Urban Necromancer by Phil Chard Read Free Book Online Page A

breaths for a minute.
    The music carried on, oblivious to her struggles.
    Calmer – and angry that she’d experienced fear – her steps resumed.
    Ancestral voices fill the air…
    The forest strips your senses bare…
    Upon reaching the summit, she quickly reached for the light switch.
    Click.
    Nothing.
    She retried, several times, all the time knowing the light was not going to come on. Damn it .
    Juliet’s eyes tried to make sense of shapes in the darkness. As her eyes adjusted to the environment, familiar shapes started emerging from the fog of darkness. The upper floor was stately; the stairs led onto a square perimeter walkway surrounded by a guardrail balustrade. It was the kind of image that harked back to a thousand horror movie scenes where the hero or villain would crash through the guardrail and fall to their death; a twitching corpse on the ground floor, with legs twisted at unnatural angles.
    The design was a pain, as well as eerie, you had to walk all the way around the perimeter to get to any of the rooms. At least the space was clutter free ― with the exception of the carved wooden sculpture of two Siamese cats entwined. On all sides of the perimeter walkway was a confusion of doors – ten in total.
    Ancestral voices chant and plea…
    The high volume easily identified the room of the song’s origin ― one of the empty bedrooms.
    “I’m here to help.” Juliet tried to shout over the music, but her words were drowned out.
    A dancing sibyl calls to me…
    She walked towards the room, bypassing the tacky Siamese cats decoration.
    Conscious mirage melts away…
    Her bare feet were becoming icicles on the unforgiving wooden floor.
    The secret rainbow covers me…
    She stopped at the door; it was ajar by the smallest of margins. Her flat palm nudged it open another quarter inch. Encouraged by a view of emptiness inside, she nudged it open further. The room was still barren, exactly how she remembered it from the dozen or so reconnaissance trips of the house that she’d undertaken. Yet music was coming from somewhere in here.
    She tiptoed inside, heartbeat gathering pace again. In the curtain-less window, a moonlit starry night stared back at her. There were two new objects in the room: a chair in the right hand corner and a small compact CD player in the opposite corner, the power cable snaking around to a plug socket nearby. Both objects were new to the room. Her eyes moved between chair and CD player, trying to forge a logical argument for how they had made their way in here. There were none; the spook had finally arrived and it was playing games.
    Secret rainbow tap the vein…
    The speakers struggled tinnily against the volume.
    Secret rainbow cover me…
    She jabbed down on the stop button on the CD player and then took in the silence, studying the room for movement, inch by inch. The only noise now came from the whistling wind, which was softly buffeting the window that she was sure had been closed tightly.
    She repeated her mantra, “I’m here to help.”
    There was nothing; no movement, no sound except the window in the wind.
    “I’m here to help.” The words were uttered softly, as if she were a mother reassuring a child with a grazed knee.
    The wind still toyed with the window; apart from that the room was silent. Seemingly resigned to failure, Juliet sighed, made her way over to the window and locked the catch tightly.
    When she turned back from the window, the sight that greeted her was happening too quickly for her to react to it: a second after registering that the chair was hurtling towards her head, she found herself on the ground and her world soon turned to darkness.
     

Chapter XII
     
     
    As soon as her eyes flickered open and registered daylight, the pain attacked her in savage waves. Juliet felt at the considerable bruise now attached to her forehead. She sat up in the room she’d lost consciousness in the night before and tried to marshal her mental faculties back to