A Haunting In Wisconsin

by Michael Richan

  “It’s 50k if she comes willingly,” he replied. “Double that if I have to force her back. And you’re not paying me to keep her out. I bring her back once — after that, it’s up to you. I can’t guarantee that she won’t go back in, and if she does, it’s another 50k if you want me to try again.”

  “I’ll pay it,” the woman said without hesitation. “Fifty or a hundred thousand, I don’t care. I just want her back.”

  “Half now, before I start,” he replied. “The rest when I bring her out.”

  “If you have to force her to come out with you,” the woman asked, “how will that work?”

  “I have a method,” Derick replied. “I presume that’s why you called me.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I was just wondering how you do it. Is it safe?”

  “I have an object I’ll take into the Dark River with me,” Derick replied. “Once I find her, I’ll incapacitate her with it. Then I’ll return here and stimulate her physical body. It’ll cause her to leave the Dark River and return.”

  “Stimulate her body?” the mother asked suspiciously.

  “It’s like a shock,” Derick replied. “It interacts with the object in the Dark River and forces her back.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s a lot less brutal than other methods,” he said, engaging a selling patter he’d used in the past. Even as he said the words he regretted speaking them. This was a gig he didn’t really want, except for the money. If it didn’t have a payday, he wouldn’t be doing it.

  “I didn’t think you could take objects to the Dark River,” she said.

  “I can.” He left it at that.

  “How?”

  “A trade secret.”

  “How will you find her?”

  “Another of my trade secrets.”

  “I have to know you can locate her quickly, before she’s too far gone. I’ve heard they can’t return after a period of time. Will your object still work in that case?”

  “It’ll work, it’ll just kill her,” he said with a snark, becoming tired of the conversation. “Listen, I know what I’m doing. I assume you talked with people who’ve used me in the past. I have a track record. If the eggs have hatched, I won’t bother. I’ll return and tell you, and refund half the deposit.”

  “Eggs?” the woman asked, her eyebrows rising.

  Damn, he thought. Slipped up. Telling specifics about the Dark River to people not familiar with it was like a rabbit hole. Once you started explaining it to them, you had to keep explaining and explaining. And he was tired of talking to begin with.

  “Infected,” he said. “Addicted, whatever. The point is, if I can’t bring her back, I won’t. She’ll be trapped there and you can deal with her body. I assume she’s at the motel.”

  “Room number 127,” the woman replied. “You’ll go there and try?”

  “You pay me, I’ll start the day after tomorrow,” he replied.

  “No, it has to be now.”

  “Can’t. I have commitments I have to take care of tomorrow. If she’s only been in there a day, it can wait until then. She won’t become addicted in three days.”

  “I’ll pay you,” she replied. “But I have a condition.”

  “What?”

  The woman turned in her chair. “Angela!” she yelled. Then she turned back to Derick.

  “I want you to take her sister with you,” she said.

  Derick rolled his eyes. “Fuck no,” he replied. “No.”

  “I’ll pay you extra.”

  “I don’t babysit,” he said. “Why would you send in your daughter?”

  “I want her to keep an eye on you,” she replied. “Insurance.”

  “That makes no sense. You’ve got one daughter in there already that you’re worried will become addicted. Aren’t you worried about your other daughter, too?”

  “She’s been there before, and it doesn’t appeal to her,” the woman replied. “She won’t be any trouble, I assure you. She might be of assistance while you’re in there.”

  “I don’t need any help, or the complication,” he said, standing up. “Forget it, the deal’s off. Find someone else. Send in your daughter instead.”

  “Please, sit,” she said. “Now listen. You know you’re one of the few people who has a way to extract people. My daughter can’t bring her back on her own. You’re the one with the method.”

  “This is starting to stink,” he said. “And I don’t like stink.”

  “I’ll pay you double,” she said. “50k up front.”

  Fuck me, he thought, trying not to let his reaction show. That’s a lot of dough. That’s a lot of collection calls evaporating into thin air. He paused, turning back to the woman. If she had the money to put up, maybe this wasn’t such a bad task. He’d never had someone in tow while performing an extraction, but as long as she just tagged along it might not be a problem. Maybe she’s right, maybe she could help, he thought. Not that I need any help...fuck, now I’m just rationalizing because I need the money.

  “A hundred thousand up front,” he said, “because she’s not coming back willingly, is she?”

  “She may not,” the woman replied. “And you start tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow.”

  A hundred thousand, he thought. Half of which I can keep if I get in there and find she’s already turned. He couldn’t resist the draw of the cash, the relief it’d give to his strained bank account.

  “I’ll start tomorrow night,” he said. “As long as your check cashes.”

  A tall, thick woman in her late twenties walked into the room. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt that read “Fuck Authority.” Her blonde hair hung at the sides of her head, chopped short. She looked at Derick and sneered. It was a sneer he’d seen before on countless suspects when they sat cuffed in his patrol car.

  “Nice shirt,” he offered.

  “Angela, this is Derick,” the woman said. “He’s a retired police officer. He’s going to go in after Anna. You’re going to go with him and make sure it gets done.”

  Angela dropped onto a padded chair next to the woman and stared at Derick. “Sure, momma. Whatever you say.”

  The woman opened her purse and removed a checkbook, scribbling a note. She ripped it off and handed it to Derick, who took it and examined it.

  “If this doesn’t clear when I try to cash it tomorrow morning, you’ll not hear from me again,” he said. “And don’t bother calling me.”

  “It’ll clear,” she said. “And I presume you know the bank won’t give you that much cash. They’ll turn it into a cashier’s check or something like that.”

  “That’ll work,” he said, slipping the check into a pocket inside his jacket.

  “Alright, then it’s settled,” the woman said, closing her purse. “When should Angela meet you at the motel?”

  “8 P.M.,” he replied. “Wait outside the lobby. We’ll go in together and get the room. You’ve been in before?”

  Angela stared back at him. “Once or twice.” He could tell already he didn’t like her.

  “You know your way around?”

  “No, not really.”

  “You better not get in my way. And you better do exactly as I tell you, once we’re in.”

  “I’ll do as I please,” she replied.

  “Angela,” the woman interjected. “Please, I need you to work with him. He’s the only way we can get Anna out. Do as he asks.”

  Angela stared at him. He could see she wasn’t pleased by her mother’s request. “Sure,” she replied.

  He knew she didn’t mean it.

  - - -

  I shouldn’t take this gig, he thought as he drove back to his home in Roanoke. I can call her up and back out, just as soon as I talk with Braithwaite tomorrow. If things go the right direction with them, I won’t need to take any more gigs, ever again.

  He sat up straight behind the wheel, trying to adjust his back. Driving hurt the most. He’d taken a bullet in the line of duty ten years ago, and ever s
ince then it was hard to sit right in the seat of a car. They’d given him cortisone shots, but those had stopped long ago. Now the pain was like a parasite that rode along inside his body, flaring up when it wanted attention, destined to be there for the rest of his life.

  He turned onto the interstate. There’s no guarantee Braithwaite will come through, he thought, playing devil’s advocate with himself. Better keep this gig in the back pocket until I know for sure.

  Over his many years as a cop, Derick had seen plenty of strange things. Most of it was explainable as simple oversight. Some of it was human stupidity or depravity. However, a few of the things he’d seen had been truly mysterious. Most cops shuffled those items away in their brain, choosing not to think about them. It was hard enough to be a policeman, dealing with the worst people society had to offer. Stopping to explore elements of crimes that they subconsciously knew could never be explained — but would never admit as much — was something most smart cops avoided, choosing instead to engage the same blissful detachment that tended to ruin their personal lives.

  He’d demonstrated plenty of that detachment over the years, enough to scare away most of the people who imagined he’d be worthwhile as a friend, lover, husband, or father. It was a disease that ran rampant through police hall, infecting every new recruit as sure as a genetic defect. Not only had it happened to him after he’d sworn it wouldn’t, he watched it happen to others — every partner and superior he’d ever known, despite their attempts to remain unchanged.

  Now that he was out, living in his late forties with a policeman’s pension and a collection of debts he’d inherited from a divorce (as well as the copious amount of new debt he’d been able to skillfully add to the pile), he spent his time trying to diffuse the cynicism he’d methodically acquired over those years, hoping the attempt might make him feel like a normal person. It was taking more time than he’d anticipated. What he’d found with The Achernar Group had helped; it brought some sanity to what he’d experienced over the years, the unexplained things that he’d filed away in his mind like everyone else. Most cops just forgot about them when they retired, but they had begun to drive him crazy, like little puzzles he still had to finish. The Achernar Group had filled in the mysteries with explanations, and made the buffer easier to pull down.

  They had answers where nothing else seemed to fit. Murders committed by long-dead relatives, witnesses who claimed an unseen force had spoken in their ear things they couldn’t possibly have known, cops who inexplicably shot each other after discovering a butchered child. Detectives couldn’t figure it out, and the strange details were just pushed aside in favor of more logical explanations: if a witness statement didn’t fit, they must have imagined things. Or were crazy.

  The first thing he did after he retired from the force was to look into these unexplained mysteries. He didn’t want to hide them away, uncomfortable with their lack of solid rationality. He wanted to explore them, dig into them, find out what was behind them. He knew his cop buddies would have no interest in it and would never approve, so he saved it until he was free of the force, free to look to his heart’s content without censorious partners or superiors. After a lot of research, he’d found The Achernar Group. The discovery proved fruitful.

  At first their proposal seemed a little crazy: people in the world who possessed abilities that others did not. Abilities people didn’t talk about, that the media ignored as fiction and the police ignored as embarrassing. But the more he listened to their theories, the more they began to fit. They started to fill in the holes of the many unexplained cases he’d seen over the years.

  All the answers seemed to revolve around people who had “the gift”. That was what they called it. And those with the gift described the way they could see things as “The River”.

  He went back to a few of those cases, investigating on his own, digging into the possibility that the unanswered questions were involved with someone who had the gift, someone who could enter The River. The Achernar Group described it as a place surrounding all of us, alive with an alternative view of things. They claimed that people with the gift could go there, just “drop in” whenever they wanted, like jumping into a metaphorical river. There they could see things that the rest of us could not. They said that in The River, you could see some pretty weird shit. Ghosts, for one.

  The first time he heard this description from TAG his well-honed skepticism kicked in and he discounted it entirely. But the more he looked into their claims, the more he saw it filling in the holes of many cases he’d written off over the years.

  Then, he met one: a truly gifted person. He saw what they could do. He looked for every way he could think of to deny it and prove them wrong, but in the end the man he saw enter The River and return with information he could not have possibly known proved to be genuine. And that same man had gone on to educate him on innumerable aspects of The River, spending hours and hours with him, listening to Derick recount unsolved cases and providing possible solutions, all River-based. Giving him descriptions of what The River was like; what was in it, how things looked, the strange creatures that were there, how certain objects changed form when observed there. He’d even told him about the bizarre varieties of The River — the downwind mutations in the west, the hyper-haunted vortices of the gifted who became vorghosts, and the most tantalizing and feared place of them all — The Dark River.

  That was five years ago. He’d come a long way since then. He knew he’d need a second career; he was way too young to physically settle down. He’d considered everything — security jobs, blue collar skilled labor, truck driving. He laughed, looking back on it now. Never thought I’d wind up doing this, he thought. Now I’m taking gigs to extract people from the Dark River for a fee. Who would have guessed?

  Rain began to fall and he turned on the wipers. Damn, this is going to make it feel even more humid than it already is, he thought.

  Tomorrow he’d meet with Braithwaite and see what they wanted to do about his proposal. TAG had been pussyfooting around him for months now, afraid to commit to any particular course of action. I have to pin him down, he thought. I need some money and I need it now. They’ve had plenty of time to get their shit together. If he doesn’t come up with something substantial tomorrow, I’m done with them. For good.

  Chapter Two

  Derick was immediately put off when he entered the room. Someone else was there with Braithwaite; he thought it was going to be a meeting with just the two of them. He didn’t like surprises.

  “Derick!” Braithwaite said, grabbing his hand to shake it. “Please, come in. Derick, this is Julian Kent, from Boston. He came down just for this meeting.”

  Derick stopped just inside the door. “I understood this was just going to be between you and me,” he said to Braithwaite.

  Braithwaite chuckled. “Yes, well, things have changed a little. Your proposal was so important to the Group that my superior, Mr. Kent, decided to travel down to speak with you personally about it. Isn’t that right, Julian?”

  “Absolutely,” Julian said, extending his hand. Derick didn’t take it.

  “I don’t like surprises,” Derick said. “This is a surprise.”

  “But, you’ll find, not an unwelcome one,” Julian said, lowering his hand. “I think you’ll be pleased.”

  “I’m already not pleased,” Derick replied.

  “Please, sit,” Braithwaite said, directing them to a collection of padded chairs in the corner. Braithwaite was a vice president of an energy company and had a beautiful office with lots of space. Derick was positive the company had no idea Braithwaite was also a leading figure in The Achernar Group and often used his corporate digs for meetings not strictly related to company undertakings.

  Derick walked to the chairs and took one, trying not to fume. Things were already on the wrong foot. It didn’t bode well for the rest of the meeting.

  “We’ve given your proposal considerable thought,” Julian said as he sat.

&nb
sp; “So I’m dealing with you now, not him?” Derick said to Julian, pointing at Braithwaite. He knew this would get under Braithwaite’s skin, and he wanted to irritate the guy for not telling him in advance about Julian’s attendance.

  “I’m from the Boston headquarters,” Julian said. “We have control of the major purse strings. Braithwaite and I talked at length about you and the details of your proposal, and we both agreed it would be best if I came down to meet you and discuss the project.”

  “Well, I’m here for an answer,” Derick said. “What’s the decision?”

  “Well, we’re very intrigued,” Julian replied.

  They paused. Derick waited. Julian didn’t say more. He felt himself becoming more irritated, the same way his meter ran up when a suspect lied to him.

  “That’s it?” Derick asked. “I came here for that?”

  “We’re intrigued, and we’d like to know a little more before committing,” Julian said.

  “It’s all in the proposal,” Derick said, his irritation rising more. This was beginning to feel like a game, like some corporate negotiation. He didn’t play that way.

  “Yes, but sometimes there are intangibles that aren’t in a written document,” Julian said. “Like you, for example. I wanted to meet you, to see what we’d be investing in.”

  “You’d be investing in the object,” Derick replied. “The object that lets a normal person like me enter The River. That’s what you’d be investing in. It’s what you guys have wanted for years, isn’t it? A way to bridge from just studying The River to actually entering it? That’s what I was always led to believe you wanted. Well, I’ve done it, with the object. You’d be paying me to let you study it.”

  “Not just the object, but you too,” Julian said. “Your proposal said we could study it so long as it remained with you, was tested with you. That makes you part of the investment.”

  “It’s my object,” Derick said, feeling as if he was playing a very slow game of cards where he’d already exposed his hand but they were showing just one card at a time. “I’ve learned over the years that your organization doesn’t have the greatest reputation for honesty. There’s no way I’d just hand it over to you. It has to remain with me.”