by Noel Hynd
Then, “I have Henry’s decapitated skull,” he said. “It was buried beneath the basement. Osaro is waiting. We need to inter it with the rest of his remains as quickly as possible.
Once Annette was steady, Brooks washed the lime from his eyes. He urged her to go on ahead to the cemetery. He asked her to walk to the adjacent field and pick up his Jeep.
“I don’t even want this thing in my car,” Brooks explained.
“This thing” was Henry’s head. Brooks would carry it over himself. Right away.
She shuddered. She pulled his car keys from his pocket and went to the Jeep. She climbed in, turned on the ignition and drove. After she was gone, Brooks went back downstairs and retrieved the skull.
Tim Brooks would never be able to describe it, but there was something horrible, something beautiful and something therapeutic about the walk.
He walked in the moonlight, the human head in his gloved hands. A funeral cortege of one. He stared straight ahead. He prayed that he would encounter no one who saw what he carried. It was a scene out of all Halloweens, a nightmare for all midnights.
He walked steadily. Henry was in his mind the whole time, cursing vehemently.
“I’ll have you slain yet. I’ll haunt you till you burn in Hell, Brooks. I’ll see that woman drown. I’ll see him crushed by a truck.”
“I’m not listening,” Brooks answered.
Truly, he could lie as well as Henry. Every word from the spirit, every threat, rang home. The moon cast a million shadows through the branches of trees and every one, as he waked with Henry’s head toward the cemetery, transfigured itself and took the shape of a small demon, an army of monsters of the darkness.
Brooks turned a final corner and walked through the gates of the graveyard. In the moonlight, up ahead, on the crest of a hill, he saw his own vehicle parked. Annette stood next to the Jeep, arms folded, seeming to shiver from a sudden blast of cold.
Reverend Osaro was there at the gravesite, as were four men to help lower the casket.
The head seemed to move in Brooks’ hand as he walked the final steps. Brooks refused to look down. The head had an animation of its own now. The final illusion of Henry’s spirit animated the skull, the final desperate, horrible trick to attempt to cause him to panic.
But Brooks wouldn’t. He held his ground. He repeated long lost prayed from the Sunday schools of his youth, his armor against the satanic darkness of Henry’s soul and Henry’s hatred. Verses that hadn’t come to him in years, snippets of a faith that he didn’t know had remained within him.
Brooks was halfway up the walkway now, halfway to where the grave was located. A breeze riffled through his hair.
Henry’s voice came from just below Brooks’ hand now, speaking as if it came from the aged skull.
As if the mouth moved…
As if the long-dead eyes saw and shined…
As if the ears heard and the nose smelled…
“You’ll burn in Hell, Brooks! I’ll see to it that you burn in Hell. I’ll see that a million other devils come forth, dispatched by the Prince of Darkness himself, to torment you every day of your life!”
“I’m not listening, Henry.”
“Of course you are! I’ll see to it that your days and nights are laced with rage and failure, that your body is wasted with cancers, that your children die young, that…
From somewhere, Brooks recited, “Jesus said, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.’”
Henry’s spirit howled.
“You can’t do anything more,” Brooks said. “I won’t let you. You’re nothing without fear.”
Brooks arrived at the grave site. Reverend Osaro looked quizzically at him. “Was that Mathew 19:14 I just heard you recite?” he asked.
Brooks shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t even know where it came from.”
Osaro smiled slightly. “Oh, I do,” he said.
Then Osaro lowered his eyes slightly and looked for only one second at the grisly thing that Tim Brooks carried in his hands.
“Couldn’t you at least have used a shopping bag?” Osaro asked.
“That way he couldn’t have said anything,” Brooks answered.
“Oh. He’s talking to you, is he?”
In Brooks’ mind, Henry was still cursing violently, vehemently and profanely.
Osaro looked around. “That’s funny I don’t hear anything,” he said.
Brooks shrugged. Henry was screaming into his soul, loud as a jackhammer.
“Me neither,” Brooks said. “I don’t hear a thing.”
Brooks went to the coffin. Carefully, he laid the head at the top of the skeleton. Then he stepped back. The other members of the funeral team came forward and closed the lid. Then they stood back. Annette moved next to Tim and Tim wrapped an arm around her.
Henry’s cries were muffled, then silent.
Osaro held his Holy Bible in his hands, an old black one that appeared to have been with him for generations. He might have read but didn’t need to.
St. Paul a final time.
Osaro speaking, a gentle voice on a midnight breeze. “I will arise and go to my Father, and I will say unto Him, Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee,” he said. “And I am no more worthy to be called Thy son: make me as one of thy servants.”
The ceremony took place over five minutes. Then the casket was lowered. Brooks wasn’t sure but he thought he heard a terrible long hissing sigh as the casket went down and the earth received it.
Annette must have heard it, too. Or perhaps she sensed it, for she tightly gripped Brooks’ hand. In the moonlight, they could see quite well. They saw the casket settle on the floor of the grave. Then the grave diggers reached for shovels.
Brooks held one, too. He stayed with Annette until the grave was filled in and complete. They both threw dirt and Henry’s grave.
It was at that time that a wave of exhaustion overtook them both. Emotional and physical. They climbed into the Jeep.
At the wheel, Tim leaned back and exhaled a long breath. “It’s over,” he said finally. “It’s over.”
They drove back to his place and slept more soundly than either of them had in months, not since the very peaceful days that they could barely remember, back before the death of Mary Elizabeth DiMarco.
Then again, that was way back when they didn’t even know each other.
Part Four
Epilogue to Terror
Faith is the substance of things hoped
for, the evidence of things not seen.
—The Epistle of Paul to The Hebrews
We walk by faith, not by sight.
—The Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians
Chapter Sixty-four
Over the remainder of August, Annette Carlson reclaimed her home at 17 Cort Street.
She reclaimed it slowly at first. Spending an hour every day there, then two hours, then more. Eventually she worked up the nerve to spend an evening. Next a night with Tim. Then two nights. By then the spell, if that’s what it had been, was broken. The hauntings had ended.
The old house still gave an eerie creak occasionally, but there were no more sightings, no more strange otherworldly appearances. As a conduit from one plane of reality into the next, the place had fallen fallow.
It was as if a mood had been lifted, an unseen grip released. Whatever force had been in control of 17 Cort Street held it no longer. The house, in fact, became a charming, comfortable place for her, one where she enjoyed being and one which she hated to leave.
The charges against Eddie Lloyd for the murder of Mary Beth DiMarco were eventually dropped. Lack of evidence. Though the case remained officially open, the Nantucket police considered it solved. Andrea Ward wrote a long series about the case for her paper. Her editor cut much of it, not believing it could actually be true. Eventually, Andrea resigned. She would try the story as a book, if only a publisher would believe her, so s
he wasn’t sure whether to sell it as fact or fiction.
George Osaro soon departed Nantucket, also, though, in his usual manner, nothing occurred in a straightforward fashion.
On August 31, two weeks after the burial of Henry Flaherty’s remains, George began his goodbyes. He had been offered an assignment in northern Minnesota, he told people, but had nixed that because of the weather. “I am not going to wear the equivalent of a space suit six months of the year!” he had complained. So a different assignment was found for him in the Pacific northwest. So, bottom line, he was leaving a week early for his new parish in Oregon, he explained. And he was doing it as he saw fit.
He distributed small trinkets to friends and parishioners, tokens by which to remember him and his Spiritual Nantucket soirees. He had also left his Voyager at the church, having signed the title to the car over to the parish.
“It’s my small gift to the gray-haired ladies and the rest of you lovely old hens who volunteered at Christ and Holy Trinity,” he said, dismissing his own generosity, at the presentation. “I’m tired of paying the extortionate insurance rates and I don’t think the filthy old heap will be able to drag its butt across the entire country, anyway. I mean, really. It’s a roach motel on wheels as it is.”
George rolled his eyes. Then he winked.
The ladies blinked.
“So how are you getting to Oregon?” Brooks eventually asked one evening.
“It’s a big country,” Osaro answered. “I thought I’d see it close up.”
He showed Brooks a new pair of hiking shoes and his battered backpack, the latter crammed with a few changes of clothing and that old Bible. George was planning to hoof it across the country and had every intention of traveling light.
“Material possessions are really a chore anyway,” he explained. He was nothing if not unorthodox. But for a spiritual man he was consistent. “How much can you take to Heaven with you, anyway?”
Annette gave him a kiss shortly in advance of his departure. There were the inevitable awkward moments when the pastor seemed to waver about going. But then George Andrew Osaro rallied his spirit and promised he would remain in contact.
At four o’clock on the overcast afternoon of September first, George said his final goodbye at the police station. Tim Brooks embraced his friend and told him he’d miss him. Then George turned and left without looking back. Simple as that.
From a window, Brooks watched the minister walk to the ferry terminal. He thought of all the suspicions he had ever entertained about George and he weighed the many theories about ghosts that he had unearthed in the Eksman Collection at Harvard.
Yet Brooks felt a lump in his throat and a deep sorrow as he watched his friend depart.
Labor Day passed, and with it, summer. The island was left to its year-round population, plus a few who felt that the glory of autumn is Nantucket’s most beautiful season. But in the end, September was a time of departure, a time of things coming to an end, a marking of the passage of one more season from the life of every human.
Annette began to assemble many of her things first for the journey back to California for preproduction, then for the voyage to Europe. Message From Berlin was going to happen. And there was work to be done.
Brooks had some vacation time coming and Bill Agannis agreed that he could take it toward the latter half of October and early November. Tentative plans were made by Brooks to travel to Europe to visit Annette on her set. She insisted that he come. He had only been to Europe once in his life previously.
At first he had demurred, muttering something idiotic about it “not being right” or it being “kind of awkward.” He also knew that the cheap-shot press would have a field day with their relationship.
“But I love you,” she told him. “I don’t care what anyone writes in the press and I’m going to cry if I lose you.” He realized that he felt much the same way, and told her so in those words. So he agreed to visit.
“Plus if I get a free week we can drive from Italy up to Paris, all by our lonesome selves,” she whispered in his ear at one point. “We can stay in these sexy little guest houses along the way.”
He applied for a passport renewal immediately.
In the best sense of everything, he felt like he was twenty years old again, with a bold, wonderful life stretched out before him. Better yet, after the experience with George and Henry, a deep faith had rekindled itself within him and he would never fear anything again in his life.
Even death. He now knew there was something on the other side.
He could feel it. He had seen it.
A week after Labor Day, Annette locked up her house and flew to California. Like George Osaro, she said she’d stay in close touch.
Annie did. She and Brooks exchanged brief calls each evening for no other reason than to hear each other’s voice. It was a bittersweet way to maintain a relationship, full of frustrations and insecurities. But looked at from another angle, knowing there was someone in the world whom one loved that greatly and would soon see again, it was a soaring wonderful addition to each of their lives.
It was more, however, than anyone heard from George Osaro.
Not a word came from George. Not a letter. Not even a postcard as he traveled his unorthodox path across the United States.
The darker side of Brooks’ psyche took over and he began to imagine what dire fate might have befallen a single, boyish looking Japanese-American traversing the continent on foot.
Or, for that matter, exactly what plane of which universe had George dropped into? So Timothy Brooks, ever the detective, ever concerned body and soul about people he cared for, took it upon himself to find out for sure.
He wrote to the parish in Oregon to which Osaro claimed he had been assigned. Ten days later, Brooks’ letter was returned. The destination was nonexistent, though on checking, Brooks had used the exact address that Osaro had provided him.
So Brooks picked up the telephone and tried to call. The parish named had no listing. And when Brooks pursued the matter and dialed all the Lutheran parishes in Salem, none had heard of a George Osaro. None was even expecting a new pastor.
Brooks took the matter to Lieutenant Agannis one slow morning in late September. Agannis sat behind his desk and ruminated upon yet another elusive point of police work.
“So what are you asking me for, Timmy?” Agannis asked.
“Well, I think all of us on this island owe George a little something. We never would have put Henry to rest without him. So I’d like to make sure George is at least safe.”
Agannis moaned. First he had been asked to believe in ghosts. Now he was being asked for an extra hit on the town’s staggering treasury.
“You talking about traveling expenses, Tim? In this day of tight budgets?”
“Yes, sir.”
Agannis whistled low and pondered the point for a moment. In the corner of the office, Boomer glanced up at the invocation of Osaro’s name. Then, as if even the dog knew George was gone, Boomer exuded a gigantic yawn.
“Okay, I guess we can label this a ‘Missing Person,’ can’t we?” Agannis concluded. “What do you need?”
“Maybe a week.”
“Ouch! Take it before I change my mind.”
Brooks smiled gratefully and stood. “Thanks,” he said.
“Get out of my sight, will ya?”
“Yes, sir. With great pleasure.”
Two mornings later, Brooks found himself sitting in the office of Stephen Kerrigan Albright, the Lutheran bishop of Boston.
Bishop Albright was late arriving from another meeting. As Brooks waited, his head swam. He recalled the many times that he had sat in Reverend Osaro’s much smaller rectory office in Nantucket. And he recalled also the profanity-laced conversations on the subject of this very bishop, as well as Osaro’s unflattering nicknames for him.
At ten minutes after two, Bishop Albright rolled into the room. The bishop was not at all what Brooks had expected. He was a genial gray-ha
ired man, immaculately dressed in a dark blue suit, trim and patrician, with friendly, kindly eyes. He had an easy manner and greeted Brooks warmly.
“From Nantucket, are you?” the bishop inquired after excusing his tardiness. “I used to summer there myself. How are things on Nantucket?”
“Overall, just fine,” Brooks said. “A bit quiet after the summer, sir. Mercifully.”
“I’m sure. Lovely little patch of the world,” the bishop said. “‘The Old Gray Lady of the Sea.’ Isn’t that what they call the island?”
“Yes, sir. It is.”
“You’re so lucky to live and work there. I understand the island is particularly beautiful in the autumn.”
“It can be.”
“Please sit,” the bishop offered.
Both men sat.
“My wife and I were hoping to sail over to Nantucket with friends this past summer,” the bishop began. “But, well, you know how things are, Sergeant. We never did have the time,” Brooks was not a sergeant and doubted that he ever would be. But, yes, he knew how things were.
“Maybe next year,” the bishop said.
“That would be nice,” Brooks said. “If you have a moment, come by police headquarters and say hello. Many of our officers are very sincere Christians. They would enjoy meeting you.”
“I’ll do that,” the bishop said indulgently. “That’s very thoughtful of you.”
“It would be our honor, sir.”
The Bishop paused. “Now, tell me. What can I do for you today? Is this personal business or professional?”
“A little of both. Mostly personal.”
The bishop waited.
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with one George Andrew Osaro. Formerly of your parish in Nantucket.”
“Ah, yes. George…” The bishop nodded. His voice tailed off inconclusively. Then he laughed. “Quite a curious fellow. I heard he calls me ‘Bishop Halfbright’ behind my back. I think that’s hilarious. There’s a lot of the staff here that would agree, you know.”
Brooks stayed with the first line of inquiry.
