~~~
The truck stumbled several times after being thrown into park and having the key ripped from the ignition behind Daniel as he raced up the porch into the house. The front door was swinging, though the wind had died down some from what he’d felt driving through the front of the storm through the valley. There were no lights on. Daniel’s home, like the rest of the town, was completely dark.
“Rachel?!” Daniel called.
He took a few steps towards the kitchen to see if something had happened to her. There he noticed that the back door as well as all the windows which could open were. Water glistened about the kitchen, filling various containers and pooled on the counter tops here and there, as well as on the tile below his feet. When Dan turned back into the living room to head down stairs he noticed the carpet was squelching as well. It was as if it had rained inside the house.
“Ray?!!” Daniel’s voice held more of an edge.
A feeling was creeping into Daniel’s chest that he’d not known before. It was akin to a mother’s panic when she recognizes her child has wandered away in a store. Yet, somehow, Daniel knew already that he wasn’t going to come across Rachel talking with a friendly store clerk in the next aisle over. The house was empty. It felt empty. A deep vacuum pulled the heat out of Dan’s body as he moved through the living room. His world was beginning to freeze around him. Dan’s home, and perhaps all of Woodland Hills as far as he knew, had become a ghost town and it echoed and chilled like an old, vacant graveyard might.
Just as he rounded the end of the basement stairwell rail to check for Rachel in her room, he caught a glimpse of the attic pull-down ladder through his bedroom door. Turning into the bedroom he stopped and peered up into the attic, which was now absolutely pitch-black from where he stood. He called Rachel’s name again. Before going up, he rushed to his bathroom door just to make a quick double check that he wouldn’t find her there, injured, trying to bandage herself. Many frightening possibilities played out within Dan’s mind and he wanted to silence each of them, becoming desperate to know exactly where Rachel was.
Tearing up the pull-down into the attic, Daniel instinctively reached out for the switch to the light there, but of course it did not respond after flicking it up and down repeatedly. He could see faint light coming in from the dormer window and started making his way there slowly. Lightning flashed again outside, though the thunder was a good four or five seconds off and muted somewhat by the heavy clouds, he could see that there was a puddle in the dormer.
Stepping around the same corner of the dormer from which Rachel watched her captor rise through the stair hole Daniel noticed there had been a struggle, though not a terribly violent one. The chair was moved out of position and a couple of the books had been pulled off the shelf, as if Rachel had grasped them from the floor. In the puddle there was a piece of notebook paper.
Daniel picked the paper from the floor and shook off the standing water that came with it. The paper itself was soaked, but the ink was mostly intact and he realized he was looking at his brainstorming list about the shadow again. All of the would-be labels were now completely crossed off with a new marking, except for the word “soul”.
Fingers began to go numb and he half sat, half fell into the chair in the dormer. As the page shook in his hands he realized there was something bleeding through from the other side. He turned it over and found new writing on the back of the paper. It read: Mine now.
Daniel knew exactly who the line meant. Rachel was gone. But where? Where could this crazed shaman soul have taken her? Was it even possible for him to take her against her will?
The house creaked and groaned under the pressure of more wind as another flash and some rolling thunder passed through the home and verily through Dan’s own body.