Stones Unturned Read Free

crimson. It was strangely mesmerizing, watching the pool of blood around him expand in size, the flickering streetlights at the far end of the alley causing a strobe that made the gore shift in color from fire engine red to nearly black.
    Dragging his gaze from the pool, Cully realized that Tommy wasn't moving anymore and that the blood had pretty much stopped flowing from his body. The humming had stopped as well, and he began to grow anxious. He listened intently, waiting for a sign that he wasn't alone.
    It wasn't long before the pooling blood began to bubble. Cully stepped back. Every instinct screamed at him to run, but he couldn't bring himself to act. Not yet. The voice had yet to do what it had promised — Cully was still not hearing the music.
    "Where are you?" he asked, watching as the blood bubbled and frothed. "I did what you wanted — give me back my music," he said, his voice growing louder, tinged with panic. "Do you hear me?"
    The roiling pool of gore exploded upward in a roaring fountain, covering him in a fine, gory mist that filled his nostrils and mouth, stinking and tasting of metal.
    Cully stumbled back, temporarily blinded by the blood in his eyes. As he frantically wiped at his eyes, trying to clear his vision, he sensed that he was no longer alone.
    "I can hear you just fine," said a voice that made Cully remember every bad thing that had ever happened to him.
    As his vision cleared, he saw its body glistening wetly in the flickering fluorescent lights from the mouth of the alley. Its long, spindly arms moved as if conducting the Boston Symphony. It was far more, now, than just a voice.
    Far, far more.
     

CHAPTER ONE
     
    There's still a music to this place, Arthur Conan Doyle thought as he strolled into the woods behind the small cottage he had acquired in Cottingley. The forest glowed with autumnal colors and the warmth of the fall sunshine. Yes, things had changed much since the last time he'd visited, but the music was still here. Faint, but here nonetheless.
    He breathed in the cool November air, his mind traveling back to the year he'd first visited this quaint English village, situated between the larger towns of Shipley and Bingley in West Yorkshire. It had been warmer then, the gardens and forests lush with summer growth. Conan Doyle smiled at the pleasant memory.
    With all the recent supernatural threats to the world and the knowledge that somewhere out there in the cosmos, the ancient evil known as the Demogorgon was even now traveling toward Earth, Ceridwen had convinced Conan Doyle that he needed to recuperate, to rest and rejuvenate himself. Neither of them could think of a better place to do that than Cottingley. It had been here, after all, that Conan Doyle had first encountered the world of Faerie.
    He had met seventeen-year-old Elsie Wright and her younger cousin Francis Griffith in 1920 and found himself captivated by the photographs they had taken, and which had caused an uproar among the local populace. Of course, he had known they were forgeries, these fanciful photographs, showing the girls interacting with tiny fairy folk and gnomes, but he played the part of the gullible old man. Conan Doyle had been in his sixties then, his studies of spiritualism and magic beginning to garner far too much attention. He had needed more privacy to continue his studies, and what better way than to be branded a credulous old kook.
    Yet his strategy had had unexpected consequences. The trip to Cottingley had been all for show. The last thing he had imagined was that he would encounter actual mysteries in the woods outside the village, or that the playful hoax of two young girls would lead him to a real encounter with the Fey. But he stood now not far at all from the very spot where he'd had his first encounter with creatures from Faerie and discovered in an impossibly hollow tree an entrance into a world beyond his imagining.
    The voice of his lover stirred him from his ruminations of the