Legacy
By Chris Coppel
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About this ebook
Their remote house, the lateness of the hour, the unexpectedness of the delivery… something feels wrong to Craig, a sheriff in the high desert of southern Utah. It has taken him years to recover from the psychological trauma he’d undergone as an elite Marine sniper, but his life was now simple and complete.
But then he opens the crate to discover an intricately carved wooden mirror. Now Craig must fight an enemy far worse than any he’d encountered in the Middle East. Only this time he is battling against time and the embodiment of evil in a desperate attempt to save his family. His mission will take him twenty five years into the past and six thousand miles from home in order to defeat the reanimation of a 16th century English witch in this spine-chilling time travelling horror.
Chris Coppel
Chris Coppel was born in California and has since split his time between the USA and Europe, living in California, Spain, France, Switzerland and England. Chris taught advanced screenwriting at the UCLA film school and has been writing for over thirty years. He is the author of Far From Burden Dell, Luck, The Lodge, Legacy and Liner.
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Legacy - Chris Coppel
Copyright © 2021 Chris Coppel
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1800468 870
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Epilogue
Chapter One
She sat in the pitch-dark trying to expend as little energy as possible. She was very weak. She had almost left it too long this time. She had allowed her life force to wane dangerously. She had permitted too much time to pass since her last feeding. She knew that she had to feed the light at least every quarter century for her to continue her existence, even when not in human form. Despite spending most of her time in the alternate realm where her spirit didn’t need to take on the appearance of a solid shape, she still expended energy. To feed the light, she knew she had to again take on her original mortal form, even though it was now so ancient and decrepit she hated every second spent within its aged confines. She wished that her powers had given her the ability to occupy the youthful bodies of her bloodline once she had taken their life force, but she had never been granted that level of physical dominance.
From her lair outside her original dimension, she had seen time pass like no one else on earth. When the last of her kind were being hunted and burned alive at the stake, she had managed to evade her pursuers. Instead of running and hiding, she used the powers with which she’d been blessed to not just evade the hunters, but to move between the realms. The magic had come, as great things often do, at a great cost. Her ability to travel outside the laws of physics required unbelievable sacrifice, both by her and by those on which she had to prey.
Despite her immense knowledge and magical abilities, when she first used her powers to move between realms she had never anticipated that with each feeding she would gain not just the light, but twenty-five living years from each donor. She had fed the light fourteen times starting in 1643 when she was only twenty-eight years old. She had witnessed almost 400 years of change in the old realm. She’d seen plague, war and famine repeat itself over and over again. She’d watched sleepy towns grow from walled enclaves to sprawling cities of glass and steel. She’d seen the first train, the first aircraft and even the first rocket blast its way off the planet.
None of that mattered to her in the least. The days when she cared about what went on within the old realm were long gone. Centuries gone. She now had only one focus.
To follow her bloodline and feed the light.
Chapter Two
The banging on the door shook the entire house. Craig had been prepared to ignore the 2am disturbance and continue with the X-rated dream he’d been having. His wife, Jenny, however, had no intention of letting that happen and neither did Steeler, their oversized yellow lab. He was barking up a storm somewhere downstairs.
Aren’t you going to see who it is?
Jenny mumbled.
At this time of the morning, I don’t care.
The banging repeated. This time it was even louder, sending Steeler into an even more intense barking jag. They heard Sally, their four-year-old, start crying in her bedroom just across the hall. Tim, their five-year-old, then came moping into the room and jumped on the bed.
Mommy, what’s that noise? Please make it stop,
he pleaded.
Daddy is going to go down right now and make it go away. Aren’t you, sweetheart?
Craig fumbled to turn on his bedside light. Though thirty-seven, he could still pass for being in his mid to late twenties. He exercised daily and tried hard to keep himself in good shape – more for work purposes than vanity. He ran his hands through his sandy blonde hair then reluctantly swung his legs off the warm and comfy memory-foam bed and forced his feet into his threadbare slippers. Jenny had tried, on numerous occasions, to buy replacement footwear, but he always went back to the same pair he’d worn for twelve years.
Craig grabbed his terrycloth robe off the back of the door.
Will you go and try to get Sally settled while I find out what idiot is trying to smash down our door?
Craig said.
Tim immediately looked scared. Somebody is smashing down our door?
Jenny glared at Craig for his poor choice of words.
He pulled a ‘whoops’ face then headed down the narrow stairway. He bundled the robe more tightly around himself in an attempt to ward of the chill from the old house. In an effort to cut down on the utility bills, they kept the heating off overnight. As they were usually tucked up under layers of quilted covers they didn’t feel the wrath of the high desert winter cold. The downside to the cost savings was that any time spent out of the bed during the night hours was brutal. A trip all the way to the front door was really going to take a toll.
Just as Craig reached the tiny hallway at the bottom of the stairs, Steeler ran up to him, head-butted his thigh then started the crazy sideways dance he did whenever he got over excited.
Another volley of percussive banging on the house’s wooden front door seemed to shake the whole building to its foundation. Craig was surprised the door hadn’t splintered in two after the repeated abuse. Then again, Craig realised, the door had lasted close to 150 years so some asshole’s knuckles were unlikely to finish it off at this point.
He stopped and opened the hall cupboard then entered the six-digit code into the gun safe bolted to the wall. He removed his police issue Glock 19, slipped in a fresh clip and chambered a round. He held the gun calmly at his side.
He reached the front door and checked the peephole. As usual he could hardly see a thing. It pissed him off that he kept procrastinating about getting either a peephole that actually worked or maybe even something a little more high tech like a Ring camera doorbell. Of course, it didn’t help him at that moment.
I am going to open the door now,
Craig shouted. I am a sheriff’s deputy and I am armed. Please step back and keep your hands in view.
He waited a few seconds then undid the old-fashioned lock as well as the more modern deadbolt. He threw open the door, ready for a confrontation. The sub-zero blast of air hit him like a fist. The first thing he saw were the tail lights of a grey truck bumping its way along their snow-covered gravel drive. It was hard to tell in the dark, but he got the impression that it was a very old vehicle.
The second thing he saw was the box.
It was huge. Craig was a big guy and the box was taller than him. It was at least six and a half feet high, three feet wide and about one and a half feet deep. It was covered in heavy-duty brown wrapping paper. A small label was in the geometric centre of the package.
It read: TO THE EDMONDS FAMILY.
There was no other information. No address, no mention of who sent it or even which courier company had delivered it. That was the biggest disappointment, as Craig desperately wanted to give them a call in the morning and give them a little piece of his mind concerning middle-of-the-night deliveries.
Craig considered leaving the box outside, but it had clearly snowed earlier and would most likely do so again. He had no idea what was in the thing but doubted that a good beating by a winter storm would do it much good.
He knew just by looking at it that it was going to be a battle to get it through the old doorway. He deduced that the only way to get the box inside was to tip it on its side then drag it into the hallway while lifting it back to its full height once inside.
As he tilted it, he suddenly realised that it was extremely heavy and solid. He had to use every ounce of his strength to not let the top end crash down onto the brick entry.
He manhandled the brown monolith-like package through the entryway and onto the flagstone-floored hallway. After securely locking the front door, he turned back to the mystery box wondering if he should check its contents there and then or wait till morning.
The decision was made for him as Jenny called down from upstairs.
Who was it?
I think it was a courier. Someone has sent us a giant box. I was just thinking of opening it.
You’ll do no such thing. You must be freezing and the kids aren’t going to calm down until you’re back up here where you belong.
You’re the one who made me get out of bed and come down here,
Craig shot back.
Jenny used her ultra-calm voice. The one that left no room for misinterpretation. Come back to bed, please. You can open your box in the morning.
Craig gave the box one last glance before returning the gun to its locker and heading back up to their warm bed.
Craig woke as he usually did, to the dawn chorus of breakfast-making and children waking. Before the kids, the transition from sleep to being fully awake had been a gradual and peaceful experience. Now it was like jumping onto a moving roller coaster in mid-ride. You just had to hang on and hope for the best.
It was Saturday and he didn’t have a shift till the next day, so he at least didn’t need to battle for his place in the bathroom queue. The little house had been his and Jenny’s dream. The kids had been another, but staggered aspect of the same fantasy. The house was indescribably quaint. Having been built in the late 1800s by an early settler to Southern Utah, it was not exactly stuffed full of all the mod cons. Despite that, they’d fallen in love with it the moment they saw it. It was perfect. It had privacy. It sat on ten acres that butted up against BLM (Bureau of Land Management) property. It had been plenty big enough for the two of them and they had hoped it would even suit their needs when the time came to start a family.
Kids had arrived and it soon became apparent that the house wasn’t big enough, yet they simply couldn’t bring themselves to give up all the positives just for the efficiency of having a little extra space.
The one aspect that they’d never fully fleshed out in their master plan was what the impact would be of four people living life to the fullest within the confines of a 1200-square-foot house. Especially when two of them were very small and very messy people who seemed to constantly need to use the one and only bathroom for purposes far beyond those for which the room had originally been intended.
They’d applied to Kane County for a permit to extend the back of the house by adding an extra bedroom and family bathroom. They were granted approval but it came with a condition. The property’s sewage waste fed into a pre-existing leach field. As long as the home was in its original condition, the approval of use for this archaic system was grandfathered to the owner. If they were going to structurally remodel, especially if that included the addition of a toilet, they would have to install a modern septic tank.
Craig tried to argue the point that someone at some time in the past had already screwed up the original purity of the home by installing indoor plumbing, electricity and an upstairs bathroom. He suggested they reconsider his planning request on the basis of there already having been a precedent for improvement.
The county rejected his request adding that, as their home was considered an historic building because of its age, he was lucky they didn’t require him to convert the house back to its original condition sans the luxury of plumbing, heat and electricity.
Craig decided that there were some battles that one just knew couldn’t be won. They’d also known before they bought the house that any remodelling would probably come with some costly conditions.
Craig had assumed that a septic tank couldn’t be that expensive. He was wrong. The cost to install one almost doubled the estimated cost for the whole extension.
And so, the family persevered.
Craig threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt then checked the bathroom before heading downstairs. He was amazed to find it vacant though it did look as though a tornado had recently passed through. Even though years had passed since the patter of little feet became the normal background track to his life, Craig was still amazed at how many towels two children could use for one pre-breakfast face wash. He counted seven.
Jenny enforced a strict ‘don’t just leave things on the floor’ policy so each towel had been draped over something. Strangely none of the hooks or racks that were there for just such a purpose were rarely, if ever considered. One towel was thrown over the toilet seat, another hung from the washbasin’s hot tap and another was stuffed through the horizontal blinds.
Craig felt pretty certain that each of the chosen towel-hanging places had to have been much harder to coordinate than placing them where they were supposed to go. Then again, Craig no longer thought with that freedom of disconnected thought with which a child’s mind is blessed.
As he hung a few up just to have them out of the way, he noticed that they were beyond soaking wet. How could anyone, even a small child, drench towel after towel when carrying out something so basic as giving their face a quick wash.
Don’t dawdle in there too long,
Jenny called. Breakfast is ready and the kids want to open the big present.
Be right down.
Craig had actually forgotten about the big box he’d battled with earlier in the morning as he was still half asleep and hadn’t had any coffee yet.
Craig quickly finished his post-wake-up toiletries then headed downstairs. The box was still in the hallway and he saw that part of the brown paper appeared to have been peeled away already. Judging by the small width of the rips, hands of the little people had unquestioningly been involved.
I see that some field mice have been at the package already,
he declared as he walked into the kitchen.
NOOO, Daddy. It wasn’t mice. It was us. We wanted to surprise you, but then Mommy said we had to wait for you before we could open it,
Sally exclaimed.
Craig grinned at the sight of his family all gathered in the kitchen. Even Steeler was lying belly up on the tile floor waiting for either a tummy rub or an errant scrap to fall from the counter.
Jenny was wearing a pair of work jeans and one of his old shirts. She hadn’t put on any make-up yet and her blonde hair was pulled back into a simple ponytail. She looked stunningly beautiful.
They had met when Craig was on leave in San Diego and Jenny had been attending a graphic artists convention off campus. Somehow they ended up in the same bar in the Gaslamp Quarter. She was with fellow students from UCSD and he, with some of his Marine buddies.
In retrospect, Craig realised that it may not have been the most auspicious start to a romance but somehow it had worked out for them.
Craig looked over at his children. Tim was engrossed in a puzzle on the back of his cinnamon cereal box. Sally had obviously started her day with a nutritious bowl of Fruit Loops judging by the pink-coloured milk remnants in her bowl. Jenny had waited for Craig to appear before depositing a plate of scrambled eggs with a side of wholegrain toast at the head of the table.
Thanks, babe.
He gave her a peck on the cheek as he sat down.
Jenny’s final task before getting to enjoy her own breakfast was to place Craig’s oversized coffee mug in front of him. It had been given to him as a birthday present by his fellow officers at the Kanab sheriff’s department. It read ‘To Provide and Be Served’.
Craig ate his food as he listened to Sally tell a lengthy saga about a moth that had got stuck in her room the previous day. The story lasted through the eggs and two cups of coffee. Finally, with everyone fed, watered and up to date on the moth adventures, they could all focus on the big event.
Unwrapping the big box.
Chapter Three
Right!
Craig announced. The first thing is to get this mother…
Craig!
Jenny scolded as she leant her head towards the children.Sorry. The first thing is to get this… thing into the living room so we have some room to work. Jen, could you get me a couple of dry towels so we can shove one under each end? I think that once we get it onto carpet we’ll be fine, but we’ve got to get it out of the hall first.
Jenny went into the narrow utility room off the kitchen and reappeared a few moments later with two of their shabbier towels that had been relegated to domestic spills and the like.
Craig took each one and folded it lengthwise until he had a narrow towel strip that he could force under each end of the monster. He and Jenny then took a side of the box and grabbed a towel end in each hand.
Tim