Occasional Demons

by Rick Hautala

  “There’s something here, though...“ Jack said, scratching behind his ear as his voice trailed off to a whisper. “I can...I can feel it, It’s like a...like a—“ He shook his head and finished, “I don’t know.“

  “A hunch, perhaps?“ Fred asked without making any attempt to disguise his opinion of detectives who placed even an ounce of faith in hunches.

  “I can’t believe you can’t sense anything about what happened here,“ Vernon said, knowing that the off-handed reference to hunches was a direct slam at him and his abilities. “Or is it simply that the two of you don’t believe me when I tell you what I feel—what I know happened in this room?“

  “I always get the creeps in a room where someone’s snuffed it,“ Fred said. “’Specially when it’s a suicide.“

  “Jesus! I can’t believe you guys!“ Vernon shouted. “The killer signed into the hotel under the name ’John Smith.’ He pays up front, in cash, for five days and leaves specific instructions at the desk that he doesn’t want the chambermaid to clean his room or change his sheets and towels. Now, assuming he wasn’t in town on business, in which case he would have charged the room to his company and probably wouldn’t have chosen such a flea-ridden hole like this, that should instantly make you suspicious.“

  Neither cop reacted, but Vernon didn’t care; he was getting used to it.

  “So anyway, sometime during the weekend—and I guarantee you it was late Friday night—he picks up this whore downtown, brings her up to the room and, after having a bit of fun, has some serious fun. He strangles her with her pantyhose. Once she’s dead, he stuffs her inside the closet and leaves her there until he has a chance to get her out unobserved. He dumps her body and a bundle of her clothes off the bridge into the KenduskeagRiver where, if you’d bother to do a bit of trolling, you just might find what’s left of her.“

  “Well,“ Fred said, “there ain’t nothing else we’re gonna find. We outta here?“

  Stroking his chin thoughtfully, Jack finally nodded and said, “Yeah. I guess so.“

  “Will you guys just hold on for one minute?“ Vernon said. He didn’t like letting his agitation show like this, but they were making it almost impossible for him to work. “Just stop chattering for one minute, if you please. I need to spend some concentrated time here, all right? Otherwise, I’ll never pick up all of the important details. The psychic vibrations of the hooker’s death agonies are so strong I can’t get a clear impression of who her killer was.“

  Feeling mild surprise that neither detective started razzing him about “picking up vibes,“ Vernon moved slowly toward the closed closet door. If he touched the doorknob, which the killer must have touched because he’d stuffed the body in there, then he just might get a sharper sense of who the killer was. Narrowing his eyes to slits, he focused his mind until a faint tingling began to prickle the base of his skull. It started to spread up the back of his head in cold, oily waves. The psychic space of the room filled with a hushed expectancy, like just before a thunderstorm. There was an unnerving sense of familiarity to this room, but Vernon ascribed that to the psychic impressions he got which sometimes made other people’s thoughts and feelings seem startlingly more real than his own.

  Before he left the room, Jack walked over to the window and, with a quick motion, pulled aside one of the curtains. Vernon yelped with surprise when the sudden burst of sunlight washed into the room. He rushed toward the window to close the curtains but stopped in the middle of the room when Jack drew the other one back.

  “Wait just a second, all right?“ Jack said. He shook his head. “I...I can’t get rid of the feeling that we’re...that we’re missing something here...something that should be so obvious.“ He placed his hands on his hips and stared blankly around the room. “Let’s run through it just one more time, okay?“

  Fred folded his arms across his expansive chest and sighed. “You’re wasting our time, pal,“ he said, wrinkling his nose as he sniffed the rancid air in the room.

  “So... “ Jack began, rubbing his hands together as he studied the room, “after signing the hotel register as ’John Smith,’ this guy pays for the room up front for five days.“

  “In cash,“ Fred added.

  “Christ, I just told you that!“ Vernon shouted, angered at the way these two men kept ignoring him.

  “And now,“ Jack continued without a pause, “he has a ’John Doe’ tag on his toe down at the city morgue unless—or until—his fingerprints get ID’d.“

  “That tag must read ’Jane Doe’,“ Vernon whispered. “And I already told you what her real name is—or was. It’s Estelle Phillips. And she didn’t commit fucking suicide! She was murdered! Got it? Murdered!“ He shook his head with disgust. “What in the Christ are you two talking about? The only man involved here is the man who killed her.“

  “And no one on the hotel staff took any notice of him, right?“ Jack continued as he paced the length of the room. “This guy is practically invisible. He’s just some lonely asshole who comes out of nowhere and takes a room for five days.“

  “Yup. You’ve got it,“ Fred replied. “Can we leave now?“

  “So far, so good,“ Vernon said sarcastically. “Then he hires a prostitute, fucks her, then strangles her with her panty hose, and dumps her body into the river. Christ on a cross, you guys are blind!“

  “Com’on. Let’s get the fuck out of here,“ Fred said. “Tell you what—I’ll buy the first round at Pedro’s.“

  “Yeah—yeah,“ Jack said, still moving back and forth across the floor. “It’s just that I...I can’t shake this weird feeling...“ His voice dropped as he looked around the room, his eyes darting from one dark corner to another.

  Vernon’s anger spiked. Throughout his career as a psychic detective, he’d had to deal with plenty of skepticism and outright hostility, but these two men were beyond belief, ignoring him as though he wasn’t even there. Vernon started toward them just as they turned to leave. He held up his hand to signal for them to stop.

  “Yeah,“ Vernon said, more mildly as he let his hand drop to his side. “Maybe it’d be better if the two of you waited down in the lobby. Give me ten minutes here alone, and I’ll tell you all you need to know—the killer’s name, address, even his Social Security number. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll even get an idea where he went from here.“

  “Shut that door, will you?“ Fred said, nodding in the direction of the closet.

  Frowning deeply, Vernon glanced over his shoulder at the closet door. He hadn’t touched it, and he could clearly see that the closet door was still shut tightly. He hadn’t had to open it to know that’s where the killer had stuffed Estelle’s body.

  “The closet door’s already closed,“ Vernon said with exasperation. He wondered if Fred was having trouble seeing in the dimly-lit room. As if to prove his point, he reached out for the doorknob. He grunted with surprise when his hand passed right through the tarnished brass doorknob as if it didn’t even exist.

  “What the fuck?“

  The illusion was so powerful that, for a moment, he couldn’t tell which was real and which wasn’t, his hand or the doorknob.

  “Okay...okay, I get it,“ Vernon said, realizing at last that he was seeing a psychic impression of the door as it had been when the killer left Estelle’s body there. “You had the door removed for evidence, right? Taken to the lab to check it for fingerprints and blood stains?“ He glanced around the room again, wondering what else these two lame-brained detectives couldn’t see. Surely, the bed and the bureau were still there, and the blood stains on the wall and floor, but what else might not even be real, apparent only to his inward-turning eye?

  Maybe that’s why he wasn’t getting a clearer impression of the killer. There was too much psychic turbulence in the room. It frustrated him that he could only receive distinct impressions of what Estelle had experienced as she died. He could hear her weakening grunts of resistance, the grating squeak of the old bedsprings as the man pressed her down and twis
ted the panty hose tighter and tighter around her throat. Her could feel the icy terror in her mind as her pulse sped up, and spinning lights flashed like meteors across her retina. He could hear her dwindling internal scream as she was pulled down...down...down into the maw of the eternal black gulf.

  But he could feel nothing of what the killer had thought and felt as he viciously twisted the life out of Estelle. Maybe because that’s what the killer had felt—a cold, absolute, limitless nothing!

  Fred opened the door to leave. Jack started after him, but as he passed by Vernon, he stopped short. Slapping his hands against his upper arms and rubbing them vigorously, he shivered. His teeth made a little chattering sound.

  “Jesus,“ he muttered, his eyes widening with fear. “That’s so weird.“

  “Huh?“

  “Just now. Right here in the middle of the room,“ Jack said, shivering again. “There’s this—like, cold spot right here.“

  “Yeah...sure,“ Fred said as he stepped out into the hallway. He moved out of sight but then stuck his head back into the room when his partner didn’t follow. “You comin’ or not?“

  “Yeah,“ Jack finally said. He shook his head as though just waking up. “It just feels so...strange.“

  “There’s nothing strange about it!“ Vernon yelled in exasperation. “There was a murder here! A young woman was killed! The psychic residue is as thick as morning fog. You can’t touch it or carry it down to the crime lab to analyze, but it’s here just as surely as you and I are here!“

  “Come on, man,“ Fred said impatiently. “I can already taste how good that first beer’s gonna go down.“

  Before Jack took a single step, the hallway echoed with the sound of the elevator door rattling open. Out in the hallway, Fred called out a greeting to Lieutenant Fisher, and then both men entered the room.

  “Well, I guess you boys can take a break on this one,“ Fisher said, smiling widely. “The fingerprints checked out. We’ve got a positive ID on the stiff.“

  “And her name’s Estelle Phillips, right?“ Vernon asked edgily.

  “No shit,“ Fred said, casting a smile at his partner as he slapped his fist into his open hand.

  “Yup,“ Fisher continued. “The case is clearly a suicide and is now officially closed.“

  “What the fuck?“ Vernon shouted when Fisher didn’t even glance at him. He was about to say more, but just then pulsating warmth washed over his shoulders from behind. At first he thought the curtain was still open, and sunlight was pouring into the room. Then he realized that he was standing with his back to the bed, not the window. Before he could turn and look, the heat rose rapidly until it was scorching the back of his neck. In frustrating slow-motion, he turned and saw that the circle of yellow light had returned. It pulsated as it hovered at eye-level, just above the bed.

  “What the—“ he muttered, staring wide-eyed as the circle gradually expanded. The temperature in the room was rising rapidly. Before long, Vernon’s face was bathed with sweat. As the circle of light expanded, it blocked his view of the bed and the splotches of blood and flesh on the wall.

  “Yeah,“ Fisher said, nodding casually. He put his finger under his collar and tie, pulling to loosen it a bit. “You may have even heard of him.“

  Vernon was listening to them, but their voices sounded extraordinarily far away. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the steadily expanding circle of yellow light. The center started to change subtly. At its core, the light seethed with ripples of deeper reds and oranges, like raging thunderheads under lit by a fiery sunset. The circle of light suddenly telescoped backward, and within seconds, the hotel room dissolved into a long, bright tunnel. Waves of vertigo swept through Vernon. Fisher’s voice was still ringing in his ears, but it seemed to be coming from miles away, warbling with a curious Doppler effect.

  “Actually, he was quite famous in his own right,“ Fisher’s distant voice continued. “His name was Philip Vernon.“

  “Oh yeah, sure,“ one of the other detectives said. Vernon could no longer distinguish who was speaking because the voices were so distorted. “He was that guy who billed himself as a...a—what do you call ’em?“

  “Psychic detective,“ another voice said, warbling wildly up and down. “He went around the country using his supposed psychic abilities to help police solve crimes. But hold onto your ass. There’s more.“

  The conversation barely penetrated the cresting waves of total terror that were sweeping through Vernon. The blazing tunnel of light continued to stretch away from him, disappearing into a fiery core that seemed to be sucking him into it. Mounding folds of glowing red and orange condensed into shapes that looked like gnarled hands that reached out of the maelstrom of light.

  “Yeah—“ a faint voice, even further away, said. “Earlier this afternoon, we got a call at the station. Some kids playing down by the river found the body of a woman washed up on shore. She had a couple of priors, so it was pretty easy to get a make on her. Name was Estelle Phillips. A hooker. But guess who’s wallet was tangled up in the bunch of clothes we found a couple of hundred yards upstream?“

  “No shit.“

  “Uh-huh. Philip Vernon. We did a quick lab check on the skin we found under her fingernails, and it looks like a pretty good match with Vernon’s. She must’ve put up quite a struggle. What it looks like to me is, after he dumped her into the river, he must’ve realized his wallet was missing and might turn up in the wrong place, so he came back here and blew his brains out, splattering them all over the wall.“

  Vernon wanted to cry out, wanted to scream that it wasn’t him, but the steadily rising roar of flames that belched out of the tunnel of light surrounded him and smothered his thoughts and words. Gigantic hands clawed at him, catching him by the shoulders and pulling him forward. He tried to shake loose, but the pull was inexorable … irresistible. He looked down at his feet and stared in horror as they slid helplessly across the hotel room floor. Terror as bright as chrome filled his mind when he realized that his body was dissolving, being crushed inward by the reaching hands as it was consumed by the raging inferno.

  Nothing could stop his rising panic and pain. It increased in a wild crescendo until that distant voice came once again. It was no more than a hissing whisper from the edge of reality.

  “So once we get more detailed lab work done, I’d say it’s pretty much an open and shut case of murder/suicide, don’t cha think?“

  No! Vernon’s mind screamed, whining higher and higher. I’m not dead! I can’t be dead! I can’t be!

  A monstrous roar from the throat of the tunnel blended into guttural laughter that filled Vernon’s mind. He could feel himself dissolving into the blazing lances of flame, and still the bestial laughter rose louder and louder until it and his pain blended together, and they were all he knew.

  (Author’s note: Please note the copyright date on this story...just so you don’t think I “borrowed“ the idea from a rather recent famous movie with a similar denouement.)

  The Compost Heap

  Merit Parker finished the job about an hour after sunset, and now that it was done, he was sitting on his back porch steps, beer in hand, congratulating himself for getting it done so fast and with only a small amount of real mess to clean up. His face and hands were smeared with mucky black earth, but he didn’t mind at all. He actually reveled in it. Just as soon as he finished his beer and took another five or ten minutes to enjoy the peace and quiet of the night, he’d go upstairs and take a shower.

  Yes-sir-ee bobca, he thought. Peace and fucking quiet.

  Merit had been surprised by how much blood there had been in the old girl, but then again, he thought with a chuckle, he shouldn’t have been too surprised. What with all those rolls of blubber and pulpy muscle, there probably should have been gallons more. It was a good thing he had caught her outside; otherwise, there would have been too much of a mess in the house to clean up. These days, with all that modern detective stuff cops have, even in a small town l
ike Hilton, Maine, he figured they would have eventually found some minute trace of her he would have missed cleaning up. No, catching her off guard outside by the garden where he could easily turn in the topsoil to bury the spilled blood had been a pure stroke of fortune.

  The peace and quiet. Sweet Lord Jesus in Heaven. This farm hadn’t known quiet like this since—hell, since before he married the bitch back in ’67.

  As he listened to the soft strains of a whippoorwill up on Watcher’s Mountain, Merit wondered why the Christ he had waited so damned long to do it. Certainly over the thirty-plus years of their marriage she had provoked him plenty, but there had never been any one thing that triggered it, put him over the edge. Living with Lydia had simply become a constant, irritating strain on his nerves. When he did snap and finally did something about it, he hadn’t acted out of anger or impulsiveness. He had planned it all quite carefully, biding his time, and he had dispatched Lydia with all the cool calculation of a sophisticated killer from some slick spy novel. He didn’t act at all like a man who had been pushed far beyond his limits. What it all boiled down to was, he had simply become numbed to the constant, daily irritation of living with her, and he had finally done something about it.

  The stroke of inspiration, the one part of the whole thing he hadn’t counted on, was cutting her up into little pieces and burying her beneath the compost heap out behind the barn. That sucker generated so much heat it actually steamed in the winter. Why, back in the seventies, some of those hippies who lived in one of those communes over on the other side of Watcher’s Mountain had actually run their water pipes under their compost heap to get hot water. Merit suspected that would have gotten it to about piss warm, but now he laughed with glee when he considered how in the coming months, the worms and grubs and heat of rotting vegetation would reduce Lydia’s body, big as it was, into a mound of nice, rich, black, moldy mulch. It would take—what? He wasn’t sure. Maybe a couple of weeks; certainly no more than a month or two.