Eidolon

Chapter 20: Blackhaven

The moment they arrived back at Cynthia's house, they dashed upstairs to her room and dumped the armloads of files onto the floor. They had gotten all mixed up, having been dropped out a window in such a haphazard rush, and some were wet or torn. Fortunately, nothing seemed to be damaged badly enough that it was unreadable.

Alex began trying to reorganize the various sheets of paper, placing them in the correct folders as best she could guess, creating a number of stacks on the bedroom floor. Cynthia mostly stuck to trying to clean off the ones that had been smeared with mud and grime, and lay out the wet ones to dry.

"You think we've got anything useful here?" she asked.

"I hope so," Alex replied. "I'd hate for Spooky Jay to have sacrificed himself like that for nothing."

Cynthia chuckled, shaking her head. "You make it sound like he died." Alex knew she was poking fun at her, but was too focused on arranging the documents into piles to respond.

"Hello, mija," Mary Lopez's voice came from the doorway, startling Alex so badly that she visibly recoiled. "What are you girls up to?"

"Just working on a project for school," Cynthia replied casually. She was a much better liar than Alex, who decided to keep quiet and continue shuffling papers as inconspicuously as possible.

"Well, if you're hungry, there's snacks in the kitchen," her mother said.

"Okay, thanks mom," Cynthia replied, a bit rudely as she reached over to push the door closed again.

"Look at these photos," Alex said, handing a stack to Cynthia. They were not the gory, post-mortem pictures of dead bodies one often saw in police shows, but instead a collection of images that showed strange symbols similar to what they had found in the confessional booth and Ellison Park. Some were drawn onto walls, others etched into wood or painted on the ground, but they all had similar designs.

"There's more of these than I would have thought," Cynthia commented.

"Yeah," Alex agreed. "They were all found in the general vicinity of someone who died. Some of them were a lot more mundane than Heather Cole or John Ferguson, though. I never would have thought to even suspect some of these people's deaths were related to the ones we knew about. There's over a dozen different cases here."

"Do you think all of these people are wraiths now?"

Alex gave a grim nod. "It's very possible." Her eyes fell to a picture of what appeared to be a stack of books lying on the floorboard of a car. There was a handwritten note attached to it.

"What's that?" Cynthia asked, seeing Alex's interest.

Alex read the note, apparently written by Detective Prescott himself. "There was a stack of occult-related books found in John Ferguson's truck. They later disappeared from the evidence room."

"Well that definitely sounds like a clue," Cynthia said.

"That's not all," Alex said, her voice growing excited and manic. "The books had sign-out cards on the inner cover... from the Blackhaven University Library."

Cynthia just stared back at her expectantly, as if waiting for her to continue. "Uh... I'm sorry, should that mean something to me?"

"Blackhaven is a ghost town about fifty miles outside of Arcadia City," Alex explained. "It was abandoned back in the late seventies, when some kind of chemical accident resulted in the evacuation of the entire city. There's been dozen of articles and a couple of documentaries about it. A lot of people think it might have been some kind of covered-up government experiment or something."