“No you’re not. You’re sensitive to it. Have you seen one?”
“One what?” Jesse asked.
Renee motioned to the marble statue beside him. “An eldritch.”
There had been a night, only a week before his thirteenth birthday, when the sky had turned funny colors and Jesse could have sworn he saw something in the clouds. A huge form. When he tried to tell his parents about him, they passed it off as a dream. Great-uncle Ephraim told him to write such weird things down, and be careful who he shared them with.
Renee stepped closer again, and she narrowed her eyes in concentration. For a moment, she seemed to drop the ghostly act, but then maybe Jesse had been dragged more toward her world and its strangeness. “You haven’t. But you have left yourself wide open. You need to be careful about that.”
“Wide open?” Jesse asked.
“That is how they get in here.” Renee tapped his forehead. “And once they get in, they don’t let go.”
“Once who gets in?”
Renee laughed as she drifted toward her brother. “Maybe you aren’t as open as I thought.”
The marble statue seemed to leer at him, and he backed away from it. As he reached Milton and Ronald, and now Renee, they were discussing how the robber broke through the glass door.
“And you didn’t hear that?” Milton said.
“I did. I assumed Anita dropped something,” Renee replied.
Ronald looked more upset with his sister. “Our footage of the thief is limited. The system is designed to record when its activated. Since she turned it off, it stopped recording.”
“We’ll need a copy,” Jesse said.
“That’s already in the works,” Ronald said.
“Don’t understand why you called the bureau about this,” Milton replied. “Seems straight-forward. Perp smashed the door, grabbed the statue. Left.”
Ronald glowered at Milton, as if he was scolding an employee for questioning him. “Because those detectives in the hallway got one look at this room and ran out of it. I understand that the collection is strange, but every piece is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some more. At the very least, it needs to be added to the stolen art database before someone tries to sell it.”
“How much is the missing statue worth?” Jesse asked.
“Around a quarter of a million,” Ronald said.
“That seems an awful lot for a man with tentacles,” Milton said.
Renee held up a finger. “Not a man. A figure lacking a defined face except for its grin. It’s shrouded in a cloak, but rises on four tentacles for legs. Another two serve as its arms. Toothy has a grace about it that defies explanation.”
“Toothy,” Jesse repeated.
“I wasn’t allowed to call it Sucky as a child, though it does have more octopus-like tentacles rather than slimy, worm-like appendages.”
“You named it?” Milton asked, his voice incredulous.
“I named everything in here,” Renee said. “It is far easier to get it out of your head if you can say, ‘not today, Toothy.’ Though, I must admit, this room was better balanced with Toothy in it rather than out. Toothy kept the others in line.”
Ronald wiped a hand across his brow. “Not this again.”
Renee lifted her chin andhmphed.
Things would be a lot less weird if Jesse were still in bed with Bryce or if he could call him and talk about this weird shit. But an ongoing investigation wasn’t a topic to discuss with a civilian, and Jesse wasn’t sure Bryce would appreciate hearing about all this nightmare-inducing art. Seemed like the guy had enough on his plate already.
Still, trying to shake this strange encounter from his head was going to take more than writing it down in a journal. Jesse scribbled down a few more notes as Milton continued asking questions.
Now, if only he could ignore the creepy sensation that something was watching him.
