CHAPTER 4: THE HOUSE ON ABERDEEN STREET
1
The desert held its breath as Sheriff Ezra Grandos guided his patrol cruiser down the dirt path that twisted toward the old quarry, the vehicle's tires crunching gravel with a sound like bones being ground to powder. Dawn was breaking across the Arizona sky in strokes of bruised purple and sickly orange, but the light seemed to die before it reached the earth, as if the landscape itself had developed a taste for darkness. Thirty-six hours had passed since Bobby Brando and Woody Callahan had vanished into the night, and every instinct Grandos possessed—every one honed by twenty-three years of policing a town that shouldn't exist, that defied rational explanation at every turn—screamed that the answer lay ahead. In the black mansion. In the place where reality wore thin like old fabric stretched too far across too sharp a frame.
He had been avoiding this place. Consciously, deliberately avoiding it, the way a man avoids looking directly at the sun even when he knows he must eventually face it. The mansion had stood there since before Saint Patrick had a name, since before white men had carved roads through the desert and claimed ownership of land that had never truly belonged to anyone. Local legend said it had appeared overnight, that it grew from the earth like some monstrous black flower fed by the nightmares of sleeping gods. Grandos knew better. He knew it had been built, and by whom, and for what purpose. He just wished he didn't.
The cruiser's headlights cut through the morning mist, revealing the skeletal silhouette of the house against the lightening sky. Black as sin, Billy Johnson had called it, and the old man hadn't been wrong. The paint seemed to drink the morning light, absorbing it rather than reflecting it, creating an impression of absolute void where a building should have stood. The windows—boarded up, some from inside—watched him approach like the dead eyes of something that had witnessed the birth and death of worlds. Grandos felt the familiar chill crawl up his spine, the cold that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with proximity to the wrongness that permeated this place like a disease.
He parked the cruiser thirty yards from the property line, far enough that the house couldn't reach him with whatever tendrils of influence it might extend, close enough that he could still see the details that made his stomach twist. The gate hung open now, ripped from its hinges with a violence that suggested something large and desperate had fled the property in terror. Or something equally large and terrible had forced its way in. Grandos drew his sidearm—not that bullets would do much good against what lurked in places like this, but the familiar weight in his hand was a comfort, a connection to the rational world he was paid to protect even when that world had holes in it you could drive entire realities through.
The air changed as he stepped through the broken gate. It grew heavier, thicker, charged with something that tasted like ozone and old blood. The desert sounds that had followed him here—crickets, distant coyote cries, the whisper of wind through scrub brush—went utterly silent. Even the birds knew better than to fly over this ground. Grandos walked carefully, his boots making soft sounds in the gravel, his eyes scanning every shadow, every window, every piece of architecture that seemed deliberately designed to hurt the human eye. The house was wrong in ways that defied simple description. The angles didn't quite add up, the proportions subtly off, as if it had been designed by someone who understood three-dimensional space but had chosen to violate its principles out of spite.
That's when he saw the body. Lying in the dead grass near the front steps, dressed in the same dirty jeans and flannel shirt Grandos had seen him wearing yesterday morning when they'd spoken outside the Quick Stop. Billy Johnson, the town's unofficial historian, the keeper of secrets that should have remained buried, the man who had undoubtedly told the boys about this place. Dead. Very, very dead.
Grandos approached cautiously, his training warring with his supernatural experience. Crime scene procedure said secure the area, call for backup, preserve evidence. Experience said there was no backup he could call that would understand what they were walking into, no forensic kit that could measure the residue of dimensional passages, no detective manual that covered cases where the perpetrators might exist outside linear time. He knelt beside the body, and the sight made him curse in three different languages.
Billy Johnson hadn't just been killed. He had been executed. A single bullet hole in the center of his forehead, neat and precise and almost surgical in its placement. But around that hole, the skin had started to... change. It was darkening, taking on a texture like old leather, but with patterns that reminded Grandos of the symbols he'd seen in books that should never have been written, that spoke of angles between dimensions and geometries that made mathematicians weep and go mad. The blood around the wound wasn't drying normally either. It had crystallized, forming intricate fractal patterns that caught the morning light with an unnatural shimmer, as if the very essence of the man's life force had been trying to communicate something in its final moments.
"Você trouxe isto sobre si mesmo, velho," Grandos whispered, his voice rough with grief and anger. You brought this on yourself, old man. Billy had known the risks. He'd spent the last forty years collecting the town's dark secrets, filling notebooks with stories that would get him killed if the wrong people—be they human or otherwise—ever discovered what he knew. But he'd also been the boys' best chance of understanding what they were walking into. And now he was dead, his last words probably screamed into a silence that had no ears to hear them.
Grandos stood slowly, his joints protesting, his heart hammering against his ribs with a rhythm that felt all too familiar. Fear. Cold, clean, rational fear that kept a man alive when everything wanted him dead. He scanned the area around the body, his trained eyes picking up details that most would miss: the disturbed soil where someone had struggled, the scuff marks on the porch steps that suggested heavy boots and desperation, the faint shimmer in the air near the front door that looked like heat haze but felt like the aftermath of something tearing through the fabric of reality.
He was about to call it in, to radio dispatch and request the coroner and crime scene unit, when something caught his eye. A small object clutched in Billy's rigid right hand, almost hidden by the crystallized blood that had pooled around his fingers. Grandos knelt again, carefully extracting the object with gloved hands. It was a key. An old brass key, ornate and heavy, with a head shaped like a coiled serpent eating its own tail. The symbol of Epimethius. The serpent that consumes its own tail, forever returning to its beginning, just as the ancient entity was returning to claim what had been stolen from it.
The key was cold. Unnaturally cold, as if it had been stored in liquid nitrogen rather than clutched in a dying man's hand. As Grandos held it, he felt something stir in his mind—a whisper of memory, of another time, another place where keys like this had opened doors that should have remained sealed forever. He had seen this symbol before. Not in books. Not in stories. Carved into the flesh of a man who had tried to explain why his daughter had vanished from her locked bedroom, leaving behind only a drawing of a snake eating its own tail and the smell of ozone and rot.
"Billy," Grandos said to the dead man, "what did you tell those boys? What doors did you help them open?" But Billy Johnson wasn't talking anymore. His secrets had died with him, crystallized in patterns that only the mad or the damned could read.
2
The front door of the mansion stood slightly ajar, exactly as the boys had left it, exactly as it had stood for forty years since the night of the last great failure. Grandos pushed it open with his foot, his weapon raised, every nerve ending screaming that this was wrong, that this was the kind of mistake from which men didn't walk away. The door swung inward without a sound, without protest, without the creak of hinges that had been rusting for decades. And inside—inside was darkness so absolute it seemed to have weight, to have substance, to actively resist the morning light that tried to follow him inside.
The sheriff reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a heavy silver flashlight, clicking it on with a practiced motion. The beam cut through the darkness, but it didn't illuminate so much as it revealed the depth of the wrongness here. The entryway was exactly as he remembered from his last visit twenty years ago, when he'd been young and stupid and thought he could solve this town's problems with a badge and a gun and a refusal to believe in things that couldn't be explained by science. Grand staircase spiraling upward into shadows. Furniture scattered and broken as if by violent struggle. Portraits on the walls whose subjects seemed to shift and change when you looked directly at them, their eyes following you with malevolent intelligence.
But there was something new here. Something that hadn't been present during his last investigation. The air was alive with energy that made his teeth ache and his fillings throb with a low, persistent hum. It was the aftermath of a dimensional crossing, the residue left behind when reality tore itself open to allow passage between worlds. Grandos had felt this before, in places where the walls between what is and what could be had grown dangerously thin. It meant someone had crossed over recently. Someone untrained. Someone with power they didn't understand. Bobby and Woody. They had been here.
He moved deeper into the house, his flashlight beam dancing across surfaces that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. The parlor was a cathedral of decay, but here too there were signs of recent passage. Footprints in the dust—two sets, one larger than the other—leading toward the back of the house. The prints were distinctive: one from a pair of Air Jordan 11s, the other from Converse sneakers that matched the description Margo had given of what Bobby had been wearing. Grandos knelt, studying the prints, his mind reconstructing their path. They had moved with purpose, not like terrified boys fleeing a haunted house, but like explorers following a trail only they could see. Toward something they had been told to find.
The hallway leading to the elevator was where Grandos found the first real evidence of what Billy had shared with the boys. The walls here were covered with markings, symbols scratched into the peeling wallpaper with something that had left residue he couldn't identify—not paint, not blood, not anything human. The symbols matched the ones growing on Billy Johnson's forehead, the same geometries that made his eyes water and his thoughts slide into uncomfortable directions. They were dimensional coordinates, map markers showing the way between worlds, written in a language that predated human speech by millennia.
"Idiota," Grandos muttered, tracing one of the symbols with his gloved finger. Idiot. Billy had given them the keys to the kingdom without teaching them how to defend themselves against the things that ruled there. He had probably thought he was helping, thought the boys might be different from the others, might succeed where generations had failed. But Grandos knew better. The realm didn't care about intentions. It cared about power, about hunger, about the endless cycle of consumption and replacement that had governed the multiverse since before time had a name to be called by.
He reached the elevator and stopped, his flashlight beam playing across the ornate doors. The elevator of impossible function, the machine that shouldn't exist but had been operating in this house since long before elevators had been invented, since before the concept of vertical transportation had occurred to human minds. The doors stood open now, revealing the mirrored interior that reflected his own face back at him infinitely, each reflection slightly different, slightly wrong, as if showing him versions of himself that had made different choices, that had walked different paths, that had died in different ways.
The inside of the elevator was covered in more symbols, but these were different. These weren't just coordinates—they were equations, calculations, the mathematics of dimensional passage written by minds that understood the universe as a tapestry that could be folded, cut, and rewoven according to principles that made Einstein's theories look like children's drawings. Grandos felt a headache forming behind his eyes, the familiar precursor to understanding things humans weren't meant to understand. He forced himself to look away, to focus on something solid, something real.
That's when he saw it. Tucked behind the elevator's call button, almost hidden in the shadows where the mirrored walls met the brass frame. A small leather-bound book, identical to the dozens he had confiscated from Billy Johnson's apartment over the years. Grandos pulled it free with a pair of evidence tweezers, his hands steady despite the tremor that ran through his chest. Billy's journal. The old man had brought it with him, had probably been writing in it right up until the moment someone put a bullet through his brain.
The sheriff moved to the window, using the morning light to examine the journal's contents. The handwriting was Billy's unmistakable scrawl—furious, spidery, cramped as if the old man was always racing against some deadline only he could perceive. The first few pages contained Billy's usual ramblings about town history, about the suspicious deaths that had been covered up, about the patterns of disappearances that followed astronomical events in ways that couldn't be coincidence. But then Grandos found the entries from the past week, the ones that mattered.
October 28th. The boys came again. Bobby Brando and Woody Callahan. They listen. The Callahan boy has the rage in him, the fire that calls to the dark places. The Brando boy has something else, something quieter but deeper. The realm-mark. I saw it when he touched the old map, the way the symbols responded to him. They've chosen him, or he's been chosen for them. I don't know which is worse.
October 30th. I told them. I had to. The dreams are getting stronger, the whispers clearer. Epimethius stirs in his prison of endings, and the pathways between worlds grow thin. The 1956 door is opening again. I can feel it. I gave them the coordinates, the safe words, the warnings about what lurks in the spaces between. The Brando boy took it all in, his eyes seeing beyond the paper to the truths written there. The Callahan boy just wants adventure, the fool. He doesn't understand that adventure is what the darkness calls itself when it's trying to sound friendly.
November 2nd. They're going to go. I can see it in their faces, the way they look at each other when they think I'm not watching. They think they're being brave, think they're exploring an abandoned house. They have no idea they're walking to the altar, no idea they're being offered as keys to open locks that should have remained sealed forever. I should stop them. I should call their parents, the police, someone who can lock them away safe. But I won't. Because I'm a coward, and because somewhere in my rotting soul, I still believe. I still believe that this time might be different. That this time, the door might lead somewhere better.
November 5th. They're going tonight. I felt the realm reach out and claim them, felt the moment their names were written in the book of the lost. I'm going to the house to watch, to bear witness. If this goes wrong, if the darkness takes them like it took the others, then someone needs to remember. Someone needs to keep writing until the bullet finds them too.
Grandos closed the journal, his hands shaking now despite his best efforts to control them. Billy had known. He had known exactly what was going to happen, had known the boys were destined for something terrible and magnificent, and he had let them walk into it anyway. The old man had been a collaborator, a willing participant in the machinery that fed children to the hungry dark, all because of some desperate hope that this time might be different.
The sheriff's radio crackled to life, dispatch calling for him, wanting to know his status, wanting to know why he hadn't checked in. Grandos ignored it. He was deeper in the house now, moving past the elevator into areas he hadn't explored in twenty years, into the parts of the mansion that existed in folds of space that didn't quite align with normal geometry. He was looking for something specific, for the evidence that would connect this disappearance to the others, that would reveal the pattern he had been tracking since his first week in Saint Patrick.
The basement door was in the kitchen, hidden behind a false panel that Billy had shown him once during a drunken confession, back when Grandos still believed there was such a thing as coincidence, back when he thought the universe was fundamentally rational. The door opened onto darkness that felt different from the shadows upstairs—deeper, older, charged with the weight of years spent housing things that should never see the light of day.
Grandos descended the wooden stairs, his flashlight beam cutting through dust that sparkled with an unnatural luminescence, like particles of ground crystal or powdered starlight. The basement was larger than it should have been, extending beyond the physical boundaries of the house above, reaching into spaces that made no sense according to the laws of physics as humans understood them. The air here was thick with the smell of old rituals, of things that had been burned and things that had bled and things that had been offered up to powers that existed before humanity had learned to fear the dark.
And there, in the center of the impossible space, was the evidence he had been seeking. An altar of black stone, carved with the same symbols that decorated the house upstairs, that decorated Billy's forehead, that decorated the journal in his pocket. And on that altar, laid out with ritual precision, were the things that proved what Saint Patrick really was, what it had always been.
Photographs. Dozens of them, black and white, yellowed with age but still clear. Children from different decades, all posed in the same ceremonial positions, all wearing the same robes decorated with the serpent symbol. Boys and girls who had disappeared from town records, whose parents had been told they ran away or moved away or died in accidents that left no bodies. The class photos of missing children, the yearbook portraits of the never-found, arranged in careful patterns around a central object that made Grandos's breath catch in his throat.
A book. Bound in what looked like human skin, written in ink that shimmered with the same iridescent quality as Billy's blood. The founding text of the Church of the Final Dawn, the cult that had been born in this basement in 1956, that had secretly governed Saint Patrick for forty years, that had been offering children to the darkness in exchange for power, for knowledge, for the privilege of serving as midwives to the birth of a new reality.
Grandos approached the altar slowly, his training forgotten, his fear overridden by the cold certainty of finally understanding. He had known there was a conspiracy, had known the town's leadership was involved in something dark. But he had never imagined the scope of it, never realized that Saint Patrick wasn't just a town with secrets—it was a machine, a carefully constructed device designed to open doors between worlds, to serve as an anchor point for when Epimethius returned to reclaim what had been stolen from him.
The photographs told the whole story. Children from 1956, 1964, 1972, 1979, 1987, 1995. A cycle of offerings, timed to astronomical alignments, to moments when the walls between realms grew thin enough for passage. Each child marked with the serpent symbol, each photographed before being taken to the house, each fed to the elevator that wasn't really an elevator but a gateway, a threshing device that separated those who could survive the realm from those who would be consumed by it.
And in the center of it all, the photographs from the current cycle. Bobby Brando and Woody Callahan, their faces captured in the same ceremonial poses, their eyes wide with the same mixture of fear and excitement that Grandos had seen in every other photograph. They were the latest offerings, the latest keys in a lock that had been slowly turning for forty years. But they were different too. The journal had been right about that. Bobby had the realm-mark, the sign that marked him as something more than human, something that could potentially challenge the darkness rather than simply feeding it.
Grandos picked up the cult's holy book, his hands steady now, his mind clear with the terrible clarity of the damned. He needed to understand what they believed, what they thought they were accomplishing with these rituals, what connection they had to the ancient entity that stirred in his own nightmares, the one whose name he sometimes whispered in his sleep without meaning to.
The pages were filled with the same delusional theology he had encountered before, the same desperate rationalizations that men use when they ally themselves with powers they cannot comprehend. The cultists of the Final Dawn believed they were helping Epimethius not to destroy all universes, but to restore the original creation, the single perfect reality that had existed before the Light had splintered everything into infinite imperfect copies. They saw themselves as saviors, as patriots of the true reality, as warriors fighting against the cosmic error that had produced this flawed multiverse.
But the truth was simpler, and uglier. Epimethius didn't want to restore anything. It wanted to consume everything, to digest all the infinite realms and use that energy to break free from its prison of endings, to emerge into the spaces between worlds as something that could never be contained again. The cultists weren't allies—they were appetizers, and their children were the main course.
Grandos was so absorbed in the book, in the awful clarity of its revelations, that he almost didn't hear the sound upstairs. The soft creak of a floorboard, the careful tread of boots on the hardwood above, the distinctive click of a shotgun being pumped. He wasn't alone. Someone had followed him, someone who knew what he would find here, someone who was part of the machine.
The sheriff moved quickly, grabbing the journal and the key from Billy's body, shoving them into his jacket pockets before retreating into the shadows behind the altar. His heart pounded against his ribs, but his hands were steady, his mind clear. He had spent twenty-three years preparing for this moment, for the confrontation that would determine whether he was a lawman protecting his town or a guardian protecting reality itself.
The footsteps descended the basement stairs, slow and deliberate, confident. A flashlight beam cut through the darkness, sweeping across the ritual space, across the photographs of missing children, across the altar that had been the site of so many terrible transactions. And then the beam found him, found Grandos crouched behind the black stone, found the sheriff with his weapon drawn and his face set like stone.
"Well, Sheriff," said a voice Grandos recognized instantly, the voice of the man who had appointed him to this position, the man who had been mayor of Saint Patrick for as long as anyone could remember. "I was wondering when you'd finally get around to visiting our little chapel."
Mayor Robert Thorne stepped into the light, his expensive suit looking out of place in the primitive ritual space, his face wearing the same paternalistic smile he used at town meetings and ribbon-cuttings. In his hands, he held a shotgun, but he wasn't pointing it at Grandos. He was holding it casually, as if they were old friends meeting for hunting season rather than enemies meeting at the scene of a forty-year conspiracy.
"You shouldn't have killed Billy," Grandos said, his voice low and dangerous. "He was harmless."
Thorne laughed, a sound that was genuine and somehow more terrifying than any threat. "Harmless? Sheriff, Billy Johnson was the most dangerous man in this town. He knew things, he wrote things, he preserved memories that should have been allowed to fade. He was a liability, and his time had simply come. Just like yours has."
The mayor's smile widened, but it didn't reach his eyes. His eyes were cold, calculating, the eyes of a man who had been making impossible choices for so long that he no longer recognized the difference between right and wrong, only between what served the plan and what threatened it.
"You're either with us or against us, Ezra. It's that simple. You always knew it would come to this eventually. Every lawman who serves this town has to make a choice: protect the people as they are now, or protect the reality they're about to become."
Grandos stood slowly, his weapon still raised but not pointed directly at the mayor. Not yet. "The boys, Bobby and Woody. They're not like the others, are they? That's why you're so worried. That's why you had to silence Billy."
Thorne's expression shifted, the paternalistic mask slipping just enough to reveal the fear beneath. "The Brando boy is marked. We've been watching him for years, waiting for the signs to manifest. He's not just another offering—he's a potential vessel, a possible host for when our Lord returns. If he survives the realm, if he masters it rather than being consumed by it... everything changes. The prophecy could be fulfilled."
"Prophecy?" Grandos spat the word like something vile. "You're basing all this on the ravings of madmen from the 1950s who thought they could bargain with forces they couldn't possibly comprehend."
"They understood more than you think," Thorne said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "They knew that the multiverse is dying, Sheriff. All the infinite realms are suffering from the same sickness, the same entropy that eventually consumes everything. The Light that created them is fading, and when it goes, everything goes with it. Everything except the original. Everything except Epimethius's realm."
He stepped closer, the shotgun still held casually but his finger now resting near the trigger. "We're not destroying anything, Ezra. We're preserving. We're ensuring that something survives when the rest collapses. The boys are our best chance—Bobby as potential host, Woody as the sacrifice that empowers the transition. It's a terrible thing, I won't deny that. But it's necessary."
Grandos felt something inside him break, some last piece of hope that his town could be saved, that the conspiracy could be unraveled without bloodshed. Thorne wasn't just a corrupt politician or a deluded cultist. He was a true believer, a man who had looked into the abyss and decided to serve it rather than fight it.
"The problem with your logic, Robert," Grandos said, raising his weapon until the sights lined up with the mayor's chest, "is that you're assuming Epimethius wants to preserve anything. You're thinking like a human being trying to understand something that predates humanity entirely. It doesn't want to save reality. It wants to eat reality. And you and your 'church' are just the appetizers."
For a moment, the basement was silent except for the hum of dimensional energy, for the whisper of dust motes in the flashlight beam, for the sound of two men breathing, each waiting for the other to make the first move. Then Thorne smiled, a genuine smile this time, one that showed his teeth and the confidence of a man who believed he was on the right side of history.
"The difference between us, Sheriff, is that I'm ready to die for my beliefs. Are you?"
Grandos didn't answer. He just squeezed the trigger.