AEGIS Tales

by Todd Downing

  Peterson stalked toward us, orange light from his cigarette making his face into a gargoyle again. “Where you been? Sleeping?” he demanded.

  “Happy to bill you overtime,” I answered, unflinching. “Who are the stiffs?”

  “The swell in the suit is Antonio Feri. Age 67 when he died last week.”

  “Why does that name ring a bell?”

  “His nephew, Jerry, is a bootlegger.” Peterson flashed a look that, even in the dark, I could tell was frustration at his failure to bring the entire criminal element in San Francisco to justice.

  “Jerry Feri,” I chuckled. “You can’t write this stuff.” Funny names aside, I was glad the Italian mafia hadn’t infiltrated my beloved city. Yet.

  Mandy was already standing over the open casket nearby. “Anita,” she whispered. Her slender fingers flitted over the corpse’s face, closing the poor woman’s eyes and collecting some greasy residue from inside the coffin lid. She scraped it into a glass vial much like the coroner’s and stopped it with a cork, dropping it back into her handbag.

  Peterson nodded, ambling over to the coffin. “Anita Scariso. Antonio’s daughter. Age 35. Married to Alfredo Scariso. Also a—”

  Before Peterson could finish saying “bootlegger”, a well-dressed man in pinstripes, spats and a Longley bowler hat came pushing through the small crowd of police officers. He was clearly distraught and, upon seeing the woman in the casket, paced back and forth next to the open grave and shook with tears of anger and regret.

  “Anita! What happened? What has happened here?”

  Peterson was all business. Clapping one large hand on the man’s shoulder, he offered a cigarette with the other. “Alfredo Scariso. Can you tell me where you and your wife were last evening?”

  The bootlegger composed himself and finally stood still, taking the cigarette and nodding. “Anita and I had just returned from a gala luncheon at the Orpheum, but it was just champagne and hors d'oeuvres, so we decided to have an early supper in the kitchen.”

  “When was this?” Peterson asked, scribbling in his notebook.

  “About 4:30 in the afternoon.”

  “When did Anita disappear?” Mandy asked quietly, eliciting a shocked look from Scariso.

  “I—I’m not sure,” he stammered. “No later than 5. I went to the cellar to bring up a bottle of wine, and when I arrived, she was gone. I searched the house and walked the neighborhood… I returned after an hour and took the car out in a wider search. After scouring the city, I returned home and have been waiting by the telephone since then.”

  I could tell Scariso was a tough guy by nature, so it was oddly endearing to see him tear up over his late wife.

  “And we called you just before 5 a.m.?” Peterson noted, checking his watch.

  “Yes,” Scariso nodded, transforming suddenly into a mass of conflicting emotions. “How could this happen? And what are the police doing to find her killer? What are you doing, Sergeant?” Although he was shorter than Peterson by nearly a foot, Scariso puffed up on his toes and got within three inches of his face, cheeks dark red with fury. We could see the spittle fly.

  I knew I’d regret it, but Peterson and I went way back, so I intervened. “Look, Mr. Scariso. We’re dealing with a supernatural entity here. There’s nothing the police—”

  “You’re the ghost hunters I heard about on the radio, eh?” he turned his attention on me, face red and eyes ablaze. “I got a lot of friends in this city, Mister Ghost Hunter. You find whatever did this to my Anita, maybe you get to call yourself my friend, capiche?” He made a show of straightening my tie just a bit too tightly, inferring what would happen should we be unsuccessful. So much for the city being mob-free.

  Peterson was a statue. “Stubbs,” he said in a clipped tone, “come take Mr. Scariso’s detailed statement and make arrangements for the autopsy.” As the surly cop approached to take care of the bereaved bootlegger, Peterson added, “Condolences, Mr. Scariso.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Scariso muttered as he walked away, turning back briefly to point at me. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you, Mister Ghost Hunter.”

  “So we have a slightly better timeline to work from,” I said to Peterson as Stubbs escorted Scariso away. “The wife disappeared sometime before 5 p.m. When was Mr. Feri’s body found displaced?”

  Peterson flipped a page in his notes and fished his pocket for another cigarette. I pulled one from my own jacket and lit both with a wooden match.

  “About 3 a.m., a night watchman was making his rounds and apparently got the bejeezus scared out of him.”

  “So if our psychic vampire abducted Anita at about 5…”

  Mandy knew where I was going and completed my thought. “The average person can survive five and a half hours inside a sealed casket.”

  Peterson swallowed. “And how do you know… Nah. Never mind.”

  “That means we’re looking at a time of death before midnight,” I said.

  The Sergeant took a deep drag on his cigarette and looked right at me. “Time of death is only relevant in the matter of ‘how fast can we dig up the grave after the corpse appears?’ What’s interesting to me is that the new victims are linked by blood.”

  “Not with each other,” I argued.

  “No, not with each other. With the previous occupant.”

  Mandy’s eyes went wide. “It’s using the family bloodline to find the location. Most entities we know of that shift between dimensions need to have seen or visited a location before. But it can’t have seen the inside of these graves. So it’s using the victim’s ancestry as a map.”

  “Hey Mandy,” I said, “my Uncle Mike is buried at Laurel Hill. I want you to know that in case I go missing.”

  Mandy smiled. “Your Uncle Mike has been dead for ten years. This entity needs a closer connection to point the way. Both Langston and Feri were buried within the past week.”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “Just the same…”

  “I’ll dig you up with my bare hands if I have to,” she promised with a wink.

  Peterson gestured at Mandy with his cigarette. “What does your, uh, juju tell you about this thing’s limitations, if any?”

  “Well, the cemeteries are close together,” she began. “Where was Chuck abducted?”

  Peterson consulted his notepad. “The Langston family home is in Pacific Heights. The Scarisos live in North Mission.”

  “Those are just a few city blocks away from each cemetery,” I offered. “Maybe this thing doesn’t have an unlimited range.”

  “It’s found a convenient food source,” said Mandy, making Peterson shudder. “As long as it can find new victims, it won’t be letting up any time soon.”

  “We should get back to Oscar Morgan,” I said. “See what he’s come up with to help us catch this thing.”

  Peterson nodded. “You do that.”

  “Hey, Sarge,” I added, “Post some uniforms around all four cemeteries and have those steam shovels ready to burn. That way we’ll have a better chance of finding a displacement soon enough to save the buried victim.”

  “Yeah. And we’ll have the precincts keep an ear on the switchboards for any missing person alerts.”

  Mandy touched Peterson’s shoulder as we began to head back to the street. “The displacements will be recently interred, in plots purchased before the 1901 moratorium,” she said. “And the victims will be adult blood relatives.”

  “Stop the presses,” Peterson put up a hand and halted Mandy in mid-stride. “Why adult?”

  A gentle look washed over Mandy’s face as she explained. “Why, because this entity requires absolute terror when it feeds. And while a child might experience terror of the unknown, an adult will feel terror from knowing what is happening.”

  We left Sergeant Peterson alone in the graveyard, as a cold morning breeze blew in off the Bay. We hailed another cab and headed back to the Mission District, to Oscar Morgan’s town home once again. As anticipated, he met us in that same gold smoking jacket an
d offered us freshly-brewed oolong tea. The man was only unstructured in his carnal proclivities; everything else, it seemed, was by-the-book. This visit, however, held a gift in store. As we were comfortably ensconced in Oscar’s front nook, sipping proper tea from China, he disappeared into an office and returned with a small wooden box. Several phrases and symbols—what I figured to be arcane spells—had been burned into the wood, which was beautifully finished with walnut oil.

  As he approached, Oscar gave us each a parental look of warning, before opening the box and allowing us to see the contents in the morning sunlight. Inside the box, on a bed of dark green velvet, was a curious transparent object. It resembled a stone or crystal, yet it was artificially round, as if it had been crafted, like a warped marble with a convex side and a concave side. About four inches in diameter, it drew the sunlight into it and seemed to glow on its velvet seat. Mandy reached for it, but began to swoon. Oscar closed the box and I reached over to hold Mandy upright.

  “Whoa there,” I said. “What’s that all about, Morgan?”

  Oscar grinned a broad, white grin. “It’s a psychic lens,” he explained. “The crystal absorbs psychic energy from the convex side, while the user remains behind the concave side.”

  Mandy nodded. “So we can trap the entity.”

  “Precisely,” Oscar kept smiling. “It also allows the user to see through the lens into the astral plane.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “So how do we use it?”

  “I’ll do it,” Mandy jumped in. “I can draw the entity to me.”

  “Are you sure?” I hesitated. “That thing almost toppled you here at the table.”

  Oscar chuckled. “As long as she stays behind the concave side, it should be fine. And she’s right—her psychic ability can summon the entity to her.”

  “Where did this come from?” I wondered aloud.

  “I found it on an expedition in Arabia,” he explained. “It took some time and a fair bit of training to be able to figure out its properties and how to control it. It’s been sitting in my collection for the past six years. Glad it can be of some use to you and Sergeant Peterson in the meantime.”

  We offered Oscar Morgan some money for his psychic lens, which he refused. Then we said our goodbyes and headed home to the office.

  With a belly full of roast beef on rye and a root beer or two, I passed out on the Murphy bed in the side office—shoes, hat and all. Mandy meditated, sitting quiet and still in the overstuffed armchair in the corner. The psychic lens lay on its velvet bed, box open.

  I awoke to darkness. I tried to sit up but bumped my head and had to lay back down. Drawing my lighter from the inside breast pocket of my jacket, I flicked the lever, creating the small, amber flame which presently illuminated my surroundings. The silk bunting was a dead giveaway, no pun intended. I was in a casket, and when I called out, I could tell by the dull acoustics that the casket was underground. As much as I tried to maintain my cool, the truth is I’ve never been keen on tight spaces. I gave myself the privilege of a few punches to the lid’s interior and a second shout, before deciding to conserve my air and hoping aid arrived soon. But then a face—that horrible, blurry skull—thrust itself through the casket lid above my own, glaring down on me with evil intent. I cried out in surprise, and the thing began to smile. It was more a grimace, or an approximation of a smile performed by someone with no emotional reference. The thrum of a beehive on high alert erupted within my head. The buzz became a ringing, and I became dizzy. I watched the face as it smiled its practiced smile, and the casket began to rattle and shake apart. I braced for the imminent cave-in. Then Mandy’s face replaced the entity’s cruel visage, and I realized I’d been dreaming.

  “What’s the scoop?” I asked, trying to be casual.

  “You were dreaming of it, weren’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, to be clear, you were out of your body. You were traveling.”

  I struggled to a sitting position, reached for my pack of cigarettes on the side table, and fished one out. “Yeah, so I was dreaming. So what?”

  “Jimmy. Psychic energy is a two-way street. Your astral body was roaming while you slept, and that is where this spirit travels. You didn’t just dream the encounter. You were there—just not in your physical body.”

  “Lucky me.”

  Mandy looked into my eyes. “It now has your scent. We’re not safe. Neither of us.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “So we need to end it.” I rubbed my temple, head still buzzing. “Did I hear the phone?”

  Mandy sighed and gave my neck a therapeutic squeeze. “It was Peterson,” she said. “There’s been a new displacement. Masonic Cemetery.”

  It wasn’t until we exited onto the street that I realized how late it was. We hailed a cab and headed back to Cemetery Central. Mandy clutched the carved wooden box tightly to her.

  We arrived to find six uniforms and three detectives, a steam shovel work crew and the cemetery night watchman, all standing around a corner plot. The Masonic cemetery had sat unused for twenty years, as there were no vacant plots and most Masonic families were already using the funerary facilities in Colma. Nobody had been interred in the last week, month or even year. It was just dumb luck that the watchman had discovered the skeletal remains of a George Lamont—dead since 1897—splayed out like a Halloween decoration next to his own headstone.

  “This is a new activity,” Mandy worried.

  “Well it sure ain’t the M.O. you suggested early this morning,” Peterson agreed. “What’s it doing dragging thirty-year-old bones out of the ground?”

  “Maybe its feeding has been making it stronger, able to trace bloodlines back farther,” Mandy suggested. “Or something else.”

  I had a hunch, but I wasn’t sharing it just yet. It occurred to me that sometimes objects, and not genetics, could carry a psychic impression over a long period of time. It could be that an item which had once belonged to the displaced—a Masonic ring, perhaps—might be the ticket. If they dug up the victim and he or she was in possession of such an object, my hunch would be proved.

  Mandy paced nearby, shaking her head in frustration. She even peered through the lens a few times, scanning our surroundings. Every now and again, she’d catch my eye and say, “nothing” under her breath. The steam shovel went to work, and within fifteen minutes, the casket lid was visible. A team of cops in shirtsleeves surrounded the casket in the hole and Paterson ordered it opened.

  Mandy and I stood at the top of the grave, peering down over the cops as they pried the pine lid away from the box to reveal its contents. It was empty. Mandy walked away, disgusted. “It knows.”

  A shudder ran down my spine as I realized the implication. “It pranked us!” I spat.

  Mandy stopped in her tracks, her jaw set like stone. “It knows. It knows us. It knows we’re onto it, and now it’s strong enough…”

  “To throw us a curve ball,” I finished. “Just great.”

  Now I was mad. We had to find this thing. Find it and dispose of it. It had become a personal affront to my honor and reputation as a ghost hunter.

  Peterson was already flagging one of the plainclothes detectives. “See if we can track down the family that belongs to Mr. Lamont here. Make sure there’s been no abductions or disappearances. At the very least, maybe this thing’s playing a game of round-robin—might’ve stashed a potential victim in a different grave or something.”

  I tapped the sergeant on his massive shoulder. “Hey, Sarge, we’re gonna see if Mandy can pick up the scent. If you find a home address, leave a message for me at the precinct. I’ll keep checking in.”

  “Alrighty,” was his gruff reply. “Go to it. I’ve had enough of this thing, and I’m counting on you two to kick its behind back to whatever dimension it came from.”

  We headed out from the cemetery gate and hailed a cab. Mandy held the lens to her forehead and scanned the city with her intuition open and her eyes closed.

/>   “Balboa,” she said softly. “1625.”

  “1625 Balboa Street,” I instructed the driver, and when I looked back at Mandy—she was gone.

  The psychic lens sat undisturbed on the seat next to me. The cab door was closed. There was no way she could have fallen out without someone noticing, least of all, me.

  “Driver! Stop!” I barked.

  The cabbie hit the brakes and the hack screeched to a halt. I opened the back door, panicked. “Mandy!” I called out, but no reply came.

  In a fit of desperation, I removed my fedora, grabbed the lens from the back seat of the cab and held it up to my forehead, clamping my eyes shut.

  Nothing.

  Turning slowly from west to east, I began to see impressions, shadows, like peering through an aquarium at a face on the far side. If this thing could see the spirit realm, it made sense that sweeping it along Cemetery Central would have yielded some ghosts. And boy did it ever. They mostly roamed back and forth on their hallowed ground, content to replay old conversations or messages to their loved ones. None paid any attention to me, and I continued my sweep south and east, back toward—there! Suddenly my mind filled with a picture so vivid it could have been a new Douglas Fairbanks movie.

  I could see the lights of the city against the night sky. The view panned down and I could see Mandy’s dress and new patent leather flats. It was as if I were her. Or rather, she was sending me the images and I was picking them up through the lens. I knew she was trying to give me all she could so I could get to her fast. At her feet lay a small, gold signet ring of some kind. Was that the Masonic symbol? The view tilted to the left: the silhouette of a giant bell. Then to the right: a Spanish adobe arch overlooking… Market Street? Only one location in the city with that particular view: Mission San Francisco de Asís—or “Mission Dolores”, as it was commonly known. Specifically the bell tower of the new basilica.

  I ducked back into the cab and slammed the door. “Mission Dolores,” I ordered, “and step on it!”

  The cab took off like a sprinter with a hotfoot, screaming down Geary and Arguello, down Stanyon through Golden Gate park. I kept the lens to my forehead, angled toward Mandy at all times. Occasionally the cab would have to swerve or hit the odd pothole, which disrupted my connection, and that separation filled me with a dread I’d never known. I couldn’t lose her. Not now. Not like this. As we weaved down street after street toward the Mission District, I kept getting glimpses of Mandy’s situation—moving from arch to arch, looking for any egress, chased from the hatch and passage by a frenetic crackle of blue-white energy. She was trapped in the belfry, her only escape from the entity a fifty-foot drop to the pavement below.