by Tim McGregor
Mockler closed the door behind him and sat down in the empty chair. Setting aside the paper cup of water he held, the detective looked at the suspect across the table. He had worked toward this moment for almost two years, the chance to interrogate this slippery Brit for the gruesome murder of a Jane Doe in an abandoned tenement. Now he simply felt sick at the prospect. Everything had turned upside down within the last few days, the lines blurring between allegiances and questions of right and wrong.
The fact that the suspect continued to nap was irksome. “Sit up, Gantry,” Mockler said.
The suspect straightened up. The shiner under his right eye was purple, the cut on his lip a deep red. “Alright, detective?”
Mockler took out a notepad and pen and laid these on the table. He had no intention of using them but the videocamera glared down at them from above and he had to make a pretence of following procedure. He nodded at the man’s bruises. “That looks like it hurts.”
“It does.”
“It’s too bad,” Mockler said. “I was hoping to turn off the camera for a minute and get in a few rounds myself before we got into the questions.”
Gantry smiled. “It must gall you to no end that your chubby mate made the arrest and not you, eh? Your mates have been congratulating him all day.”
The detective leaned back in the chair. “I ought to wring your neck for taking Billie into that place.”
“Then turn off the camera. We’ll go a round or two.” Gantry loosened his collar. “Where is Crypto now?”
“Stanley Gottferb? He’s in the morgue.”
Gantry smiled. “Ah. So the day hasn’t been a complete waste.”
“What was that about? Settling an old score?”
“A deal gone sour. Ol’ Crypto thought I’d cheated him. I hadn’t, in case you’re wondering. Turns out Crypto was just an idiot.”
“What was the deal?”
Gantry touched his lip, blood appearing on his fingertip. “Crypto wanted a certain occult item I was able to obtain. A simple trade.”
“And what did you get out of the deal?” Mockler asked. He picked up the pen.
“A favour, to be called in when needed. Crypto may have been a complete twat but he had thousands of fans willing to do what he asked. A network like that is priceless.” Gantry shrugged. “I didn’t get a chance to call it in.”
Mockler laid the pen back down. “What do you mean by ‘network’? Kids to do your dirty work?”
“More like an early warning system really. See, his particular fan-base are keyed into the same area I tread. Eyes and ears, for anything coming down the occult pipeline.”
“I see,” the detective sighed, too exhausted to hear more of the man’s lunacy. “And what’s coming down the pipeline?”
“Hell, of course. Straight for us.”
“Us or you?”
Gantry chuckled at that. “Well, yours truly, I suppose. Once I’m gone well, it’ll be the rest of you.”
Mockler scribbled something in the notebook. “These fans of Gottferb. Are they a danger to Billie? Will they come looking for revenge?”
“Not likely. Their idol’s been wasted. They’ll just herd to some other empty rock star to worship.” Gantry loosened his tie again and shifted restlessly in his seat. His fingers drummed nervously along the table top. “You don’t smoke, do you?”
“No.”
“That’s a shame.”
Mockler couldn’t resist the sneer stretching across his face. “You having a nic fit?”
“Confiscating a bloke’s fags? That’s just inhumane, you ask me.”
“Just policy. No smoking in the work place.”
“Aye, policy,” Gantry spat with no uncertain venom. “God knows we must cling to our policy, don’t we? Without policy, there would be anarchy. Christ. And don’t you look so bloody smug.”
Mockler stifled his mood and got back to business. “So. Tell me about the woman you murdered.”
“We’re really gonna go through all that?” The muscles in Gantry’s jaw flexed. “Here, put this down for the record: It wasn’t me, mate.”
“Prove it,” Mockler said. “We’ve been at each other’s throats for almost two years, Gantry. I want the truth.”
“No, detective. You don’t.”
Mockler reached into a pocket and tossed something onto the table. A crumpled pack of cancer sticks. The lighter bounced over the surface and Gantry caught it before it skidded off the end.
“Tell me about the dead woman I found you with,” Mockler said. “And the one before that. The woman in England. Your wife, Ellen.”
“Ellie,” Gantry corrected, already lighting up.
Mockler watched the man across the table carefully. “Ellie. Start with her. How long were you married?”
“Two years? No, three.” Gantry muttered, hauling so hard on the cigarette that the glowing end crackled. “Most of that spent apart.”
“Apart? Why? Did she wise up to the fact that she married an asshole?”
Gantry nodded. “Pretty much. You know how it is when you’re with someone. Someone special? You put your best face forward. Try and change to become something better and hide all the nasty shite that slithers around inside. Well, I made a go of it but what’s bred in the bone will out in the flesh.”
“You could only hide it for so long?” Mockler meant for his tone to be searing but it didn’t come out that way. “Your true nature leaked out.”
“It did.” He tipped the ash of the cigarette into the paper cup. There was a tiny hiss. “But it was more than that. I was up to my eyeballs in dodgy shite. Ellie paid the price for my mistakes.”
“What does that mean?”
Gantry smoked the stick down to the filter. “You know the world I travel in, Mockler. You’ve seen enough of it, haven’t you? With Billie? Well there’s a price to pay. It’s like a rule of three. Tinker with the supernatural for your own ends, it lashes back at you thrice as hard.
“I was younger and arrogant. I’d conjured up something real nasty, you see. I’d wanted revenge on someone and the thing I dredged up was a real piece of work. A lesser deacon of Hell, so to speak. Spiteful bastard too.”
Mockler remained stone, offering up no reaction to the man’s words. He jotted into the notebook again.
“I know, I know,” said Gantry. “It’s sounds insane but there you are. Anyway, this spiteful bastard, he wasn’t without a sense of tragic irony. Once he’d done what I asked, he didn’t come after me. Oh no. That would have been too pedestrian for him. He went after Ellie.”
“I see,” Mockler said, game face still on. “And this thing killed your wife? Does it have a name?”
“Several. None of which are safe to utter here.” Gantry dropped the cigarette butt into the cup and reached for another. “You ever seen a demonic possession, detective?”
“I’ve seen The Exorcist. Twice.”
Gantry smiled. “Then you haven’t seen possession. You’ve seen the soft-core version of it. This thing, it did terrible things to Ellie. I didn’t know a human body could snap and twist the way she did. I tried to exorcise the bastard out of her but, well, that blew up in my face.”
Mockler watched Gantry’s eyes glaze over in an awful way. His mouth twitched, as if seeing some horror known only to himself. The suspect’s eyes welled up instantly and a tear dribbled down his bruised eye but Gantry made no move to wipe it away.
He cleared his throat. “So. This thing killed her?”
“Yes. Then it fled. I went after it, following it to Norway, where there was an outbreak of occult violence. Then I followed it here to the New World. Steeltown of the north. Hamilton. It found another victim.” Gantry looked up to meet the detective’s glare. “Did you ever identify the woman it killed here in town? The one you found me with?”
This time it was the detective who turned his eyes away. He shook his head in the negative. The victim in question was partially burned, with no clothing and no identification. She rema
ined a Jane Doe.
“Jot this down,” Gantry said, wagging his chin at the notepad on the table. “Mercedes Rhul. She has family down in Buffalo. It took hold of her. I tracked Mercy down to that abandoned tenement and tried to cast the fucker out. I failed. Again. It tore her up and set fire to her. That’s when you barged in. The rest, you know.”
Neither man spoke after that, caught up in some mad game of brinkmanship over the truth.
Gantry rubbed his eyes and then hunched over the table on his elbows. He looked old all of a sudden and Mockler realized that he had no idea what Gantry’s true age was. He had assumed the man was not much older than himself but in the harsh light of the interview room, John Gantry seemed much older, like he had aged rapidly in the last day or so.
Gantry rolled his gaze up slowly, the broken blood vessels in his right eye rendering him a slightly deranged look. “I need to get out of here, Mockler.”
Mockler blinked at the baldness of what the man was asking. “My hands are tied.”
“We still have a problem,” Gantry said. “The Bourdain woman. She’s still a threat. Billie’s in danger.”
“Billie? I thought Kaitlin was the one in danger.”
“She is. Or she was. I don’t know. I haven’t twigged what that witch is after.” Gantry leaned back in the chair. “Better keep an eye on Billie all the same.”
“I aim to.” Mockler closed the notebook and rose from the chair, ending the interview. He reached for the door.
“Oy,” Gantry said. “What’s the date today?”
Mockler had to think about it. “The thirtieth. Why?”
“Tomorrow is All Hallow’s.” Gantry’s face flattened as he spoke.
“And? Did you have plans to go trick-or-treating?”
“Keep your eyes open, mate. If the Bourdain woman is going to pull something, it’ll be tomorrow.”
Mockler stopped. He considered himself to be a patient man. He had to be. The job required that trait but the amount of spooky nonsense he’d been through in the last while was enough to strain it. He looked at the suspect. “Halloween? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“High holiday, sonny Jim. The one night of the year when the spookshow gets to run riot. So yeah, I’d keep your eyes open.”
Mockler didn’t bother to reply. He left the room and stepped back into the hallway where Odinbeck was waiting.
“Quite the looney-tune, huh?” Odinbeck said. He nodded at the video monitor. “What do you want to do now, chief?”
Mockler exhaled. “Get the paperwork started. So we can charge this son-of-a-bitch with murder one.”
Chapter 27
THE HOUSE WAS STILL HAUNTED. Not by ghosts or unexplained phenomena but the lingering phantom of a broken relationship. Remnants of a life made and then rent asunder, leaving fragments behind like the shrapnel from an explosion.
Billie sat on the floor in Mockler’s kitchen, finishing her tea. Sticking around was a bad idea but the fatigue in her bones made her postpone the bike ride home and she stayed for a little while after Mockler left. Just to finish her tea, she’d told herself, but now, sitting on the floor and looking around, she wondered if she really just wanted to snoop. Or torture herself in some masochistic way.
The state of Mockler’s home was sad and gloomy, ripped in half as it was. Christina had packed up her things and moved out but there was still a strong presence of her within the walls. That was to be expected. Everyone leaves a psychic imprint on their dwelling, no different than coats of paint on a wall. Layers and layers of it, lending a secret history legible to those who can decipher them. Billie was getting better at decoding these imprints and this house hummed with the presence of the woman who used to live here. It was almost as if Christina was still here.
It felt intimidating, this residual energy left behind. Tiny details told the tale of the couple who had lived here. A tube of lip gloss on the kitchen counter, a dried rose in a thin glass on the window sill, brittle as paper. A calendar on the wall next to the fridge, jotted in both his and her handwriting, appointments staled or never kept. The fridge door was a colourful jumble of paper held in place with magnets. Pictures, notices and fliers. The business card of a local handyman. A child’s drawing of a flower under a rainbow. Billie wondered where it had come from. A niece or nephew, the child of a close friend?
The paper bits overlapped one another in a collage. Tucked under an old invoice was a photograph. Billie got up and slipped it out, causing a magnet to tumble to the floor. The photograph was a snap of Mockler and Christina sitting on the rocky shore of a lake. The forest surrounding them suggested northern Ontario. Cottage country. Both of them in bathing suits and wet hair, their smiles bright and warm.
Self-doubt was something of a chronic illness for Billie, an affliction that nibbled at her insides her entire life. Looking at the snapshot caused it to flare up. Was this something she wanted with Ray now? A life together with weekend trips to a cottage and leisurely dips into a lake? Her things scattered with his, a calendar scribbled in both of their scripts? Was it even possible, given how strange their friendship had been so far? It had been nothing but murder and corpses and ghosts. How could that form the foundation for anything lasting?
Stop, she told herself, cutting short the interior dialogue that could quickly degenerate into a mental loop. She put the photograph back, securing it under another magnet in a spot where it would be seen. Mockler could deal with it or leave it there. It had nothing to do with her she decided and crossed to the front door. Standing in the doorway, she reached up and ran her fingers over the lintel until she found the spare key. She locked the door, replaced the key and went down the porch steps to retrieve her bicycle.
The rumble of car tires made her turn around. A vehicle roared into the driveway, the headlights blinding her. Had Ray forgotten something? Was there some new crisis unfolding or maybe he just wanted more time with her? A cold snap of terror rippled through her at the idea that it might be Christina, coming back for something she had forgotten. Maybe the photograph on the refrigerator door?
The car inched forward, angling the headlights out of her eyes and she blinked until her vision cleared. She heard the engine change intonation, slipping into a slow idle as the gear was set to park.
The car looked all wrong.
Billie blinked again, thinking the momentary blindness was playing tricks with her vision. A dusty black Camaro idled in the driveway before her. A vintage ‘81 model with a hood scoop like the one her estranged father used to drive. It looked exactly like the one she and Mockler had found hidden under branches in a ravine. That same car, she knew, was sitting in a police impound yard on the other side of town. Do cars have ghosts too?
The sound of metal grinding against metal cut the air. And then the driver’s side door swung open and a figure climbed out.
~
The despised water stain on the ceiling was gone. Kaitlin blinked her eyes at the clean ceiling tile, wondering if it had been replaced while she slept. It hadn’t. She was in a different room now. The police had her moved to a different floor after the two former ghost-hunters had tried to kill her. She tried to remember what floor she was on now but couldn’t. The room she was in was identical to the last one, with the exception of the clean ceiling tile.
She touched her brow and was surprised to feel it beaded with sweat. She had woken with a start, feeling a sharp pain in her head. Fear fluttered in her belly, wondering if the awful woman from the Murder House was trying to reach her again. But that wasn’t it. The unusual pain had felt different, tinged with a sense of panic and confusion. Had it been just a bad dream? Lord knew she’d had enough of them since waking up in the hospital.
Billie.
The pain had something to do with Billie. Kaitlin sat up and scrounged for the cord with the call-button. She had no idea how she knew this to be true but the pain that had awoken her was tied to Billie. Was she hurt? Was there some weird emphatic bond between them that allowed
Kaitlin to feel her friend’s pain? A sudden and acute tangle of emotions rumbled quickly through her chest. Panic and confusion followed quickly by outright terror. It was baffling at first until Kaitlin realized that these feelings weren’t her own but Billie’s. They rippled through her like an echo. Something was deeply wrong.
Lifting the phone to the bed, she dialled Billie’s number. It rang and rang. Hanging up, she called Tammy’s cell, trying to quash her own rising panic as it rang down the line.
“Hello?”
“Tammy? It’s Kaitlin. Is Billie with you?”
“Why would she be with me?”
“Because she’s your friend, remember? Have you seen her?”
“Not in a couple days,” Tammy said. “Hey, how are you feeling?”
“I’m fine. Listen, I’m worried about Billie. Can you go to her place and make sure she’s okay?”
“Why are you worried about her? I’m sure she’s fine.”
“Will you just go check on her? I’m serious.”
There was a pause on Tammy’s end and Kaitlin’s patience dissolved. “What is it with you? And Jen? Why do you hate Billie?”
“I don’t hate her,” Tammy said in a low hush.
“Then what is it? The two of you have been so awful to her.”
“It’s just,” Tammy started to say before her voice trailed off. There was a sigh and then, “She scares me. Okay?”
“Scares you?” Kaitlin looked at the receiver, as if she could see her friend’s expression in it. “That’s crazy. Billie would never do anything to you.”
“It’s not Billie herself,” Tammy said. “It’s the stuff around her. You know what I mean.”
Kaitlin knew better than anyone what her friend meant. “Fair enough. Listen, please just check on her. Than call me back.”
Hanging up, she tapped her nails on the hard shell of the telephone and stewed over what to do next. She doubted she would have any better luck with Jen. Remembering something, she stretched out to retrieve a business card left on the night table and punched in the phone number printed there. She’d try Billie’s cop friend, Mockler. He’d know what to do.
