Free Necromantic by Rick Gualtieri, Cole Vance Page B

Shilpa’s body wasn’t even close to being winded. If I got spooked, I could run back upstairs without the risk of a heart attack. I hadn’t been so certain of that with Darla.
    Even with the lights going, I still flipped on the flashlight. The little extra bit of illumination made me feel a bit better as I walked toward the rear room. I didn’t know what I expected to find. For all I knew, the weirdness on the floor was just the result of Harold dropping a can of paint and not bothering to clean it up. My gut, however, didn’t quite believe that.
    When I had last been down here, I’d gotten a strange feeling when nearing that room. It might have just been Darla’s body reacting to my over-active imagination, but somehow I didn’t buy that either.
    Stepping to the doorway confirmed that feeling. Again, I felt... weird . It was like a low level electric current was running through my body. It wasn’t just my imagination either. I could feel the hairs on my neck standing up and, looking down, I saw that my nipples were entirely erect. There was definitely something odd here.
    I had the flashlight, but I didn’t want to see just bits and pieces. That would probably freak me out even worse. It was all or nothing. I reached around with my left hand and found the switch. I flipped it and the room lit up. There was still just one bare bulb, but Harold had apparently upped the wattage.
    I blinked my eyes at the sudden brightness and then just stared.
    “Holy shit.”
    * * *
    What I had seen weren’t just random paint marks on the floor. It was kind of crude - Harold had never been much of an artist - but the shape would have been obvious to even a blind man. A large black pentagram was painted on the floor of the room, taking up at least half the space at over ten feet in diameter. It would have made even the most bitter of Goth teens weep with joy. Had it been the only oddity in the room, it would have been freaky enough. It wasn’t, though.
    Something lay in the middle of the pentagram. From the look of it, it might have been a table of sorts. It was hard to tell. If it was, though, there was obviously something (or multiple somethings) on it. Either way, the whole thing was covered in black felt so that only the legs were visible.
    I could only see the bottom six inches, but they looked familiar. “Son of a bitch,” I said, recognizing it. It looked familiar because it was our old coffee table. When it was upstairs, it sat in our living room covered in books and a few knickknacks. Now...well, now it was obviously being used for a slightly different purpose.
    The room wasn’t finished with its surprises yet, either. The far half was perhaps even freakier, if that was possible. A work table took up one corner. It looked like it was covered in books of some sort. That wasn’t the weird part, obviously. The other side of the room, though, that was definitely catching my eye.
    This definitely warranted closer inspection, no matter how much I really didn’t want to. I stepped in, again feeling that weirdness, skirted the outside of the pentagram - for some reason I didn’t want to step into it - and walked over to the far side of the room.
    The best way to describe it would be an altar of sorts. A circle was drawn in the floor around it, looking as if it were made with nothing more exotic than chalk. As for the altar itself, well I wasn’t sure. I was never much of a movie buff in life, but I had seen my fair share. I had even watched a few scary movies in my day. This wouldn’t have fit into any of those. It wasn’t terrifying, so much as odd or off in a manner of speaking.
    The front of the altar didn’t seem so surprising. There was a dagger, a few small urns, an incense holder...nothing more unusual than one might see on any given Halloween. The back of the altar, though, was strange. There was a small statue. It seemed to be of a man sitting on a throne. He was wearing some sort of headdress and was holding a