Mortsafe

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Turning his back on Ryan, to say nothing of Jean, Michael, and the other kibitzers, Pagano strode to where a young woman, Liz, presumably, was adjusting her bonnet, wide collar, and long skirt. Seventeenth-century clothing, Jean noted. Like that worn by the ghost in the vault beneath the Playfair Building.

  The entire company, cameras, guide, re-enactor and all, surged toward the far corner of the Kirkyard, followed by the scrum of onlookers. There Pagano resumed his stance on the steps of a cylindrical mausoleum, his shoulder against the iron grille covering its doorway. Liz strolled on through another gateway, its iron grille open onto a long narrow space lined with yet more mausoleums, empty doorway after doorway turned toward each other like two ranks of blind soldiers.

  “Go for it!” called Ryan.

  The lights from the camera glared out, whiter and brighter than the sunlight, and shadows flickered in the interior behind the black leather shoulders. Jean thought of the glare of the police lamps in the vault. But that wasn’t even a pauper’s grave. It was no grave at all. This, however, was the burial place of a rich and powerful man, George MacKenzie, Lord Advocate of Scotland.

  “The Covenanters wanted to run their churches without any interference from the king. In 1679, Government troops chased them down and imprisoned them in this corner of Greyfriars Kirkyard. Those who didn’t die of exposure were tortured and murdered by George Mackenzie, the judge buried here—whoa! What’s that?” Pagano jerked away from the grille and spun around. “Something grabbed at me!”

  His motion was so sudden Jean’s heart bumped upwards, and beside her Michael twitched. But it was all part of the show. Nothing moved beyond the grille but the shadows generated by Pagano’s own crew.

  He turned back around and lowered his voice, so that the sibilants hissed. “It was only a few years ago a homeless man broke into this tomb, looking for a place to sleep. Whatever he saw here, whatever happened to him here, drove him mad.” With a knowing look directly into the camera, Pagano paced toward the gateway. “This gate is usually kept locked. Bad things happen to people here after dark. But we have special permission to go inside.”

  A flashbulb went off amidst the kibitzers.

  “Hold it!” Ryan yelled, and rounded on a gray-haired square-jawed man still holding a camera before his face. “Please, sir, no photos.”

  “No photos,” Pagano repeated, pointedly leaving off the courtesies.

  The man waved a hand, less in apology than in dismissal, and melted back into the gathered bodies.

  “Any tour group can get special permission,” Jean said. “Although why anyone would want to go in there after dark, I don’t know. All part of the Edinburgh experience, I guess.”

  The wind blew Michael’s reddish-brown hair back from his brow. His blue eyes, still focused on Pagano, sparked with intelligent skepticism. “That was a potted history of a potted history for you.”

  “No kidding. Scholars have trouble keeping it all straight, let alone TV hosts. You’ve got Knox and the Reformation, you’ve got Presbyterians against the Catholics and the Episcopal Church, you’ve got the royalists against the Covenanters, the highlanders against the lowlanders, the English parliamentarians, the Restoration, civil war upon civil war, faith versus public order, Covenanters holding services in open air rather than in government-sanctioned churches. And more than enough cruelty to go around.”

  “Some of the royalists were exhuming the bodies of dead Covenanting leaders and dismembering or beheading them.”

  “Alasdair was just saying that our ancestors were an unforgiving lot.” Jean thought of the second body in the vault, hanged and disarticulated.

  Michael nodded. “Too many folk today would be as vindictive, given the chance.”

  “Yeah.” Not that the first body, the woman’s, had any obvious injuries.

  Since the circus had rolled away from the sidewalk beside the church, Michael and Jean headed toward the back gate and his rendezvous. They skirted several extension cords snaking across the grass, Jean thinking that George Mackenzie would have found electricity to be a handy-dandy torture device.

  She paused next to the two mortsafes tucked side by side into the lawn. “To leap from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, I saw a mortsafe earlier today, in one of the South Bridge vaults.”

  “Did you now? Is it in good enough condition to display in the Museum?”

  “I don’t know. It’s pretty rusty. It’s in better condition than the two bodies in the same chamber, though.”

  Michael looked down at her. “Eh?”

  She told him the tale, including her suggestion about sending the decayed book to the Museum, and concluded, “The man was hanged, apparently, and it looked like he had a Bible with him, and since the ghost is dressed pretty much like Liz there …”

  The cameras swiveled, Ryan gestured, and Liz came running out of the gateway, cap askew, large dark eyes bulging, mouth open on a scream which reverberated eerily in the stone-lined enclosure—the sarcophagus—of the kirkyard.

  Michael glanced at Jean, brows reaching for the sky. Jean shrugged. By the time that sequence was broadcast, both Liz and her setting would be computerized into a soft-focus slo-mo twilight.

  Pagano turned to the camera and said, “Something evil lurks in the Covenanter’s Prison, biting and scratching visitors. But it can’t be contained by stone walls and iron bars. Is it the demented spirit of George Mackenzie, released by the intruder? Does the Mackenzie Poltergeist also roam the South Bridge vaults? When we come back, we’ll find out.”

  “Great!” shouted Ryan. “We got it!”

  “So he is planning a show in the vaults,” Jean said, mostly to herself. “I won’t be swooning in surprise at that.”

  Chapter Eight

  “No ghostmonger’ll be missing out the vaults.” Michael considered the mortsafes, his head tilted to the side. “You’re thinking the man in the vault might be a Covenanter? But the South Bridge vaults were built …”

  “A hundred years later. Yeah, I know. There’s just as much logic in my connecting the body to the Covenanters as in ghostmongers like Jason Pagano saying the Mackenzie Poltergeist roams the vaults. In the seventeenth century there were no vaults, only the Cowgate meandering along the valley paralleling the High Street.”

  “Are ghosts logical, then? Is a poltergeist by way of being a ghost, and not some sort of weird phenomenon?”

  “Are people being scratched at all? Usually poltergeists move things and throw them around. Assuming poltergeists actually exist.”

  “Well, some folk would question the existence of ghosts, or of emotional resonances caught in physical objects, but …”

  “But,” Jean concluded. “Oops, we’d better move on.”

  The film crew started back toward the church and Jean and Michael moved on, but not before Pagano shot them another piercing look. Jean bared every tooth and a couple of fillings in a smile. “Thanks! Good show!”

  A young woman wearing a denim mini-skirt and a scanty version of Pagano’s black leather jacket sidled up to him and extended a notebook. “Jason, would you mind signing my wee book?”

  Pagano made an about-face toward her. “My pleasure. And what’s your name?”

  In private, Jean noted, the TV host’s accent gravitated to the English Midlands. Of course he’d adopt a more neutral accent to sell his show in the US. Ryan, now—his accent was neither mid-Atlantic nor Midlands, it was Midwestern U.S. Jean could hear the cornfields and the catfish. Liz sounded English, although the long black hair tumbling down as she removed her cap might indicate some cross-Channel ancestry.

  What color had Sara’s hair been? Had she been a good Scots—or mid-American—redhead? Had she been darker in coloring, like Pagano? Jean couldn’t remember what Amy Herries looked like. The encounter had been too brief, leaving her with only an image of smeared eyeliner and a wail of grief and resentment.

  “Even if the woman is Sara Herries,” she said to Michael, “how did sh
e get into a closed-off vault back in the mid-nineties? A question that leads me to you, of course. You were at the university then.”

  “And my band was practicing in the vaults.”

  “Not the one beneath the Playfair Building, I assume.”

  “Had no clue that was there, no.”

  “Vasudev Prasad, the guy who owns the property, was saying Lady Niddry’s used to be a student hang-out.”

  “Oh aye. Beer, crisps, music, raves—we were calling it ‘The Body Snatcher’, just for a bit of fun.”

  Jean grinned, thinking of her “Body Snatchers Are Us” comment to Miranda. “Fun being relative.”

  “Especially at that age. We were making too much noise to be scared by ghosts or tattie bogles or body snatchers, I’m telling you that. It wasn’t only our lads, either. Some nights several groups’d be playing in different areas. There was no one charging us for the space—no one had thought yet to develop the vaults. They were just empty rooms, more than a little uncanny, oh aye, and the acoustics weren’t the best, but when you’re a student, ‘no charge’ decides the matter.”

  “Several groups playing at once? And you with bagpipes? It must have been deafening.”

  “My ears are ringing still,” Michael said with a grimace. “Mind you, it’s Hugh you should be asking. I’ve only ever been a hobbyist.”

  “It’s possible Sara was a musician or a groupie, but even if she was, that doesn’t explain …” Jean sighed. “So do you remember the Sara Herries case? She disappeared from a pub on the South Bridge in 1996.”

  “I’m remembering, oh aye. My first brush with crime, if at quite a remove—I had an undergraduate class with her is all, the year before she went missing. She was considering reading history, same as me, though I ended by deciding on history and archaeology and she changed her mind, went elsewhere. Far as I’m remembering, she was a bit of a Goth, likely would have been a fan of yon Pagano. But I canna say any more about her than that. I never had anything to help the police with their inquiries. Less couthy polis than Alasdair, mind, but then, they were hardly making social calls.”

  “They rarely are, more’s the pity,” Jean said.

  The sun dipped below the roofs and shadow thickened in the kirkyard. Any warmth the sunshine had held—more psychological than real—ebbed into coolth. The traffic noise from beyond the walls seemed muted, held by a barrier not of space but of time. Except for the sound of sirens going by, first a police car, Jean decided, followed a moment later by an ambulance.

  Michael bent to peer into an empty mausoleum, the sculptured skulls protruding from its doorway partly chipped away, partly fouled not just with bird droppings but with what looked like blood but had to be ketchup. In the gloomy interior of the tomb, cellophane snack bags rustled in a chill draft. “The same sad folk are out and about here of a night that once lived in the vaults. The poor, the muddled, the criminals who prey on them.”

  “And the ghostmongers. Better than body-snatchers, I guess. Brain-snatchers. Pretend danger, not the genuine article. History interpretation, ditto.” Jean glanced back at Pagano and his crew, now packing up. Or the crew was packing up, rather, while Pagano stood aside, one hand holding a phone against his ear, the other chopping the air.

  She and Michael ducked into a passage between two rows of yet more mausoleums. The gateway at the end opened onto a wide lawn surrounding a turreted building seemingly teleported in from Ruritania.

  “Robin Davis,” Michael said suddenly. “I don’t know him, myself, but I’m thinking Sara was working for him as a research assistant. He’s a bit of a goat with the undergraduate lasses, mind you, or was at the time. Had his favorites. But I reckon the polis had a word or two, eh?”

  “Robin Davis?” repeated Jean. “Vasudev was just talking about his new book. Commerce and something …”

  “Commerce and Credibility, oh aye. He’s saying that people are much more likely to have supernatural experiences in the vaults or here in the Kirkyard or at Mary King’s Close, any site rumored to be haunted, if they go there expecting something supernatural to happen.”

  “That’s psychology more than history, although history is all about people and their psychology.”

  “Davis is doing social anthropology, right enough.”

  “And Sara was researching for him? That doesn’t tie in with her being a fan of Pagano—well, I’m building bricks without clay, let alone without straw.”

  “That you are.”

  A woman pushing a stroller appeared in the far gateway and waved. Michael and Jean waved back.

  “Seeing is believing, and believing is seeing,” Jean said. “That’s my working thesis in a nutshell.”

  “Davis’s working thesis goes further. He’s saying it’s all belief and no seeing. He’s even implying in his conclusion that religion is just as false as ghosts and other paranormal beasties.”

  “There’s an implication that would have led to some pretty grim repercussions in past times, which is more than a few ghost stories have ever done. Unless you’re thinking of father, son, and holy ghost. Vasudev was asking whether a ghost had to be Christian in order to be deterred by a cross.”

  “Shows the cultural implications of the supernatural, Davis’d be saying.”

  “True. But it’s religion that’s a very complex matter of culture and politics as much as faith, while ghosts—just happen.”

  “To some folk,” Michael told her with a grin, and raised his voice. “Hullo there!”

  Rebecca maneuvered the stroller down the walk, between ranks of doorways both blank and bricked, between palisades of memorial plaques and other intimations of mortality. Enclosed by a plastic weatherproof bubble and layers of knit garments, little Linda looked like a hothouse orchid, if orchids had bright eyes and rosy cheeks. Cheerfully oblivious to her surroundings, she shouted, “Da-da!”

  “There’s my lass.” Michael tweaked a lock of auburn hair that escaped Linda’s Fair Isle-patterned cap.

  Rebecca wore a knit cap that matched her daughter’s. Its bobble bobbed as she turned to Jean, her brown eyes sparking with curiosity. “Are you on the trail of a story, Jean, or on another case?”

  “Story,” Jean replied, just as Michael answered, “Case.”

  “Both,” admitted Jean. “Alasdair’s got an official toe in the door and I’m playing professional nosy parker. This one’s more of an academic exercise than an immediate threat to—to our life and limbs, anyway,” she concluded, wondering if that sounded quite as cold-hearted as it felt.

  “Anything to do with that mob?” Rebecca looked past them at the work party in the kirkyard. “Whoa. Who’s the metrosexual Rasputin?”

  Michael guffawed. Jean whooped. The sound, channeled by the avenue of stone, turned several heads, including Pagano’s razor-cut and heavily gelled one.

  Jean answered, “That’s someone who wishes we’d shut up and go away. Jason Pagano, ‘Beyond the Edge’.”

  “One of those supernatural TV shows, right?” Rebecca replied.

  “His guide was telling him that the ghost of Mary walks at Holyrood. Neither Alasdair nor I have ever picked up anything there, though.”

  “I get the occasional quiver from handling her things, and I may have heard a few footsteps and the like. But then, I may be expecting to hear footsteps.”

  “And there we are,” Michael said, as though some issue had been settled. He took the handles of the stroller and turned it back toward the gate. “We’re away, then. Are you going home, Jean?”

  “Yeah, but …” She could have walked with them, and reached Ramsay Garden via the West Bow, but the Cowgate lay behind her. “Not tonight. Y’all enjoy the concert.”

  “We will, thank you,” said Rebecca, and took Michael’s arm.

  “If I’m remembering anything about the Herries case, I’ll be giving you a shout, eh?” Michael said over his shoulder.

  “Who?” Rebecca asked.

  “The game’s afoot,” Michael told her. “Alasdair
’s on the case. Our tale began this morning in the South Bridge vaults …”

  “Good night!” Jean called after them. She strolled back into the kirkyard, skirting the television crew. In the dusk they were fast devolving into dim shapes illuminated only by the occasional small comet of a flashlight or the red, pungent tip of a cigarette.

  Pagano’s voice said in the gloom, “Of course I’d be interested in a contemporary murder. A university student, you’re saying? Proof of evil presences in the vaults, that will do nicely. Ta.”

  What? Who said anything about murder? She looked around so quickly her neck almost snapped, but couldn’t distinguish him from the others, let alone see who he was talking to, in person or on his phone. Her foot slipped off the side of the walk, her ankle twisted, and it was only with an ungainly flail and lurch that she kept herself from falling onto the mortsafes. Which would have done neither antique iron bars nor living flesh any good.

  A hand seized her forearm. A breathless voice demanded, “You all right, ma’am?”

  She looked around to see Ryan’s pale face barely a foot from her own, his eyes so wide the whites glinted. Good grief, had she looked that much like a train wreck? She tested her ankle. Whew. A-okay. “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “No problem.” Releasing her, Ryan spun back around to the group. There was Pagano, a hulking black presence in the darkness, just tucking something—his phone?—into his pocket. So who had called him? A handler who’d read the morning paper? Whoever it was who’d tipped him off about the ghost at Lady Niddry’s?

  It was about time she touched bases or knocked wickets or whatever with Alasdair. Funny, how she used to be a complete brain all by herself.

  This time watching where she was going, Jean walked on wondering if there were indeed any ghosts or spirits or uncanny presences in Greyfriars Kirkyard. Despite its reputation, she’d never sensed anything there other than sorrow, and that was probably the grief of the survivors. It wasn’t the most peaceful of cemeteries, but still, it was populated only with the surrendered husks of humanity. Any lingering memory-images gathered elsewhere.