Thrice Told Tales

by Robert W. Walker

  “He said I should give myself up, but Dooley didn’t like that idea.”

  “Give yourself up to who, Detective Jensen?”

  “Yes. Dooley heard Detective Jensen say this case’ll make his career. So Dooley whispered that Jensen was using me.”

  “You saw Jensen last night? Where?”

  “My house – came to my house. There was fog and Dooley was there.”

  “You didn’t – ”

  “Dooley did.”

  “In the fog?”

  “Yes.”

  “But, Katherine, with Roth, there was no fog in here.”

  “Yes, there was! Moment before you came in there was. Place was full of fog. Came spilling out the vents.”

  Although Jessica knew there was no fog, she glanced around to assure herself. No fog, no spilled coffee, no crushed-out cigarette butts, nothing out of the ordinary save for Roth lying dead on the carpet.

  Tears stanched, Mrs. Helspenny tilted her head to one side, then the next as she peered at Jessica. “Dooley says you’re going to hurt me. Is that true?”

  “Katherine, why would I?”

  “Dooley never lied to me, not like Jake, or Jensen, or Roth. Are you lying to me?”

  “Me? No.”

  “Dooley always said if we married, we’d make our own rules.”

  “You weren’t married to Dooley?”

  Mrs. Helspenny, distracted, rubbed at her forehead. “Fog, makes its own rules,” she said.

  Fog makes its own rules . . . rules of fog. These phrases, these concepts of a confused mind rolled over in Jessica’s mind. “Katherine, we’re going to need some help here,” she said, motioning toward Roth’s body. “I’m just going to . . .” Jessica turned away for a moment, picked up a napkin, then knelt to retrieve the ice pick. She took care to not smudge the fingerprints or touch the blood. As Jessica rose, she Mrs. Helspenny clamped one hand over the other, the hand twisting, pulling, as if it were in a tug-of-war.

  “Why can’t fog be controlled or quantified or figured like other things?” the woman asked to the ether. She twisted toward Jessica, pleading, “Did you know I was a math teacher at the high school? I try to figure these things out, but they don’t figure. I can only tell you . . . Dooley’s back!”

  Jessica wheeled in the direction the woman stared, her face blanching white.” Mrs. Helspenny rose up and, as she did, she plunged a hand into a pocket. When the hand came out – a fist – it held a second ice pick that now rose high, the woman screaming, “You’ll never hurt me now!”

  Jessica spun back as the hand and pick hammered down at her brain, but mercifully, the pick entered Jessica’s twisting shoulder instead. She responded, sweeping up with her scalpel, slicing through the woman’s clothes, cutting a gash across her abdomen.

  Mrs. Helspenny, shocked, paused.

  Jessica continued around. She kicked out her foot, catching the mad woman behind her ankles, upending her. Mrs. Helspenny’s windmilling arms could not stop her fall, and she struck her head on a sofa table, the sound like a gunshot. The mad woman had gone silent and lay now in a heap on carpet.

  Jessica, her chest heaving, her lungs sucking for oxygen, stood there uncertain, her hand going to her shoulder. A clean, bloodless wound beneath her lab coat, but the pain was significant. Then came a movement somewhere in the room. The movement caught her eye but it was neither Mrs. Helspenny or Roth, but from near a vent to the side – an escaping gas.

  Fog?

  #

  Mrs. Helspenny, after she came to, talked, rambled on and never stopped, and Jessica could not help but wonder if it was Mrs. Helspenny’s defense against Dooley returning in the fog. The insanity claim put forth by her court-appointed lawyer held at a hearing, and the judge ordered the woman to the state asylum.

  Jessica repeatedly visited Katherine there. Sat with the woman for hours, listening, trying to make sense of it all. Had she snapped on learning that Jake had killed her child? The words rolled forth from the woman non-stop, most of them little more than nonsense and as disconnected as a Charles Manson monologue. But some words, some phrases meandered through her discourse again and again . . . “It was the fog. . . . Fog’s got rules. . . . Got to figure the rules of it.”

  The psychiatrist assigned the case told Jessica Mrs. Helspenny had gone to scribbling mathematical formulas and algebraic equations with crayon and on table paper. “Papers the walls of her room with it all,” he’d said, shaking his head.

  Jessica asked, “Can I see her room?”

  “Good timing,” Dr. Koontz replied. “She’s in group session with my colleague on the case right now, so she’ll be out.”

  Koontz led the way.

  She wandered about the otherwise plain room, studying the scribblings while Koontz looked over her shoulder, frowning. Finally, Jessica asked the psychiatrist, “May I take a few of these with me?”

  “Whatever for?”

  “To be analyzed by experts, former colleagues still with the FBI.”

  “I don’t think there’s much worth analyzing, but I see no harm in it.” And he randomly pulled down three sheets and gave them to Jessica.

  Her former associates at Quantico studied them as diligently as Jessica before they sent her a one-page report that could have been summarized in three words – nonsense, mathematical gibberish.

  In quiet moments in her car or her office, and not so quiet moments in the autopsy room, Jessica replayed the case, Mrs. Helspenny’s torment, and came over time to fear that she was approaching a precipice beyond which lay insanity. She came to speak little of the case and told no one of the smoky residue that had rises from Jake Helspenny’s brain, and somehow found life in the ventilation system; she dared not mention the slit of milky fog that wisped away through the waiting-room vent like a witch up the chimney.

  She maintained a habit of, at 5:45 p.m., going home to the farm, to her husband Richard, sure that the stability of both would keep her steady, secure. Yet, when the weather conditions were right, when the dew point and the temperature converged, when the air was utterly still, fog would engulf her and Richard’s farm, and she would stand at the window and stare until some movement, like that of a scurrying insect, drew her gaze. The movement might be as brief as a swirl in the fog, and it was gone, or had it been there at all? Was it illusion, the mind playing tricks on itself?

  The fog this night was so thick that Jessica could not see the horse stable less than fifty yards from their home.

  Richard came up behind her. The start she felt melted when he quickly grabbed her up and wrapped his arms about her shoulders. “Jess, why do you stare out like this? All it does is make you one bleak, gloomy Gus.” Richard’s rich voice, firm and sure, had a reassuring quality she’d grown to expect and want.

  Gloomy, melancholy, uncommunicative, Jessica thought. It’s the fog.

  For heaven’s sake, talk to me,” Richard said. He kissed her behind her ear. “Tell me what’s going on. Have I done something wrong?”

  She touched his hand, caressed it. “No, just something troubling about fog.”

  “Since that Helspenny case, you’ve been this way about the damn bloody fog. It never once bothered you before.”

  “I’m sorry, Richard. I can’t explain it, can’t put it into words.”

  “Try the words ‘frustrating as hell.’”

  She pulled herself from his arms and walked away. “Rules of Fog,” she muttered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’m going to bed.” She could feel his eyes on her back as she walked off.

  Alone again, Jessica knew she’d never shake off the Helspenny case, not fully ever, no matter how much time passed. Nor could she share the details with Richard, the person she loved most. It was, as he’d said, frustrating as hell. But it was also as if she had deciphered one of the rules of fog. She’d done so one dreary night standing over the tombstone of one Dooley there in cemetery fog. She’d seen no ghost rise from the earth, had seen no spectral face
in the stones, nor shapes in the fog, but she thought she’d caught a whisper ride past on the wind. Perhaps one of the rules of fog, and since then, she’d chosen to live by it: Silence is peace.

  The End

  THE UNREAD

  “I swear on my dead mother’s eyes, I’ll find a place on the shelf for your book, Arthur dear,” Minerva “Min” Wakely promised the long dead, unread author.

  Tonight she made the same promise to the pages of Arthur’s unpublished manuscript, as she’d rubbed each into her nude body, her very skin reading his words, taking them in in a reverent earnest moment before falling asleep over her reading of his oft time confusing, sometime awkward, sometime passive, but always sincere dissertation-styled book on a subject that ought not be kept from the world, a book filled with hope and humanity and promise.

  Perhaps it’d not been recognized for genius due to an ill choice of font, and the poor quality of Arthur’s printer – cheating little empty of ink horizontal space-lines across all the letters -- made the reading an eye strain, and the quality of the Office Max paper began to tell early on, after the midway point on page 3,024.

  The day played out in Min’s head parabola-fashion as she slept, events going in and out, each mingling within egg shell casings scattered along a slanted boardwalk through a white cloud labyrinth promising nothingness and peace for the price of a shuddering bug, and no part of her dream or its whole made sense; however, it did make for perfectly lovely nonsense. Finally achieving REM sleep, she became startled on feeling the approach of the now familiar spirit -- her prodigal ghostly lover returned to a single-minded purpose, to pleasure her.

  Its presence -- unmistakable as a stone through a pane of glass -- woke Min, who held herself in rigid check this time. In fact, this time she’d the good sense to recognize the strange odd pressure crawling up alongside her leg, the weight of it against the mattress like a cat comprised of smoke, yet owning an odd bulk. One ethereal paw at a time came, until it reached her mid-section and straddled her, sniffing about her privates. It’s furry touch tickled, brought up gooseflesh. She almost laughed, knowing that the sprite crawling over her believed that it’d done so with such deft and care that she could not have possibly sensed it. The poor, dear, wretched Arthur proved so sweet, so naïve; even his spectral form did not detect her conscious state, did not know what was going on, not really, not on this plane – that her vagina tingled and her nipples hardened at his spirit touch. Arthur remained Arthur, shy and clueless, even in death.

  Arthur remained still...silent... patient... tolerant...touching her forever...breathing over her abdomen, now sniffing about her naked navel. She’d taken to sleeping nude to encourage his ethereal advances and still, he didn’t get it-- that she had summoned him and not the other way around, summoned him by reading his opus. The opus of a dead man, an opus no one before her had ever read, much less understood.

  Naked to his touch, so moved by words he’d left behind, she psychically begged his tentative move ever lighter up to the curve of her sagging breasts, and finally to slither imperceptibly onward toward her solar-plexis, to perch there in patient stealth time. All but weightless now straddling her chest, in her face. Finally situated -- again with weak, blind movements – Arthur’s spirit began to seek out her throat. Its featherlike feelers smoothly stroked the neck, following its dip and curve to the flat of her chin, and with its mouth now within a hair’s breadth of hers, the ghost kissed her lips, but not really -- its electric energy not quite touching her after all -- just hovering and breathing deeply, stealing her exhalations, working up to stealing her inhalations. All this as each breath passed her lips and nostrils in a rhythmic mimicry of the sex act.

  It’d come again, and it wanted what it wanted -- this thing of spirit Arthur Milmar had become. The specter left her breathless, and in feeling breathless, she felt something, and in feeling something, she, too derived pleasure from the exchange, even if it was a languishing delight, a kind of dying. The spirit succubus meant to live longer and gain in strength, so it might visit with her longer, or so it transmitted this notion to her, pleading for Min to enter into a symbiosis of cold flesh-hot flesh; to desire within a lovely touch, always culminating in conversation rather than completion, as it appeared that Arthur loved Min’s mind as well as her body.

  Their exchanges and their lives would be more meaningful, and neither might fade, and she might in fact learn to meet more of his kind and they -- the ghosts -- would not disappear in mid-blink or go silent in mid-word the instant they learned she was eye-to-eye aware of them. How wonderful if Arthur and the others could keep hold of their form and truly control their ethereal mouths, so they wouldn’t want to leave her while desperate to remain with her, so they wouldn’t evaporate without answering the unfathomable questions she stored up, wishing to pose. Questions that might send the timid dead Arthur scurrying off as they had the dead other author: astral plane guru book writer Jacob Kosler, whose out of print title she had so loved.

  She let Arthur’s essence come...felt the ghosts’ sticky and spotty ectoplasmic spray between her legs, and its struggling breath on her open lips, her nostrils, the roof of her mouth as it dug deep for its need. Yet even as Arthur sprayed out his ectoplasmic passion, she remained as unsated and as unfulfilled as he remained unpublished, unread. Still with each coming, she believed it could, it must, it had to happen.

  Relax...enjoy...consider the alternative. She had learned the ways of the dead; she knew how easily spooked a spirit could be, and she had trained on Kosler how to erect a bond, to prolong the ethereal form and hardness of the species. She now had the inside track. Arthur required her living breath to come into being, to hold shape and to move about for any length of time. The more of her breath that a spirit breathed in, the more it stole from her, the longer it remained...the longer they had to converse, and to smoke and hold hands afterward, then to speak of lost goals, failed opportunities, disappointed lives, and dead dreams. “Lost goals or lost ghouls,” Arthur quipped, always the funny man.

  She no longer feared Arthur’s kind, although some held more bitterness, more acrid anger, more frustrated hatred and absolute disdain for what had happened – or failed to happen – in their lives, when the life of the wordsmith had failed them. For all the dead authors who came into Min’s bed were in life unpublished and unread, and they remained the aggregate unread. Those who’d died before achieving the Holy Grail — publication. Not bestseller-dom, just publication.

  How they died and how they lived or rather failed to live could form a book in itself. Some, the bitterest of the lot, had succumbed to suicide, some to depression that’d helped along a crumbling loss of purpose and health, while others died of a bad liver and a broken heart. Some contained within their daemon hearts more earthly cursed hatred than any on this side of perdition and possible publication. Min knew that this esprite de corps could be dangerous if given too much leeway. Both Jacob Kosler and Arthur Milmar had warned of Min to beware, as had Mrs. Cox, the Head Librarian at Min’s place of work, the Repository for Unpublished Manuscripts buried these days in a bunker below Washington D.C.

  So she knew for whom to ‘open’ wide and for whom to ‘shut off’. She would not allow those “bitter de core” -- as Arthur called them -- into her bed anymore than she would allow them into her body or being.

  But this one, Arthur Canterbury Smith Milmar II, while sad, disenfranchised in life, disenchanted with God, pitiable and filled with tales of woe…this romantic had certainly had far more reason to nurture a growing, festering rage as his talent, his precociousness, his elegance and literate style should have risen to the top echelons of the publishing world but had not. He’d fallen through a considerable crack and into drugs and booze. He’d had his “awful truth” manuscript – Literary Origins Before Christ -- The History and Fateful Journey of the Many Lives of the Christ Story B.C. -- turned down by every publisher in the known universe as too controversial in the time of a Bush White House. At very le
ast, Arthur had realized that his nine hundred and ninety ninth rejection slip said something loud and clear when he’d put the barrel of that gun into his mouth. But Min held the key to soothing his troubled soul, utilizing her own truth, that all those damnable ninety nine slips were slip ups, the collective ass of the gutless, spineless, brainless, money-grubbing publishers on New York’s Publisher’s Row. That the mountain of rejects said more about the condition of publishing in America than it did about poor Arthur, as when he’d desperately turned Before Christ into a screenplay, jazzing it up, renaming it The Christ Clones, only to garner hundreds more rejections. Min gave a thought to the spineless jellyfish who ran the film industry in LA and Hollywood. Arthur cared less that he’d died than that his manuscript had never lived. And what horror did that speak of for the dashed artist Arthur?