Darker Than Noir

by Riley, R. Thomas; Zoot, Campbell; Chandler, Randy; Kauwe, Faith

  “It’s not supernatural. The way Father Thomas explained it to me, only God is supernatural. And Jesus and the Holy Spirit, of course. Satan and his legions are preternatural. They can do no miracles. But what they can do is no trick. It’s real. And evil.” He turned to address the tape recorder. “Father Thomas, I must have invited it in somehow. It has possession of me now, there is no doubt. Please tell the archbishop and get his permission. I don’t believe I have much time. Please, Father, you have to cast out this vile spirit.”

  “You said your priest pal was just a phone call away. Why don’t you call him?”

  “I’ve tried. They won’t let me. The call doesn’t go through, or when it does Father Thomas is never available. This is their doing. They know Father Thomas can drive them out and they fear him.”

  “Hell, Father, why don’t you just go to St. Augustine. What’s keeping you here?”

  “They won’t let me leave this room. I’ve tried.”

  “You want out of this room? You really want out, I’ll pick you up and carry you.”

  Trench stepped toward the priest.

  Father Ryan said, “No! Don’t touch me! Stay back!” Then his eyes rolled up into his skull and he went rigid, like someone had shoved a steel rod up his ass.

  Trench froze.

  The thing in the chair was no longer Father Ryan. With only the whites of its eyes showing, it said in its sludgy voice: “Come closer, pilgrim. We love what you did to that Nazi whore. The way you cuffed her to the steering wheel and gassed the Jew-killing bitch to death.”

  Trench went cold. His teeth chattered. Nobody knew he had killed the Nazi war criminal in just the way the demon described.

  Nobody knew he’d used the Nazi bitch to cure his sex problem.

  Seeing a bunch of dead soldiers with erections had left him unable to get a hard-on. Turned out, it wasn’t unusual for corpses to get hard-ons when the bodies were left for days to bloat in the field.

  Rough sex with the Nazi broad right here in the hotel had put the iron back in his cock. He’d let her dominate him. Hurt him. And later he’d driven her out on a dirt road, dazed her with a fist to the jaw and cuffed her, just as the thing in the armchair said, and then watched her die as the car filled with exhaust carried from the tailpipe via a garden hose.

  “You got hard watching her die,” the thing said. “We loved that. You wanted to fuck her corpse but you couldn’t let yourself go that far. We give you permission to do everything! She’s here with us now. You’ll never have to hold back again. You can have her. Let the Lord of Light lead you.”

  He felt pressure building behind his eyes. And in his crotch. He was sprouting a boner. He wanted to turn and run out of the room but the thing in the chair held him in place, rendering him unable to will his body to move.

  “The Lord loves a cheerful killer,” the thing said in an inhuman voice. “Killing is what you love. The fucking is only an afterthought. You thrill for the kill. Death makes the world go round. Reap for our Shining Lord. We will show you the way.”

  “Fuck you, no. You’re a crazy son of a bitch, a fallen priest. You need a headshrinker. That’s all.”

  The thing in the armchair expelled gusty laughter that hit Trench like a foul gale-force wind and knocked him back. “Lies are what fools tell themselves. Lie all you wish but not to yourself. The Lord of All Knowledge shows you the way.”

  Trench felt a blinding murderous rage rising within. “Jesus Christ!” he bellowed.

  “We told you not to say that name!” The priest-thing twisted its face into an expression that was not human, its jaw opened impossibly wide, and it clawed the air with harpy-like talons.

  The bathroom door banged shut. Windows rattled in their frames. A loud blast of gas blew from the fiend’s ass, making an ugly blat against the chair seat. The thing’s face changed again, this time it looked the way the Nazi woman had looked at the moment of her suffocating death.

  Trench wanted to get the hell out of that room almost as badly as he wanted to strangle the demonic priest where he sat. He flexed his fingers and moved in closer for the kill.

  The fiend leapt out of the chair and tackled Trench, taking him to the floor while trying to bite his family jewels. Trench clapped his hands against the priest’s ears, hard enough to rupture eardrums. From deep inside the priest’s body the thing began to whine, the whine rising in pitch like a boiling tea kettle steamed up to shriek. Trench grabbed the man’s skull and wrenched it viciously to the right. The loud pop was the sound of his neck snapping. The whining went on for a few long seconds, even after the dead man’s body went limp in his killer’s grasp.

  Trench let him go. The corpse thudded to the floor, the priest finally free of the thing that had evilly squatted inside him. The squatter was evicted.

  Trench grinned.

  Ghostly talons dug into his shoulders. They burrowed deep, going down his spine.

  “Come on in, bitch,” he said. “I’ll fuck you back to hell.”

  * * *

  St. Augustine was a quiet little town, as Florida tourist traps went. Most of its visitors were older folks with a mature interest in the town’s history as the nation’s oldest city. They were more the museumgoer type than the hell-raiser breed. Which suited Trench fine.

  He found Father Thomas Riley late at night in the rectory. The priest wore Bermuda shorts, a white pullover shirt and sandals. He had wine on his breath—unless it was the blood of Christ.

  “You,” Trench said in a voice not his own.

  “Pardon me?” Father Thomas flashed a look of fear.

  Trench tamped down inexplicable feelings of hate, got control of his voice and words and said, “You look familiar is all. Father Ryan sent me. He’s dead. He wanted you to hear what’s on this tape.”

  Trench held up the recorder in his left hand.

  “Dead you say? What happened?”

  “He seemed to think he had the devil in him. Something he caught while helping you drive out demons. I guess it got the best of him.”

  “Oh my dear Jesus. Come in, come in.” Father Thomas waved him inside.

  “Show me where to plug this in and we’ll get right to it. There’s not a lot on it. The recording session was…cut short.”

  “The kitchen,” Father Thomas said and pointed the way.

  The house smelled of cooked onions and cinnamon and a few spices Trench couldn’t identify. The priest told him to put the recorder on the counter by the sink, then to have a seat at the kitchen table. The tape hissed and popped as the two men sat opposite each other. Then Trench’s recorded tinny voice rumbled from small speakers: “Okay, Padre, for the record, how the hell did you make that water pitcher fly into the wall without touching it?”

  The whole thing took less than five minutes. It ended with the snapping of the spine and Trench’s bravado comment about fucking the demon back to hell. Father Thomas looked askance at his visitor. Trench said, “That snapping sound was me breaking his neck.”

  Trench grinned.

  Father Thomas jumped out of his chair and started reciting Latin. “Exaudi, Deus, salutis amator…” Though Trench had never learned a word of the dead language, he preternaturally understood exactly what the priest was saying: “Hear, God, lover of human salvation, the prayer of your Apostles Peter and Paul and of all the saints, who by your grace emerged as victors over the Evil One.”

  Trench stood slowly, showing teeth in a wide grin, and said in a familiar subterranean voice, “You thought you beat us, priest. You won the battle but not the war. Our reinforcements are here. And it’s time to pay the piper.”

  Father Thomas went on with the Latin.

  Trench didn’t want to see what was coming next so he mentally went away like a man stepping back into mercifully thick fog and left the devil to its devices.

  The fog didn’t squelch the screams.

  * * *

  Driving back to Miami, Trench saw flashes of what the demon had done to Father Thomas. It was
like recalling somebody else’s horrible memories. Those were his big knuckles smashing the priest’s nose against his bloodied-to-pulp face, and those were his same hands wrapped around the man’s neck and throttling him until his head tried to come off. His hand holding the kitchen knife that cut off the priest’s tongue. Had he cooked it in the frying pan or had he only thought of doing it?

  “You did it,” said the thing in the backseat of the Ford coupe. “And then you ate it.”

  Trench looked in the rearview and saw a shadowy form with a face from hell. A harpy’s face but more hideous, a face of cobbled pieces from the ugliest monsters Hollywood had never dreamed up. A face too terrible to put on the big screen.

  Trench belched. He got a taste of half-cooked meat.

  The thing laughed. “Your unholy communion, shamus, talking back to you.”

  Trench floored the accelerator. The car sped over blacktop, headlights losing their fight against the night.

  “We’re going all the way with you, Trench-foot,” the demon said. “Hitching to hell and gone. But keep this in your mind: We’re not here to make you do evil. We’re here because you are evil. We never come in uninvited.”

  “Fuck you,” Trench said.

  “If you like. We’ll have time enough for that and many other wicked things. Ours will be a solid partnership. You’re going to quit your job as hotel dick and start you own detective agency. Oh, don’t worry about the money. We’ll make it readily available. We love detectives! The seedy lives they poke with sticks, the nasty shit they wallow in, all that delicious sin and degradation!”

  “Fuck you. You’re not real. You’re not even back there.”

  “You’re right, of course. We’re not here. We’re inside you. So buckle up, buddy. The long ride is going to get rough. Brutal.”

  The thing laughed and added, “Hardboiled to a fine crisp, our very own private dick.”

  MASKS

  By J. T. Seate

  In the French Quarter you can find all the dames you want. But occasionally, you cross paths with a special breed of skirt. That’s what happened to me on a late October night near Canal Street in a strip joint called the High Hat.

  While I watched the uniforms cuff Charity and place her in the back of a patrol car, I was aware of a shimmering red blouse beside me. In it was a ravishing brunette who was put together like a Greek statue with arms.

  “Excuse me,” she said. Her voice was low and husky. “Charity’s a good kid. Give her a break.”

  I swiveled toward the brunette unable to prevent my eyes from taking a swift survey down her body. I made her for pushing thirty, but not by much. Her red blouse revealed the tops of alabaster breasts stacked as nicely as feathered pillows. The rest of her was just as delectable, built like a Marvel comic book character come to life. Following the journey, I found her eyes and kept them riveted to mine—strictly business. “And you are?”

  The female observed me with green-eyed solemnity. “Stella Barton. I’m the den mother around here.”

  “Head stripper, huh? Well, Stella, it appears one of your cubs got careless at home and let a butcher knife slice through a guy’s neck instead of the watermelon.”

  “The cad she’s been living with? He’s dead?”

  “Charles Lasky. As dead as Rudy Valle’s comeback.”

  Her bosoms swelled. “Serves the piece of garbage right. She’s better off, but you’re wrong about Charity, Mister. She’s a rabbit. She’d run first.”

  It sounded like Stella might’ve enjoyed watching the pathologist gut dear ole Charley. “This is New Orleans,” I reminded this red-lipped doll. “Impulsive behavior is practically expected.”

  “Charity couldn’t cut up anyone.”

  “We’ll be taking your statement at a later time, Miss Barton.”

  “Would you ask Charity to call me the minute you finish working her over. She’ll need a place to stay while your boys are playing with evidence in her apartment.”

  “Unless the boys downtown decide to book her tonight,” I said, more interested in Stella’s shape than her words. “We’ll let her make a phone call when we’re through.”

  “See that you do, Detective . . . ?”

  “Peters. Detective William Peters.”

  Stella Barton shot me a look designed to drop charging elephants. She shrugged as if my name meant less than nothing, all business and sass. Then she turned on a dime and walked away with a swaggering wiggle that said, “I’m your wildest dream.” Male catnip. I stuck a Camel between my lips, thumbed open my Zippo, and leaned the cigarette into its flame. Stella’s sculpted torso probably drew more customers into the High Hat than a hole in a window screen draws flies. I idly wondered how many poor slobs had braced her over the years only to discover a cougar rather than kitten.

  I followed the black and white in my unmarked car and thought about all the dames who’d snapped due to some abusive ‘piece of garbage’, as Stella had so delicately put it. I knew well the savagery of which humankind was capable.

  But my mind returned to the luscious form of Stella Barton. I wouldn’t have minded getting jake with Stella. She was the kind of dame who could make a man climb walls. Her body represented not only sex, but hopes and dreams. A fresh source of sustenance tantalized me, but she was undoubtedly all too familiar with coppers busting her place, or grabbing a handful of female to allow the place to operate.

  After spending most of the night grilling Lynn Williams, a.k.a. Charity, and asking if she knew anyone who might benefit by turning the dearly departed Charley into a morgue job, we let her go on her own recognizance. I knew she hadn’t committed the crime. Most of these young women, naive girls from small towns, wouldn’t see the evil in Jack the Ripper if you showed them the pictures of his six dead hookers.

  A Packard Coupe picked her up and I went home to my small riverfront apartment which was slowly sinking into the Mighty Mississippi. A breeze rippled through the trees carrying a whisper of death along with the scent of the river. It was Friday and Halloween began at midnight, a busy night for brawls. I idly wondered how many drunken Cajuns would carve one another into ’gator bait by Monday morning.

  I listened to a serenade by cicadas and bullfrogs along with the plaintive sound of an occasional lonely foghorn somewhere upriver. They were sounds which reminded me of twisted hopes and broken dreams, a longing for something which seemed just out of reach. I fought the urge to dwell on the shapely Miss Barton, or the familiar tug of a dangerous thirst. Instead, I indulged in two of my three vices: Scotch and the Blues.

  ***

  The next morning I called Miss Barton and requested her presence at the station. I told the boys I wanted to interview her personally because she reminded me of a doll I had broken down once. Yeah, the line had whiskers, but I didn’t care.

  “The sisterly type, eh Peters,” the Chief sneered, his mouth crowded with bad teeth and his belly, no doubt, full of Friday night gumbo.

  Stella Barton arrived late in the afternoon. I escorted her to a private room. She looked prim and proper compared to the night before, more like a society dame who’d just come from a Garden District soiree than the madam of a strip joint. Her raven hair was pinned up. It highlighted her long neck. The fading sunlight from a small window wrapped around her nicely.

  Through a swirl of blue smoke from our cigarettes, Stella spent an hour and a half telling everything she knew about Charity’s whereabouts on previous evenings and what she knew of the deceased now residing on a slab in the morgue as cold as a dime’s worth of baloney with a big smile carved into his neck, still as cement, a red tag tied around his big toe.

  Her gaze was cool and detached. I talked calmly, making sure not to ask pointed questions and she seemed appreciative. The who, where, and when’s fell sensually from her mouth. Eventually, I stopped prodding her to go on.

  “Thanks for not giving me the third degree,” she said so pleasantly I almost believed her.

  “You mean the spotlight and the r
ubber hose? We got rid of those a couple of months ago.”

  “I mean for taking me seriously. A refreshing quality for a cop. Most of you gumshoes take me for a high-class bimbo.” Her eyes fell to her hands, which were folded demurely in her lap as if in prayer. I wondered if her winding road might have begun as a good Catholic girl.

  Another cigarette died and was entombed in an ashtray. A thin trail of moisture glistened in Stella’s décolletage. I tried to keep my eyes trained on hers, but that little wet trickle got in the way. Even as she sat in the metal chair, Stella Barton moved with the sensual promise of what could be, every inch of her shouting, “Female.”

  She looked up, wondering why I hadn’t responded. “So, are there any more questions, Detective Peter, or can I go home and take a hot bath?”

  “That’s Peters, Miss Barton.” I had no other reason to hold her except to wonder what kind of underwear she wore to compliment the garter belt and hosiery most dames sported these days. “That’s all for now, but please—”

  “Don’t leave town, like they say in the movies,” she said petulantly.

  “I was going to say, call me if you think of anything else that might help.”

  “Sure thing, Peters.” She stubbed out her fifth butt, uncrossed her legs and stood, straightening her skirt. “I’ll call the minute the real killer confesses to me.”

  There were enough bodies loitering around the station to cast a De Mille epic. I led her past the normal assemblage of cops, boozed-up rednecks, and hookers, through the heavy scents of sweat and musk to the double doors leading out of the station.

  “Maybe we could have a drink some night you’re off,” I heard myself saying.

  Stella stared at me, her eyes dancing with frantic energy, as if she could see into my soul. A wry smile softened her features. “In my business there aren’t any nights off except Sunday. I don’t much care to drink on my night off.”

  “Maybe dinner then?”