by C. L. Bevill
Tavie suddenly understood that she was being courted. Mistress Nightshade might be on the opposite side of a jail cell, but she had immediately comprehended what the elders were doing.
“Make sure they tell you all of the perks,” Nightshade advised. “There’s two cots in the back that you share with Enoch and Fritzi, and Fritzi snores, as well as dreams about her twenty-seven cats. Did you know they ate her after she died? Anyway, she sleep-pets. Sometimes she sleep-snips their nails. Over and over again. Also Enoch pops his knuckles while he’s resting. It can be horribly annoying. Did I mention that all of the bad people will be watching your back, and I don’t mean in a my-what-an-adorable-derriere manner. They’ll want to turn you or get you on their payroll. The last Deadsville sheriff got dragged out of here by a reaper and he was screaming bloody murder. I mean the sheriff was screaming bloody murder, of course, because reapers only say a few select phrases. I guess the sheriff didn’t do so well on recidivism, especially his own.” She shook her head sadly.
Maximillian motioned Tavie toward the end of the hall. Nightshade kept talking, “And the Ralph Harrison Gang will want to decapitate you on a regular basis. They get someone new to do it each time by promising redemption. The sheriff before the last one lost his head fifty-two times. Then he quit and moved into the barrows with a milkmaid from Patagonia.” She demonstrated by slicing a line across her neck with her index and middle fingers. “They say you can still talk after it’s done.”
Enoch said, “Oh, shut it, Nightshade, this one’s got a gun.”
Nightshade shut it.
Tavie made a mental note about Nightshade. She wasn’t a prostitute; she was a dominatrix. The differences were dramatic. Once Charlie had explained to Tavie why they could arrest one but not necessarily the other one, and Tavie had blushed right down to the roots of her hair. She didn’t blush nearly as much now. In any case, Nightshade was a wellspring of knowledge that might not be otherwise obtained.
The remainder of the jail didn’t take long to view. It was as Nightshade had said. A back room with two cots and some private items was pretty much all that was left. Then they went out the narrow back door to see the backside of the building. A battered generator sat there and was secured with chains and padlocks.
“What powers the generator?” Tavie asked.
Lillian snickered. “It ain’t gasoline. I don’t think we get gasoline through here but once in a blue moon. That’s usually in the tanks of cars that come through. Since those are generally wrecked or burned, there isn’t much there. No, it’s ectoplasm.”
“Ectoplasm,” she repeated. “I’ve heard the terms ecto juice and ectohead. Is that related?”
“We’re dead,” Sternstein said. “We’ve got to be made out of something. Call it some kind of energy. It can be siphoned off and used in other ways. It’s what powers the lights and keeps some things running. There are a few buses that run irregularly here, using ectoplasm.”
“Who’s providing the ectoplasm?” Tavie asked.
“Deadies donate it in trade. It’s kind of like being paid for donating plasma. A little ectoplasm goes a long way. We have a clinic two streets over that keeps it all straightened out.” Maximillian pointed in one direction. “It’s a pretty valuable commodity. We also get the prisoners to donate, which is part of their punishment while they’re here.”
“And ecto juice,” Tavie prompted.
“Someone figured out how to manipulate it into drink form and added a little jolt of something else. It’s concentrated ecto. Makes you drunk and hyper at the same time and it tastes just like chocolate milk. If you have a drink, make sure you’re sitting down the first time.” Sternstein smiled reminiscently.
“And ectoheads are addicts, like alcoholics,” Tavie concluded.
Lillian nodded.
“The biggest problems we have in Deadsville are ectoheads, gangs, and the occasional psychopath,” Sternstein said. “Generally psychopaths get a visit from a reaper sooner rather than later, which typically solves the problem. We figure it’s something in the way their brains are formed. If a person doesn’t know they’re actually doing something wrong, then it’s hard for them to be judged and taken away.”
“Taken where?”
“That’s the $64,000 question, sweetness,” Sternstein said. “We wouldn’t have all this folderol if we knew what was going to happen next. If we knew everyone was going to get theirs, perhaps we wouldn’t be all wrapped up in an elephant sized knot.”
“Of course, if you have faith in your religion,” Lillian said slyly, “then you probably know exactly where you’re going.”
Tavie looked around. They stood in an alley. At the end she could see people moving around. There was the noise of some game being played nearby. Someone shouted, “Yes! Yes! YES!” in answer to something else that happened.
“No children here,” she said. “No babies. No young ones. I saw a young man before who might have been about fifteen.”
“A few are younger,” Maximillian admitted, “but mostly they’re innocent. As far as we know they go somewhere else. The people who come to Deadsville are a little more complicated.”
“Complicated.” Tavie was complicated. She knew all about complicated. If given the chance she would say that it had needed to be done. She would say that her temper had gotten the best of her. She would say that she couldn’t get the picture out of her head. It was all of the above.
“So what do you think?” Maximillian asked politely. He looked as if he would be equally comfortable in an executive’s office or a five-star restaurant.
Don’t forget about that handy-dandy tantō, Tavie reminded herself. “About the jail?”
Maximillian nodded. Tavie looked around. Everyone looked quietly expectant. Sternstein appeared almost antsy. Lillian was the only one who seemed kind of bored.
“It’s a jail. It’s rudimentary but hey, it’s not like we can run down to the closest place with wrought iron and a MIG welder, right?” Tavie didn’t wait for an answer. “What exactly are you looking for here?”
“We want a new sheriff,” Lillian snapped. She patted her jacket in a way that reminded Tavie of smokers looking for their pack of cigarettes. Then her hands dropped away as she remembered that not only had she stopped but that she was dead and there weren’t any more to be had. “Duh,” Lillian added.
“Why not him?” Tavie asked and pointed at Enoch. “He’s been around for a while, based on the uniform and the glasses. Looks like he got stabbed in the fifties or the sixties. Obviously he knows the whole deal.”
“1962,” Enoch said and laughed. “I’ve got the fade, ma’am. I ain’t likely to be here much longer. Any time now and one of them fellas with a scythe will wander up to touch me.”
“The fade?”
Enoch held up one of his hands. “Just watch a moment.” The hand was just a hand. It was white and had callouses as if he wasn’t just a police officer. He saw her look and said, “I work the farm, too. I worked the farm, that is. Being a patrolman don’t pay enough for the note. Minimum wage was just a dollar an hour back then, you know. Just keep watching my hand.”
Tavie’s eyes almost rolled but she stood there for a moment, waiting. His white flesh was solid with only the freckles and a spray of red hairs over the back of the hand. Then it flickered, just a little. It went translucent for no longer than it would take her to take a breath. Then it became solid again.
Enoch laughed again. “I bin here a long while. I’m ready to move on. I don’t know where I’m going but I have faith.” He shook his head. “Best to train someone new. If I didn’t know better I would say serendipity had her fine hand in making this so. You coming here at just the right time and all.”
Tavie watched Enoch put his hand down. “You don’t have a gun?”
“The fella who kilt me took my service revolver before I died,” he said with a sigh. “Expect that man— his name is Jed Rafferty— is dying right now. He’s been in prison a long time. Must
be in his seventies now. Last I heard, he had diabetes, high cholesterol, and gout, all the same time.”
“The man who murdered you is dying,” Tavie said. “Does that have something to do with it being your time?”
Enoch shook his head. “It don’t always work that way and asides we don’t know exactly what’s happening in the living world. Ain’t nothing here written in stone, unless you happen to be named Moses.” He laughed at his joke.
“So why me?” Tavie asked the rest.
“You’re a cop,” Sternstein said promptly. “You have a gun. You protected someone innocent. All of that plus you’re not a pushover. I can’t see you falling for some of the nonsense that happens around here.”
But Tavie knew she had already fallen for some of the nonsense. She had told Thana about the plot of a bad B movie and Thana had deemed that a trade. Tavie had gotten something she wasn’t certain she wanted.
“How does this work?”
Sternstein glanced at Maximillian and Lillian. The three of them seemed to be the core of the elders. If they had been there the longest, or perhaps they happened to have wrangled the power of the positions. Tavie couldn’t understand that. They didn’t have anything to truly threaten people with, so why follow their edicts?
“The sheriff keeps the peace,” Sternstein said. “Takes the troublemakers to jail. Leaves them there until they straighten up or a reaper comes for them. Really, there aren’t too many who are so terrible.”
“Those three in there might have raped your little friend, Coco,” Tavie said coldly, “in their attempt to get her diamond tennis bracelet. That’s not so terrible?”
“Surely you’ve run into people who don’t get the proper amount of justice,” Maximillian said. “What would you have us do? Cut off their dicks?”
“We could let Mistress Nightshade do that,” Tavie suggested, only half-joking. “She might actually enjoy it.”
“Lock a deadie up for long enough and they’ll agree to anything,” Lillian interjected. “Justice is a gray scale, as I know you’re used to.”
“You simply shoot them in the head, if you can,” Sternstein said. “Body works, too. As you can tell from your first experience. Then have the brute squad drag them here. Lock them up until they give up their weapon or whatever they hold dear. Sometimes we offer to give it back to them if they keep their noses clean for a certain period of time.”
“That’s a pretty messed up system of justice,” Tavie noted.
“That’s Deadsville,” Sternstein said wryly. “If they’re bad enough, as we’ve said, the reapers take care of it.”
“Does the sheriff work for the elders?”
“No, the sheriff works for the common good,” Lillian said and it was sarcasm personified. “Of course, the sheriff reports to the elders, but a sheriff’s got to have some good common sense.”
“So no one is above the law,” Tavie prompted.
“If one of us does something evil, then we’re going in those cells, just as the rest,” Maximillian said.
“How about you with your little Ginsu knife?” Tavie asked.
“New deadies get upset because they can’t tell they’re dead,” Maximillian said. He didn’t sound upset. “We have to prove they’re dead and quickly, too. It wasn’t an issue for you, though, was it?”
“I think it was the guy with the shark on his head that pushed me over the edge,” Tavie said. “Why is it different for you than, say, Mistress Nightshade?”
“I only cut that woman’s hand off once,” Maximillian said, “and it came back.”
“According to Nightshade, so did the guy’s testicles,” Tavie said with a smile. “Did the old testicles fade away like the hand?”
“That’s what happens,” Sternstein said.
“So what happens to sheriffs is that they get a little too much power, right?” Tavie asked. “Don’t you worry that’ll happen to me?”
Maximillian looked at Tavie and then looked at Sternstein and Lillian. Tavie knew right then they were keeping something from her.
“I’m a little different,” Tavie said.
Maximillian nodded. “We’ve been here long enough to know that something is different. If there were portents and omens, the skies would be raining blood and frogs, and the local seers would be packing up to move back to Iowa with the grandkids.”
“I arrived just in the nick of time,” Tavie said. She made a moue. “This sounds like a set-up. I die. I come to Deadsville. You need a sheriff. Voila. Here I am. With gun and badge and special spidy senses. I shall uphold justice and ride through the west with a mask on a white horse and silver bullets. Wait, wrong scenario.”
Sternstein sighed. “She’s so new. Maybe this is a bad idea.”
Lillian said, “But she’s got a gift we’ve never seen before.”
Maximillian added, “And a strength we don’t see often.”
“Octavia,” Sternstein said, and Tavie said, “Tavie.” Sternstein started again. “Tavie, do you know what happened to you?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Nothing.”
“There were a few bits and pieces,” Tavie said. First on the scene. Stabbing victim. Someone with dark eyes. A feeling of despair. Her mother was crying. Her father downed a schooner of beer. Puddles A. Lott was whining and chewing on his back leg. She pushed the visions out of her mind before she lost herself.
“Did anything else happen?”
“You mean here or there?”
“Something happened here?” Sternstein jumped on that.
“A lot of things happened here,” Tavie said. She wasn’t sure if she should talk about Thana or Thana’s gift or that Tavie had stupidly agreed to a trade even though she’d been warned. It didn’t seem like the vilest gift, either. It could have been tons worse. She could have visions of people’s nose picking habits in her head or how they scratched their butts when they thought no one was looking. “Weird things,” she added.
“How weird?” Lillian asked.
“I saw a man with a pancake head,” Tavie said. “He tried to hit on me.”
“Yeah, that guy’s rather proud of having been run over,” Sternstein said. “He uses his hands to direct his eyeball.”
“That’s the one. He was only marginally better than the guy with the shark.” Tavie shuddered. “Maybe I’m better off not knowing.”
Abruptly, Fritzi came to the door at the back of the jail and frantically motioned at Enoch. Fritzi whispered into Enoch’s ear and glanced at the elders with a frightened expression. Enoch said, “Of course not.”
Fritzi said, “It’s true. Cold like icicles. Just lying there.”
“Cain’t be,” Enoch said. “That’s never happened before.”
“I know,” Fritzi hissed. The fuzzy blonde hair was like the top of a woman who had been struck by lightning. Her big blue eyes were like empty saucers. Tavie could see under Fritzi’s cover that she had been cut into several pieces and then sewed back together with black thread. She looked a little like an abbreviated version of Frankenstein’s monster. Tavie remembered about the cats and resisted shaking her head. Had that all happened before Fritzi had died? How was that possible?
“Who tole you?” Enoch demanded of Fritzi.
“Walleyed Tony,” Fritzi said. “He never lies about anything.”
Enoch glanced at the group of elders. Then his boyish gaze came to rest on Tavie. His expression was grim. “We got a dead deadie.”
Maximillian grunted. “This is Deadsville. We’ve got thousands, tens of thousands, maybe.”
“No, he’s really dead,” Enoch said. “Dead. Seriously dead.”
“A really dead guy in Deadsville,” Tavie said with a scoffing snort. “Imagine that.”
Chapter 6
Death will come uninvited.– Lithuanian Proverb
~
“I had to die for this crap to happen.”– Octavia Stone
~
“Wot’s all this, then?” Enoch tried to
do an English bobby’s accent but it ended up sounding like a Texas country boy doing a bad Cockney accent. He might as well have added, “ya’ll.”
Tavie dutifully followed Enoch and the elders into Deadsville, mildly interested because they were curiously intent. The deadie known as Walleyed Tony led them where they needed to go and he really did have a walleye. She looked around her as they walked down the streets. Some of the streets were named. Others were not. Occasionally there would be a significant landmark, like the WWII Avenger plunged halfway down into the earth. Its wings had broken off and were propped against the main body. Someone had built a house using the upright portion of the plane as one of the corners. A dim blue light stemmed from the cockpit enclosure, making it look like a freaky military sculpture.
Maybe one day Tavie wouldn’t need a map to find her way around Deadsville. She hoped she wouldn’t be there that long, but then so, probably, did a lot of deadies.
They ultimately arrived at a dark street with a crowd of people blocking the entrance. It didn’t have any of the blue lighted lanterns hanging on sundry poles and walls, so the shadows were long and deep. Enoch rustled up a lantern from somewhere. Tavie didn’t know from where; his uniform was form fitting. He forced his way through a group of gawkers and looked down at something she couldn’t see because of the previously mentioned crowd of curious onlookers looking down, too.
“Say, Tavie,” he called back. “You should come take a look. I ain’t never seen the likes before. At least not on this side of the veil.”
Tavie worked her way through the throng. Certainly, the dead liked a spectacle. But then again, so did the living.
After elbowing a man with a broken neck that bent over nearly ninety degrees, Tavie finally snapped, “Get your asses back away from here!” She didn’t have any real authority. She hadn’t taken the job and she wasn’t sure how well the people would listen to her. There was a clamor of dissenting grumbles as they backed away.
“Keep going!” Tavie added in a no nonsense tone. This was a tone that police officers ascribed to and a tone that would not allow people to disobey. She secretly called it her mommy/teacher/DPS road test supervisor voice.
