Chapter 4 — The Leech House

  Allen re-read the text as Hollow Glen station slid into view. The Ghostline ran through all the grittiest parts of town, and the passengers found therein reinforced that fact quite plainly.

  he thought, hitting send — the raucous coughing from the homeless man behind him coloring the scene.

  Tommy was—well, felt generous, but didn’t quite cover it either. They’d met back in college, and while Tommy came from the “right” side of society, he’d never minded slumming it with the plebs. He’d once extended a standing offer for well-paying freelance work — though the nature of the jobs he pitched always felt a little dubious.

  Still, Allen wasn’t in a position to be picky, and Tommy might pay up front.

  Pocketing the phone, Allen stepped off the train and into a wall of lingering morning fog. The air smelled faintly of rotting wood and distant rain — sweet, soft, and wrong in a way you didn’t quite notice until it settled in the back of your throat.

  Hollow Glen wasn’t a place — just old. Decayed. A district with deep magical roots and a reputation for attracting exactly the kind of people whose existence the Registry liked to ignore. College kids crossing the Cut to run experiments too shady for Cathexis. Rogues from the Warrens using it as a buffer zone to keep their home lives clean. And when things went south or sideways?

  It’ll work itself out.

  Case-in-point — 43, Barrow Hollow Road — and fresh F-tier contractor Allen Dessel, here to ‘work it out’.

  The house was a two-story husk — rundown and just shy of condemned. A picket fence — once white, probably — peeked through a riot of overgrown weeds. Creeping vines blanketed the facade, climbing up cracked brickwork in an attempt to reclaim what the city had clearly forsaken.

  If the place had ever been painted, that paint had long since surrendered. The bricks were pitted and half-eroded, the whole structure leaning ever so slightly to one side, as if it were too tired to stand upright.

  More interesting, though, were the bald patches in the lawn — dead spots where nothing grew at all. Not weeds, not grass, not even moss. Just bone-dry soil that seemed to emit an imperceptible aura of dread. Allen figured that was where the neighbors’ pets had dropped, though he didn’t have the gear on him to confirm it.

  Not that he really wanted to.

  The stench of rot and decay was pungent though intermittent — suggesting that more animal carcasses could still be found scattered around the property. A low hum resonated in Allen’s teeth — a subtle sign that while every other trace of modernity had abandoned this place, the electrical grid hadn’t.

  Assuming the contractors who’d filed “insufficient evidence” were either dangerously incompetent or legally blind, Allen snapped a mental picture and made his way toward the neighbors house.

  45 Barrow Hollow Road looked like 43 might’ve been — if someone had weeded the yard. And maybe exorcised a poltergeist.

  Allen rapped his knuckles sharply against the door, hopeful the tenant was home. The listing had suggested speaking with the neighbors — so speak, he would.

  The faint shuffle of slippered feet rasped from behind the door, and Allen let out a small sigh of relief— glad to find success on his first try.

  The door creaked open, long and slow, like it was savoring the suspense.

  “...Hello?” an elderly woman intoned. She seemed dazed or drugged — probably both — but knowing what lurked just a yard away, Allen found it hard to blame her.

  Flashing his brand-new badge, Allen summoned his best salesman voice.

  “Hello ma’am. I’m with the government, here to inspect your neighbor’s property for…”

  He faltered briefly, grasping for something plausible.

  “...code compliance,” he finished, lamely.

  “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions about the place?” He added, rallying with a charming smile, hoping she’d missed the hiccup.

  The woman stared at him blankly, just a beat too long — like a hug that should have ended three seconds ago — then let the door drift open further and gestured him inside, silently.

  With a grimace he hoped had passed for a smile, Allen strode confidently in.

  While 43 seemed to still have electricity, this woman appeared to have given such frivolities a complete pass. Lining the walls were candle sconces — lit candles and all — and interspersed between them hung ancient, yellowed portraits of stern-looking men in stiff, formal poses.

  Through the doorway at the end of the hall, a candlelit chandelier hovered over an antique hardwood table. The chairs beneath it were bare and angular, devoid of upholstery — the kind of seating that brought early 1900’s classroom dunce stools to mind.

  Taking a seat hesitantly, Allen grimaced again and tried for polite conversation.

  “Beautiful er… lovely home you have here, ma’am,” he said, “almost nouveau baroque.” he added a nervous chuckle to soften the absurdity.

  The woman stared.

  Ahem

  Clearing his throat for a second attempt, he pressed on.

  “Right — well…” he fumbled, “so your neighbor lives next door?” he finished, wincing. Surprisingly, question elicited a response from the seemingly comatose woman.

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  “Yes.” She said without a trace of sarcasm.

  This Allen thought in disbelieving reproach.

  He tried to subtly inspect his badge, wondering if it had exerted an undue amount of influence on the woman — masking the motion with a quick buff and polish — but nothing seemed abnormal.

  Deciding to level with her — since beating around the bush was starting to hurt his brain — Allen asked, point blank,

  “Have you filed any reports about # 43 Barrow Hollow Road recently?”

  Leaning forward he added,

  “It’s those reports that bring me here today, and I’d like to hear more details if you happen to have them.”

  After a long, uncertain pause, the woman lowered herself into a chair with slow, deliberate care.

  “I’ve had… dreams,” she said ethereally, eyes fixing on a point just over Allen’s shoulder — unintentionally freaking him out.

  As he tossed a nervous glance behind him, she continued.

  “Is it a doorway if there is no door? A hole, if there was no digging? A tear… without a blade?” her cadence was slow. Ominous.

  “It whispers to me, you know…” she whispered, making sudden eye contact.

  “every now and then — with words that rather than sound — with taste and smell, too.”

  There was something almost in the way she said it.

  “It asks me to come to it — but I know it just wishes to .”

  She blinked — and suddenly, a flash of clarity surfaced.

  “I’m sorry, what did I say?” she asked, confused.

  “...Uh.”

  Allen thought, now thoroughly weirded out.

  —

  “Right! Thank you so much for your time, ma’am,” he said, faux-cheerily. “Perhaps consider some melatonin and a nice, long nap,” he added, already halfway down the porch steps.

  “...yes,” came the slow, whispered reply — one that Allen made a point not to look back at.

  , he thought, frustrated — his only goal now to put as much distance as possible between himself and the lunatic he’d just spoken with.

  A gentle rustle in the hedge surrounding #45 sent him skittering with a startled squeak, but at a second glance— over the shoulder mid dash — Allen realized it was just a rabbit.

  Across the street — and far enough away to feel a modicum of safety return — Allen stopped to catch his breath and re-evaluate the case. Clearly, the other contractors who’d considered this job had had similar encounters with #45, because all wanted to do right now was skip town himself.

  He forcefully reminded himself that he was a competent, experienced connoisseur of the freaky and abnormal — and that dealing with this particular strain of abnormal was literally his job now. Calling on every ounce of self-discipline, he rallied himself to return.

  But first: some light reading.

  One of the few actual benefits of having attended the Cathexis academy was their mandatory course. Dry as the sahara, but critically useful. See, Cathexis was the gatekeeper of a highly coveted ritual — one that facilitated the creation and linking of a soul-bound grimoire. And they kept that ritual locked down tighter than the nuclear football. Or Fort Knox.

  Why? Because the ritual was a major recruiting draw — probably 65% of students enrolled for the grimoire. The rest were either scholarship grunts like Allen or silver-spoon legacies like the Vander brats. The schooling was a far-cry from the price tag, but the grimoire made up for all that and more.

  A soul-bound grimoire wasn’t some dusty old tome like or the No — this was a living record, tied directly to your soul, and it gave several laws of physics a bold middle finger.

  Summonable anytime, anywhere. Auto-organizing, with a built-in search function. Infinite pages. Entirely indecipherable to anyone but the owner. Done right, a soul-bound grimoire was the ultimate magical cheat sheet.

  Allen had seen the potential immediately — and capitalized. Many a long night had been spent plumbing the depths of the Cathexis Library, poring over anything that looked remotely useful and cramming it into his personal archive.

  Infinite pages? Search functionality? Private, and therefore no copyright issues?

  You can bet your ass he was going to do his level best to turn it into his own magical Google.

  Of course, even he’d been… from the university, that plan had already started to come apart. The clean, well-cited academic entries were haphazardly interspersed with any and everything he felt inclined to jot down, which introduced the first wrinkle.

  The search function worked perfectly. perfectly.

  Instead of distinguishing between journal scribbles and formal documentation, it just dumped everything that seemed related to the searched topic into one chaotic pile. Supposition, theory, half-drunken notes — all presented with the same confidence as peer-reviewed academia.

  Allen caught on early and tried to adapt — formatting his casual entries to be as distinct as possible. But still, confusion lingered.

  Example?

  Why might chupacabras be magical relatives of capybaras?

  An interesting hypothesis for an interesting class — but now it read as in the Allen Dessel Personal Grimoire?.

  Served him right, he supposed, for being too cheap to buy real notebooks and abusing the infinite pages feature like an idiot.

  He’d found workarounds — like searching the of a book he’d transcribed rather than keywords — but sometimes keywords were all you had.

  Like right now.

  With a flicker of focus, Allen summoned the grimoire to hand. It snapped into existence with a whisper of parchment and a whiff of old leather and ozone. Flipping it open mid-step, he racked his brain for what might be causing these disturbances.

  On the heels of his conversation with Madam 45, he’d ruled out passive manifestation parasites with extreme prejudice.

  he thought, honing in on 45’s direct references to “it”. #45 — and damn did he wish he’d gotten a name so he could stop calling her that — had said quite a lot while actually saying very little.

  Reading between the lines, Allen could deduce that:

  A. this was a singular entity.

  B. it was some flavor of extra-dimensional.

  C. it eats people.

  Not a ton to go on… but it was a start.

  Allen tapped the edge of the tome and muttered, “Search: extra-dimensional, sub-parameter: consumption.”

  The grimoire hummed with a noise that made no sound — — and the pages fluttered to life, rifling with a will of their own. They landed on a slapdash appendix listing every reference relating to the search parameters.

  Thankfully, it was smart enough to tag correlating titles — if an entry had one — which let Allen immediately rule out classics like “Denny’s incident Dec24 — NEVER AGAIN” and “What’s Off About Alexis”.

  Unfortunately, that still left him with a very long list of short quotes offering very little context. He sighed and started skimming.

  At least the results were sorted by submission date, giving him decent odds of hitting on a proper textbook entry early on, rather than whatever half-baked nonsense he’d logged on a whim.

  Still, it took about 45 minutes of dedicated, mildly resentful speed reading to find something that even might be applicable.

  The entry opened on Passive Manifestation Parasites — which had caught his attention in the first place — but eventually segued into a more dangerous strain of extra-planar entities.

  Allen was pretty sure this excerpt was ripped straight from the Necronomicon — theone — given 45’s creepy-ass ramblings, that felt like a point in its favor.

  infest

  *yada yada yada*— Allen skipped ahead,

  Allen blinked. No author. No date. No citation.

  But someone — probably him — had scrawled in red ink:

  “”

  He sighed.

  “Of course it is.”