“When who died?”
He paused, stilling his nerves. Then, “Forget it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t know what I’m saying. A dizzy spell.”
He pushed himself up, tried to gather his strength, to gain some equilibrium.
“You got a problem?” growled Doogan.
“I do, as a matter of fact,” Salinger said. “This isn’t a crime scene.” He gestured at the corpse. “And that’s not a job for the police.”
“Not the cops’ job? It’s an unexplained dead body, ain’t it? Who else should deal with it?”
“An archeologist maybe.”
Doogan’s weather-beaten face scrunched up even more than normal. “You’re bullshitting me, right?”
For a moment Salinger said nothing, staring blankly into Doogan’s eyes.
“Look,” he said finally, forcing a patient tone to cover his annoyance, “It’s obvious this is a very old corpse. That’s all I’m saying.”
Wal sneered. “So, we shoulda just ignored it then?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“What’s ya beef then?” growled Wal.
Salinger directed his attention to Doogan. “Can I speak to you, Sam … alone?”
Doogan obviously didn’t like the idea, but shrugged and followed Salinger away from the others. When they were far enough out of earshot, Salinger stared Doogan in the eyes for a few moments. Doogan shifted uneasily.
“Well?” he muttered.
Salinger sighed. “You do realize this whole thing is as suspicious as hell, right?”
“What’d you—?”
“You know what I mean. I’m surprised you expect me to buy it.”
“What’s ya problem, mate?”
“For a start, tell me this: How did you bastards happen to stumble on this desiccated corpse way out here in the middle of nowhere? Having a little stroll through the desert, were you? On a workday?”
“We were heading back to town … for supplies… .”
“And saw it from the highway even though it’s in a hole overshadowed by a rock at least a kilometer away? Need I point out a dozen other unlikely aspects to this … whatever it is?”
Doogan sighed. “Look, mate—” He glanced toward his underlings, “—let’s just say it’s dumb chance, eh? Seriously, getting to the truth’d be a pain in the arse. Not ’cause there’s anything illegal goin’ on. Just ’cause it’d be bloody inconvenient.”
“Inconvenient?”
“Yeah. Hypothetically speaking.”
“Well, hypothetically, how about you come clean, Sam, and tell me all about the inconveniences.”
Doogan sighed, finally raising his head to look at Salinger with an air of resignation.
“We might’ve found the bloody thing in a new part of the mine, in a pocket opened up by the ’quake. You’re right, it’s real old. It couldn’ta been put there any time in the past coupla hundred years ’cause the space was completely sealed off ’til we came along. But look at it! It might be pretty wasted and dried out, but there’s still some meat on its bones. How the fuck could it be there, in a hole in the ground that no one’s seen since before us white bastards turned up to pinch this land off the natives?”
“You tell me.”
“I can’t. But we knew straightaway there was something weird about it. It freaked a lot of the men out. Even the local Abos wanted nothin’ to do with it. Wasn’t an ancestor of theirs or anythin’, so they wanted it off their land. And at any rate turning the mine into a huntin’ ground for feral academics woulda meant suspending current operations—and we can’t bloody afford to do that. The company’s already close to bankruptcy, Jimbo, what with the Greenie’s war on coal and all that eco-shit. And… .”
His diatribe morphed into a political rant. Salinger listened patiently until he got bored with it, then gestured for Doogan to stop.
“Yeah, yeah, I get your point, Sam.” Doogan adopted an air of puppy-dog misery. “You really didn’t think this through though, did you?” Salinger continued. “You hypothetically dump the body out here where it’s unlikely to have been unearthed and then you tell me you stumbled across it. Why? Maybe because you reckon I’m just a dumb cop and won’t notice the illogic of it all?”
“Mate, I just—”
“Why did you even call me? If you’d dumped it, covered it over, who would’ve known?”
“Thought it might be … you know … important. Seemed like the right thing to do.” His face adopted an expression of confusion. “Shit, I don’t know. I just felt … I had to. The others weren’t keen but… .” He tapered off. Then: “There’s something I should tell you, something … about this thing.”
“Oh?”
“It’s crazy, but … since we found it, everyone’s been antsy. Weird shit has been happening—”
“Weird shit?”
“Reports of … the men seeing … you know… .”
“What?”
“Ghosts or somethin’.”
“Really?”
“And voices … well, one voice… .”
“Saying what?”
“No one could tell. But Frank Napper … remember him? He went nuts and tried to kill himself. Kept yelling he couldn’t stand being alone anymore. That the shadows had told him he’d be better off dead.”
Salinger stared at him in amazement.
Doogan looked embarrassed. “I want to get rid of it, okay, but I couldn’t just toss it.”
“Why?”
“It wouldn’t let me.”
“Wouldn’t let you? The corpse wouldn’t let you? Are you kidding me?”
Doogan shrugged.
“This sounds like complete bullshit.”
“Yeah? Well, think what ya bloody like. What’re ya gonna do? Arrest us?”
Salinger sighed. “Sounds like you’re all going nuts. Just clean up the site and get rid of your own presence here. I’m tired of this crap. I’ll take some pictures of the location, because I’m supposed to. You can help me put the bloody thing in the jeep. I’ll take it back with me and—”
“We really can’t have the mine turned into an archeological dig, Jim. It’d be the last straw. That’s fair dinkum. I swear there was nothin’ else of interest in the grotto where we found the bloody thing. Nothin’.”
Salinger gestured for silence. “I’ll make up some shit about a tourist who stumbled onto the body while they were wandering around looking for somewhere to piss.”
“But your boss’ll want to interview someone… .”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll deal with it. Okay?”
Doogan looked doubtful.
“Okay?” Salinger growled insistently.
Doogan nodded.
As he drove back to town, Salinger found himself becoming more uncertain than ever about this whole business. What a load of shit! And it was one hell of a drive, too. The heat played games with his skull, making him feel light-headed, and disturbingly dizzy. About a half-hour into it, memories of Leslie and Nataly and the horrendous aftermath of the accident that took them from him began leaking back into his consciousness. He remembered how he’d struggled with his feelings of loss and guilt at the time, and began to relive the sorrow that had nearly driven him to suicide. Sudden awareness of just how lost and isolated he still felt after all these years caused him to lose focus, and he only snapped out of it when he found himself veering off the road toward a dry riverbed. He slammed on the brakes at the last moment and sat clutching the steering wheel until his fingers ached. He swore at the car, at fate, at the God that had thrown his ’copter into an irresistible dive … but mostly at himself.
Einn Saman, Myrkvar Grímur.
These words, sounding like the tail end of a failing radio broadcast, snapped him out of his melancholic paralysis. Strange, unfamiliar words they were, yet seeming to resonate with his thoughts. He glanced up compulsively. Something was in the rearview mirror. A grim, skeletal shadow stared out at him. A face.
“Who the hell—
?”
He turned, but there was no one behind him. All he could see was the body bag containing the long-dead corpse that had drawn him out here in the first place.
A shiver ran through his muscles. He breathed out, and in again, with calm determination. He had to keep himself together. Had to. This was his job. And he couldn’t let this particular case, though undoubtedly bizarre, propel him into a state of self-pitying and superstitious delusion. Best it was just forgotten. Doogan’s bullshit was getting to him.
But the feeling that something was happening didn’t go away. The shadow-face in the mirror had no doubt been his own, but he’d for sure heard the words. From the radio maybe? He checked it, but it was definitely off. He tried to repeat the words then, and even though they were foreign and meaningless he found he could remember them. Einn Saman, Myrkvar Grímur. How could he possibly recite that? His memory wasn’t good enough to recall a nonsensical sentence he’d heard once—and not very clearly—when he couldn’t even remember his own address half the time. Maybe he’d merely dreamed he heard the words and, in hindsight, any sequence of sounds would have been recalled as accurate.
“Bugger it!” he muttered and gave up, dismissing the whole episode as a dream.
It was late afternoon by the time he got back to the station. As luck would have it, the only person in attendance was Constable Hurley, who was on front desk duty. The way she stared at her computer, with a sort of sardonic intensity, suggested it was Facebook that was keeping her busy.
“Hey, Flo,” Salinger said.
She glanced up. “You took your time.” She grinned. “A three-beer problem was it, eh?”
“Just a body,” he said.
“Anyone I know?”
“Doubt it. It’s old and way past its use-by date.”
“Older than you?”
“Very funny.” He gestured toward the back. “Is the cold room open?”
“It will be if you use a key.” She tossed it to him.
“Thanks.”
“Shouldn’t you have left the victim where it was and called for the ME?”
“It’s very old, Flo. Ancient. Pretty much just skin and bone. Been in the ground for quite a while. Coughed up by the quake last week, I’d say. I took site pics.” He paused. “Besides, it was way out in the middle of nowhere.”
Hurley looked doubtful. “The Chief won’t be happy.”
“Is he around?”
“Took the arvo off. Something about his son and prepping for a Halloween party.”
“Halloween?”
“Yeah. You know, trick-or-treat. It’s tonight. The 31st. Haven’t you been paying attention?”
“Do the kids still do that shit these days?”
“Sure. Kids like getting free sugar highs. Not as obsessively as in the States, but some of the shops hereabouts’ve been pushing it. Business, you know?”
Salinger huffed. “Is Jen still around?”
“She’s staying over.”
“Well, let her know there’s a corpse waiting for her, please?” Jen was the itinerant pathologist and medical examiner. She’d been called in to deal with the forensic aftermath of a multi-vehicle incident that had taken place a bit further north the day before. “Tell her it’s a Halloween treat from me,” he added. “She should take a look.”
“I don’t think she’s due back in ’til later tonight.”
“No hurry. The dead bloke’s not going anywhere. Been lying around since colonial times by the look of him.”
“Really?”
“Something like that. I’d like her opinion at any rate. The whole thing’s pretty weird. Meanwhile, I’m going home. I’ll talk to her in the morning.”
Flo grinned mischievously. “Okay, but you really should do the paperwork first.”
“It can wait,” he growled, and headed for the door.
By the time he’d deposited the corpse in a fridge-drawer in their on-site morgue, such as it was, dusk was starting to settle in. Salinger’s head felt like it was about to explode. As a result, he drove through town slowly and carefully, noticing the general lack of Halloween pumpkins, dancing plastic skeletons, and other decorations so prominent in seasonal American horror flicks. As he said, the tradition hadn’t really caught on here—probably because it wasn’t the depth of winter. One house, just one, had a skull-shaped candleholder flickering in its front window. The Dahlman house. Dahlman was from Scandinavia or one of those places, wasn’t he?
Only once did Salinger pass a hopeful group of kids, most of them done up like Spider-Man or fairy princesses. The arachnid superheroes in particular looked rather uncomfortable in their all-encompassing costumes. The temperature was too extreme, even as the sun headed for the horizon.
A few kids had given themselves over more thoroughly, if unknowingly, to the spirit of the day and were masquerading as zombies or skeletons or ghosts—and that’s really what Halloween was about, wasn’t it? All Hallows’ Eve, Samhain, Day of the Dead: the night when the deceased, good and bad, returned to walk the Earth, demanding appeasement or atonement, before being sent back into oblivion. Manifesting as the walking dead, hockey-masked killers, spooky clowns—spirits that returned to plague humanity year after year—they knock on your door and demand recognition (in the form of treats) to send them on their way.
That’s why Salinger hated it. Mortality was, had never been, something he wanted to be reminded of. Not right now, and not so close to the anniversary of the day his family had been taken from him—no, don’t think about that! He wouldn’t go there. He suppressed the thought, refusing to ponder on it further.
One of the “zombies” waved at him. Salinger pretended not to notice. At least these particular restless spirits were accompanied by parental guardians who would stop them from grabbing the souls of ungenerous residents and hopefully limit the noise. As a cop, he approved of that. As himself, too. With a bit of luck, none of them would get to his part of town before darkness descended—and his personal demons began screaming even more loudly in his head.
His road, which lacked streetlights and was unsealed, remained typically devoid of activity, showing no sign of trick-or-treaters. Thanking whatever deity was responsible for that, Salinger parked the Rover on the tire-worn grass next to the house. As he climbed out and slammed the car door, he sensed a movement behind him, and glanced around, reacting with a twinge of uncertainty, a touch of dread.
But it was only Stan Grundy from the dilapidated graveyard of dead cars that formed a peripheral eyesore at the far end of the street. He didn’t acknowledge Salinger’s presence, so Salinger gratefully reciprocated the man’s lack of neighborly camaraderie by turning away and trudging toward his own front door.
Once inside, he fetched a beer from the fridge, and took a few desperate swigs to wash down some paracetamol tablets he’d scrounged from his medicine cabinet. Afterwards, he sat in the gloomy lounge, curtains drawn, and tried to forget the day’s craziness. He needed to clear his mind of both Doogan’s nonsense and the painful memories that were still knocking against the back of his skull.
The first was easy enough, the second less so. At some point his phone rang, several times perhaps, but he ignored it. Gradually consciousness drifted away along with the few threads of sunlight leaking in through gaps in his curtains.
Persistent banging on the door dragged him awake again. For how long he’d been asleep, he didn’t know. He was sitting in almost complete darkness now, but though his headache had faded, he still felt numb and disorientated. Whoever was at the door knocked again.
Should he get up? Could be important. But he really didn’t want to. A bleak weariness of spirit drained him of any real motivation. Anyway, maybe it was those damn Halloween kids. “Piss off!” he muttered beneath his breath.
“Jim, are you in there?” called a female voice through the wood and frosted-glass of the door. For a moment, his pulses raced.
“Leslie?” he whispered. The voice sounded like it could have been hi
s wife’s.
“Jim?”
A rush of shock and desire convinced him it was her. Ghost or living victim of misidentification, he didn’t care. He pushed himself up and stumbled toward the door.
“Jim?” said the voice once more.
“I’m here, Les,” he yelled. “Hang on! I’m here!”
He flung open the door, and there she was—Leslie. Looking just as she looked in what was left of his visual memories of her. Elation swept through his body, overriding any rational doubts he might have had.
“Trick-or-treat!” the apparition said, grinning.
He blinked, stifling a cry as the figure’s face morphed into the wretched, rotting visage of a supernatural vagrant. Dark eye-sockets, though empty, stared back at him.
He gasped and felt the energy drain from his legs. He began to collapse. But before he hit the floor, the undead horror stepped forward with a cry, grabbing him under his arms. He felt his attacker’s skeletal fingers pressing into his flesh.
“Leslie!” he groaned.
“It’s me, Jim,” the figure said. “Jennifer … Jennifer Eastbridge.”
Jen?
His eyes cleared then, and the vision he’d awoken to swept away into the night.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Salinger considered the question. Pushing himself from her grip, he shrugged. “Sorry.” He wiped his hands over his face. “I was asleep. I think I was dreaming.”
“No, I apologize.” Jen gently aimed him toward his chair. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
He sank into the cushions and reached for his half-empty beer bottle, noting that there were two other bottles there as well, both empty—and he didn’t recall getting up at any point to fetch them from the fridge.
“It’s okay,” he managed. “I had a tough day.”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. But maybe you’d rather not—”
“No, it’s okay.” He gestured toward the kitchen. “Go make yourself some tea or something. Or there’s beer and wine in the fridge. Whatever. I’ll be more … um, coherent … by the time you get back.”
The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories Page 20
