Shadows and Stone

Shadows and Stone

## Blurb

**LIVING A DOUBLE LIFE**

Dr. Alastair Stone, British expatriate with a black belt in sarcasm, attracts weirdness like catnip attracts cats. When he's not teaching Occult Studies at Stanford, he's dealing with magical threats that would turn most people into gibbering lumps. Ideally, he tries to keep these two sides of his life separate, but that doesn't always work out so well for him. Just ask his ex-girlfriends.

Tonight's date was just supposed to be a simple Halloween party at a fellow professor's house—a few drinks, a little shop talk, a fake séance. Until the "séance" summons a very real—and very angry—spirit.

Something horrible is happening in this nice, suburban home. If Stone doesn't figure out what's going on and stop it fast, some restless ghosts will make a bloody bit of long-buried history repeat itself—and kill anyone who gets in their way.

## Plot

*Shadows and Stone is a standalone novella set between the events of Stone and a Hard Place and The Forgotten.*

Alastair Stone (age 32) gets talked into a Halloween party in suburbia, and brings his current girlfriend, Maria. A séance conducted by a Madame Tanushka, planned for fun, goes awry and a malevolent, smoky entity appears. The others are unresponsive, but Stone speaks with it. It has somehow morphed the gibberish circle on the Halloween tablecloth into esoteric symbols and is trying to cross the plane. Stone disrupts it by telekinetically spilling his drink on the circle, breaking it. The entity disappears.

### Pause here a moment WARNING, Possible Spoilers Ahead

A couple of weeks later the party host, Rick Pomeroy shows up at the weekly pub crawl looking disturbed. Stone buys him a drink and asks if anything's wrong. Pomeroy says his son, Dylan, is talking to no one, and recently he found him in the middle of a drawn circle like at Halloween, talking in a different language. He's also taken to carrying a stuffed dog everywhere except school, doesn't want to be separated from it. Unable to think how to tell Pomeroy he thinks something arcane is up with the boy, Stone keeps quiet, except for asking the medium's contact info.

Stone has a coffee date with the medium, a cheerful charlatan named Eunice Wylie, to ask a few questions about the seance. She tells him she seemed to nod off, and didn’t know why there was broken stuff around the table after. She'd had a dream about a sickly 40-something man, and someone bigger and shadowy. Suddenly she goes into convulsions. Stone lays her on the floor and orders the barista to call 911. Ms. Wylie is screaming gibberish until she focuses on him and, in a man's voice, says to stay away or die. Then, she dies.

Stone, shaken, calls the Pomeroys - he has to get to the bottom of what's going on. Teri invites him for dinner. After the meal he sneaks a peek into Dylan's room and sees him talking to the stuffed dog and, to magical sight, the large shadowy entity, which feints at him. Back downstairs, he asks to speak to Dylan, that maybe the kid believes something supernatural is going on. Pomeroy is upset but his wife convinces him to let Stone do it.

Dylan tells him his dog lets him speak to a dead boy; there is also a dead baby who can't talk. They had bad things happen to them, and warn him about the bad thing. He becomes hysterical and the Pomeroy's make Stone leave.

The next day, he asks Maria - who broke up with him - to look into the murder of two children by their father in the area, as that is her expertise. She finds out that a wealthy farmer owned the land in the 1920's. He had a 5-yr old boy and an infant girl. His wife died at the girl's birth, and he went strange. He eventually sacrificed the children to a strange statue he'd acquired to get his wife back. When police arrived, he set the house on fire, and he and a police officer died. Later the land was sold and built on, and the Pomeroy's house is on the approximate same spot as the farmer’s. And today is the anniversary of that event.

Stone rushes to the Pomeroys' house after gathering some materials. He finds the house locked and no one answering a knock, and a strange glow in the pool. He magics a lock to get in and finds an older woman asleep on a chair in the living room, surrounded by a circle. He leaves her there, and rushes upstairs where strange lights flicker. He senses the power coming from Dylan's room is stronger than he is.

He bursts into the room to find a semi-substantial Dylan kneeling in a circle in a room out of the past. A more solid figure – Henry Quigley, who’d killed his children - sits on the bed. He invites Stone to join him or die. Stone, of course, attacks, but it’s shrugged off and the huge shadowy creature engulfs him. He's then forced to relive Quigley’s prior working—the murders of young Joseph and little Helen in the 1920's. He's attacked, his energy drained as he tries to shield and defeat the shadowy being at once. But, inspired, he calls on Eva Quigley, the children’s late mother. She empowers him briefly, so he can destroy the malevolent statue, which banishes the shadow and renders Quigley back to a ghost. Eva gathers her children and fades away. Quigley, cowed, also disappears as Stone falls unconscious.

He wakes to Dylan's normal room. Dylan is safe, sleeping. He puts the boy to bed, checks on the babysitter, and sneaks out under an invisibility spell as the Pomeroys return home. He knows he's lost a friend, but saved their children.

Two months later Pomeroy visits his office to tell him they're moving back to OK, and invites him for dinner. Stone is touched, especially after Pomeroy admits he saw Stone's car leaving that night, as well as the destroyed circles and stuffed dog. But Dylan is fine, back to normal. Stone thinks a quiet, middle-class, homecooked meal is a great idea.