Judas Goat Read online

  “What happened to you out here?” he whispered.

  Lamp in hand, he descended the stairs with the same hollow feeling in his gut he’d had last time. As he stepped into the kitchen, light spilled across the room, producing a large pool on the ceiling and wide bands along the walls. The windows over the sink were pitch-black reminders of how dark it had become outside. Night had fallen fast and hard, engulfing the cottage and only adding to Lenny’s anxiety.

  The idea of walking through that boundless darkness to the outbuilding was far from appealing, but he forced himself into his coat, made sure he had his cell phone with him then grabbed a steak knife from one of the kitchen drawers. He carefully placed the knife in his coat pocket and lit a cigarette. Both could be used as weapons if need be, and the oil lamp would provide sufficient light for him to get across the property to the garage. He gripped the front door. What if Gus Gauvin was out there waiting on him? He still had that ax. What if they were lying in wait? Whoever the hell they were. Damn near anything could hit him between here and there.

  Bracing himself, Lenny opened the door and stepped into night.

  * * * *

  The temperature had plummeted, and after having been spoiled for the last few hours by the cozy warmth of the woodstove, the cold was positively unnerving. Despite the deep freeze, Lenny hesitated halfway up the walkway and brought the lamp around in front of him. It wasn’t nearly as effective out in the open but still provided enough light for him to see where he was going.

  An icy breeze whispered through the forest, creeping between the trees and crossing the open property. The cold cut through him like a dagger.

  People died in weather this cold.

  A soft clanging sound broke the otherwise menacing silence.

  Lenny looked to the flagpole. The pulley ropes swayed gently in the wind. The metal clasp used to fasten a flag bumped the metal pole.

  The sky was a shade or two lighter than the night, but only a handful of stars were visible, and the moon was nowhere to be seen. The surrounding forest, more ominous in darkness, had again fallen still now that the brief wind had gone, and the silhouette of the outbuilding loomed at the edge of the property, daring him to cross the open yard.

  THEY’RE WATCHING.

  Eyes watering and his nose beginning to run in the cold, Lenny made a beeline for the garage. With tunnel vision, he hurried across the yard, trying to ignore the night and whatever else may have been concealed within it. But as he went, it felt like the forest was closing in, inching closer as darkness folded over him with the sensation that someone or something was behind him, rushing closer and closer, closing in.

  Lenny quickened his pace, but the feeling was so strong he finally turned and looked behind him.

  Nothing but night.

  He spun back around and kept moving. He was nearly there.

  As he finally reached his destination, Lenny stabbed his cigarette between his lips, pulled the keys from his coat pocket and closed on the padlock. Despite his violently shaking hands, he managed to quickly unlock the door. Without looking back a second time, he escaped into the workshop and slammed the door behind him.

  Within the confines of the building the lamp provided a fair amount of light, but with the workshop’s high roof, cinderblock walls and cement floor, the darkness was strong here. So was the cold. It was nearly as cold inside as it was out. Lenny dropped his cigarette to the floor and stepped on it. He put the lamp on a workbench and breathed on his hands, rubbing them together in an attempt to generate some warmth, then began searching for a lockbox.

  After several minutes rummaging through endless piles of old tools stacked along the shelves, he was about to call it a night and try again in the morning when he noticed something propped in a corner behind the snow-blower. He retrieved the lamp from the workbench, climbed over the machine and crouched in the corner for a closer look.

  An old black and white photograph in a large ornate frame had been left there. Lenny shone the light on it. In a snow-covered wooded area, a slight man in his sixties stood over a bloody, fallen deer. One foot rested on the carcass, and the rifle he’d used to kill the animal with was held at his side. Dressed in a fur coat and boots that looked like he’d made them himself, the man possessed a strange smile that was both prideful and melancholy, a full head of gray hair, and intense dark eyes.

  Must be the original property owner, he thought. He looked to the ceiling and the various antlers nailed there. Had he slaughtered animals here as well?

  Continuing his search for the lockbox, Lenny pulled the heavy frame away from the corner to see if there was anything behind it.

  There was.

  Roughly the size and shape of a shoebox, the metal container was lighter than it initially appeared. He brought it back to the workbench, and using the key he’d found wrapped in Sheena’s note, unlocked it.

  Inside were a spiral notebook and a dog-eared paperback. He pulled the notebook out and leafed through it. Notes filled page after page in a handwriting style that was definitely female and almost certainly Sheena’s. He put it aside and checked out the paperback, a nonfiction tome titled Looking Glass Magic, a History. Several passages had been highlighted and numerous notes had been hurriedly scribbled along the borders in ballpoint pen, again in what was most likely Sheena’s hand.

  Looking Glass. Mirrors? The mirror in the bathroom had been covered with a towel when he’d first arrived, and upstairs, he’d found another towel on the bed, a larger one that could’ve been used to cover the mirror over the bureau.

  Had Sheena taken to purposely covering mirrors in the house?

  He looked to the small windows on the far wall.

  THEY’RE WATCHING.

  Had she gone crazy? Had she lost her mind here before she lost her life?

  Lenny tossed the paperback into the box and closed the lid. He had to get back to the house; he was freezing, trembling uncontrollably, and his face and hands had begun to throb with pain.

  With the box tucked under one arm, he grabbed the lamp and opened the door. He watched the night, the trees, the sky, and the cottage in the distance. There’s nothing out there but the dark, he told himself. Sheena’s dead, and whatever personal demons consumed her beforehand died right along with her. The fire’s out, you’re just sifting through ash.

  But as he stood shivering, Sheena’s voice whispered to him from deep within the icy silence, echoing across whatever metaphysical planes separated him from his nightmares. “Who is it, Lenny? Who is the Judas Goat?”

  * * * *

  Once back at the cottage, Lenny added more wood to the stove and stoked the fire until he had it going stronger. Within moments the chill had left him and the house was toasty warm. He extinguished one lamp and took the other with him into the living room. Placing the lockbox on the coffee table, he surveyed the room and dark adjacent kitchen. Satisfied no one could be watching him unless they were outside and hidden among the trees, he sat on the couch. Physically, emotionally and mentally spent, he stared at the box. The last twenty-four hours had been so intense it felt like he’d lived a week in one harrowing day. Lenny could feel himself beginning to shut down, and sinking into the comfortable couch only made matters worse. The idea of sleep, of recharging his batteries and clearing his mind so he might approach all this with a good night of rest under his belt was appealing. But he hadn’t slept well in months. Sleep was no longer a means of escape, it was a battlefield. The only things waiting for him behind that veil were twisted dreams and upsetting memories, truth and fantasy entangled and blurred, fingerprints left behind in shadow, smudged across ever-narrowing windows of time and night. And even were he to attempt it, could sleep be a real possibility here, in this place?

  Again, the memory of Sheena’s face came to him, her eyes filled with tears.

  Night…so many years ago…Sheena sitting on the floor…head bowed…

  He tried to shut it out, but resisting only made it stronger.

 
Lost…she looked so lost and wounded…so vulnerable in her nudity.

  “I’m sorry,” he heard himself say, his voice distant and distorted, just barely his own.

  “And do you think that absolves you?” she asked.

  “I’ve always hoped so. Sometimes I’ve even prayed it would.”

  “Do you feel forgiven, Lenny? Do you feel clean?”

  Reminded of the long-ago Roman Catholic masses of his youth, he remembered having been an altar boy, and the words priests spoke as he trickled water over their hands in a symbolic gesture of purification. If Lenny listened carefully he could still hear their hushed voices drifting across the arched ceilings of that beautiful old building of wood and stained-glass.

  “…wash away my iniquities…cleanse me from my sin.”

  Time shifted, and the memories slipped away.

  Lenny rubbed his eyes and sighed. What had really happened to Sheena, and why, in death, had she brought him here?

  He flipped open the lockbox and began with the notebook.

  It began not as a journal but rather a series of fairly straightforward entries from various source materials concerning mirrors and magic. A few pages in, the notes became more extensive, covering the history of mirrors and their relation to magic, myth and spiritualism throughout the ages—The mirror dated back to ancient times…Biblical references labeled them ‘looking glasses’...Man first became fascinated with his reflection in pools of water…The earliest examples of mirrors were fashioned from flattened and polished metals, chiefly copper…In Rome mirrors were often made of tin, silver or gold, and later, glass, when the art of making and manipulating glass was discovered—but as he turned each subsequent page the notes became disjointed, and on occasion, Sheena had injected her own thoughts as well. The penmanship was also increasingly difficult to decipher, as the entries assumed a style that had clearly been produced under duress or in a hurried, frantic hand. Mirrors reflect both truth and illusion, she’d written at one point. This could be the key. Everything we see in mirrors is real but not necessarily true. I think this is how they’re doing it. Either that or I’m losing my mind. I wish I could sleep but I’m afraid to close my eyes. I’m so tired I can’t think straight. What if I’m right?

  Lenny’s eyes began to cross. He looked away from the page, fought off a yawn then flipped through more of the notebook. Toward the end the writing was illegible, and he could only make out a word here or there. At various points Sheena had been writing so furiously that she’d pressed down too hard on the pen and punctured holes in the paper. It did, however, end with a passage he could read: I never meant for this to happen. I don’t think I can stop it.

  As he went to close the notebook, a small slip of paper that had been tucked between two pages near the back slipped free and fell to the coffee table. An obituary torn from the local newspaper, the Trapper Woods Sentinel, its publication date was only a few days prior to Sheena’s death and concerned a local man, Jeremy Loudon, who had died of a sudden inexplicable heart attack at the age of twenty-three. It offered a brief biography of the man along with what appeared to be a high school senior yearbook photo. Alongside it Sheena had written: He’s alive. Lenny studied the picture a while. There was something strangely familiar about the man. He tried aging him a bit and imagining a slightly different hairstyle, and it fell together. He looked remarkably like the man in black.

  Icy fear filled his gut.

  Lenny jumped to his feet, paced to the center of the room and nervously lit a cigarette. After a couple drags he returned to the coffee table and studied the photograph again. This couldn’t be the same man. He was dead, for Christ’s sake. But the picture didn’t lie. Maybe he was the man-in-black’s brother, and just happened to look a great deal like him. Or the whole thing might just be a coincidence. I could also be mistaken, he thought. I’m exhausted and not thinking straight.

  Lenny slid the obituary back into the notebook and turned to the paperback. Written and compiled by a psychiatrist-turned-author who had spent years studying identity and self issues in human beings, along with memory systems and how the two were consistently related, the book used the mirror as metaphor but also showed why it so often had a history connected to magic, spiritual beliefs and dark rituals. For many, throughout the course of human history, in literature and film, numerous religious texts and the psyche of man, the mirror had served as both a reproduction and a deflection of the inner self, which in turn led to a series of interesting psychological as well as spiritual conflicts. The mirror was simply a scapegoat, the author argued, the proverbial ghost in the machine, the phantom gremlin in the gears, as it were, bestowed by many ancient cultures with magical properties as a means of seeing (and therefore often blaming) something other than self, other than the machine itself and all its shortcomings.

  Lenny thought back to acting class. One teacher had been a strong advocate of “mirror work” as he’d called it. The exercise involved assuming the mindset of the character one was playing, and then staring into a mirror for long periods of time until one could begin to see the inner life of the character take shape. Let your mind open, and look long and hard enough, the teacher had told his class, and you’ll see far more than the face of your character, you’ll see his or her soul emerging right before your eyes.

  Of all the exercises he’d done while studying the craft, mirror work had been his least favorite. No matter how hard he’d tried to immerse himself in the character’s inner life, all he saw was his own troubled face and the tortured soul behind it. Acting, whether study or performance, had never been a particularly enjoyable pursuit for Lenny, but rather a necessary means of release and expression. He acted not because he wanted to, but because he had to. Even before he’d met Sheena, it had always been a good place to hide.

  He flipped through the book, stopping to read each passage Sheena had highlighted. Since ancient times mirrors have mystified and intrigued human beings…Many ancient (and some modern) cultures were suspicious of the mirror and believed it could kill by capturing the soul…In India it was believed unsafe to gaze into a mirror belonging to someone else, or to look at mirrors in someone else’s home, as when one departed pieces of the soul would be left behind, stranded in the glass…In certain rituals mirrors displaying reflections of human beings were directed at statues of the goddess Kali. It was hoped the goddess’s need for human sacrifice might be sated with a reflected image, and an actual flesh and blood sacrifice could be avoided…Some believe mirrors house far more than mortal man realizes…The concept of mirrors belonging to the realm of magic and mysticism were described in various texts throughout history by many spiritual leaders, including Saint Augustine, who claimed the witches of Thessaly used them as part of human blood rituals…In certain cultures, ancient China among them, it was believed other worlds existed within mirrors and that through certain black magic rituals these worlds could be awakened…Once this alternate world and the creatures residing within it came to life, it was believed they could pass through the mirror from their world to ours…These creatures initially assumed the reflection of human beings, but they were far stronger and in reality, looked nothing like humans…After crossing through the mirror they would retain the resemblance for a time, but gradually their true natures would emerge and they would revert back to their original forms both physically and spiritually...

  “Got to be kidding me,” he mumbled, thumbing further into the book. Even the highlighted areas began to blur, one word blending into the next. His fatigued mind raced with thoughts attempting to fill in the gaps.

  Sensory memory…Iconic memory…Visual stimuli…Long term memory can be as inconsistent as short term memory…Consistently recalling something does not always result in those memories remaining wholly accurate. If the memory is stored and recalled in intervals over time, it can often solidify the memory in the mind, but studies have also shown that with the passage of time, even memories replayed in one’s mind again and again over the cours
e of years can, and often do, become altered, re-imagined in a sense, from the original, actual event the memory is recalling and recreating in the mind…The question becomes, what lapses in memory have been filled in by the mind and passed off as literal, and which parts are legitimately stored and recalled memories?

  In the border, Sheena had written: Episodic memory/Semantic memory.

  Lenny searched the pages for mentions of either and eventually found passages where the author had referenced and given definitions for both.

  Episodic memory: the ability to remember, for example, that a year ago you went on a vacation to the Bahamas. Semantic memory: the ability to remember what a vacation is.

  What we see—Sheena noted in the margin—and not only what we remember, but how we remember aren’t always the same. They may rarely be.

  His eyes dropped to the bottom of the page. Written in pen and underlined for emphasis was the sentence: Even memories of what we see in mirrors are flawed. Maybe it’s all a mind-fuck.

  That last comment jumped out at him, not because of the implication, but because it seemed so out of character for the Sheena he’d known. It didn’t sound like his memories of her. She’d had an aversion to swearing, and he could only recall her using profanity in front of him perhaps once or twice.

  Or were those memories flawed too?

  Of all the things to stand out after everything I’ve just read, he thought.

  Lenny wearily tossed the book back into the lockbox. A headache that had begun at the base of his neck had spread up into the back of his head, sending shooting sharp pains up behind his ears.

  I never meant for this to happen.

  Was Sheena honestly suggesting she’d somehow awakened beings from some other world? Beings that existed in mirrors, disguised as our own reflections no less? Was she that far gone?

  Are you, Lenny?

  Even if it were somehow true, according to her own notes and reference material, wouldn’t she have only been able to achieve this through blood rituals?