Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2)

by Justine Sebastian

  Dr. Helen lay sprawled at an awkward angle, her shoulders and head leaning against the heavy base of the altar, the rest of her splayed in the grass. One black leather mule lay on its side a little ways in front of her—her foot had slipped out of it as she fell backward. Her eyes were open and for a brief, wonderful moment, Jeremy thought she was only stunned. Then he saw the way her body was jerking; not quite a seizure, but not natural, controlled movement either. She didn’t blink and her head was laying so far to one side her cheek nearly touched her shoulder.

  She juddered and made a soft, terrible, “Buh, buh, buh,” sound as her fingers danced like dying fish at her sides. Her hands flew up and down, giving her dying fish fingers wings once, twice, three times before they flopped back at her sides and just twitched. Her heels drummed the floor and a wet stain spread across the crotch of her smart grey pants. A rivulet of drool ran from the corner of her slack mouth and dangled there like a pendulum. Her fingers stopped flapping around to their frenetic rhythm and squeezed into fists then relaxed, squeezed again and over, over, over. And a one and a two and a three… Cha-cha-cha!

  Jeremy moaned low in the back of his throat and covered his eyes like a scared child. He could still hear her though (buh, buh, buh) and only when she fell silent did Jeremy uncover his eyes. Dr. Helen stared at him, not accusingly, not angry, just blank and dumb, all of her intelligence drained out of the back of her head.

  “Dr. Helen,” Jeremy said as he crawled over to her then, skitter-quick and spidery. He touched her face, still warm, but with creeping coldness lurking just beneath it. She was dead and he knew she was dead. And it hurt. It really, really hurt. He took her in his arms, her crushed skull smearing him with blood as he rocked her back and forth. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Oh, fuck, please wake up.” He pressed a kiss to her temple, smelled her pretty, slightly gingery perfume and smoothed his hands over her torso, trying to massage life back into her body. All he managed to do was smear grime all over the front of her smoky lavender blouse.

  “Fuck!” Jeremy screamed as he squeezed her tighter. It had been an accident, a horrible, awful accident. But Jeremy knew all about horrible accidents, didn’t he? Yes, of course he did. Slipping on the surface of a frozen pond during the Little Ice Age. Swinging too high in 1905 and flying through the air with the greatest of ease only to land wrong and break his eight year old neck. A push at a party in 1925 that ended with his head busting open like a piece of rotten fruit when he flipped over the balcony and fell four storeys to the Manhattan sidewalk below.

  So many accidents, so much time and now here he was repeating some of his own violent history. That’s what history—what one life or a thousand lives—was though. A series of repeated events that people never learned from.

  No. No. That wasn’t right. It wasn’t. He was the killer, not the killed, but he knew about that, too; about being the cause of deadly accidents. One thing after another and he couldn’t bring Dr. Helen back. He could beg and plead, but it would not work.

  Jeremy bowed himself over her body and wept, eaten up with guilt and caught in an undertow of empathy so strong it did feel like drowning. Jeremy was capable of great empathy because he knew so many things, had lived so many tragedies and losses and sorrows that he could no longer keep track. At first, the lives he was born into weren’t so bad, but as the cruel army of time marched onward, the lives had become worse. Mostly because the people he became were worse; madmen and murderers, suicides and misanthropes. The list of bad grew longer than the list of good, the depression and the emptiness ate away at him a little more each time until he was no longer whole. Such love as Thanatos’s was a wretched thing that came with a terrible price attached to it. One that Jeremy kept paying because he could not stop; he didn’t even remember how.

  It had led him down into the darkness where he was left sitting holding the body of one of the most amazing people he had ever met. If Jeremy Harris had never been born on November 2, 1980 then Helen Miller (née Greene) would not have died in his barn on a hot summer’s day in 2016. If Jeremy Harris hadn’t been born there never would have even been a barn. Cause and effect were not always immediately visible, but they were always eventual.

  When Jeremy rose again, he was miserable and full of useless apologies, but he had work to do and couldn’t afford to linger any longer. Mooncricket wandered around, especially the later the hour grew; he was a nocturnal creature Jeremy had learned. He had most likely been asleep when Dr. Helen arrived which was why she had wound up in the barn to begin with—her knock at the door of the house would have brought no response. Barghest almost never barked and he was in the barn with Jeremy anyway. Mooncricket, whether nodding or genuinely sleeping was not easy to rouse in either state. Jeremy knew he was still asleep or nodding though because he had not ventured out to greet their guest. Mooncricket was lonely and he was friendly, waster boy or not, so he would have wanted to come say hello.

  For the time being, Jeremy left Dr. Helen lying in the grass on the barn floor. The shadow wraiths had gathered around her, petting her ashen face and ooohing over her. He started to walk away then stopped and said, “Clean her up, please,” in an ancient, twisted tongue. He was going to bury Dr. Helen; she wasn’t one of his offerings and she deserved to have a resting place that was not a public park bench. He was stealing her away from a family and friends who loved her, co-workers and patients that would be confused and sad at her disappearance, but there was no way he could let her leave the barn now that she had found her way in. He was too distraught and wired up, not relaxed and sated as he usually was. Taking Dr. Helen anywhere was one of those serious mistakes he had thought about.

  He still needed to move her car and he needed to do that before Mooncricket saw it. Which meant he needed her keys. Jeremy stopped and sighed then went back to Dr. Helen’s body. He patted her down, feeling for the tell-tale lump of a keyring, but didn’t find one in her trousers or in the pockets of her blazer. He hadn’t noticed a purse, so she must have left her keys in the car. She probably hadn’t intended to stay very long.

  That plan had clearly not worked out.

  The pause had given him time enough to think though and he went into the room where he kept his poppies to get a couple of towels off the shelf in there. They were the ones he used to dry his offerings with, but he always washed and bleached them afterward. They were spotlessly clean whereas Jeremy himself was not. He looked like an urchin or a crazy homeless person.

  Still nude, he took the towels out of the barn and strode across the lawn. Dr. Helen’s mist grey Jaguar was parked on the other side of his car. It was hidden from anyone—aka, Mooncricket—that might happen to glance out the windows. Hopefully he wouldn’t see a thing when Jeremy moved the car either. Things would only go from bad to worse if Mooncricket did see and ask him about it. Jeremy didn’t want that; he wasn’t done with Mooncricket yet and as long as Mooncricket remained ignorant of Jeremy’s less than savory activities then when he did finally tire of him there would be no need for bloodshed. Jeremy could simply take Mooncricket across the lake and put him back where he had found him.

  Jeremy covered the driver’s seat and floor with towels, leaving only enough room uncovered that he could accelerate and brake easily. He used a pen he found on the passenger seat to press the ignition button and the tips of his fingers to drive with once the car was cranked. It was painfully slow progress, but it was better to inch along than gun the engine. The car was quiet, but nothing was totally silent and stepping on the gas would rev the engine, which could possibly draw attention. So many details, little, tiny fine nuances that must be attended to. The upside, Jeremy attempted to reason, was that he was thinking clearly as he drove the car into the barn and parked it a few feet inside the doors.

  He wanted to get rid of the damn thing right that second, but he couldn’t. That, too, would be a mistake; dumping an expensive car like Dr. Helen’s in broad daylight during the time when most people were getting off work or driving in t
o start night shifts was incredibly stupid. He would take it that night and leave it down by the river when only the snakes and alligators were awake to see what he was doing.

  Jeremy wiped the car down with the towels, kept the pen he’d taken from the passenger seat then closed the door and rubbed down the handle as well. He’d wear gloves and a hat later to keep the car clean. He’d even clean his shoes, leave them spic-and-span and put them on while he was sitting sideways in the driver’s seat. It would all work out.

  Before he left the barn, Jeremy covered Dr. Helen with more clean towels so he wouldn’t have to look at her when he came back to bury her. He closed and shut the barn door behind him, very careful to make sure it was locked this time. Then he went on up to the house to take a shower and see if he could rouse Mooncricket.

  21

  Having made up his mind to do something about his situation did not mean that Tobias knew where to start. That little detail was proving to be quite the fly in the ointment. He spent the rest of the week distracted with thoughts about how to go about doing such a thing. Tobias was no stranger to the paranormal, but the recent events he had endured were beyond even his realm of knowledge. Which, truth be told, wasn’t a lot of knowledge to begin with; he only knew what he did from experience. He had not attempted to research ghosts or precognitive abilities since his early teens when he had quickly learned that most of the literature out there was poorly written hokum that usually involved crystals, energy channeling or some other bit of mumbo-jumbo that did not apply to what he did.

  Saturday was not much of a success on any front because he had to work again. Mr. Greene had called him and told him that Helen’s car had been found in the river early that morning. Of Helen herself, there was no sign. Mr. Greene had been set to work a funeral that afternoon, but he wasn’t able to make it for obvious reasons and so Tobias filled in.

  The entire service was a disaster, beginning with a drunken brawl between the wife of the deceased and his mistress. Then their kids—all four of which were also children of the deceased—got involved in the action. Two bored, yet vaguely amused police officers had been needed to stand at the back of the parlor during the actual service. The mistress and widow glared at one another from across the aisle when they weren’t sipping from the flasks they made no attempts to conceal. Tobias stood just outside the doors and hoped no one started throwing punches again during the eulogy, which was actually very nice.

  The end of the whole affair had come when the coffin—a cheaply made number of painted press board with plywood reinforcements in the ends and on the sides—was lifted by the pallbearers. It was painted nicely and looked fine sitting out for the viewing, but when the pallbearers lifted the casket to carry it out to the hearse there was a creak and a groan then a crack as the bottom gave out. The deceased had tumbled onto the floor and the trucker cap he was to be buried in went rolling down the aisle much to the horrified shock of the funeral attendees. There was much screaming, cursing and the inevitable falling down when a large group of drunkards attempts to flee en masse. The mistress and the widow fell on top of each other and another fight erupted.

  While the officers broke up the brawl, Tobias stared at the dead man and tried to figure out what to do with him. How delightful, he thought.

  He got the problem sorted by ushering the mourners out of the parlor and going to find a replacement casket. He made a mental note to contact the manufacturer of the faulty one and have them reimburse Greene’s. There were no more in that exact model and Tobias chose one that was slightly more expensive though it at least had a solid bottom. The family would be reimbursed the cost of the original casket and only charged what was left over on the cost of the new one.

  Once the deceased was settled into his new casket, the pallbearers were called back. Leery, but game, they lifted the coffin again then froze, waiting for another fallout. When it didn’t happen, they moved forward at a pace much slower than the usual careful, respectful walk. Tobias drove the hearse to the cemetery and stayed nearby while the graveside service was given. As mourners filed past him, he kept his expression neutral and pretended he couldn’t hear the whispers of a few people:

  Why does he have that bird on his shoulder?

  I don’t know, but it’s mighty damn creepy.

  I heard he was a devil worshiper.

  I heard it was voodoo.

  I heard it was nec— Um… Necro… Fancy? Necrofancy? That ain’t right.

  Like doing sex to dead people?

  So it went, their voices fading away as they clustered around the open grave and the casket resting above it. Tobias only then allowed himself to roll his eyes as he reached up to stroke Lenore’s breast.

  “You ever get tired of all that shit?” asked one of the cops, Chet Andrews.

  Chet had been on the Sparrow Falls police force for as long as Tobias could recall and was one of his father’s best friends. He could have gone on to be a detective or moved up in the department in other ways, but Chet liked being a patrolman. He said patrol was where all the interesting stuff happened. Chet had no real trouble talking to Tobias, so long as there was something between them. Currently, that something was the hearse.

  “Yes, but then I got over it,” Tobias said. “If it bothered me now like it bothered me when I was ten then I’d be tired and angry all the time.”

  Chet mulled that over and nodded after a minute. “Makes sense, I s’pose.”

  At the graveside, Reverend Orcko began his second eulogy, this time reading a rather lengthy passage from the Bible. Something about Lazarus as far as Tobias could tell from the few words he could make out. That was appropriate, he supposed; especially if the deceased was a zombie enthusiast.

  “How’re you holding up about your brother?” Chet asked. “That was a damn shame, I tell you.”

  “Yes, it was a shame. Such a shame,” Tobias said. The mention made him sad about Hylas all over again, but he wouldn’t allow himself to wallow anymore. He couldn’t. “I miss him, but I’m learning to live with it.”

  “Felt the same way about my Misty passing on,” Chet said. “It was her time to go though. It wasn’t Hylas’s. I reckon that’s the big difference.”

  Tobias did not point out that Misty had been a dapple grey Tennessee Walker that Chet had raised from a filly back when he himself wasn’t very old. Tobias felt the man’s grief was valid though he did not feel it was on par with losing his twin brother. He did understand though that if a person spent enough time with any animal, they began to be more than that; they became almost human. So to Chet it made perfect sense to compare the two.

  “I’ve always wondered about that saying,” Tobias said. “When people say, ‘It wasn’t so-and-so’s time to go,’ how can they know that? The person in question is clearly dead, so doesn’t that therefore make that their time go? Whenever you go then it’s your time.”

  “You are a dark soul,” Chet said after a while. “You must worry the hell outta your folks.”

  “They really don’t pay me that much mind,” Tobias said with a one-shouldered shrug. “As for the dark soul… No, not so much. I’m just being logical about it. People don’t like it when other people die, whether they’re eight or eighty. It reminds them of their own mortality, for one thing. For another, it just plain makes them sad and angry. They don’t want that person to be dead, which means it was not their time to go. Not because that person’s heart gave out or they died from a bee sting, no. It’s nothing like that. It just because the ones left behind don’t want them to be dead. They are the ones who lost someone before they decided their time with that person was up. It’s actually a selfish thing to say. Though for what it’s worth, I fully believe that Hylas died before his time because about that, I am selfish.”

  Chet huffed out a soft laugh and started to speak when the widow elbowed the mistress in the face. Even from where he stood by the hearse, Tobias saw the blood gush out of her nose. The second contact was made, outright bedlam broke out
at the graveside.

  No one seemed to know it yet, but they were all likely to be arrested once the graveside service was over. If they did know, they obviously did not care. They hit the ground, rolling around and clawing at each other. Tobias watched with his eyebrows raised and head cocked. He wanted to laugh; it was inappropriate, but he could not help it. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep his smile at bay, but even that failed when a particularly plump mourner in a flowered moo-moo joined the growing dog pile of enraged funeral goers.

  “I really hope they don’t knock over the casket,” Tobias said to Lenore.

  She made a chortling sound down deep in her throat, craggy and raw. Tobias’s own grin broke free and he started laughing, making sure to crouch down on the side of the hearse out of view while he did it. He could hear shouts and curses, those of the officers and the mourners. Someone screamed police brutality. Someone else yelled about how they’d lost another tooth. There was the shrieked assertion that, “Oh, Lord, my neck bone’s broke!” Someone else told that person to sit down and shet up. Another announced to the group at large that they needed to take a massive dump. Right on Sissy’s whore face.

  That created another uproar and Tobias leaned against the door of the hearse and laughed until he could not catch his breath.

  It was not the first funeral Tobias had worked where people fought more than they mourned and he doubted it would be the last. Sometimes they were hilarious regardless of the punches being thrown and on the flip side of that were the ones that were still sad despite the licks. A couple of more memorable funerals had been downright tense and a bit frightening to work because of how bad they got. Sparrow Falls was by no means short on violent people with evil temperaments and when those souls were thrown into a room together with a common theme—sadness that they didn’t like or want—things went nuclear quickly.