Unassailable: The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist #5 (The Case Files of Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist)

by Cynthia St. Aubin

  A blur in my peripheral vision set Dean and Kim swinging their instruments toward the doorway to my bedroom.

  “Did you see that?” Kim asked in the hushed tones usually reserved for events either disastrous or miraculous.

  “That was a pillow!” Dean unfolded himself and nearly trampled me in a tangle of limbs.

  The chill that had seeped from the tile floor into my skin bled to my bones when I rose and saw the pillow sitting smack in the middle of the floor, a good four feet from its place on the bed.

  “It probably just fell,” I heard myself say.

  “More like flew,” Kim argued.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t scrape my gaze from the unlikely object on the floor. “Something must have disturbed it. Maybe the house settled and it shook the bed.”

  “You cannot honestly be denying what we saw just now.” Kim rose to look me in the eye, her jaw taking on a stubborn set.

  “I’m not denying anything. I’m simply reminding everyone that phenomena of this kind can usually be attributed to a logical explanation.”

  As if in punctuation to my statement, the figurine of a shepherdess slid from the mantel and shattered on the glazed-tile hearth.

  “Cinnamon-toasted Jesus!” Dean leapt back a full foot, his eyes pin-balling around the room in search of additional manifestations.

  “And what’s your explanation for that, Dr. Schmidt?” Kim challenged.

  “Vibrations in the floorboards,” I said, jumping up and down. The sheperdess’s neighbors—a snoozy stable boy and his fat, soporific lamb—started rattling. “Look. Totally explainable.”

  I paused and glanced over at the mantel, where the remaining figurines were now stationary.

  A sigh of relief escaped me. “See?”

  Boy and lamb slid off in concert, shattering to porcelain crumbs at my feet.

  “They’re responding to you.” Kim startled me by grabbing both hands, the only physical contact she had initiated thus far. “Can’t you see?”

  I shrugged her off and backed away. “Stop saying that.”

  Around us, wall sconces started to vibrate, their crystal pendants swaying. A low hum built at the base of my spine and surrounded my head in a numbing fog. Thousands of whispers, the metallic scraping of summer cicadas. I brought my hands to my ears, closed my eyes against the invasion.

  “What?” Kim asked. “What is it?”

  “Nothing.” Artic cold swept through my body, reducing my skin to a carpet of gooseflesh as pinpricks erupted up my neck and over my scalp. Fear dumped a double dose of adrenaline into my veins and spurred my heart into a reckless gallop.

  Hissed words sheared from the current of sound drowning my senses. Choked syllables and unearthly rasps.

  Help…it hurt…me.

  It’s over. His face…

  He’ll kill you.

  It’s inside. It’s inside you.

  “Leave me alone.” The voice was scarcely recognizable as mine, so transformed was it by fear.

  “Dr. Schmidt, calm down. It’s okay. They’re just—”

  Ask. Ask her who did it…

  She’s like her.

  I’ll rip her up. I’ll—

  “Stop! Stop it!” I was running blind then, only vaguely aware of Kim falling backward as I bolted past her.

  My hands were slick on the bannister as I flew down the stairs, narrowly missing the landing. Falling, dragging myself up to fall again before I reached the door and tumbled out into the night.

  *****

  Alone, I watched the waves spill moonlight onto the sand and steal it back again. The night’s chill settled on onto my skin, filling my lungs with the earthy scent of kelp washed ashore.

  I had run out without as a jacket. My arms wrapped tighter around my knees, pulling me into myself.

  My head ached with the pangs of an emotional hangover whose remnant feelings still clung to the inside of my skull. Rage. Frustration. Longing. Loss. And beneath it all, a deep and abiding sadness.

  I had felt some measure of this before, but never on this scale. On days when overbooked clients were stacked end-to-end and their collective cares felt like cinderblocks piled on my shoulders, I would drag myself home and implode into sleep’s respite.

  The source of tonight’s onslaught left me hollow and shaken.

  Kim and Dean hadn’t seen Sin Pantalones and Gaybeard, nor had they heard those awful rasping voices. The revelation widened some gap yawning open between me and the rest of the world.

  This was happening to me. Around me. Because of me.

  If it was happening at all.

  How had my mother felt, the first time she had heard a foreign voice in her head? Had she sat, the way I did now, hands so much like mine twisting in the hem of her skirt? Holding onto a scrap of the material world for comfort?

  I was only eight the first time I found her hiding in the closet. Secreted among the piled shoes and coats, she scratched symbols on a yellow legal pad and told me to hide under my bed, where she found me the next morning.

  Four years passed before the state got around to institutionalizing her, leaving me the ward of a series of foster homes, as I had no relatives of record. Not for the first time, I felt an ache echo through that scooped-out place in my chest filled by neither family nor friends.

  In my thirty years, the nearest thing to a social circle I had managed included my assistant, Julie, a man who killed people for a living, a being who was only partly human, and a goldfish.

  A single tear slid into the seam of my lips, its taste almost as salty as the sea. I didn’t fight the sorrow welling up and over my eyelids, nor did I bother wiping the tracks as they stiffened and dried on my face.

  This would have been the point I nudged a box of tissues across the coffee table toward myself, had I been seated on my own expansive leather couch.

  The thought interrupted my quiet crying with an unexpected hiccup of laughter. An image of myself, alone on the beach, laughing, crying, and muttering to myself brought on a back-breaking sob. My throat and lungs chugged in soundless repetition like an engine trying to turn over.

  “There now, comely wench.”

  The ocean’s roar swallowed my startled shriek as I crab-walked backward, kicking up sand in my wake.

  My sudden movement must have startled my unlikely comforter, for he matched my scream with one of equal falsetto before stumbling ass-backward into a nearby dune.

  “Blimey!” Sin Pantalones brought a hand to his burly chest. “You’d have scared me half to death just then. If’n I weren’t dead already, that is. I nearly tarred me britches.”

  “Y-you aren’t wearing any.” I bit down on my tongue, cursing myself for having corrected something that had just admitted to no longer being alive.

  “Oy, rub it in, why don’t ye. Speakin’ o’ which…” He pushed himself onto his battered boots. “It’ll be a century afore I get all the sand from me trench.”

  Trying to stack myself on wobbly knees, I looked away as he swiped at his behind.

  “Here, let me help you,” he said, offering me the same hand he’d just used to swab the poop deck.

  “Stay away! Don’t come near me!”

  “Come on now. You don’t have to be like that.” He tucked his thumbs into the wide leather belt buckled around his barrel of his waist. A gesture I could only guess was the result of having no pockets to tuck his hands into.

  The moonlight shone on the shaved dome of his head, casting the creases of his fleshy face into shadow. He looked every bit as material as the sand beneath our feet, as the stars winking overhead.

  “Just what exactly are you?”

  A jovial chuckle boomed from him and he slapped a naked knee. “Why, a dredgie of course.”

  “What’s a dredgie?”

  The fatty pockets over his eyes lowered as his voice dropped into a scratchy bass whisper. “The ghost of a pirate what’s been done to death by betrayal.”

  “Ghost? You don’t look like a
ghost.” I made the mistake of looking him over to illustrate my point and caught sight of the organ curving in a sharp left against his thigh.

  “And what, pray tell, does a ghost look like, lass?”

  “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Vaporous? Fully dressed?”

  His bushy brows inched upward, creating miniature rolls on his forehead. “The first part depends on who be doin’ the seein.’ The second depends on how ye die.”

  “What do you mean, who be doing the seeing?” I folded my arms over my chest to gather what little warmth I could.

  “I think it be best you ask yer man about that.”

  “My man?”

  “The strapping chap what Gaybeard was wrapped around like carnivorous kelp. I owes him my thanks, by the way. That’s the first time in four centuries I ain’t been run through.”

  “Crixus,” I snorted, the memory of him relighting the fuse of irritation in my brain. “He is not my man.”

  Sin Pantalones scraped the sand with his boot. “You two seemed awfully…chummy as I recalls.”

  “Yeah, well. He’s chummy with a lot of people. He also has a nasty habit of disappearing without any explanation and leaving me to clean up after him.”

  “That weren’t his choice. He was summoned, I expect, on account of his kind ain’t supposed to interfere with my kind.”

  “What kinds would those be?”

  “The living.” Moonlight silvered his irises, lending him an otherworldly light. “And the dead.”

  An involuntary shiver snaked up my spine. Broken whispers still stuck in my memory like shards of glass. “How did you die?”

  He turned to face the sea, giving me his back. “We were docked out there. The Squatting Watchman’s hulls were burstin’ with swag, and we had just keelhauled the lot o’ Gaybeard’s crew and left his ship in splinters.”

  A little smile brightened his face.

  “A few of us felt like celebratin’, so we came ashore in a dingy lookin’ for a sip from ol’ crack Jenny’s teacup while the crew were splicin’ the mainbrace.”

  I blinked at him. “You what?”

  “The crew was gettin’ loaded to the gunwale on rum, so we came to shore to procure a little pleasant company. If you take my meanin’.”

  He waited for my nod before continuing.

  “I were in right tharr in yer very room—”

  “Wait,” I said, glancing back over the dune at the lovely three-story home lit up like a cozy lantern. “The Inn on the Hill was a brothel?”

  “Best booty this side o’ the seven seas.” He winked at me. “Anyway, thar I were with—”

  “Does Mrs. Hilliker know that?”

  “Do ye mind?” His meaty hands came to rest on his hips. “Ye’re maroonin’ me narrative.”

  “Sorry.” I took a breath and tried to channel the silent calm I sat in while clients unloaded their cares. My fingers itched for a notepad. “Go ahead.”

  He cleared his throat. “Thar I were, in a special way with Jolly Molly No-Gills Malloy—”

  “No-Gills?”

  “Aye.” One corner of his mouth curved into a wicked grin. “Someone tried to slash her throat, but she gutted the poor devil like a second-hand hog. Only when her pipes healed, the scars mades it so she didn’t gag.” His eyes muddy brown eyes grew misty. “That Molly could suck the barnacles off a—”

  “I get the idea,” I interrupted.

  “Right. So thar I were with Molly, me pants and weapons bein’ otherwise located, when out the window I sees the Squatting Watchman burst into flame. Next thing I knows, Gaybeard busts through the door with that winged rat o’ his and starts to swingin’ his cutlass around.

  “Alls I have is me trusty cleaver, but it weren’t enough.” He patted the well-worn wooden handle of the blade tucked into the back of his belt.

  “He runs me through and made me watch as the Squatting Watchman went down to Davey Jones, and me treasure with it,” he said, staring out over the water. I half expected to see the reflection of flames glowing across his face.

  “What about Gaybeard?”

  Sin Pantalones spat into the sand. “What about him?”

  “He died too, didn’t he? I mean, he’s like you?”

  “Aye,” he grinned. “Molly shot him in the arse then brained that bloody bird with a fireplace poker. I’m just glad I stayed thar to sees it instead of wandering off into that awful light.”

  “Ahh. So it’s true then. The light? Crossing over.”

  He nodded. “But tharr ain’t no way I’m going without me treasure. And you’re just the lass to help me get it.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “Firstly—” he paused, ticking off his giant thumb, “—ye can sees me. Secondly, ye can gets into that museum in town where they’ve gots it locked up.”

  “Absolutely not,” I insisted. “Firstly, that’s theft. Secondly, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a museum, but generally everything is locked up in cases that are watched over by guards.”

  “Do you think I’m daft?” he challenged. “I knows all about the guards and the cases. That’s why we’ll does tonight under the cover o’ darkness!”

  “I am not breaking into a museum. It’s absolutely out of the question.” I turned on my heel and started back toward the house.

  “Are you sure ye want to be going back there, lass?”

  I froze. “Why?”

  “All those spirits. Trying to make you feel their pain. Their rage. They’ll keep coming, you know. Now that they know you can hear them.”

  “Spirits?” I asked. “Is that what they were?” Hope and despair washed over me in disparate waves, both of them caused by the same burgeoning revelation: it hadn’t just been in mind.

  “Aye, lass. And I can make them go away.”

  “You can?”

  “If…” he trailed off.

  “If what?”

  “If you help me.”

  *****

  “Oh there you are, dear. I was worried sick!” Ruth rose from the brocade settee in the parlor and fluttered over in a swish of skirts.

  “You’re up late, Mrs. Hilliker. I’m sorry if I kept you.” I shot Sinpants a look.

  He motioned locking up his lips and tossing away the key. A wise move, as he wouldn’t have had anywhere to put it anyway.

  “The way you lit out earlier, I thought the devil himself might be chasing you.”

  “I heard the moonrise is lovely this time of year. I just didn’t want to miss it.” The ease with which lies tripped off my tongue these days to explain the unexplainable felt like something I should make note of.

  Ruth’s head tipped to one side in birdlike curiosity. “That handsome young businessman was around earlier. Shame you couldn’t have watched the moonrise with him.”

  “Shame,” I repeated.

  Sinpants waggled his eyebrows at me. I debated motioning a slit throat with my finger, but decided the threat lacked the necessary clout in addition to making me look slightly psychotic in front of Mrs. Hilliker.

  I stretched in an exaggerated yawn and blinked false sleep out of my eyes. “Well, I think I’m going to turn in. Good night, Mrs. Hilliker.”

  “Will you be at breakfast tomorrow morning?” The seemingly innocent question teased to mind images of a table accidentally set for two.

  “I might just sleep in and grab something in town.” Provided my breakfast isn’t sent to me on a metal tray through the bars of the local pokey.

  “All right, dear. Sleep well.”

  “I’ll try.”

  I slithered down the empty hall, not wanting to alert Kim and Dean to my return. The door had scarcely closed behind me when Sinpants walked right through it.

  “Handy trick,” I said. “You had better not pull that kind of stuff next time I’m in the bathroom.”

  “The sooner we gets me treasure, the better me chances are of moving on.”

  I sank down onto the bed and flopped backwards. “I need to think.”


  A timid knock at the door released a beleaguered groan from my throat. “Who is it?”

  “Dean,” the voice announced. “And Kim.”

  “Come in.” I grudgingly folded myself into a seated position.

  They looked different somehow. It took me the better part of a minute to realize what the change was. Shuffling in, pajama-ed and slippered, they had not a piece of equipment with them.

  “We came to apologize,” Kim said. “For the séance, the pictures, the tapes.”

  “And for calling you uptight and prissy.” Dean tugged at the drawstring on his plaid flannel pajama pants.

  “Pinched,” I corrected. “You called me uptight and pinched.”

  “Oh, right.” He nodded. “I didn’t call you prissy until after you left.”

  “Thanks a heap.”

  “Anyway,” Kim continued, “it’s okay if you don’t believe. It wasn’t right of us to try to use you to get readings. If you say that there aren’t any spirits following you, then it’s not our place to say otherwise.”

  “There are spirits following me.” The words had fallen from my mouth like groceries from wet-bottomed paper bag. I found myself simply too exhausted to bother with appearances at this point. “In fact, one of them is over in the corner.”

  “What? Where?” Dean glanced straight at the corner where Sinpants slouched in an armchair, knees angled brazenly outward.

  “They can’t see me, lass.”

  I averted my gaze from Little Lefty and stared up at the bed’s canopy. “Lucky them.”

  “What did he say?” Kim asked, seeming to know where my comments were directed.

  “That you can’t see him.”

  “Oh wow!” Dean started for the door. “I’m gonna grab the FLIR!”

  Kim caught him by the back of the T-shirt. “No, Dean. Not this time.”

  Crestfallen, Dean seated himself on the steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.

  Kim returned her attention to me. “What does he want?”

  “His treasure. It’s in the Squatting Watchman museum.”