Dark & Disorderly

by Bernita Harris

  A typical sight when you live next to a graveyard.

  The forms, vague and ephemeral, danced and dispersed when a dark shape outlined by a thin nimbus of fire leaped among them. Dumbarton chasing wraiths again, off gallivanting on a spectral hunt for spectral prey. He loved to play there. He tended to treat them like squirrels.

  Dumbarton tolerated Nathan, which is why, I figured, once I thought about it, his zombie had gained access this evening. Dumbarton must have recognized right of passage.

  A right, I hoped, that had been permanently canceled.

  I spent some of the dark hours hunched against the high headboard of my bed, with the light on and the baseball bat clenched in one sweaty hand, imagining stealthy footfalls creeping up the staircase. In between, I prowled through the house, obsessively checking the windows. Each time through I picked up the phone, just on the off chance I might hear a dial tone. There was no way of knowing yet if the dead line was coincidental, deliberate or just one of those casual by-products of my psychic energy.

  Other than a pair of heavy silver bracelets as power boosters and shock absorbers, I’d never needed or used much in the way of occult defense. Obviously, that had changed in a big way. Flamethrowers provided an effective deterrent to zombies, as did extremely long-handled machetes. I had neither. Beside, the undead didn’t always cooperate by showing up in places convenient for their use. I needed something else.

  Therefore, I spent some time fooling around with rock salt, herbals and shotgun shells from the gun cabinet in the old pantry. After grinding a mixture of agrimony, yew, dill, pepper and trefoil, and blending the powder with salt and metal grit, I removed shot from several casings and replaced it with my concoction.

  I couldn’t keep my mind on the job and quit after two replacements. I was not a gunsmith. There was a genuine danger my thin theories and amateur alterations might result in me blowing myself into gory bits and pieces.

  I suppose I dozed a little during my brief stints in bed, thanks to bolting upright at every sinister sound. Once a long mournful scream jerked me awake. Only a train somewhere to the northwest. Another time the banshee wail of sirens rose in the distance. Lots of sirens. They seemed to moan across the night forever.

  A couple of hours before dawn Dumbarton gave tongue with his dreadful, bloodcurdling howl. I smiled grimly when I heard tires screech and a vehicle accelerate down the street. Someone, maybe vandals, had tried the boundaries of the property and hadn’t expected to find a Doom Dog on guard.

  I did not have a good night.

  At daybreak I went out on the dewy back veranda in the pale dawn, eager for the light. Feeling pale and wan myself, I watched as the sky bowl faded to pastel layers rimmed on the horizon with gold. The sort of sunrise that makes it easy to believe the world was flat and fixed. All the little birds, finches and sparrows, began their customary unholy racket, chirping and trilling and flitting. I took that as a good sign.

  A raven, as fat and black as if it had fed on the curses of the condemned, flapped from the dark woods in the narrow ravine behind and below the house. That silent flight was not a positive omen.

  Neither was the small dark shape of some animal bigger than a squirrel that streaked across the grass and disappeared beyond the apple tree. I thought of weasels and other avatars and that it might be wise to pay close attention to the auguries of ordinary things.

  The porch swing creaked as Dumbarton thumped to the floor and padded toward me. I braced myself. He leaned against my leg for a moment.

  “Good Doog.” I patted the great head. “That was you in the night, wasn’t it? Must have scared the living shit out of someone.”

  He rolled a large red eye up at me and gave me a phosphorous grin before trotting down the porch steps to his lair under the veranda.

  Dumbarton came with the property. It seems the house was built on the site of an early settler’s cabin. Said settler found murdered, his gold missing and his black mastiff gone. A probable suspect was discovered a short distance away with his throat torn out.

  Nathan inherited the property from an uncle about a month after we were married. Dumbarton made his appearance shortly after we moved in. Since Nathan proved as allergic to spectral hounds as he was to the normal variety, he demanded that I exorcise Dumbarton. I flat-out refused. That was one on the long list of things we fought about with increasing acrimony. One should never have a relationship with someone who doesn’t like animals. It’s a crucial character flaw.

  I had exorcised the ghost of Nathan’s uncle, Raymond Strange, from the house, because he liked to throw things and was inclined to toss about my lingerie drawer. But Dumbarton? The way I saw it, Dumbarton wasn’t a nuisance like the uncle and provided a degree of protection from possible night prowlers. Besides, I liked dogs.

  I went back through the house to check the front.

  For two seconds I thought the filament glistening between the porch posts was the effort of an ambitious spider and grabbed for the broom to knock it down. It wasn’t. A thin length of fishing line stretched taut about chest-high over the steps.

  Had I run out, frantic and terror-blind last night, I would have been clotheslined. The line might have cut my head half off if I had hit it square at full tilt. Certainly, it would have given any pursuing creature time to catch up. A simple, practical booby trap, an extra fail-safe for the zombie. The trap confirmed a connection with a human agent, not a solely supernatural one. A guerilla trick, which meant a guerilla mind, one familiar with camouflage and ambush. I should remember that and be on my guard.

  The knots defeated my fingers. I tried a kitchen knife. No luck. Finally, I rooted around until I found a pair of wire snips. Maybe this was the reason for the car in the nighttime—someone intending to remove the evidence. I got another baggie and coiled the fishing line in it.

  By six-thirty according to the old mantel clock in the kitchen, I had changed out of jeans and sweatshirt and into my last pair of clean underwear and my best professional outfit, gathered my hair in its usual knot, covered it carefully with a matching scarf and was on my way. The outfit co-coordinated beautifully with the circles under my eyes.

  I stopped at the end of the short flagstone walk to check the mailbox. I hadn’t bothered yesterday. No hate mail disguised as sympathy cards this time. Just a bundle of flyers—supermarket, chain store and automotive—my water and sewer bill, a newsletter from PSI—Paranormal Studies Institute—and a circular from the Psychic’s Circle, LLC, offering me twenty percent off their new collection of “genuine cleansing crystals secretly mined from the misty mountains of Ulaan Bataar and guaranteed to remove negative energies and banish malicious entities by their unique and powerful vibrations.” Yeah, right.

  The automotive flyer reminded me I needed to arrange to rent a vehicle; I planned to return to work tomorrow and Nathan’s car was totaled. Nathan had always been smugly critical of my deficiencies as a driver. Though it was true I couldn’t drive worth shit and found dodging the gormless ghosts that wandered into traffic difficult, I’d never even pronged a fender. Turned out he couldn’t drive for shit either; he managed a fatal head-on with a rock-cut. Ironic, that.

  I turned to look back at our white clapboard house. Mine, now, I supposed. I thought it a dear little place when I first saw it, tucked on its long lot where the pavement ended, with only an unimproved laneway leading on to the next concession road. The house at the end of the street. The last house within the boundaries of the Old Town, before Waredale’s rapid expansion had led to amalgamation with the Greater Metro Area—GMA. A house almost invisible in winter, appearing only when spring gave it background. A house set apart. A place to hide and rest.

  Now, the concession road had been renamed after a former town father and the once quiet lane provided access for construction equipment, necessary for a burgeoning housing development taking shape in the vacant farmland between. The old silo that had once loomed like a border tower above the cornfields had come down last week, al
ong with solitude.

  I liked the house for its verandas and tasteful gingerbread and the fan light over the front door, its gables and chimneys, its garden with its peony and lily beds, and what remained of an old orchard. Beds of sweet, white daylilies and lilies of the valley bordered the front walk. For me, Nathan had said. He’d said many charming things those first weeks before and after we were married. A pity he’d meant none of them truly.

  The house had welcomed me. But my hopes and dreams had soon worn away under the constant traffic of Nathan’s disapproval, not unlike the finish on the old house’s hardwood floors. In spite of his criticism, I had put down a few tentative roots. The mechanical shovel that dug Nathan’s grave may have severed those roots. After last night I wasn’t sure I could see the house as sanctuary. Not anymore. Last night it had been more like a labyrinth of dread.

  3.

  I turned and marched on down the sidewalk, gaining confidence for the day ahead from the steady click of my boot heels on the pavement in the early morning quiet.

  Just past the cemetery, the furry spirit of roadkill squirrel scampered across the street, attached itself to my ankle and hysterically tried to scramble up my pant leg. I reached down and touched it. My fingers tingled at the contact as it dissipated. Freshly dead, then. Little creatures usually fade fast, but the pity I felt for their small spirits was for me another downside to acute clairsentience.

  While waiting at the corner for the light to turn, beside a lady with three yipping, weaving low-slung hounds on a triple leash, I reflected that larger mammals exhibited a longer fade time, depending on the circumstances. Dumbarton, for example, wasn’t exactly a Black Dog apparition, but more of a hybrid entity. I was never certain exactly what he was and I didn’t particularly care.

  The light changed and the hounds bayed and coursed across the intersection, dragging their owner behind them. A couple of centuries must have passed since wolves or bears or moose foraged in this area, so it was unlikely I’d ever have to remove large animal spirits. One never knew, of course. After more than a decade of rather mundane, traditional hauntings, the paradigm appeared to be changing. A pack of ghostly hounds or wolves padding and howling after game some winter night down Main Street would certainly startle the current complacency.

  I trotted on, intent on arranging last night’s events into a succinct and coherent report. This early, the sidewalks were relatively clear of pedestrians, so I was saved from the psychedelic distractions offered by human auras. Tied to their owners, the auras streamed past like so many iridescent soap bubbles.

  I needed caffeine, preferably black and sweet as sin, before I headed for the police station with my package of show-and-tell. The coffee shop went quiet when I walked in. Nathan’s death had reminded everyone in dramatic fashion who his wife was and what she did. I suppose they thought it indecent that Freaks like me walk around and eat like everyone else. I suppressed the nasty impulse to show the carefully averted faces the finger.

  I found a table by the window. In a corner. With my back to a wall.

  I was brooding over my second cup, watching a ray of sunshine dance a spook light from my coffee cup to the ceiling above and playing with the saltshaker, when a Department of Highways crew-cab pulled in and parked. I identified one of the men who climbed out by the broad-brimmed black hat he affected. Made him look like a Mennonite elder. Ric something. A Dutch name. Vandermeer? Vanderveen? Tall and thin. Face like a demented chipmunk. Receding hairline. Decent sort. He did streets and roads like I did buildings and public spaces. He was salary. I was contract. We’d met at an orientation seminar, passed occasionally in the municipal building but rarely needed to cooperate on exorcisms.

  Ignoring all the grim predictions from assorted experts, portentous psychologists and hysterical World-Enders, the town council of Waredale had responded to the pandemic of ghostly visitations by deciding that the problems were merely a more exotic extension of municipal standards. They were basically bylaw control issues, like parking meters, barking dogs and garbage.

  The council had then proceeded to pass a slate of bylaws to regulate and/or eliminate any intrusive manifestations that disturbed the peace and privacy of its citizens and, after running through a series of ineffectual psychics, eventually hired me as paranormal consultant and ghost buster, with Ric, a former Works person, as backup. While the situation was considerably more complicated than that—and might become even more complicated in the future—in many of the cases of psychic litter I’d dealt with in the past year, I had to admit the good burghers were essentially right.

  Ric had come to the funeral. One of the few who had come for me.

  The other man took his coffee and cruller and went back outside to sit in the sun and have a smoke. Ric picked up his cardboard tray and peered around in a mechanical, uncertain way, like someone emerging from a dream—or someone who had passed a night as bad as mine.

  He nodded and spoke to four men in Works department overalls who were leaving. Only one nodded back. It wasn’t rudely obvious, but they skirted around him. Talent makes a lot of people uneasy—even sensible, practical guys.

  Or maybe it was just the smell.

  Ric preferred to wear a protective scent he believed banished evil spirits, demons and negative influences. Asafoetida, which wasn’t called devil’s drek for nothing. I wore my signature lily scent exclusively, as much as an affectation over the pun as the fact I liked it, though tradition claimed lilies were a charm against fascination. Of course, Nathan complained I smelled like a crucifixion—or a funeral.

  Ric wavered in my general direction. I dragged my boots off the opposite chair and gestured. Freaks might as well stick together.

  “Lillie,” he said, in a faraway voice, “you look like shit.”

  “Thanks. You smell like it.”

  He put down his coffee tray carefully, then nearly knocked the lot over when he slumped down in the chair, propped his elbows on the table and dropped his face in his hands. I rescued my evidence envelope and tucked it under one hip. Scrubbing his hands up and down his face, Ric blinked at me, his eyes as bloodshot as mine.

  “You available for call?”

  “Tomorrow, maybe. You’ve had a bad night.” I didn’t make it a question. The outer ring of his normal aura was flecked with black.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.” He fumbled off the plastic cover and squeezed the container in both hands. Coffee slopped over his knuckles. He didn’t notice. I pushed napkins across the table.

  “Scheduled? Or were you called out?”

  He downed one cup. It should have scalded his mouth but he didn’t even wince.

  “Scheduled. The River Road, due to complaints. Recent rash of accidents. Ghost-crossing signs haven’t done any good. We closed down the worst section. Eastbound lane.”

  I nodded. The proliferation of ghosts over the years created more than a nuisance, they’d become increasingly dangerous in other ways. A hazard on roadways when they wandered into traffic was only one. Drivers tended to react by slewing off the road into ditches and careening over sidewalks. I wondered if things had worsened in the last two weeks.

  “The River Road. Go on,” I prompted. If something else happened last night to a Talent, I sure as hell wanted to know. Particularly on that road.

  “We had two sets of soul-rescue psychics, a pair on either side, walking the verge, arms waving in the air, yodeling out, ‘Follow the Light.’”

  “Wait a minute, Ric. A mass exorcism by self-professed psychics who aren’t Talents? Even for feeble entities that’s excessively diffuse. Dangerous too. Not sure I’d want to attempt it because of the energy drain.” Average psychics could only encourage and invite, they could not compel. A Talent could.

  “Whose bright idea was this? Not yours, I know.”

  Ric looked away. “Lillie, I’ve been working double shifts and haven’t been able to keep up. The psychics volunteered, so when the request came down to take them along I grabbed it.
You know how they’re always pushing for a piece of the action…complaining we’re too slow…I figured one of them was related to someone on council. I was ready to do cleanup of the stubborn ones anyway.”

  I managed not to roll my eyes. Ghosts were individual entities. They required individual attention.

  “I thought the town tried that measure of using standard psychics before they hired us and found the one-size-fits-all didn’t work. Too much fraud, too few willing spirits and too little bang for the buck. Never mind. What happened then?”

  He crushed the empty cup like it was a beer can and reached for the other. “We were coasting along in low gear, keeping pace, when my driver says, ‘Holy fuck! Look behind!’ I looked and there they were, strung out behind us, drifting along, about a dozen of them, following our lights.” He gave a high, strangled giggle and then grimaced. “Sorry. It did look funny.” He ground his palms into his eyes again and shook his head.

  “We stopped and switched off the spots and the rack lights, and leaned on the horn to alert the silly fuckers it wasn’t working. I got out and you could hear the moaning. That’s when it happened. The whole freaking flock of spirits shot across the divider and swarmed the oncoming traffic in the westbound lanes. The headlights, you see. They were following the light. There was an eight-car pileup. Three transports. God-awful mess. One dead. Last car in, poor bugger. Lanes were still closed and they were still cleaning up, doing measurements, the usual stuff, when I told Jerry we might as well pack it in.”