Shadows Out of Time

I knew only one thing for certain after that. Dennis somehow found his way back from The Private Estate, returning in 1971, perhaps seized and yanked though time and space as I had been by Redcap, but Redcap didn’t let him leave the Coven. He sent what my research identified as a familiar, maybe one that contained an aspect of his witch-master, Keziah Mason, herself manifest in a subservient, insectoid body. I’d blown my one chance to save my brother’s life and lost my best friend in the bargain. Although I rushed crosstown back to the apartment building in search of Maggie, I found no sign of her. Our access to the strange basement space had vanished. A solid wall stood where we had stepped over the grave of a lost child and into an underground nightmare. The super mocked me for suggesting such a space had ever existed.

Maggie’s disappearance destroyed her family. They never fully believed my lies that I didn’t know what had happened to her. How could I ever explain? It ruined me as well. I drifted apart from my parents and extended family, and despite two attempts at marriage, I wound up alone in life.

Now a night and most of the ensuing day have passed since Maggie came to visit. I’ve sifted the past and written down my memories. It’s clear to me now that Redcap knew we were coming that summer and used Squirrel to set us up. He manipulated me in hope of obtaining the information my brother refused to give him, setting the ritual circle like a trap into which Maggie and I blundered. What did Dennis know that led to his death? Who was the stony figure with Redcap? I’ve asked myself if I truly want to know the answers because if I accept Maggie’s invitation, I will finally have them, all of them.

Maggie, she explained to me, never left the Private Estate. She befriended the Inheritor, dwelled in his library, and looked out through its marvelous windows upon all time. She knows what happened after the door slammed shut in my face, and to her our separation occurred only weeks ago. She knows what Redcap wanted to know: the time and nature of the Old Ones’ return. She has invited me to go with her to the Private Estate when the moon next changes, to walk along the same Perry Street alley from which I stumbled so many years ago, back into that scream-riddled city out of history.

The world, it seems, has not much longer to wait for the dark times Dennis feared.

One too many wasps have stung. The nest will soon be cleared.

Will the Estate protect us? Maggie wouldn’t say.

Tonight, the first night of the full moon, the moon has changed, and opened the way.

I must decide.

Very soon, Maggie will knock again on my door.

Toward a General Theory of Yithian PsychologyROBERT GUFFEY

“The possessing entity is as much a slave to negative psychic forces as he who is possessed.”

— Prof. Nathaniel Peaslee, 1929

Dear Dr. Peaslee,

Consider these pages the update you requested on the curious affair of Sean Willeford. For the record, it was the unexpected discovery of a lengthy article by your grandfather, Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, published in several parts by the Journal of the American Psychological Society in 192829, that gave me the key to solving Sean’s problem. The title of the article in question was “Pnakotic Theory: A Research into Dream-work and Temporal Endurance.” I tried to tell my patient’s father, Howard Willeford, the most significant facts about your grandfather’s theory, but the man refused to listen. In order for you to understand exactly what occurred, it’s necessary to go into some detail about the exchange I had with the elder Willeford that strange afternoon.

“God damn it, lady, he’s not getting any better!” Willeford shouted, slamming his fist into his palm.

I admit I answered him somewhat stiffly. “Address me as Dr. Keil, please.”

Willeford stood in the lobby of my office and yelled at me in front of my secretary, a terminally optimistic young man just shy of twenty-two who was a devotee of New Age philosophy and an expert at ignoring all negativity within a twenty-mileradius. I, on the other hand, had been practicing psychotherapy for the past fifteen years; I wasn’t used to ignoring any negativity. Nor was I used to being chewed out by an obese old man with a red face and waving fists, I assure you.