because they don’t have anything better to do. I can’t imagine Lila takes any of that seriously, and no educated person could entertain it for even a moment. This is the twentieth century—even in Louisiana.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “She believes in gris-gris bags but not the black wolf. And you’d know, right? You’ve been the Thibault family lawyer for a long time, and I understand you were engaged to Lila’s aunt Janine.”

Lupin was not much of a poker player. He looked surprised and angry that I’d brought that up.

He took a breath and spoke softly through clenched teeth. “Janine Thibault was the light of my life when I was young, and Robert was like a brother to me. I have always done everything I can for the Thibaults—to protect them and their family honor from any threat.”

That felt like a warning. I left Lupin’s office with the feeling I was walking point through a minefield.

But there was nothing else to do but keep moving forward.

***

It had gotten late, and I decided to start out for the cabin first thing in the morning. I wanted to make sure I arrived while it was daylight. If Lila was really as scared as Margaret had said, showing up unannounced after dark at a lonely cabin was a bad idea.

Back in my hotel room, my head hit the pillow, and I fell asleep.

I knew in a flash the dream was going to be bad.

It was ice cold, and I was all alone, knee-deep in dank swamp water, creeping through the misty dark shadows. I had a pit in my stomach, and I was listening intently.

Lila was out there, and I felt like she was near. Suddenly, I heard the soft splash of something moving up ahead… lost in the foggy gloom.

I knew it was Lila and she was in danger. I called her name, as loudly as I dared, and began running toward her, pushing through the murky water and the dark haze.

But somehow she was always just ahead of me and out of sight. I ran and ran, long and hard, but I couldn’t reach her.

Finally, my body gave out—my lungs burning, my sides aching. I doubled over, trying desperately to catch my breath, resting my hands on my knees.

When I looked down in the dark water, I realized what I was standing on.

In the silty shadows, I saw… the black cloud.

The thing opened its immense mouth, and I dropped straight down in a dizzying spiral through a well of darkness into a mass of glistening white fangs.

I choked out a yell as I felt the first sharp stab of teeth.

I woke up gasping, and I knew then what Seraphine had been talking about.

I felt the mark of the black wolf.

***

I rented a rattletrap Ford first thing the next morning and headed for Terrebonne.

The city thinned quickly—mansions giving way to warehouses, warehouses to sugarcane, then cane to swamp. Civilization peeled back like old paint in the humidity.

I drove past empty shacks, and the road narrowed until it was barely a seam in the marshy reeds, flanked by endless cypress trees.

I kept thinking about the case. All the people. Margaret Endicott. Seraphine Leroy. Richard Lupin. Rene Martin. Even old Landry Thibault.

And Lila, poor Lila.

What was happening to her? What was the Thibault curse? What was the black wolf? Or who? And what was the cloud?

How did it all figure?

And what would I find when I got to the cabin?

I’d been driving almost two hours, when I saw a truck parked up ahead just off the road on a muddy sidetrack.

There were three men standing beside it. As I got closer, I could see an older man with a straw hat on his head, and two younger men, with rifles, dressed like hunters.

The older man stepped into the road and flagged me down with a friendly smile. He looked like a gentleman of leisure out for a stroll.

I pulled over and was in for a surprise. The two younger men suddenly pointed their guns at me. One had a red beard, and the other was easily three-hundred pounds.

All three men looked grim now, and straw-hat motioned me to step out of the car.

I got out carefully, covered by the rifles, and then Red-beard the hunter reached into my jacket and took out my pistol.

This was no accident. They knew to check me for a gun.

I had only one thought: Lupin.

“What’s this all about?” I asked, trying to keep the edge out of my voice.

“You will find out, my friend,” the fat one said in a Cajun accent.

The three men hustled me down the muddy sidetrack. I stood there thinking through what I had done wrong to end up this way.

Straw-hat looked at me darkly and said in a cultivated voice, “We don’t like strangers poking around in our business down here.”

I eyeballed him back and said, “Yeah, sure, buddy, I know how you feel, but I’m here on a job. I’m trying to help somebody.”

His expression didn’t change. “You’ll have to learn the hard way.”

Red-beard stepped forward with a rope to tie my hands. He had my pistol stuffed carelessly in his belt.

That left just Fatso holding a rifle—pointed only loosely in my direction. Straw-hat didn’t seem to be armed. These guys were used to dealing with wild animals, not with men.

I don’t like taking chances or hurting people, but I had a job to do. All I needed was to get Red-beard between me and Fatso’s line of fire.

It was over in an eye-blink. I lunged sideways and forward into Red, snatching my .38 from his belt while shoving him hard into his fat friend.

The two hunters both hit the mud hard, tangled together. Straw-hat’s jaw dropped while he stood frozen with fear.

I had the drop on them. I started collecting guns, and I had all three men tied up in a few minutes. I gave the truck a good once-over, found some more weapons, and then examined all the firearms.

I walked back to the men.

“Okay,” I said. “Time to tell me what’s going on.”

They looked sullenly at the ground.

“Then I’ll start. Straw-hat, that truck is yours, right? Registration says it belongs to Antoine Lupin. So you’re Richard Lupin’s brother? Or cousin? And he called you and told you to bounce me off this case. Right?”

No one said a word.

“And these rifles have bullets tipped with silver and cut with crosses. So you’re on a loup-garou hunt, I take it. You don’t look superstitious, but you know what’s what. That’s why I’m here too—the wolf hunt. You know that, right?”

Still, nobody said a word.

“And what about the black wolf? What do you know? Where does it come from? Does it have a human form? Do you know who it is?”

Still no answer.

“Speak up! Do you think it’s Rene Martin? Or somebody else?”

Silence.

“And what happened to Janine Thibault back in ’39? Do you know? Did you let the black wolf kill her? Or did you put Janine down yourself because you thought she was the wolf?”

Straw-hat looked guilty. He began to fidget while his lips quivered a little. That was it. I could read it in his eyes.

He had helped kill Janine Thibault—sure as the world.

“Okay,” I said. “Nobody’s looking back now. What’s done is done. But this time it’s different. I’m here to protect Lila Thibault, and I won’t stand for any interference.”

No one would even look at me.

I shook my head. “This has been a very one-sided conversation. I don’t like having to rough people up. It gives me indigestion. Tell that lawyer to keep out of my way—or somebody might really get hurt.”

Then I jerked out the truck’s spark-plug wires and flattened its tires. I left the men tied up and took their guns with me.

I had better things to do than worry about them right back on my tail.

I needed to get to the cabin.

***

A little later I was rattling down the road—my head buzzing with all the crazy angles in this case.

Where did the black wolf come from? Who or what was it? Was it Rene Martin?

Could it even be Lila herself? What would I do then?

And what was the black cloud?

I would know more when I reached the place at Terrebonne. Then I wondered if Lila was even there at all—or if that was just a bum-steer from Lupin.

In a half-hour, I took a turn and the Ford bounced its way onto a rutted trail that ended in a marshy sawgrass clearing next to a muddy creek.

I saw the cabin, old and standing on crude stilts. It was made of weather-beaten plank wood, partly warped and sagging, like it was making up its mind whether it wanted to lie down for a little rest.

I stepped out, silver cane in hand, and gris-gris bag tied to my belt.

I left the guns in the car. It seemed like the right thing to do somehow.

There was a very strange stillness in the air. It was like everything there was afraid to make a sound.

I approached the cabin, and I saw them.

Animal tracks in the mud. I grew up in the city, but I know what dog tracks look like, and these were much, much bigger. I was getting closer.

I went up on the rickety porch. I knocked. No answer. I shouted. No answer. And in the silence that followed, I felt like I had yelled a curse word in a church.

The cabin door creaked open under my push. I put my head inside. Shadows, mustiness, and stale air. I called out several times. Still no response.

I went in. The place looked a little better on the inside than the out. Old furniture, kerosene lanterns, some books, and an aged phonograph.

And there it was. On a divan, blood. Blood everywhere. And torn bloody rags on the floor—it looked like what was left of a woman’s dress. Some small bits of flesh too.

But no sign of a body. My throat tightened. Was Lila already dead? Or worse?

I kept searching.

It was clear she had been here. There was a suitcase at the foot of a bed. Women’s clothes in the closet. There was a rosary looped on the bedpost. And an old Bible open on the bed table. Someone had marked the passage about the Gadarene swine.

I kept looking around.

Then I came across a purse in a chair—Lila’s ID was in it.

I also found a page torn from a notebook on a table. Written in a delicate, anxious hand: I hear it out in the bushes now. Am I dreaming? Am I crazy?

In another room, there was a .32 automatic on a desk—loaded. And a piece of paper. Written on it were the words I’m so sorry and nothing else. A suicide note?

I made some coffee on the rusty kitchen stove and kept looking around. There was no phone, and nobody to call anyway.

I knew something would happen if I waited.

So that’s what I did.

***

Night came down fast and pitch black. Restless, I went out on the creaky porch and lit the lanterns. Maybe Lila was out there somewhere, lost and wandering.

The trees seemed to lean in like they wanted to whisper little dark secrets to me. Everything was strangely quiet.

Then, in the distance, I heard something splash.

I looked out. I could just make out the figure of a man walking up slow. He was limping, and he moved like he was sick.

He came up to the porch in the half-light but kept his eyes away from me. He was short, dark, with long black hair and a black beard. He looked like a hippie burnout and not one of the nice ones.

I just stared at him.

“Hey, man,” he said, looking off to the side. “Lila around?”

“Nope,” I replied. “You Rene by any chance?”

“Yeah,” he said blankly. “You got anything to eat in there, man?”

“We do—come on in.”

He shuffled inside the house, still limping. He still wouldn’t look at me.

He walked absently through the cabin but stopped suddenly when he saw the blood on the divan and the rags on the floor. He just stared for a long time.

Then he looked over at me with guilt in his dark eyes.

I said, “Do you think you might have done that?”

He looked sick at heart and said, “I don’t know, man. I have dreams—crazy dreams. I’m on horse, man. Bad. And I can’t kick it. I just can’t kick it.”

He looked over at the blood again and said, “Are you a cop?”

I said I was a private investigator.

“You gonna take me in?”

I said I might have to.

He made a fast break for the back door, but his limp let him down.

I caught up quick, and I didn’t hit him any harder than I had to. Knocking him down was unpleasant.

A little later, he sat shivering in the corner—with his hands tied behind his back, so I wouldn’t have to rough him up again. Today seemed to be my day for tying people up.

He was really aching for his H now, but there wasn’t anything I could do.

I was trying to figure out my next move when I heard it.

A sound piercing the silence outside. It was the long, lonely cry of a wolf. Just like in the dream. It rose and fell in haunting waves and then everything was silent again.

I told Rene I was sorry and dragged him gently into a closet for safekeeping.

I went back out on the old porch to see what I could see.

***

The night was dark, but the lanterns cast some light, and the moon was on the rise.

I was holding the cane and had my hand on the gris-gris bag on my belt. And I saw something, a shadow, out moving among the trees.

I called out Lila’s name. No response.

I stood there a moment and tried to decide what to do next. Then I stepped off the porch and walked out onto the soft wet ground toward the trees.

I called her name again.

If it was Lila, she might be suspicious of me, a strange man, at the cabin. I called out Margaret Endicott’s name and said she had sent me from New York to help. I called out Seraphine Leroy’s name and said I was a friend of hers as well.

I kept listening intently for what seemed like ages, and then I heard a sound, like a woman sobbing.

And suddenly Lila staggered up out of the shadows.

As she did so, a chilling wolf’s cry suddenly rose again in the distance.

That startled her, and she raced toward me in a panic—her eyes, pale blue and wild. I could see that she was bloody and bruised. She looked like she had been chased for miles and miles.

The wolf’s howl kept sounding through the night—high and low in an icy hollow wave.

Lila began muttering to herself in a panic, “The wolf, the black wolf. It’s here. It’s here.”

I took her inside, put a blanket around her, and gave her a stiff drink.

She was totally lost in her thoughts, muttering and jumping at shadows. I kept trying to ask her questions, but she couldn’t hear them and would look up suddenly startled and say, “Le loup noir, il est ici!”

So I took her hands in mine and reached out to calm her. I felt her wild panic coming into me, and my calm went back to her.

In a few moments, she seemed to realize where she was. I told her again slowly who I was, how Margaret had sent me, how I had talked to Seraphine, that I was here to help.

She looked at me with a strange desolation. “I don’t think any of it matters. I don’t think anyone can do anything. The black wolf is here. The loup-garou. Wherever I go, it finds me. It’s the family curse… our blood has been… corrupted… for generations.”

Her gaze wandered over in the direction of the desk where I’d found her note and the gun.

She looked back at me. “I had a plan, you know. I was going to end it all right here. So I wouldn’t have to… face what’s coming for me. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. It’s such a sin…”

She sat there with a heartbreaking helplessness, and I tried to ask a few more questions. But her panic was coming back, and she wasn’t coherent enough to respond.

I watched her pale blue eyes grow more and more fearful. Within minutes, she seemed totally lost inside herself again and began to mutter in an aching frantic voice. “A Thibault sold his soul to the devil. Now we all have to pay. The sins of the fathers. The sins of the fathers. The devil will have his due.”

The eerie howling started up once more outside the house. It was louder and more angry than ever.

It also sounded very close. And I could swear it was more than one animal now. It couldn’t be any kind of echo. What were they? Wolves, coyotes, dogs?

Lila looked almost out of her mind now with panic. I put her in a back bedroom, gave her the old Bible and her rosary for comfort, and told her to stay there and stay quiet.

But I felt impelled to go outside again and see what I could see in the moonlight.

That’s where the answers were.

***

Back on the porch, I turned down the lanterns and strained my eyes searching for any sign of movement in the moonlit shadows, waiting for the next wild howl to break the cold silence.

After a few moments, silver cane in hand, I walked off the porch a few paces onto the spongy damp ground.

I had to see the black wolf.

I peered into the darkness, and I could see shapes milling out in the distance. Something was out there, restless in the shadows, what looked like a whole pack—wolves, coyotes, dogs, something.

It popped into my mind how strangely quiet Rene had been in the closet earlier when I brought Lila into the house, and then I heard it.

A thunderous crashing noise! It had come from the back of the old cabin.

I turned and was stunned to see the nightmare silhouette of a massive canine racing around the side of the place.

The black wolf—the loup-garou!

It was a surreal sight: an enormous creature, blacker than black, with a gleaming aura, eyes glinting diamond-like in the darkness.

It was evil, unholy, and terrifying.

And the immense thing was hurtling toward me at an incredible speed, its huge paws thudding hard on the ground.

It was closing fast, and I knew it would tear me apart in a heartbeat.

Quicker than thought, I swung the silver cane at it like Joltin’ Joe.

A strange light flashed with the cane’s shuddering impact, and the thing’s great bulk flew sideways with a throaty cry, rolling over and over.

Then the black wolf vanished in the darkness.

I stood stunned for a moment, my arms throbbing, still gripping the silver cane. I knew silver could hurt the creature like nothing else, but the cane clearly had power far beyond that.

I turned and raced back to the cabin, slammed the door behind me, and tried to slow my breathing and clear my head. The wolf’s rank stench was still in my nostrils.

If it came back, the doors and windows couldn’t keep it out. And I’d seen the other animals moving in the woods.

I yelled to Lila in the back bedroom to hide.

In a near panic, I thought, how to fight? Silver, fire, penance—Vogel had said.

I had the silver sword-cane, and I’d seen what it could do.

There was no time for fire, but I said a quick prayer, and I yelled to Lila again. She was still quiet, but suddenly muffled noises came from the closet—where Rene had been.

My mind was racing, and I tried to make sense of all my thoughts. Something bad was about to happen.

Then a side window crashed in with a heart-wrenching jolt of shattered glass and a deafening series of thuds.

The werewolf was in the cabin!

As my pulse raced, I suddenly saw it through the kitchen doorway.

And it was one of the most frightening things I have ever seen.

A monstrous ravening wolf, black as night, hazy somehow even in the light, mouth open, fangs bared, saliva oozing down its snapping jaws, the floorboards creaking under its heavy weight, its deep angry growl reverberating in my ears.

I looked at it in horror and stood very still.

The black wolf just stared at me, tensely waiting to spring, and its eyes were shining with an insane fury!

But those eyes—they were a bright pale blue.

Bright pale blue, a mockery of the eyes I’d just seen.

They were Lila’s eyes.

It was her. Lila was the black wolf!

Mad with bloodlust. Ready to kill. Ready to rip me limb from limb at the first opening.

It was kill or be killed. And I had the cane… with all its power.

But I knew—I knew, I wasn’t going to kill her.

She wasn’t a monster. She was the one I was there to protect, and she was cursed.

I stood there—and looked at her. “Lila,” I said. “Listen. Listen. You know me now. Margaret sent me. I know Seraphine. I’m your friend. I’m here to help. And I won’t hurt you no matter what.”

I closed my eyes and gripped the silver-headed cane, waiting for something terrible to happen.

Then I opened my eyes again, and I saw Lila sitting on the floor, bruised, bloody, and silently crying.

She looked at me with wild, wild eyes and said, “Help me, please! I have to get away! But wherever I go, it’s there—the black wolf is there!”

***

Moments later, Lila lay on the bed—in a faint.

As I watched her, I held the cane, and I studied the five-fold crusader cross design on its head. Then I thought about my dream.

Like a flash—I understood.

I knew how the black cloud figured.

Lila was cursed, possessed by the cloud that I’d seen in my dreams. It was a devil, a demonic wolf spirit, and it was the cause of her change. The curse of the black cloud was passed down through the Thibault bloodline.

But Vogel said the curse could also be passed through the commingling of blood.

I looked at the cane, and I understood now. I knew what I had to do.

I got Rene out of the closet and cut him loose.

I said, “Listen, buddy, I think in about two minutes, I’m going to need you to get your sister out of here. Can you do that?”

He nodded yes but his expression gave me less than full confidence.

“I’m trusting you because I have to,” I said. “Don’t mess it up. When I say ‘go,’ you get Lila out of here. Drive back to New Orleans. Get her to Seraphine and stay away from that crooked lawyer!”

I handed him the car keys.

Then I slit my thumb with my pocketknife and pressed it on one of Lila’s many bloody scratches, and I invited the black cloud, the wolf spirit, in.

I’m here. The blood flows. My body is stronger than hers. I’m ready for you.

It left her body and came right away. It had been waiting for me.

I can’t really describe how it felt. Something like malaria—of the soul. But instantaneous.

I yelled, “Go! Get Lila and get out of here. Go now!”

Then I felt the full force of the fever and the pain. It knocked me off my feet.

I watched Rene struggling to get Lila out the door and yelled at him to get moving.

I crawled into a backroom, dragging the cane with me. The silver head repulsed me, and the gris-gris bag on my belt seemed almost to burn.

I slowed my breathing as the fever-pain came in waves. I focused on what had entered my soul and tried to confront it.

It was there inside. It had an incredible hunger. It was sentient. Malevolent. Powerful. A demonic wolf spirit. A true devil.

I held the cane and kept my eyes on the cross design, trying to force the evil thing back.

But it was incredibly strong, and I slowly realized just how powerful it was. I fought and fought. I don’t know how long. You can’t measure that kind of time.

And the thing kept growing until the horror inside me was a tidal wave.

I saw now that my hands were misshapen. There was a mirror in the room reaching down toward the floor. My face was a nightmare.

I prayed for strength as the wolf spirit twisted my body and battered my soul.

I was like a man hanging off a cliff by his fingertips. Unbearable pain and fear. Each second both an instant and an eternity—before the fall.

But I had a consolation at least. Lila… Lila would be free.

And suddenly I was falling through the blackness and waiting to hit bottom somewhere in the depths of a dark hell below. It was a long, long fall.

Then… everything changed.

Lila. It was Lila. Somehow she was standing in front of me.

I looked at her, and I felt a frenzied red desire for her blood swell up inside me and my jaws snapped convulsively.

Lila said to me desperately, “I had to come back. I can’t let you do this! I’m the one who should die. It’s my blood, my family. Please, you’ve got to save yourself! Send it back to me! Please!”

And time seemed to stop. The world fell away, and we were suspended in a strange pale emptiness.

I could feel the ferocious wolf spirit, the black cloud, hanging between the two of us in an endless space of nothingness. It felt like both our souls were hanging in the balance.

Then suddenly I could sense that others were there in the emptiness—with me, with Lila, and with the black cloud.

One moved forward and then another and another and still more. A chorus of five murmuring whispers began. One for each cross on the silver cane.

I don’t know what they were, but they had a luminous power, and their quiet murmurs were louder than any devil’s cry.

And the black cloud couldn’t fight us all. It closed its ravenous mouth, shrank back to an infinitesimal point, and disappeared in an ugly burst of fever.

It was gone, and I knew in my bones the curse was over. The last thing I remember was the fever-pain leaving my body.

When I woke up, Lila was bathing my face with a cloth. She was smiling somehow through the bruises and the blood. She told me that outside in the car she had been able to feel what was happening with me and with the wolf spirit.

She had finally understood, and she made Rene bring her back to try to save me.

The hippie burnout was over in the corner—dead-eyed and looking like he couldn’t decide which of the three of us was the craziest.

Neither could I.

***

And that’s my story.

I don’t know what really happened. Not exactly.

Vogel is tight-lipped sometimes and won’t say what power the silver cane might have had or where it might have come from. But I know it saved my life—and more—several times that night.

And the end result was clear. Lila’s free, and she’s been able to live without fear for the first time in months. The Thibault curse is over, and the sins of the fathers have finally been buried where they should be—in the past with the evil men who committed them.

Margaret? She was a satisfied client. My good pal Mickey? He was happy with the agency’s fee. He’d gazed at me with affection and said, “I hate these crazy cases, Dash, but money is money.”

And me? I’m back in New York, of course—dodging cabs and drinking coffee. New Orleans is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to die there.

And you—if you’re ever out on the bayou on a moonlit night and you hear the loup-garou’s lonesome cry, just run. Run like your life depends on it, because it probably does.

And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

***

The Dash McCain story “The Black Wolf” was in part inspired by Alexandre Dumas’s The Wolf Leader (1857).

A new Dash McCain noir occult detective story will appear each month in 2026. In April, Dash investigates ghostly sightings and strange deaths in a remote and long-abandoned convalescent home in “The Shadows.”

I was a lonely child, and I loved my grandfather’s library and all the old books.

One day, I found a very peculiar book. It was hidden in a dark little nook behind a row of tall bound volumes, thick with dust.

It was more like the diaries I’d seen than anything else, written all by hand in cramped letters and symbols. Parts of it were in English, but other parts weren’t in anything I’d ever seen before. Not Latin or Greek or French or German. Not even Italian.

The symbols were the alphabet of some foreign language, I thought. Or perhaps they were really a cypher hiding secrets from prying eyes. I liked thinking the latter very much.

There were blank pages too scattered through the book, and I felt strangely as if something were written on those pages, blank or not. But no mark of ink or pen could I find.

The parts of the book I could read spoke of spirits, spells, angels, and devils. It was all so very interesting, but I can’t say I really understood it.

Still, I would sit all day some days, reading through the book, staring at the blank leaves, looking at the strange cyphers.

Miss Emily was very cross at first, but later she would look at me with tears in her eyes and say, “Never you mind, child. You read just what you like.”

Then the dreams began. Not nightmares, really. Just dreams.

A kindly old man would whisper in my ear and laugh a little to himself. I wasn’t afraid of him, but I didn’t feel he meant to do me any good.

Night after night he came. And I began to wonder if his whispers were words from the old book. I couldn’t understand them, but they always brought the cyphers to my mind somehow.

And late one night, I could finally make out what the old man was saying.

His whisper was hoarse and strange.

“Blood to blood. Bone to bone. We are kin, son of my son, and our souls are joined. I will have your life. I will have your body. I will return to the world. Azael Morvane Zathiel Ashtan.”

I was in bed, awake now. Very weak and tired.

And my chest grew numb, and I felt my spirit rise from my body to drift through the strange coldness of the room.

I turned slowly in the ether and looked down at my little body lying on the bed in the moonlight.

I watched the body stir, and I saw the strange look of triumph suddenly on my own small, pinched face.

“I have returned,” the little white face said in my high-pitched voice.

I watched all this in wonder.

“Are you really… my grandfather, sir?” I said. “And have you really taken my body?”

The little face seemed to smile and frown at the same moment. “I am, and I have, and you shall not haunt me, child! I will say a spell and banish you to the beyond!”

I felt whispers then all around me, but I wasn’t afraid.

“Please, sir,” I said, “there won’t be any haunting. I’ve got to go now to join my mother, who lives with the angels. She’s always had to come so far to sit with me in the mornings when I’m feeling poorly.”

The little face began to look very queer.

“I’m sorry, sir. I hope the pain is not too much. I’m afraid I’ve been so ill for so long that I’ve grown used to it.”

“What?” the little voice gasped. “Oh, it’s… it’s unbearable!”

“I’m very sorry, sir, but I do think they expect me to die quite soon now. I overheard Miss Emily saying it would be a great mercy.”

The old man in my child’s body began to tremble.

I sighed. I felt sorry for the man, bad as he was, but I was still glad to be free.

Then my mother’s hand touched mine, and I saw her shining face in the dark, and I was happier than I had ever been.

And I knew that my story was written in the old book… on one of the pages that looked blank.

I was reading a strange story about a man with an ancient book.

A volume called “The Book of Dreams,” a forbidden, otherworldly tome that could make dreams into reality.

The man dreamt of Dracula, and Bram Stoker’s creation appeared in the dead of night.

“You have brought me to this world,” the Count said in near perfect English. “Bid me welcome. It is my due.”

“My God, you can’t be real!” exclaimed the man.

“I am born of book,” the Count replied grimly, “and truly I am as real as you.”

Or me, I thought suddenly. Or even you.

***

The Drink

I poured her a drink, and I made it special. Not quite the way she liked, but special.

“Do you believe in free will?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?” she said.

“Free will? Do we choose the things we do or can unknown forces take the reins and drive our destinies?”

“I can’t believe you’re really my son with all your foolish talk. Where do you get these ideas?”

“Oh, I’ve been reading about irresistible impulses and the insanity defense. Very practical, I’d say. So answer my question.”

But she couldn’t… and the drink fell from her hand.

***

The Clock

I was a child, and I hated the old house, especially the clock in my bedroom.

It was a grandfather clock, still and silent.

“It’s right twice a day,” my great aunt liked to remark. “You should be glad just to have a home.”

But at night I felt like something was there, something watching and waiting.

One night I crawled out of bed and crept over to the clock. I opened the panel slowly and peered in.

Something was there in the dark.

The clock struck—and now I sit watching and waiting… with that something in the dark.

New York, February 1972

They say New York never sleeps, but I know better. The city sleeps, and it dreams. It even has fevered nightmares on occasion. And one night, when the shadows shuddered and the cold wind blew, one of those nightmares got up and walked around. This is the story of a terrifying evil—one four thousand years and more in the making—which was revived to stalk our city streets today. Every word of it is true.

It began for me early on a cold morning. I was warm in bed in the dingy low-rent walkup that I call home. It was about 3 a.m., and I was drifting in and out of sleep.

The dreams were the ordinary kind—bits and pieces of life jumbled with things that made no sense. A hazy moment from my childhood in Hell’s Kitchen, a flash of falling shells in the War, a glimpse of people I’d never seen before at Coney Island.

And then everything changed.

I was somehow drifting slowly through the air and below me was sand—endless hot sunbaked swirling sand. The world felt both old and new. And pyramids… gleaming white pyramids capped with gold stood in that blowing sand in the middle of a city of dull brick buildings.

And I felt like something was down there in the depths below those pyramids.

Then suddenly I was down in those depths too. I was in darkness, in a narrow passageway, and I could feel a strange heat radiating through the stillness. Something was very close to me, something terrible.

And time seemed to spin and spin. That something, it had been there… waiting in the darkness. A thousand years. And another thousand, and another thousand, and more.

I began to feel like an innocent little desert beetle walking past the lair of a trapdoor spider. I could feel the danger, but I couldn’t stop myself from getting closer and closer.

That something had been waiting, just waiting, until the wait was over—and now it finally was.

And I woke up with a gasp, breathing hard, my lips cracked, my throat dry, my face hot.

I lay there quietly in the dark, and I thought to myself… something very bad is happening.

And I wondered what would happen next.

***

I got to the office late that morning, trudging my way through the cold and the city’s dirty snow, and my partner was unhappy, as he often is.

“No more of these crazy cases, Dash! I mean it!”

That was Mickey McGonigal, senior partner of McGonigal & McCain, Private Investigators, and a pretty nice guy if you don’t make waves or step on his corns.

But I had been making waves. I was working unusual cases, ones that touched on the supernatural. Mickey did not like that reputation for our agency.

“Another client’s upset, Dash! This is the second complaint this month about you and your crazy cases.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, I know, but I had proof positive on that last case.”

“You had proof? It was a coffee can full of ashes! What you have isn’t proof. It’s a talent for repelling normal clients. You know—divorce cases, missing spouses, embezzling business partners. Normal, paying clients. People think you’re nuts, you know that—right!”

But I’d already stopped listening.

I was looking at a newspaper. A headline had caught my eye.

Egyptian artifacts had been stolen in a burglary.

It was the Egyptian Hall at the Hudson University Museum. There had been a crude break-in, a smash-and-grab in the dead of night. The story said several small devotional objects had been taken.

My mind was working. I had had a strange dream about ancient Egypt, complete with blowing sand and white pyramids, and someone had stolen Egyptian antiquities on the very same night.

Now I have had too many prophetic dreams in my life to believe that that was just a coincidence.

I slipped on my hat and coat against the blowing cold, left Mickey still complaining, and headed down to see what I could see.

***

It was pretty much business as usual at the museum, except that the Egyptian Hall had been closed and taped off by police.

I went to the doorway and had a look in. From where I stood, I could see which display cases had been hit, but most of the objects in the room were undisturbed.

It all felt eerie to me. Maybe it was just the dream that I’d had, but it felt off. These ancient objects from halfway around the world were both so alien and so familiar, and they felt alive somehow.

On the wall was a fragmentary section of an old temple bas-relief decorated with hieroglyphs. A large mummy case stood alongside it. Next to that was a statue of a jackal-headed figure holding a staff. And there were glass cases with amulets, figurines, and more prosaic items.

I stared at them and wondered who had broken in here and why.

A few other gawkers came by as well.

I turned and saw a seedy young man staring at the Egyptian display just like I was. He looked like a kid with his nose at a candy store window. He was heavy, soft, and just a little… slimy.

I shook my head. The world takes all kinds, and this guy wanted past the police tape just like me.

I looked back at the haunting display just as the young man muttered, “They were wiser than we.”

“What was that?” I said affably.

His eyes flitted over me with a vague measure of contempt, and he said, “The ancient Egyptians. They were wiser than we.”

“Were they?” I said with a smile.

He nodded absently. “Do you know Edgar Allan Poe?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’re old pals. We used to drink wine together and brick people up.”

The joke didn’t register. He was staring intently at the Egyptian display. “Poe knew they were superior,” he said softly. “Some say it was satire, but he knew.”

The guy was talking, but I realized now it was really to himself. My standing there just made it seem a little less crazy.

So I nodded politely and filed him under NJ—for nutjob.

I turned back to the display. The atmosphere was truly hypnotizing. Those objects, their age, the lives they touched so long ago.

After a few more moments, I had to tear myself away. There was work to be done.

I began to strike up a few discreet conversations with employees. But nobody would talk much about the break-in or the theft—not even to a private eye plausibly posing as an insurance investigator. They had clearly been told to keep quiet.

Finally, I found a custodian in an out-of-the-way corner, a man who said he was friends with the security guard who had been on duty during the burglary.

He was a small man with a large mustache, who said to call him Yorgi. I gave him twenty bucks, and he gave me the confidential scoop on what happened.

He spoke in a careful whisper. “My friend, he is afraid for what he saw—and also afraid to say what he saw. I do not blame him. He say it was… like a man, yes. But dressed all in dirty brown cloths… like bandages. And the face… just like a dead man’s face. My friend, he fire shots, many shots. But… the man just… walk away into the night. My friend—he know how this sound, and he does not want to lose the job, so he keep his mouth shut tight.”

I thought that one over. An unidentified man, dressed in dirty wrappings, with a dead man’s face, stole ancient Egyptian artifacts from a museum and walked away from multiple gunshots—here in New York City in the year of our Lord 1972.

Either Yorgi was pulling my leg or this was going to be a bad one.

I knew I had to find out who—or what—had broken into the museum. And why.

***

If you’re looking for leads, you have to put out the word where it will do the most good.

So I did—on the street and in the dark corners of the city. My contacts included many of the subscribers to my one true love, The Nighthawk, my underground newsletter of the unexplained, which I publish whenever I have enough items and money for 200-plus copies.

It took me two days of making the rounds—lots of phone calls, lots of shoe leather, and lots of meeting people in alleyways, but I finally got a tip that sounded like it might be worth tracking down.

The tip came from Jimmy Steptoe, a street magician and conjure man, who really knew his stuff. I caught up with Jimmy while he was doing card tricks on the sidewalk, and he took a moment to talk.

He was flipping the cards back and forth in front of his smiling face as he spoke. “I heard what you’ve been looking for, man, and I’m telling you, straight up, I think I got something! Two old dudes are on the wagon after what they saw the other night. They say it was a guy, all wrapped up in dirty rags, head to toe, and he up and vanished—turned to dust, they say—right in front of them. I’m giving it to you straight—just exactly what they told me. Now, that’s worth twenty dollars, at least!”

He was right. I paid him the twenty and then watched him as he dazzled some tourists with his magic hands. Jimmy could make a deck of cards sing like Pavarotti at the Met. It was a thing of beauty, and I wanted to stay a little longer.

But something told me I’d better be making good time.

***

Part of Jimmy’s scoop was a location, a midtown street corner, and that led straight to a rundown warehouse storage facility that looked extremely promising. I felt sure I would find something there.

On the inside, it was mostly endless rows of plywood cubicle partitions topped with chicken wire. The dust was thick, and a wall-eyed guy at the front desk looked like he hadn’t blinked since the moon landing.

It was getting pretty late. I talked to the clerk. He wasn’t interested in talking to me, but President Jackson was another story.

You could tell he was the kind of guy who had poked around a bit and knew what kind of stuff people had stored in their cubicles. I mentioned Egyptian artifacts, and his eyebrows went up.

I sweetened the deal with another twenty, and he took me to a particular unit way off in the back, Number 249. He said that it had been paid for in cash. That meant that the name given—Carter Howard—was likely false, but I would need to check it out nonetheless.

The clerk had a ring of skeleton keys—not that the lock was a serious obstacle—and got me inside for a peek. Old sheets covered what looked like stacked crates and boxes. The air was especially musty and filled with a faint scent of something very old and aromatic.

I started poking around, and there it was—leaning upright in a corner under a brown-streaked cloth.

A mummy case. It was made of weather-beaten wood, seriously damaged in some parts, and partially covered with flaking yellowed plaster. It was almost seven feet tall and decorated with faded hieroglyphs and other worn symbols. The figure covering the lid had a sickly yellow mask-like face with a blank expression, which seemed to watch the space with a placid indifference. It was strange to imagine just how old this object was and how far it had come to rest here.

The lid was cracked open, and I could see the case was empty. I don’t know what compelled me to run a finger along the edge, but I did, and it came back black with soot. That seemed especially odd. I leaned in and could smell a slight scent of scorching and decay.

I kept looking at the mummy case, and I could feel it. Something was very wrong.

After a few moments, I started going over the rest of the cubicle with a fine-tooth comb, but there was nothing else. Just empty boxes, empty crates, all under dusty sheets.

If I’d seen anything that looked like the stolen items from the museum, I might have gone ahead and called the cops.

As it was, I decided to wait and play it close to the vest. Somebody had brought that case here, and that somebody would be back. The clerk agreed to keep an eye out and tip me off fast if anyone came in for Unit 249. He set a steep price, but I could find the money.

And I thought about Jimmy Steptoe’s friends. They had seen something, on the corner, something strange, late at night. And it was pretty late now.

I decided I’d watch the place and see what I could see.

***

I set up shop in the shadows across the street. I was ready to stay until morning.

It was cold, and I drank black coffee from a thermos a little older than D-Day. I muttered under my breath and tried to ignore the snow turning to slush around my shoes.

And I waited.

It got colder and colder. My mind wandered, and I began to worry whether I was really on the right track.

And I waited some more.

Then a little after 2 a.m., I suddenly felt almost dizzy, like I’d been hit with a flash of heat and light—except everything was definitely still cold and dark.

And suddenly I saw something, shuffling down the street in the half-light.

It was a shape. Tall. Bent. Gaunt.

Like a man, but not quite a man.

Something horrible—wrapped in dark dirty rags—and moving with an eerie, shambling precision, like a Salvador Dali clock, melted but still keeping good time.

The face stayed in the shadows, but I knew it must be horrific beyond words. I was glad I didn’t have to see it. The claw-like hands looked strong and murderous.

I just stared at… the thing. It was hard to believe my eyes. But there it was. An evil mockery of a man. It had gone for a little walk, and now it was coming back.

Then it stopped by the storage place—and just dissolved into dust and blew away toward the back doors near the alley.

It was there, rock solid, one minute, and then it was sifting in the wind the next.

It was terrifying. I stood there blinking—trying to understand what had just happened.

I stared for a long time—looking at where the thing had been and trying to convince myself that what I had just seen wasn’t really real.

It was late. I was tired. I’d had a couple of shots from my flask, and I’d been working too hard for too long.

But I knew I’d seen it. Just like Jimmy said.

I was steeling myself to go back into the storage unit and have another look at the mummy case, when suddenly in a flash it was there again.

A swirl of wind had disturbed the air for a moment, and then the thing seemed to step straight out of the shadows beside the building. It tramped down the sidewalk again, leaving deep, wet, ashy prints in the snow.

It was off into the night once more, and this time I would be tailing it.

***

I walked quietly behind the thing, my heart pounding in panic and disbelief.

I didn’t want to get too close, but I was afraid of losing it if I hung back too far. I could almost hear the roar of a hot sandstorm in my ears when I looked at it.

The creature led me through the shadows and a maze of dark alleyways and back streets. It had an uncanny knack for avoiding lights, cars, and people. Once or twice someone seemed to have glimpsed it, and they just stumbled back in a daze.

At one point, the thing dissolved again into a cloud of dust and blew across a busier street.

I followed it in horror from a distance and watched it in awe as it hazily rematerialized again in the shadows.

Finally, it reached an old apartment building. It was five stories, art deco, the kind of place that once had glamour and now just had mice. The creature entered the building without using the door. It just dissolved again and passed through the entryway—sifting through the cracks.

I waited, then crept in behind.

The smell was unmistakable. Decay. Old spices. Scorched linen and hot sand.

The stairs creaked under my feet like they were trying to warn me off. I stood still, halfway between the third and fourth floor, ears straining.

Somewhere above, something moved. Not fast. A slow, deliberate tread, like a steam-powered sack of bones.

Then muffled noises and a thud. Not loud, but somehow… final.

My face and neck felt incredibly hot. I hesitated a moment longer. I had a very bad feeling about it all. Then I drew my breath in and crept up the last few steps.

An apartment door on the right had burn marks and ash on the carpet in front. I crept up and gently turned the knob. It was locked but easy for me to spring. (I had a misspent youth.)

I gently pushed the door forward and started to look in, but the door came swinging back hard—and clipped me like a right-cross from a prizefighter.

I stumbled, lost my footing, and fell back on the hallway floor.

Out came the creature, moving past me in a blur without even turning its head, silent and terrible. I felt a burst of wildfire blaze across my mind’s eye, and I caught an awful whiff of dry rot and singed cloth.

By the time I scrambled up, holding my pounding head, it was gone.

***

I cursed softly to myself, unsteady on my feet, and saw a few partially burnt papers scattered on the hallway carpet. I gathered them up, pocketed them, and walked back to the doorway with my head throbbing.

The hallway was clear and no one seemed to be stirring.

I stepped inside the apartment and gently shut the door—careful not to touch the knob with my fingers. The room was a mess of scattered books and papers.

And there—on the floor—was a body.

A young woman. Her eyes open wide, arms flung out, and throat crushed. There was scorching on her face and clothes.

She was dead. Her luck had run out.

As I stared at the body, an awful vision flashed before my eyes. I saw the woman standing in front of me, her face twisted in terror, eyes wild. Her last panicked thoughts ripped through my brain. My God! It’s real! It’s really real—and a burst of blackness exploded. The vision was gone.

The woman lay dead on the floor. Murdered… while I had listened idly on the stairs.

I stood there quiet for a moment. Then I took a deep breath, let it out, and shook everything off. There would be plenty of late nights ahead for self-recriminations.

I had real work to do, and I had to move fast. I started to look around.

On a desk, under spilled ink, I saw a Student ID. It was from Hudson University.

Her name had been Linda Silver. She looked like an all-American girl—with a big bright smile and frizzy blonde hair.

Judging from the books, she had been a grad student in Egyptology. There was a typed manuscript. The title burned itself in my memory, Coffin Texts and Funerary Rites in the Middle Kingdom: A Reassessment of Ritual Continuity in Provincial Traditions.

A quick onceover of her apartment didn’t turn up much else.

I knew the police had to be told. I left quietly and called in an anonymous report from a pay phone.

Back at my apartment, I examined the papers I’d found scattered in the hall. They were four partial pages of scribbled notes—scorched brown in many places, indecipherably written in others, but the import of it all was clear.

It was about ancient Egyptian funerary rites, protective spells, revival rituals, and a debate over the interpretation of certain hieroglyphs. A few things stood out especially. The name “Ted” appeared twice as did the word “reanimation.” The phrases “reverse funerary rites,” “alien Ka and Ba,” and “Egyptian sorcery” were all circled for emphasis.

As I read, I kept hearing Linda Silver’s dying thoughts echo in my head, My God! It’s real! Maybe she was the first to die in this case, and maybe not. I didn’t have the full picture, but I knew I hadn’t acted fast enough, and there would be more killing if I didn’t pick up the pace.

I had a lot of questions, and I had an idea where I needed to go to find some answers.

***

The next day, I slipped into the Egyptology Department at Hudson University, discreetly asking a few questions, letting folks infer I was a police detective, and flashing a PI “badge” when I thought it would help.

They were just as much fun as you’d expect. But I got important information and nailed down a suspect while successfully dodging the real cops.

One young lady was very helpful. A Miss Patty Brownfield, a compact, studious, no-nonsense type. She was a graduate student and said she had been acquainted with Linda Silver.

Patty didn’t know any details about what Linda was working on—just that it was funerary rites, the magical rituals the Egyptians used to ensure safe passage through the afterlife. She told me Ka was like a life-force animating a body and Ba was something like an individual spirit or soul.

I asked her if Linda had any enemies.

She frowned. “Everybody loved Linda. She was smart and super-nice. But I can think of one. If you ask me, you guys should be looking for a man named Ted Bellingham. He was a real creep—just obsessed with her. He followed her around all the time when he was a student here. If there’s anyone we know involved in this, I bet you it’s him.”

I perked up at the name Ted. Same as Linda’s notes. That was a big score.

I asked Patty to tell me more about Ted Bellingham. She made a face like it was an unpleasant subject. “He was a graduate student for a while. But a creep, like I said, a real creep. He couldn’t get along with anyone. Fought with his advisors. Fought with other students. So arrogant and combative. And he was just plain weird. He’d talk about the Egyptian gods and the afterlife like they were all… real. You know? Like their spells were real and… could do things.”

I asked a few other people about Ted Bellingham. They used words like brilliant, weird, crazy, and off-putting. His studies had apparently been discontinued at the request of the department. I gathered as a result of his irregular study pursuits and his bothering of female grad students.

Bellingham’s particular research interests had been funerary rites—just like Linda Silver.

It didn’t take me long to locate a picture of him, and I was in for a little surprise.

I had seen Ted Bellingham before—at the museum. He was the slimy guy staring at the Egyptian display with that kid-outside-the-candy-store look—talking about Edgar Allan Poe. He had been right under my nose the morning after the break-in.

He was the key to all this, sure as the world, and I needed to know more.

***

Next I called on my old friend Willy Vogel.

Vogel was a heavyweight—three hundred pounds of pure genius with an encyclopedic knowledge of the occult and a relish for strange happenings that was unmatched.

His place was a labyrinth of cigar smoke, empty brandy glasses, books, papers, and strange artifacts. He could have used two full-time housekeepers, but he made do with none.

“Ah, Dash,” he said in a throaty rasp straight out of a Shakespeare play, “Have you come about the Egyptian relics and that murder by any chance?”

“How did you know that?” I said, surprised, as I cleared a space to sit down.

“You watch the papers and have an eye for the outré.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve seen more than my share of it lately. Something very old and sinister has been shambling through our city streets.”

“I see,” Vogel said, just a little surprised himself.

I took off my hat and got down to business. “What can you tell me about mummies? The supernatural dimensions, I mean.”

Vogel knitted his brows in thought, his favorite activity. “It’s a rich subject, Dash. It covers everything from curses and guardians to the afterlife and revenants. Where would you like me to begin?”

“You tell me. Here’s what I know.” I gave Vogel the whole story—all I had seen and heard plus Linda Silver’s handwritten notes.

Vogel listened intently and then carefully reviewed the crumpled notes with a large magnifying glass.

Suddenly, he looked up at me with piercing eyes. “Extraordinary, Dash, just extraordinary! You have something here that’s fascinating—and deeply disturbing. Of course, mummified human remains may be simply that—no more, no less—but there are indeed esoteric scholars who have suggested that those remains can be revived and transformed into a vehicle for something truly terrible… if the appropriate rites are performed.”

That sounded ominous enough. “What kind of rites?” I asked.

Vogel smiled slightly. “For possession. Just as these notes indicate, there are dark hints in obscure corners of occult literature of the existence of spells for the reverse application of funerary rites, recipes for the revival of a mummy through its possession by an evil spirit. In such a case, the mummy is a portal for entry, a bodily host, and a physical anchor in our world for something malevolent… from an alien plane of existence.”

He puffed his cigar thoughtfully as I tried to absorb this information, and then he went on. “From what I have read, the authenticity of the mummy is essential to the success of these rites. That’s because of the effect of the original Egyptian funerary rituals themselves as well as the thinness of the boundaries between planes of existence in areas venerated in ancient Egypt. These in tandem have a peculiar effect. They give these mummies a special metaphysical resonance.”

“Interesting,” I said, not fully following, I confess, all that Vogel was saying.

“Yes, and if these hints are true, someone with the appropriate invocation formula and the original contents of a mummy case, could let loose something quite terrible upon our world. And, of course, that would end very badly for everyone involved if nothing were done to stop it.”

I felt like my face was suddenly a little numb and my throat slowly tightened. “And what could be done to stop it?” I asked.

Vogel looked at me strangely, and then he spoke in a voice hoarser than usual. “This evil’s pathway into our world started in ancient Egypt, and the power of original Egyptian devotional objects would be by far the most effective way to combat it. That was in fact part of their original design, and I do happen to have something I believe could be quite powerful in a case such as this.”

Vogel retreated to his backrooms. That’s where he kept a good part of his vast collection of curiosities from a lifetime of careful scavenging.

He came back after a few minutes—with an object in the palm of his hand.

It was a scarab figure, cracked a bit, and made of green stone etched with deep marks. Vogel said it was a “heart scarab” inscribed with a protective spell in hieroglyphs from The Book of the Dead and sacralized by ancient Egyptian priests. The charm, he said, would hold great power over the alien demonic forces that might have been summoned in a “revival” funerary rite.

Vogel pressed the scarab charm into my hand, and I felt like I could sense its power as my fingers closed around it.

We talked a little longer, and then I thanked Vogel and set about my business. He looked almost worried as I left.

I had to hurry. I knew I needed to find Bellingham, and I felt like the clock was ticking.

***

I was ready for the long haul, but it took me less than twenty-four hours. Bellingham wasn’t any good at laying low.

After a couple of dead ends, I found another clerk at the storage facility, and he recognized Bellingham from the photo I’d finagled and said he had also seen the same man, not too long before, carrying groceries outside an apartment building just a few blocks away.

I went to the building. It was rundown and in a seedy midtown neighborhood—just five blocks from the storage facility.

The place was a dump among dumps and almost deserted. Even the rats seem to think it was beneath them. But not Bellingham.

He had been using a phony name, Richard Bethell, but I got his apartment number from the super based on his photo. It only cost me ten bucks.

I’m a big fan of cage-rattling in a case like this, so that afternoon, I was knocking on his door.

There was no answer, so I started kicking. I don’t like to get tough, but sometimes it helps.

I heard the door unlatch, and it opened on a chain. It was dark inside, but I could see two things in the doorway.

A face. Very fat and toad-like, frozen in a frightened scowl. That was Bellingham all right.

And the barrel of a gun—a little Saturday night special held low and pointed at my middle. It was shaking just a bit.

“Hello, Mr. Bellingham,” I said. “I’m an investigator and wanted to ask you a few questions about some stolen Egyptian antiquities and the murder of Linda Silver. May I come in?”

He flinched when I mentioned the murder and pulled the gun barrel back from the doorway.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” he said in a voice that was somehow sneering and frightened at the same time. “Can I see your badge?”

I flashed my PI license and my investigator “badge,” and he smiled sourly. “So you’re not a police officer. And what was that name? McCain, was it? I’ll have to remember that.”

He looked at me for a moment. I thought there was a flicker of recognition in his eyes.

I smiled. “Yep, that was me—at the museum. I try to do something educational once a week.”

He stared at me now like I was speaking in Pig Latin.

I waited a moment and then told him again, slowly and firmly, that I’d like to come in and ask him a few questions.

Bellingham looked like he wanted to run and hide, but he knew he had to say something. “Yes, yes, certainly. I’d be happy to talk with you, of course, but… not now. Can you… can you come back tomorrow morning?”

“Sure,” I said. “But, say, you’re interested in Egyptian funerary rites, in reverse, I hear. How’s that going? Any notable results you’re ready to share with the—what do you call it?—the scholarly community? I think that alien Ka and Ba stuff will knock their socks off.”

It sounded like he literally shook on the other side of the door.

After a moment, he stammered out, “S-s-sorry. You’ll have… t-to come back… t-t-tomorrow morning.”

“Sure thing,” I said, knowing full well what would likely be waiting for me in the apartment then. That is, if he didn’t send it after me tonight. “I’ll come back tomorrow morning. Nine, okay?”

He agreed to a meeting that I knew would never come.

***

One way or another, Bellingham’s next play would have to come through the thing. That’s where all the answers were.

That night, I stood in the dark across from the storage place with nothing but a thermos of cold coffee and a pack of cigarettes. I had the weight of a body on my mind, and I knew I might be next in line.

The green stone scarab charm was in my pocket, and I was holding it like a GI in a foxhole with a lucky rabbit’s foot.

The wind off the East River cut like a razor, but I didn’t move. I watched the storage place. Now was not the time to lose focus.

And I thought about Linda Silver—she was so terrified. I wondered why she had been murdered. Did she know too much? Or was it jealousy? Or both?

I had to stop Bellingham, and I had to destroy that creature before someone else got killed.

I kept waiting.

Just after midnight, the thing came again.

It was clearer this time. No sound. Just a strange shimmer in the air as blowing dust swept in from the alleyway shadows, and then the shape… coalesced.

And it stood there again. Tall, terribly thin, gnarled, covered in dark tattered wrappings, steaming faintly in the cold air, its head cocked unnaturally to one side as if listening to something only it could hear.

Then it slid farther from the shadows and moved down the sidewalk with a precise but rickety gait. I followed cautiously, my shoes silent on the snowy pavement.

It never turned, never hurried. It didn’t need to.

I knew where it was going. Five blocks down, it stopped near the back doorway of Bellingham’s rundown building. Then it sifted into dust and blew like a sandstorm to the door, vanishing into the seams and cracks. No broken locks, no shattered windows.

I reached the spot seconds later, heart pounding.

The door was locked, but I let myself in with a practiced hand. Inside, it was dead quiet, the kind of hush you get only in places where people have learned the hard way to mind their own business or leave entirely.

The air had that smell—like burnt parchment and scorched herbs. Up the deserted stairs, I heard that shambling sound again.

I finished slowly climbing the stairs with gritted teeth and a pit in my stomach. Sometimes your gut tells you you’re making a mistake, but there’s nothing else left to do.

I took a deep breath and quietly let it out. Bellingham’s apartment door was in front of me, and I could hear a slight murmuring noise inside.

I went up to the door, waited a few seconds, and then I popped the lock nice and easy to peek inside. The door was on a chain, but it was long enough for me to get a good look.

It was quite a sight through the partly open doorway.

Dim light, old oil lamps, a circle of dark red sand, and Bellingham, toad-like on the dirty floor, in the middle of it all in a trance—his arms outstretched, his eyes rolling, chanting very lowly to himself in a mad voice, a tattered papyrus scroll in front of him.

I took a deep breath. It was time to make my move.

I knew in my bones I was about to see something that would haunt me the rest of my life.

With a thrust of my shoulder, I snapped the chain and stepped into the shadowy room.

***

And I saw it.

My whole world narrowed to the sight of the thing. I could see its withered dead face—with a blackened jaw hanging off kilter, a nose half-broken off, and deep dark sockets where eyes had burned out centuries ago.

Its body was tall, painfully gaunt, with its joints all askew.

As I stood there stunned, a wave of unnatural heat and a whiff of musty dry rot rolled toward me.

My .38 was in my shoulder holster. I don’t always carry it, and I hardly ever shoot anybody. I certainly didn’t expect a firearm to do much good against this creature.

But I had the stone heart scarab, and I held it out in front of me.

It had power.

The dead thing shrank back with a muffled sound—not loud, but low, a sound I felt more with my stomach than I heard with my ears. I stepped toward it as it shuffled backward.

The thing cowered tensely—its black eye sockets somehow burning—like an animal afraid of fire but desperate to attack and looking for any angle, any opening.

I could feel the waves of its heat and anger.

I kept the scarab charm held out and looked over at Bellingham. He was in a daze, staring at the roll of papyrus. I saw his revolver on the floor beside him.

I turned back to the mummy. The empty sockets where its eyes should have been glowed with an infinite blackness. It was terrible to see.

Then I seemed to have another vision of blowing sand and pyramids in the depths of that blackness.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Bellingham and the mummy and thought, who is the puppet and who is the master? And then I wondered, was that really my thought—or was it Bellingham’s or the creature’s?

I was beginning to become dazed myself.

I felt a wave that was Bellingham’s hunger, greed, lust, hate, and naïveté.

And I felt the creature’s immense power and its desperation for the freedom to destroy.

My head swam with a whirlwind of visions that made no sense. Swirling black lights in a white sky, horribly alive somehow and cursing my name in voices like metal striking metal.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Bellingham, more entranced than ever.

I was still holding up the heart scarab, but my hand began to dip, and the thing stepped forward menacingly, a creaking in its throat that could have been a growl or a warning.

And I felt the creature’s hot thoughts radiating out from a desiccated skull: Serve me… or die.

Suddenly, I knew I was running out of time. The thing in front of me was terribly dangerous. I was losing control. Its black eye sockets seemed to pull me into the dark depths within.

I felt like I was being sucked into an alien dimension, and I knew that its bleak world would be filled with horrors beyond anything I could imagine.

Then a desperate thought flashed through my brain. A vision of the papyrus scroll.

The creature… it was worried… worried that I might get to the scroll and…

Destroy it!

That was it—I needed to destroy the scroll!

Then to my infinite horror, I felt my hand open up, against my will, and drop the scarab.

The charm bounced off the floor, and I watched it quietly roll away.

My mind’s ear split with the thing’s deafening scream as it leapt on me with amazing speed.

I cried out as it knocked me back and we hit the floor together in a tangled mass. Its coarse burning touch was horrible beyond words. I flailed wildly and pushed the thing’s foul dead face away from mine, yelling “Mother of God.”

The creature was grabbing at my throat with its horrible hands but suddenly hesitated, and I reacted with a gut-wrenching spasm of primal adrenaline and threw the thing off.

I was back on my feet in a frantic eyeblink, lunging toward the papyrus.

I grabbed the scroll from the floor as I raced forward toward a doorway and heard the awful rustle of the thing chasing right behind me.

Then I furiously ripped the papyrus in two!

I turned, and the creature, its grasping claws right in my face, went rigid. A crackling sound came from deep within it.

Then it flashed with a sudden flame, and its body collapsed to the floor and burst apart in an ugly blast—like a broken sack of ashes.

And I felt a sharp stab—the creature’s anguish as its alien spirit blew back to its own dark world, and Bellingham simultaneously let loose a wild scream like something had snapped inside his brain.

The mummy’s remnants now lay on the floor, a scattered pile of bones, ash, and rags—smoking slightly with an awful smell.

I stared at it in horror for a moment—barely able to comprehend what had just happened.

Then Bellingham looked up blindly, holding his head, and cried in a shrill voice. “What did you do? What did you do?”

His face twisted further in disbelief, and his body started convulsing. A choking, almost animal sound came from deep within his torso. He looked over at me. “You don’t… understand,” he said, strangling on the words. “You don’t understand… at all. I-I had their… wisdom. I… had… their wisdom.”

I stood just staring at him. He sat there, sobbing, and kept muttering and heaving, but he was talking to himself again, and not to me.

And he had no idea that the thing he’d raised up was going to murder him—if not tonight, then soon. He had lost control.

There was nothing more I could do. I gathered up the pieces of the scroll, the heart scarab, and Bellingham’s pistol, and I left him crying to himself on the floor.

Then I walked out into the snowy night and made an anonymous call to the police.

***

Later, over some very old brandy, I filled in Vogel and asked him what the thing was—really.

Vogel blew a smoke ring out slowly and deliberately. “I would say it was an alien intelligence—much like an evil spirit or an elemental—crossing into our world through the borderlands that brush the Duat, the dark underworld of the Egyptians. Think of it as… an ember that flares up periodically through the ages, an ember tied to the occult resonance of ancient Egypt and its artifacts. Yes, you banished it—for now. But these things enter our world from some nameless dimensional twilight and are likely deathless. And the ancient magics of Egypt have a power that cannot fade so long as their sacred objects are intact. You have a scroll, torn apart, and a mummy case, empty now, but there are others—many others. Sooner or later, someone will try again.”

“And then?”

He laughed. “That’s why the world has men like you, Dash. You’re needed—at least periodically.”

“It’s nice to be needed,” I said, “but I could use fifty bucks and a day off.”

I lit a cigarette with slightly shaking fingers. My hands still smelled like four thousand years of death, and somehow I still felt the feverish heat that came off the creature.

I talked with Vogel a while longer, and I drank a little too much of his brandy. Then I went home and slept a long time.

And that’s the story.

My partner Mickey? He still thinks it was a man playacting in dress-up bandages if it was anything at all.

The cops? They said that Bellingham confessed to the museum break-in and the murder. He had committed these crimes in some kind of psychotic state. The police had their man, and they were satisfied. And Bellingham was placed in a mental institution, likely never to stand trial.

The authorities were half-right at least. Bellingham summoned the thing and sent it out. He was guilty as sin, and I hope his confession and confinement offer some measure of peace to Linda Silver’s family.

But, of course, I know what really happened.

I saw the thing—I saw it walk and I saw it fall. I saw the flames, the wrappings, and the hot ash on the floor. I know that something terrible came to our world from another—and I know someday it, or another like it, will be back.

So, my friends, if you’re ever out on some cold dark night, and there’s a shuffling sound, a wave of heat, and the musty smell of ancient death, start running and never look back.

And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

***

The Dash McCain story “The Egyptian Ember” was inspired in part by Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” (1892) and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Nemesis of Fire” (1908).

A new Dash McCain noir occult detective story will appear each month in 2026. In March, Dash travels to New Orleans to search for a missing heiress haunted by a family curse in “The Black Wolf.”

New York, January 1972

Evil still stalks this earth. Sometimes that evil is out in the open and repellent on its face, and sometimes it comes alluringly disguised as something else—beauty, art, or love. But whatever its outer form, evil remains evil, and it can be terrifying and fatal. This is a story of that second kind of evil, a lovely red rose with sweet perfume... and deadly thorns.

It started for me with a phone call. I’d been drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and staring out the office window at the city below while listening to the lonely traffic sounds. Then the phone rang, and I knew in my bones it was going to be something big.

I answered, and heard the voice of Vinnie the Vulture, my morgue attendant friend and an unceasing source of sensitive information on the QT.

Vinnie said, “I got another weird one, Dash. I know how you like those.”

That was how I found out about the first victim.

Dana Marlowe. Twenty-two. A Columbia dropout and aspiring painter. She was found curled up behind a locked bathroom door in a tenement on Delancey—surrounded by scattered rose petals. Pale as porcelain. Eyes wide open. No sign of trauma or wounds. No drugs in her system. And almost no blood in her veins.

The details were hushed up, and the death barely made the papers.

But I started poking around. That’s what I do. I’m a private investigator, I collect unexplained events for my underground newsletter The Nighthawk, and I don’t like to stand idly by when I think something’s wrong.

I was still following up leads when the second killing happened just a week later.

This was Amy Velasquez. Fashion student and amateur painter. She lived with a dachshund named Pícaro and had a still fresh tattoo on her arm that read “art is love” in shaky Germanic letters. She was discovered lying peacefully on her bed, hands folded, with a single rose beside her. And like Dana Marlowe—she had no visible trauma and no real blood in her body.

That was a second mysterious death. A second beautiful young woman. A second person involved in the City’s avant-garde arts scene and its world of studios, galleries, shows, and after-parties.

And there were also deeper common threads if you were willing to look for them. And I was—I walked my feet off talking to cops, informants, bystanders, friends, family, whoever would give me the time of day. I have to say people are surprisingly susceptible to my low-rent charm.

And I found something very interesting. There was a particular woman who seemed to have come into the lives of both these young ladies just shortly before they died.

The woman’s name was Marcilla Carsten. Or maybe Marci or Cilla. And sometimes Carstairs or Carson too—depending on exactly whom you asked.

Marcilla was said to be strikingly beautiful—tall, dark-haired, with magnetic eyes. She had a shadowy past and seemed to float gracefully from one place to another like a puff of smoke on the wind. And she was best known around town as the founder of Nekoyia, a new and very fashionable art gallery in Alphabet City—one celebrated for its daring aesthetics and counter-culture atmosphere.

But not everyone was a fan. Amy Velasquez’s sister, Rosie, told me that Marcilla was “very bad news” and that the entire family were afraid of her and were certain that she had had something to do with Amy’s death. The lovely Marcilla was in fact, Rosie said, “una bruja con mal de ojo,” a witch with the evil eye.

And I had found something else too, something even stranger—and carefully ignored by the police. Reports of a cat. A big one, like a panther, jet black in color.

The cat had been seen prowling near the scenes of both deaths. One young lady, laughing self-consciously, told me that she had seen the cat, and that it seemed to “just disappear” right in front of her, shining eyes and all. She said she knew, of course, that it couldn’t have happened that way, but that’s what it looked like to her.

Cue the third killing—about a week after the second.

This was Shauna Monroe. An independent filmmaker, poet, and painter. Twenty-six. Found in an old warehouse right next to the building where a wild arts-crowd “happening” had been staged the night before. There was no apparent bodily trauma, but she had somehow been bled almost white.

The very same pattern again, and Shauna’s best friend and roommate said that she’d recently become infatuated with a woman named “Ci Ci,” who ran an art gallery in Alphabet City.

I was fortunate enough to manage a look at Shauna Monroe’s last painting, an impressionistic watercolor, left half finished with her demise. It was nothing other than a chilling portrait of a shadowy black panther, with sultry, luminous eyes, climbing through an apartment window that looked just like Shauna’s own.

And Marcilla remained a complete mystery. I couldn’t find any trace of her at all in any official records despite all my efforts. It was like she had just dropped down one day from nowhere into the New York City art scene—an enigmatic Galatea formed by some cryptic Pygmalion.

But I had a hunch about what was really happening, and I knew that if I kept digging, I’d eventually find what I was looking for.

I just wondered if by then Marcilla would be looking for me.

***

And that’s when all hell broke loose. In the office, I mean.

“You’ve got no clients! None, Dash!”

That was Mickey McGonigal, my bosom buddy and the senior partner of McGonigal & McCain, Private Investigators. Mickey was an old friend from our NYPD days together, but also a red-faced bruiser built like a side of beef.

He stared at me. “You know what I did today, Dash? I balanced our books. You know what I found? That your last paying case was a month ago, a guy who thought his Persian cat was possessed by the spirit of Tallulah Bankhead. A nutjob—and fifty bucks!”

I didn’t look up. I was poring over some photographs I’d managed to find of Marcilla Carsten. She looked like a femme fatale from a ’40s movie—somewhere between Ava Gardner and Marie Windsor.

“I’m working a lead,” I said.

“You don’t have a client! You’re chasing ghosts. You’re embarrassing us. This is supposed to be a detective agency, not a… whatever the heck this is,” he said, holding up the latest issue of The Nighthawk, filled with strange and inexplicable events. “I’m getting notes from the landlord on scraps of paper slid under the door!”

“Great,” I said. “Ask him if he believes in vampires.”

Mickey’s face took on the pained look he always gets when his blood pressure goes too high, and he took a deep breath, held it in for a moment, and slowly let it out. “Okay,” he said. “Fine. Go on. Do your spook thing. Maybe I can pay the Con Ed bill with deposit bottles.”

That was Mickey—a good guy when you dug down deep. I didn’t have the heart to tell him where I was headed that evening. To Nekoyia—for the big art show party and to have a look at Marcilla face-to-face.

I wanted to dig a little deeper and see what was hiding and where.

***

Marcilla’s gallery had truly gone over the top for its special one-night happening called Neon Nocturnes.

The space was all black velvet drapes, deep red carpeting, flickering candles, and ultra-modern art. Lightshow shadow puppets and worse danced on the walls. Music that sounded like the Beatles drowning in a barrel of acid played on a loop. It was photorealism, abstract illusionism, and psychedelics meets Dracula and a wild after-party.

It was also invitation-only, but I had bluffed my way past the doorman with some double-talk, drawing on my year at Fordham on the GI Bill and my eighteen months as a crime reporter. I was cleverly masquerading as an art critic for a radical left magazine.

Lots of shiny people had turned out for the happening—artists, hippies, musicians, actors, space cadets, and slumming New York aristocrats. It was a hep-cat party scene, but it did make me feel just a bit like a square in my hat and rumpled suit.

I was puzzling over a painting, a series of chalky interlocking red, black, and white rectangles within rectangles, when I noticed a young lady standing next to me.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said, speaking loudly to be heard over the music.

I smiled. “It’s certainly something.”

She was an attractive young thing—well dressed with oversized glasses and a sensitive bookish demeanor.

She looked over at me. “My name’s Felicia... Jameson. I’m a painter. I love Neo-Gothic Cubism. I hope to do work with this power... someday. I have a small show of my own coming up in a few weeks.”

I smiled again. “My name’s... Sidney Marshall McCain,” I said, keeping the alias I had used to get into the gallery. “I write on arts and culture for The Free Radical. I’ll have to come by and see your show. Say, do you know our lovely hostess, Marcilla Carsten?”

“I do,” she said enthusiastically. “I just met her last week. She’s so beautiful, and she knows so much about art. She’s amazing.”

“Yes, she’s certainly something...” I said.

Felicia happily talked more about painting and about Marcilla, and then she drifted away with a friendly wave to me as she followed a surge in the crowd.

Then I saw the person I had really come to see.

Marcilla, the beautiful Marcilla, standing at the center of the room, illuminated by shimmering strobe lights and presiding like a languid queen over a fever-dream domain. Her shining black eyes surveyed the room.

She saw me too and approached with the enthusiasm of a well-fed house cat who’s decided to play with a mouse.

“Why, Mr. McCain, welcome to Nekoyia!” she said, with a voice like cool honey over the music. “I didn’t know you enjoyed the arts.”

I smiled, a little surprised that she knew exactly who I was. “Oh, well, I guess I like to see what’s what, and I’m a big fan of whatever that is,” I said, pointing my thumb at the interlocking rectangles, “plus I’m a longtime lover of soup cans in all colors.”

She laughed. It was the kind of silverbell laugh that makes you feel like a puppy getting your head scratched.

“I’m sure you are,” she said. “But you’re also here for those girls, aren’t you? Those poor lost little girls you keep asking about.”

That was another surprise, but I kept my poker face. “Oh, they weren’t lost,” I said with a smile. “They were found. You know, dead. And they all came to this gallery.”

She eyed me flirtatiously. “Why, yes, Mr. McCain, everyone comes to my gallery. Even you’ve come tonight. The allure of art can be... all-consuming.” She brushed my arm with her long-fingered hand. Her nails looked sharp.

“Yeah,” I said breezily. “Something’s been all-consuming, but I’m not sure it’s art.”

Her smile grew even brighter. “We’re all called to make sacrifices. I’ve devoted my whole life to art and... to love.” The way she said it, she might have been a high priestess holding a blood-stained knife.

I started to quip back, but she put a hand up to my lips and gave me a long smoldering look. Then she said softly, “Do feel free to drop by after hours, Mr. McCain. We have a special collection in the basement. You can come down sometime and see my... etchings.”

With that, she abruptly turned to face a young man who had just joined us and was eagerly awaiting a chance to interrupt. He looked like a cross between a Rolling Stone and Beau Brummel.

Others quickly came as well, vying for Marcilla’s attention. I let myself slide into the background, still feeling the power of her charms like an intoxicating perfume.

The music had grown even louder, and I breathed in the smoky atmosphere and glanced over at the party’s communal mural, a massive white canvas, which guests had been invited to adorn with their own impromptu works of art—graffiti, handprints, drawings, whatever their hearts desired.

Written in the center in bright red letters in an old German block script were the words Art is love, love is life, life is blood.

That could have passed for Nekoyia’s official creed, and I well remembered that Amy Velasquez had the same phrase, “art is love,” tattooed on her arm in the same old-fashioned lettering.

I had to know more. As the atmosphere intensified, I slipped farther away to look around and see what I could see.

Snooping is my favorite hobby, and it was high time to snoop.

***

I soon found myself well away from the music and headed toward some back rooms and then the basement. I had diplomatically passed a couple who were necking. After that, nobody was around.

It was pretty dark down there, and I didn’t dare turn on a light. I popped out my pencil flashlight and had a look around. I saw boxes. Stacks of paintings. Some statuettes. More boxes. Sheets hanging over God knows what.

Holding my little light in the darkness, I half-expected to hear Bela Lugosi say “I bid you welcome” from the shadows.

As I looked at some of the artwork in the dim light, I could see that many were older and Gothic in style. Some were downright macabre and unsettling, including a number of paintings of pallid and seemingly newly deceased young women reclining on couches and beds.

Then I saw a striking antique-looking statuette that was plainly Marcilla herself. She was dressed in old-fashioned period clothing, standing with her arms outstretched in a way I felt was somehow vaguely threatening.

This figure was certainly powerful in design and technique. Say what you will, Marcilla was a beautiful subject and had a definite flair for the dramatic.

I picked up the piece for a closer look in the dim light. On the bottom of the base, it was inscribed with the name “Millarca” and the date “1872.” That was very interesting. A different name and a hundred years ago. Could it have been her great grandmother, I wondered. Then the thought popped into my head that Millarca was an anagram of Marcilla.

As I held the figure in my hand, I began to feel something strange. It was like... a hunger, a craving coming off the statuette, for something unusual, and I felt like that something... was blood.

And then I saw them.

Rats—quite a lot of them. A few feet away just barely in the light cast by my pencil flash. Small and hairy. They were looking at me. I would have expected them to scatter or do whatever it is that rats do on their off hours. But they were just sitting and looking at me. It was an unpleasant experience.

I was watching them back, when I heard it. A sound. From behind me in the dark stillness.

A faint feline moaning. Like an alley cat, but bigger, and it was slowly getting louder... and more and more angry.

I turned in the darkness.

In the shadows, across the room, there were two glowing eyes. My blood absolutely froze.

The eyes blinked shut and disappeared.

I could feel the presence of an intense danger. That was enough for me.

In a panic, I dropped the statuette, turned, and raced toward the next room, stumbling in the dark, falling, and scrambling back on my feet. I could hear something—something big—padding softly behind me.

It was gaining fast. I almost felt its hot breath on my neck, going in for a kill. The fear was indescribable. The primal terror of hominid prey but even worse because this was something... supernatural.

Heart pounding, I raced up another set of stairs and burst into a better lit room, surprising another romantic couple. The man yelled. The woman screamed.

The fear dropped instantly, and I covered my eyes with my hat, apologizing, as I made my way past them and back to the music and the party.

And I swear I heard behind me a faint silverbell laugh as I mopped my forehead and tried to catch my breath.

I knew then I needed expert help, and I knew where I’d find it.

***

The next day, my friend Willy Vogel poured some sake in an ornate cup and muttered, “Extraordinary,” as he listened to my story.

“You’re right, of course,” he said after a moment. “It certainly could be a vampire. The feeding is controlled, fastidious even, without obvious marks, but the blood loss is consistent with vampirism. And some of these creatures have been known to take the form of cats rather than bats or wolves.”

Vogel was a strange bird himself, three hundred pounds of elegant Englishman, an antiquarian and aesthete who knew much more about the occult than anyone I had ever known. He always made me think of Sydney Greenstreet, and his more than spacious rooms were stuffed with books, manuscripts, and curiosities of all kinds.

“What should I do?” I asked.

“If she’s a vampire, you must look for her sanctuary. Find the haven, and if the corpse is there, be ready to act. If it’s not, destroy the haven itself, and you’ll force her into an act of desperation. Of course, she may have more than one resting place. They often do, but that will likely flush her out for revenge anyway.”

That sounded dangerous. “How do I... destroy a vampire?”

“To be certain that you’ve done that, you have to stake it. Either the actual corpse itself or the quasi-corporeal projection that may prowl the night for victims. Ash wood is certainly best, though hawthorn or oak will do, and the stake should be blessed—to be truly effective—by a sincere believer in a religion of pax et caritas. That’s especially important if you have to stake the wraith-like projection.”

I nodded, trying to take it all in. “Anything else?” I said after a moment.

“Yes, don’t fight on her ground if you can help it. She’s strongest there. And don’t invite her onto your ground. That gives her power. You can protect yourself with a circle of holy water. Crosses can be good for protection too. Most important: Don’t look into her eyes. She can make you forget what she actually is and who you really are—with her eyes. That’s her greatest power, really.”

I was silent for a moment.

Vogel added, almost cheerfully, “It will be terribly dangerous.”

“That’s good,” I said. “I just turned fifty, and I’m trying to avoid the complacency of later middle age.” I’d meant that as a light-hearted quip, but it didn’t flow quite as cheerily as I’d intended.

Vogel sat musing for a bit and then thought of something else. “Of course, the very best thing to do is to confront a vampire with its one true name. That has tremendous occult power, but it would likely be difficult to find, even assuming she has a long history, as your investigation certainly suggests. Still, I will do a little research just in case, and I’ll also offer you several historical volumes from my library for your review—please bring them back. Each one is a rara avis.”

We talked a little longer, and then I left with an armful of books and a strong sense of foreboding.

***

I made it home to my walkup in Hell’s Kitchen, exhausted and with an aching back from carrying Vogel’s books.

It had been a long day, and I must have been asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

I’m a vivid dreamer, and my dreams are often wild—and sometimes prophetic.

That night, I dreamt that something unspeakable was stalking through a forest hunting me. It was an ominous cat-shaped shadow with bright shining eyes. And I was somehow up in the sky and could see myself down below, unsuspecting and asleep, curled under a tree in a dark wood. The shadow-cat drew closer and closer, and suddenly I was down on the forest floor struggling to wake up as its dark silhouette closed in on me. I was terrified. And then I was awake—breathing hard in the darkness.

I sat up in bed, catching my breath and listening to the silence.

Something had woken me up, I thought, not just the dream.

Had I heard something in my sleep? What could it have been?

I sat there for a moment and then I did hear something—clearly.

A little patter at the front window, where the fire escape was.

I got up, crept over, and pulled back the shade.

She was there. Marcilla. Her black eyes burned in her head. Her skin was a deathly pallid white against her jet-black hair. Her face smiled bizarrely, revealing a mouth full of shark’s teeth. She was wreathed in a strange white mist and her head slowly bobbled like she was floating in air. She looked like a seductive mad woman. She looked like a monster.

“Mr. McCain,” she said in a sweet eerie voice, “can I come in to play?”

I tore my eyes away from hers and shoved the shade back in place. Then I raced to grab my mother’s old crucifix, which was hanging on the wall.

I had no idea what I would do if she tried to come through the window—other than to hold up the crucifix and pray.

After a moment, on impulse, I went to the side window. I peeked behind the shade.

She was there too somehow—with the same bizarre expression—floating three stories above the ground.

“Mr. McCain,” she said in the same sweet eerie voice, “can you come out to play?”

I retreated to the center of my apartment. Turning round and round until I was dizzy watching the windows.

Then a bone-chilling singsong chorus of voices sounded in unison from all the windows at once. “Mr. McCain,” they trilled, “did you know that curiosity killed the cat?”

The voices began laughing a long strange laugh. No silver bells now. More like something from the basement of a madhouse. It seemed to come through every window in the apartment. It was terrifying.

I sat and waited, breathing slow to try to stem my panic.

But nothing happened.

The laughter died away, and I heard the unsettling rumble of something like a cat. Its deep guttural caterwaul and hissing made my neck hair stand on end. It kept vocalizing until I thought I would go crazy…

Then all was quiet.

I stayed on guard until sunrise. When the sun was up, I doubled-checked the windows. Marcilla was long gone, of course.

I settled down and began reading Vogel’s books, and after a while I found something. In a very old book on middle European lore.

A picture and a name. The picture was a careful reproduction of a vivid portrait painted in 1698. It was her all right. The name was another anagram of Marcilla, and there was a family name attached this time. The volume gave the year of her birth as 1678.

She had been well known in Styria in the eighteenth century as a vampire who took the form of a monstrous black cat.

And now I had her real name.

I knew what I had to do, and I would be ready before sunset. She had been toying with me, but I wouldn’t be toying with her.

I would be playing for keeps.

***

A little later, I stood listening to Mrs. O’Hara, my landlady, talk about the “tiger” she saw in the shadows outside her window in the night.

She had called the cops, she said, but they acted like she was nuts. I told her I would keep an eye out for anything unusual. She said she had never been so glad to have a private investigator as a tenant. It made her feel safe. I had to laugh a little at that one.

Then I got a phone call. It was Vinnie again. “Dash, we just got in another stiff—a young lady, almost no blood. Died last night. I thought you’d want to know.”

He said her name. It took a moment to register with me, and I asked him to repeat it.

It was Felicia Jameson. The young lady from the art show. She liked Neo-Gothic Cubism and hoped to do work with power someday. She had her own art show coming up, and she was just twenty-six.

Now she was dead.

Vinnie said they found her locked in her bedroom, spread out on the bed, surrounded by roses. No sign of struggle, no trauma, no drugs. And almost no blood in her body.

I gritted my teeth and cursed myself.

I hadn’t been quick enough to help her, but I would stop the killings now.

A little later I went by St. Aidan’s Church to see Father Tierney. He was about seventy, born and raised in the old country, and always very understanding when I needed something like holy water or an object blessed.

But he definitely gave me the eye when I asked him to bless my ash wood stake.

“Do I want to know what this is for, Dash?” he asked.

I looked down at the stake.

“Nope,” I said. “I don’t think so. Even I don’t want to know what it’s for. But I will say this, I think we both understand that evil—real evil—is out there and still a threat to the innocent. And if good men do nothing, evil will triumph.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Have you been praying for wisdom, Dash, or just reading Edmund Burke?”

I laughed. “Not much of either.”

“I’ll mangle me own quotation then. If you fight with monsters too long, you’ll be one yourself before you’re through. Think about that—and be careful. May God bless and keep you.”

He blessed the stake, and I thanked him.

As I walked off, I felt just like I did in the war before a big push—all keyed up, nerves a-jangle, wondering how I would hold up when it got really ugly.

***
I was watching Nekoyia from a street corner later that afternoon. It was the only place I knew that Marcilla’s resting place might be. She had never had a home address that I could find.

It looked quiet, dark, and locked up tight—after the happenin’ happening of two nights before.

I kept watching it. I knew Marcilla had some security guards—as well as the rats. She was careful when she wanted to be.

After a while, I decided to risk going in. That was better than waiting for sundown.

Basement access wasn’t hard. I slipped in the back way, satchel in hand, without a sound or any surprises.

Down in the basement again, I searched. Before long I found a crate—under a white sheet without a speck of dust.

I felt in my bones that this was it.

I cautiously opened the crate and inside was an elaborately carved and decorated wooden casket with a pentagram where one would expect to see a cross.

I hesitated a moment. If she was in there, in her casket, I might be in real trouble. She would certainly be weaker during daylight, but the basement was dark, and this was her home ground.

But my gut told me that she wasn’t in there. I said a little prayer and then pried open the coffin—with my heart in my mouth.

It was empty.

She did like to recline in style. The coffin had velvet lining and an intoxicating exotic perfume—like roses and ambergris. But also the scent of earth and old rot. And something else. It was... cat. It smelled like cat.

By the light of the flashlight, I could also see a thin layer of soil and little patches of sticky dried blood in the folds of the lining.

I looked at the blood, and I felt a sensation coming from the coffin. It was that same strange hunger again, but I felt it more clearly this time. And the words I’d seen on the canvas at the happening came into my mind. Art is love, love is life, life is blood.

Marcilla wanted blood from her victims—and all the rest too.

Then I heard them. The rats—more of them than ever. They did not seem pleased to see me. They were gathering in a little semicircle around me, their eyes shining red in the darkness. It felt very threatening.

I had to move quickly. I poured a little holy water in the coffin and then a lot of gasoline—as the rats began to almost shriek and crowd in closer.

Then I struck a match and flicked it in the casket. The flames licked up like they were hungry for more.

Miles away, I heard a piercing scream—it cut through my stomach and raced up my spine to the top of my head. Maybe I heard it with my ears, and maybe not, but I heard it all the same.

The rats melted away, and I raced out of the basement and headed straight for my office.

I wanted to be on my home ground, where I’d made my preparations, when she came for me.

***

I hadn’t been there long when the windows darkened as the sun went down.

On our rundown floor, a lot of the offices were vacant, and the hallways were usually pretty empty by this time of day. I’d given the cleaning lady ten bucks to run a long errand for me.

The silence felt ominous. I was at my desk with a bottle of whiskey in front of me, taking a shot with a trembling hand to steady my nerves. I stared down at the dust on my desk and breathed in the office smell—old papers, antiseptic, and stale cigarette smoke.

Then the air suddenly turned still and cold and the floor just outside the door creaked a little.

“Someone there?” I said.

Marcilla’s purring voice sounded sweetly. “Mr. McCain? I’d love to see your office. May I come in.”

“Sorry,” I said in a voice calmer than I felt. “Landlord says no cats or dogs in the office, and I gotta follow the rules. I’m behind with my rent.”

There was silence for a moment, then the door opened, and she walked in—slowly, deliberately, dramatically.

And there she stood in front of me across the desk, almost shimmering. Marcilla’s voice had been honey, but her eyes were flame and her hair was wild.

She looked like rage wrapped in black chiffon.

“That was one of my favorite coffins,” she said. “And you’ve burnt half my gallery.”

“Yeah, and you killed four women.”

“Four this month. But that’s not so many in the grand scheme of things. And they were all very willing to die for art and for love.”

As she spoke, her fiery eyes slowly locked on mine, and I could feel their hypnotic pull, but I knew the danger and looked down as quickly as I could.

There was silence for a moment and then she spoke—as if from a thousand miles away.

“Mr. McCain… No, I take that back. I’m going to call you Dash… Dash, my love, I understand that you’re afraid. But I know that you want truth more than anything, and I have that for you right here. You can see beyond the veil. Things you’ve never imagined. Truth, the real truth, the whole truth—and love, and art, beauty, magic. It’s all here for you, my darling. All the secrets. All you have to do is open your heart to it. And whatever you may lose will be worth it, I promise. Just look into my eyes. That’s all.”

I felt her powers drawing me to her but resisted with everything I could muster. I stared hard at the label of the whiskey bottle on my desk, the remnants of the last drink still burning slightly in my mouth. A bottle of Paddy Old, my pop used to say, will never steer you far wrong.

And I held on like my life depended on it.

Still, I couldn’t shake the pull of her black eyes as they radiated through me. And I began to feel weaker with each passing moment.

It was surreal—sitting in my roller chair in my dingy office with that seductive undead thing in front of me.

And just when I felt like I might begin to break, she seemed to give up.

“As you like it,” she said simply.

Then black eyes ablaze, she gathered her strength, hissed in rage, and darted over the desk for my throat.

My heart leapt in panic, but she was stopped short—in total shock.

She had crossed the circle of holy water barely visible in the dim light of the office. Now she was trapped in the circle and almost paralyzed.

I watched her for a moment—her shock turning to disbelief and frustrated fury.

We locked eyes. The thing behind three hundred years of murder was trapped, and she knew it. She was the one in danger now.

I stood up out of my chair and took a deep breath. “Marcilla,” I said, “you hide behind a lot of names. Nicknames like Marci, Cilla, and Ci Ci... You like anagrams too. Millarca was carved on your statue. And I’m sure you’ve used Carmilla often enough too, but today... today I call you by your one true name—Mircalla. Mircalla Karnstein!”

She stammered in rage and panic. Trapped in the holy circle and confronted with her one true name, she began a chilling change that still haunts my nightmares to this day.

Before my eyes, her quasi-spectral form slowly started to shift in shape and wither.

She took on the features of the big black cat-like creature that was her true spiritual essence as a vampire. And she aged moment by moment, like a grape shriveling into a raisin.

In a few horrifying moments, a grizzled monstrous cat-thing looked up at me, its eyes dull and filled with a senile fury. Marcilla had projected beauty and strength, but that was all a lie... built on darkness and murder.

I took up the stake. It was sharpened to a point, and it had been blessed by the most saintly man I know.

I walked around the desk and raised up the stake for the lost girls, for all that she had killed and would have killed.

“I lay you to rest,” I said. “Mircalla Karnstein.”

Then I steeled myself and did what had to be done. The undead cat-thing stiffened on the dirty floor under the stake with a hoarse cry and collapsed.

The cat-body slowly turned to gray ash, and the ash crumbled. All that remained was a handful of dust, that—and a slight scent of rose water perfume mixed with something old and sour.

It was over. After three hundred years, it was over.

***

Next morning, with the sun shining through the windows in our musty office, Mickey listened to my story and surveyed the pile of dust that I had reverently swept up and placed in an old coffee can as an urn.

“You’re a lunatic,” he said. “You’re saying that was a vampire. Is that what you’re telling me? A vampire? In the office? Three hundred years old? You’re a lunatic!”

“I’m a successful lunatic.”

“Define ‘successful.’”

“The murders are over, and I’m still alive.”

“Well, at least you admit you’re a lunatic. That’s progress, Dash.”

I laughed and let Mickey have the last word. It always makes him happy.

The cops quietly closed the case files on the four young women who had been killed. The police had no leads, and they never officially recognized them as murders at all.

Marcilla Carsten was reported as missing. But no one could confirm that she ever existed in the records of any country or determine who she might really have been.

Some say Marcilla was just another alias of an international confidence woman, still on the loose. Others say that Marcilla was never just one woman to begin with, and that others—perhaps an entire crime ring—had used that name and might still be on the prowl in New York City.

But I—I know what really happened.

Nekoyia? It was fire damaged and shuttered. And it took almost twenty-four hours for the arts-crowd hipsters and their hangers-on to move to the next happenin’ hotspot.

And you, if you’re ever in Alphabet City walking past an abandoned art gallery on a cold dark night, and you feel like something’s watching—well, take my advice, don’t look too closely at the windows. You might not like what’s looking back at you.

And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

***

The Dash McCain story “Marcilla” was inspired in part by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (1872).

A new Dash McCain noir occult detective story will appear each month in 2026. In February, Dash confronts an ancient evil that stalks the streets of New York City in “The Egyptian Ember.”

Beginning in 2026, this Substack will feature short fiction chronicling the case files of Dash McCain—a noir private investigator with second sight who walks the mean streets of New York City in 1972, investigating supernatural mysteries.

Think Raymond Chandler meets Algernon Blackwood, J. S. Le Fanu, E. F. Benson, and M. R. James. These will be spooky, retro-noir tales inspired by the classic pulp detectives and the great traditions of uncanny literature.

This series is perfect for fans of occult detective fiction as well as for admirers of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The X-Files.