by Simon Murik
I let out a weeping chuckle as the pain and sadness of everyone who’d come here before me smothered my body and soul. My chest squeezed tight and I struggled to breathe.
A hand grabbed my forearm like an iron vise and pulled me away. “I told you not to come down here, Father!” Michael’s voice snapped. He dragged me through the blackness and seconds later we were back in the dimly lit mural room. Michael pulled me to the stairs and I ran up them and into the church hallway. I collapsed onto the floor. Breathing hard, Michael started dragging me by my arm down the hallway. “It won’t come upstairs but we shouldn’t stay this close.” After about twenty feet he let go and I slumped to the floor; Michael sat down next to me with his back against the wall.
“So did you get your answers?” he asked.
My head had stopped spinning and my chest had relaxed. “Almost,” I said. I looked over at the thin man. “Who are you, Michael?”
Michael rubbed his hands together and looked at the floor. “In the book about the church’s history you read about the dark priest, correct?”
I pushed myself to my elbows.
“Well, what the book doesn’t tell you is that just before he’d been hung, this dark priest set a curse on the church. And that after his death, anyone who went into the basement and viewed his mural would be haunted by its ghosts.” Michael looked at me. “This way, under a stream of caretakers that Martin could trust, the mural could be continued.”
I bit down on my lower lip and then let it go. “Caretakers who Martin could trust—caretakers who shared his bloodline,” I pieced together.
Michael stared hard at me. “That’s right. I am Michael Walker Halligan. And it’s been very nice to meet you, Father.”
I lay back down, stared at the ceiling, and chuckled.
The moon’s gray rock floor sprawled into the black horizon. I tapped the hallway-length window with my fingers and sighed. Six months I’d been up here on Alpha Base 6. Why they’d tacked the 6 on the end I had no idea; there was only one base on this cold rock, just like there was only one person—me.
But it’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into.
My friends had said I was out of my mind to take a two-year stint up here and they might have been right. The guy before me had been killed performing observational experiments on some crater about six miles from the base and I’d be lucky not to suffer at least some level of radiation poisoning by the time I got off of here.
But a half-million bucks for the gig was worth it.
I cracked my knuckles and walked down the steel hallway into my quarters. A junior-sized bed, small desk, and a nice view of the north side of the moon was about all it had going for it. Yawning, I walked over to the bed. I’d been working since 0600 and needed a quick nap or I was liable to wander outside without my helmet on. I lay down, closed my eyes, and a cold breeze suddenly flowed over my face.
My eyes popped back open.
A thin white blur hovered in the center of the room. I shut my eyes and opened them again. It was gone.
“This damn place,” I said as I turned over and went to sleep.
Three hours later I was up and back at work. The roaming satellite had spotted a nice patch of golden ore just a couple of miles away and I wanted to mark the location and send it to the company to get the OK to dig. I began to take down the coordinates when another cold breeze hit my back.
I turned around and my heart froze.
A pair of blurry white hands gripped the inside of the doorway like they were struggling to keep an unseen body from flying away. The hands let go and I got out of my chair and went into the hallway.
Nothing.
I rubbed my temples and then checked my pulse. Jesus, I was barely a quarter of a way through this job and I was already seeing things.
I headed to the communications center to transfer the data about the ore and get the go-ahead to extract it. When I got there I punched the coordinates into the computer and hit send. It would be a few minutes until I got a response and I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. When I opened them up a few seconds later the computer screen was white static. I stood up and looked around the room; the three other computer screens were also all static. It could have been a solar block, but that was unlikely. Putting my hands on my hips, I bit my lower lip and stared at the floor for a second.
Was five hundred grand worth it?
I shook my head and looked back up. The screens were back to normal.
A message came through and I was cleared to get the ore. As soon as I stepped back into the hallway, a noise like a wrench banging against a metal pipe rang through the station and the back of my neck got tight. It sounded like it’d come from the west end of the base and I ran down the hall, made a right, and then a quick left to see the Records Room’s white fluorescent light on. A thick, wavy white figure—almost like a blurry space suit—stepped out of the light and into the doorway. It disappeared back into the light as fast as it had emerged and when I got to the room nothing was there.
No doubt about it, I was cracking up.
And yet …
The company had barely given me any information about my predecessor’s death. The report I’d received had just said there’d been an accident resulting in the death of an employee while performing a lunar experiment and what was called a Quick Crew had come and retrieved the body before I’d arrived. The exact location of the site where he’d died had not been given and the files that had the info were locked in the computer as “Top Secret.”
I entered the Records Room and naturally it was empty. However, the company’s silver logo floated across the screen of the computer. At the bottom of the screen were the words “Access Granted.”
I went to the computer and clicked the mouse. The logo disappeared and a three-dimensional overview of a path from the base to a location with a green laser beacon marked “Crater” appeared.
Top secret or not, I was going to go take a look at the site for myself.
I hurried to the changing room next to the air lock, put my moon suit on, and then walked into the air lock and hit the “Open Portal” button on the wall. There was a mechanical grumble and the two metal halves of the circular door began to slide away from each other. Ten seconds later the portal was clear.
I stepped through it. The rover was parked next to a big gray boulder about thirty feet away from the portal and I walked over to it. Grabbing the two handlebars outside of the rover’s door, I pulled myself up, opened the door, and slid in. It was the first time I’d been in the rover in a few days and it felt good to be outside the base. I flipped the ignition switch and the dashboard and headlights lit up. Pressing down on the accelerator I gripped the thick steering wheel and accelerated forward.
For the next fifteen minutes I rumbled over rocks and up and down small hills towards the site. When I saw the beacon I pulled the rover up to it, climbed out, and walked over to the edge of the crater. It was about a hundred feet deep and maybe a mile wide.
At the bottom I could see a body.
I carefully sidestepped down the crater and over to the body. The nameplate on the suit said “Walker.” Kneeling down, I ran my hands over the suit and inspected the golden visor. No tears or cracks.
Whatever had killed him had been internal.
And the company had never actually come to get him or even give him a burial.
Loneliness sunk through me like a stone sinking in the ocean and I looked to the west. At the top of the crater a blurry white figure stood at the edge looking down at me. We stared at each other for a few seconds and then it seemed to just drift into the darkness and moon rock.
I nodded, stood up, and made my way back up the crater to the rover. When I got there I hopped inside and started driving back across the lunar desert to the base. I didn’t know what had happened to Walker and I’d probably never find out. But I’d return to bury him.
Because five hundred grand might have covered me cracking up, but
it didn’t cover being haunted by a dead astronaut’s ghost while alone on Alpha Base 6.
I killed my dog when I was six.
She was a Maltese puppy, hardly bigger than a good-sized hamster when I killed her. It wasn’t an accident. It was childhood sadism, a mean streak that ther0apists claimed they’d managed to remove shortly after the death of the tiny pooch.
I don’t even remember her name any more, probably one of those dumb dog names small kids come up with, like Spot or Rover. I remember I thought she was a male for the first few months we owned her.
I hardly remember the deed, honestly. We were playing fetch with a stick, and I started to throw the stick at her. The next thing I knew, the sticks became rocks and my pet wasn’t playing anymore. Just whimpering. Then … not.
My parents sent me to a therapist, and the therapist told me to value life and become a hippie or a vegetarian or something. I wasn’t really paying attention. I did feel bad about my once-pet, though, and told my parents that I didn’t want to have another animal. It didn’t take too much convincing. I avoided animals for years after that, and they made it really easy to avoid me. When they saw me coming they would step back, stay away from me. I guess maybe they could smell what I’d done. I’d heard crazy stories about that sort of thing, dogs smelling guilt and earthquakes, like they have some sort of sixth sense.
I did eventually become a vegetarian—for health reasons, not because I valued the lives of the cattle. I had some gastro-intestinal issues that the doctors told me about without using a single word that I actually knew the meaning of.
One day, after school, as I was walking home, I noticed cats jumping in fear and running away when they saw me. I stepped on an anthill, but none of the insects bit me—they just ran away. I came into my home, our neighbor’s goat bleating and kicking at her fence, and told Genevieve to please shut up.
Why did our neighbors have a goat!? Eventually Genevieve bleated herself out and was quiet, so I could get started on my homework. In biology we’d started studying mice. My class had to fill out research papers at home while we took care of mice in class. Oh, yeah. That was going to work out just fine.
It did not work out just fine. Adorable little Penrose, a little white mouse who wouldn’t hurt a fly, jumped into our teacher’s beard and frantically began biting in a blind panic. The projects were cancelled, videos were leaked, and the entire situation was mess. But biology is a high school requirement, because I totally have a career ahead of me studying animals. On the plus side, Dr. Hayka had a project planned to replace the cancelled mouse study very quickly: mouse dissections.
Dead animals hardly ever run away.
In that vein, some kid thought it was a great idea to bring her pet snake into lunch to show it off. It wasn’t venomous, or ten students would be dead right now, so I guess there’s that. This did not, however, stop the hefty lawsuits, investigations, and rather annoying snake hunt that involved me standing in the hallway to stop the snake from entering the cafeteria. I was there for nearly an hour, being scary to a snake that wouldn’t show up.
This was a standard day, aside from the arrival of the serpent. Animals shun me, panic when forced to be near me. That’s why it was such a shift when they stopped.
Maybe everyone else was living like this the whole time, but not being feared by animals is just awful. I hadn’t been bitten by ants in my entire living memory; now they sought me out. I found that I hated the red monsters; I hated their burning bite. Cats would hiss and scratch at me, and dogs … dogs. It was as though they had a personal vendetta against me, as if they somehow knew that I had killed one of their own. I heard barking all night, complemented by Genevieve’s angry bleating. The entire animal kingdom seemed to have been mobilized in a war against me.
Every day during in the summer, I would wake up with mosquito bites on my face.
Genevieve tried to bite me as I walked by her fence, pushing against the painted wood. She bleated angrily at me, almost as if she were saying come back and fight, you yellow-bellied murderer!
I had no idea where the words came from. I’d certainly never thought of anything that strange. But when I stopped to think about it, I was stung by a wasp.
Animals are monsters. They are vicious, powerful creatures and I am sure that they would gladly tear me apart and feast on my remains. Almost all of them have mouths and can bite, and they will bite given any—or, more often, no—provocation.
For weeks the hells that suburban nature could unleash dogged me. Bites, stings, scratches, and howls of rage followed me from every corner. I lived in constant fear of the lower level of the food chain. I felt that I could never be more afraid when my dog spoke to me when I fell asleep one night outside on the hammock.
I assume that if a dog spoke to anyone they would be shocked. The fact that she was dead didn’t make it much more plausible. And yet the pooch I knew from childhood appeared to me, in perfect health, just as alive as she’d been the day before I’d brutally killed her.
“Well, well, well. You’re looking awful. It’s like someone viciously stoned you to death,” she said bitterly.
I didn’t say anything for a while, but when I found my voice I stuttered out an apology.
“I am so sorry, Rover.”
So I had named her Rover. That was a good thing to know.
“I was only a child,” I tried to explain.
Rover barked at me in a way that made by blood curdle.
And just then Genevieve hopped the fence and was heading full speed towards me. Within a split second, she knocked me off the hammock and onto the ground. I was under her kicking hooves. A sharp blow hit my head.
Darkness.
I shot out of bed, slid the nightstand drawer open, and grabbed my gun. The thumping noise had come from the weight room down the hall and it was the third night in a row I’d heard it. I tapped the sensor on the wall and the hallway and exercise room lit up. I held the gun out and walked down the hall into the room.
Nothing.
The rack of dumbbells was organized, the medicine balls were neatly stacked, and the bench press had two forty-five pound plates on each side. Exactly how I’d left it.
But I was positive I’d heard a heavy thud repeatedly hit the black, matted floor.
Three nights in a row this had happened and four nights ago was when Johnny had died from a gut shot wound on my operating table—the one that I used in my office to moonlight for our local crime family
Difficult patients. Awful people.
But did they ever pay well.
Johnny was a superstitious guy though and wound up really tight. I’d gotten the call at 1:17 a.m. that he’d gotten plugged by a rival mob guy and he needed immediate fixing. Twenty-five grand in cash on the spot. Who wouldn’t mind dealing with these assholes for that? But the damage was too vicious and I’d lost him while he was underneath.
And now I was hearing noises late at night.
I spent the rest of the night watching TV and the next morning did fifty laps in the pool, showered, and then went out to Joey’s Omelets for breakfast. It was just after ten when I got to Joey’s and I took a table next to the window. Angela, the waitress, saw me as she poured a fat guy with receding gray hair some coffee and nodded. Five minutes later she set down my usual Greek omelet and tall glass of orange juice.
As I ate the omelet and sipped orange juice I thought about the mess I’d gotten myself into. God damn Johnny Corsico. I had the busiest practice in town and I’d graduated third in my class in med school.
But Johnny hadn’t cared about any of that. In fact, other than money, women, and guns, Johnny hadn’t cared much about anything. I couldn’t even remember how I’d gotten hooked up with the family anymore, but after seven years of dealing with them the money barely made it worth it.
And now, thanks to Johnny buying it on the operating table, I couldn’t sleep through the night.
Twenty minutes later Angela brought the bill and hurried off to sea
t a chattering group of tennis-playing house wives who’d just walked in. I set a twenty on the bill, got up, and pushed my chair in. The bill blew off the table onto the gray, carpeted floor and I picked it up and put it back on. The slight breeze from the ceiling fan didn’t seem strong enough to blow the bill off the table, but who the hell knew? I picked the money up and put it back on the table. I started to turn and the corner of my eye caught the bill blowing off the table again. I shook my head and looked at. Picking it up again, I put it on the table and slapped the empty glass over it. The bill stayed still.
I really needed a vacation.
Southern Utah was supposed to be nice this time of year.
I spent the rest of the afternoon with Jane, my administrator, at the practice. At 3:30 my cell phone rang. It was Vince, Johnny’s brother. This wouldn’t be fun. Vince questioned me over what happened to Johnny like a pit bull that’d just learned to speak English. I explained that the bullet had ruptured Johnny’s internal organs and nothing could be done. Vince hung up and so did I.
I looked at Jane and told her she could take off for the weekend. She grabbed her coat and left and I started to check over some paperwork when a high-pitched sound came out of the break room down the hall. I hurried to the break room and saw an empty coffee pot sizzling on the coffee maker. I turned the coffee maker off and took off the pot. Black burn marks covered the bottom of the glass and I ran it under cold water. Smoke flared from the pot and when it died out I set it in the sink. It was really hard to imagine Jane leaving the pot on the coffee maker like that, but as out of it as I’d been for all I knew I could have done it myself.
My phone rang again and I took it out of my pocket and looked at the screen. It was Johnny’s number. I watched the number blink as the phone rang and after a few seconds the voice mail light went on. About twenty seconds later the light went off. I hit play on the voice mail and a blur of static twisted into my ear. I hung up and deleted it.
I’d worked seventy hours this past week and that included the Johnny thing. I didn’t want to deal with any of these guys anymore and it wasn’t like any of them really had anything on me to force me to keep being their after-hours doc.