A Host of Shadows

by Harry Shannon

  I didn’t answer, just severed the connection. The more Kasper knew when Petersen grilled him, the more trouble he’d be in.

  I wasn’t about to come in for a chat and let the trail go cold. I decided to gamble Petersen wouldn’t be able to pull a warrant until late the next day, and I figured to have it all wrapped up by then.

  I took the San Diego freeway to the Wilshire exit and headed toward the VA Center. According to Kasper, Jack Wade went there for treatments, although a call to the shrink at home turned up that Wade had missed his last session. Also that he lived in a small, rent controlled studio apartment at the western edge of Santa Monica.

  Frankly, I was hoping I wouldn’t find him dead. This whole situation was messy enough already.

  The place was a real dump; barking dogs, cat urine and beer bottles in the planters—weird for such a nice part of town. The morbidly obese landlord answered after my third, fairly aggressive knock.

  “Wade? He moved out, middle of the night, maybe a week ago. Nothing in the place but garbage, wet towels and a bunch of bloody sheets, you believe that? Prick still owes me a month’s rent.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Crazy as a bed bug, always carried a gun.”

  “Any idea where he might have gone?”

  “I did, I’d be chasing after my money, right?”

  He slammed the door in my face.

  There didn’t seem to be anything else. I called Kasper back and told him what I knew, asked him to play it safe and put out an APB on Jack Wade. Then I sat in the car for a while, thinking about what to do next. Closed my eyes and pondered. Then it hit me. I pulled my laptop from under the seat, hijacked some broadband and did a little extra research. And suddenly I knew what had been nagging me all along.

  The church at Sunset and Bellflower has a large parking lot on the south side. A few cars were parked near the back of the building. I waited patiently for the occupants to return. Six men and three women came out at around 1:00 in the morning. One of the men was big, burly, but too young to be Wade. Two of the women stayed behind to chat. Finally the brunette got into her dented BMW and drove away. When the blonde opened her car door and slipped into the driver seat, I tapped on the passenger window.

  “Jesus, you scared me!” Daisy Kendall opened the door for me to slide in. “Have you learned anything?”

  “A lot.”

  She caught the tension in my voice. “Is everything okay? What’s going on? Did you talk to Kevin?”

  I nodded. “I did better than that. I tracked down the men who raped you, Daisy. They’re all dead.”

  Her jaw dropped. “Dead?”

  “They were murdered. So I got right on it, and traced the clues right back to your AA friend Jack Wade.”

  “God. Poor Jack.”

  “I don’t suppose he was here tonight?”

  Daisy shook her head. “No, I told you, I haven’t seen him in days. Someone told me he was drinking again. Oh, my God, so now Jack is in serious trouble?”

  I patted her hand gently, smiled. “No, Daisy. Elizabeth Bath. You’re in serious trouble.”

  Her eyes went dark and feral. She almost had the .38 out of her purse before I could get the cuffs on her. I twisted her wrist and took the gun away. I dropped it into my coat pocket.

  I shook my head. “They wouldn’t cut you in, would they?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me go.”

  “You weren’t raped; it was staged. You told me you were a good actress, and you are. Damned good.”

  “What? Fuck you.”

  She spat at me. I wiped my face with my sleeve and kept talking. “Here’s what I think. The Rowdy Boyz were really raking in the green on that video series. They had already milked it for a bundle, emptied their accounts, and now were about to split town without paying you the nice, fat percentage they’d promised. So you went after them, one by one, looking for their cash.”

  She snorted. “If you think I’ll ever admit to any of this, you’re just spinning your wheels.”

  “The thing is, after the first killing, you weren’t just rolling around in fake blood anymore. And now you had a taste for the real thing. I think you killed him in the nude, and cut his throat just to bathe in blood again, Elizabeth Bath.”

  “Why do you keep using that name? I hardly ever go by that name.”

  “Because Elizabeth Bathory was one of the most famous women in Eastern European vampire lore. She lived back in the 1500s, as you know perfectly well. A madwoman who murdered peasants to bathe in their blood, hoping doing so would help her to stay young.”

  “Great.” She sneered. “So now you think I’m a vampire?”

  I stared. “No, I don’t think you’re a vampire, Daisy. Believe me, they do exist and I’ve met the real thing. But I do believe you think you’re one. Or at least that Elizabeth Bathory was onto something back in the day.”

  “Get out of my car.”

  I ignored her. “You went to Dover’s first, and woke him up with the gun.” I tapped the .38 in my pocket. “Probably not this gun, although maybe you’re that stupid. Anyway, Dover told you that one of the other guys had the cash. Maybe he said something, pissed you off. So you stuck the pillow over his face and shot him. Then you tossed the house, just in case, which is why it was such a mess. After that, you wiped his blood on you, cleaned up the room and used the shower. Hell, maybe you got off for all I know.”

  Daisy/Elizabeth snickered, fiddled with the cuffs and looked up at me. Those pretty eyes rolled. She looked kind of like a Great White too long on the Atkins Diet. “You done yet?”

  “Wild Man was probably next, but he told you Robbins had it. You had nothing to lose by then, so you killed him, too. Bathed in blood. Again, you showered afterwards and cleaned up. But when Robbins didn’t have the money either, you went nuts and took him out. So you did three murders in one night, probably all for nothing. Am I right?”

  “Think about it. Blood everywhere, all the supernatural shit? I’ll say I went temporarily insane after being raped,” Daisy said, coolly. “I’ll walk in a year or two.”

  “Maybe. Daisy, what happened to the money? Did Jack Wade catch on to the scam and get there first? Or did you set him up for this from the start?”

  Daisy didn’t answer.

  “Is Wade dead, too?”

  She sneered. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  I shrugged. “Me, I figure he’s dead, because you wanted me as an insurance policy. You knew where I’d go, so you called the police to report my actions as if you’d seen them to make it look like me on the vengeance trail on behalf of my sad little client. That way, if the cops didn’t buy that crazy Jack Wade did it, they’d likely come after my ass instead.”

  The car went red, then white as the patrol car pulled in behind us. For the first time, Daisy Kendall looked concerned. Then her eyes filled up and her lower lip began to tremble. It was an Oscar-worthy performance. She was working up a damned good imitation of an upset victim.

  “You’re good,” I said, then reached into my shirt pocket and produced my cell phone. I spoke into it. “Isn’t she, Jon? She’s really good.”

  Kasper showed up in uniform, at the driver side window. He tapped on it. I reached over and opened the door while Daisy hissed like an angry cobra. Kasper mockingly held a phone pressed to his ear. “Good, but not good enough. I heard the whole thing.”

  I smiled happily. “See? He heard the whole thing.”

  Daisy started screaming and kicking and threatening to kill us, too. It took some backup to get her subdued and on the way to jail.

  Kasper and I watched the second car drive away. I rubbed my sore nose, where Daisy had kicked me.

  “You were right about Wade,” Kasper said. “We found him a couple of blocks from his place, wrists sliced wide open and all bled out. The girl tried hard to make it look like suicide, but added to everything else we’re probably going to get her for that one, too. Appare
ntly he was found clinging to an empty suitcase.” He tapped the trunk of Daisy’s car. “So lay you ten to one we find the cash in here.”

  “I figure that’s probably what set her off. Wade turned out to be a prick, just after the money. So he ripped off the Rowdy Boyz first. When Daisy caught wind, she went on a rampage, found out she liked blood for real instead of pretend. She wigged out completely, and now everyone ends up dead.”

  “Everyone?”

  “She’ll get the needle for sure.”

  Jon nodded. “Yeah, probably. You look like you could use some coffee.”

  I shook my head. “If that stunt got Petersen off my ass, I think I’ll just go on home to bed. I’ll come by in the morning and give you a statement.”

  Kasper yawned. “Fair enough.”

  I started toward my car. “You know, people like that make me wonder sometimes.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “If this world is another planet’s hell.”

  Actually, I don’t wonder. I know.

  _______________

  “Maybe this world is another planet’s Hell.”

  —Aldous Huxley

  The Name of the Wicked

  How magnificent is the desert sky! The icy, scattered stars are like teardrops of crystal in a calm, dark ocean. A harsh wind is coming from the east, off the dry salt flats; wheezing down the gully and into this small canyon. It sounds like a creature in pain. Time hangs suspended. This land could effortlessly move a hundred years forward or back, but this is the night of April 16th, 1892.

  Pray for me. I may not live to see the morning.

  It’s getting hard to think, much less write in this journal. I can no longer feel my legs and doubtless have lost a great deal of blood. I can’t smell anything but dust, cordite, my own stink and the acrid odor of lamp oil. Ominous shadows are dancing all around me, lurking just beyond a yellow smear of light, waiting for my lantern to go out.

  When the glare no longer hurts their eyes they will attack.

  I have no excuse for my conduct; I certainly cannot plead ignorance. I returned to Nevada already well-schooled in the history of the region. After all, my grandfather’s ranch, several miles south of Two Trees, overlapped much of what had been the land of the Horse Humans. I had heard the legends at the knee of Nelly Tall Bear, who watched over me, this both before and after my parents died of the fever.

  Old Nelly was a large woman, jolly yet quite imposing. She wore pale deerskin and turquoise beads that were patiently threaded onto tiny strips of leather: Oiled hair, black as newspaper ink, pulled back tight and braided. It kept her aging face youthful. In fact, Nelly still looked girlish much later, in her coffin. She told me of that savage tribe; how the Horse Humans had sacrificed their own children and young girls to a demon called Orunde. They were the only known cannibals in the region and eventually their bloodlust all but wiped them from the face of the earth.

  As for me, I would tremble in awe when told of these primitive, horrible beings, my little pulse racing with boyish delight. On occasion, my mother would overhear such a recitation, grow distraught and sternly admonish Nelly to ‘stop this nonsense for the sake of the child’s immortal soul.’ Mother was a saved Christian and a stern taskmaster. I respected her, certainly, but it was Nelly who I loved as my true mother. After such a scolding, Nelly would promise to refrain from speaking of the Horse Humans again, but before too long I would charm yet another tale from her reluctant lips.

  On the other hand, my father was not a religious fellow. Indeed, he was known to enjoy the occasional card game, a cigar and some brandy. Father was a bald, round and bookish man given to wearing suspenders and wire-frame glasses. I think he found Nelly and her macabre fables quite amusing. In fact, he would argue to mother, ‘would you rather he read a Grimm Brothers fairy tale of a cannibal witch baking live children in her oven?’ Father reckoned that no harm could ever come to me merely from ‘the fevered imagination of a tribe of illiterate savages.’ Hogwash, he would sputter, is hogwash.

  But Nelly swore that her own great-great-grandmother had been a Horse Human named Crow Wing. And that Crow Wing’s mother, fearing for her life, had sent her to the hills to live with the Cave People, because they worshipped the sky and seldom went to war. Then Crow Wing, knowing that the night of Orunde had come, sat high up in the mountains and watched the tiny fires in the valley. Only one child was to die, but this night the sacrifice spread like a blaze in dried sage; seeping out like blood upon the sand. The Horse Humans went berserk. Three children, four. Warrior turned on warrior. They skinned one another. More killed, more died. It was blood lust.

  They say Crow Wing cried when she heard the final, tortured shrieks of the last remaining men, women and children. She vowed to tell the story; to pass it down from generation to generation, so that Orunde would never again successfully deceive a people. “Nelly, stop in the name of God!” Mother would cry. “Oh, hogwash!” Father would respond. “Let the boy be.”

  As previously stated, I was told these tales many times. They kept me hushed under the itchy covers, quaking but still, very long into the night; which is what I suspect old Nelly Tall Bear had intended. They also thrilled and disturbed me, thus sparking an interest in anthropology, anthropophagy and my wish to study at the finest schools in Europe after my parents passed on. Indeed, I did my Ph.D. on the legend of the Horse Humans, but Nelly would have been shocked, for I held that they had never truly existed. My thesis was that the tale of Orunde was apocryphal.

  Hush!

  A few pebbles zing merrily down a rock face and sprinkle a flat rock like jacks. Something is inching closer, staying just beyond the blush of yellow light. Tears spring to my eyes as I ache for opportunities lost and roads not taken.

  Sweet Jesus, I am running out of time. Must hurry, write faster…

  I returned to America via New York at the beginning of this year, 1892. I traveled west on the Union Pacific Railway with my degree, boundless arrogance and a financial grant from the fine Territory of Nevada. I was determined to prove my thesis and write a scholarly book before achieving tenure at a suitably posh university.

  In my arrogance, I had my life all mapped out. I returned to the Two Trees area via stage coach; I hired a digger, a merrily alcoholic sociopath named Abraham Lincoln Moon; and ventured out into the desert on horseback.

  My deceased grandfather’s ranch had been sold whilst I was abroad, of course; various parcels had then been divided and auctioned away to pay taxes. I had not been home in many years, although I knew that the area I wanted to visit lay a few miles south. Research had revealed that the deed was held by one Samuel Moon, the uncle of my drunken assistant, a fact which explains the necessity of his foul presence. He sang, mumbled and was exceedingly flatulent the entire trip.

  We rode further into the sage-freckled emptiness of the Nevada desert, until all signs of civilization vanished. No telephone poles, railway tracks, fences; not so much as a strand of barbed wire (as a child I had called the wickedly spun metal twine ‘bob wire’). The heat was as scorching as I remembered.

  The day dragged by until finally a red sunset stained the horizon. We had ridden for several miles when we spotted some cow skulls and buzzard feathers near a huge mound of earth. Abe Lincoln took a long drink of whiskey, belched and shook his head. “There,” he said. “That was the Horse Human land.”

  “And your Uncle Samuel lives there?”

  “No.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Not lives. He watches.”

  “Watches what?”

  Abe Lincoln Moon shrugged. “Just watches.”

  We continued on. My buttocks and thighs ached mightily and it was dusk by the time we located the dilapidated wooden shack. It had splintered frame windows and a roof of dented sheet metal that arched like a rainbow in the pastel sunset. I squinted and made a note in this journal as Abe Lincoln Moon approached the house.

  “Empty.”

  I shivered. The night was coo
l; a dry breeze raised the small hairs on my neck. I took a drink of water and swatted a horse fly away from my reddened nose. “Perhaps he is sleeping,” I ventured.

  Abe Lincoln scowled again. He grunted. “I doubt it.”

  For some reason his stereotypical behavior annoyed me. I slid down from my mount and cringed. I was used to traveling in a buckboard or a carriage. My very testicles hurt. I had not ridden a horse in many a year. I massaged my muscles beneath my stiff new work pants.

  “We’ll camp here,” I said, imperiously. “I don’t give a damn if your uncle is home or not. My buttocks are sore and I need something to eat. Build a fire.”

  Abe Lincoln Moon said: “Build your own.”

  I blinked. “Excuse me?”

  He shook his head again. “I won’t,” he said. “Not on this ground. This ground is sacred.”

  I squatted down and rubbed my eyes. I fear I was quite condescending. “Mr. Moon,” I said, “it’s getting late and I am weary. Now, first of all the entire Horse Human legend is just that, a legend. I have already told you that. There is nothing here that will harm us. Second, your uncle has built his home here, so quite obviously this place is safe. Third, if it is a question of money, I can…”

  Moon snorted. “You think I am afraid because it is Horse Human land?” He slapped his own chest. “I have their blood in me.” I rolled my eyes, but he did not seem to notice. “But this is also where many white men are buried. That makes for too much magic.”

  Moon now seemed totally sober and somewhat imposing. In fact, his doughy facial features had somehow hardened. He now reminded me of Nelly Tall Bear, my beloved childhood nanny. I swallowed and jumped to my feet. “White people?” I looked around, and my heart kicked in my chest. Even at dusk it became clear to me. I registered the scoured, white rock face and the Two Trees; the low creek bed and the gully coming in off the flats. “My God,” I said. “This was part of my grandfather’s property, Moon! I remember it from when I was a boy. Your uncle took some of the land nearest our spread.”