Whispers of the Dead_A Special Tracking Unit Novel by Spencer Kope

Author:Spencer Kope [Kope, Spencer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250072887
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Belen, New Mexico—September 8, 1:30 A.M.

Concealing darkness lies upon the street.

The homes thereon are cast into shadow, with only the angles showing real depth. All else falls away into the grays and blacks of night, the intangible veil that separates the seen from the unseen, muting color, and erasing detail and contrast. Quiet reigns, for it is well beyond the witching hour.

Yet not all is still.

Some shadows move.

The opening between the door and the frame gapes wide, providing ample room for the thin blade as it scrapes across the brass strike plate. Finding the latch, the tip of the knife digs in, wiggling and prying until the bolt loosens its grip and slides free. The door groans as it swings open an inch and abruptly stops. Quiet follows … waiting … listening. At length, the soft hiss of compressed gases issues from the top hinge, and is repeated at the middle and bottom hinges.

The air suddenly tastes of oil.

As the door begins to move again, the hinges are silent. The opening widens into blackness, pressed there by a dark hand. When it comes to a stop, the house lies still. For a full minute this unmoving silence continues, as if the very night is listening for disturbances within.

And then the shadow steps forward.

For a moment, the doorway is filled with his silhouette, and then he fades into the interior, shadow into shadow. Without a sound, he crosses the hardwood floor, as if gliding rather than walking … as if he has no feet at all.

* * *

When Carlos sits up in bed at 1:33 A.M., he’s not exactly sure why he’s awake. He listens for a car or a barking dog, but there is nothing … and something at the back of his mind is coiled, defensive. Fear rushes through him and he doesn’t know why. A dream, he reassures himself. It’s only a bad dream.

Yet still he sits, hardly daring to breathe for the noise it makes.

Several stints in prison had allowed Carlos to hone his lizard brain, that collection of primal instincts centered in the brain stem that signal danger, even when none is immediately apparent. Right now his lizard brain is on fire, and it shows in the sweat beading on the back of his neck and in his palms.

“Is someone there?”

He feels foolish as soon as the words are out of his mouth. If anyone had actually answered, he would have run screaming from the house, but he really didn’t expect anyone to answer. It was a reflex comment, something to break the quiet and reclaim night. Hearing his own voice should have calmed him, reassured him, but it doesn’t.

The same overwhelming sense of apprehension continues to claw at him, and he forces himself to breathe slowly, deeply. It’s just the night, he tells himself, just the utter quiet of the house, nothing more. But there’s a patch of darkness in the open doorway to the walk-in closet that he didn’t notice before; a darkness deeper than normal—deeper than it should be.

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