The Adventures of Andrew Doran: Box Set Read online

  I was upon the spirit in moments and swinging wildly. I opened and closed my eyes rapidly, not wanting to see the beast, but wanting to insure that my attacks were finding home.

  Unfortunately, they were. I beat and clawed and scratched, but every attack that I had only passed through the apparition. I was doomed and could only hope that in death I would find the power to destroy my adversary.

  It was in that final acceptance that I calmed down long enough to see what the depraved monster was doing.

  He was placing a hand out in a calming fashion, with the palm down as if to say “Settle down, please.” His eyes were imploring and I was starting to get the impression that he wasn’t there to hurt me.

  I stepped away from him out of comfort and not fear. Being so close to him meant that I couldn’t actually take him all in. I leaned against the baseboard of my bed and curiosity must have replaced the fear that was etched into my face, because Adam Sturn started to relax as well.

  He raised his calming hand to his face and pressed his index finger to his lips. I nodded and he lowered the hand that had placed the silencing spell around the room.

  I stared at the ghost and waited. I wasn’t exactly trusting the spirit, but I was fairly certain that he wasn’t going to try and hurt me.

  Once he had seen me calm down, Adam Sturn’s spirit began mouthing words, but no sound came out. However he was planning to communicate his message to me, it would have to be without words.

  When Adam had been alive, he had been the very definition of neighborly, and his face, while silent, was exactly as I remembered.

  The spirit was talking rapidly, and I wasn’t certain that he knew that I could not hear him. His lips were a rapid movement that my eyes just couldn’t keep up with.

  I tried to hush him. “I can’t hear you,” I said while I cupped my ears and shook my head. If anyone entered then, and couldn’t see the recently deceased milkman, then they would see a boy making funny faces at nothingness.

  For the first time since I had seen the spirit, I desperately hoped that no one was about to enter.

  After a minute of my head shaking, Adam’s lips began to slow and then stopped altogether. Frustration crossed his glowing face and I slowly lowered my hands from my ears.

  That was when Mr. Sturn began miming.

  I climbed up onto the edge of my bed and for the next few hours we mimed back and forth. I learned pretty quickly that he couldn’t hear me either. His signals were hard to understand at first, but over time we worked out a mutually beneficial form of communication using our hands and bodies to get our words across.

  From his mimings, I learned that I was the only person who could see him. He wasn’t sure why this was, and neither was I. As far as I was aware, there was nothing at all special about me. If I was being completely honest, the ‘King of Baseball’ wasn’t even that great at his favorite sport.

  Once Adam had discovered that I was the only person who could hear him, it didn’t take him long to reach the conclusion that I was also the only person who could help him.

  Adam then went on to explain that he had been murdered.

  From what I had heard between mother and father, this wasn’t surprising, but the next bit of information was.

  At first I thought that I wasn’t translating him correctly, but as the hand gestures and flailing about continued, it became clear that I was understanding quite well.

  Adam Sturn wasn’t murdered by a human.

  I wasn’t entirely sure what it was that he was describing to me, but I managed to use a notebook and pencil to piece it together as he mimed. It was an image of a creature that was mostly fluid in nature. It had mouths and arms and tentacles all mashed together as if someone had taken mud and filled it with the parts of so many different creatures.

  My finished sketch, though rough, was something that my nightmares even feared.

  The next piece of the conversation made me cry and I didn’t care if the deceased Adam Sturn saw my tears or not.

  Not only was the creature still out there, but a doorway still existed between our world and where these creatures came from. More would come unless the doorway was closed.

  Adam was beginning to noticeably dim after he told me that terrifying revelation and sped up his miming.

  The doorway was in the basement of his house and the sunlight wasn’t something that these creature enjoyed. We would be safe until the next evening, but the next evening would be it. I needed to shut the doorway between worlds tomorrow night, or our neighborhood would become a very appetizing treat for these fluid beasts.

  Obviously getting weak, Adam became impatient and demanded to know if I would stand with him to shut the doorway.

  How could I say no? I wanted to know exactly how I could say no, because I dearly wanted to say no, but he stared at me with those fading, dead eyes and I couldn’t do the one thing that I truly wanted to do.

  I told him yes.

  I mimed back to him that I would wait for him to come to me, after my parents had gone to bed of course, and then I would allow him to lead me to his home.

  As he faded from view, he mimed that I couldn’t tell anyone anything that had happened that night and I didn’t have a chance to ask why.

  I prayed that he wouldn’t ever come back.

  ***

  While I did attend school the next day, I was mentally somewhere else the entirety of it.

  It was not possible to pull my mind away from the fantastical terror that had greeted me the previous evening.

  Unless, of course, I turned my attention toward the terrors that were still to come.

  I had no idea what closing the doorway would entail or how difficult it might be. What if those flesh monsters were already out and waiting for someone to show up?

  I know that if a door had been so important to me that I would not leave it unguarded. How many of these creatures would I be forced to confront?

  If Adam Sturn, an adult, couldn’t stand against one of these creatures, how could I be expected to stand against more than one?

  I decided then that I would have to tell the spirit that I couldn’t do what he wanted.

  Murders, spirits, monsters made of flesh, and doorways to other worlds? It was too much to ask of a thirteen year old boy.

  It was too much to ask of anyone.

  That evening came quicker than I was prepared to deal with it.

  First, father came in to tell me to put away Captain Nemo and turn out the lights. I tried to make him stay by asking what University was like and what he thought I would need to do in order to prepare for a life of uncovering the mysteries of civilization.

  Father only laughed and told me that he would talk to me about it the next day and that I shouldn’t be worried about such things before bed.

  When he left, it was only a few minutes before I heard my parents close their door.

  Seconds after that, Adam Sturn was standing at the end of my bed.

  He asked me through mime if I was ready. In tears, I shook my head in reply.

  For a moment, fury flashed through the spirit’s eyes, and I worried about how extensively his power could affect me.

  As quickly as the fury came to his glowing visage, it vanished, replaced by what I could only assume was empathy. He knew the fear that I must have been facing, and how I must have been feeling.

  Then he did something I had not expected him to do. He gave me the hand gestures that we had agreed upon for indicating my parents.

  Then he mimed the flesh monster.

  Our rudimentary language wasn’t incredibly detailed, but I was getting the implication loud and clear.

  If I didn’t stop the monster, then it would most likely go for my parents next.

  “Damn you.” I whispered, Adam knew what I said, even if he couldn’t hear it.

  While it had been the first curse word that I had ever used, I had meant it. Damn him to the deepest pits of Hell for coercing me with the only motivation I could
not refuse. I would fight his damned monsters, and I would most likely die in the process, but at least I would have the satisfaction of knowing that I had done everything in my power to save my parents.

  And just maybe someone out there would see the terrible sacrifice I made for what it really was, and would join me in cursing Adam Sturn to Hell.

  I nodded to the spirit and slowly slid from the bed.

  I never played ball with my own bat. It just wasn’t practical to take it to school and keep it there all day just to play for an hour and bring it back. Not when Jimmy or one of the other guys always seemed to have plenty of bats on hand.

  That didn’t mean that I didn’t have a baseball bat, though. Father had seen fit to nurture this passion of mine and got me a bat and glove for Christmas last year. It was the best Christmas that I could remember.

  When my feet touched down on the floor, I gently went to my knees and reached under my bed. I didn’t need light to find it. My hand knew right where my baseball bat was and gripped it quickly without searching.

  I let a smug looking Adam Sturn lead me silently from my room and gently out the front door.

  The way that our door was, I knew that I couldn’t let it shut again without waking my parents. Opening it had been a slow and methodical problem to solve, resulting in almost five minutes of me tugging and inching the door from its mooring.

  Instead of shutting it, I closed it most of the way. Upon first glance it would look closed, but any sort of closer inspection would show that the door was slightly ajar. My only concern regarding this is that if the monsters managed to devour me, then not even the slight resistance of the door would stand between them and my mother and father.

  I swallowed hard, and continued in the direction of the former milkman’s house.

  As we neared the front door, I could feel something change in the air. It seemed charged as if lightning were to about to erupt from the clear night sky. I wasn’t certain, but I felt as though Adam must have felt it as well, because his glow became stronger and his pace quickened toward and then through the front door.

  I made it to the front door a sudden wave of panic hit me. What if the door was locked? I didn’t think that Adam had the ability to manipulate the living world, and therefore was in severe doubt that he could open the door for me. This meant I would be locked outside.

  A locked door would stop me from saving the world.

  Half dreading and half hoping that the door was locked, I grabbed the handle and turned it.

  A deadman’s home must not have been worthy of the police to lock up. The door opened with a soft click. I pushed the door open with the end of the bat and saw nothing but blackness beyond.

  My terror filled me as if I were an empty glass. That darkness held everything and nothing and I was not sure which had me more scared.

  Suddenly, I realized that complete blackness meant Adam’s spirit was nowhere to be seen as well. While I had yet to trust the ghost, he had become the only constant that I knew of. I began to back away from the door, the warmth of my bed was all that I could think about.

  From deeper in the black abyss that was Adam Sturn’s former home, a light suddenly shone. It took me a minute, but I realized that it must have been Adam. In his excitement, he had forgotten about me and was just now returning to see where I had ended up.

  My fear must have been evident on my face, because it was only a matter of seconds before, frowning, Adam closed his eyes and his brightness suddenly doubled.

  In the illumination of his soul, I could make out the furniture and pictures on the walls. The return of the spirit did much to bolster my own spirit, and I stepped into the house, sticking as close as I could to my dearly departed companion.

  Once deeper inside the house, Adam stopped in a small living room. In the dark, I was able to make out the different shapes of the furniture.

  Adam had stopped to stare at a painting. It was a gorey thing, filled with limbs and bugs of some kind. I was bothered by it and looked away.

  That was when I noticed the stack of papers on a nearby side table.

  Reaching out with my free hand, I grabbed them and began reading them. The papers were pages, torn from a book. I wasn’t able to understand most of what I was looking at. It was all in some other language, but there were drawings. The drawings weren’t part of the original work and were instead sketched in the margins. They looked like something familiar, as if I had seen something similar before.

  Then I remembered. I had seen these symbols when the professor from Miskatonic University had come to class. These were Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  The symbols wrapped around an odd star drawn inside a circle. More words that I didn’t understand were written around those. Before I pocketed the papers, I saw that one of them had a stamp on it, and I was pleasantly surprised that I could read it and by what it said.

  Property of Miskatonic University.

  I smiled and put the papers in my pants pocket. My smile faded when I looked up and into the frowning eyes of Adam Sturn.

  He made no gestures or miming and only glared at me. After a moment, he turned and headed further into the house.

  Rounding a hall, Adam pointed toward the end of it at a door. I could only barely make it out in the dim glow of his body, but I had no doubt that it was a door.

  It was the door he had told me about. The door that led to the basement. The basement that contained another, very different kind of door.

  I looked at him again, pleading for another answer, another way to go about this, but he only jabbed his finger again in the direction of the door. I was to lead the procession to the basement.

  I didn’t let Adam see the tear that rolled down my cheek as I stepped forward and to the door.

  Reaching for the handle, I felt the tingle of charge get stronger. That static feeling in the air was emanating from behind that door, and I was about to touch it.

  I turned the handle and it creaked loudly, sending a shiver down my spine. I leaned into the door for a moment before collecting myself and yanking it wide open.

  Nothing happened.

  I don’t know what I was expecting to happen, but when nothing happened I was a little surprised. Behind the door was only more darkness that was only broken by a rhythmic flickering of faint orange light. From behind me, the spirit illuminated a set of aged, wooden stairs.

  Since the door was already open and I was starting to get used to being in the darkness, I did not hesitate when Adam urged me to start down the stairs.

  Even through my fear, I was surprised by the complete lack of noise that came from the stairs as I stepped on them. It was as if the steps were swallowing the sound. When I expected them to creak there was a severe less than nothing, as if all sound was swallowed in that one moment of potential noise.

  I made it to the bottom of the stairs and Adam’s aura was suddenly not reaching out past the stairs.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t needed.

  The basement was covered with lit candles. I was confused, at first, by who could have lit them all, but that confusion was suddenly replaced as I noticed the rest of the basement.

  Symbols and hieroglyphs were painted on the floor and the walls. As I stepped forward, I could see that it was a red substance, and even at thirteen my imagination didn’t have to stretch far for me to know that it was blood.

  My fear was turning toward concern. I didn’t know anything specific about monsters, and even less about amorphous flesh monsters, but I was under the immediate impression that symbols and Egyptian hieroglyphs drawn in blood were probably beyond their interests.

  I turned away from the carnage to look my self-appointed ferryman in the eye.

  Adam Sturn was smiling an unnatural smile. It was too wide and with too many teeth. At that moment was when the hieroglyphs on the floor and walls suddenly registered in my mind as the same hieroglyphs that I had found on the table upstairs.

  On Adam Sturn’s side table.

  �
�What’s going on?” I demanded, forgetting in my terror that Adam’s spirit couldn’t hear me.

  Or at least that was what he had led me to believe.

  “I might have told you a lie or two, Andrew.” He replied in a voice that I could hear just as easily as if he had been alive.

  Suddenly wary of what else he might have been hiding from me, I backed away from the spirit and deeper into the basement.

  “I was sick. I was dying.” He was speaking quietly, but I could hear him well. “I found an alternative to dying but it was...” The spirit waved his hand around to indicate the blood all over the basement, “...messy. Those monsters I described for you were real, but where they came from was a lie.” His smile seemed to gleam brighter. “Those creatures, the shoggoths, are local creatures. They live in our shadows and feed off of our souls.” Adam Sturn walked closer to me, forcing me further into the room. “And there are doorways between worlds, although, my basement is not one.”

  I tripped over my own feet and fell to the floor. My hands dragged over the dried blood and I squirmed as I tried to get away from the spirit and get back to my feet at the same time. It was no use, and I only scooted backward on the cold stone floor.

  “But none of this would be possible without you, Andrew.” He pointed my waist, and I knew that he meant my pocket and the papers contained within. “I found a spell that would allow me to move my spirit into a different body. Naturally, I chose a younger and more fit body.” He nodded toward me. “Unfortunately, I had to remove my spirit from my body in such a manner that would allow me remain functioning in this world.”

  He reached down and grabbed me by my throat, lifting me clear off of the floor. I dropped the baseball bat as he said, “Then I just had to lure the new body into my basement.”

  I would have screamed if it hadn’t been for the phantom hand clutching at my throat. My eyes bulged as I tried to take in breaths.

  “What I don’t understand,” Adam was continuing, “is why you could see me and no one else could. I stood in front of hundreds of children, waving and yelling as loudly as I could, and not a single one saw me.” He tilted his head to the side as he pondered further. “I had barely stepped into your bedroom and you saw me without any sort of effort. I was impressed, to say the least.”