AEGIS Tales

by Todd Downing

  “Alright,” he said. “I’ll put in a word for you.”

  “We have to get her on the truck,” Mr. Sanchez said. “I injected her but we won’t know anything for a few hours and if it doesn’t work...”

  Dominic nodded. “Miss Jensen, you may accompany us and receive medical attention as soon as we arrive.”

  Wings nodded, grateful to finally sit down and have someone else take over.

  # # #

  It was two weeks of paperwork, interviews and training before Wings was officially taken on as an AEGIS operative. By that time, the incident at the Donaldson farm was covered up as a fatal fire due to the improper use of a homemade still. Wings had to laugh at how mad the Donaldsons would have been about that, they always took great pride in knowing everything about everything.

  Dominic’s recommendation had helped push her through the process quickly, but that meant her days were filled to bursting every minute. It was just what Wings needed, a good distraction from thinking too much about Gloria, who had slipped into a coma. Every night, Wings went to the private room they’d given Gloria and read to her or talked about what was happening. The scaly skin had disappeared but in its place was pink and wrinkled patches, as if she had been burned. Wings wondered if she’d have to live with those scars.

  Not that it matters, Wings said to herself as she ran a brush through her blond hair. She’s still gorgeous.

  “Miss Jensen?” Dominic knocked on her open door. “I have some good news for you. You’ve been cleared for your first assignment.”

  Wings’ stomach flipped and then plummeted. She wanted this, very much. But she’d very much wanted to see Gloria wake up, to tell her...

  “Thanks,” she said, taking the plain envelope he held out.

  “You don’t seem happy.”

  “No, I am, I’m very excited and grateful that you pushed me through so quickly, it’s just... I wanted to see if Gloria was going to make it.”

  Dominic grinned. “Open the envelope Miss Jensen.”

  She frowned at the command but did it anyway. Her blue eyes scanned the first page of the dossier and she smiled.

  “Well?” Dominic said. “She’s waiting for you.”

  Wings bolted from the room and ran to the western corner of the complex where Gloria’s private room was. Without knocking, she burst in and felt tears leap to her eyes.

  Gloria was sitting up, her hair braided to the side. A tray of barely touched food was sitting near the bed and a manila folder was open across her lap.

  She looked up at Wings, brown eyes sparkling as she smiled.

  “Hi, partner.”

  The Spirit Was Willing

  by Todd Downing

  It was New Year's Day, 1927, and the last thing Detective Sergeant Peterson expected to find at the grave site of Meredith Langston was... Meredith Langston. The recently-buried corpse lay slumped against the marble headstone, eyes shut, makeup as fresh as when they'd put her in the ground four days previous. The gown she'd been buried in was undamaged, sentimental jewelry still present and accounted for.

  Two questions Sergeant Peterson had was how she'd come to be there, and why? The grave site was otherwise pristine; not an ounce of dirt had been moved. The unmolested state of the corpse seemed to indicate this was not a grave robbery. If it was a prank, it was in poor taste, but extremely well-executed. And why did the body of a noted San Francisco philanthropist decide to show up above ground the very morning her grandson—recently home from Stanford for the funeral—had disappeared from his bed?

  It took Peterson the rest of the day to get the court order to exhume Meredith Langston's casket. The evening shift had just come on duty and Peterson knew it would be another all-nighter for him. He didn't know what he was expecting to find in what should have been an empty coffin, but it sure wasn't the dead body of Charles Langston, the missing college boy.

  Times like these are usually when I get a phone call.

  My name is Jim Holland, and if you saw me on the street, you probably wouldn't look twice. I'm the kind of guy who can disappear in a crowd. “Nondescript,” as Peterson is fond of saying. Five-foot-nine, pale complected from living nocturnally, hair and eyes the color of mud, and usually a day behind on my shave. I wear the same gray suit every day, and the tie usually hangs loose. I smoke too much.

  My partner, Mandy Hart, is my opposite in most every way. A tall, slim Creole gal from New Orleans with skin of deep cocoa, keen fashion sense and discerning amber eyes that can scan a person's soul and peer deep into the spirit world. In all my years of exposing frauds and charlatans, Mandy's the only true psychic I've ever encountered. And her legitimate skills have come in extremely handy.

  “Happy New Year,” Peterson greeted through the phone. I could already tell he wasn’t too pleased with it. Then he explained the part about someone who should have been buried not being buried and someone who should be alive being buried where the first person wasn’t buried, and before I’d even lit a cigarette, Mandy was standing by the office door with my coat and hat.

  By the time we got to Laurel Hill, the cops had already wrapped both Langstons and packed them in an ambulance for their trip to the morgue for an autopsy. Peterson was pacing up and down in front of a row of headstones, lit cigarette wobbling in his lips as he muttered to himself.

  “Nice night for a stroll through a graveyard,” I greeted.

  Peterson shook my hand, then Mandy’s. I could tell she was already picking up a scent off the place.

  “Show me the Langston grave?” she requested.

  Sergeant Kenneth Peterson of the SFPD was close to six-foot-five with a chest like a bootlegger’s barrel. He was impossible to miss, silhouetted against the encroaching fog—even on such a dark, moonless night. The orange falloff from his cigarette gave his face a vaguely nefarious look. He led us to a plot where several uniformed officers and cemetery workers stood around a now-dormant steam shovel. The whole place was a criss-crossed tartan of flashlight beams.

  Mandy immediately wandered over to examine the coffin and the hole it had recently been liberated from.

  “So let me see if I’ve got your story straight,” I said to Peterson. “Mrs. Langston passed away… the 28th, was it?”

  “The 28th. Tuesday,” he confirmed.

  “And the funeral was yesterday, on the 31st?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And when was Charles Langston reported missing?”

  “This morning. Missing from his bed. No signs of forced entry or struggle.”

  “And also this morning…” I pointed at the open grave.

  “Mrs. Langston was discovered next to the headstone. Six feet of earth, undisturbed.” Peterson scratched his receding hairline and probably contemplated taking the vacation he never seemed to get. “We dug up her casket and found Charles Langston’s body inside.”

  “So it’s the ol’ corpse switcheroo,” I said, lighting my own cigarette.

  “Except Chuck wasn’t a corpse when he was put in the coffin,” Mandy said matter-of-factly as she rejoined us away from the grave site.

  “Chuck?” I asked.

  “That was what he went by,” she said casually.

  “Actually, that’s true,” Peterson confirmed. “From what the family told us.”

  A lot of supposed “psychics” are earnest in their demeanor, needing constant validation that their statements are correct. Mandy isn’t earnest. She just smiles and goes on her way, confident in her certitude.

  “So what are we looking at, Holland?” Peterson squinted and the soft, orange light on his face went out as he dropped his cigarette to the ground and stepped on it.

  I honestly didn’t know what to say. It’s not like this stuff is in the encyclopedia. We spend so much of our time debunking fake psychics and paranormal events, when the real stuff pops up, we often haven’t a clue how to react.

  “Well, I could take some shots with one of our special cameras, see if they pick up anything, but I
’m more inclined to hear what Mandy has to say.”

  And boy, did Mandy have something to say.

  “This is a new kind of entity I’ve not encountered before,” she said. And that meant something, given her childhood steeped in the haunted past of New Orleans. “It has the ability to move matter through the astral plane.”

  Peterson shook his head. “How do you figure?”

  “You’ve seen the result with your own eyes,” she answered with a cryptic smile. “The entity feeds on the psychic energy of the victim, which is heightened at the moment of death. Add terror to the mix and you have an exponential release of such energy—it’s a feast for this… thing.”

  I followed Peterson’s lead and stomped out my cigarette on the ground. “So there’s something… some kinda psychic vampire… taking living people and blinking them into graves, then removing the previous occupant, just for kicks?”

  “Not for kicks,” Mandy corrected, quite serious. “For food.”

  “I…” Peterson began, trailing off as he shook his head.

  I nudged him back to the case at hand. “Sarge. This isn’t your first dance. You helped us with the Noe Valley portal and solved the Jade Demon murders in Chinatown with Danny Long.”

  “That doesn’t exactly make any of this normal.”

  “Fellas,” Mandy said gently, stepping between us. “We will need to keep a wary eye on the local cemeteries in the coming days. This may not be a spirit of human origin, but it has a taste for fear, and I think we will see more of these ‘displacements’.”

  “Okay, Mandy,” I nodded. “Let’s play this smart. You consult with Oscar, see if you can’t figure out a way to fight it. I’ll check with the coroner and make sure this is what we think it is.”

  “And the P.D.?” Peterson asked, rubbing his jaw.

  “Keep a detail stationed at every cemetery in town. The moment a corpse shows up out of the ground, you dig up that grave, pronto. Chances are good you could save a life.”

  Early the next day, we called on the city coroner, who had examined both Langston corpses. Mandy had called our licensed mage consultant, Oscar Morgan, but there was no answer, so she decided to tag along with me and we could both see Morgan later.

  The morgue was in the basement of an old brick building which had somehow survived the ‘06 quake and subsequent fire. It smelled like formaldehyde and a peculiar kind of body odor—the kind that shows up after weeks of not taking a bath. The kind one might try to mask with rose oil or fresh-cut flowers.

  Doc Sawyer—his real name, I kid you not—was a short, bald man of 55 with spectacles and a bushy mustache. He had already done his examination of the two bodies, which had been shut away into two of the new refrigerated drawers where they could be kept indefinitely.

  “Meredith Langston, female, age 79,” Sawyer said, reading from his written reports. “Nothing different about her body, save for a few days’ worth of decay.”

  “The body was not messed with in any other way?” I asked.

  “No sir,” Sawyer answered with firm assuredness before continuing. “Charles Langston, male, age 23. Definitely died of suffocation, but the condition of his hands and fingers, corresponding to the damaged interior of the casket, indicates he was alive at the time of… placement… and tried to claw his way out.”

  “Horrible,” Mandy shuddered, and we all silently agreed.

  I jotted down some notes and pointed at Sawyer’s clipboard. “Was there anything else?”

  “Just the residue,” he said, walking to a counter and grabbing a glass vial with a cork stopper. “Found around the young man’s eyes, nose and ears. It’s not nasal discharge, nor any human bodily fluid.”

  Sawyer handed me the vial and had me sign for it. Mandy knew instantly what it was.

  “Ectoplasm,” she announced.

  Sawyer almost rolled his eyes, but then he remembered all the weirdness that had descended upon San Francisco in the past year and corrected himself.

  We thanked the good doctor and left with a vial of spirit tissue and confirmation of the entity’s M.O. At the phone booth outside Edie’s on Market, I spent the nickel for a call in to Peterson’s precinct downtown.

  Peterson wasn’t in, and he’d left no message.

  Another nickel bought me confirmation that Oscar Morgan was home, and would see us.

  I got lost in my head as the trolley whisked us down Market to the Mission District. Mandy, too, seemed miles away. This was a different kind of case—the kind that becomes personal, whether you want it to or not. I was glad we were getting some help. Morgan was a well-traveled and “financially-secure” occultist and author, renowned for his expertise in ancient magics. He owned a Victorian townhouse a couple blocks away from the actual Spanish mission that was the neighborhood’s namesake.

  He met us at the door in a black and gold satin smoking jacket, hair slicked back with Murray’s pomade. He was tan, his pencil-thin mustache was flawlessly trimmed, and he reeked of aftershave and exotic travel.

  “James! Amanda! Do come in!” he greeted in a baritone so buttery smooth it even made my temperature spike.

  “Oscar,” Mandy replied, allowing him to kiss her hand. “It’s been too long. When did you get back from Paris?” She was gracious, but clearly immune to whatever sex appeal Morgan had on display. I remember thinking that was just as well.

  “Why, Amanda, I wasn’t in Paris,” Oscar protested. “I just returned from Shanghai on business.”

  “Oh, so the gentleman was a passenger on the ship?”

  Now I was intrigued.

  Oscar raised an eyebrow. “Why I’m sure I don’t know what you—”

  “I’ve encountered enough Parisian gentlemen in New Orleans to be able to pick up that particular scent anywhere in the world. My dear Oscar, he’s all over your smoking jacket.”

  There was a tense silence, then Morgan cracked a wide smile. “Fair play, Amanda! You got me!” He waved us into the parlor and set out a tea service. “His name was Jacques and he was lovely. Would you like tea? I just made it. It’s oolong.”

  We sat and drank Oscar’s tea and I gave him the rundown: a corpse which should have been in the ground had been swapped with a live person who shouldn’t have been in the ground, who had become a corpse. Then, I let Mandy run with the ball. She knew how to talk to Morgan. They spoke different dialects of a common language. They went on about various types of inter-dimensional entities, lobbing options back and forth like they were playing tennis. I counted the word “entity” spoken at least thirty times. They might have actually mentioned “ley lines” as well. Finally, given the M.O., they settled on an entity of non-human origin—that is to say, something that didn’t originate on our plane of existence, and which had never been human. It wasn’t a ghost or a lost soul; it was a malevolent psychic vampire with the ability to pop through dimensions as easy as hopping on the cable car.

  And we all agreed it had to be stopped.

  We realized we’d talked well past sunset and into the night. It was already 10 o’clock and I was famished. Morgan said he needed a bit of time to locate a certain component that he could turn into a helpful tool in our kit. We took our leave and headed back to the office—which was also our apartment—stopping for takeout at Chu’s on the way.

  We feasted on chow mein and Mandarin chicken and talked some more over a couple bottles of near beer. I fell asleep on the sofa, and Mandy in the armchair.

  I dreamed I was searching through an enormous, empty mansion, in the dark. I knew Mandy was in danger, but everywhere I looked, I couldn’t find her. I suddenly turned the corner and saw her at the end of a long hall—she was bound by tendrils of ethereal light, struggling to move, unable to cry out. I began to run toward her down the hall, keeping her in the beam of my flashlight.

  And then the face appeared—vaguely human but definitely not of this world—with blurred features, skull-like, and a mouth full of dagger teeth. It popped up over her shoulder, grinning its terr
ible grin, and I could tell the tendrils of light belonged to the thing. It would feed on Mandy’s psychic energy, and feed well. I yelled her name, running down the hall at an agonizingly slow pace. The entity grinned and leered at me, then my flashlight flickered and died.

  At 5 a.m. the phone rang, sending a jolt through my body. I sat upright and grabbed the receiver from the candlestick. It was Peterson. They had another displaced corpse, and another victim. At another cemetery.

  We called a cab and headed back downtown.

  Calvary Cemetery lay southeast across Geary from Laurel Hill, and due east across Masonic from Ewing Field—where just last November I’d seen the Oakland Oaks football team crush my San Francisco Tigers 3-0.

  Along Geary, from Arguello Boulevard to Baker Street, it was pretty much “Cemetery Central”, with the Oddfellows, Masons, Calvary and Laurel Hill graveyards surrounding a multi-purpose sports arena. Hooray for the home team, but if you get slaughtered, we have you covered.

  There had been a lot of talk about shutting down the graveyards within the city limits and moving the bodies out to increase the local property values, but so far the voters had said no. Even so, the new burials in the area were usually restricted to family crypts, or plots that’d been paid for years ago. The Jewish cemetery had already put a moratorium on new burials, so most of the newly deceased were sent to Colma or South City. This made the recent interments something a bit special.

  It was a few minutes shy of dawn by the time our cab pulled up. A surly beat cop named Stubbs was on the lookout for us, and led us deep into the cemetery. Another crowd of uniformed officers and funeral home employees stood gabbing around another steam shovel, and we were treated to the sight of a dapper old gent in a black pinstriped suit splayed out unceremoniously next to an open hole. The casket had been dug up and lay open nearby, and the recently dead body of a young woman lay inside, staring up into eternity.