Inkwell of Shadows 20: Pages Better Left Unread

November 12, 2024. Moonlight Curiosities. Fairy tales lie. Some monsters are right there in plain sight. You just have to look…

Author’s Note: Inkwell of Shadows is a serialized fiction story in Moonlight Curiosity Mysteries, set in Blighridge County, Alabama. A quiet corner of the world where old ghost linger, cursed objects refuse to stay quiet, and some secrets never stay buried—at least, for long.

New installments or chapters will materialize every Monday…

Missed a chapter? You can find the full list here.

Previously. With revelations atop understanding, Daniel and Cassidy started piecing together an ugly truth—maybe Valeria hadn’t acted alone. That she’d been hired to kill them, and Daniel’s uncle, for the shop and the cursed pens. It made for a sober morning. Then, once they narrowed their list of Mason jar purchases to a handful of names, they met Dorian for lunch. As was the case with Dorian, the conversation was a few degrees shy of normal. But it was also revealing in that Daniel and Cassidy realized the pages they had discovered beneath Moonlight Curiosities may have a closer tie to Valeria, murder, and more…

November 12, 2024. Moonlight Curiosities. Fairy tales lie. Some monsters are right there in plain sight. You just have to look…

We hit Valeria Moffet’s stained books after lunch in the shop; they hit right back. I normally like that in a book, just not these. Not only was evil into journaling with amazing penmanship, it had a nasty habit of oversharing.

“She stuck a straw in him where…?” Cassidy stammered, wide-eyed.

Wincing at the words, she closed the red-stained journal on the office desk, then covered her face with her hands.

A haze of dust danced in the afternoon sunlight slanting through the damp office windows.

“I can’t believe I just read that…”

I looked over from where I was reading in the padded chair next to her. “What?”

She peered at me from between her fingers, green eyes tense. “You don’t want to know. I know, and that’s one person too many.”

Dorian’s grin was pure imp as he browsed a stack of loose, yellowed handwritten pages on the far side of the desk. “I told you that Valeria’s journals were pretty spicy.”

“Like sucking on a ghost pepper,” Cassidy muttered. She grabbed another journal and cracked it open, wincing at something new.

We kept at it for another hour. The three of us dug through Valeria’s colorful canvas journals, hunting for hints to her madness. Turned pages fluttered softly as Cassidy and I kept half an ear out for the front doorbell.

Now and then, the tense quiet broke. Often it was me scratching out notes, or Cassidy raking her palms down her jeans like she could wipe off something she’d just read. Dorian chuckled under his breath at something particularly vile, punctuating the moment like a period carved with a knife

“This?” Dorian said, waving a loose page at us. “It’s fascinating. I’ve not read this part yet. Not all of it makes sense, but it’s the same story.” He sifted through the loose pages. “Really, this feels like jumping into the middle of some sort of serial fiction.”

The bloodleech rose, tugged the cuffs of his shirt with a sharp flick, then reached for a binder of loose paper. He sorted those with the others next to him.

“Most chapters are intact.” He gestured to the handwritten stack. “This just seems to skip some parts, like a badly edited movie.”

I gratefully glanced up from what I’d been reading, blowing out a long sigh.

“Dorian, you weren’t kidding about a backpack of evil.” I closed the journal I’d just finished about Valeria’s knifing habits, then rubbed my eyes. “This is like a twelve-volume set of ‘Murder for Fun and Profit.’”

He raised his eyebrows, mouth pulled into a line that landed somewhere between sympathy and a smirk.

“Like I said, Valeria often indulged her appetites a bit much. I may be a bloodleech, and eat the occasional irritating wayward person…” He waved a hand at the journals. “I’m not that.”

Cassidy sucked in a breath, narrowing her eyes at Dorian.

“Debatable… but yeah. This is…” She rubbed her hands as if they were dirty. “… a whole new level of evil. Rituals, moldy bread, bloody ink… I desperately want a hot shower just from touching these things.” Cassidy reached for a page and hesitated. Then she turned it, squinting at the faded letters. “Oh, so she knew about the pens. Here. Someone told her they have a theme—blood, vine, leaf, and root.”

Dorian looked up from the stack of papers thoughtfully. “That explains the brown-black webbing on my accountant’s pen.”

I frowned at him, then glanced back at Cassidy as she continued.

“Valeria wrote that she was told the effect gets stronger as more pens are brought together.” Cassidy’s frown darkened into a scowl. “The ‘effect’ has to be the curse, but she didn’t write down who told her.”

My chair squeaked a complaint when I leaned back, scratching my chin. “Maybe it’s whoever was paying her?”

Dorian’s thin eyebrows reached for his styled hairline, gray eyes wide. “Paid?”

Cassidy shot Dorian a dark glance, gave me a harrowed look, then went back to reading.

“Paid.” The word landed like shattered glass. “We found out she was being paid for… all of this. Including trying to murder us.”

A flicker of real concern crossed Dorian’s eyes; a rare crack in his composure. I realized he hadn’t been aware Valeria was on anyone’s payroll. He opened his mouth to reply, then pressed his lips into a silent line as Cassidy turned to the next page.

“According to this,” she said, “Valeria had been stalking Meredith Rawls before Meredith died. She was suspicious Meredith had a pen, and got really obsessed-creepy about that. Valeria wrote that she saw Meredith write ‘more of my pages.’”

I blinked, sitting up straight. “Wait. More of ‘her’ pages? What does she mean by ‘her’ pages? Is that more of the curse?”

“Valeria always was a bit intense, even for a bloodleech,” Dorian mused. He reached for the entire stack of loose pages; flipped past a dozen, then stopped. “She wrote some of this story.” Dorian lightly shook the pages at us. “These are the ones with her handwriting.”

Cassidy sat back in her chair with a pensive look, lightly drumming her fingers on the office desk. “So, if the pens are all connected, what if the curse is forcing people to bring the pens together?”

Dorian sagely nodded. “That would make a certain sense from how I’d understand these things.”

“You’re doing better than me,” I sighed, dragging a blood-stained journal toward me. “But it feels right. Almost as if the pens are trying to track someone down.”

Cassidy shrugged. “A certain person or type of person. So, Valeria had two pens and was stalking Meredith for what she thought was the third.”

I eased the stained blue canvas journal open, sniffing as dust assaulted me. “Don’t forget my uncle. Valeria was stalking him to get this shop.”

Dorian hummed with a wicked grin. “From what little I’ve read, I’d say she was after your uncle for other entertaining reasons beyond the shop.”

I rolled my eyes, dragging them from the ceiling to the current journal of horror in front of me. “Did not. Need. To know. That. Thank you…”

Dorian softly chuckled as if he’d heard the best joke in the world. “My apologies, Daniel,” he said, though I could tell he didn’t entirely mean it. “That bit aside, it begs the question… why? Eager to get the pens for her client, if ‘client’ is the right word?”

I turned a yellowed page, then tapped the narrow, frantic handwriting. “Ask and ye shall receive.”

Unlike the other entries, this handwriting had melted into a frantic scrawl. The letters leaned sideways so hard, I thought they’d fall off the page. I squinted to make out the words.

“She wrote this last year, right before Meredith Rawls died.” I scanned the page, flipped to the next, and shuddered. “Valeria was there. She went to kill Meredith and take the pen.” I swallowed, voice broken. “According to this, she found Meredith already dying, holding a page where she’d written ‘please let me stop’ repeatedly. Valeria killed her anyway. Wrote that it was ‘mercy,’ putting her out of her misery. Then she ransacked her house but never found the pen or the other pages.”

Dorian stood as still as a statue, eyes clouded. Next to me, Cassidy’s eyes went huge.

“Oh, God, Daniel. That’s why Meredith had a closed-coffin funeral,” she whispered, covering her mouth with a hand.

I nodded jerkily with a quick glance at Dorian. “Yeah. Bloodleech killing. Those are brutal. No offense, Dorian.”

He inclined his head with a thin, honest smile. “None taken, Daniel. As I said, I’m many delightfully dark things, but never that.”

“Anyway,” I muttered, taking a shaky breath. “This reads like she got desperate. Says here she was running out of time. Felt the shop was her only chance to get all four pens to make her client… and the pens… happy.” My breath caught as I looked up from the journal.

We exchanged a silent look as the ceiling fans creaked methodically elsewhere in the shop.

“Well,” Dorian cleared his throat. “I had no idea that Meredith Rawls’s house had that sort of character when I bought it. One wonders what other secrets are buried under its floorboards. I’ll look once I’m home.”

“Right. So. Back to… er… reading?” I asked hesitantly. “Has anyone found anything about who was paying Valeria?”

“I think I did,” Cassidy grimaced, wiping her hands on her jeans again, then tapped the journal on the desk in front of her. “She never wrote a name. Just called them ‘V’. This V told Valeria to keep the pens together. No account records, nothing.”

Dorian snorted. “Money always leaves a scent. Once I’m home, I’ll ravage her old phones. See if I can find that.” The bloodleech stared holes in the loose papers he was sorting. “I’ve found something here, too. Not sure it’s a good thing.”

We leaned over the desk while Dorian arranged three specific pages from the stack next to each other. He tapped each one.

“Same story.” He waved a hand. “Same chapter, and all three pages are in order; twelve, thirteen, and fourteen.”

The bloodleech studied us, tapping the pages again.

“That… that’s three separate sets of handwriting,” I said, an icy chill skittering up my spine. “Sometimes one set picks up mid-sentence.”

Cassidy blinked, leaning over the desk to read. “The cadence… the writer’s ‘voice’… it doesn’t change.”

“No, not a bit,” Dorian replied darkly.

“Dorian? You have to get that pen away from your accountant,” I muttered. “Soon.”

For one shallow heartbeat, the air went still as if it had let out its last breath.

The front bell’s clang felt like a slap to the face. We jerked away from the desk and its contents as if they’d come alive. Dorian squared his shoulders, blinking away the black void from his eyes. I hung my head, letting out a breath as Cassidy glanced at the ceiling, gently squeezing my arm.

“A customer. I’ve got it, love.” After a kiss on my cheek, she breezed out of the office, a shop owner’s smile firmly in place.

I studied the journal in front of me with a frown, as if trying to deduce any new terrible truths. Out in the store, I heard Cassidy talking with someone about Moleskine notebooks. I managed two more pages of Valeria raving about my uncle and Moonlight Curiosities before I felt an uncomfortable tension in the air.

On the other side of the desk, Dorian had gone unnaturally still. With cat-like ease, he helped himself to a padded chair, reclining with his legs crossed. He sat still, hands clasped in his lap. From his pressed tan pants to slicked-back sandy hair, Dorian looked like a magazine cover model come to life, but frozen in place.

All except his eyes.

Those narrowed slightly, like a cat studying a bird while waiting to pounce.

“What?” I asked.

His eyes flicked over to me, then back out into the shop. “Small world. That’s the man who did everything he could to try to buy my house out from under me.”

I followed his gaze, then sat back in surprise when I saw Caleb Hayes talking to Cassidy.

“Him? Caleb Hayes?”

Dorian arched an eyebrow. “Caleb? Well, now, that’s interesting. He told me his name was Price Hayes.”

“Price?” I blinked, then narrowed my own eyes.

The bloodleech’s mouth pulled thin. “The same. He seems the determined type. Claimed the Rawls house was an old family home, which was a lie. A word of advice, Daniel? That man? Whatever he’s after, he’s determined to get it at all costs.”

“He came by the other day for a really specific roll top desk.” I watched Caleb, or Price, Hayes cross to a stack of black leather pocket notebooks; Cassidy a step behind him. “He said the desk was from a family estate.”

Dorian’s mouth twisted into a devious smile. “That man’s after something, Daniel. Trust me on this. Predators know predators… and he’s one. Just not the same kind as me.”

We watched Mr. Hayes purchase two notebooks before he headed on his way. Cassidy returned to the office, face a worried mask.

“That was Mr. Hayes. He asked if we’d found anything about the desk. When I told him no, he got a little pushy, but not too much. He stressed that he really wants his family heirlooms.”

“Really,” I said, my voice a low, suspicious grumble.

Dorian lightly knocked on the office desk, then eased out of the chair. “Heirlooms like the Rawls house? Well, how about that?”

“The Rawls house?” Cassidy shot us a confused look.

I lightly shook my head. “Dorian says he’s met the man by another name.”

“Indeed, I did,” Dorian said. “I’ll ask around, see what I can find about this Hayes gentleman. Like what his name really is.” He inclined his head with another of those sharp, predatory smiles. “I’ll be in touch.”

Dorian strolled out. No sooner had the front door shut behind him, Cassidy sat on the edge of the desk next to me. “Daniel, I don’t like this. Not a bit. That Hayes guy gave me a bad feeling. I thought I’d have to shift, just to have my claws handy.” She squinted at the dust motes dancing in the warm office sunbeams spilling through the window. “You know, there’s a scent off the ink on Valeria’s journals. I smelled it downstairs.”

I slumped back in my chair, wide-eyed. “You mean from the desk and papers?”

She nodded a tiny bit. “Yeah. That can’t be right, though. Valeria never got that far inside here… did she?”

I frowned, chewing on my thoughts. Every half-answer died in my throat as I stared at the journal page in front of me. It was filled with the shaky words of ‘please let me stop.’

“Not sure,” I said, meeting Cassidy’s worried gaze. “But we’re about to find out. Let’s take another look at that desk.”

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Moonlight Curiosity Mysteries is a work of pure, unabashed fiction. To be honest, it’s a bit creepy, if not spooky, when is isn’t beside itself with nerves. It tends to be a little shy. Did I mention it likes to needlepoint because there’s lots of stabbing? Names of characters, places, events, organizations and locations are all creations of the author’s imagination for this fictitious setting. Which means, really, he gets all the blame.

Any resemblance to persons living, dead, undead, or why-aren’t-they-dead-YET is coincidental. The opinions expressed are those of the characters and should not be confused with the author’s, since the characters and the author tend to disagree a lot. Like daily.