by Tim McGregor
His elbow slipped from the edge of the table. “She moved out.”
“I know but, you were engaged. It’s just—” She cut her words short, waving a surrender with her hand. “I shouldn’t pry. It’s none of my business.”
Mockler sipped his beer and set the bottle down precisely in the ring of condensation it had left on the table. “Something changed,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t the same as before. We couldn’t fake it any longer.”
More questions came bubbling up but she stifled them down and became very very still.
“I told you about her depression. She’s struggled with it her whole life but the last round was prolonged. It went on for over a year. I guess it just became the new norm for us.”
Billie remembered. She also remembered that there were mitigating circumstances to Christina’s depression. Namely, a malignant ghost in their home that was tormenting both of them.
“But then she came out of it,” Mockler went on. “I thought things would go back to how they used to be. It didn’t happen. Things had changed between us. It was as if we were just trying to survive the depression. To just get through another day. When it finally lifted, we were almost strangers.” He let slip a tiny chuckle. “Like empty-nesters when the kids leave home.”
“That must have been hard,” Billie said.
“It is what it is,” he shrugged. “But there was more to it. There was someone else in the picture.”
Billie froze up. “What do you mean? She met somebody?”
“No. I did.”
Her guts dropped through the floor and her heart paced up a notch. What he was saying didn’t make sense. He was seeing another woman? Wouldn’t he have told her about it? Weren’t they friends? After all this? “Who?”
His eyes rose up to meet hers. “Billie…”
“No,” she said. “Don’t.”
“It’s you.”
She felt a tiny bit seasick, like the rug had been pulled out from under her. Not knowing which way was up. It was similar, she thought, to the time he had knocked her into the harbour and she sank below the dark water. Discombobulated. Unsure of which direction to swim.
Something touched her elbow and when she turned, he was there, taking her by the arm.
“Let’s get out of here.”
They walked through the parking lot in silence. A fence hemmed the sidewalk where the ground dropped to the creek below. Her balance was still off, making each step uncertain. She stopped and then he did the same.
“Come here,” she said.
His hands wrapped around her biceps. His head bent down and she went up on her toes and their lips met. The kiss went on and on, neither wanting to break apart or come up for air. The wind picked up and tussled her hair over both of their faces. Their lips came apart with a small wet smack, the pupils in their eyes dilated with delight.
She took his hand and they continued on up the road to the motel. Their room was the last one on the end. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. The room looked as hideous as it had before but neither cared. They stepped inside and Billie closed the door behind them.
Chapter 15
THE ROOM WAS STILL dark when she opened her eyes. She wondered why her bed felt so lumpy and then remembered that it wasn’t her bed. She was in a crummy room at the Moonbeam Motel in her hometown. And she just spent the night with the man she’d been smitten with for the last four months. The grin that broke over her face was so wide it hurt.
“Hey,” she said, rolling over.
The other half of the bed was empty. She ran her hand over the sheet but it was cold, as if no one had been there at all. Had she dreamt the whole thing? She sat up and her body confirmed that it hadn’t been a dream. Her lips felt raw and there were spots all over her skin that felt bitten and scratched and gripped and kissed. The grin on her face kept growing wider.
She turned on the bedside light. “Ray?”
The bathroom door was wide open, the light off. Climbing out of bed, she wrapped the sheet around her and checked the bathroom just to make sure. Where had he gone?
Chilled, she hopped back into the bed and pulled the ratty bedspread over her. Had he just left? Did something happen? Maybe he had changed his mind after spending the night together and got into his car and drove away. She got up again to check to see if his car was there when the door swung open, allowing an icy blast of air into the room.
“Morning,” Mockler said, quickly shutting the door behind him. “Did I wake you?”
“Where did you go?”
“To get provisions.” He held up a tray of coffee and a paper bag damp with grease. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he handed her the coffee. “How did you sleep?”
“Like a log,” she said, almost surprised at her own answer. She took a sip from the cup. “Thank you.”
He opened the lid from his cup and blew away the steam and fitted the lid back. Then he finally looked at her. “We’re okay, right?”
“Yes! Great even.” Panic fluttered somewhere in her belly. “Aren’t we?”
He leaned over and kissed her. Coffee dripped onto the bedspread.
“I feel happy,” she said.
“It’s nice to see.” He lifted up the paper bag. “You hungry?”
“Not just yet.” She opened the bag and looked inside. “Donuts? You’re such a cop.”
“It was the only thing open this early.” He dug into the bag and plucked out a cinnamon dusted one. “The sun’s up. Get dressed.”
He didn’t move or turn away. She raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you just gonna sit there and eat your donut and watch me get dressed?”
“Yup.”
She shooed him away. “Go look out the window or something.”
“After last night?”
“I’m not quite there yet. Go on.”
He groused but crossed to the window and pulled the curtain open. Billie snatched her clothes from the floor and tugged them on. “Is it cold out?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess we didn’t dress for this, huh?”
“We’ll make do.”
“Billie,” he said, gazing out at the parking lot. “Are you sure you still want to go back to the Lookout Point?”
“Of course. Why?”
“Are you dressed?” She said she was and he turned to look at her. “What if we find something down there? Are you ready for that?”
“I guess we’ll find out.” She ran her tongue along her front teeth. “I hate not brushing my teeth.”
Mockler reached into his jacket pocket and produced a white paper bag. He tossed it to her. “Catch.”
Inside were two new toothbrushes and a travel-sized tube of toothpaste. He nodded at the bathroom. “Ladies first.”
Pulling into the gravel spot on the roadside, it was easy to see how the Lookout Point got its name. The bluff dropped away into a wooded ravine where the creek trickled away and beyond that, a pastoral glen of rolling fields.
Billie stood at the edge and looked down. “How thick is the brush down there?”
“Thick enough,” he said, coming alongside of her. “You sure about this?”
“Yes.” She looked around the gravel spit for a trail or walkway. “How do we get down there?”
There was a footpath back near the road, little more than a rutted track of dirt cutting through the ferns and snaking down into the ravine. Mockler went first, pushing back the branches of pine that blocked their way. Once at the bottom they were drawn to the creek where the water gurgled over the stones. They were both a little out of breath.
“Well,” he said, looking back at her. “Which way?”
Billie rotated slowly on her heel, squinting her eyes as if trying to peer through the dense foliage. “This way.”
“Lead on,” he said.
They pushed on through the thicket until the brush lessened and the bare trunks of trees stood under a canopy of pine boughs overhead. A clearing of sorts ran through the trees.
“Is
this a road?” Billie asked.
“Looks more like a logging trail.” Mockler looked around. “Are you onto something?”
“Yes. It’s close, too.”
She pressed on, following the trail. They ascended a rise and came down the other side and then Billie stopped. Up ahead on the trail was a massive pile of dead branches and timbers. Not a natural tumble of deadfall but something constructed with purpose.
“What is it?” he said.
“I don’t know. Looks like a beaver lodge.”
“Stay here.”
Mockler approached the pile of dead foliage, snapping twigs under his feet. He started to pull the branches away and toss them aside. After a few minutes of hard going, he stepped back and ran a hand through his hair. “Billie?” he called out.
“What is it?”
“What kind of car did your father drive?”
“A Camaro. Black.”
Detective Mockler looked at the ground and shook his head. “Son of a bitch.”
Billie marched forward, her eyes going wide. “You’re kidding me…”
“Don’t come any closer,” he warned but she ignored him. Peeking through the tumble of leaves and mud was the dusty skin of a car door. Black.
Billie stomped over the thicket and pulled away more of the dead foliage, carefully at first, then urgently.
He took hold of her arm. “Billie, wait. You don’t want to do this.”
“Yes I do. Help me.”
Together they cleared the tangle of sticks from the portside of the vehicle. The tires were blown, the Camaro sunk into the mud below. The windows were cloudy with dust and pollen, concealing the interior. The detective gripped the door handle. He looked at the woman quickly before pulling the door until it squealed open.
The cab was empty save for a noxious smell and an old blanket strewn across the backseat. Billie leaned in closer, squinting into the darkened interior. “There’s nothing here,” she uttered.
Mockler took a breath and swung into the driver’s bucket seat. He searched the glove box and folded down the sun visors and reached under the seats. Scrambling out, he took a deep breath. “Nothing,” he gasped. “It’s been cleaned out.”
“This is crazy.”
Mockler straightened up. “Is it his car?”
“It has to be.” Billie stepped around to the back of the vehicle and pulled away more of the deadfall. Tossing away the last of the sticks, she stepped back and they both looked down at the trunk.
“Shit.” He pressed in and tried the trunk but it was still locked. Stepping back, he kicked at the weeds on the ground. “I need a rock or something. A big one to smash the lock.
Billie bent low and reached her hand into the rear wheel well.
“What are you doing?”
She came away with a small metal cannister and twisted it open. “Hideaway key,” she said, pinching the spare car keys from its receptacle. She handed it across and he slotted the key into the lock. It was rusted and he twisted it back and forth until it clicked.
Mockler looked at Billie. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
“Open it.”
The trunk lid sprang up and bounced on its hinges. Billie had steeled her nerves for the sight of a body hidden under a tarp or bare bones or a mummified hand stretching out but none of that materialized. The trunk was empty save for a bald spare and an old jack.
Mockler turned his head and spat into the weeds in disgust. Then he kicked the bumper.
Billie simply sat down, crunching into the dry twigs under her. Her arms flopped to her sides, palms up to the sky, a dull sheen of disbelief glazing her eyes.
~
The notes made no sense. A frenzied scribble of mad ideas, ancient rituals and odd symbols. Gantry laid the mess down and ordered another drink. This nonsense might take all night to decipher. If, he thought to himself, there was anything here at all besides the barking mad ravings of some lunatic hack.
He had spent almost two hours with the book dealer, Lars, and that proved tortuous. After getting over his initial wariness, Lars turned out to be quite the chatty lad, blathering on about the most dreary minutiae of the pulp era. More than once, Gantry had considered murdering the geeky mouth-breather with his bare hands, if only to stop the chatter but he needed the windbag’s expertise. They sifted through the man’s collection of works and letters by the pulp writer, Howard Gunther Albee, lately of the Murder House on Laguna Road.
The man was prolific, publishing yarns in over a dozen pulp magazines between the late twenties until the middle of the Second World War. And all types of stories too, from Westerns and detective yarns to science fiction and jungle adventure but his true forte were tales of horror and the supernatural. Alongside the pulp stuff was the non-fiction. Books and articles about magic and the occult, historical studies of witchcraft and religions, and essays about spirit mediums and seances. The man was an early investigator into the occult and the paranormal, travelling the world to track down any hint of the other world. Leafing through the material, Gantry had developed an affinity for the mad bastard and his work. A colleague from an earlier time.
Until something went off the rails with Howard Gunther Albee, right around the time he took possession of the abandoned property on the hill. Narrowing their search to the years between 1941 and the man’s death, he and Lars had still unearthed a tidy pile of articles and stories to go through. There was also the man’s correspondence. Albee had been drawn to the Murder House because of its haunted status and apparently decided on a whim to purchase the place on his first visit to the property. He began documenting all paranormal phenomena, becoming obsessed with unlocking its secrets. His wife of the time apparently didn’t care for rattling around in a haunted house and left him five months after they moved in. Albee became something of a recluse after that, rarely leaving the grounds of the former Bourdain manor.
Among the piles of letters and notes that Lars had collected, Gantry had taken away a notebook and a few letters. Needing to get away from Lars’s chatter, he quit the book collector’s place to find a quiet bar where he could pore over the material. Even after an hour of studying the scribbled pages, he still wasn’t sure what Albee had been after. There were written requests to professors and antiquities dealers for information on Sumerian pottery, ancient Jewish mystical practises and Vatican materials on demonic possession. Most of what he collected was cobbled together into one document that looked like the lunatic ravings of some demented charlatan. The pages were crammed with notes in different languages and dotted with arcane, bizarre symbols. Gantry couldn’t make much sense of what it was. His best guess was that Albee had been trying to concoct some kind of spell or ritual, the main purpose of which was to scrape the soul out of a living person. The thought of some poor bugger emptied of his or her own soul like a hollow eggshell gave Gantry the shudders.
A trick like that, he concluded, would take real power. Not unlike the awful thing that had kicked his arse around the cellar of the Murder House the night before. Whatever was slithering around that dilapidated house, it had power in spades.
The anti-smoking laws that infested every city he travelled in were getting on his nerves. It was a cardinal sin to deny a man the right to murder himself with nicotine while enjoying a pint at the same time. To drive him out into the cold just to indulge his habit seemed petty, if not downright rude. He folded the papers into a pocket and went out the side door exit.
His steps echoed around the vacant alley as he lit up and made his way south to King. He was still parcing the bizarre scratchings of Albee when the hair on the back of his neck stood up. Trouble about. He could hear them, skulking through the darker shadows of the alley, trying to be quiet to ambush him but they were clumsy and loud, telegraphing their every move.
Six in all. Four of them stepped out of the darkness to block his path forward. He didn’t need to turn around to know there were two more cutting him off from behind. Gantry sneered, blowing smoke
out of his nostrils like some pale dragon. He wasn’t in the mood for this bullocks tonight. He had work to do.
“You better have a damn good reason for getting in my way, lad,” he grumbled.
Three of them were armed with baseball bats. All of them looked like ghouls from a B-movie. Black and white face paint covered their features, dried up and cracked over their skin. Clad in black with their hoods pulled up over their heads, they had the look of a junior-league Satanic cult.
One stepped forward, taller than the rest. “His Worship wants a word with you.”
That’s when it hit Gantry, the familiar face-paint. These goons were fans of the death metal star Crypto Death Machine. He had dealt with Crypto a few times in the past. The man had an interest in the occult that went beyond the set dressing for his act. His fans were known to paint their faces in the same style as their hero. They were also notoriously cult-like in their following and known to be extremely violent.
“I’m busy,” Gantry said. “Now piss off.”
The goon out front reached behind him and came up with a gun. A nickel-plated semi automatic. “You think you can try and kill Crypto Death Machine and get away with it? Asshole, you got another thing coming.”
“Is that idiot off his meds again? If I tried to kill your little hero, son, he’d be fucking dead.”
“So you meant to just disfigure him,” the goon said. “Is that it? Make him suffer that way?”
Footfalls crunched behind Gantry. The rest of the goon squad was closing in. “What the hell are you on about?”
“His face,” spat the goon. He raised the gun and aimed the barrel at the Englishman. “What you did to his face.”
“You stupid little boy.” Gantry took a step closer, right into the line of fire. “Does she know what you did?”
The goon bared his teeth like a dog. “The fuck are you talking about?”
“Your mum?” Gantry said. “Does she know what you did to your little sister?”
“Shut up!”
Gantry smiled. “She’s gonna know now, mate. They’re all gonna know.”
