Joseph C. Lisiewski
It’s a bitterly cold January day in 1976. Gus Breach, the Chief of Police, his three deputies, and Frank Lewis the town mortician, have no idea that the discovery of a strangely dressed, headless and bloodless corpse lying on a deserted mountaintop road, is about to plunge them and the residents of Kulpsville, Pennsylvania, into a holocaust that cannot exist by any reckoning of human experience. A desecrated grave, strange markings in the snow and signs of a violent struggle, all push Breach’s former experience on the Pittsburgh Homicide Squad past the limit. A few rejected memories of a similar event trigger his intuition, and the old cop’s blood freezes as his instinct “To Protect and To Serve” is thrown into high gear.
Brutal murder after brutal murder forces the Chief to call in the State Police and then the Army, but to no avail. All weapons are useless against the floating patch of darkness that conceals the NightShadow monstrosity within. Only when the aid of Abraham ben Yakov, a retired psychiatrist, is enlisted, can the horror be met head on. He alone knows the secret about NightShadow. A secret that involves a conspiracy formed on both sides of the grave; and an enemy he knew throughout his life he would one day have to face…and try to destroy.
Accompany Breach, Yakov, and the valiant few as they confront the madness that is NightShadow—that is, if you dare.
Joseph C. Lisiewski, Ph.D., is a noted physicist involved in the study of the Relativistic Space-Time Continuum, and has published numerous nonfiction books and papers in the Occult, Magic, and Alchemy since 1980. His Occult and Sci-Fi horror books, Geometries of the Mind and The Altar Path—soon to be re-released by AuthorHouse in new editions—have been well received by readers and reviewers around the world. NightShadow, his third horror novel, promises to be his best yet. Lisiewski combines elements of science with Occult principles and his own personal experiences in these fields, which has enabled him to produce works of horror that his readers never forget—even after the lights are turned back on!
http://www.8thmatrixpress.com
Chapter 1
The First Corpse
Gus Breach remained in a squatting position, his arms resting on his knees, hands locked together. On that bitterly cold day, January 12th, 1976, a man’s breath would normally crystallize in front of him in a slow, steady stream. But not on that Monday. The Chief’s breath froze in front of his face in short, even bursts, keeping pace with the pounding heart in his chest. As he stared down at the covered corpse lying on the mountaintop dirt road in front of him, he shook his head from side to side. The look of disgust sat heavy on his hard, cracked face, as his thoughts huddled around this strange event.
What could do a thing like this to a full grown man?! he thought. Ten years on the Pittsburgh force and now twenty in this nothin’ hick town. I expected to have it a lot easier than this near my retirement! This is for the big city boys with the detectives and resources needed to deal with insanity like this. This is why I left the city! Had my belly full of this kind of crap! It sure doesn’t belong here in Kulpsville, Pennsylvania! Nothin’ ever happens in the coal towns around here. Nothin’ more than the usual drunks fightin’ with their old ladies or with each other, or a punk or two breakin’ a window at the Junior High, or maybe some son-of-a-bitch rippin’ off a vending machine in the Laundromat. Not this. Damn!
I don’t even know where to begin! It’s been a long time since I handled anything even remotely like this. Things were a lot different then. Not like now. And murder like this one? Guess I’ll have to call in the state boys down the road. Maybe they’ll give me a quick refresher course in homicide investigation or offer some pointers. Maybe even help out with the investigation. Guess that’s the best I can look for.
A loud shout hacked its way through the frozen winter air, finally reaching Breach’s ears, breaking his train of thought.
“Hey, Chief! I found somethin’! Better come and take a look!”
“What did you find, Barker?”
“I think you better come and take a look! I don’t want to disturb any evidence!” the younger cop called back.
“Dave, how many times do I have to tell you? This isn’t Kojak! What did you find?”
“Lots of weird footprints, Chief, and a . . . a . . . head!”
“What did you say?” Breach yelled back in excitement.
“A head. A human head. It’s got to belong to the dead guy up there on the road with you! You’d better come and take a look!”
The Chief rose from his stooped position, walked over to a water company cleared path, and joined Dave Barker in a hollow fifty yards away that paralleled the mountain road.
Barker had covered his find with an old rag he carried in his back pocket. He was new to the force, and still went by the book. He used the rag to keep his new, steel blue .38 Police Special polished, even while on the job. He would never be able to use the rag for that purpose again.
“Lift the rag up,” Breach ordered. “Let’s see what you’ve got there, son.”
Barker removed the soiled rag carefully. Staring up at the Chief of Police was a human head. Its eyes were frozen in place by the winter chill, but still they bulged from their sockets as if reeling in horror from the sight of some inhuman monstrosity, or perhaps from the realization of dying. The clear haze covering the pupils was frozen over by a more intense cold¾one all men would know on a given day: the absolute cold of death. Its curly graying blond hair lay in fixed, random loops on the top of the skull. Ice crystals had worked their way in from the outside, matting the strands after the body warmth had ebbed away. The ice sparkles on the skull reminded Breach of the head of Medusa.
The skin was an ashen gray, held tightly in place by contracted facial muscles. The mouth was open, a blue-black tongue hanging out and lying over the left corner of the mouth. From the old cop’s battlefield experience in World War II, the deep purple lips told him the man had been dead for less than twelve hours. Even cold doesn’t turn a man’s lips that color. Only death, and the time it came to him, did that. Breach began to clench his fists tightly. His black leather gloves made crackling sounds as he opened and closed his hands several times. He wanted to make sure the gloves were still on, and that he could feel through them. He didn’t want to touch the thing with his bare flesh.
“Look at these footprints, Gus! I was born and raised around here just like the others, and I’ve hunted these mountains since I was nine. I got to tell you, Chief, I’ve seen a lot of tracks over the years, but I’ve never seen anything like this! What do you make of them?”
Breach walked carefully around a set of tracks that were better preserved than the others. The vortex formed by the trees in the hollow caused the wind to roll around this particular set of prints, instead of covering them with blowing snow as it did to most of the others. He inspected them carefully, bending down to feel their curve and depth.
“Come here, I want you to learn. See here? Look at the heel. See how round it is at the back? Now look at it here, three inches down. You know what that slight arc is?”
“No,” the young cop said. “That’s what confused me. You can see the toes up at the front of the print clear enough, but a bare heel doesn’t make a mark like that. It’s flat near the arc, not round like at the base. So what could make a footprint like that?”
The Chief didn’t answer the young man’s question immediately. He had a linear way of teaching. Like putting one foot in front of the other to get from where he was to where he wanted to go. He didn’t skip around like the young kids who were the patrolmen on his force.
