Page 26 of Lion's Share
Even with everything else that was going on — having two electrical outages within a few hours of one another was not a good sign — Ben couldn’t help feeling pretty good about life as he walked home that night. Dinner had been incredible…and the kisses he shared with Sidney afterward even better.
He’d been halfway worried she might tell him tonight that their kisses the day before had been a mistake, and while she valued his help, she truly wasn’t ready for a relationship. That wasn’t what had happened, though…not by a long shot. Yes, they’d only kissed, hadn’t even moved to the couch for a make-out session, but he was still completely happy with the situation nonetheless. She didn’t think this thing with him was a mistake, and she clearly had no intention of breaking it off.
As he went, he halfway expected to be jumped by FBI agents asking him what his business was, walking down dark side streets at close to ten o’clock at night, but of course, they weren’t here to be police. They were investigating the anomalies…and, it seemed, trying to see if there was a connection to Victor Maplehurst’s death.
Neither of which was at all desirable.
Ben had to hope they wouldn’t learn anything about his presence here. He did his best to maintain a fairly low profile, although pretty much everyone in town knew he was seeing Sidney Lowell. But since he was just renting and didn’t actually own any property in Silver Hollow, he hadn’t left much of a digital footprint.
Then again, all it took was one person mentioning that they’d had a YouTube star — there was a joke — recently move to town, and that said YouTuber had a channel specializing in cryptozoology, and it would all be over. That kind of revelation was sure to send up every kind of red flag.
But at least Marjorie had agreed to be circumspect, and that was something. The risk still remained that she might run into the feds, although he knew she was going to pick up stakes late Sunday morning and drive back to Davis. That still left not quite a day and a half where she could be discovered, but Ben had to pray the gods would be smiling on them and that her investigations would continue without mishap.
A gibbous moon floated overhead, helping to guide his way. In a few more weeks, it would have dwindled to nothing, and the dark of the moon would be upon them.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to think about what might happen then.
Possibly, nothing at all. The portal had become erratic enough that it was now difficult to predict what it might or might not do, where it would appear, or when.
The cottage was quiet, the one light he’d left on in the living room there to guide him in. As usual, the clocks in the kitchen were blinking away, thanks to the recent power outage, and Ben was glad he’d bought a surge protector to safeguard his laptop against any of those unexpected bursts. He tried to leave the MacBook unplugged as often as he could, but there always came a time when he needed to charge the thing.
After getting himself a glass of water — he ignored the clocks, reminding himself that time was a human construct…well, and that he was getting damn tired of always resetting the things — he went back to his laptop and opened it up. A thought had occurred to him as he was walking home and pondering the events of the evening, and he wanted to see if his theory held any water or whether he was just grasping at straws.
The trail cams had shown evidence of only one person carving those Ogham letters into the trees, but that didn’t mean their black-clad friend didn’t have someone else on his team. That might explain why the electrical disruptions seemed to be increasing.
Maybe the theory was a long shot, but Ben still figured it couldn’t hurt to check the trail cams and make sure everything remained quiet. And if he just happened to spot someone else out there where they shouldn’t be?
Then he’d download the footage and send it along to the sheriff’s department. There was a very good chance they’d ask him why he was filming the trails, but all he’d have to do was claim that he was here researching the Pacific Northwest version of the chupacabra, and that should be enough to explain the cameras.
It would probably also earn him a chuckle from the deputies, but Ben didn’t care about that. He’d been laughed at enough that other people’s skepticism or even outright derision was, if not precisely water off a duck’s back, at least something he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring.
Sidney had given him the logins for the trail cams, so it didn’t take him too long to navigate to the sites for the two separate companies in question and get signed in with both of them.
The only sign of life in the portal clearing was a huge horned owl moving swiftly through the dark, obviously on the hunt. After fast-forwarding through the rest of the footage for that particular site, Ben could tell nothing untoward appeared to have happened there.
He moved on to the other cameras from that company, reviewing the additional footage and finding absolutely nothing of note. So far, it sure didn’t seem as if his theory about the black-clad man having an accomplice had any real merit.
Under most circumstances, Ben would have been cheered by that confirmation. One vandal was enough to deal with, but two or more of them?
Now, though, with it looking more and more as if the guy had been acting alone, Ben wasn’t sure what to think. Not with the electrical systems in Silver Hollow appearing to glitch more than ever.
He’d been feeling pleasantly mellow as he walked home, both from the kisses he and Sidney had shared and also from the half bottle of wine he’d drunk with the excellent chicken paprikash. Unfortunately, the afterglow of his evening continued to fade as he scanned the footage from each trail cam and confirmed that all appeared to be quiet on the forest front.
As far as he was concerned, his latest theory had turned out to be a complete bust. Sure, he had two more trail cams to check, but he had no reason to believe they would show him anything other than the same empty clearings and quiet woods he’d seen in the rest of the footage. In fact, he almost said the hell with it and logged out, but the dogged dedication to research he’d gained while getting his doctorate wouldn’t allow him to do that. No, he’d check the remaining cams and then call it a night.
And hope like hell that Marjorie Tran had some kind of perfectly reasonable explanation for why the ghosts in the machine had been extra active today.
He navigated to camera number 57188. Sidney had said she was thinking about renaming them to things like Portal Clearing #1, Oak Glen #2, and so on, designations that would make it immediately clear what they were looking at, but it didn’t seem as if she’d gotten around to taking on that particular task. Understandable, since she was holding down a full-time job in addition to keeping track of all the local craziness.
The footage from that particular camera showed a clearing he didn’t recognize right away, one he thought the black-clad stranger hadn’t yet explored, since the muddy-looking video didn’t reveal any obvious markings on the trees. That meant the spot had to be deep in the forest, a place where Sidney had guided Ben as they were setting up the cameras. This made some sense, since she’d lived in Silver Hollow all her life and knew its terrain in a way most people never could.
All seemed quiet, just like all the other footage Ben had watched so far.
But then….
The air seemed to shimmer and grow brighter, so bright that the glare overwhelmed the white balance on his laptop’s screen and everything washed out for a second or two while it recalibrated.
A circle of standing stones stood in the clearing, glowing with that inner luminescence Ben knew all too well. All around it were the glittering little fairy bell flowers, and the gleaming moss and the plants that looked like diamond-dusted yuccas but weren’t.
