2. Sebastian

2

Sebastian

September 4 th , 2024

I drove slowly along the winding road, navigating the sharp turns and steep inclines. Towering trees lined the way, their branches forming a natural archway that allowed only slivers of light to penetrate the canopy. It made the whole area seem as if it were bathed in perpetual twilight.

“So, I noticed a few anomalies in the records, but I don’t know if it’s a big deal or not.” My friend Jesse’s voice played through the car speaker, coming out slightly tinny from the shitty reception in this area. “It’s from the nineties, so it probably doesn’t even matter anymore.”

I glanced at the GPS. “You’ll have to tell me about this another time, man. The reception on this stretch is spotty as hell. We’ve probably only got two or three minutes before it drops out.”

As I spoke, intricate symbols began to appear on the trees around me, carved deeply into their trunks. Some resembled ancient runes while others depicted crude humanoid figures; a clear sign that I was entering a place shrouded in lore. Antlers hung from branches above, swaying gently in the breeze.

The arcane symbols and hanging antlers, eerie as they were, were merely a sign of the lengths that Pinecrest Falls locals went to in order to attract tourists seeking a brush with the infamous cultists that lived in the area.

The real cultists—otherwise known as the Covenant—kept to the most remote parts of the forest, away from prying eyes and curious tourists. They rarely ventured this far down the mountain, and they didn’t carve their symbols into trees alongside the road.

Just into the bodies of those who crossed them.

“No problem,” Jesse replied. “Like I said, it’s probably not a big deal, anyway. I’m just bored as hell.”

“Looking for any old issues, huh?”

Jesse had attended law school with me, but after failing the bar exam multiple times, he’d taken a job as an archivist at my father’s hospital in Manhattan.

“Yup. Anything to make the days go by quicker.” He coughed and went on. His voice was beginning to sound fuzzy. “So, you’re up in creep country again, huh?”

“Yup. About ten minutes away from the house.”

“When are you coming back?”

“Honestly? No fucking idea.” I gripped the wheel tighter as I steered around another sharp turn. “I took a month off, but I might end up taking longer.”

“Must be nice being a fancy foundation lawyer with all that paid time off. Doesn’t hurt that your dad owns the joint, either.”

“Hey, watch it,” I said, smirking. “If he didn’t own it, you might be out of a job right now.”

Jesse chuckled. “I know. I’m just messing with you. But seriously, you’re really doing this? You’re going up to that witch village?”

I scoffed. “They aren’t witches. No such fucking thing.”

“You know what I mean. Are you really going there?”

“Yup.”

“To be honest, I thought you gave up on this plan three… wait, no, four years ago.”

“I’ve been biding my time,” I said, glancing at a bleached set of antlers hanging from a branch on my left. I knew the locals put them up as decorations for the adventure-seeking tourists, but I always wondered who was stupid enough to see them as anything but a clear warning to stay the fuck out of this place unless they were truly prepared.

Then again, half the tourists were true crime fanatics who made their pilgrimage to my mother’s murder site every year, pretending they wanted to lay flowers and honor her memory, when in reality they were making content for their stupid fucking podcasts and websites. They didn’t care about the real and ever-present danger that lurked in these woods. They just wanted clicks and views.

Jesse laughed again. “Hey, with mysterious talk like that, you’ll fit in perfectly with those fucking creeps.” His voice suddenly turned somber. “But seriously, good luck. You deserve answers. Your mom was a really cool lady.”

My lips tightened. “Yeah. She was.”

“I still remember those balls she used to make us after preschool. What were they? Chocolate, peanut butter, coconut…”

“And honey.” A ghost of a smile lifted the corners of my mouth. “That was her favorite thing.”

“They were bomb. I want—” Jesse’s voice faded out for a moment, so I couldn’t catch a word he said. When the reception returned, he was bidding me goodbye. “Catch you later, man.”

Five minutes later, I turned into the steep driveway that led to my family’s vacation home. I always felt a pang in my guts when the house came into view. So many good times had occurred here, but they were all wrapped up in the worst time of all—the night my mother was taken.

As I drew closer, I saw my father’s car parked by the front of the house. He was standing on the wraparound porch, one hand lifted in a greeting.

“For fuck’s sake.” I gritted my teeth as I braked. What the hell was he doing here?

I didn’t have a bad relationship with my father. Not at all. But he wasn’t supposed to be here. This must’ve been the first time he’d even stepped foot on this land in over a decade.

After what happened to my mother, he stopped visiting. He didn’t want to give up the house, though, because he knew it still contained a lot of happy memories from before that dark time, and so he’d passed it down to me as part of my trust fund provisions, which came into effect around six years ago.

I exhaled deeply and headed up the steep wooden stairs that led to the porch. Dad gave me a tight smile and leaned in to give me a brief hug and pat on the back. “I was in the area and thought I’d drop by, because I knew you were coming up here today,” he said when he drew back. “Totally forgot I gave all the keys to you.”

I snorted. “You were just in the area, huh?” I said fumbling in my pocket for the front door key. “In a remote town in the High Peaks Wilderness?”

“I know it sounds like a lie, but I need to go to Montreal, and it’s only an hour away from here,” he said, lifting a brow. “It seemed reasonable to come by for a visit.”

“Why are you going to Montreal?” I asked, frowning as I turned the key in the lock.

“The Thorne Foundation is funding a drug trial that’s showing promising results for Alzheimer’s patients,” Dad replied. “Unfortunately, the lead scientist is a born-and-bred Montrealer, and she refuses to move her team down to the States, even temporarily. So I have to head up there for a couple of weeks to oversee a few things. One of your uncles will be joining me too.”

“I see.” I pushed the front door open and stepped aside, gesturing for him to go in. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a familiar accent table on the far side of the open plan living room. The sight instantly made me stiffen.

While I was crouched under that very table during an impromptu game of hide and seek twenty years ago, my mother was abducted by two men from the Covenant. Men she’d seemingly been friendly with up until that night.

After they snatched her, a large-scale search of the wilderness ensued, including several police raids on Alderwood, the isolated village belonging to the Covenant cultists. That search lasted six days before Mom’s body was found by hikers in a remote spot around forty minutes north of our vacation home property.

She was dressed in a ceremonial white gown and tied to a blood-soaked stone altar. Her throat had been slit, and esoteric symbols were carved into the flesh of her arms, legs, and abdomen. A strange effigy overlooked the sacrificial altar, hanging from a tree branch—straw and leaf body cloaked in hessian with an animal skull for a head and antlers bound to the top with twine.

I had nightmares about that night for years when I was a kid. Someone accidentally left the crime scene photos out on a desk one day when the cops called us in for an update on the case, and the images burned themselves into my mind’s eye, intensifying the awful dreams until I was convinced that I’d actually been there to witness her murder.

Night after night, I closed my eyes in bed and found myself helplessly watching a ceremony in the deep woods. Chanting men and women held flaming torches as others tied my screaming mother down. A man in a dark cloak and hulking antler headdress muttered an incantation as his gleaming knife hovered over her, before—

Fuck. Stop it.

Acid rose in my throat as the memories flashed in my mind for the millionth time, and I jerked my gaze away from the table. I’d thought about tossing it out over the years, or burning it on a bonfire, but something had always held me back. The same thing that brought me back to this place over and over again.

I turned away and followed my father, who was heading for the kitchen.

“Montreal aside, I also wanted to check out the updates you’ve made on the place,” he said. He slowly turned a full circle and let out a low whistle. “You were right. The remodel was a fantastic idea. There’s so much more light in here now.”

I gave him a tight smile and nodded. In reality, the kitchen remodel was merely a cover story to account for all the time I’d spent up here in recent years, along with the necessity of having contractors and construction workers on the property for so long.

“You want a coffee?” I asked, gesturing toward the espresso machine. “Or do you have to head off now?”

“I can stay for a drink,” Dad replied, glancing at his phone. “But I have to be going within the hour. It’s raining later, and you know what these roads are like in bad weather.”

I tilted my head toward him as the machine whirred. “Why didn’t you just fly?”

He smiled and lifted his palms in mock surrender. “All right, all right. Your obvious suspicions are correct. I came here with an ulterior motive,” he said. The smile faded. “I came to ask you once again if you’ll cancel this… this plan of yours.”

My lips thinned. “Nope. Appreciate the concern, though.”

He sighed and slumped into a chair by the dining table. “Do you really think those savages will let you through the gate?” he asked.

“They let Mom in, didn’t they?” I said, raising a brow.

The Covenant’s short-lived acceptance of my mother’s ecological anthropology research project had been a major coup for her career. She was one of the only outsiders they’d ever allowed to stay in the village, making her a total hero in the anthropology and sociology department at Columbia.

Her research had mostly focused on the sect’s use of plants in their day-to-day life, but she’d also observed and noted their general cultural practices. Most of her notes had been lost after her death, but enough remained to give the world a general picture of their ways and history.

She’d described them as following a ‘magico-religious doctrine’ that seemed to be an unlikely blend of paganism, occultism, and Christianity. That doctrine had stemmed from the beliefs of the original members, who arrived in North America long before the United States were founded.

Many of those founding members were so-called witches who’d fled Europe to escape persecution and death sentences. Others were French Catholics who’d shipped themselves to the new world in hope of a better life for themselves and their children. They were originally citizens of New France, which had once owned territories all over Canada and the States. At some point they’d abandoned those Acadians to create their own little world in what was now known as the High Peaks Wilderness in upstate New York.

Some other early members were English settlers who’d defected from the British-owned territories of North America to join the tiny new offshoot colony, bringing the English language that the Covenant would eventually adopt to better communicate with the outside world when necessary.

The result of all that history was what we saw today: a reclusive religious group living in the vast, untamed wilderness, practicing so-called magic and carrying out ritualized murders in the name of their revered deity.

My mother’s curiosity about them had won her much acclaim in academic circles, but it had also sealed her fate.

Dad narrowed his eyes at me. “Even if they do let you in, what the hell do you think is going to happen? You think they’ll just admit the truth to you?”

“I told you, I have a plan.”

“Christ,” he muttered, scraping a hand through his thinning hair. “This is my fault, really. I didn’t talk about it enough when you were young. You needed that. You needed to know—”

“Dad, no.” I cut him off and placed the steaming coffee mug in front of him. “You were fine. I knew everything there was to know about it by the time I was in junior high, anyway. I saw the news. Read all the bullshit theories online. Some assholes even made a fucking B movie about what happened to her. Remember? Horror in the High Peaks?”

Dad looked exasperated. “Then why on earth are you going up there? What do you think you’re going to find out that we don’t already know?”

“There’s always something. A person who wants to talk after holding a secret in for so many years. Or a trophy someone kept from the killing.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Twenty years, Seb. Twenty years. And they’ve still never been able to pin it on those cultist freaks. How many times did the police and FBI raid their little compound?”

“Four.”

“And they found nothing to connect them to what happened to your mother. You know this.” Dad leaned back, eyes narrowing as he stared at me across the table. “And it wasn’t just them. Do you have any idea how many private investigators I hired over the years? They all came up empty too. Not to mention the average solve rate on a case that’s been cold for two decades. You know what that is?”

“I know it’s low, yeah.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing?” he barked, slamming his hand on the table. “Other than pointlessly putting yourself in a huge amount of danger?”

Danger hadn’t bothered me in a long time. Not since I was eight years old and had my first brush with death, courtesy of the Covenant. From that moment on, fear and I became strangers, and rage-fueled adrenaline became my constant companion.

I leaned back in my seat and folded my arms across my chest. “Calm down.”

My father closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I just… I worry about you. So much. Your uncles are worried too. After what happened to her, none of us can bear to think that the same thing might happen to you.”

“It won’t. I have something Mom never had.”

He opened his eyes, brows lowering into a frown. “What?”

“Guns.” I smiled thinly. “Multiple guns.”

He groaned and buried his face in his hands. “Christ,” he muttered again, shoulders drooping. He looked back up at me. “You didn’t answer my question. What makes you think you’ll find something to prove it was the Covenant? Even the FBI couldn’t find anything to pin them.”

I knew I’d find the truth, but I couldn’t tell my father—or anyone else—exactly how I planned on making that happen. If I did, they’d probably call the cops or have me committed to a fucking mental hospital.

“I have my ways,” I said.

Dad didn’t even seem to hear my response. He was looking over my shoulder, eyes unfocused. “It still astounds me that those bastards actually got away with it, even with your witness testimony and the fact that anyone with so much as half a brain cell can see it was them,” he said. “For people who claim to eschew the modern world and all our laws along with it, they sure as hell know how to game the legal system.” He paused, eyes snapping back to meet mine. “You want to know something, son?”

“What?”

“Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I actually wonder if witchcraft is real, and that’s how those Covenant bastards get away with all the shit they do. There really doesn’t seem to be any other explanation.”

“I think we’ve all thought that from time to time,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. “But they’re just people. People who are about to get a fucking wakeup call.”

Dad sighed. “You’re really still going to try and get into Alderwood?”

“Yes.”

“There’s nothing I can say or do to convince you otherwise?”

“Nope.”

Another sigh. “I should’ve known you wouldn’t give in. You’re just like your mother,” he said. “She was strong and tenacious. Stubborn, too. Never gave up on anything. That’s one of the many reasons I loved her so much.” He briefly paused again, eyes misting over. “But it’s also the reason she died. I don’t want to see the same thing happen to you.”

“I’ll be okay,” I said firmly. “I’ll be careful.”

“You damn well better be.” He raised his brows. “Anything you need at all, and I mean anything, you call me. If I can’t answer for some reason, you call one of your uncles instead. You hear me?”

“Yup.”

“All right.” He downed the remainder of his coffee and stood, peering out the picture window. “I should probably head off before that rain starts. I can already see some threatening clouds out there.”

I saw him off, and then I walked around to the back of the house and stepped down the shrub-lined garden path. A metal hatch lay on the ground in a large clearing at the end.

I pulled the deadbolt across and lifted the hatch, swinging it over to rest on the grass. Then I descended into the darkness, using my phone to light the way. Once I was at the bottom of the stairs, I fumbled on the wall to find the switch. Seconds later, the space was flooded with harsh fluorescent light.

I took another step, peering around with a satisfied smirk.

This space was the real reason I’d had all those construction workers up here over the last couple of years. It was originally a small wine cellar, but I’d hired the contractor and specialists to extend it into a multi-roomed bunker. I made it seem like I was a nutty doomsday prepper who wanted a secret underground lair to retreat to when things got too hot out in the real world. None of the guys asked any questions beyond the scope of the project, anyway. I paid them too much for them to do anything but hold their tongues and build exactly what I wanted.

The right part of the main space was small, with a work desk and photos lining the walls. On the left lay a door to a dark side room I’d set up with a mixture of toys and torture devices.

A thick pane of unbreakable floor-to-ceiling glass stood a few feet back from the main space. Beyond that was a soundproof chamber with a concrete floor and a heavy door that could only be opened with a keycard. Inside, it was meagerly furnished with a bed, a toilet, and a sink.

I pulled out one of my keycards to ensure it was still working, even though I’d already checked at least ten times over the last few months. The light on the access panel flashed green, and there was a soft hiss as the lock released.

I entered the chamber, sat down on the narrow bed, and looked around, imagining what it would be like to live in such a sparse shithole for weeks on end.

Soon, I wouldn’t have to imagine it, because I’d see the reality of it playing out right in front of me, courtesy of the prisoner I intended to take.

I knew she would beg. Cry. Scream. Threaten me. I’d see the wild, trapped-in-hell look in her eyes and hear the pleading tones in her voice every time I came to visit her down here. None of it would change my mind.

One way or another, she’d eventually be forced to give in. Submit herself to me as she shivered under my directives. And when that happened, I’d finally have everything I needed.

Answers.

Justice.

Vengeance.