The Love of the Dead

by Craig Saunders

  C r a i g S a u n d e r s

  The Love of the Dead

  Evil Jester Press

  New York

  The Love of the Dead

  Copyright © 2012 by Craig Saunders

  All Rights Reserved

  Evil Jester Press

  Ridge, New York

  No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any electronic system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the authors. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Edited by Gregory L. Norris

  Cover art by Gary McCluskey

  Formatting and design by Peter Giglio

  First Digital Edition

  July 2012

  I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

  The Book of Lies

  Aleister Crowley

  High priest the mesmorous, the soul auctioneer,

  Sells scorpion tightropes, while surfing on fear

  “Soul Auctioneer”

  Death in Vegas

  Shimmy on down baby

  Shimmy on down

  “Troubled Times”

  Screaming Trees

  Part One

  The High Priestess

  Chapter One

  Monday 10th November

  Some time after the killing started, some time before it ended, Beth Willis sat at her kitchen table with a glass of whiskey. Beth needed a focus for meditation and preferred a whiskey tumbler. It worked best if it was full to begin with, empty later on.

  She stared at the still liquid, her brow drawn tight, cross, but not really knowing why. What was the point at being angry with the dead?

  She didn’t want to meditate, but spirits were demanding bastards.

  It didn’t matter that this was stupid. It didn’t matter that she was probably wasting her time, or that her son had kept her up playing the Xbox long after last night’s binge should have put her to sleep.

  Breathe out, breathe in. Relax. Let calm wash over her.

  Damn, she wanted to drink it. Focus on that. Let it go where it will.

  The theory behind meditation was easy enough. Some people counted. Others focused on a candle flame and said “Om” while their legs went numb from twisting into stupid positions. Meditation was supposed to be comfortable, but she had a hangover and was liable to fall asleep. So she sat.

  Theory was fine, but above all, don’t fight it.

  She had a kind of a guide who she spoke to. Most of the time that she got a message, it came from him. She didn’t often sit and stare at nothing like she was pretending to be Yoda, way back when her son had been into Star Wars and not Lara Croft—the Angelina Jolie version, not some pixelated bimbo.

  But this call hadn’t come from her guide. This was straight up lightning. You couldn’t fight that no matter how you tried. You can’t catch lightning.

  Breathe. Watch the liquid.

  Breathe.

  It was no use, she thought, but then she was staring slack-jawed at the ceiling. A stringy cobweb dangled from the medallion and swayed in the draft from the rattling windows. She didn’t really see it; her kitchen didn’t exist for her anymore. She could have been dreaming, but for her eyes being open, staring into space, seeing beyond the four walls. Seeing a man’s house. An unfamiliar house but it didn’t shock her. It was just somewhere else to be. Interesting, perhaps, but just another house.

  There was a dresser against a wall. A short thing. Maybe it was called a sideboard. She didn’t know. A candle burned within a glass tube. The tube was red. The room took on a ruby glow that should have been soothing, but then the man’s hands came into view. It didn’t seem soothing anymore. It looked like blood.

  The man flicked cards. Tarot. Rider-Waite cards. Just like the ones she used.

  They weren’t his cards. They were the victim’s.

  Flick, and the card flew through the air onto a table she didn’t see. Just the cards. They started face down but landed face up.

  The Tower, flames licking the upper windows. The Tower, and a man and a woman falling, robes and dresses fluttering as they plummeted to their deaths. The Tower, a storm on a black night. Lightning crashed.

  Over and over the cards landed, though there was only one Tower card in the deck.

  The man’s hands were strong, nails clipped short, no scars. The backs of his hands were covered with thick black hair. Deft hands. But these weren’t healing hands. They were a killer’s.

  Steady and perfect. Building a tower of cards. Building a tower, but the tower wasn’t about building. The TOWER, the card said. The sixteenth card of the major arcana.

  It wasn’t about building at all. It was about falling, burning, destruction.

  The ends of things. Of lives.

  As hard as it came, the vision fled. She fell forward so hard she cracked her favorite glass with her forehead. She watched, numbed, as blood dripped and mingled with the spilled whiskey on the tablecloth.

  Her heart pounded and she was panting like she’d run half a mile. She didn’t scare easily, but seeing a killer making a house of cards like that, a vision so powerful...she didn’t know what it meant but it was bad medicine and she didn’t want any of it.

  “But you’ve got it, Beth. And you know damn well what it means.”

  Spirits had called her out. Guides didn’t do that for no reason. She might not know the whys of it, but she knew who the hands belonged to.

  He’d been in the paper every day for the last three weeks.

  She stumbled on the way into the hall, holding pressure to the cut on her forehead. She’d knocked herself a pretty good one, but she could still see straight enough to read the phone book.

  She dialed the police, got the usual run around. Finally, she made it through to the local station. A detective named Coleridge picked up and by the time she’d finished talking with him, her night was well on the way to turning to shit.

  Chapter Two

  “Coleridge,” he said in a big man’s gruff voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Ma’am?”

  She took a deep breath and dove right in, just like when you take a plunge into the cold sea, no preparation, only blind forward momentum.

  “I’ve been trying to tell someone about a...a vision I had. About the killer in the paper.”

  She felt like a fraud all over again.

  “Let’s run thought it, okay? You want to give me what you’ve got?”

  “I’ve never done this before.”

  “Anything that’s useful, we use. We don’t talk about it, but we often have calls from mediums. Just give me what you’ve got and don’t worry. I’ll be straight with you. I don’t believe in God, but just because I don’t believe in something don’t mean it isn’t real. So you don’t mind what other people think and tell me what you know.”

  Just like that. No bullshit. Straight up. She was flustered, even though she’d been giving people messages from the dead most of her life.

  “Just a picture, really. A Tarot card. Well, a deck of Tarot cards, but one in particular.”

  “Go on.”

  “You know Tarot?”

  “If you would, ma’am,” he said, and she got the impression that he knew well enough what she was going to say.

  “The Tower, Detective. That’s what I saw. That’s it.”

  When he spoke again his voice was different. Softer.

  “Thank you. That’s very helpful. Nothing else?”

  Nothing else? Nothing else, Beth? But she could
n’t say what else, because it was insane and she was already telling a policeman that she had visions.

  “No, just that.”

  “Can I ask, what made you call us?”

  “I see the papers. I know about the killings. Detective Coleridge, I knew two of the people who were murdered. I just know it’s got something to do with them. Something to do with Tarot, maybe. They’re mediums, right? It just made sense. I know it’s relevant. I just don’t know why yet.”

  He didn’t say anything for a while. Thinking. She could hear him breathing. Labored breath, like a fat man.

  “Ma’am,” he said eventually. “Give me your contact information. If we get anything else, I’d like to be able to call you. If that’s okay.”

  She agreed without thinking it through. She had many failings. Most she knew. Some she forgot, like expecting strangers to believe her visions were the truth.

  “Yes,” she said, because the damage was done. She wasn’t just some crackpot woman living in a little cottage by the sea or simply the embarrassing town drunk anymore.

  She hadn’t thought it fully through. She never did.

  Now, she was involved.

  Chapter Three

  After she made the phone call, Beth pulled on her coat and took some money from the bread box.

  “Miles! I’m going into town! Don’t break anything!”

  Nothing.

  Whatever.

  She pulled on a coat and stepped outside onto the walkway, half buried in sand. She’d stopped brushing it off the flagstones because it always blew back. She’d given up most of the house maintenance. A fresh coat of paint on the door the previous year had been about the last thing she’d done that hadn’t been essential.

  The ocean took its toll. Storms rolled in off the North Sea, bringing hard and bitter winds. The salt air cracked paint and brick and wood alike. The gutters rusted, tiles flew off. But her two-bedroom cottage would prevail, as it had for decades.

  The sea was at high tide, a hundred yards or so from her home. It came as close as fifty when there was a big swell, but never to her front door with its new coat of paint. She hoped it never would.

  Sand crunched under her feet, coarse and full of sharp bits of crushed shells. The going grew easier once she reached the road. In summer the road would be dangerous to walk on, too, because of the traffic. The Norfolk coast was heaven in the winter, hell in the summer. Hell wasn’t other people, only tourists.

  A couple of cars passed, but she stepped from the road into the sand and let them go. The town sign rattled in the wind. A bird drifted on a gust, not flapping, just hanging there, suspended on the icy rush. Some kind of black bird, maybe a crow or a raven. Out of place by the sea. She watched it until it sank from sight behind the big warehouses on the edge of town. Ugly structures, all gray metal. The sidings rattled in a high wind, sometimes loud enough for her to hear even though she was the better part of a mile from town.

  There were a few small traffic circles, but crossing them was pretty easy now that the weather had cooled and the tourists had left. The nearest shop was on Cliff View, a street that ran dangerously along the side of a steep hill. Nice view from the houses there, but they weren’t worth a penny and were probably only a decade away from falling into the sea.

  She picked up a loaf of bread, a can of beans, a bottle of whiskey, and a pack of cigarettes. It cost her almost twenty quid.

  “How are you, Beth?” asked Jean from her perch behind the counter.

  “I’m all right. Getting cold.”

  Jean tipped a glance at the bottle. “That’ll warm you up.”

  Same conversation, except in the summer.

  “Cheaper than heating. See you.”

  She started toward the door.

  “You see the paper?” Jean said.

  The question stopped her from exiting. “No.”

  Beth hadn’t even thought to read the headlines, just about her next drink, her next cigarette. Something to eat, too, just to go through the motions of a normal life.

  It didn’t matter, because like it or not Jean always told her what was in the paper.

  “Been another killing. Down the road. Happened in a little church in Winterton. One of them Spiritualist churches.”

  Beth paled. “Did they give out a name?”

  “Sure. Unwin George. Weird name, eh? Probably a wizard.”

  Beth quietly let her bottled breath out. She shouldn’t be relieved, because someone had been murdered, but she was, because she didn’t know him.

  “They’re calling him a serial killer. In Norfolk. You wouldn’t believe it, would you?”

  “I guess not.”

  Mr. Took came in. The wind pulled the door from his grasp, bashing it into the lottery counter.

  “What’s that?” he said, cocking his head and aiming his good ear at Jean.

  “Murder! In Winterton.”

  Jean was warming to the topic. Beth reckoned when she started to flush high across her cheek bones, the conversation from her end was done.

  “Mr. Took.”

  “Beth,” he said, nodded. Disapproving, but she didn’t give a shit.

  “I better go, Jean. See you.”

  “Oh. Bye then.”

  Beth made sure she pulled the door closed behind her. The plastic bag with her medicine in it flapped in the wind.

  ***

  “Nothing else?” the policeman asked. Beth almost got his voice right.

  “Sure,” she said, talking to herself as she walked back along the coast road, ignoring the swelling sea and the grit from the beach kicked up by the winter wind that scoured her face.

  But really, how did you tell a policeman something that sounded completely nuts?

  “Sure, Mr. Policeman. I’m a medium, don’t you know. I see dead people. That’s funny, right? I see dead people. I don’t see living people. So, it’s funny, see? Because I can see the killer’s hands.”

  “What’s that you say, Mrs. Willis?” she replied to herself in a gruff voice.

  “That’s right, Mr. Policeman. Mr. Coleridge. What is your damned first name, eh?”

  “Never mind that, Mrs. Willis. Get to the point, will you?”

  “I see dead people, you stupid fucking copper, and I saw the killer. How’s that?”

  And that was the thing she couldn’t tell him. She could tell him sometimes she put her left foot in a bucket of cold water to meditate, but she wouldn’t. She could tell him she saw dead people every day, and sometimes they clamored and shouted for her to tell their loved ones things so they could move on. She could tell Jean that she saw her grandfather over her shoulder, and that he thought she was an idiot. She could tell Coleridge that when she spoke to him on the phone a man came and stood in front of her—and that he had a hole right through his face. She could tell Coleridge, hey, I have your partner here, he blew his head off, with a shotgun. Right. Well, he wants his watch back. Seriously, you couldn’t rest after death and you came back to tell your old partner you want a watch back?

  Sure, she could tell him all that and more. But what she couldn’t tell him was that the man who was killing mediums across their desolate stretch of county was dead.

  Chapter Four

  A solitary raven, buffeted by the wind, drifted toward Beth’s house. It flapped its wings a couple of times, the clap of air audible even over the gusts blowing in from the North Sea. The bird landed on the worn wooden rail on Beth’s back porch, the sea churning behind it. It watched through the window, unnoticed, as Beth put the bag containing her medicine on the kitchen table.

  The sun had nearly set. The raven hid in the gloom. Beth switched on the light, illuminating the bird, but it wasn’t concerned. The light would reflect from the inside of the window and she would be blind to whatever was outside.

  It watched from the shadows while Beth pulled a tumbler from the cabinet, poured a healthy shot, and swallowed it in one gulp.

  The woman leaned against the table, her head hanging d
own. Tired.

  The raven wasn’t tired. It felt something stirring within its marrow, a hunger that could not be sated.

  A seagull flapped and hopped on the sand behind its perch, watching the raven.

  The raven turned its head and watched the seagull. It made a sound, like speech. People say ravens are possessed of intelligence. Cunning birds, tricksters, eaters of the dead.

  Superstition.

  But this wasn’t a raven. It was something much more.

  It ate the dead. It tricked, it mislead.

  It lied.

  “Toc-toc,” it said to the seagull. The seagull flapped its wings, disturbed. But it didn’t fly away.

  The raven ignored it, turned back to Beth.

  She pulled a cigarette from a gold and silver packet. She flicked a lighter, drew long and hard on the cigarette, and then exhaled a plume of smoke into the air.

  Another seagull fluttered down on the sand at a distance from the raven. It hopped closer, then back. Larger than the raven, it still seemed wary, as though it sensed something unnatural about the bird. But another landed, and another. Hopping back and forth, getting bolder.

  Beth turned away from the table and wandered to the back door, nearing on the porch.

  The raven that was more than just a bird glanced once more at the seagulls, ultimately dismissing them because it had more important work this night.

  It did. Hunger drove it. Its business wasn’t the birds, or the woman in the window. Not tonight.

  It flapped its wings wide and then it was lost in the dark.

  Beth sat on her battered recliner. She cradled her whiskey in her lap, flicked ash onto the warped wood beneath her feet.

  Seagulls watched her from outside the circle of light for a time, then took to the black skies, and Beth was alone but for the whiskey, and the cigarettes, and the quiet uncaring sea.