Chapter 33: Marina Murders (13)

“So?  In or out?  It’s not too late.”  Lev asked.

“I’m still in.”  It came out surly, like I was upset at them for something that wasn’t their fault and outside their control.  

In reality, I was upset at everything but them.  The cold, Emyrith, the Ryus, and the Valentines… even just a bit at my parents.  Which wasn’t fair.  But nothing about this was fair.

Unfairness. Ironically, the only thing you can count on to be fair in life.

“Good, cause I need you.”  Lev stepped forward.  He pointed in the direction of the underpass, “What do you see?”

I noticed the subtle shift in power; Penelope taking the proverbial backseat while Lev came to the forefront.  I could only assume that this was their dynamic.  Penelope made all the calls, building out details of working relationships and dealing with people; meanwhile, Lev was the one who’d take charge when there was some kind of danger involved.

Which only confirmed everything I knew about their relationship so far.  Lev was the muscle, Penelope was the brains.  The only thing I hadn’t figured out yet was why?

What had he called her? ‘Heir’?  

I followed Lev and stopped about fifty feet away from the underpass.

The place gave me chills that reached all the way to my rectum.  And I hadn’t even opened up my Third Eye yet.

“What am I looking for?”

Lev shrugged.

“We wouldn’t know.”  Penelope added.

“Right.”

Like before, I had to play it by ear.  Just like how they were doing.  They weren’t too different from me, stumbling along and trying to make sense of it all.  Which was why that revelation freaked me out so much.  I had next to zero idea what I was doing.  And I say next to zero… because I wasn’t the same person I  was yesterday.

With slight effort, I felt my mind reach into a place deep inside of me –the place where all the memories lived, memories of the ghosts, the nightmares, the Fox-Sister; all the horrible, unspeakable things– and felt the place squirm in response, the dredge of ancient metaphysical flesh which squirmed in response my prodding.

My Third eye opened.

I’d been preparing myself for the worst.  Even before I opened up my senses, every fiber of my being said that this was the place.  This was the place where the creature dragged all its victims to, where the horrible eyeless evil thing I’d seen in my vision had taken poor Susan and killed her, before dumping her body like trash at the side of a road somewhere.

The world came into hazy focus, the spiritual layer of the world overlapping the physical.

Blood oozed out of the underpass.

It seeped into the cement, staining it with rusty brown.  Splotches of ruddy red stained the walls in a murderer’s attempt at avante-garde art –except I knew it wasn’t on purpose, just a byproduct of everything happening here.

The change of scenery was a representation: a symbol.  The murders had left a psychic energy.  Each murder a small echo of a tortured scream, the helpless terror of each victim leaving a spiritual scar on this landscape.  The blood stains was just a result of that; my brain interpreting what my Third Eye saw.  I knew that much from the books.

I also knew that it wasn’t just about seeing.  It also meant that I could hear;  it was an opening of the senses, sticking my head in the other side.  Seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and even touching to a certain extent; that was what it meant to open a Practitioner’s Third Eye.

There was nothing else.

No ghastly wails from the victim’s Vestiges, or Echoes of their murder.  Neither was I greeted with the sight of the murdering thing in question looking back at me from within the Underpass.  Quite the opposite, everything was quiet; the harder I focused and tried to hone in on the Other Side, the less I heard.  The waves crashing upon the docks became less, and so did the soft crunch of snow as Lev paced from foot to foot.

The silence was deafening.

The shadows in the underpass tunnel grew deeper, and growing infinitely more insidious with each passing second.

A minute passed.  Then another.

Nobody told me this, but I knew that having my Third Eye open for a long time in a place like this wasn’t a good thing.  It felt bad.  Like the way you just know it’s bad when looking down into a gorge and imagining yourself jumping off, or seeing a rabid dog go all stiff with its nose pointed towards you.  You just know and in the same way, I knew that I was risking something, or hurting myself.

It took another minute for me to see.

I saw what looked like the edge of a sleeve, flapping in the air as it disappeared deeper into the tunnel, a piece of red string trailing behind.  It had only been there for a second, but my Third Eye caught it.  What the Eye saw was stuck in my memory; and permanently etched there.

I turned off my Sight, closing my real eyes too.  Gnawing hunger pangs –the only way I could describe it really– throbbed painfully in the real estate behind my eyes, between my ears, and right below the top of my head.

“Did you see the sleeve?”  I asked Lev.

“Yes.”  Lev hissed in satisfaction.  “I thought it was a trick of the light.  You seeing it too means something was there, staring back at us.”

Hearing Lev put that much faith in my abilities boosted what little confidence I had in them.

Another question came to mind, “I thought you couldn’t see these things.”

“By virtue of being what we are,”  Penelope answered for him, “We can See most.  Remember, we carry a bit of that side in us; it’s etched in our DNA.  But there are some things we can’t See.  Like the ghost you were talking to.  When they’re too small, or too big, or too powerful, we can’t See.  Though not always, depending on who we are.”

Right.  I should’ve known that.  The bird-creature, which she called an ‘Outer’ at the subway.  Not only did she see it, she had tackled it.

“Ok, enough of that.”  Lev stepped past me, taking the lead in heading straight towards the tunnel.  “Let’s go.”

I shuffled off the snow chips on my jean cuffs and hurried after him.

Most pedestrian underpasses aren’t long, they’re not meant to be.  They’re usually built under train tracks so that people can cross over to the other platform easily and safely.  In the more civilized parts of New York –no offence to Staten Islanders– they’re usually placed around the Long Island Rail Road, otherwise referred to as the LIRR.

But this underpass didn’t have anything over it.  Not only that, the closer we got to the tunnel, the more I realized how dark it was inside.  This tunnel either wasn’t on the city’s grid or it’s been out of use for so long that they simply didn’t bother keeping up with maintenance and repairs.  It was just long enough so that the exit on the other side wasn’t visible either.

The snow wasn’t helping, and instincts honed from years of finding places to sleep between the city blocks of New York City said I’d be blind as a bat inside.

The moment we stepped into the tunnel, the snow-chill lifted from my skin.  The howling of the wind softened, muffled somewhat by the cement walls.  There was a soft click as Penelope lit up her flashlight.  The light swiveled, revealing parts of the tunnel that I didn’t want to see.

The tunnel wasn’t as wide as I thought it would be; just enough for the three of us to walk shoulder to shoulder with a little bit of finger room.  The inside was all wet cement, harsh stone, rigid angles and none of the warm roundness that I’d come to associate with fairytale bridges.  

Shards of glass from broken bottles littered the floor.  Half-burnt cigarettes and joints told tales of local teenagers using this place as a hangout spot.  I thought I saw a broken needle in one of the corners.  The scent of piss and rust was overwhelming.

And I realized just how insane this whole thing was.

I was a fucking eighteen year old about to walk into the tunnel that a ghost of the murder victim practically screamed that she got murdered in.

Jesus, I hadn’t even kissed a girl yet.

At least I held hands with a girl once, in eighth grade.  Her parents were getting divorced.  It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did as it always does.  Her name was Hazel.

We continued walking.