by John Moralee
I hoped so, but so far there were no signs. But then, as time approached two in the morning, I sensed a change in the atmosphere – an electricity of expectation, building and building.
There was a figure in the mist.
“Billy?” we gasped.
No, it was too big. The disappointment hit me like a brick. It was an old man in a heavy sheepskin coat. As he stepped forward, supporting his body with a walking stick, I recognised Angus Seamore. He greeted us merrily, quite unaware that in our time he was dead.
“Angus? What are you doing here?”
“Looking for Monty. He’s a wee black lamb, he’s gone missing. Have you seen him?”
“No,” I said, harshly. I didn’t want Angus to ruin the chance that Billy would appear. I liked the old man, but right then, I was worried his presence would interfere with whatever magic was in the air.
“Right you are,” Angus said. Whistling, he merged with the mist. A few seconds later I glimpsed him down in the valley – an impossible distance to travel in that time. He’d found Monty. “Angus is caught in this time thing, too. I bet he doesn’t even know he’s dead.”
“Should we tell him?”
“No,” I said.
“God, I wish this made sense.”
I felt a tugging of my sleeve.
“Daddy, can we go home?”
*
We all went back to the farmhouse. We ate a breakfast of toasted waffles and syrup - Billy’s favourite. We were so pleased to have him back for the third time it was as if we too had been reborn. Billy acted as if it was just an ordinary day, though he asked why Mummy and Daddy were smiling so much. We didn’t dare risk losing him again, so we stayed in and near the farmhouse that day, treating him to ice cream and Mars Bars. Then Abby and I took turns playing games until Billy was so played-out he was ready for bed. After tucking him under the sheets, we both sat on the bed and read him Mr Men stories, enjoying his delighted, wondrous expressions. He fell asleep happy, looking so peaceful. We kissed him goodnight and went downstairs, feeling complete.
“What do we do now?” Abby asked. “Billy’s alive right now, but what if he dies again?”
“We just have to be careful, I guess.”
Over the dark winter months that followed we gradually got back to living as if he had never died. Abby completed her thesis and I got a large contract that would give us a steady income for years. But we were afraid that if we took Billy away from the farmhouse everything would revert to how it had been. (He only had to wander a few hundred metres from home and he started complaining about his stomach, but improved one hundred per cent once he returned.) We could not risk taking him far beyond the bounds of the farmhouse.
Billy knew there was something wrong with him, that he could never leave the farmhouse. Ever.
Abby wanted to tell her parents about Billy, but I convinced her it wasn’t a good idea until we understood if his reappearance was permanent. “Imagine the situation if the press got wind of a story like this, huh? No, we can’t tell anyone until we understand it.”
“But Billy can’t stay here forever without friends and school and all the normal things a kid his age needs to be happy. He gets bored playing on his own. He feels trapped. He wants to know why he can’t go to school, thinks it’s his fault. Soon this place will be like a prison, and he’ll blame us.”
It was true. There had to be a way of making Billy’s reappearance permanent. Keeping him alive like this was heartbreaking, but at least he was alive. But then one day Billy ran off to play by himself. I was on my computer at the time and Abby was in the town, buying groceries. I heard his scream too late. When I ran outside, I followed his muddy footprints down the road, where they stopped suddenly, as though he had vanished completely. He was gone again. But this time, when we went up to the hill late that night, Billy did not appear. He did not appear the night after that – or the ones after that. He was dead again.
*
During the months of Billy’s confinement, I had performed some experiments on the valley. I used a two dozen identical watches, which I placed in locations around our home. There seemed to be no effect on the watches most of the time, but at certain times of day, usually in the early morning, the watches would be lose their synchronisation. Some would be hours ahead; some would be hours behind. By charting the changes on a map, I was able to trace the effect. There was a definite pattern, centred on the hill where I had first encountered Billy. That was the focal point. When I threw a tennis ball over the hill, I saw it stop in mid-air and return back to me.
“It’s like a geyser of time,” I explained to Abby. “It’s not always there, but when it happens, time can run backwards or forwards within its influence. You wouldn’t be aware of it if you were inside the effect. Billy is and was alive in another time – the time he was at the hill when the geyser erupted. The farmhouse seems to be a place where the time is running normally. But he can’t physically exist outside the valley without snapping back into the events that already happened. He’s only alive near the farmhouse. He may still be alive in another pocket of time. The faintest echo of his living self.”
“So he’s trapped here forever?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see why he can’t be brought out of the time-effect alive. It must be something to do with paradoxes – he can’t be alive and dead at the same time. There has to be some reason why it doesn’t work, though. I’ve worked out the phenomenon reaches a peak in two days time. Time at its centre will be running backwards very fast – but only for a few minutes. Then the geyser will be barely active for years and years. I have an idea, Abby. I hope you won’t object, but I want to dig up Billy’s body. I want to bring it home.”
*
With the shovel on the passenger seat, Abby and I left the farmhouse with heart beating a staccato rhythm. The time-geyser would be active that night between 2.04 and 2.07 – then our chance would be over. Billy’s grave was in a quiet part of the cemetery, far from the church and the prying eyes of witnesses. I had once placed a wreath on the headstone and read the epitaph, over and over.
WILLIAM ROBERT RAMSEY
1993 - 1997
LOVED AND LOST
BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN
*
Feeling like Burke and Hare, the pulse in my forehead throbbing, I dug deep into the soil, working feverishly to make a hole in the frozen soil. Abby watched out for the sexton and anyone else who might object to what we were doing. Deeper down the soil was moist and crawling with worms and beetles, crumbling from the sides practically as fast as I piled it up. I worked for three hours, past the point when my arms and back were red raw with pain. Smeared with dirt from head to foot, I hit wood as the light was fading from the sky. It had taken longer than I expected – far too long. The coffin was child-sized - four feet of solid oak, caked with earth. As I hauled it out, I noted it was heavier than I expected, as if rooted to the ground, but I managed. Abby could not look at it.
I carried the coffin to the Land Rover. I slid the coffin onto the back seats. I wanted to check its contents, to see if Billy was inside and somehow breathing. But I knew if I did look - if I saw a decayed body, bloated by expanded gases and congealing juices - there would be no way I’d have the energy to continue.
“We’d better hurry up,” Abby said.
The engine started with a growl of disapproval.
I drove like a mad man, Abby urging me on.
It was almost two already
Cornering too fast, the coffin slid off the back seats and wedged in the leg space. There was an awful smell, a death smell escaping from it. Keep you eyes on the road, I thought. Don’t think. Do. But –
What if we were too late?
We had ten miles to go.
I kept driving. My watch read two when I could see the dark farmhouse ahead. I drove up the hill towards the site where the effect would be strongest as the seconds ticked by. It was a minute past two when I braked near the top. I parked and Abby opened the door for me
. I carried the coffin to the top of the hill. One minute left. I placed it in the exact location where the effect would be strongest, hoping and praying it would work. Then I ran down the hill, getting in the Land Rover before we were caught in the time-geyser. We drove down to the farmhouse. The mist encroached upon the hill and everything was still.
It was now 2.04.
We waited three minutes.
We checked the house for Billy.
He was not there. He had vanished.
Had it gone wrong?
Nervously, we went back up the hill on foot.
I could see the coffin.
We approached it.
“Look in it,” Abby whispered. She stood behind me as I slid off the lid. We both stared into the coffin at the little body within.
Billy was inside. He sat up, bewildered. He was fit. He was well. He was whole again.
He gave us a big, big smile.
Sleeping in the Earth
Patrick Bane shuffled out the rear of the prison truck bound by handcuffs chained to leg irons. He was wearing the bright-orange clothes he wore in prison. He had not shaved today, or yesterday, and his chin looked dark and rough. He was smiling, his teeth shining in the cold light of morning. His long hair – hair that had not been cut in fifteen years – bristled in the wind coming down from the mountains. He made a joke about it to the six guards, but nobody responded. They were too busy looking around the unfamiliar area, into the deep woods beside the road, their Ithaca 12-gauge shotguns held down but ready.
I sat at the wheel of my Chevrolet Neon, watching them. I was half-expecting the media to show up, but so far things were going as planned. Personally, I didn’t think releasing a convicted serial killer so he could locate where the bodies were buried was any sort of plan. That was why I’d volunteered to act as a backup to the search team. When I’d caught Bane in 1985, I’d certainly never thought something like this would happen. Sure, he was going back to jail, but the whole deal made my skin crawl. I felt as though it was my responsibility to ensure nothing went wrong. I had no doubt Bane would try escaping if the opportunity presented itself. He wasn’t doing this as a favour for the victims’ families - that was for certain. He would try something … and I’d be waiting.
I touched my .44 automatic for luck, then opened my car door. My partner, Frank Herschel, got out his side. We both slammed our doors at the same time, walking towards the group. Frank offered a cigarette. I accepted.
“Nervous?” I asked.
“Like I’m visiting the dentist for an exploratory.”
*
Two guards were taking spades out of the truck. I saw Bane staring at me. He was grinning. “Don’t you trust my word, Ben? Should I turn around so you can shoot me in the back?”
I ignored him. I wasn’t going to rise to the bait.
“This is a big mistake,” Frank muttered.
“I agree.”
“So why is he being let out?”
“It’s election year. The governor needs the bodies found just as much as the families. He was the DA who put Bane away, remember?”
“No,” Frank said. “I was only ten in 1985. You keep forgetting I’m not as old as you. I’ll still be in my twenties when you retire, buddy. I don’t know a thing about what he did. Tell me.”
“It was a big story. During the summer of 1984, Bane kidnapped and murdered at least six teenage girls. I caught him because I staked out the grave of his first victim, Victoria Smith. He went there on the anniversary of her death. He was still carrying the murder weapon, a knife he’d brought back from Vietnam. There was blood from several people on the blade. More evidence of the murders was found in his cellar – gruesome mementoes of the killings. But we never found the bodies, just pieces of the heads, like ears and noses …”
I whispered as we walked behind the search team up a trail into the woods. Two men flanked Bane, two went ahead, two stood behind. Wisely, they had not undone the leg irons, as Bane requested. Nobody was that naïve. He had to stoop and shuffle.
As he directed the search team along the paths, Bane kept looking back, grinning.
I was highly tempted just to blow his brains out. I had my .44 out, down by my side. The safety was switched off. I was growing more certain he was just leading us nowhere, hoping for a break to escape. The woods offered so many hiding places for a man like Bane. A trapper and Vietnam veteran, he knew the woods better than anyone. I watched Bane and the pine trees, constantly scanning for any signs of trouble. Bane called back to me, “Hey, Ben, you’re not going to join my fan club?”
“I’m happy where I am.”
“Scared I’ll bite you or something?”
“Tell me something, Patrick.”
“What?”
“How’s prison?”
He stopped talking to me after that.
“Touchy,” Frank said. “He’s not too friendly, is he? I liked what he said about my being a bodyguard, though. I see myself as a tough version of Kevin Costner. Maybe he’s not such a bad psychopathic cannibal serial killer after all.”
“Yeah. He’s up for the Nobel Peace Prize. Right after Saddam Hussein.”
“How far is it?” the leader of the search team asked Bane. His name was Roach.
“About another five minutes at this pace. Maybe if you undid my feet I could move faster?”
“Nice try. Where is it?”
“I’ll recognise where when I see it.”
“Yeah, right,” I said to Frank. Frank gritted his teeth.
Bane continued shuffling up the trail.
Frank was bored. “So. What happened after you caught him?”
“At his trial he tried to get off by using some of the prosecution witnesses in his defence. Two out of the eleven witnesses who’d seen him kidnapping the girls said he was much taller. It was an explainable discrepancy – they only saw him for a few seconds from their moving vehicles, which makes it hard to estimate someone’s height. But he wanted to make the jury wonder if there was the slightest doubt.”
“It didn’t work,” Frank said.
“No. It wasn’t enough for reasonable doubt, not with the forensic evidence and the other witnesses. Next, his lawyer tried to make the jury believe I set up Bane for everything, including the bodies in his house. It was a ludicrous defence thrown together at the last minute. The jury voted unanimously for his conviction. He was sentence to death. He still claimed absolute innocent until last month, when his fourth appeal failed to even reach the court. Suddenly, he changed his mind. Not only did he admit his guilt, but he confessed to three other unsolved murders. He offered the governor the location of the nine bodies in exchange for a life sentence. Of course, Bane said he would have to look for the site himself because after fifteen years he couldn’t recall the place without being there.”
“I don’t like this, Ben. Have you seen that movie Seven? There’s this bit when the bad guy, Kevin Spacey, takes the cops on a wild goose chase ending with –”
“Yeah, I saw it. Bane’s leading us into a trap. That’s how it feels.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“Be prepared for anything. For all we know he could have hired one of the guards to free him.”
“Maybe he hired you, Ben. Or maybe he hired me …”
I grinned at him. I had thought of that. That was why I’d done a background check on my new partner. Everything he’d told me checked out. He was the third son of a large Catholic family. He was married to his childhood sweetheart, Caitlin. They had two kids, aged one and three. I had been to his house a couple of times to see them.
“Uh-oh,” Frank said. “Where are they going now?”
The entourage had left the official trail and was going up a grassy path. Bane led the team between some large pines. I could hear the sound of running water. It made me want to find a bathroom. But I continued. Frank and I maintained a vigil on the group.
They reached a glade, where Bane stopped. He made a big deal out of
sniffing the air and looking around. “This is it.”
Roach said, “You buried them in the open?”
“I tried digging in the woods, but I hit iron-hard roots every time. You need a lot of space for a mass grave. Besides, I did it at night with the full moon above – this was the only place I could see what I was doing without a flashlight. I knew the grass would grow over it, but I wasn’t guaranteed that in the woods.”
“Where exactly?”
“Now, that’s the question. Where exactly?” Bane stepped forward and pointed to a mound near the far edge of the glade. “There. I remember now.”
It did look as though the grass was longer.
Grass grew longer if the ground under it was deeper.
Maybe it was the right place.
The men with spades rounded on the location, treading carefully. I could appreciate their caution. It could have been booby trapped with a mine, knowing Bane.
But nothing happened to them.
“Should we dig, sir?” one asked his boss, who was standing beside Bane.
“Be careful. Bane, if there’s anything in there …”
“Boy, you are paranoid, Roach. I’ll dig if you like.”
“No,” Roach said sharply. “You stay cuffed at all times. That’s how the governor wants it.”
Bane shrugged.
The two men probed the ground, then sunk their spades into the earth. They were soon making black heaps around a shallow pit.
“Deeper,” Bade said.
“How much?”
“Deeper.”
I looked at Frank. He shook his head.
“There’s nothing here!” a man protested.
“It’s deeper,” Bane said. “I worked on it for hours. Wait a second – maybe it’s to the right over there –”
He had his guards looking right just as he jumped left. I yelled out a warning, bringing my gun up. Bane landed on something that caved in. He fell down a concealed hole, leaving the guards grabbing the air, looking confused.
