A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

  “You’re the actual—are you the only one?”

  “God, no. These new ones, they’re all from the Hastings family. Is this what you really want to know?”

  “I’m not sure what I want to know,” I confessed. “And worse than that: I’m not even sure what I do know. I’m having a little trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction at the moment.”

  “Well,” he drawled, “part of that is your coma. You were asleep for three months. It’s going to take a while before those dreams and images and memories are sorted out. And I will admit that part of your problem there is my fault. I told you a lot of things when you were in your coma.”

  “You’re a very confusing person.”

  “That’s deliberate,” he admitted.

  “You’re a trickster figure,” I told him point-blank. “That’s who you are, with your—deliberate confusion.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Trickster figures, they appear in all mythology and folklore,” I snapped. “They’re gods or people or anthropomorphic animals who play tricks, break the rules, deliberately behave in an odd manner.”

  “Reynard the Fox,” he said, happy with his realization. “I know that one. My grandmother used to tell me stories—”

  “Exactly,” I snapped. “Classic example. And a French example, which is, you say, your heritage.”

  “I don’t say it’s my heritage,” he corrected, “history says it.”

  “I don’t know that. You’re tricking me about everything else.”

  “Not everything’s a trick.”

  “Fine, but the trickster is also a Jungian archetype.”

  “What’s your point?” He was still smiling. “You seem to be getting all riled up.”

  “What you’re doing goes beyond mere odd personal behavior,” I answered him. “You’re trying to mess up my mind.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “But we agree that you act this way on purpose,” I said to him. “You tell me you’re the Earl of Huntingdon so that when I recount that to anyone, I sound crazy. I know because I tried to use exactly the same technique, taking a page from your book, on young Albert just recently—when he had a gun in my face.”

  “Must have worked,” he drawled.

  “And your true identity,” I went on, ignoring his comment, “I mean, God knows who or what you really are. It’s hidden. I look demented while you vanish. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s what’s going to happen.”

  He shrugged, but the smile was still there.

  “It’s also a technique that some secret societies and government agencies employ,” I ranted on. “You tell me all about your family history and your reasons for helping me, and when I relate that information to my friend the sheriff, he thinks I’ve lost my mind—or I’m still suffering from the aftereffects of the coma. You tell me these things to hide your tracks. Or to hide in general. Am I right?”

  “I can see that my visit has upset you,” he said soothingly. “That was not my intention. I really just wanted to give you back your box and say good-bye.”

  I lowered my voice and tried to sound absolutely sane. It wasn’t easy. “Am I really related to Jelly Roll Morton, or is that another trick?”

  “You’ll have to come to your own conclusions,” he said steadily. “But that is your box, that tin there. And the pictures in it? Your mother thought they were important enough to keep for you. They tell you a story. You remember all that.”

  “My problem now,” I said, “is that I’m worried even those memories might be fantasies, not recollections of actual events.”

  “You want me to make you some more tea before I go?” he asked. “I don’t like to see you this way. I worry about your health.”

  “And that’s another thing!” I snapped. “At a couple of very key moments in this whole business, you’ve given me some kind of tea. I think you drugged me. That’s what I think now. You’ve been drugging me and telling me things and I’ve come to believe them and you’re doing it for some kind of weird or sinister purpose.”

  “That’s strong talk.” His voice was very calming.

  “That’s not going to work either, that hypnotizing voice. All your soothing talk, and on top of the doctored tea: it’s actually a wonder I haven’t lost my mind.”

  He started to protest, then thought better of it, though I didn’t know why. “I see your point. I did put a lot of powerful herbs in all that tea. And I did use a little—language persuasion.”

  “Hypnosis.”

  “All right.”

  “Damn it.”

  “Well, you wanted to know,” he told me. “Listen. I came here in December when I found out you were in a coma. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I don’t see how they matter now since it all turned out about as well as anyone could have wanted: you’re alive, Albert’s caught, the Sons of Wingfield—those poor, stupid bastards—are all going to jail. That’s pretty nice work, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Travis is going to jail?”

  He nodded. “They’re all in violation of the new Hate Crimes legislation.”

  I thought that sounded odd, a little stilted, and then I remembered several old news stories.

  “No,” I said, “I think the Georgia Supreme Court struck down the Hate Crimes statutes for this state—a while ago.”

  “I don’t care about that,” he said sharply. “This is a federal matter. The attorney general requires data collection on any crime that’s committed because of the victim’s race—or religion, disability, sexual orientation. Since 1992, the Department of Justice and the FBI have published a report every year on those statistics. That report is public knowledge: anyone can read it; anyone can do something about it. And then a couple of years ago the president signed the Matthew Shepard Act. You know what that is, don’t you?”

  “I do,” I answered uncertainly, “but I’m not sure what it has to do with all this.”

  “Well among other things,” he explained, a little irritated, “it dropped the requirement that the victim of this kind of crime had to be engaging in a federally protected activity before the law would apply.”

  “This is more—I don’t know, more tricks. This boring government official routine, it’s just another persona you’re wearing at this moment to exacerbate your strangeness.”

  “Why in this world would I want to trick you?” He sighed. “I’ve been trying to help you.”

  “So you say, but that makes you what, exactly? Some kind of a vigilante? Some kind of—I don’t know, you want me to believe that you came to my rescue when these men tried to kill me? Because of my bloodlines? Because we’re related—are we related?”

  He shook his head and the smile finally vanished from his face. “Look, Fever. I know you think this is a story about a man who gets shot and goes into a coma for three months. But, as is always the case, there is a larger story at work. You just got in the way of that larger story, one about a network of idiots and lizards who think that their work is to purify the American gene pool. That story started long before you were born, and, I am very sad to say, will probably go on long after you die. But the good news is: your part in that story is done. Go on back to sitting on your front porch, writing your little folklore articles; get married to that nice nurse. Have a life. Everybody in this town can try to get back to whatever it is that passes for normal around here.”

  For no reason I could think of, I blurted out, “Except for Melissa Mathews. You didn’t do such a great job of helping her. And the man who shot her, may have killed her—he’s going to get off!”

  And just like that: the smile returned. “Oh, I don’t know. You never can tell how these things might turn out.”

  “What?” Once again he had thrown me completely off balance.

  “I’ll leave you with this thought,” he answered quietly. “Your mother taught you to believe in lies, your father wanted you to believe in magic, and yet your whole adult life has be
en about the truth and the facts. You study about things in the past, about folkways and stories and songs. Why is that? What are you looking for? And if you extend that curiosity to the study of your own past, your own stories—well, what are you looking for?”

  “Stop it,” I said, shaking my head to clear it. “You’re trying to distract me, to break my concentration.”

  “I’m not trying to do a thing in this world but—wait, almost forgot. I brought your clock.”

  “You’re doing it again!” I almost came out of the bed. “You’re misdirecting the conversation!”

  His answer was to toss his briefcase onto my bed and snap it open. “Glad I remembered this. Did you ever look at the underside of this thing? I left it in your bedroom for you to see, but I guess you didn’t get a chance to examine it properly.”

  He produced my clock, the one that had been on the downstairs mantel for years, and had suddenly appeared in my room just recently.

  “What—what underside of what?” I stammered.

  “I was afraid of that.” He rolled his head around, popping several vertebrae in his neck. “That’s why you’re still asking me if you’re related to Jelly Roll.”

  “What’s in the clock?” I demanded.

  “Take it.” He thrust it toward me.

  I grabbed it out of his hands.

  “Look,” he insisted, motioning for me to turn it over.

  I did. In small, engraved letters, nearly rubbed away by the years, I could barely make out the name “Simard.”

  “It’s a family heirloom, you understand,” he said softly. “Open that little panel.”

  I stared. “What panel?”

  He pointed to a small hinge that anyone would have assumed was a door to the inner workings of the clock itself.

  I unlatched it. A single piece of folded paper fell onto my lap.

  “It’s a birth certificate,” I gasped.

  “No.” He shook his head.

  “What, then?”

  “Damn,” he sighed, “just look at it.”

  I set the clock on my lap and picked up the paper. It had been folded four times. With each turn and unfolding, I felt an overwhelming rush of anticipation. When the page finally revealed itself, I was baffled.

  “What is this?” I asked, staring at it.

  “What does it look like?”

  I stared. The paper was a piece of handwritten sheet music. The title, printed large, was “Birdie,” and below the title it said, “arr. TBM for L.”

  “I don’t understand what this is.” But I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  “All right.” He winked. It seemed an odd facial tic more than an actual muscular gesture. “Do you know the song ‘Angel Eyes’?

  “Angel Eyes”? I leaned forward, uncertain what he’d said. “You’re asking me about the Sinatra song?”

  “I prefer to think of it as a Nat ‘King’ Cole song.”

  “My mother used to listen to it. That’s what this is? A handwritten version of that song?”

  “No, that’s not what it is.” He laughed. “I just wanted you to remember the last line of that song: ‘Excuse me while I … disappear.’”

  And he was instantly gone out the door. That odd exit was the final confirmation of my suspicions that his behavior was deliberately odd so as to foil any attempt to describe or explain him in any coherent way.

  Suddenly alone once more, I had the sensation that there were pieces of a puzzle in my lap, but that I didn’t understand them, like the sheet music in my hand. I felt there was something important I was missing, or forgetting, like a half-remembered dream. I was certain that if I could just collect my thoughts, I would be able to explain everything. In short, I was looking, as Einstein had for all his life, for that greatest of all impossible phantasms: my own personal unified field theory, the explanation that would explain everything.

  Maybe it was something about Albert that was bothering me. In cold examination under florescent hospital lights, it barely seemed possible that he had come from Chicago to kill me based on a nearly hundred-year-old grudge. Or maybe grudge wasn’t the word for a blood feud, but it didn’t seem so very likely that I would be singled out after so long a time. It seemed such a strange, dark path for a boy that young, especially in the twenty-first century.

  I put down the sheet music and turned my attention to the tin box. It was packed. True to his word, the old man had stuffed it with everything I had ever seen on the subject of my mother’s lineage. I sorted through it for a moment; stopped at the picture of a beautiful young woman, dressed for church, standing in front of a 1930-something maroon Hudson Terraplane. It was the edition of that car with the waterfall front grill, an expensive automobile for our part of the world in those days. As I was turning it over, I realized that it would say, on the back, in my mother’s handwriting, “Birdie, 1943.”

  With a weird excitement, I realized that Birdie must be the daughter of T-Bone Morton and Lisa Simard, my grandmother, or possibly my great-grandmother. Even a cursory examination of her face, despite the age of the photo, revealed obvious signs of our kinship, and subtle signs of her mixed ethnicity. Then, as I stared back at the sheet music, I caught hold of a half-remembered coma-dream. It involved a melody that T-Bone had constructed out of birds sitting on wires outside his window in Paris. They’d looked like notes on a sheet music staff. After he’d whistled or sung the melody, the birds had flown away. It was his or Lisa’s proof of the existence of God, because only God could remember that melody. But they had apparently named their child after God’s messengers—if not angels, at least creatures with wings who had brought them the song. And just as obviously, T-Bone had done his best to remember the tune, his own half-remembered dream, and give it to his wife and daughter.

  I had no idea why that thought made me want to cry, but it did. Maybe it was because Birdie herself had flown away now, as had Lisa, and T-Bone, and both of my parents—as well as Chester and Eulalie. All were gone.

  Or maybe it was because I knew that their lives had been destroyed by secrets and events that had seemed monumental in their day but were barely noticeable in mine. A few generations previous to mine, a life could have been permanently altered by a discovery of mixed heritage. In my lifetime, that same discovery was little more than a colorful curiosity to most people. And if Melissa Mathews had been correct in her assessment of her generation, those secrets and adventures would mean nothing in the very near future. All the misery caused by those ancient hatreds: a woman gunned down in Paris, a man forced to give his daughter to strangers, an attempt on my life—the murder of my mother—all would be rendered into dust, barely worth noting.

  Thank God I was not left to those melancholy devices for long. Lucinda came in, smiled oddly, and went right to one the machines to which I was connected.

  “Where’d you get all that mess?” she asked, nodding toward the things in my lap.

  “This guy brought them to me,” I said in a deliberate attempt to be vague. “Did you find out anything about Melissa?”

  “No,” she answered. “They were all in consultation, her team, for some reason—and in a locked office. Very odd.”

  “So you came back to be with me?”

  “Sort of.” She had an air of studied calm. “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t fool me. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh,” she drawled casually, “your EKG monitor got a little fussy. It set off a beep in the nurses’ station. Something upset you?”

  “I had a visit from someone, as I was saying,” I began. “He gave me these things. They’re very important. They’re the reason Albert tried to kill me.”

  I lifted up the clock a bit for her to see.

  “Uh-huh, that clock? And those old papers?” She sat on the bed. “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, sweetheart, that you haven’t been in your right mind since you came out of your coma, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I sighed, “but—”
>
  “For example,” she said patiently, “just for an example, I heard you mumbling all that—what was that you were doing to that boy in your room when I came in? All that mumbling and chanting?”

  “Oh, now you want to hear about it? Well, that was a calculated ploy—a kind of psychic weapon.”

  “Go on,” she said with the patient demeanor of a professional therapist.

  I smiled. “I was trying to frighten him.”

  “How?”

  “He was—it’s a long story, but I was trying to remember any voodoo chants or speeches that I could from a very old study, something I’d done in undergraduate school. It was fascinating, actually, about the—”

  “Could we just get to the point?” she asked wearily.

  “Well, as I say, it’s a bit complicated, and involves a strange older man from New Orleans, but I was trying to make Albert believe that I could put some kind of gris-gris spell on him, make him sick or make him drop dead or something. It was all I could think of to keep him from shooting me.”

  “What were you saying, those words, what were they?”

  “Nothing really,” I admitted. “I was just trying to remember, out loud, the various names and aspects of the voodoo god Ogun, a mythology associated with Hephaestus in the Greek or Bisvakarma in the Hindu pantheon. Ogun has power over fire and iron and politics and war and—”

  “Fever,” she stopped me.

  “You asked,” I told her innocently.

  “Because,” she said, her voice lowered, “it just sounded so … so crazy.”

  “I understand that,” I said, “but you have to know that it was working until you burst on the scene with your hypodermic needle and your Superman Complex.”

  “Fine,” she sighed. “The next time you die? No help from me.”

  Before further fussy repartee could ensue, Nurse Chambers bustled in, beaming, with Andrews close behind.

  “Wait ’til you’uns hear!” she exploded. “You are not going to believe it!”

  Lucinda spun around. “It’s Melissa.”

  “Yes!” Stacey shouted. “She’s fine!”