The Somnibus: Book I - Finding the Mark (A Paranormal Thriller) (10 page)

M
ort came in and stopped in his tracks in front of Mallen.
He walked over to his dead brother and looked down on him. He wiped his eyes
and took in a full chest of air. His eyes surveyed the barn before he ran
through the damaged front door. I waited until he’d had enough time to get out
of the area before climbing down from the loft.

I walked on tiptoes, trying to soften the
crackling of the hay and gravel beneath my feet. My head peeked out of the barn
and saw nothing of Mort.

I held the key to Mort’s immortality in my pocket,
knowing he would put up a fight to get it. My Jeep sat maybe fifty yards from
the entrance, and I dashed for it. My heart hammered in my chest when I reached
the door.

My hand found the key still hanging in the
ignition.
Nothing.
I turned the key twice more before
realizing it wasn’t going to start. It hit me that I’d left the lights on when
I’d first gone into the barn.
Now
what the hell
am
I going to do?

As I sat thinking about my next move, the driver’s
side window exploded, sending shards of glass into my face. My left eye went red,
and I instinctively jumped to the passenger’s seat. Pain seared my face as I
scrambled to escape, my left ear ringing out in unbearable agony as I fumbled
for the door handle. The door swung open, and I fell to the ground,
disoriented. Footsteps pressed into the
dirt
as they
got closer. I put my head to the dirt, and they stopped behind me.

Mort yanked me up by the collar of my shirt. I had
no sense of balance and my surroundings spun out of control. He reached into my
pocket and took out my trace. He held it up and then put it in his pocket.
“I’ll hold onto this for you. Now, where were we? Where did you say you threw
my trace?”

My legs struggled to find any support while he
dragged me back into the barn. He dropped me to the ground, landing me in the putrid
puddle of his dead brother. I tried to regain my bearings while the black
liquid squelched under me.

“Alright!”
I shook my head, hoping to regain some focus.
“I’ll take you where I threw it. Just give me a second to catch myself.”

He bent over and picked up the shovel I’d used to
bash Mallen’s head in. “You have one minute to get
yourself
together.”

I struggled for something to say, anything to
stall the situation. “The Somnibus, are they even real?”

“Not that it’s going to matter to you much longer,
but they are. Not quite what I told you they were, but they are real. They’re
stupid creatures, in fact. They can be a nuisance, but I know how to handle
them. I’ve killed plenty of them, and now they just let me go about my
business. As far as the other stuff, the stuff between Mallen and me, that was
just theatrics, having a little fun at your expense.”

“Is that why they didn’t attack us when you took
me to Brookesville?”

“Yes. They know better. Those were the lower-level
feeders, and they don’t have much fight in them. Some of them can be nasty, but
they don’t mess with me, and I don’t mess with them. There’s a balance to be
had.” Mort lost his focus a bit and lowered the shovel, resting on his palms as
we talked.

“Why do you need both traces? What’s the point?”

“I wish you knew even a little about all of this.
Mallen wanted your trace. I went along with it, but he wanted to take over the
world, so to speak. I’m not even sure he could have obtained the power needed
from the stone. He was sort of a buffoon when it came to most things. I wanted
him to have yours, so I would have my own. I just want my immortality.”

“I thought my trace would only work for me or my
family. Why would it have worked for Mallen or you?” My balance leveled off and
steadied a bit.

“Well, that’s true as long as you have living
family members. It may not give me the extra power you possess, but at the very
least it should provide the added protection of its immortality.” Mort grew
more agitated with my questions and he picked up the shovel again. “Otherwise,
it will be loyal to the first person to possess it after you die. As I’m sure
you’ve guessed, that will be me. It’ll give me a backup, so to speak. Your
minute is more than up. Let’s go.”

The strength returned to my hands and my mind.
“Okay, okay. I’ll show you where I threw it and you can go get it.”

“Alright, but
we
will go get it.” He walked
backward to a storage room just behind him and grabbed a couple of flashlights.
“Get up.” He shoved the end of the shovel in my back and pushed me through the
barn doors.

“I threw it over there.” I pointed to a clump of
trees and we walked away from the barn. Each of us had a flashlight and as we
walked, I slid my hand into my pocket with Mort’s trace, the stone cool like
mine.

Leaning over I shuffled my feet in the leaves and
dirt. “It should be somewhere around here,” The beam of light caught a solid
branch on the ground about five feet away. I made my way toward it and stopped
for a second. Mort stood at least ten feet away, and I’d only have a couple
seconds before he reached me. My vision had not yet returned in my left eye,
and my ears rang with pain, but I had to do something before he realized I had
taken him on a wild goose chase.

“I think I found it!” I dropped my flashlight,
picked up the branch, and waited for the sound of his footsteps. His footsteps
fell closer. I waited.

He came up behind me and I stood up and swung the
branch with all my power. The solid connection made a hollow sound as it took
us off our feet. The force splintered the branch in my hand as I came to rest
on my ass and Mort landed flat on his back.

I stood up and rushed over to grab my flashlight.
The light gleamed down revealing a huge dent in the center of his forehead, his
eyes unfocused yet staring upward into the darkness. The skin had split in the
center of the depression, and I nearly vomited as blood bubbled from it.
Lowering my head to his chest, I found a faint heartbeat. He took fast but
shallow breaths. Something tugged at my conscience as I knelt over him, blood
gurgling from his broken skull. I knew what he had had in store for me, but a
part of me wanted to rest his trace in his hand and save his life.

I grabbed my trace from his pocket before pulling
his trace from mine. I studied it between my thumb and forefinger, thinking of
my mother and father. What would they have done? My mind twisted as to what I
should do. Mort had been a good friend, or so I thought, up to that point, but
he’d also planned to kill me tonight. Time stood still as I pondered my
situation.

My parents raised me to be forgiving of others,
but that was before someone had killed them, murdered by a person who had no
regard for the worth of their lives. In my mind, Mort had condoned the actions of
his brother by not acting sooner. He was as much responsible for their deaths
as Mallen. I could have let him die, and no one would know except the man
behind the mirror.

Mort’s throat gurgled, and I reached to put the
stone in his hand. My conscience couldn’t carry another life taken by my hands.

A wind swept through the trees, and the air became
metallic and hot, turning foul as the unmistakable tinny taste coated my
tongue. Mort’s eyes filled with fear for the first time. One of his pupils
was dilated
from the blow and the other had fallen out of
center. He mouthed the words “I’m sorry” while the unmistakable shriek of the
Somnibus raced in from the distance.

One of them rushed toward me but stopped just
short of striking me in the chest. I fell back, and Mort’s trace fell from my
hand, landing next to his body. The Somnibus hung in the air before it darted
away and joined the others as they circled in the dark sky above us. Their
wispy cloaks trailed behind them as they tightened their circle, floating like
whispers spoken into the air, their shadowy tendrils in tow. I squeezed my eyes
shut and opened them again in hopes that they were just a part of my
imagination. They continued to swirl in the darkness above.

The group gradually descended upon us, and their
circle tightened further. They continued, lower to the ground and closer to
Mort. A glimmer of life flashed in his eyes as the tendrils reached out and
fully engulfed him. The swirling shadow rose from the ground, dragging Mort’s
body with it.

His feet and arms dangled from the shadowy vortex
as it rose into the sky. Just as his hands left the ground, his fingers reached
for the trace that had landed next to him. The dust swirled, and I shielded my
remaining good eye with my arm.

The wind died and I lowered my arm. The Somnibus,
and Mort, were gone. Leaves swirled in their wake, leaving no evidence that
they had even been there. The tainted air dissipated, and the concerted
shrieking faded into the night sky before the air became still.

I made my way back to where Mort had been lying.
My head tipped to find nothing but a clear night sky full of country stars. The
ground where the Somnibus had taken Mort from sat empty. Not only was all
evidence of Mort gone,
but
so was his trace.

END OF BOOK I

Read an excerpt from
Book II on the following pages

AN EXCERPT FROM THE SOMNIBUS: BOOK
II-THE SIX STONES

I
bought a new bed when I replaced the death stained carpet in my bedroom. I
wanted to remember the happy times in the house from my childhood, the days
when my parents were still alive, and did my best to erase the bad memories
from days spent there with Mort. Lying down, I fell asleep the minute my head
hit the pillow.

My eyes fluttered
open and I stood in an unfamiliar room. A stark white, domed ceiling towered
over the expansive space and colorless walls rose from a cold marble floor. The
box from the vault sat on a metal table in front of me, a symbol stamped on the
lid.

Unlocked, I
removed the latch and lifted the lid. Inside, six stone traces sat arranged in
a pattern. Mine was in the middle and one of the other stones resembled the one
Mort and Mallen shared, but I didn’t recognize the other four. Each of the
outer stones had a hole in the center. Reaching into the box, the mark on my
hand emitted an emerald glow, painting the inside of the box a brilliant green.

Before I touched
any of the stones, they began to vibrate and hum in rhythm. Pulling my hand from
the box, I watched while they arranged themselves into an odd pattern. My trace
remained in the center as the others migrated toward the middle, and the outer
edges of my oval trace darkened to a deeper shade of green as they drew closer.
The stones paused before reaching the center and then snapped into place
against my center stone. The deep green mark in the middle of my trace became
black, spinning like a mini vortex.

The others stones
continued to vibrate and hum with an almost inaudible tune; I felt the sound
more than heard it. My trace stopped swirling and I again reached into the box.
The green glow illuminated the inside of the container and the entire shape
spun in the center. I jerked my hand out while the stones spun as one complete
unit. 

A focused beam of
white light burned through the air to the ceiling. Stepping back, I tilted my
head up while light poured onto the ceiling, spilling a puddle-like reflective
image onto the white dome. Images churned in the reflection while I tried to make
sense of them. The light’s intensity grew, and as I held my arm up to
shield
my eyes my palm again lit up in a green brilliance.
The emerald color mixed with the pure white of the light to give clarity to the
imagery on the ceiling.

The picture
showed what appeared to be some type of island, the sky a dreary gray with fog
and haze smothering the light, allowing only a fraction to show
through
. The scale of the images was unclear; I might have
been a hundred feet or a hundred miles above the trees. An ebony and charcoal
landscape stretched in every direction when a bright flash lit up the center of
the image. Within seconds, Somnibus fled from the trees in every direction, not
one
or two, but thousands. Their shadowy figures
rolled in waves, streams of Somnibus bleeding from the center, flowing
endlessly into the black and dusty area surrounding the trees before
disappearing out of the edge of the projected image. The flow of shadows slowed
before the scene went still.

My
neighbor’s barking dog woke me up from the confusing, yet strangely clear dream
at two in the morning. The mutt had a habit of waking up and barking when Tom
came home from work in the middle of the night.

I
rolled over and wrapped the pillow around my ears before finally falling asleep
after the barking slowed and eventually stopped.

A
sliver of light sliced its way through the blinds in my room and I sat up in
bed recalling the vivid details of the previous night’s dream.

What
scared the Somnibus from the trees? What frightened
them
? The Somnibus had fled when Mort had shown up for the first
time. He had appeared as an orb of white light, and all but one took off,
leaving only my attacker. Was Mort still alive and somehow trying to tell me
something? The Somnibus had taken Mort and I never found his trace, the one
that gave him immortality.

The
box at the bank had a habit of tugging at my curiosity, and it weighed heavily
on my mind after the dream. I threw on some clothes and headed to the bank,
determined to find out what was inside.