The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told

by Martin H. Greenberg

  “You drink,” the old man said, “because it closes your mind’s eye. I have watched you. You see too much.”

  “You’ve watched me?” Decker was getting more and more sober by the minute. “You’re following me?”

  “If you recall,” the old man said with the patience people reserve for drunks, fools, and children, “I arrived before you did. But I must confess that I have been waiting for you.”

  “Me and all the other American hacks,” Decker said.

  The old man smiled, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. The smile was friendlier than Decker expected. “Admittedly, you American hacks, as you say, are dozens of dimes—”

  Decker winced.

  “—but I, in truth, have been waiting for you.”

  Decker drank his water. It did clear his head, although he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted his head cleared. “What’s so special about me?”

  “You see,” the old man said again.

  This time, Decker did roll his eyes. He drank the last of his water, and stood up. “Old man, I’m so damned drunk that this conversation isn’t making sense. How about I meet you here tomorrow at midnight, and I promise to be sober. Then you can tell me your story.”

  “It is your story,” the old man said.

  “Whatever you say,” Decker said, taking the bottle of water and heading north.

  He had a hell of a walk—at least for an exhausted drunk. Normally he wouldn’t have minded the jaunt up to the twisty little streets near the Sorbonne. The Hôtel de Lisbonne was on the corner of Rue Monsieur-le-Prince and Rue de Vaugirad. All he had to was walk the Boulevard St. Michel toward the Seine and he’d be in his bed in no time.

  But he usually avoided the Boulevard St. Michel. He avoided a lot streets in Paris, at least on foot. The old man was right; Decker saw things. But he usually attributed those things to drink or to too much imagination.

  The soldiers he always saw marching through the Arc de Triomphe wore no uniforms he recognized. They marched in lock-step, their heads turned side to side as if they were little tin soldiers with moving parts.

  But he didn’t always see the soldiers there. Sometimes he saw a flag that he didn’t recognize with a Fylfot in the middle. The Fylfot, an ancient elaborate cross, was supposed to ward off evil. But he somehow got the sense that the Fylfot itself—at least as used here—was the evil.

  On the Boulevard St. Michel, he saw students rioting in the streets. The students were grubby creatures, with long hair and carrying signs that he did not understand. Sunshine shone on them, although he only saw them when it was dark.

  Because of these visions, he studied Paris history, and found nothing that resembled any of it. The soldiers were unfamiliar, just like the flag, and the students too filthy to belong to any modern generation. He could dismiss such things as figments of his imagination.

  But the woman—she had been real.

  He had touched her, her skin cold and clammy and gray from the elements. Her eyes had been open and cloudy, her lips parted ever so slightly.

  He had found her six months into his trip to Paris. Shortly after, he had wandered into the offices of the Trib, such as they were, and offered up his services.

  Novelist, eh, kid? The man at the copy desk had asked.

  Yessir.

  You know how many novelists we get here, hoping for a few bucks? At least two a day. Sorry.

  I have experience . . .

  Those fateful words. I have experience. And he did. From his college newspaper to the Milwaukee Journal—yes, he had been a good Midwestern boy, once too, a boy who didn’t like near beer. A boy who actually had dreams for himself.

  Five thousand words of horseshit later, stories about the tourists (Mr. and Mrs. Gladwell arrived this afternoon on a trip that has taken them from their home in Lincoln, Nebraska, to New York City through London, and now here, in Paris, where they are staying at the Ritz . . . ), stories about everything except the woman, crumpled beneath Pont Neuf.

  Somehow he made it to the Hôtel de Lisbonne without seeing anyone, real or imaginary. The front desk was empty, so he reached over it and grabbed his key.

  As he climbed the dark narrow stairs to his room, he heard a typewriter rat-a-tat-tatting. Someone was working on something, maybe a short story, maybe a novel, maybe a freelance piece for Town and Country.

  He unlocked his room and stepped inside, then stared at his own typewriter, gathering dust beneath the room’s only window. A piece of paper had been rolled in the platen since sometime last month, with only a page number on the upper right hand corner (27), and a single lowercase word in the upper left.

  . . . the . . .

  As if it meant something. As if he knew what he was going to do with it.

  The paper was probably ruined, forever curlicued, although it didn’t matter. If he finished typing on that page, he could pile the other twenty-six pages on top of it, flattening it out.

  If he sat down now, nearly sober, the old man’s words still echoing in his head (You see them too), he would write:

  The woman discarded at the foot of the bridge looked uncomfortably young. Her brown hair was falling out of Gibson Girl do, now horribly out of fashion, her lips painted a vivid red. Part of the lip rouge stained her front teeth. If she were alive, she would turn away from him, and surreptiously rub at that stain with her index finger.

  He looked away from the typewriter, from that little accusatory “the.” The description of the woman did not fit with the bucolic piece he had been writing, a memoir of Germantown Wisconsin in the days before the war, when he had been a young boy, and his father was still alive, tinkering with his new Model T, his mother tutting the dangers in the new-fangled machinery, the bicycle he himself had built from a kit, with the help of the man who lived next door.

  Those were the kind of books people read now, memories of times past, not bloody, dark stories about dead women on Paris streets.

  Decker took off his suit and hung it up, although he didn’t brush it out, like he should have. He lacked the energy. As he pulled off his shirt, he realized the stains were worse than he had thought. Long, brown stains up front, looking like blood.

  He was thinking of blood, though. He wasn’t going to let his imagination win.

  Besides, he still had one clean shirt. He needed to take the bundle to the laundry, along with his suit, so that he could look pressed and sharp again, instead of rumpled and disreputable.

  He left his undershirt, boxers, and socks on, and tumbled onto the bed, the saggy mattress groaning beneath his weight. The bed hadn’t even stopped bouncing by the time he had fallen asleep.

  She was there in his dreams, her rich brown hair piled on top of her head, with a few curls cascading around her face. She sat on the edge of the bridge, feet dangling over the Seine, leaning back toward the road. Her eyes smiled, her lips—a perfect cupid’s bow, just like the drawings she mimicked—rouged darker than her cheeks. The makeup softened her living face, making her seem as unreal as the women in the advertisements.

  While her hair was old-fashioned, her clothing was not. No buttoned down shirtwaist for her with a long skirt that fell to her ankles. She wore a black skirt that grazed her knees, silk stockings with a perfect line up the back, and a blouse so soft that it seemed almost indecent. Around her neck, a simple St. Christopher’s medal, and a delicate gold cross with a tiny diamond in the center. A gold band on her right hand, a band she twisted when she saw him approach, a frown creasing her lovely forehead.

  He stopped beside her. She was American—he knew that without asking—and he held his reporter’s notebook in his left hand, a pen in his right.

  Her face shut down when he asked her name. And then her eyes clouded over, and her mouth opened ever so slightly.

  The St. Christopher’s medal disappeared and the gold ring too. But the expensive necklace, the gold cross with a diamond in the center, remained, as if it were her calling card.

  He woke up thinking about it, twis
ted to one side, the bottom of the cross bent slightly as if she had fallen on it against the stone walkway.

  She had worn no stockings when he found her body, and the sensible shoes, made for walking in a strange city (he knew that as clearly as if she had told him) had been replaced by thin heels, the kind flappers wore with their knee-length dresses and opera-length pearls.

  He woke up thinking of the difference between the smiling girl in his dreams and the dead woman on the walkway, her skin cold against his fingertips.

  He stared at his typewriter, his fingers itching to finish that sentence.

  . . . the . . .

  The.

  The woman discarded . . .

  Discarded.

  He got dressed, and stumbled out of his room, ostensibly searching for breakfast, but really on his way to get another drink.

  Still, that day, he made it to midnight without taking a nip from the bottle he kept at the bottom of his desk drawer. He didn’t take the glass of wine offered with dinner, nor did he drink the shot of vodka offered to him by the White Russian he’d met while waiting for the American tourists he was supposed to interview in Le Procope.

  He arrived at the Dôme exactly at midnight, sober as a judge. Decker had pressed his suit and worn his last clean shirt, mostly as an apology for the way he had looked the night before.

  He hadn’t examined himself in the mirror until this morning, but even then he had looked a fright—his hair standing on end, his nose bulbous, the capillaries in his cheeks bursting from too much drink. His eyes were red rimmed and he knew his breath was bad enough to kill any small rodent unfortunate enough to cross his path.

  So he cleaned up, although no one at the Trib noticed, except Whatsisname Shirer, the kid from Ioway or Illanoise. Whatsisname Shirer had raised his eyebrows, but hadn’t made a single remark, smart ass or otherwise, and so no one else seemed to notice.

  Thurber was busy making up the news. Root was working, trying to get someone at the copy desk to expand the notes his so-called reporters had turned in. Most everyone else was so bleary-eyed that they would think they were imagining Decker in his spiffed up clothes and slicked-back hair.

  Alcoholic wave indeed. It had become an alcoholic ocean, and he was seeing it for the very first time.

  The Dôme had customers this night, at least a dozen sitting on the terrace, with more inside. The interior was grayish blue from all the cigarette smoke—it looked like a fog had blown through Paris and gotten stuck only inside the Dôme.

  Outside, a group of men crowded around one of the tables. Decker recognized some of them from the Transatlantic Review. They spoke earnestly to each other, one of them shaking the stem of his pipe at a bespectacled man in an American felt hat.

  Decker avoided them, just like he’d taken to avoiding Know-it-all Hemingway. Instead he circled to the other side of the terrace, near the taxi stand. This evening, one of the ubiquitous uniformed policemen paced, hands clasped behind his back.

  The Dôme seemed normal, not like something out of a painting, the way it had the night before.

  Because Decker was concentrating on its normality, he almost missed the old man, sitting at the same table, his back against the café’s glass windows. Another man sat with him, younger, sharply French with his narrow face, black hair, and up-to-the-minute gabardine suit.

  Decker wandered over toward them, as if they weren’t his destination at all. When he reached the table, he pulled out the only other chair and sat.

  “You’re lucky I remembered,” he said.

  “I knew you would.” The old man wore the same suit. His eyes were as clear as Decker had thought. “You have not had a drink.”

  Damn that incontinent English. Decker couldn’t tell if the old man had asked a question or made a statement. “I told you I’d be sober. You told me you had a story.”

  The younger man stared at Decker as if he thought he was rude. Maybe he was.

  “I said, I had a story for you.” The old man emphasized the last two words.

  Decker looked at the younger man. “Maybe some introductions would be a good place to start.”

  “Maybe not,” the old man said. “We shall perform the—how do you say?—niceties after we have determined what disturbs you the most.”

  “What disturbs me the most,” Decker said, “are people who waste my time.”

  He shoved the chair back, about to stand, when the old man touched his arm. The old man’s skin was cold. In spite of himself, Decker shivered.

  “Americans are impulsive,” the old man said to his companion. “And somehow they have come to embrace a lack of politeness as if it is a virtue.”

  “Look,” Decker said, almost adding “old man” like he had done last night when he was drunk. That had been rude, but not intentionally rude. “I deal in hard, cold facts. The first hard cold fact you learn about damn near anybody is his name, which you’re not willing to tell me. So I’m not willing to stick around. See ya, pal.”

  This time he did stand. He was going to repeat the same walk he’d made the night before, up the Boulevard St. Michel. Maybe he should walk around the Luxembourg Gardens instead, meander instead of go directly.

  He was nearly to the group of Transatlantic Review writers when the old man said, “The students, they will be in the street tonight. And tomorrow, the flag will fly over the Arc de Triomphe.”

  Decker stopped in spite of himself. A shiver ran down his spine. He hadn’t told anyone about those waking dreams. Not even when he was drunk. Probably not even when he was black-out drunk, since he got quieter and quieter—a man who knew how to keep secrets, Root used to say, when he was the one who poured Decker into a taxi.

  Decker pivoted. He walked back to the table, as the old man had known he would. But the old man did not smile like a man who had won an argument. Instead, he remained grimly serious. The younger man continued to stare.

  “The soldiers leaning out of the Hôtel de Ville, do you not notice how blond they are?” The old man’s voice was soft.

  The other man watched Decker avidly, as if everything depended on his response.

  The Hôtel de Ville was Paris’s city hall. And he’d only seen soldiers there once, in the middle of a summer afternoon, as heat shimmered on the boulevards and he sat outside, trying to find a bit of air in a city not used to extreme warmth.

  “They wore helmets,” Decker said, knowing that was an admission.

  “But they were fair-skinned, no?”

  “Stocky,” he said, wishing he hadn’t responded. But that was what he had noticed, how stocky and square they were, as if the uniforms they wore with their unrecognizable helmets made them as solid as a boxer in the beer halls near Milwaukee.

  “And they wore this symbol on their arms.” The old man pushed a piece of paper forward with a Fylfot drawn on it.

  In spite of himself, Decker sat back down. “Who are they?”

  “A nightmare,” the old man said. “One we pray we will not have. But our prayers will be for nothing. Because only strong nightmares leach backwards.”

  “Backwards?” Decker asked, thinking of the woman. Was that a backwards nightmare? He had seen her six months after he arrived—years ago now—and he dreamt of her every night, awakening from those dreams unsettled.

  “The soldiers,” the old man said. “They are little boys now, playing with battered tin soldiers from before the War. If, indeed, they are healthy enough to play. Most are hungry. Some are starving.”

  Decker frowned. Even when he was sober, Decker didn’t understand the old man. The old man spoke nonsense. But a nonsense that Decker found enticing, in spite of himself.

  “Starving?” Decker said. “Then why don’t you do something?”

  “Why don’t you?” the old man asked. “Your country pushed for reparations. Your President Wilson. Somehow he knew how to cure the world. He made it sicker.”

  “Congress never ratified that treaty,” Decker said, wondering why they were talking abo
ut the Treaty of Versailles conference from six years ago, from before he even arrived in the City of Light.

  “And that makes it all better, no?” the old man said. “Leadership provided by your president here in Paris failed at home, so the fact that the other countries—”

  “Grand-pére,” the young man said, touching the old man’s arm. “That is enough. He is not responsible for his country’s follies.”

  “They are all responsible,” the old man said.

  Decker was frowning now.

  “You were telling me about soldiers and little boys,” Decker said, trying to get past this confusion. “Soldiers, little boys, and backwards nightmares.”

  “They are not nightmares,” the younger man said. “They are visions. The future, haunting us here and now.”

  Decker frowned. “The future?”

  The young man nodded. “Events so powerful they reach backwards to us. We have seen the soldiers for generations now. We have not understood them until—what is it you call it?—the Peace of Paris.”

  “You understand it now?” Decker asked.

  “We understand that they are Germans.”

  “Marching into Paris.” Decker snorted. “Are you hoping for this?”

  Three men from nearby tables stared. Most everyone here served in the War or had lost someone who had.

  “No,” the younger man said, holding up his hands. “It is the worst kind of tragedy. But we do know, from the students who are also a vision leaching backwards, that Paris herself will stand.”

  “The students.” Decker wasn’t going to ask any more and he wasn’t going to reveal what he had seen. He was assuming the younger man meant the grubby students he had seen some nights as he walked up the Boulevard St. Michel.