by Ivan Blake
Such a disappointment Chris Chandler hadn’t been home. She would have loved to share this adventure with him. Friday night, mother’s car, and no Floyd for once, she was going to do something she’d been intending to for weeks—find Darleen Jensen. Her father had once suggested it might be possible to see the spirits of people in whose deaths one had played a part. Tonight she’d find out.
Her girlfriends would have freaked if she’d asked them to come ghost hunting. And Floyd, the wimp, would probably have bailed; at Darleen’s funeral, he’d said he felt sorry for her. Sorry? For that hypocritical bitch? Unbelievable! Now Chris Chandler, on the other hand, Mallory just knew he’d have enjoyed this. What a fascinating person. Sure, he was gorgeous, but what really intrigued her was his air of menace, like he was on the verge of killing somebody…and she knew how that felt.
Unpaved Bailey’s Road wound from the region’s largest woodlot high in the hills back of Bemishstock some twenty miles down to the carton plant in town. During the day, a steady stream of logging trucks used the gravel track and their dust coated everything. At night, Bailey’s became a quiet country lane once again. Mallory had never been out here. No one of any interest lived on Bailey’s Road. All the tiny houses and old mobile homes along the road were decrepit, many without siding, most with windows sheathed in plastic, several lacking even the most rudimentary front step, and almost every yard filled with junked cars, enormous stacks of firewood, and a semi-permanent rummage sale under an assortment of shelters and plastic tarps.
Mallory got to the Bailey’s Road turnoff after dark and wasn’t exactly sure where Darleen Jensen’s family lived along the road. She wasn’t worried about finding the place, however, because there was bound to be a memorial of some sort close by. Darleen had thrown herself in front of the logging truck at the end of her own lane, and people in Maine for some ridiculous reason loved to mark the traffic deaths of their loved ones with some kind of tacky roadside cenotaph.
Sure enough, in the beam of her headlights, Mallory spotted a large white cross at the side of the road. She drove slowly past the cross and the Jensen’s driveway, parking some distance along the road where she couldn’t be seen by any Jensen who might be home. Mallory walked back to the cross in the pitch black and freezing cold. Since there were no street lamps or other homes along this stretch of the road, the only illumination came from an old floodlight flickering atop a tall pole near the Jensens’ house.
Mallory remained in the shadows as she examined the memorial. Someone had stripped a patch of scrub and thin grass and hammered the cross into the rocky hard pack. The cross had been knocked together from old two-by-fours and painted white. It was wrapped in Christmas lights and artificial flowers, and surrounded by Barbie dolls and stuffed animals. To the upper portion of the cross was duck taped a plasticized picture of Darleen with the words Calt Home by thu Lord scrawled across it. An extension cord ran alongside the drive from the cross to the house, but the lights were not illuminated.
Darleen’s home was an old green trailer with dented siding and a weathered plywood extension that probably functioned as a mud room; its ply had been painted with the Stars and Stripes, now badly faded. The trailer was dark save for the flicker of a television through the living room window. A wheelchair ramp made from shipping pallets ran from the drive to a small front porch. Wooden butterflies and a large gold star adorned the front of the trailer, and the drive was lined with half-tires painted white. In a now-barren flower bed across the front of the property was written in painted white stones, Jesus Loves Me. How such people could possibly imagine any god loved them was beyond Mallory’s comprehension.
Mallory left the shadows and walked to the middle of Bailey’s Road. She turned slowly in a circle, all the while peering out into the dark, and listening. Dry leaves danced across the road. The wind whistled through the black spruce. She stopped to stare at the cross once again.
Then she heard the weeping. Close by.
From the house? No. From behind her. She spun about.
Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the dark on the far side of the road. From her drive up Bailey’s Road, Mallory knew the shoulder on the left side dropped away sharply into a deep drainage ditch, but of the ditch and the trees beyond the edge of the gravel she could make out virtually nothing.
And yet, out there in the dark somewhere, someone was weeping.
Then she saw it. Up the road, on the left, almost abreast of her car, a tiny glow, barely discernable, little more than the spark of a firefly, the merest flutter of light in the blackness. Perhaps it was a trick of her eyesight, a visual memory of the lamp in Darleen’s yard. But no, it really was there, a pale green glimmer, rising from the ditch.
Mallory walked up the road toward the glow. Her heart raced—her first ghost! Suddenly, as she neared the light, a wave of excruciating pain and self-loathing overwhelmed her, and she doubled over with nausea. Her stomach heaved, her skin felt clammy, her head throbbed. Only after several minutes was she able to stand upright and stagger forward to the edge of the ditch.
Down there, in the dark weeds and the muck, she saw it—a wisp, an outline, a mere trace of a figure within the pale green glow. Then a face appeared, shattered, broken, and wracked with grief. Darleen Jensen. Sprawled at the bottom of the ditch, twisted horribly, up to her waist in freezing water flowing right through her, she sobbed, wailed, and waved her arms about, beseeching one minute, then covering her ears the next against some deafening cacophony only she could hear. Darleen stared up at Mallory, her eyes filled with torment and terror. She appeared to mouth the words, help me, help me, I beg you.
Mallory laughed. “There you are! Amazing. And now you’re stuck. You didn’t know did you, when you jumped in front of the truck, that you’d be stuck where you died forever? That’s what suicide gets you. Better get used to your ditch, bitch, it’s your home for eternity.”
Sitting at the side of the ditch, Mallory started tossing stones at Darleen. “You’re my first, you know!” The stones passed right through her. “And this feeling I’ve got, the pain? Is it yours? It’s like the smell of something rotten that lingers in a place even after the object has been thrown away! That’s so cool!”
The spectral figure kept right on weeping. “Can’t hear a word I’m saying, can you?” Mallory said, then fell silent for a moment. Suddenly she shouted, “Get out of there, you bitch! Come up here! Do as I say right now!”
Darleen didn’t move; she merely kept up her pathetic crying and pleading.
“Useless,” said Mallory. “Pitiful, like you always were.” Then Mallory fell silent for a moment, pondering something. “Okay, so what if a person killed himself out of anger instead of sorrow, would that make a difference? Would their spirit still be useless like you, or would they be able to do stuff, say, maybe hurt other people?”
“Who’s out there?” someone shouted from back at the Jensen’s place. “What’s going on?” Several lights came on and Mallory heard footsteps on the wooden ramp.
She ran to her car, jumped in and drove away, laughing the whole time. She drove a couple of miles on toward the woodlot, turned in a logging road, waited a few minutes to see if anyone was following, and then headed back to town. The lights were off once again at the Jensen’s place as she raced past, except that is, for the cross. It glowed red and green.
* * * *
All night long, a chill wind off the bay rattled the small window by Chris’s bed. He rolled onto his side, pulled the covers tight around his chin, and opened Mr. Duncan’s book on Mortsafemen. He flipped quickly through the illustrations and then began to read. The hours fell away.
During the Middle Ages, cemeteries were customarily constructed outside a city’s walls and so functioned beyond any sort of control… money lenders, thieves and prostitutes plied their trades with impunity…and of course grave robbers. First protectors of the dead were grave diggers…earned a little extra money from families who did not want…their loved ones defil
ed… However, the same grave diggers who protected graves probably also robbed them...
…by the end of the thirteenth century self-appointed grave protectors…began patrolling cemeteries…demanding fees for the protection of the dead. During the Great Plague, they oversaw the construction of mass graves... And as the Plague abated, they restored order to the burial of the dead...
...their numbers grew to a point in 1403 when protectors in the city of Mainz organized a guild, The Holy Brotherhood of Mortsafemen… colleagues all over Europe petitioned to join them. Mortmen, as they were known, became in effect an international police force for cemeteries.
By the middle of the fifteenth century Mortmen were so…powerful they commissioned Emansus of Geisteborg…to set out the theological underpinnings of their work, De Sanctitate Sepulchro et protectione mortuis or On the Sanctity of the Grave and the Protection of the Dead.
…cited biblical, apocryphal and scholarly sources to suggest the care of a corpse and the sanctity of its resting place determined the quality of a soul’s experience in heaven. … while a corpse is still intact on earth, its soul in heaven is vulnerable, and if the corpse or its resting place is defiled, then the soul knows pain, and if the pain becomes great enough, then the soul may be pulled back from Paradise to wander the earth in agony until its resting place is restored.
...Emansus…argued…Mortmen were for all practical purposes a religious order… their holy calling…to protect the deceased until nature, rather than man, can return the remains to the earth, and thereby, preserve the joy and salvation of the soul in heaven.
De Sanctitate Sepulchro…among the first books printed…gave Mortsafemen…such an exaggerated sense of their own importance that they became a kind of government unto themselves. …adopted as their emblem a black figure with an axe standing atop a Mausoleum on a field of gold… wore long dark coats of leather…carried hatchets…adopted a brutal charter of punishment for defilers of the dead…shaved the heads of prostitutes who fornicated on graves. Money lenders…chained to gravestones…without food…cut off the hands of vandals who defaced tombstones. …put out the eyes of thieves who stole coins and jewels from coffins…dismembered body snatchers and scattered their limbs around the cemetery to assure their everlasting misery.
…the Mortsafemen’s zeal began to appall even their most ardent supporters, and in the late sixteenth…their critics moved against them…guild was banned everywhere. What became of the Mortmen no one knew for sure.
Chris dozed off with images of axes and body parts dancing in his head.
Chapter Five
Saturday, November 16
When the last goat was in the tiny pen, Ronald Meath secured the gate and filled their trough with feed from the latest batch. The goats sniffed the feed warily and backed away. Damn! He should have checked the old lady’s cause of death more carefully, but the goats always knew. He was getting careless; the price of so many disappointments lately.
He often asked himself—especially after yet another calamitous experiment—how he’d know if he’d gone mad? Was it madness to keep trying, in spite of innumerable setbacks, to accomplish something the whole world considered impossible? He supposed it might seem that way to a mediocre person—but not to him. Persistence in the face of overwhelming odds wasn’t madness; on the contrary, it was the price of greatness—to strive, to lead, to overcome, when everyone else lacked the vision and courage to even try. And greatness would one day be his; of that he was absolutely certain, even if the struggle to achieve it cost him everything.
Ever since he’d been ‘sent down’ from Oxford after a night of heavy drinking—during which he’d defaced the portraits of several notable alumni including his own father’s, the detestable stick insect and Harley Street surgeon, Reginald Sir St. John fucking Meath—all Ronald had ever wanted was to one day best his father’s reputation. And for a while among a small circle of colleagues in the curious new American discipline of Chiropractic, he had achieved a measure of notoriety. Then it had all gone terribly wrong, everyone had turned on him, and he’d found himself raising goats on the coast of goddamned Maine. But still he wasn’t about to give up on his dream, not now he was so close.
Here in Maine, surrounded by intellectual pygmies as dense as the north woods, he’d continued his research, stealing the corpses he’d needed from under Brewster’s nose for years. He’d probably ground half the funeral parlor’s clients into goat feed by now and Brewster had no clue. That was the one good thing about being marooned on this god-forsaken coast. No one paid him the slightest bit of attention. One day they would, however. Oh yes, when eventually his achievements attracted the world’s attention, colleagues who’d once rejected him would again grovel at his feet.
In the meantime, he needed help. His wife was becoming useless. There’d been a time when she’d been quite helpful, and not just for the money she’d brought to his practice. She’d been willing to discuss his ideas, suggest improvements in his experiments, and write up his findings. Not now. Now her money was gone and she constantly bickered, and contradicted, criticized and quibbled. She wasn’t even much help with cleaning up after his experiments. No, he needed an assistant, and soon. He was running out of time.
The tomb of some Austrian king reads, “He came so near to greatness.” Ronald Meath couldn’t imagine a more damning epitaph. That prospect—not the goats, not the squalor, not the mockery—was his nightmare; that he would come close to besting his father’s accomplishments, and fail all the same.
* * * *
From the moment Chris opened his eyes, he felt a curious mix of excitement and dread. Dinner with Mallory—what could it mean? Well, perhaps the chance to fondle those incredible breasts. Or, if old lady Holcomb was right, dinner might turn into something nasty. Maybe that was Mallory’s appeal; her air of...what...dark secrets? Maybe that was what intrigued him—her disquieting mix of innocence and danger.
Chris managed to wash, dress, get a bun from the bread bin, and slip out of the house without encountering any of his family, grabbing his pellet gun by the back door as he left. Gillian and her mother were already at work in the orchard, pruning limbs from their apple trees. Gillian waved. He reciprocated the greeting, then headed toward the shore to shoot water rats.
The sky was clear, the air crisp and the breeze biting. There would be frost that night. He stayed on the shore for about a half hour. He ate his bun and waited patiently, but didn’t see a single rat. Too late for them, he guessed. By this time, they must already have moved away from the shore and into their winter burrows high up in the bank. Chris wandered back up to the railway tracks and began walking aimlessly in the direction of Perkin’s Pond. From time to time, he shot at a crow or a gull. The only thing he managed to kill was time. And that was all that mattered. He didn’t know what to expect from dinner with Mallory, but the day couldn’t pass quickly enough.
“You’re spying on me!” someone shouted.
The goatman! Meath stood in the middle of a small fenced enclosure squeezed between the tracks and the shore, and was surrounded by a dozen goats. Through a tangle of hair and whiskers and wrinkles, the goatman stared with watery eyes that reminded Chris of wet kelp.
“What?” Chris said, and then, “Crap, crap, crap!” under his breath. Focussed as he’d been on his footing on the old railway ties, he hadn’t realized he’d walked all the way to the goatman’s house.
They stared at each other in silence for a moment, and then the goatman burst into laughter. “Hah,” he roared. “The look on your face, anybody would think you’d done something terrible!”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going. I’ll go!” He turned for home.
“Why? This is a free country and the rail line is public land...I think anyway.”
Chris stopped and turned around. Meath had left the small enclosure and climbed up onto the embankment. He now stood in the middle of the tracks, staring at Chris with a sort of knowing grin. From the
man’s filthy gray hair, huge arthritic knuckles, and large purple spots on the backs of his hands, Chris guessed the goatman was in his seventies or eighties. Even so, he looked to be strong. His shoulders filled out a tattered tweed jacket almost to bursting. And the soiled collar and tie he wore were knotted around his huge neck like a belt round a pig. The man had an air of menace.
“You’re the Chandler boy. I gave you a ride once.”
“How do you know my—”
“Oh, I know what goes on round here.” He walked toward Chris. The smell of the man rocked Chris back on his heels, a mix of sour milk and manure. “I’ve seen you down by the Willard graves many times.”
“You have?” Then how had Chris not seen Meath?
“Oh yes, and that was you I saw in the town cemetery yesterday, wasn’t it?”
“Maybe.”
“Tell me, why are you so interested in the dead?”
“I’m not.”
“Not sure why anybody would be. The dead are just dead, I see them every day, and I can tell you, a dead body is just rotting meat. It’s waste, toxic waste.”
Meath wiped his right hand on his trousers and extended it to Chris. “Ronald Meath.”
Chris winced at the man’s grip. “Chris Chandler,” he gasped.
“It’s nice to meet you, young man.”
Chris was almost as surprised by the man’s formal demeanor and elegant speech as he’d been by Meath’s appalling smell and slovenly appearance. Not at all what he expected from the mad man he’d seen the other night bellowing at his wife and hauling a dead body about.
“Someone told me you were a doctor,” Chris said.
“So you’ve been asking questions about me?”
“No...I.”
“I’m a doctor of chiropractic.”
“Of chiropractic?”
“One of the health care professions. Concerned with disorders of the neuro-musculoskeletal system and their effects on our general health.”
