Well, following a suggestion I began to call around a few days ago in order to find a medium. Reading had been getting me nowhere and while the disappearances had slowed down after the entities initial gorging, about one person went missing each semester. Almost always from around the area near the breezeway running from the humanities building to the library.
I had begun to call the entity Báthory for the superficial parallels to the psychopathic Hungarian countess who had, among other things, allegedly forced some of her servants to eat their own flesh. I guess we just have an instinctive human need to name things.
For weeks after I came to realize what I had brought here, I felt a slight twinge of terror walking the halls each morning. Even though I had established that Báthory seems to only hunt during the day, I still had an unease of being alone in the dark so near its hunting grounds. Early morning Eggos at home replaced my desk cereal.
Any time I was alone on campus, I braced to hear Báthory’s voice again. Even though I know in my rational mind that the voice I heard had been an ordinary sounding human voice, my memory had twisted it into something far more sinister and demonic. Each passing day and victim taken only twisted the vision of Báthory in my mind. That shapeless shadow from the surveillance video became, in my mind, to resemble something akin to a mix between Dracula and Sauron’s armor.
Every now and again I would walk the breezeway to find any evidence of Báthory. Oftentimes there was no sign. Every now and again I was startled by a pine cone dropping or a sudden breeze that rustled branches, but there was never any clear sign of Báthory’s presence. Except once, that feeling of being watched returned as I hustled to the library to make some extra print outs of an article. Perhaps Báthory preferred distracted prey. As soon as I turned, the feeling vanished. It seems my Uber service provided me a free pass as dinner.
The next day a student went missing. Báthory had been hungry that day.
Despite my misgivings about mediums and the like, I began to call around.
It is not that I don’t believe in the paranormal. Well, I obviously do now, but even before Báthory I believed. My brother and I used to ghost hunt in cemeteries. We had a few experiences growing up that we swear were ghost related, but something about hiring a medium just rankled the academic in me.
I really did not know where to start at first. Just Google mediums near me? Do they accept calls over the Ouija board? Fortunately, a member of the criminal justice department who happened to have done a study on police departments hiring mediums also happened to be an occasional sparring partner at the Krav Maga gym and drinking buddy of mine. She, with only a few follow up questions that I awkwardly dodged, provided me with a list of local mediums she had worked with during her study.
The initial calls did not go so well. It’s not that I am misanthropic, I do well with my friends and students, but I am a recovering member of the cult of productivity. I often have to remind myself that not everything has to be done with efficiency. Even though I am doing better with taking things at a more deliberate pace I still have an aversion for people that hang on niceties or speak without really saying anything though. I just want to get the information across and hang up.
My first four calls were horrible offenders on both counts and talking to them was like having to watch Báthory take another victim while locked inside my room with them.
My fifth call was the winner.
She spoke in a clear manner with a southern twang that was just a little over the top. Just to the point where I wondered if she was putting on an act. I have known people, proud of their status as southerners, that in less guarded moments have accidentally dropped the twang and spoke a few words or sentences in a more common American accent. People really do care about their image, despite protestations to the contrary.
I explained everything. Starting with the jog up through the surveillance footage and the last disappearance. She quizzed me about my beliefs and the supernatural. She wanted to know about every detail down to every campfire story I could remember. I told her about seeing lights into the local cemetery when we had drunkenly brought a Ouija board, voices in the local abandoned murder house after we had snuck in at night as teenagers, and the ghost story I had made up as a kid to scare my friends at a sleep over.
She insisted on meeting at night, but I declined. First, since Báthory hunted during the day I felt we would get the best results then. Secondly, I did not need some gossipy colleague seeing me with another woman in the building after hours. We arranged for her to meet me shortly after my office hour the following day.
When she walked into my office, I was a bit startled. You may have had the experience of hearing someone before you see them and the voice not matching the body at all. Her voice had been reminiscent of a pioneer woman from a spaghetti western. Instead she had the skin tone that would have allowed her to play someone from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia in a 1950s movie. Her clothing seemed to ignore the fact that it was 98 degrees and so humid that you could swim in the air. She looked like she should have been in a podcast studio in a swanky New York neighborhood loft, not in some suburb near a branch college that focused on education and criminal justice in a Gulf Coast swamp.
Despite all of that, she radiated the air of somebody that could see beyond what everyone else did. It wasn’t a thousand-yard stare. I was all too familiar with that gaze. Most of my five uncles had served in Vietnam. I also recognized that vacant and troubled stare from the mirror. Fuck you Fallujah.
I instinctively trusted that she was authentic and could find Báthory.
But something deep in my stomach turned uneasy the moment she walked into my office, though. It wasn’t about her. Her presence was threatening Báthory.
I should have called it off right then.
I explained that we should head down to the breezeway, but she insisted we start in my office. She was convinced I was more tied to Báthory than I realized. She was so confident and deliberate in her manner that her rituals did not tweak my anxiety about this seemingly asinine display.
After about an hour of no results, she decided we would walk the hallways I frequented. This would not have bugged me if she did not have to do it with her arms out in the air and eyes half shut. There were still students and faculty on campus. I immediately began setting up an excuse in my head. Performative art display? No, nobody who knew me would buy that. As we passed a few people I just grinned and nodded. Perhaps they would forget the whole encounter.
Báthory’s constructed image began to grow more defined in my mind’s eye. That I knew was my fear.
What was real was the feeling of rage that I felt radiating from outside the breezeway door as we approached it. The medium seemed unaffected, but began to beeline that way. I’m still wondering if rage was the emotion she sensed in those last few minutes.
God, I wish I had never opened that door for her. It was instinct to do so. We were on a mission, she was being guided by something, and I was being polite.
We walked out onto the breezeway. It was an appropriate name at the moment. A thunderstorm was rolling in and a nice cool wind rushed through the space between the two buildings where we walked. Her hipster attire suddenly seemed not so ridiculous.
I have a few core memories. I’ll never forget the time my brother drunkenly flipped off a bridge into a shallow bayou and split his scalp. I will never forget the moment I was staring right at an IED when it went off next to my best friend’s Humvee, I will never forget the first time I held my daughter.
And I will never forget the look of primal fear in that medium’s eyes when she spun around toward me.
That shriek she let out. If only I could forget that.
She bolted from the breezeway across the slightly overgrown grass. She did not stop running when she reached the road, with a speed limit of 45, that made a circle around campus.
I can never be sure if she saw that SUV. Judging by the driver’s head position, they did not see her.
She joined the world that only she could see shortly after her head struck the SUV’s hood and then the asphalt. I’m not sure if it was the vehicle or ground impact that snuffed out her light, but I definitely saw more gore eject when she hit the pavement.
As people began to run out to help and my mind actually started to process the fact that I just witnessed someone’s life end, another breeze kicked up.
That breeze carried a word. Just one word.
Don’t
Something has changed now. I know that Báthory looks more like a combination of Gollum and a porcupine than Dracula and Sauron. I know this because I can see it now.
Every day I am at work.