DARKER THAN NOIR
Edited by Faith Kauwe
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 by Grand Mal Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address grandmalpress.com
Published by: Grand Mal Press Forestdale, MA
Copyright 2011, Grand Mal Press
ISBN 13 digit: 9780982945964
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grand Mal Press/ Faith Kauwe
p. cm
Cover art by Stephen Bryant
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Table of Contents
THE KNACK OF LIVING by Patrick Flanagan
BACK-UP MAN by Justin Gustainis
DEVIL IN 206 by Randy Chandler
WED MAN WALKING by Erik T. Johnson
WINE AND SPIRITS by Gregory L. Norris
THE CUNT NEXT DOOR by Zoot Campbell
FRANK ‘N’ JOHN by Manny Frishberg
THE BOX OF THE SEVEN SONS by Kent Alyn
THE FURRY CON MYSTERY by Alan Loewen
GHOST IN A BOTTLE by Frank C. Gunderloy Jr.
STRESS CONTROL by Gustavo Bondoni
SHARDS OF THE BROKEN by R. Thomas Riley and Roy C. Booth
THE THIEF OF SOULS by Vincent Scarsella
THE KNACK OF LIVING
By Patrick Flanagan
Thump-thump. Can you hear that? That’s the beating of your heart. No, of course you don’t hear it—all it does is give us life, after all. We only ever notice it when it’s beating so fast we can scarcely breathe. Or when it beats its last. Did Renzer say that? He might have. He was a wordy guy. I can’t taste the Scotch I’m drinking. Pretending to drink. Pretending to forget. Only I can’t forget…
***
Thump-thump. She tapped her foot nervously against the leg of the chair, waiting for me to pronounce sentence. Being at the bottom of one’s profession affords you a certain freedom; when you don’t have a reputation worth protecting and simply don’t give a damn, then you can be selective in your choice of clientele in a way that the merely incompetent can’t. If I didn’t take her case, she had nowhere else to go, and we both knew it. I turned the necklace over in my hands, examining it studiously.
“Do you know what it is?” she asked. Her name was Grove. Susan Grove. No femme fatale, sorry; she had nice eyes, limned with sleeplessness and tears, but otherwise she was pleasantly forgettable. The necklace she’d handed to me, retrieved from her purse with trembling hands, was a slender chain that held an amulet of familiar design. A crooked heptagram, flared with jagged horns, and dominated by a single open eye in its center. It had the double pupil of a goat’s eye. “Hmm,” I said.
“Yes?” Susan said. “Yes? You know what it is?”
I handed it back to her. “It’s a badge,” I said. “Colgate Cavity Patrol. Do you brush after every meal?”
She took it from my hands, unsure to be angry or disappointed. “I…no, Mr. Webb, this is an occult symbol. I had been told you had some expertise in these matters. It’s the sign of the Order—”
“The Order of the Blood-red Star,” I cut her off. “A better term would be ‘cult,’ and a better term than that would be ‘scam.’ These guys were nothing more than extortionists and frauds. Peddled psychedelics and hookers to the rich and gullible, then took naughty pictures of them participating in their rituals—which is what they called their orgies—so they could blackmail them. The occult thing was just a cover, really. I doubt the guys running it even bought into it.” I looked into those eyes, wondering how much of it she believed. My lips felt dry. “They’re long gone, anyway. The ones that survived might be coming up for parole sometime in the 2020s, if they hang in long enough.”
She leaned closer, absorbing every word. “Survived what?”
I swiveled my chair around, absently scratching my chest through my shirt. “There was a fire,” I said. “This was, I don’t know, forty, fifty years back. One of their rituals got out of hand and they were probably too drugged up to know what was happening. They burned their little clubhouse down, and the ones who hadn’t been there that night got picked up the next day by the police. Conspiracy, extortion, criminally negligent homicide, all the makings of a Broadway smash, or at least Off-Broadway.”
“I had never heard of them,” Susan said.
“The surviving cultists came clean, pled guilty, cut a deal, and quietly went away,” I said. “A cynic might suspect a lot of pressure had been brought to bear on them. Lots of powerful, wealthy people with gullible relatives, who wanted this dealt with quietly. Maybe they were paid to keep their mouths shut and go to jail quietly. I can’t say I followed it all that closely.”
“I see,” Susan said. She chewed her bottom lip.
“What had you been told about the Order?”
Her eyes went to the desk. “I hadn’t been told anything,” she said. “You’re the first detective I’ve been to who seemed to know about it.”
“The other ones are too busy solving present-day cases,” I said. “But you said, ‘I had never heard of them,’ as opposed to ‘I have never heard of them.’ And you had a certain look on your face.”
She tried to dismiss my comments with a smile. Pretty, but fake. “What kind of look was that, Mr. Webb?”
I leaned back in my chair and stared at her. “The look I get from a client when I tell him his wife is not cheating on him,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me where you found this, and why you brought it to me.”
Susan mumbled something. I asked her to repeat herself.
“‘Stop reading,’” she said. “That’s what they keep saying to me. ‘Stop reading.’” And she began her story, fumbling with it as if it were a jar she couldn’t open, picking it up and trying again and again. I let the words tumble out of her mouth, waiting for it to make sense in my mind. Outside my office window, it began to drizzle.
***
Thump-thump. “I was so nervous, that first time he spoke to me. My heart was racing. He’s so—he was—so handsome. It’s, well I guess it’s a funny story; we were both stood up. Sarah, a girl I work with, had set me up on a blind date, and there I was, waiting, for a half-hour, forty-five minutes, an hour. It was this little place on Sylvan, Greek place. Anyway the guy never showed up, never called me to say sorry. Sarah was so embarrassed…
“I was at a booth table, and he was at the bar, and he, I noticed he kept looking over at me. Not too obvious, but just enough for me to catch him doing it. It made me blush. Maybe it was the wine. I’d had a few glasses while I was waiting. I couldn’t believe it when he came over to talk to me.
“His name was Reggie. Reggie Darman. He told me his date had never showed, and could he buy me a drink…such a funny coincidence. He put his hand over mine as we both laughed about it, and I blushed again.
“It was one of those nights. When everything he said, everything he did, was just…it was perfect. I couldn’t believe it.
“We went out every night that week. By the end of the month he’d moved in. It was perfect, really perfect. And then, then the calls started.”
“Tell me about the calls.”
“…he was secretive. I never liked that part of him, I accepted it, but…he would get calls, business calls and his face would change, and he’d go into another room and whisper. He seemed worried, those last few weeks. I don’t know if it was money or what. I thought maybe he was in some kind of trouble, something…it sounds stupid, but something illegal.”
“Was he a criminal? Not judging, just asking.”
“H-he was a book dealer. Rare books. H-he was very knowledgeable and good at his job and I, I only got suspicious because of the calls, he would go off and he wouldn’t tell me, he wouldn’t tell me anything, and when he came back he didn’t want to talk about it, and I loved him, a lot, and I didn’t want to pry, didn’t want to be the girlfriend w-who, who…”
“…it’s okay. Take your time. Don’t be embarrassed, please.”
“No, I never cry in public like this, I’m sorry. Talking about it…it’s still hard.”
“I can imagine.” Not really.
“…sorry, sorry…yes…well, the last call I remember, this was right before…I’m sorry…yes, thank you…this was right before the, the accident. He looked angry. Reggie was the sweetest man I’ve ever known, but that day, he looked furious. Bright red. Something was really bothering him, and he wouldn’t let me in. I tried to talk to him, but he just told me he’d take care of it, he’d take care of it.
“They called me the next day, at home. A policeman. There’d been an accident. Head-on collision.”
“I’m truly sorry, Miss Grove.”
“S-susan. Please call me Susan.”
“Truman,” I said. “Yes, really,” I added, noticing her expression. “Hey, at least it’s not Eisenhower.” She smiled politely at that oldie-but-goody from the Webb Archives. After a few minutes, she’d regained some of her composure and continued:
“I didn’t even get to say goodbye. He was so badly burned, his face was gone. I looked at the body, and I felt sick, but it was…it was abstract, you know? This wasn’t Reggie. Reggie was still the handsome guy who was overdue getting home for a few days, maybe gone on business. He wasn’t dead.
“When I dream about him…when he’s there, he’s not burned up. He’s the Reggie I knew.
“I knew that the body was him, I knew he was gone, but without seeing him in the coffin, without seeing that face…that’s the hardest part, I think…”
“I’m sure.” Not really, but she went with it. I checked my watch out of the corner of my eye.
“It was about a week, I think…a week after the accident, that I got a call. ID blocked. No voice, no message, just a hang-up. But it kept happening. Five, six times a day. I figured it was a telemarketer.”
“You didn’t recognize the number from Reggie’s calls?”
“N-no.”
“So whoever it was, said nothing.”
“Yes.”
“That didn’t last.”
“No.”
“Describe the voice.”
“Whispery. Kind of hoarse.”
“And what did it say?”
“‘Stop reading,’” she said, and there were tears again. She was shivering. “They told me to stop reading. If I kept reading, if I read too far, I would die.”
“Stop reading what?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she mumbled, looking down at her lap. “I don’t know.”
***
Thump-thump. Pounding the pavement makes up most of the job. Hell, the whole profession’s nickname refers to comfortable footwear. I spent the next few days chasing down strangers and stealing five minutes from their lives:
Police report confirmed Grove’s story. Killed instantly in a head-on, both Reggie Darman and the other driver. Darman’s body was charred, face and fingertips destroyed, but the body was “identified” as being a Caucasian male of his approximate age, height and weight. Cost me a few beers with my friend in the PD’s records division.
Closest thing to a local authority, an ancient city college professor of anthropology with a working knowledge of occult studies, shed some more light on the Order of the Blood-red Star. Their “writings” had been a laughable mishmash of Egyptian, Sumerian, and Persian mythology and symbolism. Absolute gibberish. The professor, who had followed the case closely at the time, was of the opinion that the group wasn’t so much an obvious fraud as a fraud that aspired to be real, and that was what had led them to meddle with matters beyond their understanding. I laughed and asked him if he believed in any of this nonsense. He smiled, slowly finished his drink, and wished me a good day. Gave me a strange look as he showed me to the door.
A friend at the NJDOC answered some questions about the old Order, emphasis on “old.” Two of them still wheezing—one Jason Frawley, at 77 the baby of the lot, still a guest of the state up in Rahway; and one Orson McMoneagle, 89 years young, taking up space at a Federal detention center for inmates needing hospital care. What a name on that guy.
A few more calls. It’s not strictly ethical to investigate your own client, so I do it anyway. Susan Grove didn’t have any debts to speak of, which in 2011 meant she had a mortgage, bad health insurance, and was paying way too much for cable—nothing outrageous. No criminal record. The standard handful of traffic tickets that usually crops up to show someone isn’t perfect, but is decent enough, and harmless. And worthless. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. I sat in the empty office, drumming my fingers against the desk, as twilight crept into the room.
Susan was lying about the whole thing. Unlikely. (Otherwise, why would I be wasting your time telling you this, right?)
Susan was holding something back. I had to consider it. Fear made people act against their own self-interests sometimes, if the alternative seemed worse to them.
Susan was telling the truth. So far as she knew it. But maybe not all of it.
Back to the Order. That was the weak link. This new group (the idea that 77-year-old Jason Frawley had anything to do with this was right out) wasn’t after Susan Grove’s money, because she didn’t have any. So either they thought she did, or…
Or they thought she had something just as valuable. More valuable.
The sun sank beneath the windowsill. I sat in the dark, staring at the wall, twirling the options over and over in my mind.
***
Thump-thump. “I don’t see the point of this,” Susan said, dropping the books heavily on the table as she took them from the shelf in her living room. “Reggie didn’t have many books, to be honest. He was an intermediary. Mostly he just talked to people and found out what they had and what they needed.”
“I’m sure it’s a total waste of time,” I said, looking at the shelf. I ran my finger over a length of it, then grimaced at the dust on my fingertip. Didn’t figure her for a slob. “But the caller’s threat, such as it is, is for you to stop reading.”
“Yes, but—”
“Detective,” I said, pointing at myself. “Trying to detect. Where was his office?”
“I gave him the spare bedroom to use for business.” She led me past the kitchen (dishes in the sink, tsk) and the utility room, to a small room in the back of the house. The single-sized bed had been pushed against the wall some months ago (the carpet had been permanently indented in four spots in the middle of the room) and a desk had been stuck against the wall. Reggie Darman had kept his office just as organized as Truman Webb did. Spiral-bound notebooks were stacked sloppily on the desk, with loose pieces of paper poking out. Over the desk was another shelf of books.
“Those are first editions,” Susan said. They looked like mystery novels to me—Leonard, Francis, MacDonald. I noticed something and reached out towards a book in the middle.
“What is it?” Susan said.
“This book has been read recently,” I said, lifting it straight up off the shelf.
“No, I haven’t been…I don’t come in here that often,” she said, looking away. “I…it’s uncomfortable, still.”
“Yes,” I said, “this place could use a good dusting. Except right here.” I pointed at the empty space where the book had been. “See? There’s a dust-free strip on the shelf, right in front of this book. It’s been slid off the shelf recently. Maybe more than once.” I looked for a reaction. Evasive, nervous, but totally confused.
“I haven’t,” she said. “Really.”
I held the book up. “After Dark, My Sweet. By Jim Thompson. No? No bells rung?” She shook her head. More convincing. Maybe I was wrong. I carefully slid the book back onto the shelf…and stopped halfway. Pulled it back off.
“What?” Susan asked.
“The dust jacket is a little too big,” I said. I slid it off the book. There was no mystery novel beneath. It looked like an old-style hardcover business ledger. No title along the spine. I flipped it open.
“‘A Forlorn Apology,’” I read, “‘by Abner…by Abner Renzer.” Huh. “Huh,” I said aloud. Might as well keep her up-to-date. “Renzer. Well, this is definitely a clue.” She sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at me. “The Order of the Blood-red Star was run by a Malcolm Renzer. Yeah, this…this makes the situation considerably…more serious.”
Susan looked at me. How much to tell her? “My initial theory had been that Reggie had been up to something, had stolen something of considerable worth from a client, and hidden it with you. And the people he’d ripped off were trying to scare you into giving it back. Hey, sorry. People lie to me every day.
“But now I’m thinking there’s no money at the bottom of that particular well. Whoever’s calling you doesn’t want something you’re hiding, they want something else from you. Not money.”
“I thought you said the Order was a scam,” Susan said, accusingly. “Blackmailers.”
“Yeah, they were,” I said, stretching it a bit. “Maybe…maybe this new Order, if it even rises to that level of existence…maybe they take this stuff a little more seriously. All the founders died in that fire.” That was more for my own peace of mind than hers. “Only a few made it to jail, and they were the hangers-on, the suck-ups and parasites. But urban legends are pretty immortal, at least for a while.” I flipped the book open. “Someone’s convinced this book is the real deal, and they don’t want anyone else reading it.”
“I haven’t!” Susan almost shouted. “I swear, I’ve never seen it before.”
“Anyone else with keys to the house?”
“No.”
I turned to the first page. “‘At first it seems impossible,’” I read aloud, “‘or even worse, insane. But the more one considers the possibility—”
“‘—the saner it seems,’” Susan finished. She kept talking. I closed the book and watched her. Her expression hadn’t changed, but her gaze was fixed. Staring at something only she could see. Reciting a book she’d never read.
She spoke, uninterrupted, for nearly twenty minutes. Some of it was in English. I flipped through the book, trying to catch up to her. She stopped mid-sentence, breathed in deeply, blinked, and saw me again.
“There’s a spare under the flower pot,” she said. “On the front porch. But I doubt anyone’s used it…nothing’s missing from the house, so—”
“‘At first it seems impossible,’” I interrupted her, and she was off and running again. I left her to her recitation, went to the kitchen. The house phone sat atop a small cabinet tucked in the corner. I picked it up out of its cradle, then flipped the doors open and found what I was looking for. I returned to Reggie’s office. Susan had picked up the book and was flipping ahead; she stopped at a certain page and began reading it silently.
I dialed her number on my cell. The cordless began to ring in my other hand. The sound almost shook her out of her reverie, but not quite. I handed the cordless to her. “It’s for you,” I said quietly. She took it.
“Hello,” she said.
“Stop reading,” I said into the cell phone.
“But I haven’t finished yet,” she said.
“If you keep reading,” I said, watching her watch me, knowing she wasn’t seeing me, “you’ll die.”
“No,” she said. I could hear the tears in her voice and see them slide down her cheeks. “No, he told me, he told me.”
“What did he tell you,” I whispered.
She smiled triumphantly. “I can bring him back,” she said. “He told me. It’s in here. I have to keep reading. I haven’t gotten to the page yet.”
“Stop reading,” I repeated, not sure where else to take this, but she’d already hung up the phone and returned to the book. I looked down at the page. 439. I picked up the Yellow Pages I’d taken from the cabinet, flipped it to page 439, and slowly slid it over the book. Her eyes slid down the page, memorizing the listings for Hearing Aid Sales & Repair.
I sat down on the chair in the corner of the room, half-watching Susan, half-reading the book. A Forlorn Apology. If Abner was anything like that twisted old fuck Malcolm, I doubted he’d been the apologetic type. Maybe a different meaning of the word. An account…a defense…an explanation.
The both of us sat reading in silence for some time. When the phone rang I’m afraid I may have yelped a little. Both of us slammed our books shut, thump-thump. Susan stared at me, awake now, fully awake.
“I think it’s for you,” I said.
***
“Susan.”
“Y-yes.”
“Stop reading. If you read too far, you will die.”
She looked at me as we both listened. I grabbed one of the spiral-bound notebooks and began to scribble. “I-I’ve read it,” Susan read off the page. “I’ve read it all.”
Pause. “You’ve read page 487?”
“Yes.” Another pause. Some background noise—a hushed conversation.
“Go to the cemetery,” the voice finally said. “Not tomorrow, not in an hour—now. Bring it with you.
“Go to his grave.
“If you’re ready, that is. If you’re prepared to sacrifice everything for him.”
“I am,” Susan said. She wasn’t lying. The phone went dead.
“Alright,” I said, looking her in the eye. “How much can you remember?”
“I…bits of it are coming to me. There are things I…I guess I was told to forget.”
“You’ve probably been hypnotized. Repeatedly. At some point, maybe at a party, maybe during a conversation, Reggie told you he knew how, right? Made a joke of it. After the first time, it’s easy. Post-hypnotic suggestion.”
“I don’t…yes. Maybe. It sounds right, but I don’t remember that yet…”
“You’ve been dreaming of him.”
“Yes.”
“No. You wake up, and you think you have. You have vivid, detailed memories of him. Specific conversations. Let me guess—you don’t usually remember your dreams, yes? But these you do.”
Susan nodded. “But why?” she asked.
“You tell me,” I said, seeing if she would take the bait.
“I…maybe it’s like you said. Maybe there was someone after him.” She tried to wrap her brain around it. “Maybe, maybe he’d found this…that book…and these people, the Order, maybe they wanted to kill him. But he’d read it already, and he knew.”
“What did he know?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“The secrets inside it,” she said. “Life and death secrets. Life after death.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“No, listen!” she insisted. “He must have known, he must have known, all those phone calls…trying to protect me from it…God, it all makes sense now…he knew they would try to kill him, they must have, they must have arranged it all, the accident…he knew he had to die, to protect me! To keep them away from me! So he let himself die, and, and…”
“And?”
“And now he’s reaching out! He wants me to bring him back! The book, the ritual…look, I know it’s crazy,” she said, desperately grabbing my arm. “I can’t believe I’m saying any of this. I know it’s insane.”
I smiled. “Yes,” I said, “at first, it seems impossible.” And her eyes went dim again as she recognized the words. “Or even worse, insane.” She was fighting it. I could see the struggle in her eyes. But the conditioning was too strong to ignore.
“But the more one considers the possibility—”
“—the saner it seems,” she said. “For many years now, we have studied—”
“Yes, you have,” I said. I handed her the Yellow Pages again. “Stop reading. If you keep reading, you’ll die.”
“No,” she said, taking the book. “If I keep reading, he’ll live. He’ll come back to me.” And she dove back into the book, looking for the secrets of resurrection amongst ads for plumbers and Chinese restaurants.
I tore a blank sheet of paper out of the notebook and began writing. I wrote down everything we’d spoken about, everything I was about to do, and everything I knew about the Order—what I’d told her, and what I’d kept to myself. I stuck it inside her book, about a hundred pages ahead of where she was reading. When she snapped out of it, I hoped she’d do what I asked.
I picked up Renzer’s forlorn apology. It was time to meet the new Order.
***
Thump-thump. I picked myself up off the ground and looked down on the headstone over which I’d stumbled. URICH, LOVING FATHER AND GRANDFATHER. I hadn’t thought to ask Susan where Reggie had been buried and had been stumbling around for fifteen minutes, trying to conduct a search in the middle of the night with only my cell phone for light. I was always best working on the fly, but sometimes improvising just wasn’t good enough.
JOHNS. KLIGOFF. DEVEREUX. Shit. And then I stumbled over a stroke of good luck. About ten feet ahead of me, a match flared in the darkness. A cigarette tip glowed bright enough to make out the vague shape of a robed man, leaning against a tree. I had a hunch if he turned around I’d see that familiar seven-pointed amulet around his neck.
All I had to do was knock him out, put his robe on, and find the others. I smiled. The smile froze on my face as I felt something hard and metallic pressed to the back of my head. Even for me, that was a particularly short run of good luck. “Stand up,” said someone behind me. I complied.
The smoker turned around. “Hey,” he said, startled.
“Yeah, hey,” said the man holding the gun to my head. “Nice work.” I heard a sound remarkably similar to the hammer of a revolver being cocked back. “Who the hell are you?” he growled. With his other hand he patted me down, pulling the book out of my waistband underneath my jacket.
“I know who he is,” said the smoker. “He’s the detective she went to.”
“Why don’t you take those hoods off?” I suggested.
“Shut up,” said the man behind me, and he slammed the butt of his gun against the base of my skull. I flopped forward onto the ground and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw they had dragged me some distance and dropped me beside a headstone. DARMAN. “Thanks, guys,” I said, remembering to rub the back of my head. “What’s the fare?” I grabbed the stone and pulled myself up.
Six of them, surrounding me. All were covered from head to shins in the same red robes; all wore the heptagram and goat’s eye of the Order. One of them held a lantern; he set it atop the headstone, beside Abner Renzer’s apology, and in its glow I noticed the machete in his hand, the axes and pistols in the hands of the others.
“Hello, Reggie,” I said.
The man with the machete slid the hood off of his head, and I recognized the face I’d seen in numerous photographs in Susan’s home. “Hello, Mr. Webb,” he said. “No offense, but I was expecting someone else.”
“No shit,” I said. “So who the hell’s Darman?”
Reggie looked at me. “What makes you think I’m not Darman?”
“I’m just wondering if you burned up a John Doe from some morgue,” I said, “or if you killed someone and took his place.” One of the hoods to my right mumbled something.
“Shut up,” Reggie said. He looked at me. “You’ve seen my face, so you may as well know my name. It’s—”
“Renzer,” I said. “That was fairly obvious.” Renzer looked slightly annoyed, but covered it fairly quickly. “I notice you didn’t answer my question, which means you killed someone, either way.” I didn’t say that his honesty told me he didn’t intend to let me leave this cemetery alive. What was the point?
“Where,” he said calmly, “is Susan?”
“She’s on a train,” I said. “To DC, or maybe Buffalo or Cleveland.” One of them swung something heavy against the small of my back, and I grunted. “She’s gone. She’s gone and she won’t be coming back. You’ll have to start over.”
“You idiot,” Reggie said. “You have no idea what a mess you’ve made of this.” He motioned to his men. “Show him how displeased we are.”
“Watch the jacket,” I managed to say, before a fist knocked the wind out of me. A baseball bat smashed my kneecap in. They surrounded me, kicking and stomping. A blade slashed my palm open. This was just the warm-up. When they were satisfied that I truly didn’t know where Susan was going (for all I knew she was still reading the goddamn Yellow Pages), they’d put a bullet in my head.
“Wait,” I wheezed, putting my cut hand flat on the ground. “Wait. Please. No more. If you needed her to do something, I’ll do it.” I let my voice quaver. “That’s what this was about, right? You needed her to—”
Reggie shook his head. “You won’t do,” he said. “For one thing, unless I’ve totally misread this meeting, you don’t love me.” Well, he had me there. “For another, you haven’t read the book. You certainly haven’t read page 487, or I’d know it.”
“And what’s…what’s on page 487?”
“The culmination of the ritual,” he said. “Old Abner wrote it all down. He died before he could make it work, you see.” I could tell Reggie was winding up to tell me the whole story. Just aching to tell somebody. “My great-great-grandfather. He found the symbols, he meticulously constructed the entire ritual, but he couldn’t make it work. Grandfather, he came closer.”
“Malcolm,” I said. Reggie smiled.
“You’ve followed the family, then. I’m flattered. Then you know that his attempt at it apparently failed as well. Spectacularly, I’d say.”
“A calamitous ratfuck of the highest order, I’d say,” I said. “But Malcolm wasn’t the conjurer you make him out to be, just a pimp and a charlatan. I’d say.”
Another round of kicks. “Trying to goad us into beating you unconscious so you won’t talk,” Reggie said. “Above and beyond the call of duty, really.”
“I’m a professional,” I said. “Look, you’ve lost. She’s gone and she’s not coming back, and you’re out of time anyway. I know this has to be done by midnight tonight. See, I’ve read the book.”
The look of shock on Reggie’s face…man, moments like this are why I do this job.
“Bullshit,” he whispered.
“Reggie?” one of the hoods said nervously. “You said—”
“Bullshit!” Reggie screamed. “That’s bullshit. That’s impossible.”
“You read the book?” another asked me. Me. Reggie was losing control of his little club.
“Cover,” I said, “to cover. A lot of it was arcane symbols anyway, it was a quick read. Bo-ring.”
“There’s no way,” Reggie said.
“Of course, after you mentioned page 487 on your last call to Susan—I heard the whole thing, by the way—curiosity got the better of me and I re-read that page, just to make sure. Nothing special.” I looked at Reggie. “Was something supposed to happen to me, when I read that page?”
“You read the page,” Reggie said, in complete disbelief.
“Yes,” I said. I stood up. No need to grovel anymore. “And I’ve waited…for quite some time…for an explanation. Tell me what you expected to happen.”
“By now,” Reggie said, in a diminishing voice, “it should have started. You should have grown more distant. More…more pliable. You didn’t read it.”
“I did,” I said. “More times than you know. What. Was. Supposed to happen?”
“You should be gone,” one of them said. I noticed they were backing away from me. “Your soul.”
“You should be an empty shell,” Reggie said. “By now, your spirit should have been sucked out of your body. Trapped on page 487.”
“Sucked out by the book,” said the acolyte with the axe.
“But why?”
“It needs a vessel,” said an acolyte.
“It needs a host,” Reggie said. “My grandfather tried it, and it didn’t work. The soul wasn’t fully…extracted. It couldn’t take hold. There was a struggle for the body.”
“What needs a vessel?” I asked, trying not to sound excited. Finally, an answer after all this time. “What?”
Silence.
Finally, Reggie Renzer spoke. “The demon,” he said. Clutching his machete tightly. Murder in his voice.
The demon.
They were trying to summon…a demon.
“You’re shitting me, right?” I said. “A demon? All this time, and that’s what this has been about? A fucking demon?”
Hands grabbed me from either side. “Stretch him over the stone,” Reggie said. “On his back.” He hefted his blade. “Love, you see. That was supposed to make it work. Susan’s love for me, her being haunted by my memory, was going to make her willingly sacrifice her body. For my sake, you understand. And our…our benefactor, would have an empty, untroubled vessel to take for himself. It was going to work this time. And you…
He lifted his machete high.
“Fucked…”
He swung it down, burying it in my stomach.
“…it all…up!” He wrenched it out, to hack at me again.
I grabbed his wrist.
“If that was your plan,” I said, “then you had no plan.
“And you’re an even bigger fool than Malcolm was.”
I twisted my hand slightly, snapping the bones in his wrist. He screamed and fell back. At this point the others noticed I wasn’t bleeding.
“Look at this,” I said, putting fingers through the hole in my shirt. “This was brand new. Ruined.” One of the hoods swung a club at me, and I grabbed the club with one hand and snapped his forearm with the other. They all began to run, even the fellow with the shattered arm. Reggie was crawling backwards on the ground now, unable to take his eyes off of me. He was pissing himself.
“I can’t begin to tell you,” I said, “after all these decades, how utterly disappointed I am, to hear that this…fairy tale…is what it was all about.” I stepped on his ankle, breaking it. “Or how many sleepless nights...they’re all sleepless, now, of course…I spent reproaching myself, for having throttled that fool before he answered my questions.”
Reggie’s eyes bulged. “You! No! You’re the one!”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I wasn’t the one. There is no one. And there’s no fucking demon, either. Your grandfather wasn’t burned to death by a devil’s displeasure—one of his fucking imbecile acolytes knocked over a torch and set the house on fire.” I grabbed him by his robes. “So he probably had no idea what he’d really done to me. Did he. And you…know less…than…him.” He howled as I snapped a finger backwards with each pause.
“Look,” I said, and his eyes goggled as I unbuttoned my shirt, and showed him the gaping wound. The older one.
He hadn’t been the first Renzer to put a blade in me.
“What did you say? A hollow shell?” I said. “Not entirely wrong. Go ahead, touch it. Poke it with a stick if you want. No pain. Nothing feels bad, or good, anymore. Abner should’ve apologized for his apology…I don’t sleep. Or eat. Or fuck. Or want. Anything. I can’t even give a damn about not giving a damn.” I leaned forward and caved in one of his ribs. Just to remind him this was still happening. “The soul, it turns out, is not a requirement for life. It just makes your life worth living.
“So now, Mr. Renzer, there’s just one craving.
“One sensation, that dulls the pain of…soullessness. Just a little.
“I’ve abstained for so long. So…long. But tonight…”
Reggie Renzer had started to play up his infamous past because he thought it made him look cool. Scared other kids. Then he found it was a good way to get a certain kind of girl into bed. Then he started to think he understood what he was studying. Then, of course, he made the classic mistake of thinking it was all so easy.
The last look his eyes ever gave told me he’d give it all back.
I answered his unspoken plea with a shake of my head. Then I grabbed his head, pulled him close, and sank my teeth into his neck. Blood spurted everywhere as the first hunk of meat tore free in my jaws. He was so hypnotized with fear that he barely even whimpered at first. Then the pain hit and he began to wail and thrash around.
I tore his throat out with my second bite. Soon enough, the strength bled out of him, and I continued my meal unperturbed.
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
Thump…thump…
***
“I’m scared, Truman.”
“No need. I told you. They were nothing but con men. I confronted them with their flimsy attempt at Gaslighting you and they folded. Like the proverbial cheap table. Said they were sorry, pleaded with me.” It was an effort to abstain from any punning about their hearts not being in it. “The Order is dissolved. Blown away with all the fallen leaves.”
I could almost feel her, through the phone. Feel her lean against me for support, feel her hair brush against my face. Feel the warmth of her body seep into my cold, cold flesh as she presses against me, for comfort, for solace. I almost feel something, for half a second. Just the phantom sensation of an amputee, really. “If that’s true,” she said, “then why am I not coming back?” I can hear her smile, hear her eyes shine with unshed tears.
“Because,” I said, “there’s nothing here for you, and everything out there. Because you should take this shitty, callous, cruel mind-fuck of a year and put it in your rearview mirror, and make something positive out of this. And because I’m the bottom of the barrel in this business, and maybe I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Better safe than sorry.”
“Yeah,” Susan said. She’s not afraid anymore, not really. Stronger than Reggie Renzer ever imagined. “I’ll contact you again, as soon I’m settled in here. My cousin is going to help me get set up with a job, and I’ll be able—”
“Susan,” I said, “your account’s paid in full, and this case is now closed.” And she starts to say something else, but I’ve already hung up the phone. And here I sit. Terrified to go out.
Thump-thump.
I’m tired of this. I need…I need a drink. Bourbon. I need a bloody-rare T-bone, fresh apples, mint ice cream with chocolate syrup on top. I need to hear a song that makes me cry. I need that first cigarette in bed after the first time with a new woman. I need to know what I’m missing.
Thump-thump.
I hadn’t eaten in years, before last night.
Thump-thump.
You live with an ache for so long, you get used to it. It becomes normal. When the pain lifts for an hour, you don’t know what to do with yourself. Can’t believe anything could feel so good.
Thump-thump.
Goddamn you, Malcolm. And goddamn me, for killing you so quickly. You deserve to share this exquisite gift with me.
I stare at it, lying inside the glass jar within the wall safe, the same jar Malcolm dropped it into after he cut it out of me. How many years now, how many decades? You could still set your watch to it. For the millionth time this month, I tell myself this is the day. Burn it, stab it, anything to stop that sound.
I swing the safe door shut. Spin the dial. I can hear it.
Thump-thump.
I can feel it.
Thump-thump.
Pulsing. Beating.
Thump-thump.
Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow might be the day.
Yeah.
Sure.
I slump into the chair behind my desk. The beating of my heart. The maddening taste of his flesh and blood as it slides down my throat. Nothing else. Don’t call back, Susan. Don’t you dare call this number.
Outside my window, the fucking spring sunshine warms the smiling faces of those who haven’t forgotten the knack of living. The phone rings once.
Twice.
Three times.
Four.
BACK-UP MAN
By Justin Gustainis
Winter had finally loosened its death grip on the city, and Spring was in the air. The sun shone brightly, gentle breezes blew through the trees, and the suburban lawns were finally starting to look more green than brown. Outside the house at 441 Chestnut Street, birds were probably singing, but I can’t say for sure—we had the windows tightly closed, so that all the screaming, shouting, and cursing wouldn’t frighten the neighbors.
It was a beautiful day for an exorcism.
He’d been at it for about nine hours, and things seemed to be going okay, if I’m any judge—and I guess I should be. I’ve been present at five of these things over the years. Five, not counting this one—the one that went bad.
I’m a private investigator, not a priest. But the diocese likes me to be around when these things go down, as kind of a back-up man. We have an arrangement that goes back quite a long time.
Like I said, the ritual had been proceeding pretty much the way you’d expect. Father Dwyer had gone through the Invocation, and the Naming, and we were into the third series of prayers of the Denunciation.
Then the Father dropped his crucifix, and the whole thing went to shit.
***