Falls the Shadow
Justine Sebastian
Copyright 2016 Justine Sebastian
Cover art and design by Amanda Watts 2016
License Notes:
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No piece of this e-book may be used for commercial or non-commercial purposes or adapted to other media without the permission of the author. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead; events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
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Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Justine Sebastian
For many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath
— John Keats
“Ode to a Nightingale”
1
A murder of crows had gathered in the water oak near the rear entrance of Greene’s Funeral Home. Their shining black bodies were still, oil-bright eyes focused on a subject of great interest to them. After another minute of quiet contemplation, a single large crow took wing, a silhouette burned against the brilliant blue of the late afternoon sky. It cawed once, the sound like a question, before it swooped down to land on its new perch.
Tobias Dunwalton turned his head to look at the crow on his shoulder and raised his eyebrows. He’d long since stopped being alarmed by his avian visitors; birds liked him though he had never figured out why. He watched the crow watching him, black eyes meeting more black and when the crow began to preen and groom his hair, Tobias allowed it. If it had been the first or even fifteenth time he had ended up with an unwanted shoulder ornament, he might have been more surprised and leery.
The crow plucked contentedly at his shoulder-length black hair and lightly pecked around the pale shell of his ear. It pushed at his hair with its beak like a lover tucking it back to better whisper in his ear. Tobias smoked his cigarette and watched the light traffic move by on the little side road that ran behind the funeral home.
Restless pecking; a gentle, insistent tap, drew Tobias’s attention back to the crow. When he was once more looking at it, the bird stopped its tapping and looked him right in the eye, cocked its head and cawed. It was a soft sound, a hello, Tobias thought. He was no expert on the secret language of crows, but they had been sitting on him on and off for years, he liked to think he had learned a thing or two.
“What is it?” he asked softly. “What do you want?”
The crow leaned forward and pecked lightly at his lower lip. It was a soft, like a gentle buss; an old-timey greeting to a friend you haven’t seen in a while.
“Have we met before?” Tobias asked.
The crow pecked his lip again and made a low muttering sound.
“Maybe so then,” Tobias said as he raised a hand to stroke the silken feathers on the back of the crow’s neck. It crooned at him, as much as crow could croon anyway; it was off-key and raspy as a longtime smoker’s voice, but it made Tobias smile. “Give me a moment and perhaps it’ll come to me.”
Years ago he had gotten into the habit of talking to the birds and if anyone had asked (though no one ever did) he would have happily told them that crows were his favorites to converse with. They were smart; talk to the same crow long enough and enough times, eventually you got the very real, delightfully unsettling feeling that it really did understand at least some of what was being said to it. Of course most would assume that was pure, unadulterated crazy talk, but Tobias didn’t care.
He didn’t really talk to anyone other than his twin brother, Hylas and his best friend, Dawn Marie. They happened to be well-versed in the weird that was Tobias Dunwalton.
Down the road, just out of view, Tobias heard the rumble of an engine and recognized the sound of the squealing brake pads on the vehicle. He flicked his cigarette away and leaned against the wall to wait, the crow shuffling itself on his shoulder to adjust to the new position.
“She’s not as late as usual,” Tobias said to the crow. He checked his watch. “Only half an hour today; that’s not so bad.”
The crow picked a stray hair off the shoulder of Tobias’s black suit coat. It hung from its beak like the world’s skinniest fu-Manchu mustache.
“That isn’t a good look on you,” he said as Dawn Marie’s little forest green Beetle came into view. She was driving too fast as usual and hardly braked as she took the turn into the employee parking lot. She bumped over the curb on one side and pulled in, parking beside Tobias’s black Lincoln.
The crow watched the new arrival with bright-eyed curiosity touched with suspicion. The crows roosted in the water oak, they weren’t unused to Dawn Marie, but she wasn’t nearly as welcome as Tobias and they did not want to make her acquaintance. To their credit, however, they had stopped making their noisome alarm calls every time she walked by their tree and accepted her as a regular player in their human-watching.
The crow kept its perch on Tobias’s shoulder, waiting as Dawn Marie got out of her car and slammed the door. Her wild pale auburn hair caught in the hot summer wind and blew in her face as she walked toward Tobias lurking in the shadow of the doorway.
“Damn!” she said, walking and flailing, fighting a losing battle against her unruly hair. “Stop it!”
The crow cocked its head and Tobias unconsciously mirrored the gesture as he watched his best friend struggle her way free of the curtain of hair in her eyes.
“There!” she said, shoving it back with one hand and holding it there as the wind moaned across the asphalt.
Finally noticing Tobias and his feathered hitchhiker, she raised her free hand in a wave, keys dangling from her index finger, jangling and catching the light. The crow watched the bright sparks thrown off the keys with great interest.
“You could just cut it off,” Tobias suggested for what, by that point in their friendship, was likely the millionth time.
“These luscious locks? You’re shitting me, Toby,” Dawn Marie said. “Cut off my hair, you cut off my strength.”
“Aren’t you more Delilah than Samson?” he asked.
“This is the twenty-first century,” Dawn Marie said. “I can be whoever the hell I want to be.”
Her keys jangled in her hand as she swiped at her hair again. The crow gave the keys one last, longing gaze before it gave up its post and flew away with a disgruntled squawk.
“I will never get you and the birds,” Dawn Marie said as she reached him.
“I’m not overwhelmed with understanding myself,” Tobias said.
She nodded, dark brown eyes sparkling as she plucked a feather off his coat and twirled it. Tobias thought of it as a trade: a feather for his strand of hair.
“You know what’s really weird about it?” she said as she played with the f
eather.
“What’s that?”
“They never shit on you.”
“That’s what’s weird about it to you?” he asked.
“All of it’s weird,” she said. “It’s that that’s the weirdest part.”
“Ah, clarification,” he said.
“I am helpful that way,” Dawn Marie said as she fished her cigarettes out her jeans pocket. She lit one and blew smoke away from Tobias’s face. “Anyway, Hylas wants you to call him. He rang me up on my way over here, said you’re not answering your phone and he needs to talk to you.”
Tobias rolled his eyes. “I’m not answering my phone anymore,” he corrected. “Because I turned it off. He’s annoyed because I won’t let him take pictures of the corpse.”
“Because you always let him do that,” Dawn Marie said with a little smile and matching eye roll. “I thought that’s what it was a about. He can’t even run pictures like that, so why’s he always trying?”
“My brother has hidden depths of dogged journalistic determination,” Tobias said. “I don’t know if he would run the pictures even if he could, he’s not that callous. Between you and me, I think he might be planning a book on our dear killer one of these days.”
“Between Hylas’s understandable fascination with the local psychopathic serial killer and Wes out there digging up all the other skeletons in this town, we’re going to have a library of fucked up shit to read about on the subject of Sparrow Falls,” Dawn Marie said.
“Mmm… Yes,” Tobias said. “If they don’t get shut down before they ever get started.”
“I dunno, Toby, I saw Wes’s manuscript,” Dawn Marie said. “It’s big enough to kill someone with and he’s still not done with it. That doesn’t say ‘shut down’ to me.”
“True,” Tobias said. “Perhaps Wes’s little excursion won’t be curtailed, but Hylas’s, I am sad to say, probably would be.”
“Good point,” Dawn Marie said. “Poor Hylas though.”
“Well, a town that lives on secrets would not take kindly to someone exposing them to the light of day,” Tobias said.
“You make it sound dire,” Dawn Marie said.
“The secrets here are meant to stay here according to most residents, whether they say that aloud or not. So, yes, I worry that it could become dire.”
Tobias frowned at nothing, gaze far away across the street. He would not take something bad happening to his much-beloved twin brother well. It was why he tried to discourage Hylas from probing too much, from asking too many questions. He made every attempt to rein him in when his exuberance for his job began to overshadow his common sense.
“Shit, Toby,” Dawn Marie said.
“Precisely,” Tobias said. He closed his eyes against the westering rays of the sun then said, “We need to get to work. Madeleine Haik will not prepare herself.”
“How do you remember their names like that?” Dawn Marie asked.
“Someone needs to,” Tobias said.
Madeleine Haik was a new name, a new body and for a long time she would be remembered, but eventually she would be no more than her cause of death. Another victim of the local serial killer. In the nineteen years he had been working at Greene’s Funeral Home—Dawn Marie working alongside him for twelve of them—Tobias had not forgotten a single name. Every person he prepared for burial was filed away in his mind because people came and people went, but most of all, people forgot. He felt that someone needed to remember the dead because they had once been more than moldering corpses in oblong boxes. It was important not to let that fact escape into nothing.
“That’s sweet in a sad way,” Dawn Marie said. She tossed her cigarette to the ground and stomped it out. “All right, let’s get this show on the road.”
“After you,” Tobias said as he pulled open the heavy door that led into the back room of the funeral home.
“Always the gentleman,” Dawn Marie said, clomping by him in her heavy army surplus combat boots.
Madeleine was laid out on a table already, awaiting their attention. Her burial clothes hung from a coat hook nearby; black jeans, black HexRx t-shirt, a bra and panties lay folded on the little ledge beneath and on the floor was a pair of black boots with stacked heels, a sock trailing from each one. Tobias pulled back the sheet covering her body and Dawn Marie gasped.
“God,” she breathed. “Poor girl. This never gets easier.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Tobias said.
He stood beside Dawn Marie and gazed down at Madeleine Haik’s body, death-white, the livid lines of her tattoos bright against her pallid skin. The stainless steel of her piercings winked and glittered in the overhead light, a Mexican fire opal flashed from the ring on her right middle finger. Tobias had begun the work on her earlier, re-adorning her, per her family’s request. Madeleine had gone to Lafayette for a concert at a local bar and had not come home. Two days later a realtor found her tied to the porch rails of an abandoned house in Sparrow Falls; naked and drained of all her blood.
Her family’s grief and shocked horror had rocked the parlor the day they came in to choose her coffin, a shiny black number with highly polished silver chrome accents. Madeleine had been born and raised in Sparrow Falls, but had moved to New Orleans years ago, first for college and after college, she had stayed to work. Her family could not understand her vicious homecoming or how the area madman had found her; she hadn’t been to visit her parents in over a month. She had been gloriously alive then, of course. Alive, her mother had bawled on Mr. Greene’s shoulder while Tobias stood respectfully in the back, feeling like a ghoul.
In a sense, it was Tobias’s job, with Dawn Marie’s help, to bring Madeleine back to life for a little while. Long enough her family could see her one last time and not be more brokenhearted than they already were by the sight of her. They wanted a last image of her lying in her coffin looking peaceful, like she was only sleeping.
Secondary rigor had set in and Madeleine was about as easy to handle as a block of ice, but they massaged suppleness and flexibility back into her body. They dressed her when they were done with their grisly work.
Tobias took the beaded choker from the little rolling table beside him and gestured for Dawn Marie to lift her head so he could put it on her. When he was done, the ugly, toothless mouth that had been sliced into her throat was well and truly hidden. The seam of the closed wound had been sickly pink against her milky neck before he covered it with make-up. He straightened the choker to make sure it was even then began to apply her make-up, using a photograph of Madeleine when she still moved and breathed and lived as a guide. Dawn Marie combed out her long, black-dyed hair, streaks of bright pink and blue shot through it like electric cotton candy. The barest hint of her roots showed strawberry blonde; she had a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
Little Strawberry Shortcake goth girl.
As he bent to apply her lipstick, Tobias frowned and leaned closer for a better look. The awful sweet scent of embalming fluid emanated from her, graveyard perfume that he tried not to breathe in because always and forever he would hate the smell. A scrap of something clung to Madeleine’s bloodless, bluish lower lip like the remnant of some membrane. Tobias frowned as he reached over on his table and picked up a pair of long tweezers to pluck the offending object free. It was thin, translucent white turning to weak tea brown at the edges.
“What’s that?” Dawn Marie asked, leaning closer for a better look.
“The remains of a flower petal,” Tobias said, turning the little scrap this way and that. “The M.E. missed a piece.”
“Ugh,” Dawn Marie said. She glanced down at Madeleine’s face, the heavy make-up Tobias used on the corpses had already covered the stipple marks where stitches once held her mouth closed, flower petals poking from them like her throat had begun to bloom. “Why does he do that?”
“I have no idea,” Tobias said as he set the tweezers aside to go back to work.
“It’s fucking sick,” she said.
“But you can try,” Dawn Marie said.
“Yes,” Tobias said, beginning to apply the deep red lipstick to Madeleine’s lips with short, careful strokes. “If you want to go mad, too.”
Dawn Marie grunted something unintelligible then went back to work on Madeleine’s hair. Tobias carried on with his task, turning that scrap of flower petal over and over in his mind.
Finished with her, they carried her to her final bed, the great black coffin on its wheeled cart. Dawn Marie arranged her hair, Tobias folded her fingers a little neater, made sure the ring on her middle finger caught the light and flared. They stood back to take in their handiwork. Dawn Marie leaned against Tobias’s side and he nodded, he understood.
They were good at their job and by the time they were done with a body, unless they were far too decayed or otherwise ruined, the recently deceased looked as alive as they once had been. Lying in their coffins, it was easy to picture them sitting up, bewildered and afraid, wanting to know what had happened, asking why they were in a coffin and doing it all with awful groaning, screaming sounds that came from their chests, not their mouths because their lips had been glued shut. They would try to open their eyes, but would find they could not do that either because they, too, had been sealed.
The thought of accidentally laying out a body that was not quite dead yet still gave Tobias the occasional nightmare. Mr. Greene assured him it was one of the fears all undertakers had, especially with those people who did not want to be embalmed or emptied of their blood and organs to be so much fleshy melon rind. Madeleine Haik did not worry Tobias in that way; she had been embalmed and was already more than dead before even that had been done. No one could survive losing all of their blood the way she had.
Yet in her coffin the very dead young woman looked very much alive. When Tobias could look at her no longer, he closed the lid over her face with a silent apology.
2
The white butterfly had wings made of lace, delicately scalloped edges folding out onto the midnight blue velvet background. It was a monstrous bug made of fabric, held in place by ropes of silver thread that gleamed brightly, restraining the delicate insect to keep it from flying right off the edge of the art quilt square it was displayed on. Jeremy Harris had been working on the square for the last four days; it was a custom job requested by a visitor to his website. It would pay well and though he did not need the money he enjoyed the work. The woman had been vague in her request, giving him only the basic color scheme she was looking for and saying she wanted something with a butterfly on it. They’re just so beautiful!
Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2) Page 1
